The Department of Energy announced last week that it would provide $2.785 million for a five-year project to determine potential “issues of concern” for a Native American pueblo near the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
The Santa Clara Pueblo is one of four pueblo governments in the state that participate in a program intended to ensure that DOE activities do not harm pueblo land, and to provide monitoring of impacted sites.
The funding under this Los Alamos Pueblos Project cooperative agreement will be used “to conduct a broad assessment of environmental, ecological and human health conditions on the Santa Clara Indian Reservation (SCIR), in order to identify issues of concern, and then determine the extent that those issues will impact and compromise the manner by which the Pueblo community engages in its traditional use of the community natural resources,” DOE said Thursday in a press release.
One day earlier, the department said it would provide $1.55 million for a five-year project through a separate cooperative agreement with the Cochiti Pueblo. “The objective of the project is to focus on development of strategies and protocols which would facilitate communications, including the exchange of documents, between DOE and Cochiti Pueblo and the development of strategies to enable Cochiti Pueblo to address issues related to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) activities.”
