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Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, we are going to try to make some laws in the next week in the area of jurisdiction where I am chair--the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. We have already had the most constructive and productive period for Native people in congressional history. We have invested more in water, in transportation, in broadband, in energy, in culture, and in economic development. We have passed an extraordinary number of bipartisan bills. But we are not done. We have about a week left, and we have a number of bipartisan bills that have to get across the finish line.
So I am going to summarize four bills and try to pass them out of the Senate, and then we will do more work next week on a bipartisan basis to finish out this Congress strong, to make sure we do everything we can for Native people from Hawaii, to Florida, and everywhere in between.
S. 2783, the Miccosukee Reserved Area Amendment Act, will amend existing law to add culturally important land to the Miccosukee Tribe's reservation, and it would also authorize up to $14 million to protect the land from flooding caused by Federal projects to restore the Everglades National Park ecosystem. This is a commonsense bill that passed the Indian Affairs Committee unanimously.
S. 2908, the Indian Buffalo Management Act, introduced by Senators Heinrich and Mullin, would improve the capacity of Tribes and Tribal organizations to manage buffalo and buffalo habitat and clarify the applicability of State and Federal law. It would establish a $14 million annual grant program for 7 years within the Department of the Interior to help Tribal nations play a pivotal role in this recovery effort, especially on their own lands.
S. 4365, Veterinary Services to Improve Public Health in Rural Communities Act is the Vice Chair Lisa Murkowski's bill, and it would allow public health officers from the U.S. Public Health Service to offer some veterinary services at IHS facilities to control domestic animal populations and to prevent the spread of rabies and other diseases to humans.
Finally, the Tribal Forest Protection Act Amendments Act, also introduced by Vice Chair Murkowski, and it will help to mitigate wildfire threats on Federal lands and Tribal or Alaska Native or corporation forest lands. It removes an existing requirement for mitigation work to take place on Federal lands next to Tribal lands. It also expands eligibility to include Federal lands with special geographic, historical, or cultural significance to a Tribe, and it authorizes up to $15 million annually through the fiscal year 2030.
We have a couple of other bills that we are not quite done negotiating about, in particular, a bill introduced by Senator-elect Gallego--Representative Gallego--and Senator Lujan to protect children who are victims of abuse and to help Tribes, to help families to recover. We have to do some final clarifications with our counterparts on the Republican side, and I am hopeful that we will land that one as well.
We also have a couple of bills from Senator Cortez Masto having to do with law enforcement.
And, finally, a bill that is arguably the most important out of all of these in terms of its national impact, and that is to establish a commission to reckon with the shameful legacy of boarding schools, in which children were basically incarcerated, removed from their Tribal communities, and forced to speak a language they didn't speak. Sometimes, forcibly, their hair was cut. Many times they were punished for speaking in their native language or singing their native songs. This is a legacy of abuse at the hands of the Federal Government that we have to reckon with, and this would simply establish a commission to start to delve into this history and come through it to a place of healing, but we are not there yet on those bills.
So here comes the lawmaking part.
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