over 90 percent of the Jicarilla Apache Nation's government operations are funded with revenues from production of their oil and gas resources.

I hope that is something we can look at.

I think this would be another area where we could seriously consider opportunities.

BIA schools are a critical component of the education of Native American studies.

I want to thank you for being here... we appreciate the compassion and the passion that you share for our nation...

I very much agree with your and President Obama's drive to invest in education and research and development and innovation in order to better position our Nation for the future.

It is about... helping economies grow. We want to sustain jobs, also we want to protect those agricultural interests.

There are many areas in the country, especially in the West, that we look to to provide some support.

This infrastructure strengthens the backbone of America by making resources available for economies to grow while helping to preserve vital resources like water in a place where it is scarce.

In the West, our water resources are precious and the Bureau of Reclamation helps us, especially in New Mexico, to ensure our water is used efficiently.

It is economic development for the tribes. We are going to do infrastructure investments with those tribal economies.

We can obviously see the importance of these projects.

We need to know why natural gas was cutoff to entire regions of New Mexico.

I think today's hearing provides us an opportunity to both zero in on what happened during New Mexico's recent gas outage crisis but much more importantly to get to some of those answers so that we make sure this never happens again.

This hearing is an important first step to ask the tough questions that will allow us to identify and fix problems.

Thank you for your commitment to job creation and making America a leader in technology and innovation.

I applaud those remarks, and I support them strongly, but I would like to hear more about what is actually going to be done in these areas.

I appreciate the Administration's commitment to research and development and innovation as key to the Nation's economic development.