Are you really all ears 

Madam Secretary?

Let’s see if Secretary of the Interior, Sally Jewell, honors the pledges she made to tribal members on the Wind River Reservation in August 2013.

 

“I want to be helpful, but you are the experts,” Jewell said, insisting that she was “all ears.”

Jewell claimed she had “made every effort to keep our trust with native people.”

 

 

 

We will see if that is true when it comes to her position on delisting the sacred grizzly bear, and her willingness to contravene the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and previous Secretary’s Orders pertinent to the ESA.

 

“I'm fully committed to upholding the sacred trust responsibilities that we have to Indian tribes and Indian nations and building and strengthening the nation-to-nation relationship,” said Jewell during her confirmation process.

 

Talk is always cheap in Washington, DC, and regrettably, so is life. We can only pray that Secretary Jewell is cured of her temporary deafness when it comes to the grizzly bear.

 

The Pryor Mountain mustangs, a herd highly significant to Native people, didn’t benefit from Jewell being “all ears.” On the contrary, the secretary has advocated “birth control” to restrict the already meager population, and supports the use of a strand of PZP pesticide to achieve that end.

 

Secretary Jewell, can you hear us now?