On Friday, at least 100 Indigenous protestors blocked the entrance to the 30th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, in Belém, Brazil. The action comes on the heels of an action earlier this week when hundreds of Indigenous peoples marched into the conference, clashing with security, and pushing their way through metal detectors while calling on negotiators to protect their lands.
These actions brought Indigenous voices to the front steps of this year’s global climate summit — where discussions now, and historically, have generally excluded Indigenous peoples and perspectives. World leaders have attempted to acknowledge this omission: Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said Indigenous voices should “inspire” COP30, and the host country announced two new plans to protect tropical forests and enshrine Indigenous people’s land rights. But demonstrations like this week’s show even these measures are designed with little input from those affected, garnering criticism.
Preserving the Amazon rainforest is critical to mitigating climate change and protecting biodiversity. How this is done is one of the key issues being raised at COP30. Upon the kickoff of the conference, Brazil announced the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, or TFFF, part of a plan to create new financial incentives to protect tropical forest lands in as many as 74 countries, including its own.
The Tropical Forests Forever Facility has been touted as one of Brazil’s new marquee policies for combating the climate crisis. It also potentially represents an opportunity for Brazil to position itself as a leader on environmental conservation and Indigenous rights. The country has had a historically poor track record on rainforest conservation: By some estimates, 13 percent of the original Amazon forest has been lost to deforestation. In Brazil, much of that happens because of industrial agriculture — specifically, cattle ranching and soy production. Research has shown 70 percent of Amazon land cleared is used for cattle pastures. Brazil is the world’s lead exporter of beef and soy, with China as its top consumer for both products.
The TFFF marks an attempt to flip the economics of extractive industry — by paying governments every year their deforestation rate is 0.5 percent or lower. It also attempts to highlight the role Indigenous communities already play in stewarding these lands, although critics say it does not go far enough on either goal.
Under the TFFF, which will be hosted by the World Bank, Brazil seeks to raise $25 billion in investments from other countries as well as philanthropic organizations — and then take that money and grow it fourfold in the bond market. The goal is to create a $125 billion investment fund to be used to reward governments for preserving their standing tropical forest lands. One condition of receiving this funding is that governments must then pass on 20 percent to Indigenous people and local communities.
Security personnel clash with Indigenous people and students as they storm the venue during COP30 in Belem, Para State, Brazil, on November 11, 2025.
Olga Leiria / AFP via Getty Images
The idea underlying the fund is that the TFFF could make leaving tropical forests alone more financially lucrative than tearing them down. In the global climate finance market, there aren’t currently any mechanisms that value “tropical forests and rainforests as the global public good that they are,” said Toerris Jaeger, director of the Rainforest Foundation Norway. These ecosystems “need to be maintained and maintained standing and that is what TFFF does,” he added.
But critics say that TFFF merely represents another attempt to tie the value of these critical ecosystems to financial markets. “You cannot put a price on a conserved forest because life cannot be measured, and the Amazon is life for the thousands of beings who inhabit it and depend on it to exist,” said Toya Manchineri, an Indigenous leader from the Manchineri people of Brazil. Manchineri is also the general coordinator of the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon.
He added that setting aside 20 percent of TFFF funds for Indigenous communities is a good start, but that figure could be much higher.
Other COP30 attendees have criticized the plan for trying to fight the profit-driven industries that lead to deforestation with a profit motive. “The TFFF isn’t a climate proposal, but it’s another false solution to the planetary crises of biodiversity loss, forest loss, and climate collapse,” said Mary Lou Malig, policy director of the Global Forest Coalition. “It’s another way to profit off the problems that these same actors like the big banks and powerful governments and corporations actually created.”
But the performance of the TFFF is contingent on market fluctuations, risk, and the global economy’s health each year. How much governments — and Indigenous peoples — receive each year depends on how well the market does that year.
Manchineri added that the global climate policy to protect tropical forests should do more to recognize the role that Indigenous peoples play in defending it from illegal land grabs that drive deforestation. These communities “will continue to protect” the rainforest, said Manchineri, “with or without a fund. But we need the government to recognize our climate authority and our role as guardians of biodiversity.”
Prior to COP30, Brazil and nine other tropical countries joined the Intergovernmental Land Tenure Commitment, or ILTC, a global initiative to recognize Indigenous land tenure and rights to defend against deforestation and provide a potential backstop on the ground to support efforts like the TFFF.
According to Juan Carlos Jintiach, the executive secretary of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, this commitment and the accompanying $1.8 billion Forest and Land Tenure Pledge that will support these land recognition efforts are “most welcome.” However, meaningful progress among participating countries entails establishing monitoring instruments that account for and ensure Indigenous peoples see the funds and see their rights recognized.
“We cannot have climate adaptation, climate mitigation, or climate justice without territorial land rights and the recognition and demarcation of Indigenous territory,” said Zimyl Adler, a senior policy advocate on forests, land, and climate finance at Friends of the Earth U.S.
But evidence of that recognition is scarce. Under the Paris Agreement, signatory states are required to submit climate action plans called Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs. A recent report from global experts that reviewed NDCs from 85 countries found that only 20 of those countries referenced the rights of Indigenous peoples and that only five mentioned Free, Prior, and Informed Consent — an international consultation principle that allows Indigenous Peoples to provide, withhold, or withdraw their consent at any time in projects that impact their communities or territories.
“It was a real missed opportunity to strengthen those commitments to land rights and tenure,” said Kate Dooley, a researcher at the University of Melbourne and an author of the Land Gap report.
As the conference will continue for another week, the protests have raised questions about the distinction between climate talks and action, and whether this year’s COP will translate into the latter for Indigenous communities who see deforestation and weak land tenure rights as immediate threats to their lives and homes.
“We don’t eat money. We want our territory free,” said Cacique Gilson, a Tupinmbá leader who participated in one protest. “But the business of oil exploration, mineral exploitation, and logging continues.”
The Trump administration is expanding its deep-sea mining ambitions to the region around the Marianas Trench in the western Pacific, and is nearly doubling the proposed seabed mining area around American Samoa from 18 million areas to 33 million acres, an area bigger than Peru.
The move disregards unified opposition from Indigenous leaders in American Samoa, who imposed a moratorium on seabed mining last year. Gov. Pulaali’i Nikolao Pula has asked the Trump administration not to proceed without the territory’s consent, but the federal government plans to move forward with an environmental review. “Our fisheries are essential for food security, recreation and the perpetuation of our Samoan culture,” said Nathan Ilaoa, director of American Samoa’s Department of Marine & Wildlife Resources, last week in the Samoa News. Tuna makes up 99.5 percent of the territory’s exports.
In a press release, acting Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, director Matt Giacona said the minerals could help U.S. manufacturing and defense. “These resources are key to ensuring the United States is not reliant on China and other nations for its critical minerals needs,” he said. In April, the Trump administration issued an executive order to accelerate offshore mining despite international opposition and widespread concern from scientists about how little is known about the deep-sea ecosystem and the impacts mining could have on it.
The announcement is the first time that the Trump administration has indicated interest in mining the waters around the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory that is made up of 14 islands in the Marianas archipelago in the western Pacific. The southernmost island in the archipelago is Guam, a separate U.S. territory. It’s the latest of at least four areas in the Pacific that the Trump administration has sought to open up to mining since April, including the waters surrounding the Cook Islands and the Clarion-Klipperton Zone, a mineral-rich area south of Hawaiʻi.
Nearly 100 square miles of the waters surrounding the Marianas archipelago are part of the Marianas Trench National Marine Monument. “These reefs and waters are among the most biologically diverse in the Western Pacific and include some of the greatest diversity of seamount and hydrothermal vent life yet discovered,” reads the description of the monument on NOAA’s website. “It has many secrets to yield and many potentially valuable lessons that can benefit the rest of the world.” The BOEM release did not make clear where mining might occur in relation to the monument.
The federal government has not yet identified where exactly the mining would occur in the Commonwealthʻs surrounding waters, but is opening up to public comment today, Nov. 12, and for the next four weeks. “The (Request for Input) does not constitute a decision to hold a lease sale but rather invites and encourages input from territorial and local governments, Indigenous communities, industry, ocean users and the public,” the BOEM said. The Commonwealth is home to about 44,000 residents, including Indigenous Chamorro and Carolinian peoples.
The update from the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management this week comes just days after researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi concluded that deep-sea mining could harm zooplankton, the tiny sea creatures who make up an integral part of the oceanʻs food web. The researchers found that a massive sediment plume stretching hundreds of kilometers created by mining operations clouded the ocean. Zooplankton then fed on particles in the sediment that were found to be 10 to 100 times less nutritious than their typical food. “Because this is such a tightly linked, such a tight community food web, that will have these bottom-up impacts where zooplankton will starve and then the micronekton (that eat them) will starve and this community could collapse,” said Michael Dowd, lead author of the report.
Dowd initially chose to study the waters at a depth of 1,250 feet because thatʻs where The Metals Company planned to release its sediment. The company has since decided to do so at a lower depth, at 2,000 feet below sea level, in part due to data that found there’s fewer zooplankton there and said that concerns about zooplankton at lower depths are overblown. Dowd said the absence of studies at that depth is not reassuring. “We really don’t know what that deeper community is like,” he said.
In the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, where plunging tourism has sparked a prolonged economic downturn this year forcing hotel and business closures, the news of potential deep-sea mining was met with both concern and interest. “Success will depend on careful environmental management, respect for local and Indigenous interests, and transparent, science-based decision-making to ensure development aligns with both national and regional priorities,” Floyd Masga, the head of the local Bureau of Environmental and Coastal Quality told Marianas Press.
On November 1, when the Trump administration announced it would not disburse benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, due to the ongoing government shutdown, tribal governments began to scramble. Approximately 25 percent of Indigenous households are considered food insecure and rely on SNAP as well as the Federal Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, or FDPIR, a monthly food package program.
“Usually, when it comes to feeding the low-income or poor people, Congress has always found a way to do it,” said OJ Semans, a member of the Rosebud Sioux and director of the Coalition of Large Tribes, an advocacy group representing nations with large land bases. “Now they don’t.”
A federal judge has ordered the administration to make SNAP payments to states by tomorrow. But when households will have access to those benefits remains unclear. In the meantime, dozens of tribes have fallen back on food sovereignty initiatives that have been built over the last 40 years in order to supplement food supplies. From coastal tribes engaged in the restoration of salmon to Plains nations reintroducing bison to the landscape, Indigenous food sovereignty is increasing food security and self-sufficiency for tribes.
“It doesn’t always take a crisis to realize that having a food source and being able to feed your own people is a great idea,” said Kelli Case, the senior attorney for the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative.
But many of those programs have been hard hit by climate change over the last decade. Now, disappearing federal food assistance programs and climate change’s diminishment of Indigenous food sovereignty and security initiatives are putting tribal nations in vulnerable, if not outright dangerous, positions. In the last week, a handful of tribal nations have declared states of emergency due to the administration’s freezing of SNAP benefits. Most the last emergency declarations happened at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Semans, SNAP is handled through states but tribal leaders have advocated for the reinstatement of funding to tribes by citing federal trust and treaty responsibilities — the legal responsibility the federal government has to fund and provide services in exchange lands. When it comes to federal funds and tribes, “anything that happens in the United States should be recognized through a treaty obligation,” Semans said.
But without action from the Trump administration, nations have little choice but to rely on themselves. At a Senate Committee on Indian Affairs hearing last week, Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat, said that more than half of her constituents — Shoshone-Paiute members of the Duck Valley Reservation — would lose access to essential food support as a result of the shutdown. “In response, the tribe is preparing to rely on traditional practices such as hunting elk to feed their members,” she said. Later this month, the Shoshone-Paiute tribe will conduct a workshop for members to learn how to process wild game as part of their food sovereignty and self-sufficiency initiative.
But even with budding and established food programs, tribes are still facing problems. In March, the Trump administration eliminated the USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, a Biden-era plan that allocated $100 million to help tribes purchase traditional foods from local farmers and producers and distribute them.
Earl Heavyrunner, a Blackfeet tribal member who manages his nation’s food distribution program, said on his reservation, about 20 percent of households receive SNAP benefits, while another 40 percent participate in the Federal Distribution Program on Indian Reservations, which supplies a monthly food package to families and individuals.
“I’ve been working for the program for 24 years now and this is the first time I’ve ever seen it like this,” said Heavyrunner. As the freeze continues, Heavyrunner and other tribal members have been hunting elk and culling bison to feed households. “There are other reservations that are doing pretty much the same we’re doing.”
Tribal nations have always practiced hunting and agriculture, but as the United States moved westward into “Indian Territory,” policies of extermination wiped out buffalo herds on the Plains, livestock in the Southwest, and nearly destroyed salmon and other fish habitats along the Pacific coast by damming rivers for hydroelectric power. Displacement of nations from their traditional homelands and the establishment of reservations nearly destroyed tribes’ abilities to feed themselves.
“When they got confined on their reservation and couldn’t [hunt] anymore … what did they have to do then?” said Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a Hopi tribal member who assists the Indigenous Resilience Center at the University of Arizona. “You started getting the introduction of all these commodity foods.”
Johnson is involved with dry farming, a Hopi technique used to grow crops in a desert that has been used for millennia by the Hopi and other tribes. However, increased droughts and extreme weather events are disrupting harvests and pushing tribal members to remain reliant on programs like SNAP. “We have probably had more periods of not raising the crops, and we haven’t [been] raising the crops because of climate change.”
Still, Johnson said he’ll continue farming in order to preserve the area’s biodiversity and restore the Hopi diet.
“What we need is models to get away from the SNAP stuff,” he said. “That’s the beauty that I would hope comes out of this.”
A week after Typhoon Halong passed through Japan in early October, its remnants crossed the Pacific and struck western Alaska. Nearly 50 Alaska Native communities across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta near the Bering Sea were met with towering wind speeds, record storm surge, and widespread flooding. At least one person died, and 1,500 adults and children, who were mostly Yup’ik, were displaced from the villages. Initial estimates have reported that the storm decimated 90 percent of homes in the coastal village of Kipnuk and 35 percent in Kwigillingok, which has also experienced toxic chemicals spilling into its freshwater supply.
“It’s going to take years to recover from the disaster,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski at the Alaska Federation of Natives’ annual convention last month. “After the floodwaters recede, and after the damage to the homes and the fish camp is calculated, there’s so much work that remains, and so much healing that is needed.”
State and federal resources are being mobilized to respond to the disaster. On October 22, alongside Governor Mike Dunleavy’s state emergency declaration and release of disaster relief funds, President Donald Trump authorized a federal emergency declaration and $25 million in funds for recovery and rebuilding efforts. State agencies such as the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management have also begun moving evacuees into long-term housing.
“This declaration is a critical step toward recovery, but it must be the beginning of a broader, sustained response,” said Vivian Korthius, who is Yup’ik and the CEO of the Association of Village Council Presidents, in a statement.
Kipnuk and the other villages hit by the storm have been on the frontlines of climate change for more than a decade. Rising temperatures have caused permafrost to melt, causing land subsidence and flooding throughout the delta. According to the Alaska Climate Research Center, Typhoon Halong also exhibited characteristics consistent with the effects of climate change. Rising temperatures have changed the nature of tropical cyclones, leading to heavier rainfall, hurricane-like winds, and taller waves. The storm surge that struck Kipnuk, for instance, broke a 25-year-old record.
Many of the Alaska Native villages affected by Typhoon Halong were established in coastal areas as a result of the colonial policies imposed by the United States government. When the Russian Empire arrived in Alaska during the early 19th century, fur traders sought to benefit from the industry’s boom along the coastline. After Russia sold the land to the United States in 1867, the federal government aimed not only to seize and occupy lands but to encourage assimilation through boarding and day schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
The boarding school era played a crucial role in how villages were organized. Tribal communities sought to keep their children at home, given that boarding schools forced them to live away from their tribal cultures and were associated with abuse. As a result, Yu’pik communities chose to live near and send their children to village schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“They were told, or at least it was implied, if not told, that you need to settle here to send your kids to school, or they may be sent away to boarding school,” said Sheryl Musgrove, the climate justice programs director at the Alaska Institute for Justice, who oversees climate adaptation, mitigation, and relocation with village partners in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
The historic passage of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, commonly known in the state as ANCSA, also reshaped where communities settled. The law abolished existing Native land claims in exchange for 44 million acres to be managed through private regional and village corporations. These for-profit entities, which operate in industries such as logging and oil, created jobs and encouraged settlement in centralized villages and regional hubs. As a result, settlements further solidified along the coast and near rivers.
Children play outside the school in Newtok, Alaska. Thawing permafrost, sinking tundra, and flooding have forced the community to relocate to Mertarvik.
Bonnie Jo Mount / The Washington Post via Getty Images
Given that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted that Alaska’s summer waters will be ice-free in the next decade, communities have been trying to relocate with the assistance of tribal corporations. But relocating an entire village is a tall order. Costs are high, and selecting a site to relocate to with assistance from the regional corporation can be challenging. For instance, 300 people from Newtok, a village north of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, moved 9 miles away to a new village known as Metarvik late last year. But the infrastructure in Metarvik is already falling apart. Electricity is intermittent, running water is lacking, and residents have had to use 5-gallon buckets as toilets. The project, which was meant to serve as a model for other villages, received millions in federal grants but ultimately lacked federal guidance and fell short of meeting residents’ needs.
Despite a different legal terrain and colonial legacy, the federal government still has treaty responsibilities to uphold toward tribes in Alaska. In May, the Environmental Protection Agency canceled a $20 million flood protection grant awarded by the Biden administration last year. This landmark grant was expected to accelerate relocation for many villages. Rescinding funding was yet another example of the lack of federal investment, Musgrove said.
Due to the severity of the storm’s impact, Kwigillingok leaders have elected to proceed with relocation. It’s a decision that the Alaska Institute for Justice will assist with.
“No one knows what the future brings, and we need serious investments in these communities like Kwigillingok and Kipnuk to be able to rebuild or relocate — whichever they choose to,” said Musgrove. “So they can be safe from that next storm, whenever that next storm is in frame.”
As Kristen Moreland waited for the livestream to buffer, her thoughts drifted to the years she’d devoted to defending Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the northeastern sweep of Alaska where the mountains give way to the coastal plain. On screen, the chatter of aides stilled as men in dark suits gathered behind a lectern. Then Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum announced plans to open the area, roughly the size of South Carolina, to drilling.
It marked another round in the decades-long tug-of-war over developing one of the country’s largest remaining protected areas — an effort that came to a head during President Donald Trump’s first term, and ground to a halt when President Joe Biden took office. Burgum also restored seven oil and gas leases that a state-funded corporation bid on during the final days of the first Trump administration, and that his successor later revoked.
Moreland, a Gwich’in leader and executive director of the tribal committee dedicated to protecting the Nation’s sacred coastal plain, sat stunned as the YouTube stream continued. The place she grew up — where generations have lived on the tundra alongside the caribou, weaving their history into the land — had been reduced to a line item on someone’s balance sheet. When Burgum said opening the Refuge would benefit northern communities, “it felt like a slap in the face,” she said.
“They’ve never reached out to us to listen to how this would affect our livelihood,” she said. Moreland fears development will drive the herd that the Gwich’in rely on out of range and contaminate rivers in a region where hunting and fishing are a matter of survival. For her, it felt like erasure. “It’s another disrespectful action from decision-makers,” she said. “It ignores our voice as Gwich’in and violates our rights as Indigenous people.”
As the fight over development in the Arctic continues, federal officials are racing to fulfill Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda. Though the government is shut down and many employees are not getting paid, officials continue approving permits for extractive industries. In a wood-paneled Beltway office, Burgum framed his “sweeping package of actions” as a declaration that “Alaska is open for business.”
To that end, the administration also signed permits for the controversial 211-mile Ambler Road to mineral deposits, including one owned by Trilogy Metals — which the Trump administration now holds a 10 percent stake in — and authorized a land exchange that will allow for construction of a road through Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, at the tip of the Alaskan Peninsula. “I told the president it’s like Christmas every morning,” Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy said. “I wake up, I go to look at what’s under the proverbial Christmas tree to see what’s happening.”
Last week’s announcement may not end up being the gift the governor is hoping for.
The fight over drilling in the Refuge began almost as soon as President Eisenhower established the site, once called Arctic National Wildlife Range, in 1960. The most recent volley began in 2017, when Trump signed a tax bill requiring two oil and gas lease sales there within seven years. When the first sale was held in 2021, the state corporation Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, or AIDEA, was the only major bidder. It hoped to keep drilling prospects in the region alive, despite weak industry interest. The sale ultimately generated less than $12 million — a fraction of the nearly $2 billion projected by the Tax Act for the last decade.
The Biden administration later found the leasing program’s environmental review inadequate. It conducted a new analysis, then canceled the leases in 2023, citing “fundamental legal deficiencies” and its failure to “properly quantify” greenhouse gas emissions. The second mandated sale, in early 2025, received no bidders. Compounding the challenge, major banks and insurers have refused to finance or underwrite projects in the Refuge, citing environmental risks. Oil majors have also steered clear: In 2022, Chevron and the company that took over BP’s leases on private land within the Refuge paid $10 million to walk away from them. That same year, Exxon Mobil told shareholders it has “no plans for exploration or development” there.
Still, this spring Trump issued an executive order calling for the reinstatement of AIDEA’s leases, and a federal court ruled that their cancellation was handled improperly. The state-funded investment firm remains the sole holder of leases in the Refuge.
The problem is AIDEA doesn’t have the capital or technical expertise to build out these areas on its own. It has authorized spending nearly $54 million to develop them and move permitting for Ambler Road forward. That includes hiring consultants for seismic testing to map oil and gas deposits. But first it must get permission from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to harass polar bears, something that has sparked viral protests in the past. AIDEA authorized another $50 million for Ambler following Burgum’s announcement.
Ultimately, the state corporation is spending public money on infrastructure that private firms would normally fund, while sidestepping oversight, said Suzanne Bostrom, a senior staff attorney at Trustees for Alaska. The watchdog legal organization accused AIDEA of having redirected money toward Refuge leases and Ambler from accounts within its Arctic Infrastructure Development Fund, and later its Revolving Fund, to avoid the need for legislative approval. Randy Ruaro, AIDEA’s executive director, wrote in an email that it was not legally required to seek authorization.
All of that aside, AIDEA’s track record is pretty grim. Financial records suggest the corporation lost at least $38 million on its last oil and gas venture, the Mustang field on the North Slope west of the Refuge. After oil prices fell in 2020, the corporation foreclosed on the project. The state provided another $22 million in a 2023 bailout before AIDEA sold the field for an undisclosed sum. Bostrom says AIDEA has “no actual plan for seeing a return” on its spending in the Refuge. In fact, the people of Alaska often lose money in its deals; one analysis found that almost half of the agency’s investments have been written off as worthless. The economists who crunched those numbers found the state would have come out about $11 billion ahead if that money had been put to work elsewhere.
In an email, Ruaro called the analysis a “hit piece” and said the corporation has recorded its best financial performance in six decades over the past two years. He said that analysis “failed to account for the billions of dollars generated in economic benefits” by the Red Dog Mine, which produces lead and zinc in northwest Alaska. The corporation poured $160 million — about one-third of the project’s startup costs — into infrastructure to support the operation. At the same time, AIDEA’s own consultants concluded that the mine would be built regardless, and the investment was unnecessary. “AIDEA loves to point to the Red Dog mine as a shining example of their success,” Bostrom said, but even taking those claims at face-value “doesn’t erase that AIDEA still has no viable financial plan in place to cover the cost of building the Ambler Road.”
Ultimately, any plans for the Refuge and Ambler Road — which the Bureau of Land Management has said would harm Indigenous and low-income communities — raise questions about who benefits from such development. AIDEA has, for example, proposed financing the private Ambler road through Gates of the Arctic National Park with bonds repaid by tolls, a plan critics call unrealistic, given the cost could hit $2 billion. “It’s hugely problematic for the state to issue bonds with no viable plan for repayment,” Bostrom said. “That’s not a good investment decision.”
But Ruaro wrote that is only one of several options, and that he is “confident the mines … have billions of dollars in minerals needed by the nation.” He also said AIDEA now estimates the cost at $500 to $850 million, and said the road can be built in phases.
Even with prudent financial strategies, the economics of extraction remain precarious — especially as domestic oil prices dropped below $60 a barrel this summer. Given the average breakeven price of $62, new Arctic production may not be profitable — though it would extend the life of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline that carries crude from the North Slope. The U.S. is already the world’s top producer, and more output won’t necessarily lower consumer fuel prices, says Boston University’s Robert K. Kaufmann, because OPEC and other nations still influence global markets. (As to the “energy emergency” that Trump declared, Kaufmann said, “I want what he’s smoking.”) Instead, the leases will bring more production online when “any rational scientist is calling for reducing carbon emissions.
Despite the risks, some communities in the region support new oil and gas projects. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge sits within North Slope Borough, which is larger than 39 states. Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat — a nonprofit funded by the regional Alaska Native Corporation — notes that 95 percent of the borough’s tax revenue comes from the industry, funding things like schools and clinics. Fossil fuel royalties directly benefit Indigenous communities like Kaktovik, funding essential services. “When Uncle Doug [Burgum] calls, I answer,” Josiah Patkotak, the borough’s mayor, said in a statement praising the Interior secretary’s announcement.
Indigenous communities and scientists fear that development of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will drive away the caribou central to Gwich’in and Iñupiat culture.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / Getty Images
It can be difficult to disentangle genuine local support from efforts quietly backed — or directly compensated — by the industry itself. During a legislative hearing earlier this year, state Representative Ashley Carrick said one person who testified as a community advocate was paid by AIDEA, something Ruaro confirmed to her that it routinely does. This can create the impression these projects are widely embraced.
“There’s this wide consensus that [Iñupiat] people all want the oil and gas projects. It’s not true,” said Nauri Simmonds, executive director of Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic. Many of those adversely impacted by drilling stay silent for fear of losing work or social standing, she said — and some who have spoken out have faced threats and violence.
Simmonds says what might be lost by developing the Refuge can’t be counted in dollars. AIDEA now holds leases in a part of the Refuge where the Porcupine caribou herd gathers to bear its young. The Gwich’in name for the region, where cool coastal winds protect the newborns from insects and heat, translates to “the sacred place where life begins.” Beyond its shelter, calves are 19 percent more likely to die. Scientists and Indigenous peoples fear the clamor of development will drive the herd away, severing a bond that has sustained people and animals alike for millenia. Even as climate change reshapes one of the country’s last undisturbed ecosystems, it is political forces that now endanger it most.
“One of the most wounding pieces is that this wouldn’t be something that the companies would have gone after on their own,” Simmonds said. “It is the enticements from Alaska, from the corporations, from the political landscape, that creates the appeal.”
This week, members of the International Union of Conservation of Nature, one of the world’s largest conservation groups, voted against a moratorium on the release of genetically engineered species into the wild in order to assist in conservation efforts – as well in favor of the use of synthetic biology – the technology used to alter or “edit” genetic material in living cells.
The two motions have drawn intense criticism from Indigenous-led groups and international organizations focused on agriculture, beekeeping, conservation, and biodiversity, who lobbied the International Union of Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, to impose the moratorium. A related motion, which would greenlight the use of synthetic biology for research, was approved in a vote.
At issue is the efficacy and ethical safeguards related to genetically engineered species. Since the 1990’s, genetically modified foods have been available to consumers in grocery stores. However, as gene editing technology has improved, scientists have worked on efforts related to climate change, such as disease vectors carried by mosquitoes, which have increased due to hotter temperatures driven by climate change. For instance, in August, a nonprofit released 16,000 genetically modified mosquitoes to subdue Anopheles gambiae, the mosquito species responsible for carrying malaria. The project was shut down a week later by authorities.
“At this point, the science is new, and we don’t actually have data or evidence to suggest that it could be safe,” said Dana Peris, a senior food and technology manager at Friends of the Earth, a network of environmental groups. “Instead, we have evidence that suggests this is highly risky. It’s irreversible.”
Indigenous organizations, like the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin and Wise Ancestors, meanwhile, have argued that consultation protocols and policies must be established, which “includes addressing ethical considerations such as free, prior, and informed consent and data sovereignty before research applications are considered.” Free, Prior and Informed Consent – the gold standard for Indigenous rights enshrined in international law – must be followed before companies, researchers, or governments deploy synthetic biology in Indigenous territories they say.
“Unintended consequences can permanently impact ecosystems and including people and animals.” said Peris.“And so, until there are precautionary regulations and robust risk assessments, free and prior informed consent to the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities to decide for themselves about whether or not they want to be engaged in this risk.”
However, Susan Lieberman, a member of the IUCN, calls the votes a victory in tackling biodiversity loss and conservation challenges spurred by climate change.
“These resolutions adopted by IUCN in Abu Dhabi will steer policy toward evidence-based choices that safeguard both nature and human well-being — and include the rights and leadership of Indigenous Peoples, essential partners in any durable conservation agenda,” she said.
In 2015, nearly two dozen American youth sued the federal government, alleging that the United States violated their constitutional rights by facilitating the burning of fossil fuels and allowing greenhouse gas emissions to rise to dangerous levels. Their case, known as Juliana v. U.S., was dismissed in federal courts, but inspired dozens of youth climate lawsuits including successful climate cases in Montana and Hawaiʻi.
Now, 15 of those same Juliana plaintiffs, including four Indigenous plaintiffs, are taking their case internationally in the hopes that the global community will pressure the U.S. government to act.
Last week, they filed a petition at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a seven-member commission that for decades has evaluated human rights violations across 35 countries in the Americas. Kelly Matheson, an attorney at Our Children’s Trust who worked on the petition, said the case is about the “U.S. government’s unrelenting perpetuation of a fossil fuel energy system despite knowing for over 50 years that the emission of fossil fuels was catastrophic for human rights.”
The plaintiffs include Jaime Butler, who was forced to move off the Navajo Nation’s reservation in 2011 due to drought and water scarcity, and in 2014 had to evacuate her home in Flagstaff, Arizona, to escape the Oak Creek Canyon wildfire.
“She remembers times when there was enough water on the reservation for agriculture and farm animals, but now the springs they once depended on year-round are drying up, and it is no longer possible to engage in the traditional farming activities that once sustained her community,” the petition says. “She fears for her family members, all of whom live on the reservation, who will also be displaced from their land, which will further erode her culture and way of life and disrupt her family and community connections.”
Their petition cites a recent opinion by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that concluded the climate crisis threatens Indigenous peoples’ rights, including their right to cultural life, and lists several Indigenous plaintiffs like Butler whose lands and waters have been harmed by a warming atmosphere. “These are merely examples of the many cultural rights violations experienced by Indigenous youth throughout the United States from its fossil fuel energy system and the climate pollution it creates,” the petition says.
The Juliana plaintiffs’ petition asks the commission not only to rule on whether the youths’ rights were violated, but also to issue recommendations to the U.S. regarding climate change.
Maria Antonia Tigre, director of global climate change litigation at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said it can sometimes take a decade for the commission to issue rulings. However, she said the case is still significant because the commission is the only international forum that is available to challenge the U.S. on its climate policies. “It’s another way for this to be part of the discourse and to show that something is being done about it and there is accountability, even though it does take a while,” she said.
Several international courts, including the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, and Inter-American Court of Human Rights, have issued rulings concluding that countries have an obligation to mitigate climate change, but the U.S. has long rejected their jurisdiction.
In his first eight months in office, President Donald Trump has also pulled the U.S. out of many climate-related United Nations agreements and organizations, including stopping funding for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, and reneged on the 2015 Paris Agreement, a major climate treaty that sought to limit the severity of global warming. But the U.S. is still a member of the Organization of American States, a regional network of 35 countries in the Americas that was established in 1948 to promote peace, democracy and development. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, where the petition from the Juliana plaintiffs was filed, was established as part of the regional network to promote and protect human rights.
The Trump administration has also sought to end data collection on greenhouse gases, cut funding for domestic climate research, and fueled climate denialism.
“This ‘climate change,’ it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” Trump said at the United Nations last week. “All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success. If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.”
The U.S. is an outlier in that perspective on climate. The global community has long recognized the scientific consensus that climate change is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and that producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions is necessary to stem the warming of the planet. “Climate change is an unprecedented challenge of civilizational proportions,” the U.N. General Assembly said in a resolution backed by more than 100 countries two years ago. “The well-being of present and future generations of humankind depends on our immediate and urgent response to it.”
A favorable ruling from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights would set a precedent from Canada to Patagonia, Matheson said, and add to a growing consensus in international courts that countries have a legal obligation to fight the climate crisis.
“Do we understand that the Trump administration won’t take that seriously? Yes. Do we understand that the Trump administration won’t abide by the recommendations or the authoritative decisions of these bodies? Yes, but the next administration might,” she said.
“Long term, it could help,” Matheson said of the U.S. “No matter what, it will help globally.”
The Kigluaik Mountains stretch across the Seward Peninsula of western Alaska like a spine, their jagged ridges keeping a record of time. The Inupiaq have long read these ridges and valleys as a living story: Fire and fracture have marked the rock, and glaciers’ slow grind polished it. The talus slopes gleam in the low fall sun, meltwater from the snowfields spilling into streams that thread across the map of caribou trails on the tundra below.
Hidden beneath these remote valleys lies one of the world’s largest known graphite deposits. Over millions of years, carbon deep within the earth was subjected to immense heat and pressure, forming crystalline sheets black and soft as pencil lead. Canadian company Graphite One plans to mine the valuable material for batteries and strategic minerals — despite many residents’ objections, and so far, without the federally required tribal consultation with the nearby communities of Teller, Brevig Mission, and Mary’s Igloo.
The area slated for development drains into Imuruk Basin, an estuary fed by four rivers that create one of the continent’s most biodiverse ecosystems. This vital hunting and fishing area is essential to residents’ food security and the traditions that tie them to the land. As Lucy Oquilluk, president of Mary’s Igloo Traditional Council, told the federal government, sidelining her community denied it “the opportunity to have our voice heard on issues that directly impact our communities and ways of life.”
After President Trump invoked emergency powers to produce critical minerals this spring, the federal government fast-tracked the mine’s permitting. Three of the four local tribes have vehemently opposed the project, and say the public review process has been short-changed. (The fourth, Nome Eskimo Community, has not joined the opposition, and did not respond to an interview request.)
In June, Graphite One became the first Alaskan mine — and among the first in the country — to qualify for FAST-41, a process that expedites federal approval of critical infrastructure. This hastens environmental reviews to as little as 30 days. The complex choreography of federal permits — spanning the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Fish and Wildlife Service — is now moving with unprecedented speed.
The company, which did not respond to requests for comment, envisions carving a sprawling operation into the Kigluaik: To access the remote site, it will need to use 30 miles of public road and lay 17 miles of new road, cutting across salmon streams and archaeological sites. It plans to truck the ore year-round over public roads to a temporary holding facility in Nome until a deep-water port can be built. From there, the material will make its way to Ohio, where the company plans to build a processing facility on a brownfield once used by the Department of Defense.
Graphite supply is vital to both the battery industry and national defense, and China dominates the global market. Company CEO Anthony Huston said the site “is the perfect home for the second link in our strategy to build a 100-percent U.S.-based advanced graphite supply chain.” Yet the company plans to rely on a Chinese manufacturer, Hunan Chenyu Fuji New Energy Technology Co., for design, construction, and operations — underscoring how even “domestic” supply chains remain tied to global networks and exposed to geopolitical risks.
On the strength of its promises to reduce reliance on overseas sources, the venture has received significant subsidies. In 2019, Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy nominated it as a high-priority infrastructure project, streamlining permitting. Four years later, Graphite One secured pivotal support from the U.S. Department of Defense. With funds from the Inflation Reduction Act, the company received a $37.5 million grant to expedite its feasibility study. Framed as a national security measure under the Defense Production Act, the funding aimed to develop domestic supplies of critical minerals. The resulting analysis estimated the mine could generate $43 billion in revenue for the Canadian company. In 2023, Graphite One received an additional $4.7 million from the Defense Department to develop a foam fire suppressant. Earlier this month, the company received $570 million from the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the official credit agency of the federal government.
This kind of governmental support has helped fuel a surge in mining across Alaska, where state officials are encouraging rapid development. Dunleavy recently decreed that if a state agency misses a permitting deadline, the project gains automatic approval — raising concerns of a regulatory free-for-all. Earlier this month, for example, the state approved a United States Antimony Corporation operation near Fairbanks, just three months after the company acquired the mine, saying it met permitting exemptions under state law.
In Graphite One’s case, fast-tracking has pushed tribal input to the margins. In September 2023, the tribal governments of three Inupiaq communities sent letters to the U.S. Department of Defense, protesting the fact they had not been consulted as legally required before the agency funded the project’s feasibility study. It did not respond until the White House intervened. “After the fact doesn’t count,” said Austin Ahmasuk, a Nome Eskimo Community tribal member.
During a Zoom meeting more than a year later, the department finally acknowledged the oversight, but the tribes report they never received the promised meeting notes or any follow up. The feasibility study the company produced with that federal funding explicitly tries to exclude tribes as “cooperating agencies,” limiting their ability to influence project planning and environmental assessments. (The U.S. Army Corps told Grist this was incorrect, and that relevant tribal entities have been invited into the FAST-41 process.) All of this “violates free, prior, and informed consent,” Ahmasuk said, referring to a requirement under the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, that tribes be consulted and involved in any decisions affecting their lands.
A similar pattern is emerging with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It initially estimated an environmental review would take over two years, but after a 2023 Supreme Court decision narrowed the definition of “waters of the United States,” the agency reduced the review’s scope, despite the company’s plans to expand the size of the mine, and accelerated its timeline. Tribes have insisted on the required consultation before this permit is issued, and while the Corps has agreed in principle, Graphite One submitted an application in August, while a meeting has not yet been confirmed. These expedited reviews, said Hal Shepherd, a consultant who works with tribes on water policy, turn consultation from a meaningful process into a bureaucratic checkbox. “Even if consultation does take place, the tribes are in an uphill battle to have any meaningful input for this project,” Shepherd said.
Such consultation is more than a courtesy — it is a legal and ethical requirement. Multiple federal laws and statutes require agencies to engage with tribes on projects that affect their lands. Yet across the country, critical mineral projects are pressing ahead with minimal input from the Indigenous peoples whose lands and resources they affect. In Nevada, the Thacker Pass lithium mine moved forward in February without free, prior, and informed consent. In Minnesota, tribes report being sidelined as the Department of Defense funds mineral projects, while in Arizona, a transfer of federal lands to a copper mining company was just greenlit despite a lawsuit from the Apache Stronghold.
Canada also has moved to require meaningful Indigenous consultation. Although Canadian regulations generally don’t extend to operations abroad, British Columbia, where Graphite One is based, became the first jurisdiction in Canada to enshrine Indigenous rights under UNDRIP in 2019. In 2021, Canada’s Parliament followed, requiring federal laws to align with the U.N. declaration.
Amid these broader Indigenous rights debates, Alaska Native communities are voicing their concerns: Tribal leaders from around the Kigluaik Mountains gathered September 20 to oppose Graphite One. They discussed its “irreversible damage,” the potential violence against women that often accompanies the arrival of a large workforce in remote locations, and the generational impacts to the landscape. Tribal leaders also brought up the Trump administration’s executive order eliminating federal diversity and anti-discrimination policies, which they worry will undermine potential job opportunities at the mine for community members.
Residents of Nome and other towns worry about the impact the mine will have on the land and on their lives. “This mine needs so much infrastructure,” said Austin Ahmasuk. “That’s a significant change to the community.” Ruben Ramos / Getty Images
Although some Nome residents support the mine for its potential economic benefits, others are upset that the Bering Straits Native Corporation, a regional for-profit entity where many tribal members are enrolled as shareholders, invested $2 million in the project without a shareholder vote. “The tribe has the treaty responsibility and the right to government-to-government consultation,” said Nome Eskimo Community tribal member Addy Ahmasuk, who is Austin’s daughter. “But the corporation has taken up a lot of power as the owner of the subsurface rights.” When corporate interests exploit divisions within Native communities, she said, sovereignty debates can turn into conflicts over profit rather than a community’s well-being.
These divisions are compounded by accelerated reviews, which Austin Ahmasuk worries means environmental risks will be overlooked. “Even now, at the exploration stage, there’s a very noticeable change in the landscape,” he said, including the construction of roads, which he said will likely damage cultural sites. “You simply cannot avoid the archeological history. You essentially stumble across it everywhere,” he said.
On a recent afternoon, he tried to imagine what his hometown would look like once the mine was built. The company plans to build a facility almost as large as the town itself to store its ore. The public road the trucks would rumble down crosses numerous salmon streams, where families go to put away fish for the winter. “This mine needs so much infrastructure,” he said. “That’s a significant change to the community.” New sections of road risk disturbing wildlife habitat and may prevent access to hunting grounds and fishing sites generations have depended on. Without these lands, he said, families risk losing their main sources of food. Oversight of the mine, he added, will fall largely on the community “to even understand potential violations,” noting that state and federal regulators are rarely present in the region, and in his experience, provide only minimal monitoring. “People who really care about this area, we feel sort of hopeless,” he said.
Addy Ahmasuk, meanwhile, fears the toxic tailing ponds mining creates will pollute Imuruk Basin, which sustains the surrounding communities. Graphite One plans to mill and burn the ore to concentrate it prior to shipping, releasing graphite into the wind near a lagoon many families depend on for potable water, especially communities like Teller that lack running water. “Graphite dust makes water undrinkable,” she said. The ground naturally contains sulfides that, when disturbed by mining, will create a significant risk of acid drainage that will require long-term management. “Pretty much every mine that’s mining in sulfide material has some sort of water quality impact,” said Dave Chambers, founder of The Center for Science in Public Participation. The nonprofit provides technical support on mining and has been following the project closely.
He notes faster permitting has historically led to mining projects that go awry, pointing to the Rock Creek Mine, an open-pit gold mine near Nome that benefited from accelerated oversight. “Not only did the mine not even open because their engineering was so sloppy, but they killed a couple people,” Chambers said. “That’s a really good example of what happens when you try to grease the skids and get a project through as fast as possible.”
For Addy Ahmasuk, the lesson isn’t just to slow down, it’s to rethink what activism can look like. This land is central to her tribe’s creation myths. She’s launched a grassroots organization, Sacred Kigluait, aimed at restoring and sharing the stories that colonization and boarding schools sought to erase. In doing so, she hopes to protect more than just the land under threat from Graphite One — she’s fighting for the living traditions rooted in it. “The center point isn’t stopping a mine,” she said. “The center point is coming together to remember our creation stories and start telling them again.”
In 2013, California launched its cap-and-trade program, a carbon credit market that allows companies and governments to engage with offset projects that incentivize investments in planting trees, preserving forests, or even supporting solar farms. The idea is to reduce or offset greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing credits for nature-based projects.
Initially, the Yurok Tribe expressed interest in joining the program. The market would provide additional revenue and would enable the Yurok to play an additional role in addressing climate change. But Frankie Myers, an environmental consultant for the tribe and former vice chairman, had doubts.
“This idea of you can pay-to-pollute was something that I was very, very concerned about,” he said. “I was very concerned with how that lined up with our cultural values as a tribe.”
The Yurok Tribe’s carbon offset project in Northern California includes 7,600 acres of a tribally-managed forest: mature evergreen, fir, and redwood trees, ideal for carbon sequestration. When the tribe joined the state’s program in 2014, private consultants and brokers oversaw the project due to the nation’s limited funds, removing the tribe’s ability to manage the forest in a way that aligned with Yurok values. Four years later, revenue began to climb and the nation took over management. It was then that Myers began to see the benefits of a tribal-led carbon offset project. Since the Yurok Tribe joined the cap-and-trade program, at least 13 Indigenous nations in the U.S. have launched their own offset projects on California’s marketplace.
Originally, the program was slated to end this year. However, last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom extended the state’s cap-and-trade program until 2045. The “action comes as the Trump administration continues its efforts to gut decades-old, bipartisan American clean air protections and derail critical climate progress,” Newsom’s office said.
The tribal economy for the Yurok Nation before their project relied on discretionary funds from the federal government and gaming revenue, but Myers said that the tribe has now received tens of millions of dollars in carbon credit sales, boosting their economy and funding environmental projects like and Klamath recovery work in the wake of dam removal.
But critics of carbon markets remain staunchly opposed to the programs, alleging that the scheme perpetuates colonialism, incentivizes the theft of Indigenous resources, and allows companies to essentially pay to keep polluting without having to change their activities. Even today, Myers agrees.
“I do think the concerns they bring up with carbon offsets are absolutely valid 100 percent,” he said. “I think we do fully grasp the concerns that organizations have with carbon offsets and having seen the market from the inside, they have valid concerns.”
According to a 2023 report on carbon markets by Landesa, a nonprofit focused on land rights around the world, offset projects can have negative impacts on Indigenous communities including displacement and land dispossession. In Brazil, tribes near the Amazon have experienced “green land grabs” driven by carbon offset projects. In Kenya, a soil-storing project with investments from Meta and Netflix has reportedly uprooted the traditional pastoralist culture of Indigenous Kenyans, including Maasai, Samburu, Borana, and Rendille, near the site. Reports like this have led Landesa to provide recommendations on proposed legislation in Kenya such as the Natural Resources Bill, which clarifies the rights local communities have over land resources.
However, Juan Robalino, one of the report’s authors, said that carbon markets, if done right, are beneficial for communities committed to environmental stewardship. “The influence of Indigenous people and local communities in this space of carbon markets has been action from governments, per se, to set up regulatory frameworks regarding carbon rights as well as carbon trading,” he said.
Alongside the efforts to ensure credits possess environmental integrity, that is if projects actually promote carbon offsets, Robalino notes that social integrity, or how these projects impact communities, is a recent demand by market participants and “related to respecting the rights, of the community [and] thinking more about moving from principles to actually actionable actions, setting up processes, systems, mechanisms that actually take these principles and put them on the ground.”
Both Robalino and Myers think regulation is the best way to minimize harm towards Indigenous groups on both the sellers and buyers end. Myers wants higher carbon pricing as a way to enact better controls on what type of project is sold on the market and for companies to reflect a deeper commitment to mitigating climate change than satisfying its net zero pledges.
According to Robalino, there is no mechanism to regulate carbon markets at the international level. The upcoming COP30 may address this, but advocates such as the Indigenous Environmental Network, have called for a moratorium on carbon markets repeatedly, representing an ongoing and growing resistance to how these programs impact Indigenous communities.
However, in Canada’s British Columbia, First Nations including the Council of the Haida Nation manage forest carbon projects from an Indigenous-led conservation framework while in Australia, the government’s Carbon Farming Initiative supplies credits to Aboriginal farmers who utilize traditional knowledge of land management towards projects.
For tribes interested in launching their project? Myers has three points of advice. “You have to have ownership of it. You have to have control of it, and become a hyper-focused organization on who you’re partnering with and who you’re selling to,” he said. “Don’t move away from your traditional values at whatever cost.”
‘Wáahlaal Gíidaak, who is Indigenous Haida, Tlingit, and Ahtna Athabascan, grew up on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska that was home to about 6,000 people.
She spent her career working in government and public policy advocating for Indigenous peoples and when she was first approached to work for the Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting oceans, she initially hesitated.
“A lot of our conservation organizations in the U.S. and Alaska have not always had a great history of working with Indigenous peoples in a healthy way,” she said.
She eventually took the job and is now the vice president of the Ocean Conservancy’s Arctic and Northern Waters program where she’s helping to convene conversations about what it would mean to create an Indigenous Law of the Sea.
The Law of the Sea typically refers to international law described in a 1982 United Nations Convention that governs what states can and can’t do in the ocean, and it serves as the basis for modern-day international law governing the ocean. The newly ratified “high seas treaty” creating a framework for ocean conservation builds upon the foundation set by the Law of the Sea. But like other U.N. treaties, only recognized states were able to sign onto that law, and not Indigenous peoples like Gíidaak’s. The U.N. system prioritizes the perspectives and voices of governments that are internationally recognized, which makes it difficult for Indigenous peoples who have lost their lands and political independence to ensure their concerns are considered.
Gíidaak thinks that vacuum leaves opportunity for Indigenous peoples to organize and create their own version of international law that governs the oceans. Inspired by the Māori law of the sea in Aotearoa New Zealand, Gíidaak envisions a more expansive document that spans geographies and nationalities that could help Indigenous peoples more effectively organize and advocate around critical ocean issues like climate change and deep-sea mining.
Grist spoke with ‘Wáahlaal Gíidaak about what an Indigenous Law of the Sea might entail, why it’s important, and what is being done to create it. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. How would you describe your own personal connection to the sea?
A. In our historical retelling of our islands, it is where ravens found a clam shell and pulled humans out of the clam shell. This is our story from time immemorial that tells of when humans first came to these islands This imperative and this connection to these islands has been one that’s existed for a very long time, and our connections to the nonhuman beings that exist in the ocean are part of our DNA and part of the thing that keeps us going.
About 20 or so years ago they found one of our ancestors in a cave in Prince of Wales island, and that ancestor was about 10,000 years old. They tested the DNA for our ancestor against the population of today and sure enough it matched. But the thing I found interesting was the DNA they found in the stomach of that ancestor was salmon. So for over 10,000 years we have had a connection with salmon that preexisted any laws that dictated how we harvested our salmon today. The salmon that existed back then were saber-toothed salmon.
We are starting to see the salmon disappear from our homelands and it is the last, largest wild salmon stock on the planet. Many of our communities have gone without being able to harvest salmon for at least five years now because the salmon populations have been so mistreated that our people cannot sustain our way of life and our relationship with salmon like we have always done.
Q. How is climate change affecting that relationship that you and your people have with the ocean?
A. Big ice sheets are melting at four times the rate that they would historically. As our ice sheets melt in the Arctic and in the central Arctic Ocean, it’s creating a rise in the ocean that’s impacting the rest of the world.
We’re seeing our glaciers really receding at an exacerbated rate and we need those glaciers to continue to provide for everything in our ecosystem. The glacier melts every year are what provides for our rivers. We need them to be at a steady pace and not one that’s exacerbated as it is today.
Folks have been talking about turtles coming into our waters, which is crazy to think about these species that are typically subtropically making their way to Alaska, which is the last place you’d assume a subtropical species would be. We’re also seeing the changes in our ocean and our seaweed, which is a main part of our diet.
Q. Why are you interested in compiling an Indigenous Law of the Sea?
A. My sisters in this work realized there is a space for Indigenous people at these big convenings where they’re making decisions about our homelands, and usually the space for Indigenous people is an afterthought. We get a seat at the table sometimes. It’s not a voting seat. It’s not a space where Indigenous voices are front and center. And so thinking through and realizing that our laws still carry through to today in how we operate on the ocean, how we operate in our waters — not only state and federal laws but an ancestral way of caring for the ocean that goes beyond those spaces. We were realizing that if the world uplifted those same principles and protocols for how they operate on our waters, we could get a little further down the road of caring for our ocean and our waters and caring for beyond-human beings in those spaces, if we were to uplift the truths and protocols of our people in all spaces.
Q. How would the creation of an Indigenous Law of the Sea interact with existing international law?
A. As we set out to create an Indigenous Law of the Sea, it’s not to say that we’re just going to replicate the U.N. Law of the Sea and then just put Indigenous names and faces and words in there, but to create our own Indigenous law. We’re not saying that this should replace the U.N.’s Law of the Sea. What we’re saying is that this can be an additive: to share with the world the protocols by which Indigenous peoples have always held a relationship with waters, what the protocols have taught us for thousands of years on how to treat these oceans and our relatives that exist in these oceans, how do we live in a balance and how have our ancestors taught us how to have this relationship with the ocean? What is our taboo that still exists today for how we go out on the water, and how our children and our children’s children will be taught to respect and have that care for the place that has always sustained our way of life?
Just writing those down, getting those stories out to the world so that the world can have a better understanding of what that protocol would look like.
We’re just having that conversation in Alaska right now, but we’re also in conversation with our relatives in Aotearoa New Zealand, in Hawaiʻi, with our brothers and sisters in Canada. What does it look like if we were to collectively pull into one document some of our similar stories and protocols for how we treat the ocean, and then just shared that with the world? This is a better way of being than what has currently existed, a way and a relationship that predates any government coming into these spaces that is not our own. And what would the world look like if everybody started to operate the way that Indigenous people have, and the way Indigenous people have cared for these places?
Q. Why is this important?
A. There is an opportunity for Indigenous people to say, “These are our laws,” and putting those front and center because we’ve never done that before.
We see so many different countries, so many different leaders trying their best to push things forward. And the laws that they’re creating are important, and the laws they’re taking a stand on are important. But we’ve never flexed our sovereignty as Indigenous people and said, “These are our waters.” They were our waters long before a lot of these government folks decided to step into these places, and our laws have had a reciprocal relationship in this space for a long time.
The sovereignty we carry is inherent. We have an inherent sovereignty. We had a sophisticated form of governing for our people, taking care of our communities long before any of these other governments decided that they wanted to be here. And so thinking through what it looks like for us to continue to uphold those sovereignty as nations of people across the country, across the globe, what does it look like for us to start flexing that sovereignty and saying, “Whatever’s happening over there is fine, but these are our laws, and this is our negotiated table. You can come and you can be an observer at our table. This is our table to finally have a conversation with just Indigenous people collectively standing on our own ancestral DNA and imperative for what the future protection and caring of these places should look like.”
Q. Where are these conversations happening?
A. We’ve held one gathering so far in Alaska. We invited all of our tribes and all of our native entities and leadership throughout Alaska to come sit down with us for three days. We invited our family from Aotearoa, our Māori brothers and sisters, to help us be catalyzers. The Māori are way ahead of us, like they always are. And they’ve already developed their own Indigenous Law of the Sea. And some Hawaiian folks and then some folks from Greenland and other places came to help us be catalyzers in this space. As it grows beyond Alaska, I would love to see something a little more formalized. We sat down at the U.N. Ocean Conference in France as an impromptu, informal gathering of what we ended up calling the Indigenous Peoples Ocean Alliance. I’m not sure where it’s going to take us, but I want to see us continue to grow in creating our own table.
Q. What should Indigenous peoples know about who can participate in this process?
A. A lot of our people think that they don’t carry the knowledge that can go into something like an Indigenous Law of the Sea, because so much has been lost as a result of colonization. And what we’ve shared with them is that you’re upholding those practices, and you know whether you have been told these are our traditional stories or not. The way that our people go out on the ocean, the way that people go in our waters, and the way they’re operating and treating these waters is part of that Indigenous Law of the Sea. I think that a lot of our people think that they have to be an expert in our traditional languages, or an expert in our traditional oratory or our traditional stories in order to come to these spaces and to speak the truth that we’ve always known of how we care for these places. And that’s absolutely not the case. I just want our people to feel that this is an opportunity for so many to share, especially those who are out on our waters day in and day out, what their relationship is with the water, what they’ve always been taught, how the world should be treating our oceans as a result of the lessons that they have learned over time.
Our DNA tells us it’s our responsibility to care for these places, with or without funding, with or without support. We are going to fight for the future of these places. This imperative will last for the next 15,000 years in our responsibility to care for these places. We’re always going to be here. We’re always going to be in our homelands and in our home waters. We’re not going anywhere.
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.”
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Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
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Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
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