"Forrest Gerard remembers the “high-fever pitch” reached 33 years ago when Native advocates pressed the Carter administration to create a Cabinet-level position, an assistant secretary for Indian affairs in the Interior Department.

“When Carter offered me the nomination, I accepted it,” said Gerard, now 84 and living in Albuquerque, N.M., the first Native appointed to lead Indian policy issues for the White House. “I felt I knew Washington pretty well. I knew how policy was formulated at high levels.”

Today, however, the assistant secretary for Indian affairs position has been vacant for three years, leaving many Native advocates to anxiously await a nomination to the job by President Barack Obama.

So far, only one name has been widely circulated around Washington, D.C., as the frontrunner for the position - Larry Echohawk, a law professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and a former Idaho attorney general.

“At this point, the White House has not officially notified us of the nominee for the assistant secretary for Indian affairs,” Nedra Darling, a spokesman for the Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs, said on Friday.

Meanwhile, Echohawk, a Pawnee, appears to be clearing all obstacles on his road to the White House, including some early opposition to his nomination regarding his stance on Indian gaming when he was Idaho's attorney general from 1990 to 1994."

Get the Story:
Tribes push for Native's nomination to high-level post (The Missoulian 2/22)

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