Helios Education Foundation, in partnership with WestEd, headed research on chronic absences rates and found in 2021, one in five K-8 students in Arizona schools was chronically absent. The learning loss from absences, compounded with learning loss from the pandemic, continues to threaten student mobility and drop-out rates.  

Buu Nygren was sworn in Tuesday as the next president of the vast Navajo Nation, a job that will test his ability to make good on promises to deliver water, electricity and broadband to tens of thousands of residents who don't have it.

At the annual Arizona State Fair an event called the All-Indian Rodeo features Native American competitors but isn’t organized by Native Americans – and some indigenous Arizonans want to change that. 

Few dispute that Indian boarding schools led to more than a century of abuse, systematically seizing Indigenous land, separating children from their families, destroying communities and working to erase tribal languages, religions, cultures and economies in Arizona and elsewhere. While the abuses were in the past, the schools are not, entirely.

During the last redistricting cycle, Flagstaff narrowly avoided being split into two legislative districts. But in order to keep the city whole, it was coupled with the expansive, Native American-dominated Legislative District 2, a district so heavily Democratic that not one Republican ran for the Legislature there in 2010, an otherwise GOP-wave year.

Now leaders in Flagstaff say they want to be part of a more competitive district, which can only be accomplished by severing ties with their Native American neighbors to the north and east.

Gov. Jan Brewer signed a bill into law earlier this year to ban an Hispanic studies program in one school district while simultaneously crafting an exemption for culture-based classes for other minority populations.

As the July 29 enforcement date for Arizona's strict new immigration law nears, Native American tribes are charging that the law was written without considering their unique circumstance and that it will violate their sovereignty and their members' civil rights.