After his disappearance in 2020, Nick Patterson’s mother said she received only limited help from law enforcement. The lengths she went — to discover the truth and recover the rest of her son’s body — illustrate the profound systemic failures Native families face in the search for their missing and murdered relatives.
This week, local Tribal members led a prayer walk to demand justice for missing and murdered Native people, particularly those local to the North State.
Monument status will provide increased protection for hundreds of thousands of acres of unspoiled wilderness that have been threatened by geothermal extraction. Pit River Tribal members say the federal designation will also promote Native healing.
Similar to the Amber Alert, the newly established Feather Alert system was meant to be a vital tool for Native families searching for missing relatives. Native policymakers and families say law enforcement agents are unnecessarily rejecting the majority of Feather Alert requests. Amendments to the law are already in process.
Honeygirl McCloud says her freedom of speech was violated earlier this month when her principal told her she couldn’t use a quote referencing violence against Indigenous women. The district did not confirm or deny those allegations but says that she will be allowed to use her original quote.
The designation would ban the kind of new leases for geothermal energy drilling that Pit River people have fought for decades and bestow far stronger protections for the culturally and ecologically important sacred landscape.
In 2021, Shasta County officials definitively rejected the Fountain Wind mega-energy project, twice. But now a new California law may allow Texas-based ConnectGen to build the mammoth wind turbine project anyway, despite local decisions based on years of complex environmental studies, hours of testimonies, and in-depth Tribal consultations. Fountain Wind is poised to become a first test of how much the state is willing to bypass local and Tribal governments to meet its clean energy goals.
A state law passed last fall encourages districts to develop culturally appropriate history lessons. The groundbreaking work of Shasta County's American Indian Advisory (AIA) is providing a model for districts seeking to implement the new law statewide. Now an additional $1.1 million in grant funds will take the AIA's work even further.
For many years Lim’s Café on Market Street was known as an oasis of hospitality for the Native community. Its closure this September marked the end of a remarkable space of connection created by two communities with complicated histories. Their collective pasts contain more intersections and encounters than is widely known.
At the Redding Rancheria’s first State of the Tribe address in three years, CEO Tracey Edwards emphasized the Tribe’s status as a sovereign nation seeking increased self-determination and autonomy. She also outlined the Tribe’s role in the greater community, especially in the arenas of health care and economic development.
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