Byron Dorgan: “I want to mention one area, however, that we must address. It is not addressed here. It has not been addressed by the…”

“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. 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.”