Last week, the Trump administration announced that it plans to end a federal program for greenhouse gas emissions reporting from thousands of facilities such as power plants and oil refineries.
“As the agency continues to Power the Great American Comeback,” the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, wrote in a press release announcing the proposed rule change, “this proposal represents a significant step toward streamlining operations, cutting unnecessary red tape, unleashing American energy, and advancing EPA’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment.”
Legal experts say that the move undermines U.S. obligations under international law, including legal obligations that were clarified in a landmark ruling by the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, less than two months ago. The case was brought by Vanuatu and other Pacific island states who are experiencing the harmful effects of climate change in the form of sea level rise and extreme weather, and is the culmination of decades of international litigation seeking to hold the U.S. and other major greenhouse gas emitters accountable for harming the planet.
The case included arguments by Indigenous attorneys and testimonies from Indigenous Pacific communities about how climate change-fueled extreme weather is threatening their traditional ways of life. In Vanuatu, for example, entire Indigenous villages have been forced to relocate due to landslides brought by heavy rains, leading to the loss of traditional knowledge and place-based customs.
“Entire schools have had to be relocated due to coastal erosion,” said Arnold Kiel Loughman, the attorney general of Vanuatu, who argued before the ICJ. “Every year you have to focus on rebuilding instead of developing the country.”
Maria Antonia Tigre, director of global climate change litigation at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said the ICJ’s ruling this summer made clear that all members of the United Nations have an obligation to exercise due diligence to mitigate the climate crisis.
“The greenhouse gas reporting program has been a corner store of transparency in climate governance for a long time and the data is really indispensable,” Tigre said. “Dismantling that system would really undermine the very possibility of evidence-based regulation and enforcement.”
The ICJ ruling also said that all countries are responsible for regulating major emitters within their jurisdictions. “A State may be responsible where, for example, it has failed to exercise due diligence by not taking the necessary regulatory and legislative measures to limit the quantity of emissions caused by private actors under its jurisdiction,” the court said.
A spokesperson for the EPA said that the agency is acting within the boundaries of U.S. law, including the Clean Air Act.
“We are committed to respecting the boundaries of that authority and ensuring that EPA’s requirements are reasonable and do not impose billions of dollars in cost without justification,” the agency said. “Any interested party is welcome to submit comments on the proposed rule during the public comment period, and we look forward to reviewing and responding during the rulemaking.”
Despite Trump’s “America First” policies, Tigre and other legal experts say that the U.S. is still bound by what is known as “customary international law,” which applies to all countries that are parties to the United Nations, which still includes the United States.
“I think this is precisely why this court put this [decision] out, to prevent the precise behavior that America is showing right now,” said Johanna Gusman, a Fiji-based senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law. “The U.S. can’t pretend that it doesn’t apply to them.”
The International Court of Justice was created in the wake of World War II to provide a legal venue to settle disputes peacefully between countries. The U.S. initially accepted the court’s jurisdiction when it opened in 1946, but former President Ronald Reagan officially rescinded that in 1985 after Nicaragua brought a case against the U.S. alleging the American military had violated its sovereignty. (The court ruled against the U.S. in 1986.)
In the first nine months of Trump’s second time as president, his administration has pulled the U.S. out of several U.N. organizations including the World Health Organization, the U.N. Human Rights Council, and the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, also known as UNESCO. Trump is also withdrawing the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement, a landmark climate treaty that sought to prevent global warming from exceeding the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, echoing the same decision in his first term.
The U.S.’s rejection of the ICJ’s jurisdiction does make it more complicated to hold them accountable. Gusman said she expects further domestic and international litigation down the line to cite the ICJ ruling and to see attorneys seek creative ways to hold the U.S. accountable. On Monday, Vanuatu plans to announce a new resolution to be introduced at the U.N. General Assembly to effectuate the ICJ’s ruling.
“There is an international responsibility here, even if the U.S. still tries to deny that there is one,” Tigre said.
The ICJ is not the only court that has ruled that countries have a responsibility to prevent climate change. Last year, Vanuatu and other Pacific island nations won a similar case at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, which said states have an obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In July, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a lengthy ruling concluding similarly, and wrote specifically that states have an obligation to generate accurate information to mitigate climate change.
“They have an obligation, a rock solid obligation, to collect this information,” said Kelly Matheson, deputy director of global strategy at the nonprofit Our Children’s Trust. “What the Trump administration is doing is, full stop, a violation of international law.”
Since the 1990’s, Martin Egot has protected his tribe’s ancestral homelands near Nigeria’s Cross River National Park. Egot, who is Indigenous Ekuri, helped establish the Ekuri Initiative, an organization dedicated to protecting parts of the rainforest.
In 2009, the Ekuri Initiative successfully pushed the Cross River government, a state in Nigeria, to put a moratorium on logging activity in community-controlled areas of the rainforest, and were able to enforce the logging ban by deploying eco-guards: Ekuri men who patrol the rainforest to deter developers and illegal loggers.
But in 2023, the Nigerian government lifted the moratorium to allow logging. Then, later that year, a local timber company arrived without proper permits. The Ekuri eco-guards confiscated the company’s logging equipment, but their actions caused army personnel to enter the village, firing their weapons. There were no reported injuries, but the violence all but ended the Ekuri Initiative as eco-guards are unable to compete with private and government security forces hired to protect logging companies moving into the area.
“In Cross River, the forest is almost completely gone everywhere else,” said Egot. “What we still have is found around the communities. So there’s a whole lot of pressure.”
The violence that Ekuri environment and land defenders face isn’t uncommon. This week, Global Witness, an organization that investigates environmental and human rights abuses, released a new report documenting 146 cases of homicides and kidnappings of environmental and land defenders in 2024 – an average of three people killed or disappeared every week. The report’s authors say attacks occurred after speaking out or taking action to defend their lands, with many opposing mining, logging, and other extractive industries.
One third of the collected incidents happened to Indigenous peoples, while Afro-descendants, people with ancestral ties to enslaved Africans, comprised two cases this year. Most Afro-descendants reside in South America, like Brazil, and are stewards of biodiverse land. Since the organization began tracking violence against land and environment defenders in 2012, there have been a total of 2,253 cases.
“All these years reporting on the realities of defenders across the world, highlight, to me, the disproportionate nature of the attacks that Indigenous peoples in particular, and Afro descendants, are having to suffer year in and year out,” said Laura Furones, the report’s author.
According to the study, Colombia is considered the deadliest country for land and environment defenders with the highest number of lethal attacks with 48 cases, a third of the total, global amount. However, 80 percent of kidnapping and murder cases occurred in Latin America. Global Witness attributes the high rates of lethal violence to countries with weak state presence that enable corruption and unbalanced legal systems making resource conflicts more deadly. In Asia, the Philippines saw the highest number of killings and disappearances with most violence linked to government bodies.
It’s estimated that around 54 percent of the world’s critical mineral deposits needed for green energy and AI needs – cobalt, lithium, nickel, and copper – are located on or near Indigenous lands, often driving violence. “Amid rampant resource use, escalating environmental pressure, and a rapidly closing window to limit [global] warming to 1.5C, [industries] are treating land and environmental defenders like they are a major inconvenience instead of canaries in a coal mine about to explode,” said Rachel Cox, a senior campaigner at Global Witness.
In Nigeria, Egot says he hopes to restore the Ekuri Initiative, and find ways to introduce more jobs to the region, including as eco-guards, as a way to curb logging in his community’s homelands.
“We are calling on international communities to continue to talk to our state, our government, because Nigeria signs to a whole lot of environmental treaties,” he said. “So these treaties that they sign into, do they actually respect these treaties? Do they follow up on these treaties?
In 2020, when Brian Mason began his first term as Chairman for the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Reservation, gold miners came calling. Just a few years before, Integra Resources, a Canadian mining company, had acquired an abandoned gold and silver mine on the tribe’s homelands in southwestern Idaho, but before work began, they had an unusual request: could the tribe and the company establish a partnership that would benefit both?
“There are a lot of things that were different as we started to work with Integra,” Mason said. Early efforts included invitations to tribal members to the mine while impact studies were conducted as well as initial site surveys.
Historically, mining has been ecologically costly and even deadly to Indigenous peoples around the world. The industry is also notorious for ignoring meaningful consultation with Indigenous communities and outright ignoring human rights. Even in the United States, mining companies have often operated with carte blanche in Indian Country.
Last month, for instance, the Nez Perce Tribe, located north of Duck Valley in Idaho, sued the Forest Service for approving an open-pit gold mine that the tribe says will pose cultural and ecological risks to their homelands. In Arizona, a proposed copper mine on Oak Flat, a sacred site, has been in and out of court since 2014 and ongoing resistance has led President Donald Trump to call tribal members who are against the mine “anti-American”.
For Duck Valley, the question was: how do you draw up an agreement that benefits the tribe with an industry that has thrived on theft and dispossession? The answer was surprisingly simple: include the nation as development partners in a framework that recognizes tribal sovereignty and self-determination.
Mining operations, and most especially projects connected to transition minerals, become more expensive when companies mine in Indigenous territories without working with Indigenous peoples. In 2023, a federal judge ruled that Enel Green Power, a wind turbine developer, trespassed on Osage Nation lands when it built a wind farm, creating a legal precedent that has shifted the way developers navigate projects and made meaningful tribal consultation a cost-cutting measure for businesses.
“We don’t do this as an ideological sort of effort,” said Mark Stockton, Integra’s vice president of sustainability, with regards to the Duck Valley deal. “It creates resilience in our business. It creates predictability and durability.”
Last month, the Shoshone-Paiute and Integra signed a legally binding agreement to develop and oversee the gold and silver mining project, sharing profits and establishing, within the decade-long timeline of the mine’s active operations, initiatives that will support the tribe’s economic development and language revitalization efforts. But what makes the agreement stand apart from others is its commitment to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, an international standard for the rights of Indigenous peoples. While other projects, such as the Anahola Solar Project in Hawaii, coordinated a partnership with Indigenous Hawaiians under an UNDRIP-style framework, Integra says its agreement with Duck Valley is a first in the Lower 48.
Maranda Compton, the Founder of Lepwe, an organization that consults tribes and developers in sectors such as mining, focuses on agreements and publishing guidelines that benefit tribes in other sectors through UNDRIP. “My joke is always that consultation is basically the federal government coming to a tribe and saying, How much do you hate this project on a scale from one to you’re going to sue us?”
Compton co-authored a white paper earlier this year with the Tallgrass Institute, an organization focused on Indigenous economic stewardship, detailing the way industries are shifting to respect UNDRIP and pursue coordination with tribal nations, a move that includes developers engaging in revenue sharing and continuous oversight over projects with tribes.
Chairman Mason says the demand for metals and minerals has a big impact on his tribe, especially in the neighboring state of Nevada, where Shoshone-Paiute lands are also located. “If Nevada were its own country, it’d be the fourth-largest gold producer in the world,” he said. But the state’s also been embroiled in multiple disputes with tribal nations, notably, the Thacker Pass mine project, the largest known deposit of lithium, a mineral used for electric vehicles and a sacred site for tribes, including the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony and Summit Lake Paiute. Beyond a lack of meaningful tribal consultation to mine Thacker Pass, generating an international rights violation report by Human Rights Watch, Mason noted there are no profit-sharing agreements in place and none have been proposed. On top of that, federal mining law allows companies to claim land cheaply while avoiding payments on royalties for use of that land.
“The tribes have never been subject to any of that revenue,” said Mason. “We’ve argued with the U.S. government on that, we’ve argued with the state about it, trying to get some revenue to the tribes in some form of a mineral tax.”
But many tribes in the region, including the Shoshone-Paiute, are known as “non-revenue” tribes: a tribal nation with an economy solely supported by grants and federal funding. For the Shoshone-Paiute, that has meant 85 to 90 percent of all revenue comes from federal sources. But because funding is contingent on available funding, non-revenue tribal economies are often unstable.
Tribal nations receive federal assistance as a result of signing treaties with the United States. In exchange for large swaths of land, the federal government agreed to provide support to said tribes. However, in a report released by the Government Accountability Office last year, auditors found that it was unclear how much of the $32.6 billion in tribal funding and assistance actually went to tribes. That funding is also expected to decrease. In a 2026 budget request to Congress, the Trump administration has proposed cutting funding to the Bureau of Indian Affairs by $617 million.
According to Arnold Thomas, the tribe’s Vice Chairman, the tribe’s economy, alongside other tribes in Nevada, has always struggled. By bringing in revenue from mining and gaming, Arnold believes this will move the tribe to “becoming self-sufficient and exercising their sovereignty.”
While details of the agreement are confidential, the tribe says that they wouldn’t participate if the revenue wouldn’t have been enough to fund their projects. Now on the horizon: a tribal healthcare system and language revitalization efforts to stem the loss of fluent speakers. “The funding will assist us,” said Thomas, “enhancing our teaching modalities, infrastructure, and medical needs.”
“I hope folks view this as not the gold standard, but the new standard,” said Compton.
In early August, in the village of Utulei on the eastern shore of Tatuila, the largest of seven islands that make up American Samoa, more than two dozen local residents gathered in an auditorium. They were there to learn about a proposal to allow deep-sea mining across more than 18 million acres of their surrounding waters in the Pacific Ocean.
President Donald Trump had issued an executive order to jump-start the nascent deep-sea mining industry three months earlier. Within weeks, the U.S. Department of the Interior began asking for public input on leasing the seabed surrounding American Samoa, and the territorial government organized a series of meetings to help educate the public on what to expect.
During the meeting, Oliver Gunasekara, co-founder and chief executive officer of a mining company called Impossible Metals, appeared on Zoomfrom San Jose, California, to give a presentation about how his company’s proposal to mine the seafloor about 130 miles offshore would benefit the American Samoan community.
“We have committed to provide 1 percent of our profits from the American Samoa EEZ to the community of American Samoa,” said Gunasekara, using the acronym for Exclusive Economic Zone, which refers to the waters surrounding American Samoa up to 200 miles from shore. Gunasekara said his company expects to generate up to $1 billion of annual revenue from mining; 1 percent would translate into $10 million for American Samoa per year.
About half an hour later, a local woman stood and commented on Gunasekara’s proposal. “I think it’s an insult that it’s 1 percent,” she said. “This is our ocean.”
“Many millions of dollars a year is not an insubstantial amount of money,” Gunasekara replied. “There’s no legal requirement for us to do this. This is something that we have voluntarily done. To my knowledge, no other mining company has.”
To Sabrina Suluai-Mahuka, who leads American Samoa’s climate resilience office and helped organize the meeting, Gunasekara’s response did not go over well. Neither did references by other industry officials to how it is preferable to mine “remote” parts of the Pacific than on land.
“Our waters are not isolated,” Suluai-Mahuka told Grist. “We live here.”
A year ago, American Samoa’s then-governor issued a moratorium on deep-sea miningaround the central Pacific archipelago. Yet when Trump issued his executive order on seabed mining in April, local leaders did not immediately reject it. Just a week earlier, the territory’s current governor, Pula Nikolao Pula, had publicly lauded Trump’s effort to open up Pacific conservation areas to commercial fishing, the islands’ leading industry.
But after discussing and researching the proposal, every major political leader in American Samoa came to agree: Their answer is no. “There is strong opposition to any exploration or extraction of minerals from the ocean floor in waters near American Samoa,” wrote Representative Amata Coleman Radewagen, American Samoa’s only U.S. congressional representative, in her official comments to the Interior Department. She described how Samoan culture, known as fa’a samoa, includes the story of a mother and a daughter who transformed into a turtle and a shark and swam to Tutuila.
“This is where the people stand, and I stand with the people — to preserve the shark and the turtle and fa’a samoa,” she said.
Yet whether or where the mining happens may not be up to the local Indigenous people. Unlike the independent country of Samoa, just a day’s sail away, American Samoa is a U.S. territory, subject to the whims of the American flag. Radewagen has a seat in the House of Representatives, but she is not allowed to vote, and U.S. territories have no voice at all in the U.S. Senate.
Residents of American Samoa, like residents of other U.S. territories, had no choice in whether Trump or Kamala Harris became president. Under international law, Indigenous peoples have the right to consent to projects on their lands, and in previous disputes with the federal government, American Samoa has pointed out that when it was established, the U.S. promised to respect the rights of its people. But while the Department of the Interior has elicited American Samoansʻ opinions on seabed mining, the agency’s current process could allow mining to proceed over the community’s objections.
Angelo Villagomez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress specializing in Indigenous-led conservation, is among more than 2,000 current and former residents of U.S. territories who signed a petition opposing the mining proposal. He said the situation in American Samoa reflects a broader assault on public lands and waters by the Trump administration, and highlights the political disparity facing residents of U.S. territories.
“No place is safe under this administration,” Villagomez said. “They’re not just trying to drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico and off the East Coast — they’re going to the farthest reaches of the American empire to look to extract natural resources,” he said, adding: “We should only be doing these things if the people who have to live with the outcomes are supportive of it.”
Impossible Metals workers position the Eureka II, a robotic underwater vehicle, in a Canadian lake on May 1. The company says the machine can conduct seabed mining with less environmental harm than other companies’ technologies. John Wong / AFP via Getty Images
Deep-sea mining is the process of removing minerals like manganese, cobalt, nickel, and copper from the bottom of the sea at depths greater than 650 feet (or 200 meters). In recent years, companies have spent millions of dollars investing in technology and testing it in the hopes that the fledgling industry will get the green light from national and international regulators to begin mining commercially. The problem, said Andrew Thaler, a Maryland-based deep sea ecologist and environmental consultant, is that less than half a percent of the deep-sea floor has been studied. Recently, scientists discovered a deep-sea coral reef almost as big as the Great Barrier Reef that lies perilously close to a seabed-mining test site from the 1970s. “They came within 20 kilometers of basically strip-mining the largest deep-sea coral reef on the planet 50 years before we even knew it existed,” Thaler said.
Hundreds of scientists have raised alarm about the industry’s potential to destroy sensitive habitats of animals that have evolved undisturbed for millions of years.
Gunasekara says his company is different. While other mining companies want to rip metals off of sea crusts or drill into hydrothermal vents to pull out metals, Gunasekara’s company is committed to only one type of extraction method: removing potato-sized globs of minerals, known as polymetallic nodules, from the ocean floor.
To do that, Impossible Metals invented robots that descend into the ocean and hover above the seabed. When the machines identify a polymetallic nodule, a robot arm reaches down and grabs it, similar to a claw machine grabbing a stuffed animal in an arcade. Gunasekara said the robots are smart enough to avoid living creatures, and he expects to program the machines to pick up 40 percent of the nodules they see, leaving most of the habitat behind undisturbed.
This robotic arm, part of the Eureka II, is designed to pick up polymetallic nodules from the ocean floor with minimal damage to surrounding habitat and creatures. John Wong / AFP via Getty Images
Polymetallic nodules are bulbous lumps of rock rich in battery metals such as cobalt and nickel that can be found in huge swaths of the Pacific Ocean seabed. They’re formed over millions of years. William West / AFP via Getty Images
That’s far different from the house-size tractors that other mining companies intend to drive over the seafloor that would necessarily crush the creatures beneath them. In addition to pursuing his own mining operations, Gunasekara wants Impossible Metals’ technology to be adopted by other companies.
“We would like our tech to be the preferred moving forward because it’s much less environmentally invasive, no sediment plumes, no biodiversity loss,” Gunasekara told Grist. “I want to be crystal clear: I’m not saying we’ll have zero impact; I’m just saying we will have by far the lowest impact of any form of mining anywhere on the planet.”
Gunasekara said Impossible Metals’ robots would also avoid releasing plumes of sediment that other mining companies expect to release when lifting minerals up to the surface. Avoiding or minimizing that plume is important because scientists fear that mineral-rich sediment plumes could contaminate fisheries. Such pollution could be disastrous for American Samoa, where tuna makes up 99.5 percent of the territory’s exports.
Jeffrey Drazen, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaiʻi who has studied the environmental effects of deep-sea mining, said he likes the idea of Gunasekara’s technology, but has no idea if it’s going to work. “It’s hard to evaluate any of these claims because it needs to be trialed,” Drazen said.
Types of deep-sea mining. Amelia K. Bates / Grist
There aren’t any peer-reviewed studies validating Gunasekara’s claims, and a federal environmental analysis hasn’t yet been completed. The company has tested its technology off the coast of Florida, but it still needs more analysis. “If it all works, then it will reduce environmental risk,” Drazen said of Gunasekara’s technology. At the same time, “It’s still mining. It’s still removing a substrate from the bottom of the ocean that takes millions of years to form and is habitat for the animals who live there.”
Gunasekara thinks that the environmental cost is worth it, because the minerals that are contained in the polymetallic nodules could help create batteries for electric vehicles and other green technologies, reducing energy dependency on fossil fuels.
“We all want to protect the ocean. But the biggest threat to the ocean, especially the deep ocean, is climate change,” Gunasekara said. “And so the question is, Where do we get the metal from to displace fossil fuels?”
Gunasekara is far from the only entrepreneur who sees opportunity in the demand for minerals and potential for profit. Companies have for years been building support among other Pacific islands like the Cook Islands, funding numerous local causes like medical equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic and the construction of traditional canoes in the hopes that they’ll be able to tap into what’s been called a “$20 trillion opportunity.” Those efforts seem to be paying off: The Cook Islands’ prime minister has been supportive of seabed mining, and just a few weeks ago, the country signed a new agreement with the Trump administration for seabed mining exploration.
American Samoa hasn’t seen that same level of community investment; Gunasekara from Impossible Metals hasn’t yet visited. “We’re not a massive company, and so we have not been on the ground, although we’ve had multiple calls with the governor’s office and with other people,” Gunasekara said. Currently, the Delaware-based startup employs 15 full-time workers.
Part of the reason mining companies are not flocking to Tutuila is that, ultimately, Gunasekara expects the decision on mining leases will be made 7,000 miles away in Washington, D.C. “These waters are not within the jurisdiction of American Samoa,” Gunasekara told Grist. “They may not like this, but under federal law, 3 miles off the coast belong to the territory or the state; from 3 miles to 200 belong to the federal government, and it is purely their jurisdiction.”
That’s also why Gunasekara is not discouraged by local opposition to his plan. He thinks there’s a less than 1 percent chance the Trump administration will stop the process given how enthusiastically the president has embraced mining. “They are required to be consulted, but it’s not their decision,” he said of local officials. He noted the territory also doesn’t have the right to any federal lease revenue for seabed mining the same way states like Texas and Louisiana get a cut of offshore oil and gas lease revenue, although Gunasekara said he’s in favor of changing that.
The Department of the Interior is still at the beginning of the process of issuing any seabed mining leases. The agency plans to review the public comments, identify specific areas for mining, and conduct an environmental assessment before making any leases available.
Suluai-Mahuka, the climate change resilience director in American Samoa, said the community’s lack of decision-making power comes up frequently in conversations about potential mining. “It’s within our EEZ, but it’s not within our call or our voice to say whether or not we can auction off our seabed,” she said.
“But at the end of the day,” she continued, “the question is, Whose livelihoods are going to be affected? It’s American Samoa. Whose economy might be affected with our reliance on the fishing industry? American Samoa. And whose historical ties and identities are tied to these waters? It’s American Samoa. It would make sense for our consent to be given if there was deep-sea mining,” she said. “And if the process continues, and our consent is not given, that’s very telling.”
Earlier this summer, the Banana Lake Fire erupted near Plains, Montana, engulfing over 850 acres in flames within a day. The “total suppression” response from firefighting officials included deploying at least 17 engines, two helicopters, and three bulldozers, as well as highly trained fire crews. But another newer piece of technology was also at play as firefighters worked to contain the blaze: drones.
As a new era with the natural disaster commences, both fire practitioners and researchers across the West are bolstering their arsenal with cutting-edge tools. Drones now fly above firefighters, private satellite companies monitor fire and smoke from above, and AI machine-learning models are helping to advance fire research. While these new innovations are not panaceas, ground operations crews and scientists are optimistic about the ways modern technology can help fight fire smarter, not harder.
Since 2018, drones — sometimes referred to as unmanned aerial systems, or UAS — have been flying under the radar as a new instrument for the United States Forest Service in the fight against wildfire. Thanks in large part to Dirk Giles, who launched and leads the agency’s UAS program, the number of drones deployed each year by the Forest Service has jumped from 734 flights in 2019 to over 17,000 in 2024.
“The program has really hit a new stride in the past three years,” said Giles. “We are seeing UAS supplementing fire crews across all phases of response.”
“This UAS program is now being recognized as prolific,” said Ry Phipps, a division supervisor in Region 1 of the Forest Service, which includes Montana. “There was a time we wouldn’t have even thought to try and order a drone for operations. They have become a fantastic tool that is changing the game.”
A UAS pilot from the U.S. Forest Service flies a drone using a handheld control system on the Banana Lake wildfire outside of Plains, Montana, on June 6. The pilot is looking for hotspot locations using thermal imagery, which are then passed onto firefighting crews on the ground.
John Stember
According to Phipps, drones are increasingly seen as a force multiplier by Forest Service employees. Drones equipped with infrared sensors can help detect lingering hot spots, pinpointing areas at risk for reigniting. Previously, firefighters had to meticulously hand-check burn scars, which could take days at a time and a ton of manpower depending on the size of the area. With supervisors like Phipps reading a thermal map on a screen fed by drone data, firefighters with boots on the ground can be dispatched more safely and efficiently, only going to spots that have high heat signatures.
“It saves a lot of time and risk for crews,” said Phipps.
For helicopter pilots, who help control wildfires by dropping water or fire retardant to suppress flames and creating fire lines for ground crews to control blazes, drones can also assist. Preprogrammed flight trajectories in combination with infrared sensors allow UAS to fly through heavy smoke or at night. This mitigates the need for “low and slow” reconnaissance missions, which require pilots to fly close to the ground in tricky terrain and low visibility. According to Giles, these missions are some of the most dangerous for wildland fire pilots. As their name would suggest, unmanned aerial systems offer a way to do surveillance without putting pilots in danger — which means that UAS can unlock new abilities for fire crews in extreme conditions.
“Basically, you can fly drones so that nobody gets hurt,” said Phipps. “You can replace a drone. You can’t replace a person.”
Although Giles, Phipps, and others believe that drones show great promise — especially in shifting risk from firefighters to a machine the size of a small cooler — they’re far from being a silver bullet. The machines have limited battery life and can only complete flights of about 15 minutes on average, meaning that deployments must be carefully planned. And since drones are still being studied in various fire management applications, manpower is still needed to check the “ground truth” of information that UAS provide.
Another limitation is simply availability. According to Phipps, there aren’t as many drones as there is demand for them.
Ironically, there’s also an emerging risk from privately owned drones getting in the way of official operations. If hobby drones are in the airspace near a wildfire, it’s also a no-go for land management agencies to fly. During a wildfire in Montana in 2022, aerial crew operations came to a standstill as an unapproved drone buzzed right into an area with a temporary flight restriction. Officials were able to locate the drone’s owner in just about 15 minutes — but that’s precious time when a fire is raging.
And just two weeks ago during a wildfire near Provo, Utah, fire operations were shut down by multiple drone incursions, impeding fire management on a high-profile fire near a densely populated community. While UAS are becoming more critical in fire operations, officials must also work on educating civilians to ensure unauthorized drones don’t prevent them from flying their own.
Grayback Forestry firefighters working on the Banana Lake Fire walk through the forest in a line and kneel down to feel for hotspots with their hands. Although the wildfire already burned through the area, small fires can burn underground or in tree root systems. Ground crews work in conjunction with drone pilots, who can detect hotspots using thermal imagery.
John Stember
Another area of fire management that drones have shown shown some promise in is lighting and managing controlled burns — intentional blazes set to clear dry brush and other fuels.
Fire management’s history of suppression disrupted the natural fire cycles that Indigenous communities once stewarded — cycles that many ecologists now champion. As colonization spread across the West and settlers sought to control land and resources, racist assimilation programs criminalized all manner of Indigenous customs. Prescribed burning was one of them.
But as the consequences of this more aggressive, reactive approach to fire management have become apparent, Western science has increasingly caught on to the effectiveness of routine controlled burning. One recent Stanford-led study revealed that prescribed burns can reduce the severity of subsequent wildfires by an average of 16 percent and net smoke pollution by 14 percent. Fire professionals have also recognized their potential, with applications growing year over year.
Enter another new breed of drones: UAS that can be equipped to carry “dragon eggs,” pingpong ball-sized clusters of a flammable potassium concoction that ignite on impact. This innovation helped the Forest Service burn around 189,000 acres in 2024 to reduce built-up fuels.
While the use of prescribed burns is on the rise, in Montana and elsewhere, concerns remain about public safety risks, both from air pollution and the possibility of blazes getting out of control. Technology is helping to address those kinds of questions, too.
Researchers in Montana are looking to clear some of the lingering haze of safety concerns around prescribed burns through a National Science Foundation-funded project titled SMART FIRES. (The project’s title is an acronym for Sensors, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence in Real Time Fire Science.) The group, specializing in fields from atmospheric chemistry to public health, will use the grant to conduct five years of study and fieldwork aimed at unpacking the environmental and social dynamics needed to scale prescribed burns as a preventative measure for wildfire. The suite of custom gadgets that the project is utilizing includes some proprietary UAS.
“Drones are just a tool,” said John Sheppard, who leads SMART FIRES’ AI computer science team. He added that his role in the project is a supportive one — to see how these technological tools can further the various research aims.
Using smart sensors and high-resolution cameras fastened on drones and ground sites, the researchers are training AI models to analyze prescribed burns on the fly. The different smart sensors will efficiently process real-time data, and in combination with weather and historical fire information, they will look to model a burn’s movement on the landscape.
Before conducting a prescribed burn, practitioners usually carefully examine environmental factors like wind, humidity, and temperature. These AI models will theoretically offer an enhanced version of that, also incorporating factors like ground fuels and topography to provide supervisors with the best possible data to burn accurately and safely.
SMART FIRES also touts a “science lab on wheels” — a tricked-out Ford Transit van that looks right off a Ghostbusters movie set. The van collects smoke directly from active fires, which environmental chemists then analyze to determine things like the level of PM2.5 — particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns, a concern for public health — and other pollutants present in the smoke.
The social science arm of the project will also engage community members, surveying rural and Indigenous communities in particular about their concerns and priorities related to prescribed burns and ensuring these considerations are put into risk assessments. The consortium ultimately hopes to provide interpretable, map-based forecasts to land managers to help them decide when, where, and how prescribed burns can be used for wildfire prevention.
“The goal of the project is to refine the AI models so that they can give better recommendations to experts on the ground who know best,” said Sheppard.
While drones and AI are opening up a new era for fire science and management, some of the most tenured experts on the ground have yet to gain access to these types of cutting-edge tools.
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of Montana, sometimes known by the acronym CSKT, have practiced prescribed burns as a tool for land stewardship since time immemorial. According to Ron Swaney, the fire management officer of the CSKT Division of Fire, the role of fire has long been guided by a deep cultural responsibility. “I think a lot of people underestimate the role of Indigenous burning on the landscape,” he said. “There was purpose and intent for that use of fire.”
Justin Underwood, the CSKT prescribed fire and fuel specialist, has been in fire management for 19 years and was the first UAS pilot to be certified under the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Pacific Northwest region. For three years, he has been trying to get a drone for the tribes’ prescribed burn operations. But because he isn’t employed by the Department of the Interior, he has yet to cut through the red tape.
The Office of Aviation Services, which lives within the U.S. Department of the Interior, is responsible for all aircraft services and facilities — including the certification card needed for flying a UAS. According to Swaney, the tribe has a helicopter, two single-engine air tankers, and an air attack platform for firefighting. But because drones are a newer implementation in fire management, nonfederal fire divisions may run up against a convoluted process to get clearance to use a UAS.
“I wouldn’t be so frustrated if my qualifications didn’t mirror other pilots,” said Underwood. “I’ve done every training offered by the Department of the Interior, but I am still unsure what it will take to get officially carded for a UAS.”
While the CSKT coordinates with public land agencies on prescribed burns, the tribal nation sets its own fire management plan — one part of a larger plan focused on climate change adaptation. The tribe’s approach to fire weaves together ancestral knowledge and contemporary science. But being unable to utilize the latest technological tools has hampered these efforts, Swaney said, underscoring just how important the role of technology is in present and future fire management.
Like many government agencies, the Department of Agriculture has a fraught history with discrimination and disenfranchisement. Farmers of color and young and beginning producers have long struggled to access capital, in the form of loans and grants, from the agency.
So in 2022, former President Joe Biden’s USDA created the Regional Food Business Centers program using funding from the American Rescue Plan. The program established 12 virtual centers to function as business development resource hubs within rural communities nationwide. The centers were intended as a way to provide technical assistance, navigate federal and state resources, and administer grants to small- and mid-sized farmers and ranchers who wanted to develop food businesses or access new markets. The overall goal was to build a more resilient food system.
A total of roughly $400 million was earmarked to support the 12 centers, each run by a coalition of organizations and partners based in each region, which the USDA agreed to fund for five years. In 2024, many began distributing sub-awards from that pool of funds in the form of “business builder” grants.
In early January, Ed Harvey, a Navajo farmer in rural northern Arizona, was awarded a technical assistance contract dedicated to assisting Indigenous producers from the Southwest Regional Food Business Center, which was created to strengthen local supply chains throughout Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah. Not only does he grow apples, peaches, pears, plums, nectarines, cherries, and sumac berries, but Harvey runs a consulting business geared toward helping other Navajo tribal members through all of the paperwork needed in order to begin or continue farming on their land.
Much of the farmland throughout Navajo Nation is left idle, buried in layers of dirt, wind deposits, and towering weeds, with slivers of corn, squash, and melons here and there. Harvey attributes the situation to the federal mandate that tribal members need a permit with a conservation plan in order to use their land for agricultural production. It’s an exceedingly onerous application process, and the reimbursable RFBC funding was intended to cover the costs associated with the development of conservation plans for other tribal members. When he heard he was selected for the program, Harvey was elated, and immediately began advertising the opportunity to work with him free of charge: He reached out to community farm boards, promoted it across all of the reservation’s chapter houses, and even posted flyers in local businesses.
That sense of joy morphed into one of sinking despair when, the following month, President Donald Trump’s administration abruptly froze the program’s funding, and a tsunami of layoffs at USDA and the Bureau of Indian Affairs saw thousands of federal workers leave their positions. The month of February, Harvey said, was the “worst of my life.”
“It hurt me. It hurt the business,” he said. “I did a lot of conservation plans for free, not getting paid for it, because I expressed to people that it’s paid for, so I didn’t want to let it ruin my reputation.” While the fate of the centers remained in purgatory, Harvey scrambled to remedy the damage done, completing 36 conservation projects at no charge, the equivalent of hundreds of unpaid hours and thousands of dollars worth of labor — a huge net loss.
Finally, on July 15, the USDA announced it was shuttering the program, a decision that was met with considerable opposition across food and farming sectors. And just like that, Harvey’s big plans for his community went up in smoke.
“This was a program fully dedicated to support rural people. So I was thinking, ‘Heck, yeah, I can support my relatives who live in the middle of nowhere. I can find a way to help my uncle, to help with what he needs by planting corn,’” said Harvey. “Out here in Navajo Nation, you have to take in the fact that there’s very limited opportunities for people to make money. The tribe here, we live on government assistance…people don’t have that dedicated time to give back to the land, to give back to who they are. It takes funding mechanisms or opportunities to find [it].”
Ed Harvey grows apples, peaches, pears, plums, nectarines, cherries, and sumac berries in Salina Springs, a small Navajo chapter in northern Arizona. Ed Harvey
In the press release announcing the end of the RFBCs, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins criticized the Biden administration for creating the RFBCs “without any long-term way to finance them,” which the release described as a “COVID-era program.” The release also specified that “over 450” grants so far awarded would be honored — which meant that roughly four of the centers that hadn’t yet officially awarded their grant selections had 60 days to cease operations, and the other eight overseeing those awards would end next May. But even those centers still operating through next spring won’t be running at full capacity, as the cancellation limits the scope of what each center can do to no more than merely monitoring awards and technical assistance for existing grants. Rollins also stated that “any remaining funds will be repurposed to better support American agriculture.” As of this story’s publication, the details of that repurposing are not yet known.
Roughly a week after the USDA announced the end of the RFBCs, Rollins released a memo that again took the agricultural world by storm. The five-page document revealing Rollins’ plan to significantly reorganize the agency was accompanied by an unlisted YouTube video intended for employees, which also broadly detailed the four pillars powering the decision: ensuring the size of the agency’s workforce aligns with available resources and priorities, bringing USDA closer to those it serves by relocating resources, getting rid of bureaucracy, and paring down redundant support functions.
According to current and former USDA staffers, the closure of the country’s regional food business centers and the agency’s reorganization rollout should not be considered as separate developments, but rather as successive decisions with intertwining impacts. Both moves are expected to have lasting effects on historically underserved rural communities in particular, where farmers and families are already facing the day-to-day impacts of a shrinking federal workforce in local offices. That’s to say nothing of the growing role of climate change in throttling agricultural production and amplifying economic stressors such as increased price volatility, trade war disruptions, and surging labor and production costs.
“To me, there is a real friction here between those in the administration that simply want to diminish, destroy, and decimate the federal workforce and any sort of policy goal that is aimed at improving the lives of Americans and reducing costs for those who live in rural communities,” said Michael Amato, former USDA communications director. So far in his second term, Trump’s USDA has gotten rid of more than 15,000 federal employees, nearly a fifth of its workforce, straining bureau capacity, even as the agency has culled billions of dollars in funding streams that, in the process, has buckled local and regional food systems. At least ten percent of the federal employees who have left the USDA this year worked for Rural Development, the nation’s lead agency that fights rural poverty.
“If there was some policy objective, then it’s lost on me, because I don’t see how simply just cutting funds to try to run up your DOGE score as high as possible, and calling for deferred resignations across the entire department with no strategic plan about where you see waste or where you see bureaucratic bloat,” Amato continued. “It just seems like a meat axe approach with the goal of shrinking the department.”
Rollins did not specify a timeline for the plan, nor did she share many details of how it will be carried out, but noted that the agency will move more than half of the roughly 4,600 D.C. area employees out of the capital area. According to Rollins, the five hubs, located in Raleigh, North Carolina, Kansas City, Missouri, Indianapolis, Indiana, Fort Collins, Colorado, and Salt Lake City, Utah, would bring the USDA closer to its “core constituents.” The USDA did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.
Multiple current USDA employees told Grist that not even they have been briefed on the details of the reorganization. “We haven’t been given any more information than is publicly available,” said one USDA employee who is based in D.C. and asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. “It’s been unsettling. Morale is low. It has not been a great work environment, just because everyone feels insecure right now.”
“The relocation is actually going to be moving many of our regional office partners farther from the states that they cover,” the staffer continued. “The logic is just not there. It doesn’t make sense. And the claim that they’re moving up closer to the people we serve, is just patently false.” The USDA staffer added that the mass layoffs experienced have already resulted in overworked employees and significant delays in processing financial assistance applications. “There are things falling through the cracks,” they said.
On Thursday, August 21, a letter addressed to Rollins and signed by 32 USDA unions, and shared with Grist, also expressed widespread concerns about the reorganization. It noted that over 90 percent of USDA employees already live and work outside of the D.C. area and urged the department to “slow down, engage with Congress and the labor unions in good faith, and fully assess the true impacts of this reorganization before proceeding further.”
“We are just trying to call attention to how poorly planned the USDA reorganization is, that they seem to be hiding whatever details that they have,” said Ethan Roberts, a physical science technician at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service based in Peoria, Illinois, who represents the bargaining unit employees at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research as union president. “There’s something going on. When I talk to the management in this building, they don’t know anything. They’ve not been told anything.
“Why this is incredibly harmful is because the USDA is already struggling administratively,” Roberts continued. “Here in my laboratory, the management and the admin are taking on two to three jobs just to keep up to try and make everything continue to function. If we lose even more people in D.C., at the highest levels of the human resources department, and our budgeting and our billing, it’s going to be catastrophic. There’s going to be a critical administrative failure.”
The lack of clarity has prompted plenty of congressional backlash, too. When news of the reorganization broke, a Senate hearing was swiftly assembled where a bipartisan contingency of Democrats and Republicans grilled Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Stephen Vaden about the unusually secretive nature of the rollout of the reorganization. Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry ranking member Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, said at the hearing that the committee first heard of the plan just minutes before it was announced.
“It is clear from the hearing that this is a half-baked reorganization plan developed without input from Congress or stakeholders that will almost certainly result in worse services for farmers, families, and rural communities,” Senator Klobuchar later told Grist. She noted that the reorganization “follows the cancellations or delays of funds for voluntary conservation programs that protect our environment and improve farmers’ bottom lines.”
Klobuchar and some of her colleagues on the Senate Agriculture Committee sent a letter to Vaden on Monday requesting more time to comment on the plan and increased transparency with the results of the agency’s ongoing public comment period. The letter followed at least two others that have been issued in the last month by groups of lawmakers demanding more information. Nearly all have referred to the first Trump administration’s relocation of the USDA’s Economic Research Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which resulted in the resignation of three quarters of employees, and declining workforce productivity.
Kevin Shea, a 45-year veteran of USDA who led the agency’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service for 11 of those years, and briefly served as Secretary of Agriculture during the Biden administration, points to the USDA’s claim that the reorganization plan will bring staffers closer to constituents as one example of the contradictions at play. “This whole ruse about being closer to farmers — what nonsense. They’re still going to be in cities hundreds of miles from farmers,” said Shea.
What’s more, the RFBC program wasn’t solely addressing an immediate food system crisis that became clear because of the pandemic, he said, but “it was addressing a problem that had been revealed. The problem was always there.” A USDA report released last October found that the RFBCs led to more than 2,800 individuals receiving technical assistance, 1,500 new partnerships formed by recipients, and 287 businesses reporting increased revenue as a result of the program. Other critics of the Trump administration’s decision to cancel it have argued the program was established to meet a $4 billion congressional mandate in the American Rescue Plan to build more resilient food systems.
Another current USDA employee based in D.C., who also asked to remain anonymous, told Grist that the double blow of the closure of the regional food business centers and the proposed relocations “is going to result in massive harm to rural America which, again, is a population that they purport to care about.” “There’s no particular rhyme or reason that we can tell,” the staffer said, while pointing out where the new hubs aren’t. “California is the biggest agriculture state in the country, and there’s not a hub there. Doesn’t make any sense.”
“For farmers and people that rely on the USDA for information, for money, it’s going to be poorer quality service and less of it because there’s just going to be less people working,” said Roberts, the USDA union president. “If we experience an even greater loss of the administrative staff that keeps the USDA running, by telling them that they need to pick up their entire lives and move to somewhere across the country, the USDA is going to grind to a halt.”
On August 9 and 10, a massive storm over southeastern Wisconsin dropped up to 13 inches of rain in just a few hours, sending floodwater gushing downriver and destroying more than 1,800 homes in Milwaukee. The disaster was the second-worst two-day rain event in the United States since 1871.
“For years, scientists have warned about what can happen when climate change supercharges extreme weather events. This is exactly what they meant,” the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal reported, describing the disaster as a 1,000-year flood.
Now, more than a dozen youth from Wisconsin, including Indigenous youth, are filing a lawsuit against the state’s utility regulator to force it to consider climate change when evaluating new fossil fuel projects.
Currently, Wisconsin law blocks the Public Service Commission from taking air pollution — including carbon dioxide emissions — into consideration during the permitting process. Fifteen children and teenagers, ages 8 to 17, filed a lawsuit Friday against the utility regulator alleging that the law violates their constitutional rights to life and liberty.
The case is part of a growing climate litigation movement led in part by Indigenous youth. Twelve-year-old Miahlin B., who goes by her tribal name Waazakone, and her three siblings joined the lawsuit because climate change is eroding their traditional ways of life.
The children harvest wild rice, which is sacred to their communities, but warming temperatures are making it harder to grow rice successfully. They tap sugar maple trees to make maple sugar, but last year came up dry in part because of a shorter winter season. They fish for walleye and sturgeon, but both fish populations are shrinking as waters warm.
Miahlin B., who goes by Waazakone, joined the lawsuit to protect her tribe’s traditional ways of life.
Nitumigaabow Champagne / Our Children’s Trust
Waazakone told Grist she wants to protect her community for future generations. She describes herself as a water protector, explaining that caring for water is part of her responsibility as a female member of the Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians.
“We need the government to understand that clean water and air is a human right and our most valuable resource,” she said.
The youth plaintiffs are also challenging a Wisconsin law that prohibits the Public Service Commission from mandating more renewable energy from local utilities. Right now, about three-fourths of the state’s electricity generation comes from fossil fuels like oil and gas. That’s on par with the national average, but lags far behind states like South Dakota where more than 75 percent of its state energy production comes from renewables.
The plaintiffs are represented by Midwest Environmental Advocates, a Madison-based environmental nonprofit law center, and Our Children’s Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit dedicated to advancing youth-led climate litigation.
The latter is perhaps best known for its successful litigation against the state of Montana in Held v. Montana. In December, the state’s Supreme Court affirmed that Montana youth have a constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment,” and concluded that the state should take greenhouse gas emissions into account when considering new fossil fuel projects. The state hasn’t considered any new oil and gas projects since then, so it remains to be seen what that will look like in practice.
“Wisconsin doesnʻt have any fossil fuel extraction like Montana, but they do continue to have an electricity sector that’s dominated by fossil fuels. Itʻs the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state,” said Our Children’s Trust attorney Nate Bellinger, who is representing the Wisconsin plaintiffs.
The nonprofit has filed dozens of lawsuits in the U.S. over the last decade and a half, including one against the Trump administrationʻs reversal of President Joe Bidenʻs climate policies. Last year, they helped secure a landmark settlement in Hawaiʻi with the case Navahine v. Hawaiʻi Department of Transportation, where youth plaintiffs contended that the state’s commitment to expanding infrastructure to support gas-powered cars and disregard for cleaner options violated their constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment.” There, the state agreed to develop a plan to zero out carbon emissions from its transportation sector by 2045.
In Wisconsin, the constitutional right to a clean environment isn’t as explicit as in Montana or Hawai’i, where there is language in the state constitution spelling out that right. Wisconsin Democrats tried unsuccessfully earlier this year to add that language to the state constitution. But the attorneys in this new case are arguing that a stable climate system is necessary to achieve the constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Maria Antonia Tigre, director of global climate change litigation at the Sabin Center for Climate Change at Columbia Law, said lawsuits like this take on new salience in light of the Trump administration’s rollback of climate action. “It’s even more important to bring these cases now given the current state of the United States’ stance on climate change in general,” she said.
A spokesman from the Wisconsin Public Service Commission declined to comment on pending litigation.
As state leaders grapple with mounting costs of flood recovery and plead for federal assistance, Waazakone hopes that her lawsuit forces them to take climate change seriously.
“I want the state of Wisconsin to realize that you cannot allow businesses and people to continue to erode our futures,” she said.
When the United Nations marked the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples last week, it signaled a growing recognition of a new kind of extraction. Artificial intelligence, or AI, systems are being trained on massive troves of online data, much of it collected without the consent of the communities involved. For Indigenous peoples, this new form of extraction has raised questions about who controls their histories, languages, and cultural knowledge and whether the technology will erase or distort them entirely. With this in mind, tribes and nations have been pushing to assert “data sovereignty” — the right to control how information is collected and used — and claim a seat at the table as tech companies and governments set the rules for AI oversight.
Perhaps as a reflection of the AI boom and its implications for Indigenous communities, this year’s theme for the international Indigenous day was “Indigenous Peoples and AI: Defending Rights, Shaping Futures.” At the heart of the commemorative event was the acknowledgement of a stark reality: While information extraction, data center development, and the global critical minerals race have harmed Indigenous communities, emerging AI technologies also offer tools to address some of these challenges. The critical minerals used in batteries for backup power at data centers are often sourced from ecologically sensitive regions in Indigenous territories such as the Atacama Salt Flat in Chile. The centers also consume vast amounts of water and energy, which can strain local aquifers and cause pollution. But even as communities grapple with ecological destruction and changes to their way of life due to the AI boom, some are beginning to recognize the potential it holds for language revitalization and climate forecasting.
“Indigenous people have a long history asking to be seated at the table and to ensure that those who have the power listen to their demands,” said Fernando Marani, program director of justice, inclusion, and equality at New York University, during the event. Those who currently hold power “are not governments, but the private sector,” he added.
Panelists from Norway, Canada, New York City, Thailand, and the Amazon discussed how AI affects the rights and livelihoods of Indigenous communities during the event. By adopting a rights-based framework, such as the principle of free, prior, and informed consent, tribes and nations can assert data sovereignty and drive the direction of AI development and consultation efforts, they said.
Tech companies train their generative AI and models such as ChatGPT, Claude, X’s Grok, and Google’s Gemini on vast quantities of text, images, videos, and other online data. The information is typically used without shared agreement or approval. Some of the datasets used to train these models come from governments that historically undercount, miscount, or otherwise fail to accurately represent Indigenous communities. Indigenous people, for instance, are routinely misclassified on death certificates. More recently, a Canadian television network identified a number of Indigenous language learning books with inaccurate translations likely produced with AI tools. These processes are “threatening to distort and erase our knowledge, rather than preserve it,” said Danielle Boyer, an Anishinaabe robotics inventor and founder of Skobots.
At the same time, Indigenous communities are beginning to harness AI to address their own priorities, from combating climate change to revitalizing endangered languages. PolArctic, cofounded by Yup’ik Alaska Natives Leslie Canavera and Lauren Decker, develops AI forecasting tools in conjunction with Indigenous knowledge. These tools largely help fishing businesses plan sea ice forecasts and predict fish stocks in the Arctic Ocean. Using shared knowledge of the best fishing spots, the company practices a balance between open data principles and Indigenous data sovereignty.
Similarly, Te Heku Media, a Māori broadcasting organization in New Zealand, built a speech recognition tool to transcribe te reo, the Māori language. The broadcaster trained on data using hours of native speaker audio and consulted with the Māori community. Eventually, the organization built a distribution platform known as Whare Kōrero, or “house of speech,” to store the data used to train the language model.
“The data generated from tribal communities, or even from tribal citizens being internet citizens, and signing up on social media apps, or just participating in the internet more broadly, all are a commodity,” Rusty Pickens, a member of the Chickasaw Nation, told Grist. Pickens previously worked in the State Department and White House on new media technologies and digital platforms. “How do we protect our communities and make sure you know we’re not exploited and our resources aren’t extracted yet again because of novel technology that’s coming out?”
There are a few regulations governing AI. In 2024, the United Nations adopted the Global Digital Compact, the first international framework guiding AI governance. However, the compact currently doesn’t include protections for Indigenous data. The European Union AI Act, which passed last year, also aims to minimize discrimination and bias in AI use and “set a strong step forward”, according to Anne Torill Nordsletta, a director at the Norwegian Centre for E-Health Research. “But true inclusion means more than safeguards. It means making sure Indigenous peoples are not invisible in the data used to build AI,” she said.
Pickens pointed out that AI’s rise bears similarities to coal, oil, and gas, and more recently mineral extraction on tribal lands.
“We were moved off of our tribal homelands east of the Mississippi River for land purposes, and we got to Oklahoma, then they discovered oil. Now we’ve had a land run on all the mineral rights,” he said. “Those extractive cycles of history seem to keep repeating themselves. AI and our data are another iteration of that, and I’m hoping we’ve learned our lessons from the past, and tribes can assert themselves and come to the table.”
Cody Two Bear, who is Standing Rock Sioux, served on his tribal council during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2017. Growing up in a community powered by coal, the experience was transformative. “I’ve seen the energy extraction that has placed a toll significantly on tribal nations when it comes to land, animals, water, and sacred sites,” said Two Bear. “Understanding more about that energy, I started to look into my own tribe as a whole.”
In 2018, Two Bear founded Indigenize Energy, a nonprofit organization that works with tribes to pursue energy sovereignty and economic development by kickstarting clean energy projects. Last year, with nearly $136 million in federal funding through Solar for All, a program administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, the nonprofit launched the Tribal Renewable Energy Coalition, which aims to build solar projects with 14 tribal nations in the Northern Plains.
But when President Donald Trump took office in January, those projects hit a wall: The Trump administration froze Solar for All’s funding. That temporarily left the coalition and its members earlier this year without access to their entitled grant (it was later released in March). However, the EPA is considering ending the program entirely.
The coalition is back on track with its solar plans, but now tribes and organizations, like the ones Two Bear works with, are bracing for new changes.
When President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, or OBBB, became law last month, incentives for clean energy projects like wind and solar tax credits and clean energy grants were cut — a blow to the renewable energy sector and a major setback to tribal nations. Moves from federal agencies to end programs have shifted the project landscape as well. The current number of impacted projects run by tribes is unknown. According to the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, at least 100 tribes they have worked with have received funds from federal agencies and the Inflation Reduction Act; however, those figures could be higher. “Without that support, most of, if not all of those projects are now at risk for being killed by the new unclear federal approval process,” said John Lewis, the Native American Energy managing director for Avant Energy, a consulting company.
The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, for instance, has planned solar projects reliant on federal tax cuts. The projects were designed to power a community health clinic, schools, and a radio station that broadcasts emergency notices during winter storms. However, with the passage of the OBBB, the tribe must now begin construction by July of next year or lose credits, a feat that doesn’t account for the time it takes to secure capital in various stages, seek a complete environmental review, and navigate long permitting timelines through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“Some of these projects, at a minimum, have stalled, or they’re having to be reworked in some way to fit within the current parameters that have been laid down by the administration,” said Verrin Kewenvoyouma, who is Hopi and Navajo, and a managing partner at Kewenvoyouma Law that assists tribes with environmental permitting, cultural resources, and energy development. “We have clients that are looking at creative solutions, trying to keep them alive.”
In June, the Inter-Tribal Council of Michigan, a joint organization representing 12 federally recognized tribes in the state, joined a class-action lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, alongside a tribe in Alaska, arguing that the agency illegally froze access to promised project funds from the Environmental and Climate Justice block grant program. The now-defunct program promised $3 billion to 350 recipients to fund projects addressing pollution and high energy costs. Plaintiffs hope the program will be reinstated so that pending projects can be restarted.
Tribes are now seeking philanthropy, short-term funding, and conventional financing to cover delays and gaps in project costs. After the Guidiville Band of Pomo Indians in California lost access to a $3.55 million BIA award to the tribe for solar microgrid development in March, the BQuest Foundation, which specializes in covering expenses needed to continue housing or climate-related projects, gave the tribe $1 million to resume the project’s timeline.
Currently, the self-funded Alliance is covering tribal projects that have experienced a sudden loss in tax credits, rescission of federal funds, and uncertainty of direct pay. “We’re helping try to navigate this challenging period and continue on their self-determined paths, whatever it looks like for them — to energy sovereignty,” said Shéri Smith, CEO of the organization. At the moment, the Alliance is offering a mix of grants from $50 to $500,000, and loans up to $1 million, which will be converted to grants should a tribe default.
“Tribes need to build up internal capacity to carry that out and to have control of their energy situation, for their at-risk members, and members in general,” said John Lewis. “ At such a critical stage, access to affordable, reliable electricity is paramount. The country is getting hotter. The world is getting hotter. It’s warming.”
The film “Eddington” opens at night as Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) sits in his Chevy Tahoe on the edge of a New Mexico desert. On duty, he’s bathed in blue light, watching YouTube: a video on how to convince your spouse to want a child. More cops pull up, tribal police from the fictional Santa Lupe Pueblo, and tell him a mask mandate is active on their land. Joe pulls his mask up over his nose until they leave, then immediately yanks it down.
Set in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, “Eddington,” directed by Ari Aster, blends elements of horror, Westerns, and satire that explore how we process such an earth-shattering event half a decade later. But its subplot about the development of a massive data center nearby explores just how this volatile landscape became profitable for tech corporations, while engaging with contemporary vignettes of Native life where Indigenous communities exist along the border, haunting the town’s history and politics.
In the film, the mayor of the town of Eddington, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), plays high-powered politics to the best of his ability in a small town, including cozying up to the shadowy tech company SolidGoldMagiKarp. The company has proposed a “Hyperscale Data Center Development” and Mayor Garcia touts the idea as a boon to the local economy, creating jobs. Sheriff Cross, however, sees it differently. To him, the world and its mask mandates have infringed on his town and life. As a result, he decides to run against Garcia for Mayor.
From here, the action is set in motion. Defying masking orders is used for social media points, while young, mostly white activists, engage in online activism by invoking the Navajo Long Walk and calling out stolen land–talking points that operate more as currency than a genuine desire to engage with their Pueblo neighbors. Eddington, at its heart, is a Western. Like other Westerns, it evokes a moment of discovery and unleashes it on the viewing public. John Ford Westerns locate the founding mythologies of what animates American identity among red buttes and stagecoaches. Even in Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s revelatory vision of the first atomic bomb detonated in the New Mexico desert offers a view of evil’s origins. In “Eddington,” alienation drives the narrative, framed through social media, Zoom meetings, and the tech infrastructure pushing the community apart in every way possible.
That infrastructure, of course, exists off screen and in our lives. Earlier this month in southern Arizona, nearly 1,000 people in Tucson turned out to a city council meeting after local reporters revealed that officials had secretly planned an Amazon Web Services facility in their community. At a public meeting, angry residents cited that the city’s pattern of droughts would not meet the data center’s surging water needs. In Tennessee, residents in a South Memphis neighborhood have reported breathing problems due to nitrogen oxide emissions from burning fossil fuels used to power Elon Musk’s xAI’s servers, to run Grok, X’s resident chatbot.
Because of the speed of AI data center development, tribes have only begun to grapple with this trend and threats to water, land, and energy capacity. The Tonawanda Seneca Nation filed a lawsuit against the construction of a data center in upstate New York earlier this month, arguing the site would impede treaty rights, including hunting and gathering. Last year, the Arizona Corporation Commission, a utility regulator, approved an 8% rate hike to meet the energy demands brought on by the state’s rising number of data centers. In a separate measure, the Commission rejected a package to expand electricity to residents on the Navajo Nation, where nearly 13,000 households lack access.
“As these data centers are moving into their communities, people are starting to realize that there are huge physical manifestations to all of this artificial intelligence and all of this computing that we’ve come to just kind of accept in our daily lives,” said Deborah Kapiloff, a policy advisor at the Western Resource Advocates. “There is going to start being a lot more pushback from communities as they understand what this means for them in terms of changes to their communities and these data centers siting there.”
At the end of the film, there’s an opening ceremony of the center. In the corner, next to Phoenix’s character who is now physically incapacitated, is also a Santa Lupe Pueblo leader, symbolically incapacitated. It’s revealed that the state has invested millions of dollars into clean energy projects on their land and are praised for their partnership and participation with the data center. It’s unclear if the endeavors were driven by the Pueblo, or what kind of say the nation had in the deal. As the credits roll, the center glows against the dusky blue land, almost breathing.
When former Grist fellow Joseph Lee tells people that his family is from Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, they invariably look confused about what it means to be from a popular vacation spot for U.S. presidents and celebrities like Oprah. Their confusion deepens when he explains that he’s Indigenous and a member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag nation.
“Their surprise says as much about Martha’s Vineyard as it does about the way this country sees Indigenous people,” Lee writes in his new book, Nothing More of This Land, which was published last week. “Very few people ever say it, but I can always feel an unspoken ‘but I thought you were all dead’in those moments.”
Throughout his book, Lee grapples with the question of what it means to be Indigenous. It’s a question intricately connected to climate change, Lee says, because it’s a question directly related to land. On Martha’s Vineyard, Lee’s community has long been saddled with the effects of colonization, which fuels both extreme gentrification and rising sea levels. Lee traces the history of his own tribal nation, reflects on being mixed race and living in diaspora, and envisions potential futures unencumbered by colonial constraints.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q. How would you describe the connection between Indigenous identity and climate change?
A. When you talk about Indigenous people, you have to talk about land. And right now, when you’re talking about land in any context, climate change is the looming backdrop. So many of the challenges Indigenous communities are facing may not be outwardly related to climate change, but they’re impacted by climate change. Fighting for water rights, which I would say is a sovereignty fight and a political fight, is made more difficult and the stakes are higher because of drought. Tensions around land ownership and what we do with our land are also made more complicated by climate impacts like rising sea levels and stronger storms that are eating away at our land. If you’re fighting over land and land you’re fighting over is shrinking because sea levels are rising, it makes that fight much more intense and much more urgent. You could look at salmon and the right to protect salmon and for subsistence lifestyles and all that’s becoming more complicated not just because of overfishing but because the way that salmon and other fish are impacted by warming waters and climate change. Any area of the story that you’re looking at, climate change is present.
Q. I also grew up on an island that is a tourism hub, and in so many communities that’s often perceived as the only viable economic driver. Can you talk about what it feels like to be Indigenous in a land that’s become a tourism destination, and how that affects our communities?
A. In this country, one part of the experience of being Indigenous, is the experience of erasure and of being ignored. That’s throughout history, through culture, through politics, through all these spaces. But I think especially in a place like Martha’s Vineyard, it’s even more extreme because the reputation of the place is so big and so specific. Being Indigenous, people are really often not listening to you. The more your land becomes a tourist destination, the harder it is for Indigenous voices to be heard, the harder it is for Indigenous people to hold onto the land.
In a very concrete way, tourism typically drives property values up. It drives taxes up. And that makes it harder for folks to hold on to land that’s been in the family for generations. And that’s what’s happened in Martha’s Vineyard. Beyond that, I think tourism is just a really, really difficult and unfortunate choice that people have been kind of forced into. When so much opportunity has been taken away or denied from Indigenous communities in these places, tourism is often the only thing that’s left. So it can become like a choice between having nothing and contributing to tourism, which is probably ultimately harming the community and the land, but there’s no other way to make a living. So I think that’s just a really unfortunate reality.
Q.There’s a part in the book where you’re talking about how every time you say you’re from Martha’s Vineyard, people either assume you’re really rich or they think, oh, I didn’t realize that people live there. And that really resonated with me because when I say I’m from Saipan or Guam, people either don’t know what it is or they assume, ‘Oh, are you military?’ And then when I say I’m not military, they are confused.This is a long way of asking, what do you want people to know about your community and your tribe in particular, separate from the broader journey of this book? Is there anything that you wish people knew that this book could convey so that other tribal members don’t have to be on the receiving end of that question?
A. First, I hope that this will help to change the narrative of erasure that has existed about Wampanoag people for most of this country’s history. At the very least, I hope this helps people know that we exist — we’re here. And also, I like to think that it helps to show some of the complexity and diversity of my community: that we have disagreements, we have different perspectives, we have different talents, we live in different places.
Something else that your question made me think of was the question of audience. And I thought about that a lot. Even growing up within the tribe, there was so much just about my own community that I didn’t know. And so I try not to be judgmental of what people know, whether they’re Indigenous or not. And that’s how I really wanted to approach the book. I would hope that Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers can get something out of it, both in terms of learning things, but also hopefully seeing themselves in the pages and this exploration of figuring out who we are and where we want our community to go.
Q. Another part that really resonated with me and I think a lot of Indigenous readers will relate to is the struggle of what does it mean to be Indigenous if you aren’t living on your land. I was wondering what you hope Indigenous readers will take away from the book in terms of understanding what distance from their land can mean for their identity.
A. I hope that Indigenous readers will discover what I’ve discovered, which is that there are so many ways to engage with your homelands and your home community, even if you don’t live there. I used to think that I was only engaging if I was there with the tribe doing some cultural tribal event or something, and I realized that there are so many other ways of engaging. I don’t think any of us are less Indigenous because we live somewhere else.
For a long time I felt like if it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t worth it. If it wasn’t the perfect ideal of me participating in the tribe, I thought I shouldn’t do it. Ultimately what that led to is I just wasn’t doing anything because I didn’t have as many opportunities to go to these tribal gatherings or participate in tribal politics. And so I just did nothing and I felt the distance sort of growing over the years. What other people can do is realize that there are all these small ways to engage and to try to embrace those, and not let ideas of what it means to be Indigenous be defined by outsiders, or these big colonial structures like federal recognition, for example, or blood quantum.
Q. Why? What’s at stake? Why do you think it’s important for folks to embrace Indigenous identity and why is it important, particularly at this moment?
A. Circling back to what we talked about at the beginning, we’re not going to be able to address these huge existential crises like climate change if we can’t be at least in some way united as a community, as a people. If we’re always fighting over who belongs and what does it mean to be Indigenous and saying that people are less Indigenous because of XYZ, that takes away our ability to tackle those bigger challenges. Right now we’re facing these serious challenges and that’s what we should be dealing with, so figuring this out is the first step.
This story is a partnership between Grist and Drilled, a global multimedia reporting project focused on climate accountability.
They called themselves “water protectors” and began protesting on the side of a highway near where construction was approaching the river. Most were Oceti Sakowin — Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples. It was the early days of the #NoDAPL movement, in August 2016, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had just granted a key permit for the Dakota Access pipeline to go under the Missouri River.
The company behind the pipeline, Energy Transfer, had originally considered building it upstream of the twin cities of Bismarck and Mandan in North Dakota, which are mostly populated by white people. But the Army Corps of Engineers rejected that route, in part because it had the potential to harm the cities’ drinking water supply. Instead, the pipeline was rerouted to cross the river just north of the Standing Rock reservation’s own drinking water intake.
To Dave Archambault, then-chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, this was a case of environmental racism. He and other tribal leaders were worried, too, that culturally important sites located along the pipeline route could be destroyed.
It was also a matter of sovereignty. Two days after the Army Corps issued that key permit to Energy Transfer for the new route, the tribe sued. They argued that the Army Corps should not allow construction to continue without a deeper review of the route and substantial consultation — a cornerstone of federal Indian law that recognizes the nation-to-nation relationship between tribal governments and the United States.
When small protests began, the corps had still not issued an easement, a legal right that would allow Energy Transfer to build under the river on land that belonged to the U.S. government. However, there was nothing stopping Energy Transfer from building on private land. That’s when the trouble started.
Chairman Archambault was one of more than a dozen people arrested that August for attempting to block Dakota Access pipeline construction, but there was little attention paid by journalists. Online, however, in Indigenous digital spaces, protests were becoming very visible, very quickly. Facebook Live had launched that spring, and water protectors were broadcasting their actions on social media in real time for the world to see and attracting Indigenous peoples from around the country to stand with Standing Rock.
Activists protest against the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in August 2016. James MacPherson / AP Photo
As more and more water protectors made their way to North Dakota, Achambault realized he would need help. He put out a public call to action, asking people to stand with Standing Rock. He also called Nick Tilsen, an Oglala Lakota organizer who had helped found a collective called the Indigenous Peoples Power Project, or IP3, which offered nonviolent, direct-action trainings to Indigenous peoples working to protect their communities, including from unwanted industrial development.
“The training that we’re talking about is not some crazy training,” said Tilsen, who saw the protests as an extension of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. “Some people think that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks just one day sat on a bus and launched a movement. But the reality is, they went through training. And that training helped them be disciplined and helped them be effective and helped them change the course of history.”
With protests underway, Tilsen worked with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to develop a set of principles for nonviolent direct action — protest actions and acts of civil disobedience meant to disrupt activities. At times, nonviolent direct action involves trespassing or disregarding police orders. The principles were hand-painted on a sign that hung prominently in the growing camp. Among them: “We are nonviolent,” and “Property damage does not get us closer to our goals.”
Tilsen was close with a Greenpeace employee named Cy Wagoner who is Diné and also a member of IP3, and Tilsen said he invited Wagoner to bring Greenpeace to Standing Rock. “We asked them to help train people,” Tilsen recalled. Around the same time, Tom Goldtooth, who is Diné and Dakota, was also urging Greenpeace to come. The executive director of the nonprofit Indigenous Environmental Network, Goldtooth was watching as tensions between police, private security, and water protectors intensified throughout the month. “I’m afraid of escalation,” recalled Goldtooth. “They’re waiting for someone, you know, to wink.”
Like Tilsen, Goldtooth hoped that Greenpeace would reinforce trainings already in progress, and send support for water protectors, such as a solar trailer that could power laptops and cell phones so that broadcasts could continue across social media.
Wagoner put together a proposal and a budget request for Greenpeace, which was approved: About $15,000 would pay for five people from IP3 to go to Standing Rock for two to three weeks. Greenpeace agreed to pay the cohort $125 a day, plus expenses, to conduct trainings, while Wagoner went on his usual Greenpeace salary. They began arriving around the beginning of September.
Meanwhile, the week before Labor Day, Tim Mentz — Standing Rock’s former tribal historic preservation officer and one of the people responsible for reviewing federal projects that may impact historic areas, burial sites, and religious places — began a survey of an area Energy Transfer planned to bulldoze. He was looking to see if there were culturally important sites along the pipeline path.
Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Dave Archambault poses for a photo on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in 2016. James MacPherson / AP Photo
Mentz is a highly respected elder, and the first tribal historic preservation officer in the U.S. thanks to his tireless work to amend the National Historic Preservation Act that created the role — one that is now used by over 200 Indigenous nations.
As part of Standing Rock’s lawsuit against the Army Corps filed in July, Mentz had already submitted a statement to the court saying that “destruction of these sites will eventually destroy generations of family connections to these areas of spiritual power.” He added that protecting those sites wasn’t just about the past: It was about the future of the Oceti Sakowin.
“Steps taken to preserve sites like this are important to the survival and recovery of our spiritual traditions,” he wrote. “These sites still retain the ability to mend our people.”
On a hot, bright day, with permission from the landowner, Mentz and his team drove onto the privately-owned buffalo ranch that included access to the area where Energy Transfer wanted to drill under the river, and Mentz got to work. Over the course of a few days, they documented 27 burial sites and 82 stone features — arranged in circles and other patterns for ceremonial purposes — all along a 2-mile corridor that Energy Transfer planned to dig up.
On the Friday before Labor Day, he wrote up what he found, including a cluster of stones shaped like the Big Dipper, with a grave site attached to the cup, indicating an important leader. “This is one of the most significant archaeological finds in North Dakota in many years,” he wrote. The tribe’s attorney, who worked for a nonprofit public interest law organization called Earthjustice, filed the coordinates Mentz identified with a North Dakota Court.
The next morning, the Saturday before Labor Day, bulldozers were spotted at the sites Mentz had identified and that the tribe had filed in court. Water protectors rushed to stop them but private security guards stood waiting, and their dogs lunged at the pipeline opponents.
Despite their attempts, Energy Transfer graded the 2-mile corridor Mentz surveyed, digging a foot deep into the earth. “A significant portion of the site we’d surveyed had been cleared,” Mentz wrote in another declaration to court. “I do not believe that the timing of this construction was an accident or coincidence.”
A judge ruled soon after that he didn’t have the power to stop the company from continuing to build on private land.
However, the images of security dogs attacking pipeline opponents transformed the movement. Recorded by nonprofit news organization Democracy Now!, the dog attacks were broadcast around the world and quickly went viral. People poured in, mushrooming new resistance camps across the prairie and filling them with Indigenous peoples, longtime environmental organizers, and everyday activists moved by the social feeds coming out of Standing Rock. Church members, community groups, and individuals donated money and supplies to keep the camps afloat. A school opened for families with children and kitchens opened to feed the growing number of water protectors.
Nonprofits began to join the fight too, including Tom Goldtooth’s Indigenous Environmental Network, 350.org, Bold Alliance, and Greenpeace.
More than a thousand people gather at an encampment near North Dakota’s Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in September 2016. James MacPherson / AP Photo
The story of Standing Rock is relatively well-known from here: The governor of North Dakota called in the National Guard, which joined law enforcement officers from around the U.S. and private security contractors hired by the pipeline company in an effort to disperse protests. For more than six months, water protectors faced off against military-grade armored vehicles, surveillance drones, at least one sniper, police with semi-automatic rifles, a surface-to-air missile launcher, tear gas, rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, and water cannons deployed in sub-freezing weather.
While a vast majority of water protectors, including Greenpeace employees, abided by the nonviolent, direct-action principles IP3 and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe posted in camp, not all agreed. Some pipeline opponents set fire to bulldozers and vandalized construction equipment. Some fought back against police, throwing rocks, logs, water bottles, and even Molotov cocktails.
In February 2017, soon after Donald Trump’s first presidential inauguration, the Army Corps gave the green light for Energy Transfer to begin drilling under the river. By late February, security forces moved in and removed water protectors camped near Standing Rock. Energy Transfer bored a hole underneath the Missouri River for the pipeline to be pushed through, effectively ending the fight.
Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
Chapter 2
“What the hell is this bullshit?”
In February 2017, as security forces prepared to evict water protectors from their camps, TigerSwan — a private security firm contracted by Energy Transfer — began emailing with the law firm Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher.
The firm had been representing Energy Transfer as it attempted to convince a federal court to dismiss the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s claims against the Army Corps. Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher would eventually declare victory against Greenpeace in the $666 million lawsuit.
TigerSwan had spent months spying on water protectors by monitoring social media feeds, listening in on radio communications, flying drones, and monitoring camps by helicopter. It sent infiltrators — people pretending to be water protectors — into the anti-pipeline camps to gather information. Founded in 2008 by a former commander of an elite special operations unit known as Delta Force, TigerSwan’s security contractors had cut their teeth during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At Standing Rock, it brought those “war-on-terror” tactics home.
Files obtained through a public records request reveal that TigerSwan was not only providing the intelligence it collected to law enforcement, but it was also preparing to provide some of the information it gathered on water protectors to the law firm Gibson Dunn, including a set of spreadsheets listing crowdfunding pages, how much each had raised, and who was involved, as well as spreadsheets matching protest actions with individual water protectors, labeled “named conspirators.” The company asked one of its infiltrators to identify what groups pipeline opponents belonged to. And it asked another contractor to send over the makes and models of vehicles that showed up at certain protests.
Dogs held by private security guards lunge at protestors attempting to stop the bulldozing of land for the Dakota Access pipeline on September 3, 2016. Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
That record request also revealed a purpose of the communications between TigerSwan and Gibson Dunn: a RICO lawsuit. Gibson Dunn was considering using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO — a law originally developed to go after the mafia — to target anti-pipeline activists and organizers, and had turned to Energy Transfer’s mercenary private security firm, TigerSwan, to help. TigerSwan did not respond to a request for comment.
Months later, in August of 2017, Deepa Padmanabha, the senior legal advisor for Greenpeace in the U.S., learned that Energy Transfer was suing the environmental organization in federal court, alleging violations of the RICO Act. “This one came as a very big surprise just because the Greenpeace entities had such little involvement with anything associated with Standing Rock,” she said.
Padmanabha called it a SLAPP suit — a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation — which is designed not necessarily to win, but to drain opponents of resources and discourage them from speaking out. SLAPP suits are meant to set an example, and when successful they can be extremely effective.
In 2007, banana workers in Nicaragua won a multimillion-dollar lawsuit in the U.S. against the Dole fruit company for poisoning them with a pesticide called DCBP. To combat the win, Dole hired Gibson Dunn. They alleged a vast conspiracy in which the banana workers’ attorney had recruited fake banana workers to go after the fruit company. There were multiple holes in the story that later came to light, but to the American judge who presided over the conspiracy case, it didn’t matter: The money awarded to the workers was taken back.
Dole’s general counsel at the time gave the strategy a name: the “kill step.”
The kill step worked by not only targeting the plaintiffs, but also going after their lawyers, supporters, and media. It destroyed the story being told and replaced it with a new one. Perhaps the most well-known application of the kill step by the law firm was for Chevron. In Ecuador, the homelands of several tribes, including the Cofan, Secoya, and Kichwa, had been contaminated by abandoned pits of oil waste, and in 2011, they won an $18-billion lawsuit, holding the oil giant Chevron accountable. The settlement was reduced by the Ecuadorean Supreme Court to $9.5 billion in 2013. Chevron, in turn, filed a RICO complaint in the U.S. against the lawyers who argued the case, including attorney Steven Donziger, claiming that they had contaminated witnesses, behaved unethically, and maybe even bribed a judge.
There were a number of issues with Chevron’s case, but the company won. Over the next few years, Chevron and Gibson Dunn kept going after Donziger. He ended up on house arrest for two years and in jail for 45 days for a contempt of court charge. Meanwhile, the oil is still contaminating water in the Ecuadorian Amazon — and, like the banana workers in Nicaragua, the Ecuadorians still haven’t been able to collect the settlement awarded to them.
When Padmanabha got word Greenpeace was being sued, she wasn’t just confused as to why the organization was being sued, she was also confused by the timing. Oil was already flowing through the Dakota Access pipeline — the company had gotten what it wanted. But there was a clue: “We were already dealing with another massive SLAPP suit filed in federal court.”
Greenpeace representatives talk with reporters on March 19 outside the Morton County Courthouse in Mandan, North Dakota. Jack Dura / AP Photo
In 2016, before Standing Rock, a law firm called Kasowitz Benson Torres had filed a RICO suit against Greenpeace on behalf of a timber company called Resolute Forest Products. The lawsuit claimed that Greenpeace Canada’s anti-logging campaign, which targeted Resolute, amounted to racketeering, defamation, and tortious interference. In 2017, the Kasowitz law firm filed a second lawsuit against Greenpeace, this time on behalf of Energy Transfer.
“The complaints looked very similar,” said Padmanabha. “It was the same allegations of a RICO conspiracy, and it was the same attempt to scare us into silence and bankrupt us.”
Ultimately, the RICO suit didn’t live long. A federal judge dismissed it in the winter of 2019, writing: “This is far short of what is needed to establish a RICO enterprise.” But Energy Transfer quickly filed a new version of the lawsuit in North Dakota state court, using local conspiracy law to tie the claims together.
Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher would eventually take over the case. In a statement, a spokesperson for Kasowitz, Shannon O’Reilly, wrote: “The firm spearheaded Energy Transfer’s suits against those who wrongfully targeted these projects, and we are gratified that Energy Transfer ultimately achieved such a successful result.”
In the North Dakota iteration, the lawsuit’s primary targets were Greenpeace, two individual pipeline opponents named Cody Hall and Krystal Two Bulls, and a group called the Red Warrior Society. All were accused of conspiring together to propel the anti-pipeline movement. The company also alleged that the conspiracy was spread throughout Greenpeace-affiliated organizations, including Greenpeace Inc., which carries out U.S. based campaigns; Greenpeace Fund, also based in the U.S., which raises money for certain Greenpeace efforts; and Amsterdam-based Greenpeace International, which licenses out the Greenpeace name to independently operated nonprofits around the world and coordinates some of their activities.
The lawsuit included three buckets of claims. There were on-the-ground, protest-related damages for things like trespassing and destruction of construction equipment. There were defamation claims, alleging that Greenpeace and the other defendants lied by accusing Energy Transfer of deliberately desecrating sacred sites and putting the pipeline on tribal lands, and accusing police and private security of being violent toward nonviolent water protectors. And finally, Energy Transfer alleged tortious interference — essentially, that those defamatory statements damaged the company’s relationship with banks.
Those accused weren’t the only ones impacted by the lawsuit. Subpoenas went out demanding people and organizations hand over documents or testify in front of lawyers. Energy Transfer subpoenaed Water Protectors Legal Collective, a group that provided legal support to pipeline opponents, and Unicorn Riot, a media collective that broadcast hours of footage of police violence. It also subpoenaed Standing Rock’s former tribal historic preservation officer Tim Mentz. Across the water protector community, fear began to spread that anyone and everyone could be dragged into the lawsuit.
However, two people at the heart of the case — Greenpeace’s alleged co-conspirators Cody Hall and Krystal Two Bulls — never received official notification of the lawsuit. Months went by, then years. In legal filings, Energy Transfer said they’d attempted to serve Hall at a home in South Dakota where his parents lived briefly a decade before, but the knock Hall expected at his door didn’t come. At one point, Hall got so stressed about it he called Energy Transfer. “I said, ‘You guys say you can’t serve me. I’m sitting here at home. Serve my ass. So what the hell is this bullshit?’” A receptionist took his number but he never heard back.
Helen H. Richardson / The Denver Post via Getty Images
Chapter 3
“We’ll stand with you. You’re going to fight this.”
Greenpeace was founded just as the contemporary environmental movement was taking off in the 1970s. What set the organization apart from others at the time was dramatic protest actions at sea: Greenpeace activists zoomed little boats in between whaling ships and harpoons, risking their lives to save whales. From the very beginning, Greenpeace was ardently opposed to any kind of violence. Still, governments and companies began to label its activities as ecoterrorism.
“I don’t think there’s any credible examples of anything remotely like something you could describe as ecoterrorism in Greenpeace’s history,” said Frank Zelko, a historian at the University of Hawai‘i who wrote a book on the organization called Make It a Green Peace!. “Unless you reframe ecoterrorism as a bunch of people just blocking bulldozers or hanging a banner between a couple of chimneys.”
It’s important to note that Greenpeace’s efforts to save wildlife at times took aim at Indigenous peoples and practices. For example, an anti-seal-hunting campaign Greenpeace launched in the 1970s destroyed subsistence living for a number of Indigenous communities and a major income stream for many Indigenous nations. By the 1990s, activities like those began to get pushback.
“We challenged the white organizations back in the early 1990s with environmental racism,” said Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “Greenpeace stepped up.”
In 2017, when the RICO lawsuit hit Greenpeace, Goldtooth was in touch with the organization again. “We said: ‘Hey man, this is mucked up. We’ll stand with you. You’re going to fight this.’” But by 2024, as the lawsuit looked like it would go to trial, it became less and less clear that Greenpeace actually would fight Energy Transfer.
Management for Greenpeace in the U.S. assessed that they had a 5 percent chance of winning. If this went to trial, they determined that Greenpeace as they knew it might cease to exist.
Then, around the winter of 2024, Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher reached out to Greenpeace with a settlement proposal: Energy Transfer would drop the lawsuit if the organization put out a statement. Greenpeace would have to indicate that there was violence during the Standing Rock movement, that the pipeline did not pass through the Standing Rock Sioux’s land, and that the company did not deliberately destroy sacred sites. In other words, they’d have to refute the statements that Energy Transfer had claimed as defamation.
The statement Energy Transfer wanted Greenpeace to make “would have been a lie,” Goldtooth said.
Over the next few months, Greenpeace leadership deliberated over the settlement offer. A worst-case trial scenario could mean the loss of a 50-year legacy and could scuttle Greenpeace’s future impact. It could put up to 135 staff members out of work and risk dismantling the organization’s global network. It could cause reputational damage to the Standing Rock Sioux, allies, and other activists who would be forced to testify, and it could set a legal precedent for suing movement organizations out of existence. The best-case trial scenario: Greenpeace would lose, but would be able to say that it went down fighting. Some in the organization concluded that this trial scenario would be catastrophic.
A worst-case settlement, on the other hand, didn’t seem quite as bad to some. It could cause a public relations crisis, and Greenpeace might lose a few million dollars a year in funding. Some staff might resign, and Indigenous peoples and nations might stop working with the organization. The statements that Greenpeace would have to sign could also be used by Energy Transfer to go after the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. But Greenpeace would live to fight another day.
Managing the worst-case scenario of a settlement became the option Ebony Twilley Martin, Greenpeace’s newly appointed executive director, and several senior managers supported.
Ebony Twilley Martin, then co-executive director of Greenpeace USA, speaks during a “Stop Dirty Banks” rally and protest in 2023. Alex Brandon / AP Photo
However, the view was not shared by everyone, and the question of the settlement began to divide the organization.
Multiple people high up in the organization strongly opposed Energy Transfer’s settlement proposal. For example, Deepa Padmanabha resigned as deputy general counsel because she disagreed with senior management’s position on the settlement, according to sources close to Greenpeace. Staff members who got wind of the possibility of settlement organized a letter to the board, expressing their own concerns. Meanwhile, Twilley Martin met with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe about the possibility of settling.
“It would’ve hurt us, no doubt,” current Standing Rock Chairwoman Janet Alkire said of the settlement. “ We’d have to fight against that too. Again, lies. It’s not true.” However, she said she viewed the decision as Greenpeace’s to make.
Tom Goldtooth also spoke with Twilley Martin on the phone multiple times. He said he knew she was under a lot of pressure, but he was clear in his conversations with her about what it would mean for Greenpeace to accept Energy Transfer’s terms. “This would end our relationship with you, with Greenpeace,” he said he told her. “It was that serious. This is a life and death issue to our Indigenous peoples. This is a life and death issue to life itself, to water, to the river.”
Goldtooth said that Twilley Martin was quiet. “I feel it hit her hard.”
Ultimately, it was up to Greenpeace’s board to decide. “It was clear for us that it was a hell no,” recalled Niria Alicia Garcia, a Greenpeace Inc. board member. To Garcia, the survival of Greenpeace was not the most important thing on the line, but she said it made sense to her that certain people did want to accept the settlement.
“When you’re an eight-figure, big legacy, big green, you are going to have to hire people who know how to keep a 501(c)(3) viable and afloat,” she said, referring to nonprofit organizations that are tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3). “And at the same time, you’re going to need to hire people who are fully aligned and ready to embody the mission. That is the forever tension in nonprofits that exist to be in service to the movement.”
In the spring of 2024, the board voted to reject the settlement proposal. It came at a cost: Ebony Twilley Martin, the first Black woman to serve as Greenpeace’s executive director, hailed as a “historic first” in the environmental movement, left the organization. Padmanabha ultimately rejoined the U.S. organizations as senior legal adviser.
A spokesperson for Greenpeace in the U.S., Madison Carter, wrote in a statement: “Difficult conversations are a common byproduct of risk assessment exercises, and this case is no different.” She added: “SLAPP lawsuits like the one we are facing from Energy Transfer are intended to divide movements and drain resources, which is why it is paramount that we remain as prepared as possible for any and all outcomes.”
Twilley Martin declined to comment.
Garcia, the Greenpeace board member, said, “I’m proud that we stuck to our values and decided to stay true to the spirit and the mission and the purpose of why Greenpeace ever came to exist.” She added, “At the end of the day, nonprofits are discardable; they are revocable; they are replaceable — and the movement is not. Relationships are not.”
North Dakota’s Morton County District Court set a date for trial: February 24, 2025.
Michael Nigro / Pacific Press / LightRocket via Getty Images
Chapter 4
“How many of you feel the same way?”
Jury selection began on a chilly morning last February. “I want to congratulate you on being chosen for jury duty,” said Judge James Gion to the pool of potential jurors. “It is one of the highest obligations and privileges of our democratic system.”
Gion, a judge of 10 years, presided over the Stark County District Court in rural western North Dakota, more than 90 miles away from Morton County, where the suit was filed. Every judge in the entire South Central Judicial District of North Dakota, in which Morton County sits, recused themselves from the case due to conflicts of interest.
Over the next two days, two sets of around 30 potential jurors, selected from the local populace, would answer questions from the lawyers. Each side of the lawsuit aimed to select jurors who would be most favorable to their case, and they sought to convince the judge to eliminate people too biased to be fair.
As lawyers questioned the jury pool, a pattern emerged: Multiple potential jurors said that hearing about the Standing Rock protests reminded them of what they called “the disruption in our community.” One woman put it plainly: “I think you’ll have a tough time finding people completely unbiased on that, because it affected everyone.”
Greenpeace’s lawyer, Everett Jack, asked the group: “How many of you feel the same way?”
All but a handful of people raised their hands.
About five months before jury selection began, an unusual newspaper, Central ND News, began showing up in people’s mailboxes. Sandwiched between articles criticizing then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris and analyzing the dangers of “illegal aliens” were recollections about the Standing Rock protests a decade before. Most were unpleasant.
One headline read, “Former Dakota Access pipeline protester: ‘We ended up creating a local ecological disaster.’”
Another said, “THIS MONTH IN HISTORY, OCTOBER 2016: Area schools locked down as authorities respond to pipeline protests.”
Central ND News is part of a company called Metric Media, which includes dozens of locally-oriented media sites that have been labeled as part of a “pay-for-play” network. For a price, that network has allowed corporate executives and political operatives to order up articles and have them distributed to specific audiences. These latest stories were apparently aimed at residents of Morton County, where the Standing Rock protests took place — and from which the jurors were selected. According to court filings, a murky trail of funds connects Energy Transfer’s board chair Kelcy Warren to the newspapers. Metric Media did not respond to a request for comment.
When Jack, Greenpeace’s lawyer, asked about the newspapers, a potential juror pulled out a copy he had brought with him. “I thought it was kinda weird that I got that,” he said. “It brought back memories. I agree with it that what happened down there wasn’t good.”
Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, at a panel on the future of pipeline infrastructure in March 2018 in Houston. Karen Warren / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
Greenpeace had already attempted to get the trial moved to another county, arguing that the Morton County jury pool would be too biased to decide the case fairly. In a survey the organization commissioned from the National Jury Project, a consultancy that does jury research, 97 percent of respondents gave answers indicating bias against Greenpeace, or, in a few cases, Energy Transfer.
Many of the potential jurors also had financial links to the fossil fuel industry. One of them, labeled juror 14 by the court for the sake of anonymity, said he didn’t think the case was right for him because he worked in the petroleum industry. He added that he would be uncomfortable ruling against his industry, and that he would be less likely to believe Greenpeace’s witnesses than Energy Transfer’s. Juror 14 also revealed that he had a family member in law enforcement who policed the protests. When Greenpeace’s lawyers asked for him to be removed from the pool, Energy Transfer’s lawyer, Trey Cox, pushed back.
“If the judge instructs you that the law requires you to only consider the evidence in this courtroom and to treat all the parties fairly, are you able to follow the judge’s instruction and be fair to all parties?”
“Yes, I believe I can be,” the man replied.
Juror 14 was allowed to stay.
After two days, the jurors were announced: a man who worked at a gasification company; another who oversaw two power facilities and told lawyers that “my job depends on fossil fuels” during the selection process; a woman whose family received royalties for oil on their land; and three women whose husbands had ties to the oil and gas industry. One woman’s husband also worked for a security company hired by Energy Transfer, as well as the contractor that drilled under the Missouri River, though she added that she didn’t think he worked at those places during pipeline construction.
In the end, seven of the 11 jurors and alternates revealed economic ties to the fossil fuel industry. Nobody on the jury identified themselves as Indigenous.
Opening arguments began the next day.
Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
Chapter 5
“It’s part of the treaty.”
“Here they are,” explained the Gibson Dunn lawyer, Trey Cox, standing before a flat-screen television. “These are the Greenpeace six. Not a single one of them lives in this community. These people are professionals.”
On the screen flashed headshots of six people, all employees of Greenpeace Inc.
“They embed in a location, then they escalate,” he said. “They thought they could do it in secret — they thought that we wouldn’t be smart enough to figure out what they did.”
“Today starts the day of reckoning,” he concluded.
Energy Transfer’s first witness was a towering bald man with an American flag pin on the lapel of his suit. Mike Futch was the project manager for the North Dakota section of the Dakota Access pipeline. Cox asked him about violence perpetrated by private security — like the now-infamous dog attacks.
“The only violence was when protesters came onto private property and attacked us,” Futch said. “We were always in retreat.”
According to Futch, the property damage that occurred at construction sites was intentionally violent: Pipeline opponents cut hydraulic hoses, booby-trapped equipment, filled gas tanks with sand and gravel, spray-painted cabin windows, and busted equipment gauges.
His testimony was backed up over the next few days by five law enforcement officers who agreed that the protesters were the violent ones, not security. “Violent” incidents ranged from water protectors blocking a road during a Thanksgiving Day protest in the town of Mandan, to death threats received by the now-deputy chief of the Bismarck Police Department, whose family eventually left home for a few days at the suggestion of the FBI. Captain Brian Steele testified that he got hit in the back with a big rock. Steele’s assessment: “We were probably too nice.”
It was defamation, according to Cox, for Greenpeace to say that police and private security used violence against nonviolent protesters.
Private security guards allow attack dogs to lunge at pipeline protestors on September 3, 2016. Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
On day five, Energy Transfer started playing video depositions from Greenpeace employees. On screen, Davy Khoury, a Greenpeace warehouse worker, explained how he spent hours driving on country back roads following the proposed path of the pipeline. According to his deposition, he was scouting — collecting information about what was happening with construction and passing it back to Indigenous organizers in the camps.
Energy Transfer’s lawyers displayed one of Khoury’s emails, written to another Greenpeace employee in October 2016: “The company has a place where all their toys are stored near in the Bismarck area,” Khoury wrote. He suggested a protest strategy. “If the entrances were blocked, it would be very hard for them to get to the job sites.”
The other Greenpeace employee responded, “I just sent 30 straight boxes down,” referring to lockboxes — plumbing pipes that protesters use to lock themselves to each other.
Greenpeace lawyers later pointed out that the protest Khoury suggested likely never happened.
In total, six Greenpeace employees visited Standing Rock during the protests — the Greenpeace Six, according to Cox — sometimes staying for a few days, sometimes for a few weeks. They all worked for Greenpeace Inc., and not the other two Greenpeace-affiliated organizations named in the suit — in fact, no one from either of the other Greenpeace groups even visited Standing Rock at all.
During their time at Standing Rock, those six employees delivered supplies, built structures, and helped the Indigenous Peoples Power Project, or IP3, train people in nonviolent direct action. In his video testimony, Nick Tilsen estimated that IP3 trained somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 people over the course of the Standing Rock protests. Lawyers also showed that Greenpeace employees did directly participate in some protest actions; however, Tilsen stated that no one from Greenpeace led those actions, while acknowledging that his friend from Greenpeace, Cy Wagoner, helped with some planning. Rather, it was people from the area who set the agenda.
Energy Transfer alleged that Greenpeace provided funding for Standing Rock to the tune of $55,000, and that the organization’s executive director at the time, Annie Leonard, helped direct a handful of foundations to donate an additional total of $90,000 to the movement.
The impact of that support, along with a defamatory information campaign, according to Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher, was huge: Energy Transfer spent $7 million on PR firms to deal with the protests. An additional $8.5 million went toward buying the most controversial land: the ranch where Tim Mentz found the 27 burial sites and 82 stone features. The company paid contractors $14.5 million for changes to construction plans and lost another $96.4 million when Energy Transfer delayed the refinancing of loans associated with the pipeline. The pipeline was supposed to start pumping oil in January 2017 but couldn’t until June, costing the company another $80 million.
As the trial proceeded, none of the law enforcement witnesses or Energy Transfer personnel who had been on the ground seemed to know much about Greenpeace. According to public records and testimony in court, Greenpeace hardly ever appeared in the daily intelligence reports written by the private security firm TigerSwan. Of more than 1,700 pages of police operations briefings during Standing Rock, Energy Transfer’s lawyers pointed to only one that described a Greenpeace employee at a protest.
According to Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, up to 10,000 people were in the camps at the height of the protest. In his testimony, Kirchmeier said he believed they showed up to Standing Rock because the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s chairman, Dave Archambault, put out a public call and invited people to the prairie — that the real catalysts were the dog attacks, the explosion of social media coverage, and that people believed the pipeline was located on the tribe’s unceded territory.
“It’s part of the treaty,” Kirchmeier said.
Dakota Access protestors stand their ground on the bridge between Oceti Sakowin Camp and County Road 134 in North Dakota on November 20, 2016, while being sprayed with water cannons and tear gas. Paintballs, rubber bullets, and sound cannons were also used.Cassi Alexandra / The Washington Post via Getty Images
The tribe’s treaty is a big reason why the pipeline’s operation was delayed from January 2017 to June. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers was filed well before the camps began to grow. Under pressure from Standing Rock and other Indigenous nations, the Army Corps denied the easement that December, ordering a deeper environmental review first. In other words, for most of the months in which people protested, August 2016 to February 2017, Energy Transfer did not have permission to drill. That permission didn’t come until after Donald Trump came into office, in February 2017.
Energy Transfer and its lawyers were intimately familiar with this timeline. By November 2016, Gibson Dunn was representing the company as it attempted to push the Army Corps for permissions. And by December, the law firm had helped Energy Transfer draft a memorandum urging President Trump’s transition team to advance an executive order for the Army Corps to grant the easement.
In the end, Energy Transfer’s lobbyist in D.C. even prepared a draft of the executive order, and soon after Trump was inaugurated, he signed and issued it, directing the Army Corps to deliver an easement.
“Y’all were able to start drilling under the lake within minutes of getting that easement, right?” a Greenpeace lawyer asked Energy Transfer’s board president Kelcy Warren during a video deposition.
“Shortly thereafter, yes sir,” said Warren with a laugh.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe does play a major role in the true story of Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access pipeline easement. In the months after the pipeline was installed under the river, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and other Indigenous nations continued pushing for a federal court to shut the pipeline down. In June 2017, a judge ruled that the Army Corps would have to redo parts of its environmental review. The legal back-and-forth dragged on for years.
Energy Transfer’s banks took note. In court, Energy Transfer alleged that Greenpeace’s divestment campaign, and its defamatory lies, forced the company to delay refinancing a loan, which cost them $96.4. However, meeting minutes from Energy Transfer’s board of directors, described in court, indicate that the company actually decided to hold off on refinancing due to banks’ concerns about the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s ongoing legal battle — not Greenpeace.
“This is all a bunch of bullshit,” said Doug Crow Ghost, the tribe’s head of water resources, of the Greenpeace lawsuit. Crow Ghost noted that the tribe took in $11.7 million in donations related to the pipeline protests. Greenpeace’s $55,000 and $90,000 in foundation funding was meager by comparison.
But no Standing Rock member testified in the Greenpeace trial. As a rule, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe doesn’t go to state court: The state has no jurisdiction over the nation due to federal Indian law.
Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
Chapter 6
“We believed that to be true.”
Up until October 2023, Energy Transfer claimed that Greenpeace also committed defamation when it said the pipeline would poison the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s water and that the pipeline would catastrophically alter the climate. In order to prove those claims, Energy Transfer would have to turn over internal documents to show how safe the pipeline really was.
However, the company sought to avoid handing over the pipeline safety records and dropped the claims. But Greenpeace didn’t drop its requests for the files — and as they continued to fight about it, some documents became public record.
A report commissioned by Greenpeace, based on field reports and completed in January 2024, found that Energy Transfer’s contractors allowed 1.4 million gallons of drilling mud to disappear into the hole they bored under the riverbed. Drilling mud is a clay and water mixture combined with chemical additives, used to lubricate a drill and carry away fragmented earth. Oil companies usually describe drilling mud as non-toxic, but at times it has been found to include harmful pollutants, and it can hurt delicate ecosystems. The authors, from an engineering firm called Exponent, found that the drilling mud was supposed to flow back out of the tunnel and onto the shore to be stored in an excavated pit. But some of it never did. Enough drilling mud to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools disappeared into the environment.
Water protectors protest as police line the hill at Standing Rock during the ongoing dispute over the building of the Dakota Access pipeline in November 2016. Jessica Rinaldi / Globe Staff via Getty Images
Energy Transfer has gotten in trouble in the past for using unapproved additives in its drilling mud. During pipeline construction in Pennsylvania, the company leaked thousands of gallons of drilling mud into wetlands, creating sinkholes and polluting tap water. Energy Transfer’s subsidiary Sunoco pleaded no contest to 14 criminal counts related to the spills. In Ohio, the same year the Dakota Access pipeline was completed, Energy Transfer leaked another 2 million gallons of drilling mud into the environment as it built a different pipeline — some was laced with diesel.
The spill described in the Exponent report was news to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, despite its years of raising questions and concerns about pipeline safety. So in October 2024, when the tribe filed its latest lawsuit against the Army Corps, the lawyers cited the drilling mud report as one of many reasons that the pipeline should finally be shut down. Standing Rock’s lawsuit was dismissed in March, although the tribe has appealed.
Energy Transfer alleged that Greenpeace committed defamation by accusing the company of deliberately destroying sacred sites. At the heart of that claim is the word “deliberate” and whether or not, on September 3, 2016, the company intended to destroy the sites. Court documents, public records, and testimony at trial paint a hazy picture of just how those sites were handled.
Tim Mentz’s survey began by Tuesday, August 30, and lasted through Thursday, September 1. That same week, Energy Transfer emailed police to inform them that their construction crew was moving east toward the river, according to a record displayed during the trial. Because of the company’s concerns about protests, sharing construction information with police was a routine practice at the time. The company’s schedule, which it outlined in an email, suggested that the bulldozers wouldn’t arrive in the area with the sacred sites until after September 8.
On September 2, 2016, after Mentz identified the sites, Mike Futch, the project manager for the North Dakota section of the Dakota Access pipeline, sent out his construction manager and a security guy to investigate. “We concluded that the features that Mr. Mentz had identified were outside the limits of the disturbance that we had planned,” Futch said on the stand.
According to Futch, construction crews were able to avoid any stones on the edge of the right-of-way. That analysis, Futch said, allowed him to sidestep calling in the company’s archaeology specialists. The company saw no reason to call the Standing Rock Sioux, either.
Energy Transfer’s bulldozers arrived at the site the next morning — Saturday, September 3, on Labor Day weekend — more than six days earlier than what it had indicated in the schedule sent to police days before. Public records obtained from the Morton County Sheriff’s Office confirm that that morning, the company moved its bulldozers at least 15 miles east to the area that Mentz had been working in.
That the bulldozers were moved out of order on a holiday weekend is a key reason the tribe and water protectors believe that Energy Transfer deliberately destroyed the sites. So exactly when Energy Transfer decided to bulldoze the area matters.
“Yes, we did advance and do some out of sequence work,” Futch told the court. Not because of the sacred sites, he said, but only to get ahead of a powwow planned for the area: The crews wanted to be out of way before new people arrived on top of the protesters already present.
Protesters march to the site of a sacred burial ground that was disturbed by bulldozers during construction of the Dakota Access pipeline on September 4, 2016. Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
Futch said several law enforcement officers, including Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, were notified of the change in plans — something Kirchmeier denied, saying he was unaware the bulldozers would be in that area. Normally, he added, his office was notified of construction plans, but not this time.
The dog handlers were surprised, too, according to police reports obtained from the sheriff’s office. The owner of Frost Kennels, Bob Frost, told police that Energy Transfer had asked the company to bring the dogs out around mid-September when a ruling in Standing Rock’s lawsuit against the Army Corps was expected. The security workers anticipated that the dogs would be patrolling a fence around a construction site, and one worker said he thought they’d be joined by two police officers per dog handler. Instead, Bob Frost found out in the middle of Friday night, only hours after Earthjustice filed the coordinates, that they needed to show up with dogs the next morning at 10 a.m.
While Energy Transfer’s defamation claim focused on the word “deliberate,” the company has also disputed that there were any sacred sites at risk at all. “Apparently a guy named Mentz came up with a story,” the former Energy Transfer Vice President Joey Mahmoud said in an email at the time.
In court, Gibson Dunn lawyers and the company’s witnesses pointed to a report from the chief archaeologist of the North Dakota State Historic Preservation Office, Paul Picha, who concluded that “no cultural material was observed in the expected corridor. No human bone or other evidence of burials was recorded in the inventoried corridor.”
Picha was deposed by lawyers, but the interview wasn’t shown in court. He said that his assessment didn’t actually mean much about the truth of Mentz’s claims.
“So if the North Dakota State Historic Preservation Society says something isn’t a cultural site, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a cultural site to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, correct?” asked one of the lawyers.
“Yes,” Picha replied.
Energy Transfer’s own archaeology contractor, Gray & Pape, concluded in a separate report, obtained via a public records request, that four of Mentz’s sites were in the path of the pipeline. The archaeologist, Jason Kovacs, reported that those four stones didn’t show signs of being archaeological sites and that there was no ground disturbance there — although one of the stones was covered in dirt.
However, Kovacs clarified what he meant when he was deposed for trial. He told lawyers, “I’m not qualified to assess what is cultural property or not,” and he confirmed that the company had no Indigenous specialists on staff.
“The vast majority of the times, we have no access to the tribal perspective,” said Kovacs. “My assessment of an archaeological site has to be on the archaeology itself, and that’s where I leave it. It may have further significance, but that’s, you know, not archaeological.”
His testimony was never aired for the jury.
Energy Transfer’s lawyers presented what appeared to be its key evidence that Greenpeace International defamed the corporation. In November 2016, an organization called BankTrack asked banks to divest from the Dakota Access pipeline, noting that the company’s personnel deliberately desecrated documented burial grounds and other important cultural sites. The letter was signed by 500 organizations, including Greenpeace International.
“Does Greenpeace International stand by that?” Trey Cox asked Mads Christenson, Greenpeace International’s executive director.
“We believed that to be true at the time, and we still do,” Christensen replied.
“Wouldn’t you have to talk to Energy Transfer to understand their state of mind?” asked Cox.
“Our understanding was very clear from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and allies that a number of concerns about sacred sites had been pointed out that were later desecrated and destroyed.”
Christensen added, “If you’re aware of the fact and still go ahead, then it must be deliberate.”
Stephen Olson / Getty Images
Chapter 7
“They’re scumbags.”
“Do you have any personal knowledge about anything Greenpeace did at all in relation to the protests?” a lawyer asked.
“No,” said Kelcy Warren, Energy Transfer’s board chair and largest shareholder — who was CEO when the Dakota Access pipeline was constructed.
Warren took the stand on March 13, via a pre-recorded video deposition. It was the final day of testimony.
While the board chair had no recollections about Greenpeace, he did have memories about the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. In 2016, Warren approached Chairman Dave Archambault to make a deal. “I went there with the intention of working out a financial transaction,” Warren said. Long before Greenpeace went to court, before the conspiracy lawsuits began, and before Trump’s executive order greenlighting the pipeline, Energy Transfer tried to pay off the tribe.
At the height of the protests, Warren and Archambault sat down to talk. “I said, ‘David, I’m here to make a deal with you. Let’s go. Do you want cash? What do you want?’” Warren first offered Archambault the ranch the company bought, the one that held the sacred sites identified by Mentz. “We could build you a whole new school on your reservation. Let’s make a deal,’” Warren urged.
“And he says, ‘I can’t do it,’” Warren recalled. “He made it very clear he could not accept any offer from me that involved them backing down.”
“It was clear to me that he had struck a deal with the devil,” Warren said.
“And the devil being Earthjustice?” the lawyer replied.
“Yes,” said Warren.
A sign marks the Dakota Access pipeline area north of Cannonball, North Dakota, and the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Matthew Brown / Getty Images
Earthjustice is a nonprofit public interest law organization that represented the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in the early part of its court fight against the Army Corps of Engineers. It is not connected to Greenpeace: It is not an affiliate, a subsidiary, or even funded by the organization.
“They’re scumbags,” Warren said, of Earthjustice.
“I read between the lines, and I believe that they made a deal, and Archambault couldn’t make a deal with me,” he continued.
In a statement, Archambault explained the meeting. “I was there to discuss safety — not to negotiate an end to the protests.” When Warren asked what it would take to stop the movement, Archambault said, “I explained that it was no longer in my control. The fight against the pipeline had become much bigger than Standing Rock; it was about Indigenous rights and the long history of injustice faced by our people.”
In court, the lawyer asked, “Nothing was said about Greenpeace during that meeting, was it?”
“Not that I recall,” Warren replied.
In Warren’s understanding, the Standing Rock Sioux were the entity to negotiate with when it came to ending the protests and pushing the pipeline through — not Greenpeace. According to his testimony, the tribe’s refusal to take a deal revealed that Standing Rock had sold out to its law firm, Earthjustice — not Greenpeace Inc., Greenpeace Fund, or Greenpeace International.
On the next day of court, during closing statements, Cox revealed the true extent of what Energy Transfer was demanding from the Greenpeace organizations. The lawyers said that $266 million would compensate Energy Transfer for their expenses — but they wanted triple that, in order to set an example. Two days later, the jury returned its verdict. Greenpeace Inc. was liable for all of the on-the-ground damage claims. Greenpeace Inc. and Greenpeace International were guilty of conspiracy, and all three Greenpeace organizations committed tortious interference, as well as defamation when they made their assertions on police violence, tribal territory, and desecration of sacred sites.
The total damages amounted to over $666 million.
Outside the courtroom, Cox, the Energy Transfer lawyer, posed with a huddle of attorneys from Gibson Dunn. He wore an American flag pin on the lapel of his suit, while his colleagues wore sunglasses. “Greenpeace paid protesters and trained individuals to unlawfully disrupt the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline,” he said. “These are the facts, not the fake news of the Greenpeace propaganda machine.”
He added, “Peaceful protest is an inherent American right; however, violent and destructive protest is unlawful and unacceptable. This verdict clearly conveys that.”
The Greenpeace employees and water protectors looked on, stunned.
Energy Transfer and Gibson Dunn did not provide responses to detailed questions related to the case. Instead, they provided a statement saying that the verdict was a win for North Dakotans who faced disruption and harassment during the protests.
“That the disrupters have been held responsible is a win for all of us,” the spokesperson wrote. “It is also a win for all law-abiding Americans who understand the difference between the right to free speech and breaking the law.”
Greenpeace is preparing to appeal once the court issues a final judgment.
“ What this really is an attempt to do is to destroy the idea of solidarity,” said Deepa Padmanabha, the senior legal advisor for Greenpeace in the U.S., in an interview with Grist and Drilled. “By working together, by uplifting voices, by showing support, by showing up, by communications, you somehow could face hundreds of millions of dollars of lawsuit. Because this idea of a movement, of people working together in solidarity, is actually more powerful than the dollar.”
Asked if the organization regretted not taking the settlement, Padmanabha said, “There was no choice.”
“Is our existence our ultimate mission? Just the existence of an entity?” she asked. “Or is there something in our mission that’s bigger than that?”
An upside-down American flag flies above Oceti Sakowin Camp on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on November 30, 2016. Scott Olson / Getty Images
The Center for Media and Democracy supported document review for this article.
This story is a partnership between Grist and Drilled, a global multimedia reporting project focused on climate accountability.
They called themselves “water protectors” and began protesting on the side of a highway near where construction was approaching the river. Most were Oceti Sakowin — Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples. It was the early days of the #NoDAPL movement, in August 2016, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had just granted a key permit for the Dakota Access pipeline to go under the Missouri River.
The company behind the pipeline, Energy Transfer, had originally considered building it upstream of the twin cities of Bismarck and Mandan in North Dakota, which are mostly populated by white people. But the Army Corps of Engineers rejected that route, in part because it had the potential to harm the cities’ drinking water supply. Instead, the pipeline was rerouted to cross the river just north of the Standing Rock reservation’s own drinking water intake.
To Dave Archambault, then-chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, this was a case of environmental racism. He and other tribal leaders were worried, too, that culturally important sites located along the pipeline route could be destroyed.
It was also a matter of sovereignty. Two days after the Army Corps issued that key permit to Energy Transfer for the new route, the tribe sued. They argued that the Army Corps should not allow construction to continue without a deeper review of the route and substantial consultation — a cornerstone of federal Indian law that recognizes the nation-to-nation relationship between tribal governments and the United States.
When small protests began, the corps had still not issued an easement, a legal right that would allow Energy Transfer to build under the river on land that belonged to the U.S. government. However, there was nothing stopping Energy Transfer from building on private land. That’s when the trouble started.
Chairman Archambault was one of more than a dozen people arrested that August for attempting to block Dakota Access pipeline construction, but there was little attention paid by journalists. Online, however, in Indigenous digital spaces, protests were becoming very visible, very quickly. Facebook Live had launched that spring, and water protectors were broadcasting their actions on social media in real time for the world to see and attracting Indigenous peoples from around the country to stand with Standing Rock.
Activists protest against the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in August 2016. James MacPherson / AP Photo
As more and more water protectors made their way to North Dakota, Achambault realized he would need help. He put out a public call to action, asking people to stand with Standing Rock. He also called Nick Tilsen, an Oglala Lakota organizer who had helped found a collective called the Indigenous Peoples Power Project, or IP3, which offered nonviolent, direct-action trainings to Indigenous peoples working to protect their communities, including from unwanted industrial development.
“The training that we’re talking about is not some crazy training,” said Tilsen, who saw the protests as an extension of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. “Some people think that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks just one day sat on a bus and launched a movement. But the reality is, they went through training. And that training helped them be disciplined and helped them be effective and helped them change the course of history.”
With protests underway, Tilsen worked with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to develop a set of principles for nonviolent direct action — protest actions and acts of civil disobedience meant to disrupt activities. At times, nonviolent direct action involves trespassing or disregarding police orders. The principles were hand-painted on a sign that hung prominently in the growing camp. Among them: “We are nonviolent,” and “Property damage does not get us closer to our goals.”
Tilsen was close with a Greenpeace employee named Cy Wagoner who is Diné and also a member of IP3, and Tilsen said he invited Wagoner to bring Greenpeace to Standing Rock. “We asked them to help train people,” Tilsen recalled. Around the same time, Tom Goldtooth, who is Diné and Dakota, was also urging Greenpeace to come. The executive director of the nonprofit Indigenous Environmental Network, Goldtooth was watching as tensions between police, private security, and water protectors intensified throughout the month. “I’m afraid of escalation,” recalled Goldtooth. “They’re waiting for someone, you know, to wink.”
Like Tilsen, Goldtooth hoped that Greenpeace would reinforce trainings already in progress, and send support for water protectors, such as a solar trailer that could power laptops and cell phones so that broadcasts could continue across social media.
Wagoner put together a proposal and a budget request for Greenpeace, which was approved: About $15,000 would pay for five people from IP3 to go to Standing Rock for two to three weeks. Greenpeace agreed to pay the cohort $125 a day, plus expenses, to conduct trainings, while Wagoner went on his usual Greenpeace salary. They began arriving around the beginning of September.
Meanwhile, the week before Labor Day, Tim Mentz — Standing Rock’s former tribal historic preservation officer and one of the people responsible for reviewing federal projects that may impact historic areas, burial sites, and religious places — began a survey of an area Energy Transfer planned to bulldoze. He was looking to see if there were culturally important sites along the pipeline path.
Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Dave Archambault poses for a photo on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in 2016. James MacPherson / AP Photo
Mentz is a highly respected elder, and the first tribal historic preservation officer in the U.S. thanks to his tireless work to amend the National Historic Preservation Act that created the role — one that is now used by over 200 Indigenous nations.
As part of Standing Rock’s lawsuit against the Army Corps filed in July, Mentz had already submitted a statement to the court saying that “destruction of these sites will eventually destroy generations of family connections to these areas of spiritual power.” He added that protecting those sites wasn’t just about the past: It was about the future of the Oceti Sakowin.
“Steps taken to preserve sites like this are important to the survival and recovery of our spiritual traditions,” he wrote. “These sites still retain the ability to mend our people.”
On a hot, bright day, with permission from the landowner, Mentz and his team drove onto the privately-owned buffalo ranch that included access to the area where Energy Transfer wanted to drill under the river, and Mentz got to work. Over the course of a few days, they documented 27 burial sites and 82 stone features — arranged in circles and other patterns for ceremonial purposes — all along a 2-mile corridor that Energy Transfer planned to dig up.
On the Friday before Labor Day, he wrote up what he found, including a cluster of stones shaped like the Big Dipper, with a grave site attached to the cup, indicating an important leader. “This is one of the most significant archaeological finds in North Dakota in many years,” he wrote. The tribe’s attorney, who worked for a nonprofit public interest law organization called Earthjustice, filed the coordinates Mentz identified with a North Dakota Court.
The next morning, the Saturday before Labor Day, bulldozers were spotted at the sites Mentz had identified and that the tribe had filed in court. Water protectors rushed to stop them but private security guards stood waiting, and their dogs lunged at the pipeline opponents.
Despite their attempts, Energy Transfer graded the 2-mile corridor Mentz surveyed, digging a foot deep into the earth. “A significant portion of the site we’d surveyed had been cleared,” Mentz wrote in another declaration to court. “I do not believe that the timing of this construction was an accident or coincidence.”
A judge ruled soon after that he didn’t have the power to stop the company from continuing to build on private land.
However, the images of security dogs attacking pipeline opponents transformed the movement. Recorded by nonprofit news organization Democracy Now!, the dog attacks were broadcast around the world and quickly went viral. People poured in, mushrooming new resistance camps across the prairie and filling them with Indigenous peoples, longtime environmental organizers, and everyday activists moved by the social feeds coming out of Standing Rock. Church members, community groups, and individuals donated money and supplies to keep the camps afloat. A school opened for families with children and kitchens opened to feed the growing number of water protectors.
Nonprofits began to join the fight too, including Tom Goldtooth’s Indigenous Environmental Network, 350.org, Bold Alliance, and Greenpeace.
More than a thousand people gather at an encampment near North Dakota’s Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in September 2016. James MacPherson / AP Photo
The story of Standing Rock is relatively well-known from here: The governor of North Dakota called in the National Guard, which joined law enforcement officers from around the U.S. and private security contractors hired by the pipeline company in an effort to disperse protests. For more than six months, water protectors faced off against military-grade armored vehicles, surveillance drones, at least one sniper, police with semi-automatic rifles, a surface-to-air missile launcher, tear gas, rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, and water cannons deployed in sub-freezing weather.
While a vast majority of water protectors, including Greenpeace employees, abided by the nonviolent, direct-action principles IP3 and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe posted in camp, not all agreed. Some pipeline opponents set fire to bulldozers and vandalized construction equipment. Some fought back against police, throwing rocks, logs, water bottles, and even Molotov cocktails.
In February 2017, soon after Donald Trump’s first presidential inauguration, the Army Corps gave the green light for Energy Transfer to begin drilling under the river. By late February, security forces moved in and removed water protectors camped near Standing Rock. Energy Transfer bored a hole underneath the Missouri River for the pipeline to be pushed through, effectively ending the fight.
Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
Chapter 2
“What the hell is this bullshit?”
In February 2017, as security forces prepared to evict water protectors from their camps, TigerSwan — a private security firm contracted by Energy Transfer — began emailing with the law firm Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher.
The firm had been representing Energy Transfer as it attempted to convince a federal court to dismiss the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s claims against the Army Corps. Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher would eventually declare victory against Greenpeace in the $666 million lawsuit.
TigerSwan had spent months spying on water protectors by monitoring social media feeds, listening in on radio communications, flying drones, and monitoring camps by helicopter. It sent infiltrators — people pretending to be water protectors — into the anti-pipeline camps to gather information. Founded in 2008 by a former commander of an elite special operations unit known as Delta Force, TigerSwan’s security contractors had cut their teeth during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At Standing Rock, it brought those “war-on-terror” tactics home.
Files obtained through a public records request reveal that TigerSwan was not only providing the intelligence it collected to law enforcement, but it was also preparing to provide some of the information it gathered on water protectors to the law firm Gibson Dunn, including a set of spreadsheets listing crowdfunding pages, how much each had raised, and who was involved, as well as spreadsheets matching protest actions with individual water protectors, labeled “named conspirators.” The company asked one of its infiltrators to identify what groups pipeline opponents belonged to. And it asked another contractor to send over the makes and models of vehicles that showed up at certain protests.
Dogs held by private security guards lunge at protestors attempting to stop the bulldozing of land for the Dakota Access pipeline on September 3, 2016. Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
That record request also revealed a purpose of the communications between TigerSwan and Gibson Dunn: a RICO lawsuit. Gibson Dunn was considering using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO — a law originally developed to go after the mafia — to target anti-pipeline activists and organizers, and had turned to Energy Transfer’s mercenary private security firm, TigerSwan, to help. TigerSwan did not respond to a request for comment.
Months later, in August of 2017, Deepa Padmanabha, the senior legal advisor for Greenpeace in the U.S., learned that Energy Transfer was suing the environmental organization in federal court, alleging violations of the RICO Act. “This one came as a very big surprise just because the Greenpeace entities had such little involvement with anything associated with Standing Rock,” she said.
Padmanabha called it a SLAPP suit — a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation — which is designed not necessarily to win, but to drain opponents of resources and discourage them from speaking out. SLAPP suits are meant to set an example, and when successful they can be extremely effective.
In 2007, banana workers in Nicaragua won a multimillion-dollar lawsuit in the U.S. against the Dole fruit company for poisoning them with a pesticide called DCBP. To combat the win, Dole hired Gibson Dunn. They alleged a vast conspiracy in which the banana workers’ attorney had recruited fake banana workers to go after the fruit company. There were multiple holes in the story that later came to light, but to the American judge who presided over the conspiracy case, it didn’t matter: The money awarded to the workers was taken back.
Dole’s general counsel at the time gave the strategy a name: the “kill step.”
The kill step worked by not only targeting the plaintiffs, but also going after their lawyers, supporters, and media. It destroyed the story being told and replaced it with a new one. Perhaps the most well-known application of the kill step by the law firm was for Chevron. In Ecuador, the homelands of several tribes, including the Cofan, Secoya, and Kichwa, had been contaminated by abandoned pits of oil waste, and in 2011, they won an $18-billion lawsuit, holding the oil giant Chevron accountable. The settlement was reduced by the Ecuadorean Supreme Court to $9.5 billion in 2013. Chevron, in turn, filed a RICO complaint in the U.S. against the lawyers who argued the case, including attorney Steven Donziger, claiming that they had contaminated witnesses, behaved unethically, and maybe even bribed a judge.
There were a number of issues with Chevron’s case, but the company won. Over the next few years, Chevron and Gibson Dunn kept going after Donziger. He ended up on house arrest for two years and in jail for 45 days for a contempt of court charge. Meanwhile, the oil is still contaminating water in the Ecuadorian Amazon — and, like the banana workers in Nicaragua, the Ecuadorians still haven’t been able to collect the settlement awarded to them.
When Padmanabha got word Greenpeace was being sued, she wasn’t just confused as to why the organization was being sued, she was also confused by the timing. Oil was already flowing through the Dakota Access pipeline — the company had gotten what it wanted. But there was a clue: “We were already dealing with another massive SLAPP suit filed in federal court.”
Greenpeace representatives talk with reporters on March 19 outside the Morton County Courthouse in Mandan, North Dakota. Jack Dura / AP Photo
In 2016, before Standing Rock, a law firm called Kasowitz Benson Torres had filed a RICO suit against Greenpeace on behalf of a timber company called Resolute Forest Products. The lawsuit claimed that Greenpeace Canada’s anti-logging campaign, which targeted Resolute, amounted to racketeering, defamation, and tortious interference. In 2017, the Kasowitz law firm filed a second lawsuit against Greenpeace, this time on behalf of Energy Transfer.
“The complaints looked very similar,” said Padmanabha. “It was the same allegations of a RICO conspiracy, and it was the same attempt to scare us into silence and bankrupt us.”
Ultimately, the RICO suit didn’t live long. A federal judge dismissed it in the winter of 2019, writing: “This is far short of what is needed to establish a RICO enterprise.” But Energy Transfer quickly filed a new version of the lawsuit in North Dakota state court, using local conspiracy law to tie the claims together.
Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher would eventually take over the case. In a statement, a spokesperson for Kasowitz, Shannon O’Reilly, wrote: “The firm spearheaded Energy Transfer’s suits against those who wrongfully targeted these projects, and we are gratified that Energy Transfer ultimately achieved such a successful result.”
In the North Dakota iteration, the lawsuit’s primary targets were Greenpeace, two individual pipeline opponents named Cody Hall and Krystal Two Bulls, and a group called the Red Warrior Society. All were accused of conspiring together to propel the anti-pipeline movement. The company also alleged that the conspiracy was spread throughout Greenpeace-affiliated organizations, including Greenpeace Inc., which carries out U.S. based campaigns; Greenpeace Fund, also based in the U.S., which raises money for certain Greenpeace efforts; and Amsterdam-based Greenpeace International, which licenses out the Greenpeace name to independently operated nonprofits around the world and coordinates some of their activities.
The lawsuit included three buckets of claims. There were on-the-ground, protest-related damages for things like trespassing and destruction of construction equipment. There were defamation claims, alleging that Greenpeace and the other defendants lied by accusing Energy Transfer of deliberately desecrating sacred sites and putting the pipeline on tribal lands, and accusing police and private security of being violent toward nonviolent water protectors. And finally, Energy Transfer alleged tortious interference — essentially, that those defamatory statements damaged the company’s relationship with banks.
Those accused weren’t the only ones impacted by the lawsuit. Subpoenas went out demanding people and organizations hand over documents or testify in front of lawyers. Energy Transfer subpoenaed Water Protectors Legal Collective, a group that provided legal support to pipeline opponents, and Unicorn Riot, a media collective that broadcast hours of footage of police violence. It also subpoenaed Standing Rock’s former tribal historic preservation officer Tim Mentz. Across the water protector community, fear began to spread that anyone and everyone could be dragged into the lawsuit.
However, two people at the heart of the case — Greenpeace’s alleged co-conspirators Cody Hall and Krystal Two Bulls — never received official notification of the lawsuit. Months went by, then years. In legal filings, Energy Transfer said they’d attempted to serve Hall at a home in South Dakota where his parents lived briefly a decade before, but the knock Hall expected at his door didn’t come. At one point, Hall got so stressed about it he called Energy Transfer. “I said, ‘You guys say you can’t serve me. I’m sitting here at home. Serve my ass. So what the hell is this bullshit?’” A receptionist took his number but he never heard back.
Helen H. Richardson / The Denver Post via Getty Images
Chapter 3
“We’ll stand with you. You’re going to fight this.”
Greenpeace was founded just as the contemporary environmental movement was taking off in the 1970s. What set the organization apart from others at the time was dramatic protest actions at sea: Greenpeace activists zoomed little boats in between whaling ships and harpoons, risking their lives to save whales. From the very beginning, Greenpeace was ardently opposed to any kind of violence. Still, governments and companies began to label its activities as ecoterrorism.
“I don’t think there’s any credible examples of anything remotely like something you could describe as ecoterrorism in Greenpeace’s history,” said Frank Zelko, a historian at the University of Hawai‘i who wrote a book on the organization called Make It a Green Peace!. “Unless you reframe ecoterrorism as a bunch of people just blocking bulldozers or hanging a banner between a couple of chimneys.”
It’s important to note that Greenpeace’s efforts to save wildlife at times took aim at Indigenous peoples and practices. For example, an anti-seal-hunting campaign Greenpeace launched in the 1970s destroyed subsistence living for a number of Indigenous communities and a major income stream for many Indigenous nations. By the 1990s, activities like those began to get pushback.
“We challenged the white organizations back in the early 1990s with environmental racism,” said Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “Greenpeace stepped up.”
In 2017, when the RICO lawsuit hit Greenpeace, Goldtooth was in touch with the organization again. “We said: ‘Hey man, this is mucked up. We’ll stand with you. You’re going to fight this.’” But by 2024, as the lawsuit looked like it would go to trial, it became less and less clear that Greenpeace actually would fight Energy Transfer.
Management for Greenpeace in the U.S. assessed that they had a 5 percent chance of winning. If this went to trial, they determined that Greenpeace as they knew it might cease to exist.
Then, around the winter of 2024, Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher reached out to Greenpeace with a settlement proposal: Energy Transfer would drop the lawsuit if the organization put out a statement. Greenpeace would have to indicate that there was violence during the Standing Rock movement, that the pipeline did not pass through the Standing Rock Sioux’s land, and that the company did not deliberately destroy sacred sites. In other words, they’d have to refute the statements that Energy Transfer had claimed as defamation.
The statement Energy Transfer wanted Greenpeace to make “would have been a lie,” Goldtooth said.
Over the next few months, Greenpeace leadership deliberated over the settlement offer. A worst-case trial scenario could mean the loss of a 50-year legacy and could scuttle Greenpeace’s future impact. It could put up to 135 staff members out of work and risk dismantling the organization’s global network. It could cause reputational damage to the Standing Rock Sioux, allies, and other activists who would be forced to testify, and it could set a legal precedent for suing movement organizations out of existence. The best-case trial scenario: Greenpeace would lose, but would be able to say that it went down fighting. Some in the organization concluded that this trial scenario would be catastrophic.
A worst-case settlement, on the other hand, didn’t seem quite as bad to some. It could cause a public relations crisis, and Greenpeace might lose a few million dollars a year in funding. Some staff might resign, and Indigenous peoples and nations might stop working with the organization. The statements that Greenpeace would have to sign could also be used by Energy Transfer to go after the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. But Greenpeace would live to fight another day.
Managing the worst-case scenario of a settlement became the option Ebony Twilley Martin, Greenpeace’s newly appointed executive director, and several senior managers supported.
Ebony Twilley Martin, then co-executive director of Greenpeace USA, speaks during a “Stop Dirty Banks” rally and protest in 2023. Alex Brandon / AP Photo
However, the view was not shared by everyone, and the question of the settlement began to divide the organization.
Multiple people high up in the organization strongly opposed Energy Transfer’s settlement proposal. For example, Deepa Padmanabha resigned as deputy general counsel because she disagreed with senior management’s position on the settlement, according to sources close to Greenpeace. Staff members who got wind of the possibility of settlement organized a letter to the board, expressing their own concerns. Meanwhile, Twilley Martin met with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe about the possibility of settling.
“It would’ve hurt us, no doubt,” current Standing Rock Chairwoman Janet Alkire said of the settlement. “ We’d have to fight against that too. Again, lies. It’s not true.” However, she said she viewed the decision as Greenpeace’s to make.
Tom Goldtooth also spoke with Twilley Martin on the phone multiple times. He said he knew she was under a lot of pressure, but he was clear in his conversations with her about what it would mean for Greenpeace to accept Energy Transfer’s terms. “This would end our relationship with you, with Greenpeace,” he said he told her. “It was that serious. This is a life and death issue to our Indigenous peoples. This is a life and death issue to life itself, to water, to the river.”
Goldtooth said that Twilley Martin was quiet. “I feel it hit her hard.”
Ultimately, it was up to Greenpeace’s board to decide. “It was clear for us that it was a hell no,” recalled Niria Alicia Garcia, a Greenpeace Inc. board member. To Garcia, the survival of Greenpeace was not the most important thing on the line, but she said it made sense to her that certain people did want to accept the settlement.
“When you’re an eight-figure, big legacy, big green, you are going to have to hire people who know how to keep a 501(c)(3) viable and afloat,” she said, referring to nonprofit organizations that are tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3). “And at the same time, you’re going to need to hire people who are fully aligned and ready to embody the mission. That is the forever tension in nonprofits that exist to be in service to the movement.”
In the spring of 2024, the board voted to reject the settlement proposal. It came at a cost: Ebony Twilley Martin, the first Black woman to serve as Greenpeace’s executive director, hailed as a “historic first” in the environmental movement, left the organization. Padmanabha ultimately rejoined the U.S. organizations as senior legal adviser.
A spokesperson for Greenpeace in the U.S., Madison Carter, wrote in a statement: “Difficult conversations are a common byproduct of risk assessment exercises, and this case is no different.” She added: “SLAPP lawsuits like the one we are facing from Energy Transfer are intended to divide movements and drain resources, which is why it is paramount that we remain as prepared as possible for any and all outcomes.”
Twilley Martin declined to comment.
Garcia, the Greenpeace board member, said, “I’m proud that we stuck to our values and decided to stay true to the spirit and the mission and the purpose of why Greenpeace ever came to exist.” She added, “At the end of the day, nonprofits are discardable; they are revocable; they are replaceable — and the movement is not. Relationships are not.”
North Dakota’s Morton County District Court set a date for trial: February 24, 2025.
Michael Nigro / Pacific Press / LightRocket via Getty Images
Chapter 4
“How many of you feel the same way?”
Jury selection began on a chilly morning last February. “I want to congratulate you on being chosen for jury duty,” said Judge James Gion to the pool of potential jurors. “It is one of the highest obligations and privileges of our democratic system.”
Gion, a judge of 10 years, presided over the Stark County District Court in rural western North Dakota, more than 90 miles away from Morton County, where the suit was filed. Every judge in the entire South Central Judicial District of North Dakota, in which Morton County sits, recused themselves from the case due to conflicts of interest.
Over the next two days, two sets of around 30 potential jurors, selected from the local populace, would answer questions from the lawyers. Each side of the lawsuit aimed to select jurors who would be most favorable to their case, and they sought to convince the judge to eliminate people too biased to be fair.
As lawyers questioned the jury pool, a pattern emerged: Multiple potential jurors said that hearing about the Standing Rock protests reminded them of what they called “the disruption in our community.” One woman put it plainly: “I think you’ll have a tough time finding people completely unbiased on that, because it affected everyone.”
Greenpeace’s lawyer, Everett Jack, asked the group: “How many of you feel the same way?”
All but a handful of people raised their hands.
About five months before jury selection began, an unusual newspaper, Central ND News, began showing up in people’s mailboxes. Sandwiched between articles criticizing then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris and analyzing the dangers of “illegal aliens” were recollections about the Standing Rock protests a decade before. Most were unpleasant.
One headline read, “Former Dakota Access pipeline protester: ‘We ended up creating a local ecological disaster.’”
Another said, “THIS MONTH IN HISTORY, OCTOBER 2016: Area schools locked down as authorities respond to pipeline protests.”
Central ND News is part of a company called Metric Media, which includes dozens of locally-oriented media sites that have been labeled as part of a “pay-for-play” network. For a price, that network has allowed corporate executives and political operatives to order up articles and have them distributed to specific audiences. These latest stories were apparently aimed at residents of Morton County, where the Standing Rock protests took place — and from which the jurors were selected. According to court filings, a murky trail of funds connects Energy Transfer’s board chair Kelcy Warren to the newspapers. Metric Media did not respond to a request for comment.
When Jack, Greenpeace’s lawyer, asked about the newspapers, a potential juror pulled out a copy he had brought with him. “I thought it was kinda weird that I got that,” he said. “It brought back memories. I agree with it that what happened down there wasn’t good.”
Kelcy Warren, CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, at a panel on the future of pipeline infrastructure in March 2018 in Houston. Karen Warren / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
Greenpeace had already attempted to get the trial moved to another county, arguing that the Morton County jury pool would be too biased to decide the case fairly. In a survey the organization commissioned from the National Jury Project, a consultancy that does jury research, 97 percent of respondents gave answers indicating bias against Greenpeace, or, in a few cases, Energy Transfer.
Many of the potential jurors also had financial links to the fossil fuel industry. One of them, labeled juror 14 by the court for the sake of anonymity, said he didn’t think the case was right for him because he worked in the petroleum industry. He added that he would be uncomfortable ruling against his industry, and that he would be less likely to believe Greenpeace’s witnesses than Energy Transfer’s. Juror 14 also revealed that he had a family member in law enforcement who policed the protests. When Greenpeace’s lawyers asked for him to be removed from the pool, Energy Transfer’s lawyer, Trey Cox, pushed back.
“If the judge instructs you that the law requires you to only consider the evidence in this courtroom and to treat all the parties fairly, are you able to follow the judge’s instruction and be fair to all parties?”
“Yes, I believe I can be,” the man replied.
Juror 14 was allowed to stay.
After two days, the jurors were announced: a man who worked at a gasification company; another who oversaw two power facilities and told lawyers that “my job depends on fossil fuels” during the selection process; a woman whose family received royalties for oil on their land; and three women whose husbands had ties to the oil and gas industry. One woman’s husband also worked for a security company hired by Energy Transfer, as well as the contractor that drilled under the Missouri River, though she added that she didn’t think he worked at those places during pipeline construction.
In the end, seven of the 11 jurors and alternates revealed economic ties to the fossil fuel industry. Nobody on the jury identified themselves as Indigenous.
Opening arguments began the next day.
Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
Chapter 5
“It’s part of the treaty.”
“Here they are,” explained the Gibson Dunn lawyer, Trey Cox, standing before a flat-screen television. “These are the Greenpeace six. Not a single one of them lives in this community. These people are professionals.”
On the screen flashed headshots of six people, all employees of Greenpeace Inc.
“They embed in a location, then they escalate,” he said. “They thought they could do it in secret — they thought that we wouldn’t be smart enough to figure out what they did.”
“Today starts the day of reckoning,” he concluded.
Energy Transfer’s first witness was a towering bald man with an American flag pin on the lapel of his suit. Mike Futch was the project manager for the North Dakota section of the Dakota Access pipeline. Cox asked him about violence perpetrated by private security — like the now-infamous dog attacks.
“The only violence was when protesters came onto private property and attacked us,” Futch said. “We were always in retreat.”
According to Futch, the property damage that occurred at construction sites was intentionally violent: Pipeline opponents cut hydraulic hoses, booby-trapped equipment, filled gas tanks with sand and gravel, spray-painted cabin windows, and busted equipment gauges.
His testimony was backed up over the next few days by five law enforcement officers who agreed that the protesters were the violent ones, not security. “Violent” incidents ranged from water protectors blocking a road during a Thanksgiving Day protest in the town of Mandan, to death threats received by the now-deputy chief of the Bismarck Police Department, whose family eventually left home for a few days at the suggestion of the FBI. Captain Brian Steele testified that he got hit in the back with a big rock. Steele’s assessment: “We were probably too nice.”
It was defamation, according to Cox, for Greenpeace to say that police and private security used violence against nonviolent protesters.
Private security guards allow attack dogs to lunge at pipeline protestors on September 3, 2016. Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
On day five, Energy Transfer started playing video depositions from Greenpeace employees. On screen, Davy Khoury, a Greenpeace warehouse worker, explained how he spent hours driving on country back roads following the proposed path of the pipeline. According to his deposition, he was scouting — collecting information about what was happening with construction and passing it back to Indigenous organizers in the camps.
Energy Transfer’s lawyers displayed one of Khoury’s emails, written to another Greenpeace employee in October 2016: “The company has a place where all their toys are stored near in the Bismarck area,” Khoury wrote. He suggested a protest strategy. “If the entrances were blocked, it would be very hard for them to get to the job sites.”
The other Greenpeace employee responded, “I just sent 30 straight boxes down,” referring to lockboxes — plumbing pipes that protesters use to lock themselves to each other.
Greenpeace lawyers later pointed out that the protest Khoury suggested likely never happened.
In total, six Greenpeace employees visited Standing Rock during the protests — the Greenpeace Six, according to Cox — sometimes staying for a few days, sometimes for a few weeks. They all worked for Greenpeace Inc., and not the other two Greenpeace-affiliated organizations named in the suit — in fact, no one from either of the other Greenpeace groups even visited Standing Rock at all.
During their time at Standing Rock, those six employees delivered supplies, built structures, and helped the Indigenous Peoples Power Project, or IP3, train people in nonviolent direct action. In his video testimony, Nick Tilsen estimated that IP3 trained somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 people over the course of the Standing Rock protests. Lawyers also showed that Greenpeace employees did directly participate in some protest actions; however, Tilsen stated that no one from Greenpeace led those actions, while acknowledging that his friend from Greenpeace, Cy Wagoner, helped with some planning. Rather, it was people from the area who set the agenda.
Energy Transfer alleged that Greenpeace provided funding for Standing Rock to the tune of $55,000, and that the organization’s executive director at the time, Annie Leonard, helped direct a handful of foundations to donate an additional total of $90,000 to the movement.
The impact of that support, along with a defamatory information campaign, according to Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher, was huge: Energy Transfer spent $7 million on PR firms to deal with the protests. An additional $8.5 million went toward buying the most controversial land: the ranch where Tim Mentz found the 27 burial sites and 82 stone features. The company paid contractors $14.5 million for changes to construction plans and lost another $96.4 million when Energy Transfer delayed the refinancing of loans associated with the pipeline. The pipeline was supposed to start pumping oil in January 2017 but couldn’t until June, costing the company another $80 million.
As the trial proceeded, none of the law enforcement witnesses or Energy Transfer personnel who had been on the ground seemed to know much about Greenpeace. According to public records and testimony in court, Greenpeace hardly ever appeared in the daily intelligence reports written by the private security firm TigerSwan. Of more than 1,700 pages of police operations briefings during Standing Rock, Energy Transfer’s lawyers pointed to only one that described a Greenpeace employee at a protest.
According to Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, up to 10,000 people were in the camps at the height of the protest. In his testimony, Kirchmeier said he believed they showed up to Standing Rock because the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s chairman, Dave Archambault, put out a public call and invited people to the prairie — that the real catalysts were the dog attacks, the explosion of social media coverage, and that people believed the pipeline was located on the tribe’s unceded territory.
“It’s part of the treaty,” Kirchmeier said.
Dakota Access protestors stand their ground on the bridge between Oceti Sakowin Camp and County Road 134 in North Dakota on November 20, 2016, while being sprayed with water cannons and tear gas. Paintballs, rubber bullets, and sound cannons were also used.Cassi Alexandra / The Washington Post via Getty Images
The tribe’s treaty is a big reason why the pipeline’s operation was delayed from January 2017 to June. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers was filed well before the camps began to grow. Under pressure from Standing Rock and other Indigenous nations, the Army Corps denied the easement that December, ordering a deeper environmental review first. In other words, for most of the months in which people protested, August 2016 to February 2017, Energy Transfer did not have permission to drill. That permission didn’t come until after Donald Trump came into office, in February 2017.
Energy Transfer and its lawyers were intimately familiar with this timeline. By November 2016, Gibson Dunn was representing the company as it attempted to push the Army Corps for permissions. And by December, the law firm had helped Energy Transfer draft a memorandum urging President Trump’s transition team to advance an executive order for the Army Corps to grant the easement.
In the end, Energy Transfer’s lobbyist in D.C. even prepared a draft of the executive order, and soon after Trump was inaugurated, he signed and issued it, directing the Army Corps to deliver an easement.
“Y’all were able to start drilling under the lake within minutes of getting that easement, right?” a Greenpeace lawyer asked Energy Transfer’s board president Kelcy Warren during a video deposition.
“Shortly thereafter, yes sir,” said Warren with a laugh.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe does play a major role in the true story of Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access pipeline easement. In the months after the pipeline was installed under the river, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and other Indigenous nations continued pushing for a federal court to shut the pipeline down. In June 2017, a judge ruled that the Army Corps would have to redo parts of its environmental review. The legal back-and-forth dragged on for years.
Energy Transfer’s banks took note. In court, Energy Transfer alleged that Greenpeace’s divestment campaign, and its defamatory lies, forced the company to delay refinancing a loan, which cost them $96.4. However, meeting minutes from Energy Transfer’s board of directors, described in court, indicate that the company actually decided to hold off on refinancing due to banks’ concerns about the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s ongoing legal battle — not Greenpeace.
“This is all a bunch of bullshit,” said Doug Crow Ghost, the tribe’s head of water resources, of the Greenpeace lawsuit. Crow Ghost noted that the tribe took in $11.7 million in donations related to the pipeline protests. Greenpeace’s $55,000 and $90,000 in foundation funding was meager by comparison.
But no Standing Rock member testified in the Greenpeace trial. As a rule, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe doesn’t go to state court: The state has no jurisdiction over the nation due to federal Indian law.
Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
Chapter 6
“We believed that to be true.”
Up until October 2023, Energy Transfer claimed that Greenpeace also committed defamation when it said the pipeline would poison the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s water and that the pipeline would catastrophically alter the climate. In order to prove those claims, Energy Transfer would have to turn over internal documents to show how safe the pipeline really was.
However, the company sought to avoid handing over the pipeline safety records and dropped the claims. But Greenpeace didn’t drop its requests for the files — and as they continued to fight about it, some documents became public record.
A report commissioned by Greenpeace, based on field reports and completed in January 2024, found that Energy Transfer’s contractors allowed 1.4 million gallons of drilling mud to disappear into the hole they bored under the riverbed. Drilling mud is a clay and water mixture combined with chemical additives, used to lubricate a drill and carry away fragmented earth. Oil companies usually describe drilling mud as non-toxic, but at times it has been found to include harmful pollutants, and it can hurt delicate ecosystems. The authors, from an engineering firm called Exponent, found that the drilling mud was supposed to flow back out of the tunnel and onto the shore to be stored in an excavated pit. But some of it never did. Enough drilling mud to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools disappeared into the environment.
Water protectors protest as police line the hill at Standing Rock during the ongoing dispute over the building of the Dakota Access pipeline in November 2016. Jessica Rinaldi / Globe Staff via Getty Images
Energy Transfer has gotten in trouble in the past for using unapproved additives in its drilling mud. During pipeline construction in Pennsylvania, the company leaked thousands of gallons of drilling mud into wetlands, creating sinkholes and polluting tap water. Energy Transfer’s subsidiary Sunoco pleaded no contest to 14 criminal counts related to the spills. In Ohio, the same year the Dakota Access pipeline was completed, Energy Transfer leaked another 2 million gallons of drilling mud into the environment as it built a different pipeline — some was laced with diesel.
The spill described in the Exponent report was news to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, despite its years of raising questions and concerns about pipeline safety. So in October 2024, when the tribe filed its latest lawsuit against the Army Corps, the lawyers cited the drilling mud report as one of many reasons that the pipeline should finally be shut down. Standing Rock’s lawsuit was dismissed in March, although the tribe has appealed.
Energy Transfer alleged that Greenpeace committed defamation by accusing the company of deliberately destroying sacred sites. At the heart of that claim is the word “deliberate” and whether or not, on September 3, 2016, the company intended to destroy the sites. Court documents, public records, and testimony at trial paint a hazy picture of just how those sites were handled.
Tim Mentz’s survey began by Tuesday, August 30, and lasted through Thursday, September 1. That same week, Energy Transfer emailed police to inform them that their construction crew was moving east toward the river, according to a record displayed during the trial. Because of the company’s concerns about protests, sharing construction information with police was a routine practice at the time. The company’s schedule, which it outlined in an email, suggested that the bulldozers wouldn’t arrive in the area with the sacred sites until after September 8.
On September 2, 2016, after Mentz identified the sites, Mike Futch, the project manager for the North Dakota section of the Dakota Access pipeline, sent out his construction manager and a security guy to investigate. “We concluded that the features that Mr. Mentz had identified were outside the limits of the disturbance that we had planned,” Futch said on the stand.
According to Futch, construction crews were able to avoid any stones on the edge of the right-of-way. That analysis, Futch said, allowed him to sidestep calling in the company’s archaeology specialists. The company saw no reason to call the Standing Rock Sioux, either.
Energy Transfer’s bulldozers arrived at the site the next morning — Saturday, September 3, on Labor Day weekend — more than six days earlier than what it had indicated in the schedule sent to police days before. Public records obtained from the Morton County Sheriff’s Office confirm that that morning, the company moved its bulldozers at least 15 miles east to the area that Mentz had been working in.
That the bulldozers were moved out of order on a holiday weekend is a key reason the tribe and water protectors believe that Energy Transfer deliberately destroyed the sites. So exactly when Energy Transfer decided to bulldoze the area matters.
“Yes, we did advance and do some out of sequence work,” Futch told the court. Not because of the sacred sites, he said, but only to get ahead of a powwow planned for the area: The crews wanted to be out of way before new people arrived on top of the protesters already present.
Protesters march to the site of a sacred burial ground that was disturbed by bulldozers during construction of the Dakota Access pipeline on September 4, 2016. Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
Futch said several law enforcement officers, including Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, were notified of the change in plans — something Kirchmeier denied, saying he was unaware the bulldozers would be in that area. Normally, he added, his office was notified of construction plans, but not this time.
The dog handlers were surprised, too, according to police reports obtained from the sheriff’s office. The owner of Frost Kennels, Bob Frost, told police that Energy Transfer had asked the company to bring the dogs out around mid-September when a ruling in Standing Rock’s lawsuit against the Army Corps was expected. The security workers anticipated that the dogs would be patrolling a fence around a construction site, and one worker said he thought they’d be joined by two police officers per dog handler. Instead, Bob Frost found out in the middle of Friday night, only hours after Earthjustice filed the coordinates, that they needed to show up with dogs the next morning at 10 a.m.
While Energy Transfer’s defamation claim focused on the word “deliberate,” the company has also disputed that there were any sacred sites at risk at all. “Apparently a guy named Mentz came up with a story,” the former Energy Transfer Vice President Joey Mahmoud said in an email at the time.
In court, Gibson Dunn lawyers and the company’s witnesses pointed to a report from the chief archaeologist of the North Dakota State Historic Preservation Office, Paul Picha, who concluded that “no cultural material was observed in the expected corridor. No human bone or other evidence of burials was recorded in the inventoried corridor.”
Picha was deposed by lawyers, but the interview wasn’t shown in court. He said that his assessment didn’t actually mean much about the truth of Mentz’s claims.
“So if the North Dakota State Historic Preservation Society says something isn’t a cultural site, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a cultural site to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, correct?” asked one of the lawyers.
“Yes,” Picha replied.
Energy Transfer’s own archaeology contractor, Gray & Pape, concluded in a separate report, obtained via a public records request, that four of Mentz’s sites were in the path of the pipeline. The archaeologist, Jason Kovacs, reported that those four stones didn’t show signs of being archaeological sites and that there was no ground disturbance there — although one of the stones was covered in dirt.
However, Kovacs clarified what he meant when he was deposed for trial. He told lawyers, “I’m not qualified to assess what is cultural property or not,” and he confirmed that the company had no Indigenous specialists on staff.
“The vast majority of the times, we have no access to the tribal perspective,” said Kovacs. “My assessment of an archaeological site has to be on the archaeology itself, and that’s where I leave it. It may have further significance, but that’s, you know, not archaeological.”
His testimony was never aired for the jury.
Energy Transfer’s lawyers presented what appeared to be its key evidence that Greenpeace International defamed the corporation. In November 2016, an organization called BankTrack asked banks to divest from the Dakota Access pipeline, noting that the company’s personnel deliberately desecrated documented burial grounds and other important cultural sites. The letter was signed by 500 organizations, including Greenpeace International.
“Does Greenpeace International stand by that?” Trey Cox asked Mads Christenson, Greenpeace International’s executive director.
“We believed that to be true at the time, and we still do,” Christensen replied.
“Wouldn’t you have to talk to Energy Transfer to understand their state of mind?” asked Cox.
“Our understanding was very clear from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and allies that a number of concerns about sacred sites had been pointed out that were later desecrated and destroyed.”
Christensen added, “If you’re aware of the fact and still go ahead, then it must be deliberate.”
Stephen Olson / Getty Images
Chapter 7
“They’re scumbags.”
“Do you have any personal knowledge about anything Greenpeace did at all in relation to the protests?” a lawyer asked.
“No,” said Kelcy Warren, Energy Transfer’s board chair and largest shareholder — who was CEO when the Dakota Access pipeline was constructed.
Warren took the stand on March 13, via a pre-recorded video deposition. It was the final day of testimony.
While the board chair had no recollections about Greenpeace, he did have memories about the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. In 2016, Warren approached Chairman Dave Archambault to make a deal. “I went there with the intention of working out a financial transaction,” Warren said. Long before Greenpeace went to court, before the conspiracy lawsuits began, and before Trump’s executive order greenlighting the pipeline, Energy Transfer tried to pay off the tribe.
At the height of the protests, Warren and Archambault sat down to talk. “I said, ‘David, I’m here to make a deal with you. Let’s go. Do you want cash? What do you want?’” Warren first offered Archambault the ranch the company bought, the one that held the sacred sites identified by Mentz. “We could build you a whole new school on your reservation. Let’s make a deal,’” Warren urged.
“And he says, ‘I can’t do it,’” Warren recalled. “He made it very clear he could not accept any offer from me that involved them backing down.”
“It was clear to me that he had struck a deal with the devil,” Warren said.
“And the devil being Earthjustice?” the lawyer replied.
“Yes,” said Warren.
A sign marks the Dakota Access pipeline area north of Cannonball, North Dakota, and the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Matthew Brown / Getty Images
Earthjustice is a nonprofit public interest law organization that represented the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in the early part of its court fight against the Army Corps of Engineers. It is not connected to Greenpeace: It is not an affiliate, a subsidiary, or even funded by the organization.
“They’re scumbags,” Warren said, of Earthjustice.
“I read between the lines, and I believe that they made a deal, and Archambault couldn’t make a deal with me,” he continued.
In a statement, Archambault explained the meeting. “I was there to discuss safety — not to negotiate an end to the protests.” When Warren asked what it would take to stop the movement, Archambault said, “I explained that it was no longer in my control. The fight against the pipeline had become much bigger than Standing Rock; it was about Indigenous rights and the long history of injustice faced by our people.”
In court, the lawyer asked, “Nothing was said about Greenpeace during that meeting, was it?”
“Not that I recall,” Warren replied.
In Warren’s understanding, the Standing Rock Sioux were the entity to negotiate with when it came to ending the protests and pushing the pipeline through — not Greenpeace. According to his testimony, the tribe’s refusal to take a deal revealed that Standing Rock had sold out to its law firm, Earthjustice — not Greenpeace Inc., Greenpeace Fund, or Greenpeace International.
On the next day of court, during closing statements, Cox revealed the true extent of what Energy Transfer was demanding from the Greenpeace organizations. The lawyers said that $266 million would compensate Energy Transfer for their expenses — but they wanted triple that, in order to set an example. Two days later, the jury returned its verdict. Greenpeace Inc. was liable for all of the on-the-ground damage claims. Greenpeace Inc. and Greenpeace International were guilty of conspiracy, and all three Greenpeace organizations committed tortious interference, as well as defamation when they made their assertions on police violence, tribal territory, and desecration of sacred sites.
The total damages amounted to over $666 million.
Outside the courtroom, Cox, the Energy Transfer lawyer, posed with a huddle of attorneys from Gibson Dunn. He wore an American flag pin on the lapel of his suit, while his colleagues wore sunglasses. “Greenpeace paid protesters and trained individuals to unlawfully disrupt the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline,” he said. “These are the facts, not the fake news of the Greenpeace propaganda machine.”
He added, “Peaceful protest is an inherent American right; however, violent and destructive protest is unlawful and unacceptable. This verdict clearly conveys that.”
The Greenpeace employees and water protectors looked on, stunned.
Energy Transfer and Gibson Dunn did not provide responses to detailed questions related to the case. Instead, they provided a statement saying that the verdict was a win for North Dakotans who faced disruption and harassment during the protests.
“That the disrupters have been held responsible is a win for all of us,” the spokesperson wrote. “It is also a win for all law-abiding Americans who understand the difference between the right to free speech and breaking the law.”
Greenpeace is preparing to appeal once the court issues a final judgment.
“ What this really is an attempt to do is to destroy the idea of solidarity,” said Deepa Padmanabha, the senior legal advisor for Greenpeace in the U.S., in an interview with Grist and Drilled. “By working together, by uplifting voices, by showing support, by showing up, by communications, you somehow could face hundreds of millions of dollars of lawsuit. Because this idea of a movement, of people working together in solidarity, is actually more powerful than the dollar.”
Asked if the organization regretted not taking the settlement, Padmanabha said, “There was no choice.”
“Is our existence our ultimate mission? Just the existence of an entity?” she asked. “Or is there something in our mission that’s bigger than that?”
An upside-down American flag flies above Oceti Sakowin Camp on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on November 30, 2016. Scott Olson / Getty Images
The Center for Media and Democracy supported document review for this article.
The Miccosukee Tribe in Florida joined environmental groups on Tuesday to sue the federal agencies that constructed an immigrant detention center known as the “Alligator Alcatraz” and located in the Everglades National Park.
In a motion to join a lawsuit, as one of the first tribes to potentially sue against the detention center, the case argues that the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Miami-Dade County, and the Florida Division of Emergency Management did not seek an environmental review.
The filing alleges the center’s proximity to Miccosukee villages, ceremonial sites, and access to traditional hunting grounds, “raises significant raises significant concerns about environmental degradation and potential impacts”.
“We are going to make sure that we fight this facility on whatever front is available to us,” said William “Popeye” James Osecola, a council member of the Miccosukee Tribe. He hopes the lawsuit will “signify that the tribe will continue fighting to do what it’s always done, which is protect the land and save the land that saved us.”
According to Osecola, since the facility’s operation began, tribal members have been restricted from gathering plants and roots for uses such as medicine. “Obviously, that’s not an option for us right now,” he said. “At the moment, it’s the first time we’ve ever seen gates like that there, so it’s very jarring for us.”
Nearby the facility, 15 active tribal villages reside inside Big Cypress National Preserve, located within the Everglades.
During the 19th century, the Seminole Wars, which the Seminole Nation and Miccosukee Nation view as one continuous conflict against the U.S., many members fled into the wetlands and used their natural environment as refuge.
Protestors stand outside a makeshift detention center for immigrants known as the “Alligator Alcatraz” as government vehicles drive by, in the Florida Everglades.
Betty Osceola
In a press conference at the detention center last month, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said there would be “zero impact” on the wetland’s environment. The site is located on an abandoned airstrip, once a controversial project that aimed to be the world’s largest airport. Observers outside the facility said they could see lights on at all hours, attracting mosquito swarms. Recent satellite images also reveal that a freshly paved road has been laid down.
Last year, the tribe and the National Park Service signed a co-stewardship agreement for Everglades National Park. The partnership aimed to collaborate on protecting tribal practices, restoration efforts for the land’s vegetation, and protection.
In these cypress swamps and toothy sawgrass marshes, wildlife alongside alligators includes bats, turtles, and panthers. Because species such as the panther are critically endangered, Osecola implied that the continuous traffic at Alligator Alcatraz will “see more deaths with the wildlife”. “It’s taken decades just to get Everglades restoration going like it is now,” he said.
While the Department of Homeland Security distanced itself after promoting the facility for weeks, claiming Florida controls the facility under state hands, critics are not convinced. Elise Bennett, Florida and Caribbean director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization that filed alongside Friends of the Everglades in the case last month, noted that “setting aside the funding for detaining immigrants is essentially a federal function. This is a federal project, regardless of what they say in their court filings.”
Last week, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a legal notice with an intent to sue that the construction also violates the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act, raising concerns such as light pollution and the use of insecticide to mitigate mosquitoes on-site that could affect the area’s wildlife and surrounding water.
Each day since its opening, protestors and groups have noticed trucks coming in carrying diesel, generators, and caged vehicles holding detainees. There are currently 3000 beds inside the facility and at least 400 security personnel on-site.
After state legislators were blocked from entering the Alligator Alcatraz’s premises, Gov. DeSantis invited legislators and the state’s members of Congress to tour the facility over the weekend. According to Osecola, the Governor of Florida did not extend that invitation to tribes.
Some Republican members claimed that the detention center was clean and safe. Others, such as Democratic State Representative Anna Eskamani, reported that, “The environmental impact of this facility cannot be overstated — there is new asphalt, thousands of gallons of water used every day and gas tanks powering generators. No alligators seen, but plenty of mosquitoes.”
President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax bill is on its way to his desk for a signature after House Republicans passed the legislation with a vote of 218-214 on Thursday. As the administration celebrates, many Americans are contemplating its effects closer to home. With deep cuts to Medicaid, food stamps, and renewable energy projects, the bill is likely to have a devastating effect on low-income and rural communities across the country.
But while Republican governors in states that rely on those programs have largely remained silent about the bill’s effects, tribal leaders across the country are not mincing words about the upcoming fallout for their communities.
“These bills are an affront to our sovereignty, our lands, and our way of life. They would gut essential health and food security programs, roll back climate resilience funding, and allow the exploitation of our sacred homelands without even basic tribal consultation,” said Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson, president of the Tlingit and Haida in Alaska, in a statement. “This is not just bad policy — it is a betrayal of the federal trust responsibility to tribal nations.”
Tribes across the country are particularly worried about the megabill’s hit to clean energy, complicating the development of critical wind and solar projects. According to the Department of Energy, tribal households face 6.5 times more electrical outages per year and a 28 percent higher energy burden compared to the average U.S. household. An estimated 54,000 people living on tribal lands have no electricity.
Under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, the Biden administration opened up new federal funding opportunities, increased the loan authority of the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program, and created new tax credits for wind energy, battery storage, large-scale solar farms, and programs to repurpose lands harmed by environmental degradation for related energy projects. When signed into law, Trump’s new bill will largely dismantle these programs.
Historically, tribes have had limited access to capital to fund clean energy projects. Through the IRA, new projects were driven by tribes to address community and infrastructure needs on their terms. According to tribes and energy advocacy groups, these projects not only help build energy infrastructure for each tribal nation but also create jobs, boost local economies, and affirm sovereignty.
Crystal Miller, a member of the Walker River Paiute Tribe, heads government affairs and policy at the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, underlined the existential outcomes for tribal communities. “It is extremely life or death if you’re talking about clean energy projects, in particular solar, which provide energy to homes, provide heat to homes that wouldn’t have it without because they don’t have lines run to their community,” she said.
Prior to the House vote, the Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy was part of a broader group that sent letters to Congress warning of the bill’s consequences for tribes, treaties, and domestic energy priorities. These “are not only economic but also environmental and humanitarian,” they wrote after the Senate narrowly approved the bill 51-50 earlier this week, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote.
Miller pointed out that tribes weren’t consulted on the terms of the bill headed to Trump’s desk, yet they will be forced to live with the consequences. Tribal leaders across the United States warned the legislation could jeopardize projects critical to their communities’ energy needs: A tribal village in Alaska’s attempt to curb high electricity costs by establishing a tribal utility; the Cheyenne River Sioux’s efforts to navigate long, harsh winters in South Dakota; and California tribes’ development of microgrids to offset power outages due to wildfires. The Hopi Tribe in Arizona said the sovereign nation’s microgrid would fail after a historic transition from coal.
Tribal leaders also warned there could be widespread job losses across the 574 federally recognized tribal nations, an outcome at odds with Trump’s economic promises. “When we talk about bringing jobs back to America and keeping them here domestically, that also includes tribal nations,” Miller said.
Kimberly Yazzie, a Diné professor at the University of British Columbia whose previous research focused on tribal clean energy development, called the legislation a big setback — though not entirely unexpected. “Tribes have been presented with challenges in the past hundred years and this is a challenge we’ll have to face,” she said. “It will come down to the tribal, entity, and individual level, and how they want to best move forward.”
Earlier this month, the Trump Administration pulled the federal government out of the Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement — a deal struck in 2023 by the Biden administration between two states and four Indigenous nations aimed at restoring salmon populations and paving a way to remove four hydroelectric dams along the river system. The move is likely to revive decades-old lawsuits and further endanger already struggling salmon populations.
“Washington state has said it’s going to need to double the amount of electricity it uses by 2050,” said Kurt Miller, head of the Northwest Public Power Association representing 150 local utility companies. “And they released that before we started to see the really big data center forecast numbers.”
Indigenous nations, however, say ending the agreement undermines treaty rights. Through the 1855 treaty between the United States and the Yakama, Nez Perce, Umatilla and what is now the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs, Indigenous Nations ceded 12 million acres of land to the federal government in exchange for several provisions, including the right to hunt, gather and fish their traditional homelands. But in the 1960’s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began construction of hydroelectric dams along the Lower Snake River – a tributary of the Columbia River – that had immediate impacts on salmon runs, sending Steelhead and Chinook populations into a tailspin.
That drop in salmon, the tribes have argued, violates the fishing clause of the 1855 treaty.
“It’s a contract right. They’re not a special public interest or private right or anything else. [The tribes] deserve to have, and demand to be, respected,” said Daniel Cordalis, a water rights attorney with the Native American Rights Fund. “They’re just not.”
After decades of lawsuits filed by the affected tribes, the 2023 Columbia Basin Agreement put a pause on litigation and opened up possibilities for salmon restoration and the possibility of removing the dams along the Snake River. With the Trump administration pulling out of the agreement, parties are back to where they started.
“The federal government’s historic river management approach is unsustainable and will lead to salmon extinction,” said Yakama Tribal Council Chairman Gerald Lewis. “This termination will severely disrupt vital fisheries restoration efforts, eliminate certainty for hydro operations, and likely result in increased energy costs and regional instability.”
To date, fish hatcheries have struggled to produce enough salmon and steelhead to meet recovery goals. The restoration efforts have been paid for by the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency responsible for maintaining the dams and marketing the power generated from 31 dams along the river system to local utilities. For the last decade, data collected by monitors such as the Fish Passage Center, a federal agency, has shown the Columbia River system’s average water temperature rising to temperatures that endanger salmon.
“For as long as these dams remain in place, the fish will continue to be threatened and endangered,” said Eric Crawford, Trout Unlimited’s Snake River director.
A 2022 report by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, recommended dam removal as the best method to save salmon. In a Public Power Council statement, representing hydropower systems in the U.S, claimed operating costs for fish and wildlife mitigation comprise one-third of the bill to utility customers.
But Kurt Miller of the Northwest Public Power Association welcomed the Trump administration’s decision, saying that utility companies had been left out of the conversations that led to the agreement. That, coupled with an expected rise in electricity demand due to the construction of data centers and the Trump administration’s goal to “unleash” American energy, is likely to take precedence over salmon recovery efforts and legal contracts struck between Indigenous nations and the federal government.
“We have rights and interests that go through the whole United States,” said Daniel Cordalis. “We should be heard, we should be consulted, and we should be represented on all those interests too, not when convenient.”
For more than 30 years, the United Nations has helped support research positions at universities to delve into the most pressing issues facing humanity: climate change, sustainable development, peace, and human rights.
Nearly 1,000 UNESCO chair positions have been established in universities across 120 countries. But only a handful of them — fewer than 10 — have been explicitly dedicated to issues facing Indigenous peoples.
Now, two Indigenous researchers from Canada and India have been tapped to co-chair a new role dedicated to advancing Indigenous rights through strengthening data sovereignty, stemming language loss, and improving research practices. Amy Parent, a member of the Nisga’a Nation in British Colombia, and Sonajharia Minz of the Oraon Tribal Peoples in India have been named co-chairs of the UNESCO Chair in Transforming Indigenous Knowledge Research Governance and Rematriation.
Indigenous knowledge has long suffered under colonial rule, and now, Indigenous languages and ways of life are increasingly at risk due to climate change. More than half of the world’s 7,000 languages are on track for extinction, an end which could be hastened by the climate crisis. Sea level rise, storms, and rising heat are forcing Indigenous peoples to leave their homelands and making it harder for communities to maintain traditional languages, lifestyles, and cultural practices. Those same extreme weather events are exacerbating existing health risks for elders and other knowledge holders, some of whom are the last in their communities to be native language speakers. At the same time, traditional ecological knowledge, often captured within Indigenous languages, is increasingly seen as a climate solution.
“When we look at Indigenous knowledge systems, everything’s connected,” Parent said. “Language is connected to land, land is connected with language, it’s connected to thinking, it’s connected to health. It’s connected to how we learn. And so when we start damaging one, we damage everything.”
Grist spoke with Parent about Indigenous knowledge systems, their connection to climate change, and what she hopes she and Minz can accomplish in this new role.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. One of your goals is help stem the loss of Indigenous languages, which are rapidly disappearing. How would you characterize what’s at stake?
A. Language is everything. Language teaches us how to think and how to know and how to connect with our land and with all living beings and teaches us our relationships with everything. If the languages continue to be taken, then we lose so much knowledge and so many values and ways of living within the world that can support us in ways where all of humanity can survive. I think we’re in a really critical moment and we need to do everything we can. If we don’t have our languages, they can’t teach us how to live well in the lands and the places where we currently reside.
For example, in my nation, we have five percent of fluent speakers left. And certainly, we are seeing a reawakening of Indigenous languages around the world. But it’s also a pressing priority for us to continue restoring and revitalizing them. So that’s something that we really want to continue in terms of our work supporting the goals of the U.N. decade for Indigenous languages and continuing to work with as many language champions and language educators and teachers as possible.
Q. Can you share more about the relationship between Indigenous languages, land, and climate?
A. In a Nisg̱a’a teachings — considered a “total way of life” — our seasonal calendar is more than a way to mark time, it is a governance framework encoded in language. Each month carries a land-based teaching that guides how we relate to land, water, and each other. For example, X̱maay — the month “to eat berries,” aligning with July — signals the time when salmonberries and other plants ripen. But this is not only about harvesting; it’s a land-based teaching that also marks the return of the salmon. The color of the salmonberry is a cue to prepare nets, clean our jars, and get our smokehouse ready. These signals are remembered and passed on through language, linking living ecological cycles to our collective responsibilities.
This is why Indigenous languages are inseparable from land. A single word like X̱maay contains generations of climate knowledge, laws, and cultural practices. When we revitalize our languages, we are not just preserving communication, we are restoring relational systems practiced across generations.
When Indigenous languages are lost, these intergenerational signals — our original “climate science” — are at risk of vanishing too. But when we respect, revitalize, and uphold Indigenous knowledge systems, we restore these living relationships and the teachings that uphold not only our lifeway but the renewal of Mother Earth.
Q. What needs to happen to prevent the extinguishing of Indigenous languages?
A. I think we need to start listening to Indigenous peoples and what’s being said first and foremost about our languages, why they’re important. We need to prioritize them in our education systems. Here in Canada, we have French and English as our dominant languages. When we look at French language funding, it is a healthy, thriving language that is disproportionately funded by the Canadian government compared to Indigenous languages. And I think sometimes as Indigenous peoples, we need to remind our own governments of the importance of our language in terms of priorities. It can be very challenging for our leaders when they’re grappling with funding issues, resource issues, health and healing crises amongst everything, that sometimes our languages get put on the back burner. And so I think it’s really important that we prioritize them in everything that we do.
Q. A decade ago, the United Nations adopted sustainable development goals to address poverty, hunger, climate change, and many other ambitious goals. Yet since then, the situation for Indigenous peoples has worsened, according to the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. What do you think about its conclusion, and what that says about the relationship between sustainable development goals and Indigenous ways of thinking?
A. It’s a necessary critique of the work right now. These U.N. bodies are doing their best but that’s a clear example of what happens when we don’t connect these green priorities with Indigenous systems and languages. Ultimately we’re just tapping something onto an existing framework: We’re not changing capitalism or questioning anything. We’re just perpetuating ongoing systems of inequality that keep on impacting the land, the roles of women, our language, and our future generations.
If you look at the conditions of Indigenous peoples around the world, they’ve gotten worse. That, to me, was more of an impetus for the work that we need to do. We can greenwash anything but we’re not going to change anything. Until we start to recognize the knowledge systems and the languages and the places from where we currently have the opportunity to reside and the privilege to reside, we’re not going to know how to live well within the living systems that we’re a part of and how to protect them and how to preserve them and promote them for future generations.
Q. You mentioned that you adopted the term “rematriation” rather than repatriation in part because the Nisga’a Nation is a matrilineal society. Now rematriation is part of your job as U.N. chair. What does rematriation mean to you?
A. Repatriation itself is really still about patriarchal authority, it’s still about reinforcing colonial logics, laws, and practices. And if we’re really to honor all of the amazing women that have gotten us to where we are today, then we need to change that term and make it more relevant. Rematriation has other dimensions, but most certainly it has to do with the restoring of our matriarchal authority within our own communities that’s been impacted by colonialism. I think it’s about honoring and recognizing that as Indigenous peoples. What, for me, rematriation represents is a balancing of all the roles in our communities with our men, with two-spirit gender diverse people, with their children, with our elders, with the matriarchs, with their chiefs, and it’s about trying to bring that balance back in that’s been disrupted by colonialism. And so, for me, it’s also a process of healing and restoring and reclaiming what was really never given up.
Q. How would you describe the significance of your new UNESCO role for Indigenous peoples?
A. It means that we have another door open to us to be able to talk to some of those who are in power who can make decisions and shape policies to allow us to create the space that we need to support our own languages and cultures. It’s a door that I’m still learning about because I haven’t been in those rooms. But it’s the door to further conversations that can support our people. It’s for everybody and anybody who feels that they’re a rights holder for Indigenous systems and for our ways of knowing, being, and doing.
Our roles are to keep that door open and to allow as many Indigenous peoples as possible to get into that room.
The American prairie was so vast, so alien, it shattered comprehension.
Newcomers to the seemingly endless grasslands that once spanned approximately a quarter of North America often hit a psychic wall, descending into fits of mania. Prairie madness, as the phenomenon came to be known, was recorded by the journalist E.V. Smalley in 1893 after a decade of observing life on the frontier: “An alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new Prairie States among farmers and their wives.”
America’s treeless, isolated expanse put early European settlers to the test. Drought, loneliness, and debt drove many to failure, forcing the homesteaders to retreat East.
But those who stayed unwittingly launched one of history’s largest terraforming projects, rewiring the land, the climate, and the future of the continent.
In Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie, longtime Minnesota journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty trace this staggering transformation.“The Europeans who colonized North America in the nineteenth century transformed the continent’s hydrology as thoroughly as the glaciers,” they write. “But, remarkably, they did it in less than one hundred years instead of tens of thousands.”
In putting hundreds of millions of acres of prairie to the plow, settlers not only forcibly displaced Indigenous nations, but completely altered the region’s ancient carbon and nitrogen cycles. They also turned the region into an agricultural powerhouse. The deep black soil once prevalent in the Midwest — the result of thousands of years of animal and plant decomposition depositing untold carbon stores into the ground — became the foundation of the modern food system. But the undoing of the American prairie also dismantled one of the Earth’s most effective climate defenses.
Grasses, like all plant life, inhale planet-warming carbon dioxide. As a result, “earth’s soils now contain one-third of the planet’s terrestrial carbon — more than the total released by human activity since the start of the Industrial Revolution,” Hage and Marcotty write. A 2020 Nature study found that restoring just 15 percent of the world’s plowed grasslands could absorb nearly a third of the carbon dioxide humans added to the atmosphere since the 1800s.
Today, the tallgrass prairie, which covered most of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and the far eastern edge of the plains states, clings to about 1 percent of its former range. Even the hardier shortgrass prairie of the American West has been reduced by more than half.
“This is the paradox of the prairie,” the authors write. “Feared by pioneers, shunned by tourists, dismissed today as a wasteland best viewed from thirty thousand feet, the North American prairie is nonetheless one of the richest ecosystems on Earth.”
Americans, then as now, have struggled to make sense of the prairie. Hage and Martcotty spoke to Grist about the near collapse of the American prairie, and what its return would mean in an era of a rapidly warming climate.
The prairie has been misunderstood at our own peril. Why is that and how do you make people care about grass?
Josephine Marcotty: When European settlers first arrived, they were terrified by the open spaces and by the crazy weather that they encountered on the prairie. Wide open grasslands were not something they had ever experienced in Europe, which had been much more controlled by humans for a longer period of time.
David Hage: The areas were so remote and a lot of these immigrants had come from sweet little villages in Norway or Sweden or Germany. Here, they landed, and they might not have a neighbor within 10 or 15 miles. People really suffered from terrible loneliness and even mental illness from the isolation.
JM: But by the time Americans realized that the prairie was something to preserve, the tallgrass prairie was almost all gone. It had been plowed and turned into farmland. So the tallgrass prairie is almost something that we’ve never experienced. We don’t know what it is.
DH: We can talk about wildlife, we can talk about water, l but the thing that knocked me out is climate change. The world’s grasslands are one of the planet’s greatest buffers against climate change. When we plow open the grasslands, as we’re doing now, a million acres a year out West, you’re releasing huge amounts of carbon, you’re making climate change worse, and you’re taking out all those acres of grass that could sequester carbon in the future. One researcher we talked to, Tyler Lark, at the University of Wisconsin, said that the recent pace of plowing in the western grasslands is the climate change equivalent of adding 11 million cars to the roads every year. So it’s a climate change disaster.
Early settlers didn’t just plow the prairie. They also forcibly displace Native peoples to do it. How do you see large-scale prairie restoration as a means of reparations?
DM: We write about the bison herds out West on Native American reservations. There are now 25 or 30 of these wonderful tribal bison herds. This operation to rescue Yellowstone bison and distribute them to Native peoples has launched these tribal bison herds all the way from Alaska down to Texas. And it’s a triple win: It saves this endangered, magnificent animal; it’s good for the grasslands, because where bison graze, grass flourishes; and it’s a wonderful way of preserving the threatened cultural heritage of the Plains tribes in South Dakota. There’s also a great outfit called the Buffalo Grasslands Coalition, which is a tribal operation to raise money and restore grasslands and native ecosystems on tribe-managed land.
JM: A lot of the tribes have both a sacred herd that they use for their cultural and the religious ceremonies, and they also have livestock herds that they use to turn into meat that they sell, not only to their tribal members, but to others. It’s having that economic independence that grants a stronger sense of sovereignty. You can’t do it without economics.
The majority of the prairie is gone. Given its value, why does its destruction continue? Is it policy or profit or something else?
JM: Because corn pays more than cattle or bison.
DH: We came across an amazing statistic, that of all the major landscapes in America, grasslands were the last one to get their own national park. It didn’t happen until 30 or 40 years ago, and one of the reasons was to protect that grass, they would be competing with farmers and people who wanted to earn a living on that land.
JM: The EPA just raised the ethanol fuel mandate. In other words, they’re creating an even greater market for corn. And it was ethanol that really drove corn prices up, and they’ve been up ever since we started mandating the use of ethanol in fuel. That’s just going to continue as long as we don’t subsidize other kinds of farmers that actually grow food for us. Otherwise, grassland will never be able to compete.
The book makes the case that federal subsidies for ethanol have been disastrous for grasslands. Is it possible to dismantle a system that is both ecologically catastrophic and economically entrenched?
DH: It is a huge source of revenue for farmers in the Upper Midwest. We ran into a lot of farmers who said, “I wouldn’t be able to sell my corn crop if it weren’t for ethanol,” or “I didn’t make any money until ethanol came along.” So it’s very hard for politicians campaigning in the Midwest to stand up against ethanol. But it would only take very modest changes to the federal farm bill: Just wind down the ethanol mandate a bit, add a little more money to these proven federal conservation programs which reward farmers for conservation practices on working land.
JM: The economics are a false economy. It’s all driven by federal policy and not markets.
DH: We met wonderful people in the course of reporting this book, generous, hard working people, but they’re trapped in a system that’s not of their own making. We have this federal set of subsidies that just pushes farmers in the direction of plowing more land, planting more corn, using more chemicals, and they don’t have a lot of choice if they want to save the family farm and stay in business.
The book has an alternative vision for agriculture — one that saves soil and may even provide a lifeline for the prairie. What does that look like and where is it happening?
JM: It’s going to be different wherever you farm. It’s a lot easier to grow cover crops in southern Iowa than it is in North Dakota, simply because of the difference in the weather. A big piece here would be for farmers to plant more diverse crops. Nature does not like simplicity. Nature likes complexity, and if we had a more complex farm system, it would be better for everyone.
DH: There’s really good research coming out of Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota, which shows that when you have a slightly more diverse crop rotation, you have less flooding, less erosion, healthier soil, less diesel fuel and less fossil fuel-based fertilizers.
For the fewer than a hundred people that make up the entire population of Port Heiden, Alaska, fishing provides both a paycheck and a full dinner plate. Every summer, residents of the Alutiiq village set out on commercial boats to catch salmon swimming upstream in the nearby rivers of Bristol Bay.
John Christensen, Port Heiden’s tribal president, is currently making preparations for the annual trek. In a week’s time, he and his 17-year-old son will charter Queen Ann, the family’s 32-foot boat, eight hours north to brave some of the planet’s highest tides, extreme weather risks, and other treacherous conditions. The two will keep at it until August, hauling in thousands of pounds of fish each day that they later sell to seafood processing companies. It’s grueling work that burns a considerable amount of costly fossil fuel energy, and there are scarcely any other options.
Because of their location, diesel costs almost four times the national average — the Alaska Native community spent $900,000 on fuel in 2024 alone. Even Port Heiden’s diesel storage tanks are posing challenges. Coastal erosion has created a growing threat of leaks in the structures, which are damaging to the environment and expensive to repair, and forced the tribe to relocate them further inland. On top of it all, of course, diesel generators contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and are notoriously noisy.
“Everything costs more. Electricity goes up, diesel goes up, every year. And wages don’t,” Christensen said. “We live on the edge of the world. And it’s just tough.”
In 2015, the community built a fish processing plant that the tribe collectively owns; they envisioned a scenario in which tribal members would not need to share revenue with processing companies, would bring home considerably more money, and wouldn’t have to spend months at a time away from their families. But the building has remained nonoperational for an entire decade, because they simply can’t afford to power it.
Enormous amounts of diesel are needed, says Christensen, to run the filleting and gutting machines, separators and grinders, washing and scaling equipment, and even to store the sheer amount of fish the village catches every summer in freezers and refrigerators. They can already barely scrape together the budget needed to pay for the diesel that powers their boats, institutions, homes, and airport.
The onslaught of energy challenges that Port Heiden is facing, Christensen says, is linked to a corresponding population decline. Their fight for energy independence is a byproduct of colonial policies that have limited the resources and recourse that Alaska Native tribes like theirs have. “Power is 90 percent of the problem,” said Christensen. “Lack of people is the rest. But cheaper power would bring in more people.”
In 2023, Climate United, a national investment fund and coalition, submitted a proposal to participate in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF — a $27 billion investment from the Inflation Reduction Act and administered by the Environmental Protection Agency to “mobilize financing and private capital to address the climate crisis.” Last April, the EPA announced it had chosen three organizations to disseminate the program’s funding; $6.97 billion was designated to go to Climate United.
Then, in the course of President Donald Trump’s sweeping federal disinvestment campaign, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was singled out as a poster child for what Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claimed was “criminal.”
“The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” Zeldin said in February. He then endeavored on a crusade to get the money back. As the financial manager for GGRF, Citibank, the country’s third-largest financial institution, got caught in the middle.
The New York Times reported that investigations into Biden officials’ actions in creating the program and disbursing the funds had not found any “meaningful evidence” of criminal wrongdoing.
On March 4, Zeldin announced that the GGRF funding intended to go to Climate United and seven other organizations had been frozen. The following week, Climate United filed a joint lawsuit against the EPA, which they followed with a motion for a temporary restraining order against Zeldin, the EPA and Citibank from taking actions to implement the termination of the grants. On March 11, the EPA sent Climate United a letter of funding termination. In April, a federal D.C. district judge ruled that the EPA had terminated the grants unlawfully and blocked the EPA from clawing them back. The Trump administration then appealed the decision.
Climate United is still awaiting the outcome of that appeal. While they do, the $6.97 billion remains inaccessible.
Climate United’s money was intended to support a range of projects from Hawai’i to the East Coast, everything from utility-scale solar to energy-efficient community centers — and a renewable energy initiative in Port Heiden. The coalition had earmarked $6 million for the first round of a pre-development grant program aimed at nearly two dozen Native communities looking to adopt or expand renewable energy power sources.
“We made investments in those communities, and we don’t have the capital to support those projects,” said Climate United’s Chief Community Officer Krystal Langholz.
In response to an inquiry from Grist, an EPA spokesperson noted that “Unlike the Biden-Haris administration, this EPA is committed to being an exceptional steward of taxpayer dollars.” The spokesperson said that Zeldin had terminated $20 billion in grant agreements because of “substantial concerns regarding the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program integrity, the award process, and programmatic waste and abuse, which collectively undermine the fundamental goals and statutory objectives of the award.”
A representative of Citibank declined to comment. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service did not respond to requests for comment.
Long before most others recognized climate change as an urgent existential crisis, the Alutiiq peoples of what is now known as Port Heiden, but was once called Meshik, were forced to relocate because of rising seawater. With its pumice-rich volcanic soils and exposed location on the peninsula that divides Bristol Bay from the Gulf of Alaska, the area is unusually vulnerable to tidal forces that erode land rapidly during storms. Beginning in 1981, disappearing sea ice engulfed buildings and homes.
The community eventually moved their village about a ten-minute drive further inland. No one lives at the old site anymore, but important structures still remain, including safe harbor for fishing boats.
The seas, of course, are still rising, creeping up to steal the land from right below the community’s feet. In a region that’s warming faster than just about any other place on the planet, much of the land is on the precipice of being swallowed by water. From 2017 to 2018, the old site lost between 35 and 65 feet of shoreline, as reported by the Bristol Bay Times. Even the local school situated on the newer site is affected by the shrinking shoreline — the institution and surrounding Alutiiq village, increasingly threatened by the encroaching sea.
Before the Trump administration moved to terminate their funding, Christensen’s dream of transitioning the Port Heiden community to renewable sources of energy, consequential for both maintaining its traditional lifestyle and ensuring its future, had briefly seemed within reach. He also saw it as a way to contribute to global solutions to the climate crisis.
“I don’t think [we are] the biggest contributor to global pollution, but if we could do our part and not pollute, maybe we won’t erode as fast,” he said. “I know we’re not very many people, but to us, that’s our community.”
The tribe planned to use a $300,000 grant from Climate United to pay for the topographic and waterway studies needed to design two run-of-the-river hydropower plants. In theory, the systems, which divert a portion of flowing water through turbines, would generate enough clean energy to power the entirety of Port Heiden, including the idle fish-processing facility. The community also envisioned channeling hydropower to run a local greenhouse, where they could expand what crops they raise and the growing season, further boosting local food access and sovereignty.
In even that short period of whiplash — from being awarded the grant to watching it vanish — the village’s needs have become increasingly urgent. Meeting the skyrocketing cost of diesel, according to Christensen, is no longer feasible. The community’s energy crisis and ensuing cost of living struggle have already started prompting an exodus, with the population declining at a rate of little over 3 percent every year — a noticeable loss when the town’s number rarely exceeds a hundred residents to begin with.
“It’s really expensive to live out here. And I don’t plan on moving anytime soon. And my kids, they don’t want to go either. So I have to make it better, make it easier to live here,” Christensen said.
Janine Bloomfield, grants specialist at 10Power, the organization that Port Heiden partnered with to help write their grant application, said they are currently waiting for a decision to be made in the lawsuit “that may lead to the money being unfrozen.” In the interim, she said, recipients have been asked to work with Climate United on paperwork “to be able to react quickly in the event that the funds are released.”
For its part, Climate United is also now exploring other funding strategies. The coalition is rehauling the structure of the money going to Port Heiden and other Native communities. Rather than awarding it as a grant, where recipients would have to pay the costs upfront and be reimbursed later, Climate United will now issue loans to the communities originally selected for the pre-development grants that don’t require upfront costs and will be forgiven upon completion of the agreed-upon deliverables. Their reason for the transition, according to Langholz, was “to increase security, decrease administrative burden on our partners, and create credit-building opportunities while still providing strong programmatic oversight.”
Still, there are downsides to consider with any loan, including being stuck with debt. In many cases, said Chéri Smith, a Mi’Kmaq descendant who founded and leads the nonprofit Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, replacing a federal grant with a loan, even a forgivable one, “adds complexity and risk for Tribal governments.”
Forgivable loans “become a better option” in later stages of development or for income-generating infrastructure, said Smith, who is on the advisory board of Climate United, but are “rarely suitable for common pre-development needs.” That’s because pre-feasibility work, such as Port Heiden’s hydropower project, “is inherently speculative, and Tribes should not be expected to risk even conditional debt to validate whether their own resources can be developed.” This is especially true in Alaska, she added, where costs and logistical challenges are exponentially higher for the 229 federally recognized tribes than in the lower 48, and outcomes much less predictable.
Raina Thiele, Dena’ina Athabascan and Yup’ik, who formerly served in the Biden administration as senior adviser for Alaska affairs to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and former tribal liaison to President Obama, said the lending situation is particularly unique when it comes to Alaska Native communities, because of how Congress historically wrote legislation relating to a land claim settlement which saw tribes deprived of control over resources and land. Because of that, it’s been incredibly difficult for communities to build capacity, she noted, making even a forgivable loan “a bit of a high-risk endeavor.” The question of trust also shows up — the promise of loan forgiveness, in particular, is understandably difficult for communities who have long faced exploitation and discrimination in public and privatized lending programs. “Grant programs are a lot more familiar,” she said.
Even so, the loan from Climate United would only be possible if the court rules in its favor and compels the EPA to release the money. If the court rules against Climate United, Langholz told Grist, the organization plans to pursue damage claims in another court and may seek philanthropic fundraising to help Port Heiden come up with the $300,000, in addition to the rest of the $6 million promised to the nearly two dozen Native communities originally selected for the grant program.
“These cuts can be a matter of life or death for many of these communities being able to heat their homes, essentially,” said Thiele.
While many different stakeholders wait to see how the federal funding crisis will play out, Christensen doesn’t know what to make of the proposed grant-to-loan shift for Port Heiden’s hydropower project. The landscape has changed so quickly and drastically, it has, however, prompted him to lose what little faith he had left in federal funding. He has already begun to brainstorm other ways to ditch diesel.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said. “I’ll find the money, if I have to. I’ll win the lottery, and spend the money on cheaper power.”
A federal judge issued an injunction Friday that further delays the transfer of Oak Flat, an Indigenous religious site in Arizona, to a multi-national company that would make it one of the largest copper mines in the world.
More than a week ago, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in the case, allowing a lower court order to stand that approved the transfer. The district court judge in Phoenix called for a 60-day delay to allow advocates for Oak Flat to review an upcoming U.S. Forest Service environmental impact statement.
The motions for the delay came from the San Carlos Apache Tribe and a coalition of organizations such as the Center for Biological Diversity, a local Sierra Club Chapter, and Arizona’s Inter-Tribal Association.
The struggle over Oak Flat’s future has been going on for a decade. The final environmental review was released during the first Trump administration, but then halted during the Biden administration. Back in April, the current Trump administration said it would reissue its environmental review, expected June 16.
The review is necessary for the transfer of the land to Resolution Copper, a project from Rio Tinto and BHP, multinational mining companies.
There has been an issue with accessing this review before its publication. According to Marc Fink, an attorney for the Center of Biological Diversity, it’s customary to see such documents in a legal process.
That hasn’t been the case with Oak Flat.
“In my 30 years, I have never seen this occur,” he said.
The withholding of the review is seen by observers as a sign that the Trump administration wants to fast-track the mine, which would sit directly on top of sacred sites and would mine a thousand feet inside the earth.
The land in question is about 40 miles east of Phoenix in the Tonto National Forest. The Apaches consider it their land, based on the 1852 treaty signed between the nation and the U.S. government, as an outcome of the Mexican-American War a few years earlier.
Amid a current trade war between the United States and China, as indicated by Trump’s tariffs, proponents for Oak Flat are scratching their heads at conflicting national security interests. In a press release by the San Carlos Apache Tribe, chairman Terry Rambler, says that, “Resolution Copper is a major threat to U.S. national security given China’s significant financial influence over BHP and Rio Tinto.”
The United States has only two copper smelters — in Utah and Arizona — and both are at total capacity. Critics surmise that Resolution Copper will likely send raw material to China, where the world’s largest copper refineries exist.
Whether the profit margin is acceptable for Resolution Copper is also a question for the mining corporations. A feasibility study, which looks at whether the costs will scale for net profit gain, hasn’t been conducted yet according to Resolution Copper and can take years. However, if companies identify expenditures as too costly, it is unlikely they would return the title back to Apache homeland under the Forest Service.
The tribal organization Apache Stronghold also filed a separate injunction in the same Arizona court; it was their suit the Supreme Court declined to hear.
Luke Goodrich, Vice President at Becket, a religious rights legal institute who has represented Apache Stronghold, said the fight is far from over.
“The Apaches are never going to stop defending Oak Flat ,” he said. “And we’re continuing to press every possible opportunity in the courts, Congress, and with the President to make sure that this tragic destruction never takes place.”
“The Trump Administration is once again planning to violate federal laws and illegally transfer Oak Flat to the two largest foreign mining companies in the world,”said San Carlos Apache Tribe Chairman Terry Rambler in a press release.
. Back in April, the Trump administration announced they will reissue its final environmental impact statement, also known as EIS. The Biden administration halted the release of this review in 2021 but its publication is expected June 16. This controversial decision is considered as the final step before finalizing the land transfer to private title.
There has been an issue with accessing this review before its publication. According to the Center for Biological Diversity’s attorney, Marc Fink, the final EIS study and a feasibility study, which looks at the practical costs and management plan has not been shared to Link (biological) and other lawyers. “In my 30 years, I have never seen this occur,” he said.
Aside from land claims, based on the 1852 treaty signed between the Apache Nations and U.S. government, as an outcome of the Mexican-American War a few years earlier. In this legal document, according to the federal government, this is Apache Land.
Amid a current trade war with China, as indicated by consistent tariff setting by the Trump Administration, alongside land title, all parties are scratching their heads at conflicting national security interests. In a press release by the San Carlos Apache Tribe, chairman Terry Rambler, says that, “Resolution Copper is a major threat to U.S. national security given China’s significant financial influence over BHP and Rio Tinto.”
The United States has only two copper refiners in Philadelphia and Phoenix and are at total capacity. This means that Resolution Copper will likely send refining to China, where the world’s largest copper refineries exist. In an op-ed in Real Clear Energy, the executive director of HECHO, known as Hispanics Enjoying Camping, Hunting, and the Outdoors, she writes, “If reducing America’s reliance on hostile foreign powers for critical minerals is a national security priority—a goal that leaders across the political spectrum broadly support—then we should take a hard look at what’s happening at Oak Flat.”
Whether the profit margin is acceptable for Resolution Copper and Rio Tinto is also a question for the mining corporations. A feasibility study, which looks at whether the costs will scale for net profit gain, hasn’t been conducted yet according to Resolution Copper themselves. However, if companies identify expenditures as too costly, it is unlikely they will cease land title back to Apache homeland under the Forest Service.
Apache Stronghold has also filed a separate preliminary injunction in the same Arizona court for a separate date. Luke Goodrich, Vice President at Becket, a religious rights legal institute who has represented Apache Stronghold, says the fight is far from over and they’re also pursuing avenues through every branch of government including Congress and the White House. “This is not over. The Apaches are never going to stop defending Oak Flat and we’re continuing to press every possible opportunity in the courts, Congress, and with the President to make sure that this tragic destruction never takes place.”
More than 17,000 acres around the Klamath River in Northern California, including the lower Blue Creek watershed, have returned to the Yurok Tribe, completing the largest landback deal in California history.
The Yurok people have lived, fished, and hunted along the Klamath for millennia. But when the California gold rush began, the tribe lost 90 percent of its territory.
For the last two decades, the Yurok Tribe has been working with the nonprofit Western Rivers Conservancy to get its land back. The 17,000 acres composes the final parcel of a $56 million, 47,097-acre land transfer that effectively doubles the current land holdings of the Yurok Tribe.
The tribe has already designated the land as a salmon sanctuary and community forest and plans to eventually put it into a trust and care for it in perpetuity.
“No words can describe how we feel knowing that our land is coming back to the ownership of the Yurok people,” said Joseph James, the chairman of the Yurok Tribal Council, who is from the village of Shregon on the Klamath River. “The Klamath River is our highway. It is also our food source. And it takes care of us. And so it’s our job, our inherent right, to take care of the Klamath Basin and its river.”
The land transfer comes just months after the utility PacifiCorp removed four dams on the Klamath River, the largest dam removal project in U.S. history. The removal of the dams enabled coho and Chinook salmon that had been blocked to finally swim upstream to spawn for the first time in more than a century. The deal is also part of a broader push to revitalize the Klamath River Basin, where water diversions and pollution have long strained the wildlife and the Indigenous peoples who rely on them.
Multiple tributaries like this one feed into the Klamath River, where four privately owned dams were recently dismantled in the largest dam removal project in U.S. history.
Nathan Howard / AP Photo
Josh Kling, conservation director at the Western Rivers Conservancy, said the nonprofit acquired the land in pieces from Green Diamond, a timber company, and paid for it using a combination of private funding, tax credits, carbon credit sales, low-interest loans, revolving loans, federal revolving loan programs, and settlement funds. The project was also partially funded by the state of California, which returned 2,800 acres of state land along the Klamath River to the Shasta Indian Nation last year.
Kling said the 47,000 acres of land returned to the Yurok Tribe includes redwood forests that help protect against climate change and protect crucial habitat for birds such as the marbled murrelet, Humboldt marten. and northern spotted owl, just as the trees were becoming ripe for a fresh round of logging.
“The project was really timely to get in there before a new round of timber harvest and the associated road building,” said Kling. He is particularly excited about how Blue Creek, a cold-water tributary just 16 miles from the mouth of the river, is now protected because of how the tributary provides an essential place for salmon and steelhead to cool off before heading further upstream to spawn.
“The importance of Blue Creek to the larger Klamath system really can’t be overstated,” he said. “With the dam removals and the restoration of fish passage to over 400 miles of spawning habitat in the upper basin, none of that means anything if the fish can’t get there.”
James from the Yurok Tribe described Blue Creek as a high prayer area, a village site, and essential fishing grounds. In 2020, it was also where Yurok officials helped persuade PacifiCorp officials to move forward with dam removal after two decades of advocacy. James credited Troy Fletcher, a former executive director of the Yurok Tribe who played a key role in the dam removal campaign and who has since passed away, for helping to initiate the landback project.
Restoring the land will involve everything from stream restoration projects to road maintenance, James said: “We want to do everything we can to protect Mother Earth.”
Kling said the conservancy is increasingly working with tribal nations to facilitate land transfers and hopes to work with more. Studies have shown that conservation goals are more effectively met when Indigenous peoples manage their own territories.
“The more that we can partner with tribal stewards to achieve our conservation outcomes, those are durable lasting results,” Kling said.
James, too, hopes that the deal will be far from the last.
“Here’s a model that we can share with the Indian Country,” he said. “Indigenous people are the managers of the land, and they’re driving it.”
Miguel Guimaraes Vásquez fought for years to protect his homeland in the Peruvian Amazon from deforestation related to the cocaine trade, even laboring under death threats from drug traffickers.
A leader in an Indigenous rights group, Vasquez said such efforts were long supported by financial assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which spent billions of dollars starting in the 1980s to help farmers in Peru shift from growing coca for cocaine production to legal crops such as coffee and cacao for chocolate. The agency funded economic and agricultural training and technology, and helped farmers gain access to international markets.
But the Trump administration’s recent sweeping cuts to the agency have thrown that tradition of U.S. assistance into doubt, and Indigenous people in the Amazon worry that without American support there will be a resurgence of the cocaine market, increased threats to their land and potentially violent challenges to their human rights.
“We don’t have the U.S. government with us anymore. So it can get really dangerous,” said Vásquez, who belongs to the Shipibo-Konibo people and is vice president of the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest. “We think the situation is going to get worse.”
Several Indigenous human rights defenders have been killed trying to protect their land, Vasquez said, and in some of those cases U.S. foreign aid provided money to help prosecute the slayings. “We really needed those resources,” he said.
Sweeping cuts began in January
When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, began dismantling USAID shortly after President Donald Trump began his second term, it all but eliminated U.S. foreign aid spending, including decades of support to Indigenous peoples around the world.
USAID’s work with Indigenous peoples sought to address a variety of global issues affecting the U.S., according to former employees. Its economic development efforts created jobs in South America, easing the need for people to work in illicit drug markets and reducing the likelihood they would migrate to America seeking jobs and safety. And its support for the rights of Indigenous peoples to steward their own land offered opportunities to mitigate climate change.
That included Vásquez’s organization, which was about to receive a four-year, $2.5 million grant to continue fighting illicit activity that affects Indigenous people in the region. Vásquez said that grant was rescinded by the new administration.
In January, DOGE launched a sweeping effort empowered by Trump to fire government workers and cut trillions in government spending. USAID, which managed about $35 billion in appropriations in fiscal year 2024, was one of his prime targets. Critics say the aid programs are wasteful and promote a liberal agenda. Trump, Musk, and Republicans in Congress have accused the agency of advancing liberal social programs.
“Foreign assistance done right can advance our national interests, protect our borders, and strengthen our partnerships with key allies,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement released in March. “Unfortunately, USAID strayed from its original mission long ago. As a result, the gains were too few and the costs were too high.”
Musk last week announced his departure from the Trump administration, marking the end of a turbulent chapter that included thousands of layoffs and reams of litigation.
Former USAID employees said political pressure from the U.S. often kept foreign governments from violating some Indigenous rights.
In the three months since thousands of foreign aid workers were fired and aid contracts canceled, the Peruvian government has moved quickly to strip Indigenous people of their land rights and to tighten controls on international organizations that document human rights abuses. It’s now a serious offense for a nonprofit to provide assistance to anyone working to bring lawsuits against the government.
The National Commission for Development and a Drug-free Lifestyle, the country’s agency that combats drug trafficking, did not respond to a request for comment.
“The impact was really, really strong, and we felt it really quickly when the Trump administration changed its stance about USAID,” Vásquez said.
The U.S. spends less than 1 percent of its budget on foreign assistance. Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy aide in the Senate who works for Democratic Vermont Senator Peter Welch, called DOGE’s cuts to USAID a “mindless” setback to years of work.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.
Agency reached Indigenous communities worldwide
USAID’s work reached Indigenous communities around the world. It sought to mitigate the effects of human rights abuses in South America, created programs in Africa to enable Indigenous people to manage their own communities, and led the global U.S. effort to fight hunger.
One of the most recent additions to USAID’s work was incorporating international concepts of Indigenous rights into policy.
Rieser, for instance, was responsible for crafting legislation that created an adviser within USAID to protect the rights and address the needs of Indigenous peoples. The adviser advocated for Indigenous rights in foreign assistance programs, including actions by the World Bank.
“That provided Indigenous people everywhere with a way to be heard here in Washington,” Rieser said. “That has now been silenced.”
That adviser position remains unfilled.
Vy Lam, USAID’s adviser on Indigenous peoples, who said he was fired in March as part of the DOGE downsizing, said the idea of Indigenous rights, and the mandate to recognize them in foreign operations, was new to USAID. But it was gaining momentum under President Joe Biden’s administration.
Vy Lam, a former adviser on Indigenous peoples at USAID, at the United Nations during then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s speech at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues on April 17, 2023, in New York. Vy Lam via AP
He said concepts such as free, prior, and informed consent — the right of Indigenous people to give or withhold approval for any action that would affect their lands or rights — were slowly being implemented in American foreign policy.
One of the ways that happened, Lam said, came in the form of U.S. political pressure on foreign governments or private industry to negotiate mutually beneficial agreements between Indigenous peoples and their governments.
For instance, if an American company wanted to build a hotel in an area that could affect an Indigenous community, the U.S. could push for the deal to require Indigenous approval, or at least consultation.
“We had that convening power, and that is the thing that I grieve the most,” Lam said.
U.S. foreign aid workers were also able to facilitate the reporting of some human rights violations, such as when a human rights or an environmental defender is jailed without charges, or Indigenous peoples are forced off their land for the establishment of a protected area.
Money supported attendance at international meetings
In some cases, USAID supported travel to the United Nations, where Indigenous leaders and advocates could receive training to navigate international bodies and document abuses.
Last year under the Biden administration, USAID awarded a five-year grant to support Indigenous LGBTQIA people to the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Indigenous People, an agency that offers financial support to Indigenous peoples to participate in the U.N.
At $350,000 per year, it was the largest grant from any member state in the U.N., fund secretary Morse Flores said. The money would have supported attendance at international bodies to report human rights abuses and testify on areas of foreign policy and development that negatively impact their lives and communities.
In February, the fund received notice that the grant would be terminated. The State Department does not plan to fulfill its pledge to fund the remaining four years of the grant to help Indigenous peoples travel to the U.N. and other world bodies.
In most cases, people receiving assistance to attend major meetings “are actual victims of human rights violations,” Flores said. “For someone who’s unable to come and speak up, I mean, it’s really just an injustice.”
Sara Kehaulani Goo’s journey to save her family’s land on Maui began in 2019 with an email she read at her kitchen table in Washington, D.C.
“Sara, the Hāna property taxes went up 500%,” her dad wrote. “If we can’t find a way to pay, then the trust funds will be depleted in 7 years and we may be forced to sell it.”
Goo, who is Native Hawaiian, said it was the moment she realized she had to fight for her ancestral home, or risk it being lost forever.
In her new memoir, Kuleana — a Hawaiian word that loosely translates into both “privilege” and “responsibility” — Goo describes the efforts she and her relatives undertook to fight the tax increase and ensure that the land would remain in their family. But Kuleana is more than a story about rising taxes in Hawai’i, it’s about what it means to be Indigenous and reclaim identity in diaspora while highlighting the costs of colonial land theft and its continuing harm to Hawaiʻi. Goo challenges readers to think about what their responsibility to Hawaiʻi is in light of how Indigenous land loss has drastically altered Hawaiʻi’s environment and made the archipelago precariously dependent upon imported food.
Despite the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Goo’s family had kept the title to their ancestral land that they’d received from Hawaiian royals, and they had the documents to prove it. They had setup a trust fund to pay for the property taxes, but despite those precautions, rising property taxes — partially driven by out-of-state millionaires and billionaires buying up land — threw the future of the family’s land into question.
Goo is a former staff writer at The Washington Post and former editor-in-chief of Axios. Gristspoke with her about what she learned writing her memoir, and what she hopes her readers take away from it. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Your memoir focuses on your fight to keep your family’s land. Can you tell us more about what that land meant to you and why it was so important to keep it?
A. Some people might think of it as an inheritance, but it’s more than that. This was something that my grandmother talked about to our family as something that she promised to her mother and her grandma. That it was something that she wanted us to continue to carry on. So it was an intergenerational promise, and even before I knew the word, it was how I understood kuleana to be.
I was very aware of how far a distance there was between me and Hawaiʻi. That was uncomfortable for me, and I think that’s why sitting there reading that email in my home in Washington, D.C., felt so uncomfortable: It could be the end of the line, and I very much did not want that to end with me. So I realized I needed to act and it was more than just about money. It was more than being about me. I needed to act on behalf of my children. It was a big wake-up call about where I was in my life and where my generation was in our lives. We had drifted too far from Hawaiʻi in more ways than one.
Q. Climate change doesn’t figure heavily in this book, but it is something you acknowledge as an ongoing threat to the islands that compounds the trauma of colonialism. How do you see the relationship between Indigenous land ownership and climate change?
A. One thing I hope that people will take away from this book is that they will think about, “What is my kuleana?” Because I think that it is a word that Hawaiians can teach the world. The word gets boiled down to responsibility, but I don’t think it’s just that. The Western concept often feels like a burden, right? But the Hawaiian concept is much more than that, it is more about honor. It’s more about your role in society and being part of a whole. That concept was part of the Hawaiian way of life and it had to do with stewardship, not just my role and my responsibility, but how do I care for something? My stewardship and my responsibility for my part of an ahupua’a (land divisions, often from the mountains to the sea).
If you think about the way Hawaiians lived, that is something they’re trying to get back to today. You have a place that once was self-sustaining for up to 800,000 people in the middle of the ocean because they figured out how to sustain themselves with just the natural resources around them. And today, Hawaiʻi imports 90 percent of its food. Now Hawaiʻi’s looking at, How do we go back to that?
I think that Hawaiians can inspire future sustainability concepts by looking to the past. That’s not a crazy idea. I think it’s quite an inspired idea. And especially when you think about the Lahaina fires, you look at what has gone wrong and it’s not too hard to figure out. My book is not about policy, but I do think that it is about how you draw that line through history to understand a little more context for how we got here. That’s a big reason I wrote this book: It wasn’t really to tell a story about me. I really felt like as a journalist, the story of the Hawaiian people and the real story of their history was not accurately understood, even by people who visit Hawaiʻi and love Hawaiʻi. I felt like that story really needed to be better understood.
Q. Can you tell us more about what that real story of Hawaiʻi is that you say needs to be better understood?
A. Ten million people visit Hawaiʻi every year and they love it, and I think what’s missing is the real story about the economic crisis and displacement of the Hawaiian people. It’s not even just the Hawaiian people, it’s the local people: The economy is not working for them and hasn’t been working for them for quite a long time. It made a headline for a week, maybe, when the census in 2020 showed that more Native Hawaiians live outside of Hawaiʻi than live on the islands. But what is Hawaiʻi without Hawaiians? This has been a slow boil crisis that no one’s been paying attention to.
As a journalist, I’ve seen this happening where housing and real estate have been out of reach for a very long time. The housing that exists is of poor quality. It’s multiple generations of a family living under one roof and homes are unoccupied and owned by people who don’t live there: They’re owned by investors, they’re owned by people who live off-island. And you have no place that is worse than in Maui, where now you have thousands of people who have had to leave because of a fire. Meanwhile, you have all these homes available for them that are empty. But they’re not for them. They’re for wealthy vacationers. So who is Hawaiʻi for? It’s not for local people. Who is the food for? It’s not for local people. What is going on? We’re importing people, importing food — it doesn’t feel like a real place.
I wanted to tell a real story here about our most recent colonial experience that we still haven’t quite dealt with the aftermath of, and no one wants to talk about it because we just want to have a lovely vacation. I just have to bring up a really uncomfortable truth here because I’ve been seeing it and experiencing it for quite a long time, my whole life. This is the reality.
Q. One of the aspects of your experience was your frustration with government bureaucracy. How would you describe the role of government in your fight to keep your family’s land?
A. We were fighting just the latest version of this kind of faceless, shape-shifting bureaucracy when it came to this tax fight. We didn’t know who was on the other side. We didn’t know when we were going to hear back. We didn’t know what the timetable was. We didn’t know why any decision was made. It didn’t feel like we had any recourse. And I think what was interesting is that I would look through all the documents that my family had collected over the course of the 175 years this land had been in our family, and it felt like we were always fighting the same faceless bureaucracy.
We had all kinds of paper-trail evidence of court documents declaring that the land was deeded to us. We’ve been in this fight all along; this was just today’s modern version of it, and we’re always going to be in it. My kids are going to be in it too. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter who was on the other side: You feel powerless. You feel like you’re just at the mercy of some bureaucrat with a rubber stamp with an official set of documents, and it’s very frightening.
Q. Many other Indigenous people face similar experiences of feeling disconnected, either from their land, their culture, or their communities. What can they learn from your book?
A.We’re all given breadcrumbs of our family history and some of us have more and some of us have less. We all have a choice in what we choose to do with that. Some of us kind of let it go and others of us choose to investigate and are curious and we want to know more. And so that’s all up to you. For me, I was so curious and I was surprised to learn that even my cousins who lived in Hawaiʻi, some of them had the same insecurities that I did about being Hawaiian. And I realized if they’re feeling uncertain about their Hawaiian-ness and I’m feeling uncertain about my Hawaiian-ness, then who is anyone else to tell me how Hawaiian I am?
You either live your culture or you don’t. You either embrace it or you don’t. You either pass it on to your children or you don’t. It’s either part of you and speaks to you and brings you joy or it doesn’t, and you only have one life to live, so why worry about what other people think? I think that we all are on our own journeys and each person has to decide to either connect with their community or not, and how you want to do that. But you have to do so with intention.
Q. One of the most meaningful aspects of your book was your experience learning hula and how that anchored you in your Hawaiian culture. But there were challenges too: You wrote about how your children didn’t want to attend hula and how your daughter refused to wear a lei. What happened with that struggle after the book ended?
A. It has a happy ending. So my daughter Chloe is now in the eighth grade, and she has her eighth grade promotion next month. And she read the book and said, “Mom, I was young and I didn’t know, I didn’t understand.” And she said, “For my eighth grade promotion, will you make me a lei?” And I said, “Of course I will.”
So I feel like Hawaiʻi’s in their heart, you know? At some point you have to let your kids go and they will find their own way. You cannot force them. My kids have said, “Hula is not my thing,” but they have to find their thing. It may not be next year or the year after, but they have to find their own way. I just hope that I have given them enough. I’m grateful that I found myself and was able to teach them what I could and had surrounded them, I think, with enough other people in their lives to teach them, and that they will find their own way back to Hawaiʻi and the culture, and then it speaks to them. But that is up to them and their own journey. So I can just hope that it’s part of their journey. It means a lot to me, and I wrote this book for them.
Any time a federal agency wants to develop a project in Wyoming — an oil and gas lease, a pipeline, a dam, a transmission line, a solar array — it has to go through Crystal C’Bearing first. C’Bearing is Northern Arapaho and the tribal historic preservation officer, or THPO, for the Northern Arapaho tribe, so if a new wind farm is proposed, for example, she determines if any tribal areas will be impacted by the project.
“It’s a challenging job, but I feel like it’s really important work,” C’Bearing said. “I feel a sense of gratitude that I’m able to do this and that I’m able to try, in my best ability, to preserve and protect what we have.”
C’Bearing’s scope extends beyond her home on the Wind River Reservation, to any and all lands ceded by treaty, routes tribal members took during the removal process, burial sites, and religious places. That means she reviews projects across 16 states in addition to Wyoming, from Wisconsin to Montana, New Mexico to Arkansas, and all points in between — traditional homelands of the Northern Arapaho and other Indigenous nations, acquired by the United States as it forcefully expanded westward. Because of that range, hundreds of federal proposals and reports flood her email inbox every week, as is the case with 227 other THPOs working for their respective nations. Many have overlapping historic homelands and histories.
Tribal historic preservation officers, like C’Bearing, are often a first line of defense against destructive federal projects, and rely on a range of skills from traditional ecological knowledge to a cultural and historic knowledge of places and landscapes. Now, their work is under threat.
Michon Ebren, tribal historic preservation officer for the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony speaks during a news conference in 2023 in Reno, Nevada. Scott Sonner / AP Photo
In January, President Donald Trump declared a national energy emergency to speed the development of fossil fuel projects, mines, pipelines, and other energy-related infrastructure, cutting the amount of time federal agencies are required to notify Indigenous nations before starting a project. Now, as Trump’s proposed budget for 2026 works its way through Congress, the fund supporting the national THPO program is bracing for a 94 percent budget cut. On top of that, the Trump administration has yet to distribute THPO funds promised for 2025.
Traditionally, THPOs like C’Bearing have 30 days to review a project: 30 days to review federal reports, conduct site visits, identify artifacts or burial grounds, and collaborate with tribal members, sometimes from other tribes. According to C’Bearing, that window was already tight, but under Trump’s energy emergency, that deadline is now seven days. And as the year rolls on, C’Bearing’s budget is evaporating. If the administration doesn’t release the THPO funds already promised, she’ll be out of a job come September.
“If this is the moment that breaks the system, there’s not going to be anything there to catch the THPOs,” said Valerie Grussing, executive director of the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers.
The THPO program was born out of requirements established by the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act — the legislation responsible for preserving and protecting historic and archaeological resources in the United States. At the time, public concern about historic places being altered or destroyed by federally-funded infrastructure as well as urban renewal projects prompted the federal government to take legislative action. The act mandates that all federal agencies identify any impacts their projects might have on areas important to states and tribes, and notify the public about those impacts. But Indigenous nations hold a particularly important role: Agencies must consult with tribes regardless of whether the project is located on, or off, federally recognized Indian reservations. That caveat fits within a broader context of treaty law and rights, as well as the federal government’s trust responsibilities requiring that agencies put “good-faith effort” into consultations.
If a THPO conducts their analysis and finds there’s no risk of a federal project impacting cultural or historic resources, the plan moves forward. If a THPO finds there is a risk, the tribe, federal agency, and state work out a formal agreement explaining how the impacts will be resolved or mitigated. That part of the process can take years.
Shannon Wright, tribal historic preservation officer for the Ponca tribe of Nebraska, testifies before the Nebraska Public Service Commission in 2017 as part of a five-day public hearing to decide whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline.
Nati Harnik / AP Photo
With a significantly shorter review period, however, THPOs will have to make hard choices about the hundreds of reports that come in every week, the existing backlog, and prioritizing “emergency” projects at the cost of others. That means tribes won’t have a voice in how projects are determined on their homelands, putting countless cultural and historical sites at risk. Many of those sites are undeveloped wilderness areas, like with Pe’Sla in the Black Hills — a sacred ceremonial site for the Sioux, Lakota, and other nations — now facing exploratory drilling for graphite. Many of the world’s most resilient forests, like Pe’Sla, are protected by Indigenous peoples and provide climate change mitigation benefits by storing carbon.
“A lot of times we still have to take a deeper look and double check and triple check some of these areas and then coordinate across tribes if needed,” said Raphael Wahwassuck, THPO for the Citizen Potawatomi Tribe. “It’s pretty unrealistic to have good work happen in that short of a window.”
“My worry is everybody is going to use the emergency declaration in one way or another on all of these projects and we’re just going to be bombarded with a ton of them,” C’Bearing said. “It’s just another added-on thing that we need to pay attention to, among the other hundreds of things that we do here.”
But beyond the truncated review timeline, funding is running out. Congressionally approved and appropriated funds for 2025 are still being held by the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, awaiting additional review by the Trump administration. Neither the OMB nor the White House responded to requests for comments for this story. An official with the Department of Interior said that pending financial assistance obligations, including grants, are being reviewed for compliance with Trump’s recent executive orders.
“If this continues, oversight action should be taken—up to and including legal remedies to enforce the law. It’s not a suggestion. It’s not optional. The law requires these funds to be spent.,” Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, a Democratic representative from Maine, wrote in an email to Grist. She’s a member of the House Committee on Appropriations. “Holding up funding for tribal governments is wrong—morally and legally. Many tribes have been waiting for decades for basic investments in schools, housing, and infrastructure. And now, even when the funding has been approved by Congress, they’re being forced to wait again because of what appears to be a politically motivated delay that violates the law.”
Despite the outsized importance THPOs play for Indigenous nations, very few tribes can dedicate additional funds to maintain those roles. The majority rely entirely on federal funding, as the program was designed, Grussing said, and that allocation has only ever provided an average of one staff member per THPO office, per tribe.
“It’s been more difficult for tribes to prioritize historic preservation than usual. It’s usually pretty difficult, but now we’re seeing similar effects for tribal education, health, and housing,” Grussing said. Trump’s proposed 2026 budget cuts $911 million from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education. “Expecting tribes to step up and prioritize historic preservation during this time is not realistic.”
With funding cuts across multiple points of tribal operations, tribes are having to make choices like funding their health and safety — or a THPO program. Wahwassuck’s concern is that if multiple tribes lose their THPOs and staff working on consultation requests, conditions will effectively go back to a pre-consultation period, as in the 1960s. In that world, tribal nations wouldn’t have opportunities to intervene or protect lands and cultural resources.
“There’s been a lot of profit made off of the blood and bones of our ancestors and off of the lands that our tribes have had to cede and be removed from,” Wahwassuck said. “I hear it mentioned pretty regularly that this administration wants to recognize tribal sovereignty and honor the trust and treaty responsibility. However, these funding actions directly go against those statements.”
The Tulsequah Glacier meanders down a broad valley in northwest British Columbia, 7 miles from the Alaska border. At the foot of the glacier sits a silty, gray lake, a reservoir of glacial runoff. The lake is vast, deeper than Seattle’s Space Needle is tall. But it didn’t exist a few decades ago, before 2 miles of ice had melted.
On an overcast day, a helicopter carrying three salmon scientists zoomed up the valley. As it neared the lake, the pilot banked to the right and flew over the south side of the basin, whirring over a narrow outlet where it drains into the Tulsequah River. He landed on a beach of small boulders and the researchers clambered out one by one.
“We don’t think there are fish here yet,” said one of them, Jon Moore, an aquatic ecologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. “But there will be soon.” The lake, so new to the landscape that it doesn’t have an official name, is still too cold and murky for salmon. But that’s likely to change soon: As the Tulsequah Glacier above it retreats, the lake is getting warmer and clearer, becoming a more attractive environment for migrating fish. “It’s going to be popping off,” Moore said.
The Salmon Glacier near Stewart, British Columbia, is quickly melting, potentially boosting nearby mining prospects.
Max Graham / Grist
It’s among hundreds of ice-fed lakes, rivers, and streams in Alaska and western Canada that could turn into prime fish habitat as the planet gets hotter. These new salmon grounds could help counteract other threats to the fish from climate change, such as warming seas and drought. And they could bolster a commercial fishing industry that generates millions of dollars for the state each year.
The disappearance of glaciers is also creating opportunities for the multibillion-dollar mining industry. Like migrating salmon, mineral exploration companies are moving quickly into areas exposed by melting ice, hoping to strike the next big lode.
With gold prices booming and demand soaring for copper, a metal necessary for making solar panels and electric cars, mining corporations have backed a number of major projects in the region. The Canadian government is paying for roads and power lines to improve access to them.
This mineral rush promises jobs and revenue for some towns and First Nations in northern Canada. But it’s troubling to many Alaska fishermen, environmental advocates, and Indigenous leaders living downstream, near several salmon-rich rivers that start in Canada and head west across the international border. The Tulsequah River is a major tributary of the Taku River, which runs about 50 miles from British Columbia’s Coast Mountains to the Pacific Ocean just south of Juneau, Alaska. The Taku supports iconic runs of sockeye and coho salmon that power commercial fishing businesses in both countries. In 2023, Moore and other researchers warned in the journal Sciencethat, barring key policy reforms, future mines could impair future salmon habitat in glacier-fed watersheds like the Tulsequah and Taku.
Alaska Native leaders have called on British Columbia’s provincial government to clamp down on mining in the region, and some First Nations are working to restrict mineral exploration and development in their traditional territories. But Canadian officials largely support the proposed mines, and the Trump administration has stayed quiet on the issue of mining near the border, though Canada’s mineral riches have reportedly attracted President Donald Trump’s interest.
On the Tulsequah River, the stakes are clear. A few miles downstream from the new lake, a ribbon of rust-colored water flows into the waterway: acid runoff from a former gold mine. Contaminants from the Tulsequah Chief mine have been flowing into the river ever since the operation shut down in the 1950s. Alaska’s elected officials, salmon advocates, and Indigenous nations have urged British Columbia’s government and mining companies to clean it up for decades without success.
The pollution is confined to just a short stretch of river — and fish, including some salmon, still swim in the waters below it. Still, environmental groups often cite the uncontained acid drainage as an example of what can go wrong with mining.
Max Graham / Grist
Max Graham / Grist
The Tulsequah Chief mine stopped producing gold more than 60 years ago but still leaks acid drainage into the Tulsequah River. Environmental groups often cite the pollution, which is confined to a relatively short stretch of river, as an example of what can go wrong with hard rock mining. Max Graham / Grist
Max Graham / Grist
A small Vancouver-based company, Canagold, wants to reopen and expand a different gold mine on the other side of the river from the shuttered Tulsequah Chief. The opening of a new mine could coincide with the expansion of salmon grounds in the upper Tulsequah watershed. Moore and his colleagues hope that their projections of emerging fish habitat in the lake that drains into the Tulsequah River will be incorporated into environmental assessments for new mining proposals like Canagold’s.
In some watersheds, nearly all of the projected habitat lies within a few miles of mining claims. Even though no fish swim in those lakes and streams now, that could change in just 20 or 30 years, the lifespan of a typical mine, said Chris Sergeant, a freshwater ecologist at the University of Washington who works with Moore on the Tulsequah and nearby rivers. Sergeant wants regulators to consider this prospect before they approve a mine. Accounting for this future habitat is especially important, he added, “because there just aren’t that many places where salmon are doing well.”
News articles describing the effects of climate change on salmon usually tell an alarming story: Fast-warming oceans and rivers are threatening an iconic fish that thrives in cold water, while record droughts are drying up their streams.
Some of these grim effects were on display last September about 250 miles south of the Tulsequah Glacier at Meziadin Lake, a long basin ringed by hemlocks and firs, near the small mining town of Stewart, British Columbia. It’s one of the province’s most abundant spawning areas for sockeye salmon.
In a typical year, hundreds of thousands of sockeye fill Meziadin Lake and the surrounding creeks. Two creeks that feed the lake, Hanna and Tintina, have a reputation for being especially prolific. Each September they swell bank to bank with sockeye, splashing, spawning, and dying en masse. These runs can be so plentiful that wolf packs and grizzly bears sometimes catch fish within feet of each other.
But last year, during what should have been the peak of Tintina’s sockeye run, only a handful of salmon made it upstream. After a summer of high temperatures and drought, the creek was flowing at its lowest level in recent history, said Kevin Koch, a fish and wildlife biologist who works for the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, a First Nation whose traditional territory encompasses the area. Below a highway bridge, the slow, sad creek looked more like a pond. A thick mat of algae blanketed its bottom.
Two years ago, “you would have seen hundreds of fish,” Koch said, looking down from the bridge on a crisp day last fall. He saw none.
Hanna Creek, a couple miles away, also trickled at a historic low, according to Koch — though some ruby-red fish still wriggled in its mucky water.
What’s happening at Hanna and Tintina is only part of the picture, though. As the planet warms, a third creek that flows into Meziadin Lake has also transformed in a stunning way, but one that’s actually helping salmon.
Kevin Koch, a biologist with the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, watches salmon swim up Strohn Creek in September. Max Graham / Grist
For a long time, Strohn Creek gushed out of a huge glacier, and hardly any sockeye swam in its turbid water. While glacial runoff helps make some streams more habitable for salmon by keeping them cool, it also can have the opposite effect: Streams that flow directly from glaciers are often near freezing, too cold even for the cold-loving fish. And they’re full of silt, which blocks the sunlight that forms the basis of the food chain. Salmon eat insects and tiny marine animals called zooplankton; the insects and zooplankton eat algae; and the algae feeds off the sun.
As the glacier above Strohn shriveled up and retreated from a mountain pass in the second half of the 20th century, its runoff started to drain down the other side of the Coast Mountains, away from Strohn Creek. Without a torrent of ice melt, the creek lost its silt and warmed up enough that, after a few decades, salmon now spawn there in the thousands. “There was this huge shift happening before our eyes,” said Naxginkw Tara Marsden, who directs the Gitanyow Nation’s sustainability program.
Approaching Strohn Creek to observe the peak of last year’s sockeye run, Koch brushed aside alder branches and yelled to alert lurking brown bears.
“This spot is one of the most pain-in-the-ass spots for grizzlies, where I’m taking you,” Koch said. “So sorry about that.”
The stream came into view. Half-eaten fish carcasses were strewn along its banks, and dozens of bright-red salmon splashed in its shallow blue waters. Their tails slapped the surface as they fought against the current.
Sockeye salmon migrate up Strohn Creek in September. The creek became more suitable for the fish after a huge glacier above it receded. Max Graham / Grist
In some years, more sockeye return to Strohn than to Hanna or Tintina Creek. Scientists think it could be a bellwether: There are countless creeks like Strohn across Alaska and western Canada — glacial streams that could transform into salmon havens as the ice above them melts. Fish are turning up in these new spots surprisingly quickly. Hundreds of miles from Strohn Creek, scientists found pink salmon in a stream in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park less than a decade after it emerged in the wake of a receding glacier.
According to a paper in Nature that Moore co-authored in 2021, nearly 4,000 miles of new salmon streams could appear in Alaska and northwestern Canada by the end of the century. The gains could be “enormous,” Moore said.
And that estimate — one of the only published projections of emerging salmon habitat near glaciers — doesn’t account for new lakes, like the unnamed one below the Tulsequah Glacier, or streams or rivers that already support a handful of salmon but could boast a lot more. By one rough, unpublished estimate from Moore and his colleagues, the extent of lake habitat accessible to salmon in the 4.5-million-acre Taku River watershed could double over the next 100 years.
A projection showing glacial retreat and the emergence of new lakes and streams in the Tulsequah Valley, current to 2100. The projection is based on a middle-of-the-road climate scenario and preliminary data.
Analysis by Kara Pitman. Courtesy of Jon Moore.
This all sounds promising for a species under siege, but salmon researchers warn that the region’s mining boom could stand in the way.
In the Nass River watershed, which encompasses Strohn Creek and Meziadin Lake, some 99 percent of emerging salmon habitat is within roughly 3 miles of mineral claims, according to Moore and Sergeant’s study.
Around the same time that Gitanyow leaders first witnessed the salmon bonanza in Strohn Creek, about eight years ago, they also discovered that companies looking for valuable minerals had staked mining claims in the mountains upstream, including beneath some of the small glaciers and snowfields that drain into the creek.
It was a glimpse of the mineral rush that now spans hundreds of miles of British Columbia’s Coast Mountains, from Meziadin Lake in the south to the Tulsequah Glacier in the north. Nicknamed the Golden Triangle for its metal-rich rocks, the region first lured prospectors 150 years ago. They led horses across glaciers, and tunneled thousands of feet into the ice using steam-powered equipment and sleds.
The vast Tulsequah Glacier descends from the Juneau Icefield, topping the Coast Mountains on the border of Alaska and British Columbia in August 1961. Corbis via Getty Images
Today, they travel by truck and haul drills by helicopter. Driven by record-high gold prices and demand for copper, northwest British Columbia drew some $250 million in investments in mineral exploration last year, accounting for more than 60 percent of the industry’s total expenditures across the province, according to British Columbia’s Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals. A government report in 2022 estimated that more than $900 billion worth of metals could be sitting beneath the Golden Triangle. That figure stands at well over $1 trillion with today’s record-high gold prices.
The mining industry’s mark on northwest British Columbia is hard to miss. Ore trucks thunder along the region’s main highway, hauling loads from a large copper mine, built a decade ago and now set to expand. A hefty 200-mile transmission line skirts the same road: a $500 million project developed in 2014 largely to power new mines with hydroelectricity. Large signs bearing the names of mining companies — Teck, Newmont, Skeena Resources — stand beside gated gravel roads that spur off the two-lane highway.
Deeper in the Coast Mountains, the gold and copper rush happens mostly out of sight, across roadless, heavily glaciated terrain. Roughly one-fifth of all the mining claims in northwest B.C. are covered by glaciers, according to a report released last year by the Environmental Investigation Agency, a global watchdog group. As those glaciers melt, they’re exposing outcrops of gold and copper that are luring mineral companies, whose geologists then drill into bedrock freshly exposed to the sun after thousands of years under ice. Mining companies are even staking claims beneath glaciers, poised to move in as soon as the ice melts.
“The glacier might melt at some point, and you want to be the first person” to see the rocks beneath it, said Matthew Reece, a U.S. Forest Service geologist based in Juneau who oversees mining in Alaska’s national forests.
Vancouver-based Scottie Resources Corp., one of the companies with claims in the mountains near Strohn Creek, has a few prospects that could attract more investors as nearby ice thaws. Hoping to find more gold, the company is drilling into the rock near a long-shuttered underground mine in a mountain partially covered by a glacier. Old tunnels, built decades ago, allowed miners to dig up just a sliver of the deposit. Scottie Resources is discovering more gold as the ice above it melts, according to Thomas Mumford, the company’s vice president of exploration.
“We are literally the first humans to look at those rocks,” Mumford told Grist. Not far from Scottie’s claims, another small Canadian firm, Goliath Resources, recently discovered gold and copper in a small island of rock surrounded by a massive ice field. “I get the question, ‘Why hadn’t someone drilled it before?’” Roger Rosmus, Goliath’s chief executive, said in an interview posted on YouTube last year. “It was actually buried under the glacier and permanent snowpack, which are no longer there. We got lucky.”
Haul trucks are parked near the port of Stewart, British Columbia. Mining trucks carry loads hundreds of miles between Stewart and two mines in northwest British Columbia, both built in the past decade. Max Graham / Grist
A sign pictured along the Granduc Road near the border of Hyder, Alaska, and Stewart, British Columbia. The area — not far from Meziadin Lake — is a hotspot of mining, melting glaciers, and salmon. Max Graham / Grist
Reviewing filings from Canadian securities regulators, corporate presentations, and marketing materials for investors, Grist identified more than 20 companies that tout the promise of melting glaciers in Alaska and British Columbia. That number, likely an undercount, could grow as demand increases for metals like copper, and as more ice disappears. Last year, a private company named B-ALL Syndicate, partly funded by Goliath, launched a “large-scale exploration and prospecting program” aimed specifically at melting snow and ice across the region.
Most of these companies, including Goliath and Scottie, are small and based in Canada, where they can take advantage of generous tax policies. They tend to be funded by investors who like taking risks, or are eager for tax write-offs. Just a tiny fraction of prospects ever become producing mines.
Government support can help boost their chances, though — and the industry in northwest British Columbia has received a good deal of it over the past decade. Just last year, Canada’s federal government and British Columbia’s provincial government committed $140 million to upgrade the region’s only major road, Highway 37, explicitly to support production of “critical minerals.” Those are elements, like copper, that Canadian officials have deemed essential for national security and renewable energy.Some Alaskans, including the state’s Republican U.S. senators have worried that funding for Canadian mines could also come from the U.S. government, potentially boosting mining upstream from Alaska and endangering the state’s fishing industry. The Biden administration directed tens of millions of dollars to mineralprojects in Canada, also in the name of national security and clean energy as it considered Canada akin to a domestic source.
The Trump administration has yet to say if that funding will continue. Trump himself has signaled strong support for mining on the American side of the border: On his first day in office in January, he signed an executive order to develop Alaska’s minerals and other resources “to the fullest extent possible.”
But Trump has also tried to unravel the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which established tax credits and other financial incentives that have spurred mining in both the U.S. and, indirectly, Canada. And some analysts have warned that certain tariffs Trump has threatened to put on Canadian goods could hamper Canada’s mining industry and the U.S. mineral supply chain.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, has called for a halt in sending U.S. taxpayer dollars to Canadian mines, citing past pollution, like the old, acid-leaking gold mine along the Tulsequah River. “I join many in Southeast Alaska who do not believe that our pristine waters are adequately protected,” she wrote to Biden in 2023.
Murkowski’s plea came even though she has supported mining elsewhere in the state. Earlier this year, she praised Trump’s Alaska-focused order.
Many Alaska Native leaders have also been lobbying against mining in Canada upstream from their communities. Worried about threats to salmon and other traditional food sources, the biggest Indigenous nation in Southeast Alaska — the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska — wants the B.C. government to put a hold on mine permitting in transboundary watersheds until Canada and the U.S. agree to a framework for resolving mining disputes in the region. The council has also asked for a permanent ban on storing waste behind large dams above salmon-bearing rivers that cross into Alaska.
Are critical minerals “more critical than our lives?” Richard Peterson, president of the Tlingit and Haida government, asked an audience of tribal citizens, environmental advocates, and government officials at a conference in Juneau last year. “More critical than the fish?”
Richard Peterson, president of the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, gives a talk in Juneau at a conference about mining in transboundary watersheds. Max Graham / Grist
Government regulators and industry representatives contend that mining can be done safely, without harming salmon. All mining in British Columbia “is subject to a robust environmental review process, whereby any potential impact to wild salmon habitat must be avoided and mitigated,”according to a spokesperson for the province’s Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals. Regulators in the province ensure that any activity in mountain watersheds “adheres to the highest standards of environmental protection,” he wrote in an email.
The mining industry is also a vital source of jobs and revenue for two First Nations in the region: the Nisga’a and Tahltan. Over the past two decades, those nations have made deals with mining corporations for production royalties or cash payments, as well as commitments to hire their citizens. Tahltan leaders have also signed a series of agreements with the provincial government that gives the Tahltan a voice in regulatory decisions on a few mining projects in the nation’s traditional territory.
While small Canadian companies have been scouring rocks near receding glaciers, publicly traded mining giants have also been investing in prospects across Alaska and B.C. One of North America’s biggest, Newmont Corp., bought a company with two operating mines in northwest B.C. in 2023, and it’s now seeking to develop a third, in partnership with another mining giant, Vancouver-based Teck Resources.
That development, Galore Creek, would be a massive open-pit copper and gold mine 25 miles from the Alaska border, in an area ringed by receding glaciers. In 2023, Teck and Newmont’s geologists discovered minerals in rocks there that had been covered by ice a few years before. Last year, Canada’s department of natural resources handed the companies $15 million to build a key access road to a proposed processing site.
A gated road to Galore Creek, considered one of the world’s largest undeveloped copper and gold deposits, spurs off the main highway in northwest British Columbia.
Max Graham / Grist
Galore Creek’s backers are marketing the mine as a climate solution: It’s sitting on an estimated 12 billion pounds of copper, enough to make it one of North America’s biggest sources of the mineral. Since copper is great at conducting electricity, it’s especially useful for building energy equipment like solar panels and transmission lines. S&P Global projected in 2022 that demand for the metal would double by 2035.
But Teck, Newmont, and other mining corporations that could benefit from copper subsidies aren’t just after copper. Most of them are also looking for gold, which is used mainly for jewelry and in financial markets and considered less important for developing renewable energy than copper and other minerals like lithium and cobalt. The Biden administration didn’t consider gold “critical” but Trump promoted it along with dozens of other minerals in an executive order he signed earlier this year to spur mining nationwide. In addition to the copper that Galore Creek’s owners like to advertise, their mine could yield some 9 million ounces of gold, worth roughly $29 billion at current prices.
Critics argue that huge corporations shouldn’t be getting clean energy subsidies to dig gold out of the ground. The mining industry’s marketing of critical minerals, while miners largely hunt for gold, is “one of the biggest greenwashing efforts on Earth,” said Mary Catharine Martin, a spokesperson for SalmonState, an Alaska-based mining watchdog group.
One company that’s focused primarily on gold is Canagold, with its proposal to resurrect a mine along the Tulsequah River, some 40 miles from Juneau and about 8 miles downstream from the future sockeye lake that Moore and Sergeant are studying. Canagold bought the site in the 1990s and still hasn’t started producing. Soaring gold prices, driven by Trump’s tariffs and global economic uncertainty, however, have injected new life into the project, known as New Polaris. Canagold has proposed shipping construction materials by barge up the Taku River from Alaska and building an airstrip where the company would load ore concentrate onto planes to fly out of the mountains.
The New Polaris mining project sits beside the Tulsequah River in northwest British Columbia, about 7 miles from the Alaska border. A Canadian company wants to resurrect a former gold mine at the site, which is near both existing and emerging salmon habitat. Max Graham / Grist
The success of New Polaris hinges in part on a unique agreement between Canagold and the Taku River Tlingit First Nation, whose traditional territory encompasses the site and the Tulsequah River. Their agreement, announced in 2023, gives the nation a say — by a vote of its citizens — in whether the mine gets built.
The Taku River Tlingit nation is also a key partner on Moore and Sergeant’s salmon research: The nation’s fisheries coordinator, Mark Connor, co-authored the 2023 policy analysis in Sciencethat first noted the prevalence of mining claims near future salmon habitat. (Marsden, with the Gitanyow nation, was also a co-author on that paper.)
To keep emerging fish habitat intact, Taku River Tlingit established their own protected area, prohibiting mining across 60 percent of the Taku River watershed. In the other 40 percent, the First Nation allows some development with its approval. New Polaris sits in that zone, and the nation’s leaders are confident that Taku River Tlingit citizens will have a say in whether a mine ultimately gets built.
“We already have verbal agreements with the company that they will not proceed with a mine should our citizens, or the majority of our citizens, not agree with that,” said Rodger Thorlakson, Taku River Tlingit First Nation’s lands and resources manager.
Canagold, however, doesn’t have similar agreements with Indigenous governments downstream in Alaska. Clarence Laiti, president of the Douglas Indian Association in Juneau, said he’s “very, very concerned” about mining in the Taku River watershed. For decades, Laiti caught salmon for a living at the mouth of the Taku, some 30 miles below New Polaris. “It’s everybody’s river,” he said.
Clarence Laiti, president of the Douglas Indian Association, sits at the tribal government’s office building in Juneau.Max Graham / Grist
A sockeye salmon takes its final breaths after being caught at the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs’ fish camp along the Meziadin River in northwest British Columbia.Max Graham / Grist
On the beach along the upper stretch of the Tulsequah River, 8 miles upriver from New Polaris, the three salmon scientists — Sergeant, Moore, and Brittany Milner, one of Moore’s doctoral students — unraveled a 30-foot seine fishing net. To learn more about the habitat, they catch, record, and release fish in dozens of spots along the river. They had never seen salmon this far up the river, this close to the new lake. They still sample the spot, though, because they think fish could appear any year as the water warms.
Milner grabbed one end of the long net and stood on shore. Moore took the other end and waded into the water, slowly walking in a circle to corral any fish that might have been lurking. Once again, they caught nothing.
About a week later, the researchers flew back to check a dozen small, cylindrical minnow traps that they had set in the lake itself. To their astonishment, they found a Dolly Varden, a common species of char, the first fish they’d ever seen in the new lake.
Chris Sergeant (center) and Brittany Milner (right) check on a temperature logger in the Tatsatua River. The Tatsatua, high in the Taku River watershed, is a prolific king salmon spawning area. Rodger Thorlakson (left), the Taku River Tlingit First Nation’s lands and resources manager, observes. Max Graham / Grist
“It was kind of surreal,” said Milner, who had set the trap in a shallow area near the mouth of a stream that was slightly warmer than the rest of the lake. Dolly Varden, which can tolerate very cold water, often move into glacial lakes and streams before other species.
“I’m assuming the fish was just in the lake swimming around and was able to find this pocket of a little bit warmer water,” Milner said. “I was really stoked.”
The rest of the traps came up empty: still no salmon. But to Milner and the other scientists, that one Dolly Varden sure looked like a sign of more to come.
Driving into the Black Hills National Forest, as the road gains elevation, raindrops hitting the windshield slow down and start swirling in the air. It’s snowing in late April, a welcome sight in an area that’s been in a climate change-linked drought.
Today, most visitors to the Black Hills will still see lots of big trees that are intentionally left standing by the highways — the “yellowbarks,” trunks lightened by age, standing guard like the buttresses of a cathedral. The Forest Service calls this “scenic integrity”; detractors call it a “green screen.”
That’s because if you pull off on side roads, you’ll soon come to wide plots of land that have been commercially logged. Whitetail deer are running freely; the landscape looks more like a field with a few trees than a forest with a few stumps. Invasive grassland species are creeping in, like bromegrass grass, leafy spurge, spotted knapweed, tansy, and Canada thistle.
Ponderosa pines, the dominant trees here, produce their most viable seeds when they are 60 years or older. That means overcutting, combined with climate change, can permanently change the landscape. In recent decades, the 1.5 million acres of forest sprawling across western South Dakota and eastern Wyoming have weathered a historic beetle infestation and a giant fire, both tied to a warming climate.
Now the land faces more threats from the Trump administration. Foresters are seeing their jobs cut as the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, lays off federal workers; an executive order on March 1 ordered “immediate expansion” of timber production; and most recently, in April, came a USDA “emergency” directive to fast-track logging on nearly 60 percent of the Black Hills.
While “climate change” is a forbidden term in the Trump administration, wildfire risk reduction is one of the cited reasons behind the USDA order, with the directive designating almost half the Black Hills National Forest as being under “emergency” wildfire risk levels. This authorizes increased removal of trees. The memo also calls to “streamline, to the extent allowable by law, all processes related to timber production,” such as environmental review. Finally, the USDA has said the Forest Service will “issue new or updated guidance to increase timber production.” South Dakota’s congressional delegation, led by Senate Majority Leader John Thune, has been pushing for more logging too.
Logging in Custer State Park, South Dakota.
Mike Kline / Getty Images
Groups like NRDC and NDN Collective, a national Indigenous-rights nonprofit based in the Black Hills, call the directive a hastily constructed disaster. They claim that it mislabels millions of forest acres nationwide, including land that falls within reservation boundaries in many states. It also threatens at least 25 different endangered species nationwide, like the gray wolf, which has been spotted in the Black Hills, while potentially reducing the carbon storage capacity of the forest.
The directive also conflicts with a memorandum of understanding signed here just last year between the Forest Service and eight tribal nations of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate, which called for cooperative planning on forest management on issues ranging from climate protection and remediation to workforce development and the protection of cultural resources and sacred sites.
“It’s absolutely completely a U-turn,” says Taylor Gunhammer, a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation and a local environmental organizer with NDN Collective.
The timber industry is cheering. “The Intermountain Forest Association applauds the recent Executive Order and Secretarial Memo,” said Ben Wudtke of that trade association. “As an industry, we care deeply about the management and sustainability of forests and are proud to play a role in that process.”
Yet there’s a big irony: Trump’s push is unlikely to greatly increase timber production. The reason is simple: “We don’t have that many big trees left,” said Dave Mertz, who retired from the U.S. Forest Service in 2017 after 32 years and has since evolved into a conservationist.
The Lakota named the area Pahá Sápa — ”hills that are black” — for the looming, dark ponderosa pines that have been recorded to live as long as 700 years. When the Lakota and other tribes stewarded the land, they used controlled burns to clear underbrush and manage bison habitat. “Fire is natural, and the colonial mindset that it should adjust to human activity instead of the other way around is not correct,” said Gunhammer.
In the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the United States designated Pahá Sápa as “unceded Indian Territory” exclusively for use by Indigenous peoples. Just six years later General George Armstrong Custer violated the treaty and broke the law by leading an expedition into the Black Hills that spread true but exaggerated rumors of gold. Within the next quarter-century, white settlers, gold prospectors and miners followed Custer, breaking federal law in search of the metal and cutting down three-fourths of the standing trees.
The free-for-all came to an end in 1899 when Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the Forest Service, negotiated the first regulated and contracted sale of timber from a national forest.
Homestake, the first mining company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, sought to preserve its access to timber, which it needed in large quantities for the insides of its mining shafts. To do so, it pushed Pinchot for regulated transactions to guard the resource from smaller “wildcatters” who were their would-be competitors. “It was one of those deals with the big boys in the smoky room,” said Mary Zimmerman of The Norbeck Society, a volunteer conservation group.
Homestake bought 14 million board feet — a unit of measurement used by the logging industry — on approximately 1,700 acres in the Black Hills, in a transaction known as Case No.1. Some of the heartwood of the original stumps from that cut can be seen today, gnarled and gray.
Since Case No. 1, selling timber has been part of the U.S. Forest Service’s job. The money goes to pay for forest maintenance, and logging companies also sometimes provide services like underbrush clearing in trade.
Foresters set an annual overall quota. They mark boundaries of specific “sales areas” on a map that look like big squares cut from the forest. Then they do an environmental review before the timber company can go in and cut.
Trees above nine inches in diameter are the main marketable product. Between five and nine inches, they’re good for maybe wood chips or fence posts. Below five inches, it’s “dog hair,” commercially worthless. Sometimes foresters mark specific large trees to be cut, leaving others alone to maintain a certain density. Other times it’s complete removal, taking every big enough and tall enough tree off the land.
“I was as aggressive at putting together timber sales as anybody. I didn’t feel guilty about it because I thought I was doing the right thing,” said Dave Mertz, the ex-forester.
Former U.S. Forest Service Deputy Chief Jim Furnish talks with retired agency employee Dave Mertz at a logging site in the Black Hills National Forest in 2021. Matthew Brown / AP Photo
The volume of timber grew far above historic levels thanks to decades of total fire suppression that followed — as thick as a “shag carpet,” says Zimmerman. The density made the timber industry happy but ultimately made the forest more vulnerable.
Right on cue, bugs and fire arrived. In 2000, the Jasper Fire claimed 83,508 acres. It was big and hot enough to form its own pyrocumulus clouds, which can form over volcanic eruptions and cause lightning storms.
A mountain pine beetle infestation between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s eventually impacted 435,000 acres of the 1.5 million acres of forest. “I was standing under one of our trees as it was being attacked, and it sounded like a rain stick as they all flew in,” Zimmerman said. The beetle plague was directly linked both to the forest’s unnatural density and to climate change, since larvae will die off when the temperature stays at least 30 degrees below zero for at least five days.
The bugs were great news for loggers. Companies aggressively thinned stands of healthy trees to prevent spread. Foresters called it “beetlemania.” Timber production peaked in 2010.
But since then it’s been dropping. Foresters and conservationists say it’s because the big, easy easy-to-get trees are just gone.
A truck hauls trees from the Black Hills in South Dakota to a to a sawmill in 2012. Several trees are blue-stained, a sign of a fungus introduced into the tree by the mountain pine beetle. Veronica Zaragovia / AP Photo
In 2023 the Black Hills National Forest undertook an intensive Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR, project, flying over to map the land at public expense. “This forest probably has more data on it than any in the world,” said Zimmerman. Preliminary results show just what previous surveys have: that marketable trees remaining are few, far between, and small, averaging just over the minimum to be considered sawtimber at all. The remaining big trees are often on steep, rocky slopes, which require special, expensive equipment that might make it uneconomic to log them.
Neiman Enterprises, the biggest timber company in the area, closed one of its South Dakota sawmills in 2021 and laid off workers from the other one last year.
Loggers are also having to cover more area than they used to. Case No. 1, back in 1899, produced 1,500-1,600 cubic feet per acre, but recent sales were just 400 cubic feet an acre. Expanding sales areas mean carving out more logging roads, more disturbance of the soil and plant and animal species, and logging new, harder to reach and less productive areas. But still, in 2024, production was at a quarter of the peak, and well under the quota.
Yet the timber industry insists there are still more trees to cut than the Forest Service is allowing. Ben Wudtke, of the Intermountain Forest Association, provides data suggesting that the “standing live volume” of trees in the forest is high. Zimmerman and Mertz argue his numbers don’t account for the diameter of those trees.
“It’s almost like they’re flat-earthers,” said Mertz.
The Forest Service did not respond to requests for comment.
The forest now under threat doesn’t belong to the timber industry nor to the federal government. The Lakota won a 1980 Supreme Court case recognizing the theft of this unceded land. The court granted monetary damages, which now amount, with interest, to around $2 billion, but the nation hasn’t touched the money, instead insisting the government return the land. The United Nations also advocates for the U.S. to respect Indigenous rights to the land. “All the Sioux tribes have informed the United States since 1980 that ‘The Black Hills Are Not For Sale,’” Oglala Sioux Tribal President Frank Star Comes Out told the media in April of this year.
For Lakota people, a just future is clear: to bring all this land back under Indigenous stewardship, not just because of their legal standing, but because of their centuries of experience managing the forest. Around the world, landback and comanagement agreements have been at the forefront of conservation efforts.
In February 2021, several officials of the Oglala Sioux cosigned a letter with the Norbeck Society and other conservation groups to the Forest Service calling for less logging. “Due to past overharvesting and other factors, there are not enough trees left” to meet the timber industry’s allowed quota, they wrote. That winter, tribal leaders from 12 Great Plains Nations argued for the return and protection of the Black Hills in a two-hour closed-door meeting that tribal leaders called “unprecedented” and “historic,” with Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous cabinet member. That meeting seemed to bear some fruit toward the end of Biden’s term when Haaland signed a 20-year ban on mining in a portion of the Black Hills.
Two weeks later, Donald Trump took office. Now what Gunhammer called the “U-turn” has begun. Not long after Trump’s Executive Order on forests, two “exploratory” drilling projects were proposed in a different part of the Black Hills for graphite and uranium mines. The proposed graphite project would impact a place called Pe’ Sla, a mountain meadow and religious area that Gunhammer compares to Mount Sinai or the Vatican.
A single slope of this forest holds the mark of untold centuries. The biggest trees overhead may have sprouted before the Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed. The unassuming tufts of chartreuse lichen underfoot — Letharia vulpina, the wolf poisoner — can live thousands of years.
“Our lifetime is shorter than the life of a forest,” says Zimmerman. “It’s spoken of as a renewable resource, but it’s such a long-term thing that in some ways, it’s not.”
It’s a sun-splashed morning at the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California’s wood yard, a patch of land about the size of a football field, tucked in a valley about 20 miles east of Lake Tahoe’s south shore.
Magpies, black-and-white birds with blue-tinted wings, land on stacks of lumber and dig for insects. Chainsaws rev and roar and wood-cutting machines crank and squeak. A mist of sawdust hangs in the air.
Foreman Kenneth Cruz, wearing a white hard hat and neon yellow jacket, is watching crewmember Jacob Vann use a chainsaw to cut up logs of thick Tamarack pine.
“That looks dense,” says Cruz, craning his neck to look at the center, or heartwood, of the log Vann is working on.
“Yeah, it is – it’s really dense,” Vann says, tilting up his hard hat to wipe his brow. “You can tell the difference between this one and that cedar. Cut right through that cedar, but when it comes to this Tamarack? It takes a lot sometimes.”
These slices of cedar and pine will eventually be hauled over to the other end of the yard, where a firewood processor is splitting logs into even cuts of firewood.
They bought this heavy-duty machine and other equipment with a $1 million grant from the U.S. Forest Service in 2023. Now, the Washoe Tribe produces about a thousand cords of firewood a year. One cord, which consists of about 800 pieces of firewood, provides heating for about one month.
About one-third of the Washoe Tribe relies solely on firewood to heat their homes.
Kaleb Roedel / Mountain West News Bureau
Some surplus firewood ends up on shelves in local gas stations, grocery stores and area campgrounds’ supply shops. Customers who buy a bundle for their fireplace or campsite are also helping the Washoe Tribe’s energy initiative.
“The idea is that for every cord that is sold, that also pays to have a cord cut, split, and delivered to a tribal elder,” Cruz says.
It’s a program called Wood for Elders. It’s similar to a food bank. But instead of food, Cruz and his crew deliver firewood to about 110 Washoe elders – at no cost – so they can keep warm during the cold months. Although winters in the West are trending warmer, research shows that climate change can lead to more severe winter storms and cold snaps, conditions that make a well-heated home essential.
For years, the Washoe Tribe relied on volunteers to split wood from their forests and donate bundles to as many elders as possible. But, they didn’t have a consistent amount of volunteers – or wood.
Now, they have a paid crew that works year-round. That enables them to provide every elder with at least three cords of firewood each winter, which would normally cost someone about $900, Cruz says.
“Some rely solely on wood for their heat,” he notes. “That helps out those people that have a hard time through the winter.”
The Washoe Tribe says nearly three-fourths of members heat their homes with firewood and have the option of another form of fuel, like propane. But one-third heat their homes solely with firewood, said Washoe Tribal Chairman Serrell Smokey.
The Washoe Tribe produces about a thousand cords of firewood a year. Kaleb Roedel / Mountain West News Bureau
“They can’t afford to pay high prices of propane,” Smokey says. “And if we have long winters with snow, then the firewood is a way that everybody would heat their homes.”
Chairman Smokey says the tribe strategically removes logs from overgrown forests and areas previously scorched by wildfire and turns that timber into firewood. The tribe has a long history of forest stewardship, including the use of cultural fire, but colonial federal policies in the 1900s suppressed their sovereign ability to manage their forestlands. Over the last decade, however, federal fire officials have begun working with tribes and recognizing the value of Indigenous knowledge in environmental policy.
For its Wood for Elders program, the Washoe Tribe partners with the National Forest Foundation, the nonprofit branch of the U.S. Forest Service. The group hauls out damaged logs from forest thinning projects and donates them to the Washoe wood yard to use for their elders’ program.
“Our ability to remove some of this material and put it to good use while also coming up with solutions to address what to do with hazardous fuels, it really is a sort of a win-win in that sense,” says Sam Pankratz, the National Forest Foundation’s Rocky Mountain region manager.
Pankratz says these efforts are even more important as global temperatures rise and wildfires grow more frequent and severe.
Scientific research backs up that sentiment. A 2016 study found climate change had caused the number of large wildfires in the West to double between 1984 and 2015. A 2021 study concluded that climate change has been the main driver of the West’s increasing fire weather – when high temperatures, low humidity and strong winds combine.
“If we don’t take care of the forest, it will take care of itself, and not in a way that we want,” Smokey says. “It’s one lightning strike, one cigarette butt.”
In all, the National Forest Foundation’s Wood for Life program provides wood to tribes in Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico, Montana, Arizona and California. The nonprofit partners with the Hopi, Ute Mountain Ute, Northern Arapaho, Shoshone-Paiute, Eastern Shoshone, Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and Navajo Nation.
In the Navajo Nation, which stretches across parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, more than 60 percent of households – thousands of families – use wood to heat their homes.
“It’s a huge benefit because it’s used for warming the home, cooking, and everyday needs,” said Rosanna Jumbo-Fitch, the Navajo Chinle Chapter president.
Back at the Washoe wood yard, Cruz is taking inventory of the different types of timber they have on hand.
“Most of it is Jeffrey pine,” says Cruz, scanning the stacks of logs around the yard. “We do have some sugar pine. We have some red fir, white fir, some oak, and we do have some cedar.”
All of it is more wood for their elders.
“To me, it’s a good feeling that I think we’re doing something good for our communities and for our people,” Cruz says.
He adds that the Washoe Tribe will sell firewood to other tribes across the region if they are low on this precious – and potentially life-saving – energy resource.
This story was also supported by the Indigenous Journalists Association and Solutions Journalism Network’s 2024-25 Health Equity Initiative.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
It was the last night of February and a 4×4 truck vaulted down the 103-mile winter road to Cat Lake First Nation in northern Ontario, a road made entirely of ice and snow. Only the light of the stars and the red and white truck lights illuminated the dense, snow-dusted spruce trees on either side of the road. From the passenger seat, Rachel Wesley, a member of the Ojibway community and its economic development officer, told the driver to stop.
The truck halted on a snow bridge over a wide creek — 1 of 5 made of snow along this road. It was wide enough for only one truck to cross at a time; its snowy surface barely 2 feet above the creek. Wesley zipped up her thick jacket and jumped out into the frigid night air. She looked at the creek and pointed at its open, flowing water. “That’s not normal,” she said, placing a cigarette between her lips.
Wesley, who wore glasses and a knit cap pulled over her shoulder-length hair, manages the crews that build the winter road — a vital supply route that the community of 650 people relies on to truck in lumber for housing, fuel, food, and bottled water. In the past, winters were so cold that she could walk on the ice that naturally formed over the creek. Now it no longer freezes, and neither do the human-made snow bridges. “It’s directly caused by global warming,” she said, lighting the cigarette.
Jessie Boulard / Grist
More than 50 First Nations in Canada — with 56,000 people total — depend on approximately 3,700 miles of winter roads. There are no paved roads connecting these Indigenous communities to the nearest cities. Most of the year, small planes are their only lifeline. But in winter, the lakes, creeks, and marshes around them freeze, allowing workers to build a vast network of ice roads for truck drivers to haul in supplies at a lower cost than flying them in.
Despite their isolation, the ice roads are community spaces. They guide hockey and broomball teams from small reserves to big cities to compete in tournaments. They enable families to stock up on cheap groceries. They bring people to medical appointments in cities and facilitate hunting and fishing trips with relatives in neighboring communities.
But the climate crisis is making it harder to build and maintainthe ice roads. Winter is arriving later, pushing back construction, and spring is appearing earlier, bringing even the most robust frozen highways to an abrupt end. Less snow is falling, making the bridges smaller and more vulnerable to collapse under heavy trucks.
The rising temperatures give trucks only a few short weeks to bring in supplies — and often with half-loads due to thin lake ice and fragile snow bridges. Last year, chiefs in northern Ontario declared a state of emergency when the winter roads failed to freeze on time, and in March this year, rain shut down the ice roads to five communities.
First Nations urgently need permanent roads, but it’s unclear who will pay for them. Government officials in Canada say it’s not their responsibility, and with price tags running into the hundreds of millions of dollars for each community, First Nations typically don’t have the money to fund them.
But there is a third, more complex option: Many communities that rely on disappearing ice roads sit atop lucrative minerals. And where mining is approved, road permits and government funding soon follow.
For nearly two decades, companies and governments have eyed a circular mining area in northern Ontario as a promise of economic prosperity. Named after the Johnny Cash song, the Ring of Fire spans 2,000 miles and contains chromite, nickel, copper, platinum, gold, and zinc, all of which can be used to make EV batteries, cell phones, and military equipment. Scattered across the north are dozens of mines that extract gold, iron, and other minerals, but none compare to the scale of the Ring of Fire.
But resistance by First Nations and a lack of paved roads has stalled extraction. Mining the region could threaten the fight against climate change: Ontario’s northern peatlands, for instance, sequester an estimated 39 billion tons of carbon that could be released if the land is mined. The proposed Ring of Fire mining area alone holds about 1.8 billion tons of carbon. To put that in perspective, the Amazon rainforest sequesters about 123 billion tons of carbon.
Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, has longed for years to develop the Ring of Fire, even promising to “hop on a bulldozer” himself. The province, which is responsible for natural resources and road permitting, has committed 1 billion Canadian dollars ($740 million) to build permanent roads to open up mining, asking the federal government to kick in another CA$1 billion. Meanwhile, at least a dozen First Nations in Ontario are requesting government funding for all-season roads.
During the recent election, Ford vowed to “unlock” the Ring of Fire and has introduced legislation to fast-track development, actions that some First Nation leaders perceived as a threat. The Nishnawbe Aski Nation, or NAN for short, a regional Indigenous government representing 49 First Nations in northern Ontario, warned the province that it was overstepping its authority.
“The unilateral will of the day’s government will not dictate the speed of development on our lands, and continuing to disregard our legal rights serves to reinforce the colonial and racist approach that we have always had to fight against,” said NAN Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler in a statement. First Nations in the Ring of Fire area are not necessarily antidevelopment, but Fiddler said they must be engaged as partners under regional treaties.
Responding to the premier’s promise to get on a bulldozer, Eabametoong First Nation Chief Solomon Atlookan said, “Nobody’s gonna come without our consent.”
Located in the Ring of Fire region, Eabametoong relies on a winter road for supplies, including lumber for housing. The seasonal window for their ice road has shrunk so much that the community struggles to bring in enough materials to address a severe housing crisis. According to Atlookan, some homes have as many as 14 people living under one roof. Eabametoong used to haul fuel over the winter road, but it is now flown in at a much higher cost.
Atlookan said that building a permanent road could threaten traditional ways of life by bringing in tourists, allowing settlers more access to lands to build cottages, and increasing competition over hunting and fishing. But climate change and rising costs are forcing him to seriously consider a paved road. “We need to begin working on it now,” he said.
Atlookan is not against mining but knows there are trade-offs. His community’s traditional territories contain countless interwoven streams, lakes, and rivers, and mining upstream could contaminate nearby walleye spawning habitat. “They don’t realize how interconnected those tributaries are, where the fish spawn,” he said. ”It’ll destroy that livelihood for our communities. So there’s a lot at stake here.”
The province is motivated to build all-season roads to allow a more sustainable flow of goods as climate change threatens the ice roads, according to a spokesperson for Greg Rickford, Ontario’s minister of Indigenous affairs and First Nations economic reconciliation. They’re committed to “meaningful partnerships” to advance economic opportunities in the region, the spokesperson added.
But that’s not how Atlookan views the situation. He described a conversation he had with Rickford, who offered to build him an all-season road. He said he asked Rickford if he wanted access to minerals, and the minister denied that the road would be for mining access. “I said, ‘Rickford, that is what this is all about.’”
Jessie Boulard / Grist
While Eabametoong is located in the Ring of Fire region and shares a network of winter roads with a cluster of other communities, Cat Lake is in a different situation.
Cat Lake is 160 miles west of Eabametoong, as the crow flies. The reserve rests at the edge of a watershed where five major rivers flow in opposite directions, affording the community access to various rivers for travel, hunting, and living off the land. It is not located in the Ring of Fire region and has its own winter road that doesn’t connect to other communities.
Cat Lake is rushing to build an all-season road by 2030 at a cost of CA$125 million, which the community cannot afford on its own. Cat Lake is considering two routes for an all-season road. One option involves construction over the current 103-mile winter road. The other option is to piggyback on an all-season road that would be built to a gold mine, if it is approved. The Springpole mine site is 25 miles from Cat Lake, giving the community the option to build a shorter all-season road.
First Mining Gold wants to drain a lake and dig a 1-mile open-pit mine to reach the gold underneath. To access Springpole, the company needs to build an all-season road.
In past years, company vehicles reached the site by driving over a winter road that passed over a frozen lake. But several times those vehicles plunged through the thin ice due to warm weather, according to First Mining Gold’s 2023 ESG report. The company figured it was too risky to keep crossing the lake, so it asked the province for permits to build an overland winter road.
Ontario issued a permit for the company to build the winter road without Cat Lake’s consent, prompting the First Nation to request an injunction to stop construction. The community dropped its court case after reaching a settlement with the province last year. First Mining Gold did not reply when asked for comment.
In September 2020, as the company prepared to apply for permits, Wesley invited elders to a meeting to ask two questions: Did they support Springpole, and did they want an all-season road? “In order for us to get a road, we might have to let them open the mine,” Wesley explained. The elders said they don’t value gold but do value lake trout, and they believed the project would destroy fish habitat. Elders also said they wanted an all-season road that would allow young people to connect with the world while embracing their culture. “We said no to the mine, and we said yes to the road,” she said.
After the elders meeting, Wesley began to look for ways to fund a permanent road without relying on mining. She said the federal government is hesitant to fund an all-season road to only one community, and the province won’t talk to Cat Lake about an all-season road. To unlock funding, she began pursuing economic partnerships like working with PRT Growing Services on forest regeneration and a local bioeconomy that would involve a tree-seedling nursery in the community. Cat Lake is also partnering with Natural Resources Institute Finland to do an assessment of their forests.
“Relying on industry would mean that we would have to do mining with First Mining. And like I said, the community values land, air, and water. We don’t value gold,” she said.
The farther north you fly in Ontario, the fewer glimpses of infrastructure like power lines, cell towers, or paved roads. The winter landscape is composed of evergreen forests shot through with rivers and lakes, bright white from the snow resting on top. From a plane, the ice roads can be seen cutting through the trees and running over frozen lakes.
On a chilly, sunny afternoon on the Cat Lake winter road, Jonathan Williams drove a red truck with chains pulling heavy tires behind it. Known as “drags,” the tires smooth out the rough parts of the road. Warm weather makes the surface bumpy, requiring constant attention from workers like Williams, who has built winter roads for the last eight years.
“The year I started, it was minus 50 [degrees Celsius],” he said. “I was out fixing trucks on the road, and it was frickin’ crazy getting frostbite on your hands. After that, every year it’s been getting a little bit warmer, a little bit warmer.”
It costs about CA$500,000 ($358,800) each year to build and maintain Cat Lake’s winter road. The warming climate is taking a toll on the machines used on the road, but the budget no longer covers the expense of a CA$10,000 ($7,155) broken machine part.
Winter road construction, which splits the cost 50/50 between Indigenous Services Canada and Ontario’s Ministry of Northern Development, typically starts in November or early December. That’s when crews drive heavy machines over the earth to press it down. When snow arrives, they use grooming machines to pack it.
Like many reserves, driving over Cat Lake’s winter road requires passing over a lake with no bridge. When winter arrives and lake ice begins to form, crews repeatedly flood the lake to make the ice sturdy enough for heavy trucks. When the ice is ready, workers celebrate by spinning their grooming machines in circles on the frozen surface, a ritual called their “happy dance.”
To build the required snow bridges, crews use grooming machines to jam huge piles of snow into creeks. They let the snow settle for about 36 hours and then flood it to form icy crossings. The flowing water underneath naturally forms the ice into a culvert shape. “That’s why you need such a massive pile of snow to push out there, because all the water will take it away if there’s not enough,” Williams said.
A century ago, before planes and trucks became ubiquitous, remote reserves used tractor trains to pull supplies in sleds over the frozen landscape. “It’s a big bulldozer that pulls trailers behind them, sometimes 10 of them, and that’s where all the fuel came from, the groceries. Because they didn’t have big planes at the time,” explained Chief Atlookan of Eabametoong. “Back in the day, you didn’t worry about ice conditions — the ice was 40 inches thick.”
Jessie Boulard / Grist
The remoteness of reserves is a direct outcome of Canada’s colonial history. In 1867, the British Parliament claimed Canada as a colony by passing the British North America Act, which later became its constitution. It granted the federal government exclusive authority over “Indians and lands reserved for Indians” and gave provinces authority over certain issues that affect First Nations, like mining.
Since European settlement, massive land grabs and the creation of reserves have left Indigenous peoples in Canada with only 0.2 percent of their original territories. Reserves were often deliberately sited in remote locations, away from critical waterways and productive farmland. There was never any intention of connecting reserves to cities; instead, they operated like jails, preventing people from moving off-reserve or seeking economic opportunities.
The federal government has a fiduciary responsibility to First Nations, as affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada. Similar to the U.S. government’s relationship with tribes, this means the government has a legal duty to act in the best interest of Indigenous people. “Since the [court’s] decision, they’ve been looking for ways to offload their fiduciary obligations,” said Russ Diabo, a First Nations policy analyst and member of the Mohawk Nation at Kahnawake.
Although the federal government is obligated to provide the necessities of life on the reserve, like housing and water systems, federal funding formulas are unregulated and up to the government’s discretion, explained Shiri Pasternak, professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. As a result, there are huge discrepancies between what is needed and what is approved. “The underfunding of reserves amounts to systematic impoverishment,” she said.
This chronic underfunding means many First Nations experience crowded homes and broken-down water treatment plants. Although the federal government has committed to ensuring clean drinking water on reserves, more than 30 First Nations currently have long-term drinking water advisories. This includes Neskantaga in northern Ontario, which has been under a boil water advisory for three decades. Last year, in response to a lawsuit over Canada’s failure to provide clean drinking water to First Nations, the federal government argued it has no legal duty to ensure First Nations have clean water.
Despite the federal government’s history of abandoning its duties to First Nations, more communities are looking to Indigenous Services Canada, or ISC, for road funding. Of the 53 First Nations that depend on winter roads, 32 have asked ISC for funding to develop all-season roads.
The sun’s pink light disappeared over the horizon and night fell over the frozen lake surrounding Wesley’s community. She sat in the driver’s seat of her 4×4 truck that was parked on the lake’s icy surface. She watched as workers, bundled up in coats, toques, and boots, drilled a hole in the ice and pumped murky lake water through a hose into a machine. The spout of the machine, pointed upward at a 40-degree angle, blasted a stream of snowflakes into the air.
A couple of years ago, Wesley asked her band council for a snowmaker. “They thought I was crazy,” she said. “The chief finally told me, ‘Go ahead and buy a snowmaker.’”
Wesley has managed winter road construction for the past eight years. Her dad was the community’s economic development officer before her and was also responsible for the winter road. She grew up crawling around big machines; she would climb them and pretend the floor was lava.
When she took over her father’s job, men cast doubt on her ability to oversee winter road construction. “She’s a girl, we don’t have to listen to her,” Wesley said, describing how they perceived her. “My dad told me, ‘You’re the boss. Tell them what to do.’” She said she proved herself, and now the workers respect her. They don’t ask questions, they do what she says.
The snowmaker is a short-term adaptation. Wesley said the community has asked the provincial and federal governments to support construction of its all-season road.
In an interview in March, ISC minister Patty Hajdu recognized the disappearing ice roads as an emergency. “‘Emergency’ doesn’t even feel strong enough [to describe the situation],” she said. “It’s so urgent that we do more together to figure out what this next stage of living with climate change looks like for, in particular, remote communities.”
But Hajdu stopped short of committing funding for specific all-season roads. Instead, she said the cost will likely be shared but that the federal government was committed to funding all-season roads. “In theory, yes, but it isn’t as simple as a yes or no — it is project by project,” she said. “I can’t speak about specific amounts. I can’t speak about specific routes.” She said the situation is more complex than it seems, and the province has complete control over which routes are prioritized and built.
ISC provided about CA$260,000 ($186,000) for Cat Lake’s feasibility study to confirm potential routes for an all-season road. Hajdu said this is “an important step to the finalization of any infrastructure funding.”
Hajdu vowed not to tie all-season road funding to the acceptance of mining projects. “We should not be increasing funding for First Nations in any realm as a condition of approval for anything. That is very coercive and it’s very colonial,” she said.
“I wouldn’t believe it, because they use money as a way to coerce decisions. They may not directly openly tie it,” said Diabo, the policy analyst.
Last year, ISC allocated CA$45 million ($32 million) for construction of a bridge and permanent road to Pikangikum First Nation, which has a winter road that crosses a lake. Although the government announcement did not mention mining, the road will also lead to a proposed lithium mine.
Each summer, more fires burn through northern forests, Diabo said. “We’re in a time of emergency, and the issue of the disappearing winter roads is part of that.” Under the dual pressures of climate emergencies and extractive industries, some communities will decide to go forward with mining to build all-season roads. “We’re seeing that already,” he added.
In October, Wesley visited the lake that First Mining wants to drain for its proposed Springpole project. The company’s open-pit mine is in the final stages of the permitting process, and the company expects to receive federal approval by the end of this year.
For Wesley, the area isn’t just beautiful, it’s a reminder of her connection as an Ojibway person to the water, trees, fish, and land. It’s a relationship she described by saying, “I belong to the land.”
“I was almost crying, because the land is forever going to be changed in that area,” she said. “We’re gonna have a hole in the ground that’s forever going to be there. I don’t know how not to be emotional about that. Those are my relatives.”
On a sweltering January day in 2018, Pope Francis addressed 100,000 of the faithful in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, not far from where gold mining had ravaged an expanse of Amazon rainforest about the size of Colorado. “The native Amazonian peoples have probably never been so threatened on their own lands as they are at present,” he told the crowd. He simultaneously condemned extractive industries and conservation efforts that “under the guise of preserving the forest, hoard great expanses of woodland and negotiate with them, leading to situations of oppression for the native peoples.”
Francis denounced the insatiable consumerism that drives the destruction of the Amazon, supported those who say Indigenous peoples’ guardianship of their own territories should be respected, and urged everyone to defend isolated tribes. “Their cosmic vision and their wisdom have much to teach those of us who are not part of their culture,” he said.
To Julio Cusurichi Palacios, an Indigenous leader who was in the stadium that day, the words from the head of the Catholic Church — which claims 1.4 billion members and has a long, sordid history of violence against Indigenous peoples worldwide — were welcome and momentous.
“Few world leaders have spoken about our issues, and the pope said publicly the rights of Indigenous peoples were historically violated,” he said after Pope Francis died last month. “Let us hope that the new pope is a person who can continue implementing the position the pope who passed away has been talking about.”
Pope Francis delivers a speech during a meeting with representatives of indigenous communities of the Amazon basin from Peru, Brazil and Bolivia, in the Peruvian city of Puerto Maldonado, on January 19, 2018.
Vincenzo Pinto / AFP via Getty Images
During his 12 years as pontiff, Francis radically reshaped how the world’s most powerful religious institution approached the moral and ethical call to protect the planet. Beyond his invocations for Indigenous rights, Francis acknowledged the Church’s role in colonization, and considered climate change a moral issue born of rampant consumption and materialism. As the Trump administration dismantles climate action and cuts funding to Indigenous peoples around the world — and far-right politics continues to rise globally — experts see the conclave’s selection of Robert Francis Prevost, or Pope Leo XIV as he is now known, as a clear beacon that the faith-based climate justice movement his predecessor led isn’t going anywhere.
In 2015, Pope Francis released his historic papal letter, or encyclical, titled Laudato si’. In the roughly 180-page document, he unequivocally identified planet-heating pollution as a pressing global issue disproportionately impacting the world’s poor, and condemned the outsize role wealthy countries like the U.S. have in contributing to the climate crisis. With it, Francis did what no pope had done before: He spoke with great clarity and urgency about human degradation of the environment being not just an environmental issue, but a social and moral one. Laudato si’ established the definitive connection between faith, climate change, and social justice, and made it a tenet of Catholic doctrine.
The lasting influence of Francis’ encyclical would be buoyed by his other writings, homilies, and his direct appeals to world leaders. He was, for example, credited with helping rally nearly 200 countries to sign the 2015 Paris Agreement, regularly urged cooperation at international climate summits, and released a follow-up to his pioneering encyclical in 2023 that sounded the alarm in the face of the climate crisis.
“Pope Francis routinely said that we have a throwaway society. We throw away people, we throw away nature … and that we really need a culture that’s much more based in care,” said Christopher Cox, executive director of the Seventh Generation Interfaith Coalition for Responsible Investment and a former priest. “That means care for people, especially the most poor, the most vulnerable, the most marginalized. And we also need much greater care for creation. We’ve been given a beautiful earth and we’re consuming it at a rate that goes far beyond what will be able to sustain life for the long term.”
The first Latin American pope, Francis was unique in implicitly embracing some elements of liberation theology, a Catholic social justice movement that calls for the liberation of marginalized peoples from oppression. Although Francis was occasionally critical of the doctrine’s Marxist elements and never fully supportive of it, many observers see his statements regarding poor and Indigenous peoples as reflective of the doctrine’s central values.
“Right from the beginning of his papacy, that outreach, that recognition of Indigenous ways of being Catholic and Indigenous language in Catholicism, heralded — up to that point — the most expansive official recognition of Indigenous contributions to Catholicism thus far,” said Eben Levey, an assistant professor of history at Alfred University who has studied the relationship between Catholic Church and Indigenous peoples in Latin America. In the centuries since conquistadores arrived in the Americas and forced Indigenous peoples to accept their religion, many Indigenous communities have made Catholicism their own, and a growing number of church leaders have embraced the idea that there are multiple ways of being Catholic and that Catholicism and Indigenous cultures can coexist.
Members of indigenous communities from Peru, Brasil and Bolivia gather during the assembly of the Amazonian church in Puerto Maldonado, before the arrival of Pope Francis, on January 18, 2018.
Ernesto Benavides / AFP via Getty Images
A year after becoming pope, Francis approved the use of two Mayan languages, Tzotzil and Tzeltal, in mass and sacraments like baptism and confession. In 2015 he expanded that list to include the Aztec language Nahuatl, and in 2016, during a visit to Mexico, he celebrated mass in Tzeltal, Tzotzil and Chol.
In 2022, Francis officially apologized to Canada for the residential schools that ripped Indigenous children from their families, leading to the deaths of many who were later buried in unmarked graves. The following year, he rejected the Doctrine of Discovery, a religious concept that colonizers used to justify the illegal seizure of land from Indigenous peoples and became part of an 1823 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that described Native Americans as “savages.”
Elder Fernie Marty, a Cree from the Papaschase First Nation, stands next to the portrait of Pope Francis placed on top of the white chair where the Pope sat during his 2022 visit, inside the Sacred Heart Church of the First Peoples.
Artur Widak / NurPhoto via Getty Images
“The Doctrine of Discovery is not part of the teaching of the Catholic Church,” Pope Francis said, adding that he strongly supports the global implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. He also drew a clear connection between those rights and climate action: In 2023, he made clear that Indigenous peoples are critical to fighting climate change when he said, “Ignoring the original communities in the safeguarding of the Earth is a serious mistake, not to say a great injustice.”
But Pope Francis’ progressivism had its limits. In 2019, he called for a meeting of church leaders, known as the Synod of Bishops, for the Pan-Amazon region to address issues affecting the Amazon Basin. Indigenous Catholics who attended brought up illegal logging and violence against land defenders and proposed reforms. “The ancestral wisdom of the aboriginal peoples affirms that mother earth has a feminine face,” reads the document that emerged from the gathering and urged the church to give women more leadership roles and allow married deacons to be ordained as priests. In his response, Francis condemned corporations that destroy the Amazon as committing “injustice and crime,” yet refused to embrace the proposals to make church leadership more inclusive of women and married men.
Francis’ climate activism was also riddled in constraint. He transformed how religious institutions viewed the climate crisis, framing a failure to act on it as a brutal injustice toward the most vulnerable, but could have implemented “more direct institutional action,” said Nadia Ahmad, a Barry University School of Law associate professor who has studied faith-based environmental action. Though the former pontiff publicly supported renewable energy adoption, called for fossil fuel disinvestment, and prompted churches across the world to go solar, he did not mandate what he deemed a “radical energy transition” across dioceses, schools, and hospitals. The work he accomplished “could have been amplified a bit more and had more accountability,” said Ahmad.
But that limitation, she noted, likely stemmed from contradictory politics playing out within the church — many traditional, conservative Catholics, particularly in the United States, resisted Francis’ progressive teachings. A 2021 study found that over a period of five years, most U.S. bishops were “nearly silent and sometimes even misleading,” in their official messaging to parishioners about climate change and the pope’s famed encyclical.
Though Pope Leo XIV has been lauded for his advocacy in defense of immigrants and worker rights — his namesake, Leo XIII, who reigned from 1878 until 1903 is known as a historical Catholic champion of social justice and equality — the new pope’s track record on engaging directly with climate change is sparse.
Still, Mary Evelyn Tucker, co-director of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, sees comments the new pope made last year on the need to move “from words to action” as a promising sign that he will continue Francis’ commitment to communicating the urgency of a warming world. The timing of the conclave’s unprecedented decision to select the first pontiff from the United States, coming amid the Trump administration’s sweeping dismissal of climate action, elimination of environmental protections, and attacks on Indigenous rights, isn’t lost on her.
“It may be a signal to say ‘America, come back into the world community, come back into a planetary future where we collectively have been working to create a future worthy of our children and our children’s children,’” she said.
Dancers from Latin America celebrate the newly elected Pope Leo XIV in St. Peter’s square.
Valeria Ferraro / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
Leo grew up in Chicago and is a citizen of both the U.S. and Peru, where he spent decades serving as a missionary and bishop before Francis made him a cardinal in 2023. He speaks five languages fluently and some Quechua, an Indigenous Incan language.
While he was working in Peru in the 1990s, Leo was critical of the government’s human rights abuses — though he refrained from explicitly taking sides in the political fight between Maoist rebels and the government of then-dictator Alberto Fujimori, according to Matthew Casey, a historian and clinical associate professor at Arizona State University based in Lima. Still, his reaction to the country’s authoritarianism could provide a glimpse of what stances he might take as pope, Casey said. “It doesn’t matter who was abusing human rights, he was on the side of the people,” he said.
In 2016, the would-be pontiff spoke at a conference in Brazil where attendees talked about threats to the Amazon rainforest and Indigenous peoples who lived there. He praised Francis’ encyclical, describing the document as “very important,” and representing “something new in terms of this explicit expression of the church’s concern for all of creation.” To Casey, that suggests Pope Leo XIV, like his predecessor, has an awareness of the issues affecting Indigenous peoples, such as the rampant degradation of the environment.
“Both Francis and Prevost are attuned to Indigeneity in ways that they couldn’t have been if they worked in Europe or the United States, because the politics of Indigeneity in Latin America are just so different,” Casey said. More than a week after the conclave that named him pope, communities across Peru are still celebrating the selection of Pope Leo XIV.
Francis and Leo’s shared experiences working with marginalized communities harmed by colonialism and climate change, and their commitment to the social justice aspects of the church’s mission, are particularly meaningful in this political moment, said Levey, the Alfred University historian.
“We are seeing a resurgence of ultra right wing politics globally, and the Catholic Church next to the United Nations is one of the few multilateral organizations perhaps capable of responding in some form or fashion to the questions of our modern age or contemporary moment,” he said.
On October 20, 2022, Jeffery Nang, chief of the Rumah Jeffrey people in Malaysia, went to a community meeting and was handed a letter by a government official in Sarawak, a state on the island of Borneo in Malaysia. The letter was an eviction notice for Nang and the 60-some members of Rumah Jeffrey, who are members of the broader Indigenous Iban people of Borneo.
Leave their forest within 30 days, the official notice said, or risk charges against anyone who remained.
The letter was dated six days earlier. The clock had already started ticking.
The notice contended the Rumah Jeffrey people were violating the law by living within a “protected forest.” They had less than a month to demolish all their crops, tear down their longhouse and remove all of their belongings, and get out.
But although the eviction notice cited the land as a “protected” area, Nang knew there was more to the story. Five months earlier, Nang had received a visit from an official from a company called Zedtee Sdn Bhd, a subsidiary of a logging company called Shin Yang Group. According to Nang, a company official told him they needed some of their forest for timber. Sarawak wood is often imported into countries like the United States, Japan and South Korea where it is sold as furniture, flooring, and wood pellets that are burned for fuel.
Nang said he never reached an agreement with Zedtee regarding the forest or any potential relocation or payment. Instead, for nearly three years, his people have been at a standoff with authorities, as they resist the eviction levied without their consent or compensation.
That’s according to a new investigation published last week by Human Rights Watch that concludes the Rumah Jeffrey community is being wrongly evicted, in violation of Malaysia’s laws, as well as in violation of their international rights as Indigenous peoples to consent to extractive projects on their land.
Various studies have shown that deforestation is a leading contributor to climate change, leading to less rainfall, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and warmer temperatures. Research also indicates that protecting Indigenous land rights helps both save forests and protect biodiversity. But despite global pledges to stop deforestation, the problem continues to worsen.
Luciana Téllez Chávez, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the Rumah Jeffrey’s experience reflects a broader problem of Indigenous rights being disregarded in the region. There are relatively few legal protections for Indigenous peoples in Sarawak compared with other state governments, but her investigation found that even the few legal protections, such as requirements for companies to get certified, are not being met.
“There is a sense that a lot of the deforestation that happens in Sarawak is legal just because the law is so permissive of this type of activity,” she said. “What we’re trying to show is that even the modest protections that exist for Indigenous lands are not respected and this is one example of that.”
Indigenous peoples who want to stay on their land must prove their presence through a specific colonial-era aerial land survey, Chávez said. But the survey itself is classified.
“That’s just absurd,” she said. “It’s just incredibly difficult for communities to advocate for their rights because all this critical environmental information is secret.”
Chávez said Human Rights Watch worked with university researchers to access the survey data and prove that even by that arbitrary criterion, the Rumah Jeffrey have valid land claims.
Neither Zedtee nor the Shin Yang Group responded to messages seeking comment. The Sarawak Forest Department did not respond either to inquiries, but said in a letter to Human Rights Watch that it is committed to best practices in forest management.
“The Sarawak Government remains committed to Sustainable Forest Management through its forest management certification policy and best forest management practices,” the agency said. “This commitment applies to both natural and planted forests, ensuring adherence to strict standards and best practices.”
Despite not receiving consent from the Rumah Jeffrey people, Zedtee proceeded with removing trees from the forest, Human Rights Watch found. A study by researchers at the University of Maryland and the organization Global Forest Watch estimated that the subsequent logging removed nearly eight hectares of forest, or the size of nearly 20 American football fields.
Nicholas Mujah is the general secretary of the Sarawak Dayak Iban Association, a community group representing Indigenous Iban communities like the Rumah Jeffrey in Sarawak. Mujah said there are hundreds of court cases dealing with land disputes in Sarawak because evictions to make way for deforestation are growing more common.
“This type of modus operandi is very, very rampant in Sarawak,” he said.
So far, the Rumah Jeffrey community is resisting eviction. The village of about 60 people relies on the forest and nearby river for fishing, hunting, gathering, and growing food. Moving away would force them to leave two cemeteries where their ancestors and loved ones are buried, as well as a waterfall that they consider sacred.
“The land is very, very significant to the livelihood of the Iban people in Sarawak,” said Mujah.
Human Rights Watch investigators found that the Rumah Jeffrey people did not have an opportunity to provide input in the eviction process, nor do they have an avenue to overturn it.
Mujah hopes the international community helps provide some hope. At the end of this year, the European Union is putting into effect new regulations that will allow companies to be fined for deforestation on their product supply lines that occurred after 2020, whether or not it was technically legal. The law, Chávez says, is a “game-changer,” and could put pressure on the state of Sarawak and the Malaysian government more broadly to better respect Indigenous rights in order to protect a lucrative export industry.
Ideally, Chávez wants the Sarawak government to revoke its eviction notice. Human Rights Watch also called upon countries like the U.S. and Japan to enforce existing laws against importing wood that was felled through illegal deforestation or human rights violations. Finally, Chávez hopes Sarawak adopts stricter legal standards to protect communities like the Rumah Jeffrey.
“The Sarawak legal system is incredibly discriminatory against Indigenous peoples,” she said.”The local laws are not on par with the international standards with the rights of Indigenous peoples and they truly facilitate the appropriation of Indigenous land.”
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