[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 126 (Friday, September 13, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10535-S10536]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 
                                  1997

  The Senate continued with the consideration of the bill.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I have the greatest respect for Senator 
Byrd, who is going to go down as one of the real greats in the U.S. 
Senate. I have great respect for the Senator from Washington, who is 
managing the bill on the floor. This is a bill in which there is a 
difficult job of reconciling almost unlimited wants with limited 
resources.
  I want to mention one area, however, that we must address. It is not 
addressed here. It has not been addressed by the BIA, but we will have 
to address it here. It deals with the school called the Ojibwe School. 
That may not mean much to anybody in this body, but it is very 
important to those on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation.
  The Ojibwe School is an education home for 400 students. These 400 
students go to school on this Indian reservation in North Dakota in 
facilities that are fundamentally unsafe. If you go tour that school, 
you will see electrical wiring exposed, as I have seen; you will see 
students who have to go out in the middle of the winter into kind of an 
old, dilapidated trailer facility, one after another, stacked up in 
order to house the children and provide for their schooling.

[[Page S10536]]

  This Ojibwe School should have been provided with a new school years 
and years ago. It was once on a priority list and somehow it got 
dropped off that list. There is a current priority list for 
construction, but the BIA cannot tell us how the priority list was 
arrived at, who is on it, or how it was constructed. This is a mess. 
One way or another this has to be addressed, because we cannot put 400 
children in unsafe circumstances in this Ojibwe School. The BIA and our 
Congress has a responsibility.
  I almost feel that we must think about having 400 children look at 
the people who walk in the door of the BIA or through the front doors 
of Congress every morning until we look in the eyes of those children 
and say, ``We owe you a decent school to attend.''
  I must move on to another topic, but we will talk more about this 
later. I say this with the greatest respect to the people who are 
managing this bill. I say to the BIA, you must begin addressing these 
issues that deal with Indian children.

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