A FEMA Disaster Survivor Assistance Specialist leaves a flyer with information on applying for disaster assistance after Hurricane Helene at a home in Smyth County, Va., on Oct. 10, 2024. (Philip Maramba/Federal Emergency Management Agency)
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is making it easier for Native American communities — many of which have struggled to get help after a disaster — to apply for federal assistance.
The agency announced Tuesday it is changing its guidance for tribal disaster declarations by extending key deadlines, lowering minimum damage amounts and allowing the government to cover a larger share of post-disaster damages.
The changes come after years of meetings with and feedback from members of more than 135 federally recognized tribes, many of whom have not been able to apply for FEMA assistance to help recover from floods, wildfires and other disasters. Due to their sparse infrastructure, some did not meet a minimum $250,000 damage threshold. Others could not afford the agency’s standard cost-sharing system, where communities pay 25 percent of damages and the federal government covers the rest.
Starting Tuesday, FEMA has lowered the minimum damage amount for its public assistance program to $100,000 and, for the first time, has given the White House the ability to cover 98 percent of a tribe’s recovery costs once the federal government’s obligation reaches $200,000. The tribes are also now eligible for a similar cost-share arrangement to help them pay for disaster resiliency and mitigation projects. Information is more streamlined and key application deadlines have also been extended by about 30 days, among other changes.
Since 2013, when tribes were first allowed to apply for disaster assistance, there have been 53 major disaster declarations on tribal lands. FEMA said the number does not represent the reality for thousands of people living across 574 tribes, many of which live on lands that are seeing the effects of climate-driven disasters.
Some tribes have said that FEMA’s disaster application and information have been hard to access and are not sensitive to the ways that native communities live and operate. Even though they lost or sustained significant damage to their homes, some tribal members were not applying to FEMA for individual assistance to help them recover, said Kelbie Kennedy, FEMA’s first-ever National Tribal Affairs Advocate.
She and FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell have spent the last few years visiting tribes across the country and hosting feedback sessions. The candid meetings, Kennedy said, “forced FEMA leadership really for the first time to look tribal leadership in the eye and hear them when they say x and y kept me from getting resources to repair this road, or fixing this person’s house.”
Kennedy was born and raised on the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma and has seen her own community endure devastating weather events and struggle to get what they need to bounce back.
A big problem, she said, is that “homeownership is complex in Indian country because it’s on tribal land,” making it more difficult for people to apply for assistance and for tribes with no tax base to cover part of it. Many tribes also do not have resources to run and staff emergency offices, she said.
“Tribes aren’t going away. Disasters aren’t going away,” Kennedy said. “But the reality is, at the end of the day, if tribes have resources and they have access to disaster declarations, they’re going to save lives. They’re going to save lives quicker, and especially in rural America, they’re going to make a difference.”
In the dry, high New Mexico desert between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, about 120 homes on the Santo Domingo Pueblo reservation are still tattered and full of mold after a 500-year flood swept through in 2014, inundating the entire mostly adobe block village, said Herman Sanchez, the tribe’s programs administrator. The tribe was also hit by a flood the previous year, he said.
When FEMA sent an inspector down to survey the wreckage, Sanchez said the man “had no idea what an adobe block was.” The rules at the time also required the adjuster to set foot in and take photos of sacred sites.
“In our culture you can’t take photos in some spaces,” Sanchez said, and that prevented them from getting money to fix them. In the end, FEMA gave the tribe $1.3 million to fix 200 homes, which, when divided, could not cover contractors’ expenses and construction costs, he said.
“The money just sat there and seasons came and went and homes deteriorated,” Sanchez said. “Then many of them were total losses after that but people were still living in them. We didn’t get a lot of help from previous administrations.”
Santo Domingo members advised FEMA on the needed reforms, asking for the process to be more culturally sensitive. The community, Sanchez said, is “one of, if not the most, traditional tribes in the U.S.” Its 5,500 members live packed into 700 homes, averaging about eight people in one house, and only got internet in 2020.
About 80 percent of residents are self-employed ranchers, farmers and jewelry makers, he said. Many live well below the poverty line and don’t make enough to file taxes. The meager earnings from the tribe’s gas station is what funds their government — “barely,” Sanchez added.
Like many tribal nations, Santo Domingo never had an emergency or disaster plan. In Native American culture, he explained, “if you plan for disaster you are asking the disaster to happen, so Native Americans in general don’t want to plan for anything like that.” FEMA’s cookie cutter applications and project worksheets were complex and difficult for them to fill out without a paid consultant, he said, and they didn’t cover their needs and issues. The old 75/25 cost-share agreement was not accessible to them because they had to put a lot of money up front and fit the guidelines to get reimbursed.
“It was a hardship to apply for FEMA,” he said. “We don’t have deep pockets. We were living on a prayer that we could get reimbursed and last time we did not. They have made major improvements that will help us tremendously.”
Ten years after the flood, tribal members are still working to repair homes. Since they couldn’t get money from FEMA, they scrambled to get grants here and there from other sources, even opening their own construction company so they could afford to repair the decaying houses themselves.
Right now, their biggest threat is another flood. Major wildfires over the last two years have scarred the land, meaning “there is nothing to stop the water from hitting our village,” Sanchez said. And because they are a sovereign nation, there are no official or floodplain maps. With the new reforms, the tribe is going to apply for mitigation grants. Sanchez said FEMA is helping them write their own disaster plan that is unique to them.
“My opinion since FEMA has changed tremendously since 2014,” he said. “They respect our sovereignty now.”
