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Reprinted from Bartlesville Radio web page, Feb 26, 2014
www.bartlesvilleradio.com/pages/news/67442014/delawares-and-cherokees-reach-housing-agreement

The Delaware Tribe of Indians and the Cherokee Nation have signed an agreement allowing the Delaware to seek and receive federal housing funding directly from the U.S. Housing and Urban Development.

According to Delaware Chief Paula Pechonick, the Delaware Tribe is pleased to accomplish another step toward self-determination as a federally recognized tribe. She says members are grateful that negotiations with Chief Baker’s administration have resulted in this implementation agreement. Pechonick says the Delaware Tribe is moving forward with its restored status as a HUD grantee to provide clean, safe and affordable housing for tribal members. Pechonick also recognizes the continuing relationship with the Cherokee Nation to address the many unmet housing needs not provided by this agreement.

The Delaware Tribe is headquartered in Bartlesville. It was placed in the Cherokee Nation jurisdiction in 1867 by treaty. The two tribes signed a memorandum of agreement in 2008 to enable the Delaware to regain its federal recognition.

Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin, Jr. says it is a good day for both the Cherokee Nation and the Delaware Tribe because the new agreement allows their Delaware brothers and sisters to return to the table and negotiate and deal with the federal government directly. Hoskin says he is pleased to have played a necessary role as the intermediary, but even more pleased the Delaware will be able to pursue its own self-determination and governance by securing funding directly from the federal government.

Gregory Brown and Brice Obermeyer

This has been an incredibly busy and exciting three months in the Historic Preservation department, as a number of projects begin to wind toward their partial conclusion and others begin in earnest.

NAGPRA Work, Cultural Affiliation

We continue to work on “cultural affiliation” studies for two major sites, described last year in the January and April issues of the DIN. These affiliation studies, funded by a grant from the National NAGPRA office in Washington DC, will allow us to begin to repatriate over 200 individuals
from the Chambers site in western Pennsylvania, occupied in the period between about 1760 and 1775, and the Abbott Farm site near Trenton, NJ, a site
occupied and heavily used for several thousand years and one of the most important archaeological sites on the East Coast.

The final draft of our Chambers affiliation report has been completed, finally, and is being shared with other federally-recognized tribes who may have been present on and around the site (including Wyandots, Hurons, Miamis, Senecas, Shawnees, and others) and with the two museums that now have
the remains. Work on the Abbott Farm site, which is spread between at least five different museums, will continue through the summer.

Expansion of Consultation Program

A new federal program called “Positive Train Control” will cause a large upsurge in tribal consultation nationwide, and we are expanding our program
to accommodate it. Our Historic Preservation Office for several years has responded to requests from agencies and developers to review their projects for possible impacts to archaeological resources in lands where the tribe was present, now and in the past (in our case parts of no less than 14 states!). These are often abbreviated Section 106 requests, since they involve provisions of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA).

The Positive Train Control program mandates railroad companies nationwide to construct new cell towers every two miles (within the next 18 months or
so) as a measure to technologically control their trains, resulting in a huge uptick in cell tower construction and, accompanying that, many more Section 106 requests to handle. This program, which provides income for the tribe in the form of consultation fees, will add to the already very active program of Section 106 requests from other sources.

To handle this increasing load, we are excited to introduce two new part-time members of the DTHPO staff, both based at Temple University in Philadelphia. Blair Fink and Susan Bachor are Ph.D. students in the Anthropology Department at Temple, working under our colleague Dr. Michael Stewart, and are experts in the archaeology of the Delaware River Valley, original homeland of the Lenape people. They will handle consulting requests from the East Coast, and their physical presence near records repositories and the sites themselves is one of many reasons we are excited to finally have a presence on the East Coast.

Other DTHPO Activities

We have worked with the Haudenosaunee Standing Committee on a project in the town of Otsiningo, NY, where a burial was inadvertently discovered,
successfully allowing the burial to remain undisturbed. In collaboration with the St. Regis Mohawk, we are consulting on the mitigation efforts at a multicomponent archaeological site at Million Dollar Beach Site near Fort William Henry, NY, eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places; and in collaboration with the St. Regis Mohawk and Stockbridge Munsee we are consulting on the planned mitigation of the impact
of Exit 3.4 to an archaeological site in Albany, NY.

Brice Obermeyer has presented several talks of the history of the Kansas Delawares (“Talk by the Stove” at the Grinter House, Kansas City, KS on January 11, and a taped interview for National Public Radio on February 13). He also consulted with the Ohio Historical Society on their interpretive plan. Greg Brown, Cultural Resource Department Director Anita Mathis, Language Program Director Jim Rementer, and Tribal Manager Curtis Zunigha
consulted with historians from the National Museum of the American Indian on a proposed exhibit (see elsewhere in this issue), and Brice Obermeyer
and Greg Brown just returned from a trip to the Middle Atlantic Archaeological Conference near Philadelphia, where we consulted on several NAGPRA
and Section 106 projects.

Blair Fink and Susan Bachor. Welcome to our tribal community.