Last October, Aiyana James attended her first water potato harvest on the reservation of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe in northwestern Idaho. The weather was unusually cold, but she was determined to harvest her first water potatoes, a small wetland tuber that’s one of the tribe’s key traditional foods.
The smell of smoke and drying elk meat filled the air along the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene, where the tribe set up food booths and educational stations. She waded into the frigid water barefoot to dig for the small tubers, while back on land, tribal members cooked them in a traditional pit bake, where elk, camas (a flowering plant with edible bulbs), and other locally harvested foods are layered.
James, who grew up in Portland, Oregon, and spent summers and school breaks on the reservation, was excited to take part in the harvest for the first time after moving to the reservation after college. But something was wrong: Early-season snow dampened the harvest, and although it was only a light dusting, tribal leaders spoke during the opening prayers about how unusual the conditions were. It had been a dry summer, and the water potato harvest was bad, something that has been happening more and more in recent years.
“I know that this isn’t supposed to be how it is,” James said. “Deep down within me, I’m like, ‘This just doesn’t feel right.’”
After their land in northwest Idaho was carved up by 1909 federal allotment policies, Western agriculture, and logging that persists on some level today, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe lost a massive amount of acreage and, with it, their ability to manage the land and maintain balance between environmental protection and economic development. Salmon and trout disappeared from the streams. Fires became more frequent and powerful. Water potatoes and other key plants like camas, once staple foods for tribal members, started to disappear.
Now, extreme drought is making the situation even worse.
All of this is part of a reinforcing cycle of land degradation and climate change that the Coeur d’Alene Tribe has been fighting for decades. It’s a fight that James has now joined as one of the tribe’s first climate resilience coordinators.
To protect their land and community, the Coeur d’Alene are in the middle of an ongoing, multi-decade effort that relies, in part, on elder knowledge to restore an important wetland.
The tribe is bringing back beavers and salmon, restoring native grasses, and repairing stream channels. Collectively, those efforts are designed to restore balance to the landscape, make it more resilient to future climate change by fostering interconnected ecosystems, and, tribal members hope, one day allow them to rely again on important ancestral foods like the water potato.
“We’ve been living off of the foods that are on our land for thousands upon thousands of years,” James said. “Reconnecting with that food reconnects us with our land.”
Bring back the water potato, help the climate
Across the country, ecological restoration is increasingly seen as a key part of the fight against climate change, and wetlands provide an especially important service in an era of global warming: They absorb carbon from the atmosphere.
For the Coeur d’Alene tribe, a healthy wetland signifies a way to curb rising temperatures that will provide the basis for the return of a rich food source and a traditional way of life. That a wetland serves as the linchpin means that the tribe is taking on the restoration of an ecosystem that is especially threatened as the world’s climate trends hotter and more arid. Because wetlands are areas where water is at or near the surface for large parts of the year, severe bouts of drought made more common by climate change threaten their existence.
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, more than half of the wetlands in the lower 48 states are gone, and the rate of loss is only accelerating. Between 2009 and 2019, an area of vegetated wetlands in the U.S. the size of Rhode Island disappeared.
There’s an overarching effort underway to help these imperiled landscapes. The 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $1.4 billion for ecosystem restoration and resilience, while President Joe Biden also signed an executive order setting a national goal to conserve at least 30 percent of the country’s lands and waters by 2030.
The Coeur d’Alene aren’t alone in their focus on restoration, but they’re especially good at it. And their uniquely patient, humble approach could serve as a model for other communities working to restore the environment and prepare for climate change.
Tribal knowledge and expertise is especially important for restoration because Indigenous people are the ones who know what the land was like before it was degraded and what techniques will help restore it. The thread that ties it all together is traditional food, like the water potato. These cultural foods build connections between people and land and act as an especially tangible measuring stick of the impact that those connections can have on the environment.
James says that camas, for example, grows better when it is regularly harvested. But because so much Coeur d’Alene land is now owned by non-Indigenous people, tribal members often don’t have access to camas fields, and some that have been unattended for years are now suffering.
“We need these foods, but they also need us to flourish and to grow and get better,” she said. “If we do these things right and we focus on restoring our relationship and restoring our connection with our culture, sovereignty, and traditions, then that’s going to have lasting effects.”
An environmental restoration — and a cultural one, too
On the Coeur d’Alene reservation, soil health and biodiversity have declined, the water temperature is rising, and extreme weather like heat waves and drought are increasingly frequent. But the tribe’s restoration work is beginning to pay off.
In the summer of 2022, an adult salmon swam in Hangman Creek for the first time in around 100 years. Two years after the tribe released juvenile salmon into the creek, and after an arduous journey out to the Pacific Ocean and back, the tribe welcomed salmon back to the creek for the first time in generations.
For Ralph Allan Jr., the tribe’s fish and wildlife program manager, it was the culmination of 20 years of work that began with long days of fieldwork like planting trees. Now, he’s leading the department as it prepares to bring salmon back to the reservation.
Allan is also working to plant the seeds for a new generation of restoration advocates. He has led an internship program to get college students out in the field and three tribal members are currently enrolled in fish and wildlife degree programs. At the water potato harvest, Allan makes sure that department staff are working with the youth, showing them how to harvest the potatoes and pulling the kids out of the mud when they get stuck.
This cultural and community work is part of the tribe’s restoration effort. Allan worries that the tribe’s younger generation is not as connected to the land as he was growing up. “We’re not just reintroducing the species of salmon back to our people,” he said. “We’ve lost that cultural connection to the salmon as well, so we’re reintroducing a whole culture of salmon.”
While salmon are a priority, they are just one piece of a complicated, interconnected ecosystem the tribe is working to restore. Take beaver dams. Dams raise the water table, extend the area along the banks of a river or lake that more animals and plants can inhabit, and keep more water on the landscape. All of this makes the area more welcoming to salmon and other wildlife, but also makes the landscape more resilient to drought and extreme heat because wetlands absorb and retain water that is released during drier periods, explains Tyler Opp, the tribe’s wetlands coordinator.
The beaver dams also support clean, cold-water habitats for salmon, but to do that, they need trees. Since 2019, the tribe’s environmental programs department has planted over 18,000 trees from about a dozen different species, and plans to plant another 4,000 by 2025.
The tribe has used beaver dam analogs — human-made approximations — to encourage beavers to return and posts to reinforce existing beaver dams. Gerald Green, a wildlife biologist for the tribe, says they are currently supporting about seven beaver dams in the creek.
Trees, beavers, salmon, water — they’re all part of a cyclical, interdependent system the tribe is trying to restore and support. Cajetan Matheson, natural resource director and a tribal council member, says that addressing climate impacts or restoration goals one by one will not work. “Everything is really related to each other,” Matheson said. “You can’t just clear-cut a mountain and say, ‘Oh, now we’ve defeated the fire problem.’ There’s way more to it than that.”
These projects take time. Tyler Opp says that even though the scale of the work that needs to be done can be overwhelming, the tribe’s approach helps keep things in perspective.
By keeping longer-term goals in mind, like bringing salmon back, which could take decades, the tribe avoids Band-Aid solutions. The whole tribal government buys into this approach, year after year and generation to generation, and although the tribe is limited by funding and capacity, like many public agencies, this commitment allows them to focus on projects that will contribute to achieving that long-term vision. Despite the constraints, the tribe can unify behind a shared vision of the future, based on their collective history, knowledge, and appreciation for the land.
“The tribe is able to prioritize things on a far longer time scale than state and federal agencies,” he said. “The tribe doesn’t have to think in terms of the next budget cycle for getting work done. All of [the things we are doing] are done for future generations.”
Almost everyone I talked to in the Natural Resources Department credits that perspective to Felix Aripa, a tribal elder who died in 2016. He is seen as instrumental in setting the tone for the tribe’s restoration work.
Even Aiyana James, who never had the chance to meet him, says she’s listened to old tapes of Aripa. He was an early proponent of using beavers as a restoration partner and helped with things as straightforward as pointing out where a stream used to flow so that the technicians could use that as a guideline to restore the course rather than starting from scratch or guesswork. “The ultimate goal for anybody that works here in the Fish and Wildlife Program is to leave a legacy the way that Felix Aripa left his legacy and his mark on the program,” Allan said.
Before he passed away, Aripa helped Matheson and others put the tribe’s traditional seasonal calendar on paper. The calendar, which is based on seasonal indicators like tree sap rather than months and days, includes detailed information about foods, ecosystems, plants, animals, and human activities. “As we’re thinking broadly about how we approach restoration, it’s the framework that we can use,” Laura Laumatia, the tribe’s environmental programs manager, said. “It represents millennia of knowledge.”
So while the tribe is proud of their progress, they are still working for the future. “I think it’s nice to work for 20 years in the same place because you do see some changes happening,” Laumatia said. “But we know that the fruits of our labor are really going to be 70 years from now.”
Courtney Steed often burns barefoot. It is, in part, a practical choice. Setting fires in the Sandhills of central North Carolina requires an understanding of moisture levels in the scrubby underbrush, and she gets a better sense of it in bare feet. But for Steed, who is Lumbee and leads the tribe’s Cultural Burn Association, it’s also about forming a connection with the Earth and with her relatives. “I’m positive,” she said, “they didn’t wear fire boots.”
Mention wildfire, and most people picture the Western U.S. And while it’s true that in recent years those states have burned at a frightening rate, fire has long been a destructive force in the East as well. That wasn’t always so. For more than 10,000 years, the Lumbee, like many Indigenous peoples, used controlled burns to promote healthy ecosystems and clear brush and tinder. That practice was all but eliminated as colonization and government-sanctioned genocideforced tribes from nearly 99 percent of their land. Some states, including California, outlawed controlled burns, and in 1905, the U.S. government made fighting wildfires at all cost its policy.
The benefits of controlled burns are well established, and the practice, along with other Indigenous land management techniques, has seen a resurgence in the West. Now it is becoming increasingly common in the Southeast as people like Steed restore fire to a region that desperately needs it.
Courtney Steed, who is Lumbee, starts a controlled fire. She leads the tribe’s Cultural Burn Association, which is restoring the use of fire to manage woodlands. Photo courtesy of Courtney Steed
Organizations like the Cultural Burn Association have been working with landowners to set portions of farms and homesteads alight. Such efforts have been augmented by those of the Southern Region of the U.S. Forest Service, which has, over the past five years, burned an average of more than 1 million acres annually. But even that isn’t enough to match the historic scale or frequency of wildfires there. The country’s biggest increase in large burns over the past two decades occurred in the Southeast and central Appalachia, where the incidence of major fires was twice the number seen between 1984 and 1999. Each year, some 45,000 wildfires scorch 1 million acres of the region, which spans 13 states.
All of this poses a grave threat, because population centers like Asheville, North Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, have little to no buffer between communities and the forests alongside them, an area called the wildland-urban interface. In North Carolina, for example, 45 percent of the state’s 4.7 million homes lie within that zone. But restoring Indigenous burns isn’t as straightforward as it is in the West, because 86 percent of the region’s land is privately held. Compounding the challenge, many people consider fire a threat to be extinguished quickly. Even those willing to ignite their property could wait years to do so.
“The Forest Service here has a backlog of several hundred landowners, and they’re never going to get to burn for them. They can’t; they don’t have the capacity,” said Steed. That leaves groups like hers as their only option, and “If we can’t do it, it’s going to have dire consequences.”
Across the country, drought, higher temperatures, and changing precipitation patterns have made fires larger, increasingly frequent, and more intense. These changes are particularly worrying in the Southeast, given that some 90 million people live there, many of them in proximity to the wildland-urban interface, or WUI.
“The wildland-urban interface is the area where we tend to see the most risk and destruction from wildfires to human life and property,” said Victoria Donovan, assistant professor of forest management at the University of Florida and lead author of the study that found the Southwest experienced the biggest increase in large fires. “It’s extensive, it continues to grow, and it’s predicted to continue that trend in the future.”
Of the five states with the greatest number of homes in this danger zone, two are in the Southeast: Florida (which has been actively using controlled burns since 1971) and North Carolina. A third, Pennsylvania, abuts it. The threat is no less acute elsewhere: In South Carolina, 56 percent of all housing sits within the WUI. In West Virginia, it’s nearly 80 percent. Big cities are not exempt, either; in Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte, North Carolina, 11 percent of homes lie within it.
Despite the elevated risk, many homeowners don’t recognize the danger. “They don’t associate these regions with large wildfires; we think about that happening out west,” Donovan said. “So, people don’t prepare for them the same way they might be preparing for, say, a hurricane.”
Without mitigation, she added, major fires will be a foregone conclusion in a place where aggressive suppression has created a large accumulation of fuel and conflagrations that are hotter and more difficult to suppress. “You have these dynamics playing out in the region, then you throw in changes in climate and potentially warmer and drier conditions,” Donovan said, “and you set yourself up for more destructive wildfires.”
Such dynamics played out in April, 2023, when a blaze in North Carolina’s Croatan National Forest jumped from 7,000 acres to 32,000 in two days and burned for 10 weeks. In 2016, the Great Smoky Mountain fire killed 14 people, destroyed 2,500 structures, and caused $2 billion in damage in eastern Tennessee. That blaze sparked new interest in controlled burning, and was a flashpoint for the creation of organizations dedicated to restoring that Indigenous practice.
Research shows that low-intensity fires like those the Lumbee and other tribes have traditionally used can reduce wildfires by 64 percent in the year following a controlled burn. Their use, coupled with selective clearing of smaller trees and underbrush in another Indigenous technique called thinning, reduces the severity, intensity, and tree mortality of wildfires.
Even after the government banished controlled burns, inhabitants of the Sandhills continued using them. “My mom was born in 1920, and she would talk about fire the same way you’d talk about a thunderstorm,” said Jesse Wimberley. “It was just something that happened in the Southeast.” In the near-decade since Wimberley launched the North Carolina Sandhills Prescribed Burn Association, or PBA, he has worked with some 700 landowners. “I do 70 burns a year, easy; this year I’ve done 75 since January, and had more than 250 landowners with a drip torch in their hand.”
Lori Greene’s land east of Charlotte has for 30 years teemed with trees planted to harvest longleaf pine needle straw. Instead, the land went unmanaged, providing plenty of fuel for a fire. After hearing Wimberley’s “spiel” at a meeting of local landowners not long ago, she committed to burning even though she was “really intimidated, and really afraid things will get out of hand.” She and her husband became certified burners, and one evening last year they gathered with friends to set the pines alight.
Lori and Richard Greene earned their certifications in controlled burns from the North Carolina Forest Service. Their neighbors were apprehensive, but they have come to appreciate the positive impact of fire on the landscape. Photo courtesy of Lori Greene
“Some of my neighbors, I don’t think they were too happy,” she said. One of them notified the fire department, which knew of the burn ahead of time. With the trees cleared, their attitudes seem to have changed. “It looks good,” she said. “I think they’re OK with it.”
Steed worked with Wimberley and the Sandhills PBA before leading the Cultural Burn Association. The Lumbee tribe hosted its inaugural burn in December and has lit more than 80 since then. The fires are “the first step in longleaf [pine] restoration,” she said. The organization has invited anyone with an interest to attend its cultural burns and “watch us hit that reset button,” Steed said. “Then they came out and we planted longleaf plugs and had a native grass planting.”
The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is restoring managed fire in the western end of North Carolina to encourage the growth of white oak saplings and rivercane, a traditional weaving material. Fire provides “everything from basket material to food to medicine,” said Tommy Cabe, the tribe’s forest resource specialist, and improves the health and quality of the region’s watershed. It’s also been a cultural touchstone for generations of his people.
“There’s a reciprocal relationship,” said Cabe, who holds a degree in forest management and is working with the Forest Service to restore culturally significant plans on the tribe’s land. “It’s not solely to reduce fuel loads. Fire has a heartbeat. Fire is like a relative. The intention is to have a relationship.”
Fire weaves through the trees during a burn in North Carolina. One of the challenges to restoring prescribed burns is that so much of the region’s land is privately owned. Photo courtesy of Lori Greene
His tribe is uniquely poised to reestablish that relationship because, like the Lumbee, “we’re still on our homelands,” he said. “They weren’t successful in removing us. So we’re also known as keepers of the homeland. We possess and retain a lot of stories and a lot of practice that we just just haven’t been able to do. Right now, we’re starting to awaken. I think during this awakening, we could actually showcase some of our ancient practices.”
“We interface with all of the different organizations that are putting fire on the ground,” said Steed. A wildfire doesn’t recognize the boundaries of federal, private, or tribal land, and “the solution can’t either,” she said. “We have to all bring what we can offer to the table and find some common ground.”
Finding early adopters among private landowners can be tough, though. Unlike the West, where the federal government manages — and routinely burns — many millions of acres taken from tribal nations, most Eastern forests are privately held.
A Yurok tribal member stands in prayer before leading a cultural training burn on the Yurok reservation in Weitchpec, California, in October 2021. David Goldman / AP Photo
“Despite its widely known benefits, prescribed fire is rarely used on private lands in Pennsylvania,” Penn State researchers wrote last year. “Out of the 14,093 acres burned in 2019, only 340 acres were on private lands. This discrepancy is surprising when considering that 70 percent of the almost 17 million acres of forests in Pennsylvania are privately owned.”
For that reason, educating people about the need to burn is essential.
“It’s important to understand why PBAs are so crucial to this story,” Wimberley said. “If you’re going to get fire on the landscape, you’re going to work with private landowners.” Wimberley started his PBA informally, by inviting neighbors over to burn his land; “kind of an old-school thing,” he said. “Then, we’d go over and burn their land.”
Fire management isn’t just about protecting communities from catastrophic wildfire: It has myriad added boons like tick and other pest reduction, improved nutrient cycling, and better pasture growth. It also may also be the only way to preserve the unique ecology of an ecosystem that could provide a climate refuge, but faces mounting peril as the world warms.
Many keystone tree species of the region, including red and white oaks, depend on fire to curb undergrowth and create space within the canopy so sunlight can reach seedlings. In regions dominated by trees like Table Mountain pine and the pitch pine, fire is even more important. Their serotinous cones, coated in a sticky resin, can’t open and spread their seeds without it.
“A vast majority of these systems have evolved with fire, and a lot of them with very frequent fire. And so when we take fire out of those systems, we’re removing a fundamental process,” Donovan said. “We can see basically the entire system change. We see infilling of species that wouldn’t typically be there, that then can out-compete the fire-loving species and replace them. If we suppress fire long enough, we shift over to a new type of ecosystem.”
In short, burning may be the only way to preserve ecosystems already under existential threat from low regeneration, non-native species, and extreme weather. “If we can help to boost their resilience by getting fire back on the landscape,” Donovan said, “the hope is they will be more resilient to some of these other changes.”
One of the things Ka-Voka Jackson, the cultural resources director of the Hualapai Nation, most appreciates about Ha’Kamwe’ is its peacefulness. Located on a former ranch in western Arizona, the hot spring is framed by rolling desert hills. Though trucks may sometimes drive down a nearby dirt road, it’s mostly quiet. That serenity is an important part of Hualapai cultural practices that have taken place here for millennia, from gathering plants to holding ceremonies.
“When we visit and we look across the landscape, that’s the same landscape that our ancestors looked at and that our ancestors lived in, and so we hold a deep connection with the integrity of that landscape,” Jackson said.
But amid the green energy boom, Ha’Kamwe’ is threatened by lithium exploration by the Australia-based company Arizona Lithium, or AZL, and these days, peace seems elusive. Already, the mining company has drilled approximately 50 exploratory wells near the hot springs, disturbing the tribe’s cultural practices and threatening the aquifer. Since 2021, when High Country Newsfirst covered the threat that this drilling poses to Hualapai religious practices, the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, has signed off on even more drilling near Ha’Kamwe’. This July, the BLM approved AZL’s plan to bore approximately 130 more wells near the hot spring, reaching more than 300 feet deep and surrounding the hot spring on three sides. AZL will construct drill pads sites, roads, and other support infrastructure as it surveys the area further for a potential open-pit lithium mine.
On August 8, the Hualapai Nation sued the BLM and the Department of the Interior. According to the lawsuit, the agencies violated multiple laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act, in approving this new phase of exploratory mining. Since September, AZL has been under a temporary restraining order to prevent further drilling.
Now, a district judge in Phoenix is deciding whether to grant a preliminary injunction to stop further lithium exploration for the duration of the court case. U.S. District Judge Diane J. Humetewa heard the request for a preliminary junction on September 16. Until her decision, the temporary restraining order will remain in place. As of press time, a decision had not been made.
If the judge does not grant the injunction, Jackson said, “it would interfere with our ability to hold ceremony and just experience a place as Hualapai people on that land. We want the [drilling] ban, because that would allow us to continue with our lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management, without having to worry about further damage to the site.”
Without the preliminary injunction, the exploratory drilling could be completed before the court case against it, according to Laura Berglan, a lawyer with Earthjustice who is representing the Hualapai in court. ”And then what’s the tribe’s remedy at that juncture, if that’s the case?” she said. “There’s really nothing that can be done. It will just be a win on paper.”
Ha’Kamwe’ qualifies for cultural resources protection under the National Historic Preservation Act, or NHPA. One of the main complaints in the tribe’s lawsuit is that the BLM violated the law when it approved the additional drilling in July by simply excluding the spring from the area it studied for potential impacts and despite the Hualapai Tribe’s letters asking the agency to include Ha’Kamwe’ in its NHPA evaluations. The BLM also disregarded letters from the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation warning that AZL’s exploratory drilling could violate the NHPA by threatening cultural practices at Ha’Kamwe’ with its noise, vibrations, and other disturbances.
According to John Welch, vice president for preservation and collaboration at the nonprofit Archaeology Southwest, the BLM excluded “a bona fide historic property and traditional cultural property to bound the area of potential effects — which is exactly what you’re not supposed to do.” The BLM, he said, should have considered the impacts that drilling near the spring would have on the cultural practices that take place there.
The BLM also did not consider compromise options, such as moving the drill sites farther away from Ha’Kamwe’, for example, or approving fewer of them, which the tribe says violated the National Environmental Protection Act, or NEPA.
Another major issue of contention is whether the BLM adequately studied the potential impacts of exploratory drilling on the spring’s flow, as required by NEPA. The agency relied on a 24-year-old hydrological study conducted for a different project in a nearby location. The BLM concluded that the aquifer that feeds Ha’Kamwe’ was too deep to be punctured by drilling.
“The BLM refused to take a hard look at the water and hydrology,” Jackson said. “We wanted them to do a field study. Show us it’s not going to impact the water, don’t just rely on old studies to say there will be no impact.” The tribe’s own hydrological research found that the groundwater could easily be disturbed by exploratory drilling, and that drilling would likely disrupt H’Kamwe’. The tribe shared its concerns with the BLM in March, but the agency stuck to its conclusion that the water feeding the spring was too deep to be impacted.
In an unusual move, Arizona Attorney General Kristin Mayes jumped in to support the preliminary injunction that the judge will soon be ruling on, citing concerns about the region’s water supply. According to Mayes’ brief, the BLM used “stale data” when it approved continued lithium exploration near Ha’Kamwe’. But the tribe’s more recent hydrological research shows that the drilling is likely to damage the hot spring — possibly even “dewatering” Ha’Kamwe’. Mayes also concluded it’s not really clear how, in the moment, the mining company might plug a borehole that punctured the aquifer — in fact, she contends that the company already has failed to “properly cap and abandon” the holes it previously drilled near Ha’Kamwe’.
“If the tribe is correct, issuance of a preliminary injunction now is the only way to avoid irreparable and catastrophic harm” to Ha’Kamwe’, the attorney general wrote.
The tribe has already reported changes: The water level at Ha’Kamwe’ has increased during the past month, and more and more air bubbles are churning up through the water. Equally concerning are the fissures that have opened in the ground nearby. Although the Hualapai can’t conclusively connect those changes to the mineral exploration without further study, the fact that they happened so close to the most recent exploratory drilling is worrying.
In its response to the tribe’s request for a preliminary injunction, AZL maintained that the older hydrological report that the BLM referenced was correct, and that the exploratory drilling does not threaten Ha’Kamwe’. AZL also pointed out that so far none of the drilling has hit water.
As of this writing, the BLM has not responded to repeated requests for comment from High Country Newsabout the preliminary injunction. HCN also reached out unsuccessfully to Thorpe Shwer P.C., the law firm representing Arizona Lithium, and to Paul Lloyd at Arizona Lithium.
For now, until the judge makes her ruling, a temporary encampment has sprung up at Ha’Kamwe’. Hualapai people and their supporters are keeping watch and praying. Even if the preliminary injunction is not granted, Jackson said, the tribe will continue fighting to protect Ha’Kamwe’.
Jackson said that the Hualapai Nation is not against green energy. But she noted that green energy projects typically come at the expense of tribal communities and rural communities.
“We’re trying to stand up for ourselves and say, ‘You’re affecting us. You’re affecting our connection to the area. You’re destroying our history, and we’re Indigenous to this land, and these are one of the few places that we have left and that we’re trying to protect,’” she said. “Especially coming from a foreign company like Arizona Lithium — you can’t just come and continue to destroy and take away from us. We’re not going to sit there quietly and let that happen.”
At an August rally in Glendale, Arizona, the rowdiness of the crowd suggested a rockstar was about to take the stage. Instead, a booming voice welcomed the spectators with a full-throated endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris: “She is the right person at the right time to be our country’s 47th president!” The voice belonged to Governor of the Gila River Indian Community Stephen Roe Lewis, a tribal leader who helped resolve long overdue water rights in the state for the tribe last year. “Skoden!”
Later on, after a warm-up speech from running mate Tim Walz, Vice President Harris took the stage, saying she would “always honor tribal sovereignty and respect tribal self-determination,” (The 22 federally recognized tribes in Arizona make an Indigenous voting block that proved essential to President Joe Biden’s win in the swing state in 2020.) On her campaign website, she maintains that she will work to secure America’s industrial future by investing in clean energy — but clean-energy development often negatively impacts sites on federal lands that are sacred to Indigenous peoples.
The Biden-Harris administration has been one of the most supportive of Native peoples, investing millions of dollars of federal funding for climate resilience and green energy initiatives. Still, the Indigenous vote for Harris in 2024 is far from assured. While the U.S. has big goals on its path to a clean-energy future, those plans have to compete against the preservation of tribal lands — an issue Harris has stumbled over in her political career, dating back to her time as California’s attorney general.
Almost 80 miles east of the Arizona rally, a sacred site is in danger. Oak Flat, a swath of national forest land in the high desert, has been an important spiritual site for tribes like the San Carlos Apache for centuries, and is used for ceremonies and gathering medicines like sage, bear root, and greasewood. Yet the area is under threat — Rio Tinto, an international mining company, has been fighting to put a copper mine there for more than a decade. Oak Flat is home to one of the planet’s largest undeveloped copper reserves, and the metal is critical to making the electric batteries necessary for the shift to cleaner energy sources.
Oak Flat and other sacred sites have not been given enough federal protections, activists say, despite intense advocacy from the tribal nations affected. Much of the U.S. has already been built and powered at the expense of tribal lands and peoples. To reach its goal of 80 percent renewable energy generation by 2030, and carbon-free electricity five years after that, the U.S. needs big investments and robust policy support. While Harris says she is the candidate in the best position to achieve those goals, there is a concern among Indigenous communities that doing so will continue to exploit tribal homelands — most of the minerals needed for the energy transition are located within 35 miles of away from tribal communities, on lands originally stolen from them.
“They definitely are hard to do at the same time. That’s the conflict,” said Dov Kroff-Korn, an attorney at Lakota People’s Law and Sacred Defense Fund, of the balance between extracting the minerals critical to the energy transition and protecting tribal lands where many such minerals are located. He mentioned that Harris has few environmental policies of her own to critique, and that, policy-wise, the broader Biden-Harris administration has been a mixed bag. “There’s been a lot of positive signs that should be recognized and applauded. But it’s also been a continuation of a lot of the same old extractive policies that have powered America for pretty much its entire history.”
In a bid to protect some places from industry, President Biden flexed his ability to make national monuments out of sacred sites, such as the Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument — or Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni — as well as to fully restore the boundaries of the Bears Ears monument in Utah from a Trump-era rollback. Biden also appointed the first-ever Native American to his Cabinet — Deb Haaland, Pueblo of Laguna — as the head of the Department of Interior. In her role, Haaland has instructed federal agencies to incorporate traditional knowledge in order to better protect Indigenous sacred sites on public land.
During her tenure as vice president, Harris has been party to the administration’s push to produce more oil and gas than ever, despite promises to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Last year, the Biden administration also gave the green light to the Willow project, an $8 billion dollar drilling operation on Alaska’s North Slope that some, but not all, tribes were against. Throughout her presidential campaign, and in a reversal of her previous stance, Harris has showed support for fracking, a controversial drilling method that extracts oil and natural gas from deep within the ground.
Crystal Cavalier-Keck, a member of the Occoneechee Band of the Saponi Nation in South Carolina, is the cofounder of 7 Directions of Service, an Indigenous-led environmental justice organization. She’s concerned that the Mountain Valley Pipeline, currently a 303-mile system that runs through West Virginia and Virginia, will permanently damage the sacred Haw River where she has many memories with her family. Over the years, the beleaguered river has been polluted by chemicals and is now threatened by the pipeline, which began operations in June.
In 2020, Cavalier-Keck campaigned for Biden in South Carolina but didn’t see movement on the environmental protections she wanted after he got elected. She said she will still vote for Harris in November but feels like her concerns are not being talked about. “There’s not much at all on her environmental policies,” she said. “They’re saying the right buzzwords, like ‘clean, renewable, forward.’ But where’s the meat of it?”
She lives about a two-hour drive from where Hurricane Helene has claimed more than 100 lives in North Carolina, and she worries that the next big climate disaster will reach her community. Cavalier-Keck said that her tribe has had issues accessing the roughly $120 million in federal funding to help tribes build climate resilience.
During Harris’ time as attorney general of California, she argued against tribes putting land into trust, a process that can protect land as well as allow economic development like casinos where gambling might be banned, claiming the situation only applies if a tribe was “under federal jurisdiction” when the Indian Reorganization Act was passed in the 1930s. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Harris and the state, but had she won the case, about 100 tribes in California would not have been allowed to benefit from trust lands.
Still, Lael Echo Hawk, who is Pawnee and an expert in tribal law, says Harris’ decisions as attorney general aren’t reflective of what she might be capable of as president. She pointed out that as attorney general, Harris helped pass a red flag law in California to take away firearms from people deemed dangerous. Plus, she called on the U.S. Congress to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act — an issue important in Native communities, where women go missing and are the survivors of violence at a rate higher than the national average. Echo Hawk also knows of tribes concerned with border issues and immigration that are endorsing Harris. “These are important issues that I think better demonstrate her commitment to advancing and protecting tribal sovereignty,” Echo Hawk said.
But for Nick Estes, a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and a professor at the University of Minnesota, Harris might just be a continuation of the Biden administration, which he maintains has taken advantage of tribal lands. As it stands today, 1.6 million surface and subsurface acres of land within 83 reservations have non-Natives benefiting from oil, gas, and mining operations, among other extractive industries.
“You can’t just have a vibes-based environmental policy. It actually needs to be concrete,” said Estes. “What we’ve seen is just service to industry at the expense of Native lands and livelihoods.”
When Indigenous community organizer Jade Begay, Tesuque Pueblo and Diné, found out that Donald Trump had won the election in November 2016, she was en route to Standing Rock from New Mexico to protest the Dakota Access pipeline.
The underground oil pipeline snaking from North Dakota to Illinois had been the target of years of opposition by Indigenous activists like Begay, who had filed lawsuits against the pipeline and then withstood freezing temperatures and armed police to block its construction after their legal challenges failed.
The strength of their resistance had turned Standing Rock into an international symbol of Indigenous activism and resistance. It had inspired a new generation of Native American activists, and helped lead to a 2016 victory by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the waning months of the Obama administration to delay the opening of the pipeline.
But the moment Begay learned of Trump’s victory, sitting in a ramen shop in Colorado on her way north from New Mexico, she realized that win would be short-lived.
She was right. On January 24, 2017, just four days after his presidential inauguration, Donald Trump signed an executive order to speed up the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline and pave the way for the 1,172-mile pipeline to go online just five months later. The decision set the tone for the Republican presidency: Again and again, Indigenous peoples found themselves scrambling to block decisions by the Trump administration that upended decisions that had been made under Obama’s.
“Working to protect tribal communities or Indigenous communities during the Trump administration was extremely difficult because the attacks were continuous,” Begay said.
Now that Trump is vying for a second term, this time with Ohio Senator J.D. Vance at his side, Native Americans who experienced his first presidency say they expect that a second one would mean more support for fossil fuel projects on reservations.
That might be good news for the small fraction of the more than 500 federally recognized tribes in the U.S. who choose to allow fossil fuel extraction on their lands. Daniel Cardenas from the National Tribal Energy Association said he appreciated the Trump administration’s support for tribes that wanted to pursue oil and gas production, and thought the Biden-Harris administration was too singularly focused on green energy.
But Indigenous environmental advocates, like Gussie Lord, a citizen of Oneida Nation and managing attorney of the Tribal Partnerships Program at Earthjustice, felt like they were overwhelmed during the Trump administration as they watched environmental regulations and commitments like the Paris Agreement fall one after the other. To Lord, Trump’s first term was packed with “real backwards-looking actions and a real backwards approach to tribal issues.”
In contrast, six days after taking office, President Joe Biden issued a memorandum requiring federal agencies to engage in meaningful consultation with tribal nations. Whereas Trump’s coronavirus relief funding initially delayed funding for tribes, the Biden-Harris administration incorporated them more fully into the creation of legislation and budgets, leading to a 50 percent increase in funding for tribal nations compared with the previous four years under Trump.
“The last four-year period was the most constructive in American history as it relates to the relationship between Native people and the United States government,” said Brian Schatz, the head of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, who helped usher the funding through Congress.
Larry Wright, the head of the National Congress of American Indians, hopes that whoever is elected in November continues some of the progress for Indian Country made under the Biden-Harris administration, such as incorporating Indigenous knowledge into environmental reviews; proactively advancing co-stewardship; and setting aside funding for tribes facing forced relocation due to climate change.
Trump hasn’t talked a lot about what specifically he’d do regarding tribes in his next presidency. A spokesperson for his campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment. The 16-page summary of the Republican platform on Trump’s campaign website doesn’t include the words “tribe,” “Native,” or “Indigenous.” But it does lay out unambiguously how Trump stands on energy projects.
“Common Sense tells us clearly that we must unleash American Energy if we want to destroy Inflation and rapidly bring down prices, build the Greatest Economy in History, revive our Defense Industrial Base, fuel Emerging Industries, and establish the United States as the Manufacturing Superpower of the World,” the platform says, capitalization included. “We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL and we will become Energy Independent, and even Dominant again.”
That commitment to fossil fuel production is sure to deepen the climate crisis, harming Indigenous peoples who are disproportionately likely to experience negative effects of climate change. Tribes living on reservations in the U.S. are more susceptible to heat waves, wildfires, and droughts than they would’ve been if they’d been allowed to remain on original lands.
Yet despite the Biden-Harris administration’s climate justice rhetoric, it has pursued fossil fuel production even more successfully than Trump’s did, and oil and gas production has reached record highs.
Many Native Americans feel disillusioned by both parties. “It doesn’t matter who is president, if it’s a D or an R, they’re not our friends,” Cardenas said.
The Biden-Harris administration has also supported extractive renewable energy projects opposed by Indigenous peoples, providing a $2 billion loan for a lithium mine at Thacker Pass, Nevada, that’s opposed by multiple tribal nations.
“There’s been a huge push for domestic sources of critical minerals, which was something that started under the Trump administration but has continued under the Biden administration, and the Biden administration has put a lot of money into it,” Lord from Earthjustice said, adding that that’s a concern given the proximity of such minerals to Native lands.
The vast majority of minerals that are key to the energy transition are found within 35 miles of federal reservation land, which means they’re likely to be on ancestral lands taken from Native peoples.
Still, Lord said she’s been happy with the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to incorporate tribal perspectives in their decision-making compared with the lack of input tribes had under the first Trump administration.
Schatz from the Senate Indian Affairs Committee thinks that voters don’t have the luxury to vote third-party if they care about Native peoples.
“The difference is stark: One party wants to restore and cultivate self-determination, wants to provide resources for housing and education and health care and natural resource management. And the other party wants to, at best, ignore the tribes, and in many instances, through their right-wing legal machine, do violence to the very foundation of tribal sovereignty,” he said.
Wright from the National Congress of American Indians said he understands why some tribal citizens might feel disillusioned. He suggests that rather than voting by party or abstaining from voting, tribal citizens create a “sovereignty ticket” to support whichever candidates are more supportive of tribes.
“Bad people get elected by Native people who don’t vote,” he said.
Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the European elite underwent a transformation in thinking known as the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, which among other things emphasized the importance of equality. Of course, some people are ‘more equal than others’, hence why the black slave trade raged on unaffected in countries like Britain, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and the US. A few hundred years later, the West is still robbing Africa blind. Rita Bodrina explains.
Colonialism didn’t vanish in the 20th century, it merely morphed into something more subtle and insidious. From exporting cotton from India in the 18th century to mining minerals in Africa today, Western meddling continues to fuel Africa’s crises. Yet, the crippling effects of Western economic “humanitarianism” remain a largely overlooked issue.
Countries like the United States, France and the United Kingdom, still extract Africa’s wealth, often disguising their actions as “aid”, trade agreements, and economic policies. This 21st-century colonialism keeps African nations dependent, despite their formal independence.
As early as 1965, Ghana’s first Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah, warned that foreign aid wasn’t about lifting nations out of poverty – it was about maintaining control. His words still ring true today.
The Paradox of Abundance: Why Africa?
Africa isn’t poor – far from it. The continent is on the brink of becoming a global economic powerhouse, thanks to its immense natural resources and youthful population. With nearly 30% of the world’s reserves of oil, gold, diamonds, uranium, cobalt, and lithium, Africa is critical to Western economies, especially as demand surges for tech and green energy solutions. In fact, Africa holds 70% of the world’s cobalt – essential for batteries in electric vehicles and renewable energy storage – putting the continent at the heart of the global green transition.
But Africa’s riches extend beyond its natural resources. The agricultural sector, currently underdeveloped, holds enormous potential. With 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land, Africa could not only feed itself but also much of the world, provided it harnesses the right technologies and sustainable practices. Agriculture alone could generate trillions in additional revenue, lifting millions out of poverty while addressing the needs of growing populations and climate-induced food insecurity.
Farming in the Mount Kenya region, around 150km north east of the Kenyan capital Nairobi. (CIAT/Neil Palmer | Flickr)
The continent’s true strength lies in its people. By 2050, Africa’s population is projected to nearly double to 2.5 billion, giving it the world’s largest working-age demographic. Investing in education and technology could transform Africa into the innovation hub of the 21st century, positioning it as a key player in global markets – ranging from tech to agriculture to energy.
It’s not hard to see why everyone is so intent on having their influence exerted on the continent.
Where Good Intentions Go To Die
For decades, the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have held the reins of the global financial system, exerting massive influence over the world’s poorest nations. Created in 1944 to stabilise post-war economies, their original mission has since warped into something far more self-serving – benefiting Western powers while leaving developing countries in the dust. More people ought to read Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, who has aptly highlighted that “Development is about transforming the lives of people, not just transforming economies.”
Both the IMF and World Bank operate on a voting system that ties power to financial contributions, leaving developing countries with little to no say. Take the IMF: despite China’s massive $18 trillion GDP, it holds just 6.1% of the vote, while the US, with a GDP of $27 trillion, commands 16.5%, effectively giving it veto control.
The World Bank isn’t much different – the US holds over 16% of voting shares and reserves the exclusive right to appoint the Bank’s president. The rest of the G7 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK – have a combined voting power of 25%, compared to only a 16% share of world GDP.
The World Bank headquarters in Washington D.C. (IMAGE: Supplied)
If this concentration of power actually translated into genuine help for the people they claim to serve, we wouldn’t have an issue. But too often, the IMF and World Bank have instead exacerbated poverty and economic instability.
In reality, these institutions have morphed into tools of neocolonialism – exploiting the world’s poorest countries while masking their actions as “economic reform”.
Will The Circle Stay Unbroken?
Karl Marx hit the nail on the head nearly 150 years ago when he called debt a “powerful lever of primitive accumulation”. During World War I and in the lead-up to World War II, the US wielded this lever to cement its economic dominance in Europe, financing the Allies and then lending that money to German companies.
Fast forward to today, and a similar tactic is being employed with alarming success. This lever has gone global, locking newly independent nations into cycles of debt that keep the playing field rigged against the Global South.
So, can we really trust capitalists and bankers to guard the interests of ordinary people? History suggests otherwise, yet here we are in the 21st century, stuck doing just that.
For example, take the IMF (again). On paper, it offers loans to struggling nations from funds pooled by its member countries. Nothing odd here; in fact, it sounds rather helpful. But there’s a catch. Enter Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) – the economic strings that are attached to nearly every loan.
Between 2012 and 2014, most IMF loans came with an average of 20 conditions, each dictating economic reforms that borrowing countries had to follow. These reforms often serve the interests of the Western powers providing the loans, pushing countries into deeper economic hardship instead of pulling them out. But don’t all loans have rules? Yes, but bear with me.
What kinds of conditions are we talking about? For starters, SAPs usually require countries to slash public spending on vital services like healthcare and education – all in the name of “cutting costs.” For the average citizen, this means fewer doctors, teachers, and social safety nets, leaving more people already living in poverty with even more limited access to basic care.
User fees for healthcare – another common SAP demand – led to skyrocketing patient costs. By 1993, maternal mortality rates in Harare, Zimbabwe, had doubled compared to just a few years earlier. The HIV/AIDS pandemic, claiming thousands of lives weekly, collided with these austerity measures, turning cracks in healthcare systems into chasms.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought this all into the spotlight. Countries like Nigeria were forced to cut their healthcare budgets, even as the virus ravaged their populations. Why? Because the IMFdelayed emergency financing over disagreements about reforms tied to the loan. In the middle of a global health crisis, Nigeria had to gut its healthcare system to stay in the IMF’s good graces. Is this legal? Sure. But is it ethical? Is it the right thing to do when the IMF positions this as humanitarian aid?
The National Stadium in Nigeria sits unopened in 2020, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. (IMF Photo/Ebun Akinbo)
The same goes for privatisation. State-owned enterprises are sold off to private investors, often from the lending countries themselves. It’s the people who suffer when profit takes precedence over essential services. Utilities like water, electricity, and healthcare become luxuries instead of rights; costs start increasing in line with monopolistic market prices, leading to job losses and price hikes that worsen poverty rather than alleviate it.
The overall result from these measures is a vicious cycle. Countries cut spending, raise interest rates, and sell off public resources to meet IMF demands, pushing populations deeper into poverty, which forces them back for more loans. Then, with the original loan conditions remaining, they sink further into debt, and the cycle repeats. All this to say that when a study from Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center found that from 2002 to 2018, IMF austerity measures disproportionately benefited the wealthiest segments of society, leaving the bottom 80% worse off, no-one was all that surprised.
Decades of these programs have shown little evidence of fostering long-term stability. This is especially evident in places like Argentina, which remains trapped in debt cycles. The IMF’s $44 billion loan back in the day has effectively crippled the long-term financial health of the nation. It’s hard to sweep the five defaults the country had since 1980 under the rug to hide the evidence.
While these conditions might work in the Global North, in emerging markets, they widen inequality, enriching elites while leaving the majority behind. For all the brilliant economists these institutions employ, they’ve yet to offer anything more imaginative to help the developing world. One size doesn’t fit all, especially when comparing the complex economies of developed nations with those still developing.
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Uphill, Rolling Promises
One of the main conditions the IMF and World Bank often impose on African nations is trade liberalisation. If this were a first-year economics class, that might seem like the right answer to the question: “How do you promote growth in a poor country?” But this is the real world. These are actual PhD economists specialising in developing countries – and this is their solution?
While these institutions push open trade as a sure fire path to economic growth, this approach is not only misguided but ethically questionable. Countries seeking IMF loans are frequently required to slash tariffs and remove trade barriers, all in the name of “integrating” them into the global economy.
Now, opening up trade can work – but only when you already have a robust economy, thriving sectors, solid governance, and functioning infrastructure. Not when you’re literally one of the poorest countries in the world.
Imagine you’re trying to develop an industry – let’s say you’re making cell phones. At first, the government might support the fledgling industry until it grows strong enough to handle some competition. Over time, you gradually open the market, introducing more competition as the industry matures. But now, imagine being the same struggling phone manufacturer in a poor country forced to compete with the global giants right from the start. Good luck with that. You’re not getting very far before crashing and burning.
The International Monetary Fund is also headquartered in Washington D.C. It’s pictured here in 2006, with private security guards protecting the building in anticipation of a small protest. (IMAGE: Matthew Bradley | Flickr)
Take Zimbabwe in the 1990s. The IMF pushed for trade liberalisation, expecting export-led growth, which led to a flood of imports that far outpaced exports. The result? A ballooning trade deficit and soaring national debt. The SAPs that were supposed to boost the economy instead led to widespread business closures and skyrocketing unemployment. By 1995/6, around 63% of Zimbabweans were living in extreme poverty. Great job, IMF.
Since then the rate has luckily dropped to two out of five Zimbabwean’s living in extreme poverty, as of 2019.
And it’s not just Zimbabwe. Look at Nigeria. The IMF’s insistence on eliminating petroleum subsidiessparked rampant inflation, leaving many families in financial ruin. Instead of fostering growth, these policies often deepen debt, increase reliance on imports, and entrench poverty. The “cure” becomes worse than the disease.
Hypocrisy Unveiled
Maybe these well-paid, well-educated economists pushing free trade on developing nations are just out of ideas. Well, if they bothered to crack open a history book, they’d find plenty of alternatives. The truth is, the US and UK – the same countries now preaching free trade – were anything but free traders when they were in the same position as today’s developing nations.
The hypocrisy is staggering. These economic powerhouses conveniently forget that protectionism was the backbone of their own success. Take the UK in the 13th and 14th centuries: it relied on import bans and export duties to protect and build domestic industries. Monarchs like Edward III and Henry VII aggressively supported these strategies. Even after the Industrial Revolution, high tariffs shielded government-backed industries well into the 19th century, long before “free trade” became the mantra.
The US played the same game. In its early years, tariffs were key to nurturing its “infant industries.” In the late 19th century, American tariffs often topped 30%, which helped fuel its rapid industrial growth and paved the way for its global dominance.
Fast forward to today, and these very nations are pressuring African countries to open their markets and abandon the same protectionist strategies that helped them rise to power. It’s not just hypocritical – it’s unethical.
It doesn’t stop at tariffs and protectionism – both the US and UK relied heavily on state-owned enterprises to develop their home industries before ever considering privatisation. In the early stages of industrialisation, both nations recognised the need for direct government involvement in key sectors. The UK’s railway system, for instance, was heavily funded and regulated by the government before any talk of privatisation.
Similarly, the US government played a significant role in developing critical infrastructure, like roads, bridges, and energy, often through publicly funded projects. Government-backed industries were seen as essential to national development, with privatisation only becoming the norm once those industries were established and stable.
What’s Yours is Mine, and What’s Mine is Mine
In a textbook example of Orwellian doublespeak, “free” in Western economic jargon often translates to “privatised.”
The World Bank and IMF, despite well-documented failures, continue to push for the privatisation of national resources and companies. Joseph Stiglitz went on to dub this process “briberisation,” as national leaders are pressured to sell off key resources, with profits quietly funnelled out of Africa and into the developed world.
In 1989, a review found that privatising state-owned enterprises (SOEs) was a key condition in 101 adjustment programs across 34 countries, including 18 in sub-Saharan Africa. Of these, 21 programs explicitly required the sale or liquidation of SOEs, revealing a clear preference for selling off national wealth, regardless of its consequences on local economies. Not much has changed since then.
Let’s look at Ghana. After the sell-off of their telecommunications industry, giants like Vodafone (UK) and MTN (South Africa) dominate the market, offering overpriced, subpar services while failing to invest in essential infrastructure. Since then Vodafone has started to exit the market, selling shares to Telecel Group (UK).
A customer counts cash before having funds transferred to his phone at a mobile money exchange in Ghana. (IMAGE: IMF Photo/Andrew Caballero-Reynolds | Flickr)
Even basic services like water were privatised under IMF pressure, causing tariffs to skyrocket and leaving millions without access to clean water. By the mid-1990s, Ghana’s poverty rates had soared, with 47% of the population living on around $1 a day. Despite sitting on vast natural wealth, major gold mining companies in Ghana are largely foreign-owned, with bauxite industries in the hands of foreign multinationals like AngloGold Ashanti (South Africa) and Newmont (USA).
Tanzania’s journey in privatising its telecommunications sector reflects a complex narrative. The sale of Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL) and reduced protection led to the entry of foreign players like Detecon (Germany) and Airtel (India), which subsequently gained significant market share. However, it was later discovered that the transfer to Airtel might have been illegal, as such, there have been talks to reclaim the government’s original share of TTCL.
Although mobile access has improved, the overall quality of service has deteriorated, and prices have increased, rendering basic telecommunications services unaffordable for a large segment of the Tanzanian population.
Zambia faced a similar fate with the privatisation of its copper mines, a cornerstone of the economy. Foreign corporations like Glencore (Switzerland) and First Quantum Minerals (Canada) swooped in, reaping the profits while local workers faced mass layoffs and lower wages.
Côte d’Ivoire fared no better. The World Bank’s policies of privatisation and extreme public spending cuts more than doubled poverty rates between 1989 and 1995. A particularly brutal outcome has been the surge in child slavery on cocoa plantations. Multinationals like Nestlé (Switzerland) and Cargill (USA) dominate the cocoa market, but this didn’t come without accusations of profiting handsomely off of children as young as seven toiling in horrific conditions.
In Nigeria, the privatisation of the oil industry has similarly enriched foreign corporations, with Eni (Italy) emerging as a major winner. Meanwhile, local communities bear the brunt of environmental destruction, and underdevelopment.
So far, the IMF and World Bank’s privatisation agenda follows a predictable script: open up markets, hand over key industries to foreign corporations, and leave local populations to pick up the pieces.
Horizons of Cooperation
When Western leaders urge African nations to stick to a so-called “rules-based” international order – one that conveniently favours Western interests – it’s worth asking: “Who’s really making these rules?” Instead of fostering genuine partnerships, the US and its allies seem more intent on undermining regional initiatives to keep their grip on global financial frameworks. No wonder many African nations are frustrated.
This growing dissatisfaction is driving African countries to explore options that they feel will deliver mutual benefits for both parties. Emerging frameworks like the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB), the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) offer viable alternatives to traditional models of economic aid. This isn’t just a reaction to Western hegemony; it’s a proactive push to demand more equitable partnerships that prioritise Africa’s development goals and self-determination.
In contrast to older generation institutions, the New Development Bank (NDB) offers a refreshed take on voting, with equal representation for all additional member states. It’s a stark contrast to the weighted voting systems of Western financial institutions that often lead to a silencing of developing countries voices. By prioritising long-term development strategies over austerity measures, these countries can better tackle their unique challenges and aspirations.
Leaving the Door Ajar
While primarily focused on Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the EAEU is increasingly forging strategic partnerships with African countries, helping them diversify their economies and reduce their reliance on Western markets. Trade agreements with nations like Egypt, South Africa, and Nigeria are opening up new avenues for growth and fostering more balanced economic relations.
Drafts of the program between the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) and the African Union are already on the table, paving the way for further development of EAEU-Africa cooperation. Back in 2019, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the EEC and the African Union to boost economic collaboration. Fast forward to 2023, and mutual trade among EAEU member states skyrocketed by nearly 105%, hitting around $90 billion.
an aerial image of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. (IMAGE: Francois Le Roy | Flickr)
Ethiopia has emerged as a key trading partner within the African Union, which encompasses 55 African states and nearly a billion people. Notably, trade between EAEU member states and Ethiopia surged by an astounding 4.7 times from January to October 2021 compared to the same period in 2020. Ethiopian products like flowers, textiles, coffee, and beans have traditionally thrived when sold in the EAEU market.
As the EAEU has expanded, so too has the BRICS+ group, specifically in recent years. This platform is an essential bridge for establishing standards of international cooperation between developed and emerging economies. The expansion of BRICS membership to include partners like Egypt (a South African ally in the African Union), Uruguay (a Brazilian partner in MERCOSUR), and Bangladesh (an Indian partner in BIMSTEC) is already underway.
While the purchasing power parity of the original BRICS members has already surpassed that of the G7 by 5-6%, only adding to the bloc’s collective economic strength. This means the gap between the expanded BRICS+ and the G7 is set to widen even further, solidifying the growing influence of emerging economies in shaping the international order. This expansion provides a solid foundation for African nations to engage in trade in a measured and controlled manner, partnering with countries that can offer long-term economic opportunities.
Sovereignty and potential partnerships are great, but they won’t keep an economy afloat – especially not for those still developing. These countries need large-scale access to solid infrastructure and food security, plain and simple. Some BRICS nations are industrial powerhouses with extensive experience in energy, rail, and road transport, and they can play a significant role in this direction of development.
In this vein, the NDB funds renewable energy initiatives in South Africa, including solar and wind farms, that are enhancing energy security, creating jobs, and driving local economic growth. This stands in stark contrast to the IMF loans and their austerity measures that seem hell-bent on derailing critical projects.
The BRICS’ Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) complements these needs by providing a financial safety net without the harsh conditions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the CRA offered much-needed liquidity to African nations, allowing them to tackle the crisis without sinking deeper into poverty. The CRA’s flexibility enables nations to chart their own recovery paths, tailored to their unique needs.
Your Money’s No Better Than Mine
The US dollar has long been the primary currency for international transactions and serves as the global strategic reserve, thus further bolstering US hegemony. But this dollar-systems monopoly is facing its first serious challenge. Countries outside the collective West are actively reducing their reliance on the dollar. Major economies like Russia, China, India, and South Africa are shifting trade to their own currencies, moving away from the dollar zone.
Ever since the West imposed sanctions on Russia, including freezing billions in Russian reserves, there has been growing unease among the Global South. This isn’t a new trend: “The United States is imposing sanctions at a record-setting pace again this year, with more than 60 percent of all low-income countries now under some form of financial penalty, according to a Washington Post analysis”.
Many nations see this as a threat to their financial interests. By reducing their dependence on the US dollar, countries like Nigeria and South Africa are reclaiming economic autonomy and dodging the political pressures tied to Western currencies.
How does this trend play out in practice? Major natural resource transactions were traditionally paid for in US dollars. This arrangement allowed the US to detach its currency from gold while maintaining its exchange rate and influence over international finance. Since the 1970s, an agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia has ensured that oil sales would be conducted in US dollars. But this year Saudi Arabia refused to renew this contract in favour of using their own or other currencies for these sales.
This shift extends to other natural resources as well. Following sanctions, Russia has decreased sales of hydrocarbons in US dollars, opting instead for rubles and yuan, while India and China are also using their own currencies for such transactions more often.
The Lujiazui Finance and Trade Zone, which houses the Shanghai Stock Exchange and other major financial institutions from around the world. (IMAGE: Suvcon | Flickr)
Diversifying away from the dollar in trade, energy, and food imports is a significant step toward reducing risk. It gives African countries the opportunity to choose their financial systems, especially as global multi-polarity strengthens.
Since 2023, the BRICS Development Bank (NDB) has been promoting trade and investment, issuing up to 30% of loans in local currencies. However, contingency reserves are still dollar-denominated, so the process of de-dollarisation is far from over.
Looking ahead, BRICS is considering creating its own digital currency, potentially managed by the NDB. Though this could take 5-10 years, it’s a bold step toward separating the Global South from the Global West.
The BRICS Pay system is already in place and will integrate with member states’ national payment systems, like Russia’s MIR. There’s also potential for the Pool of Conditional Currency Reserves (PUVR) within BRICS to work with other regional financial organisations.
BRICS could become a key player in monitoring macroeconomic conditions, developing anti-crisis strategies, and advancing digital financial technologies.
The choice between the BRICS and EAEU models versus the IMF and World Bank will significantly shape Africa’s economic future. As Africa reclaims its autonomy, it has the chance to break free from neocolonial constraints and forge a future driven by local needs rather than foreign profit.
The path is clear: whether with the IMF or BRICS, Africa needs to find a way to choose empowerment over exploitation.
The Department of Energy gave the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation what seemed like very good news earlier this year: It had won a $32 million grant for a novel solar energy project in Washington state. Built over a series of old irrigation canals, the proposed solar panels would generate electricity for tribal members without removing farm acreage from cultivation. The location would preserve the kinds of culturally sensitive land that have prompted concerns about other renewables projects.
Months after announcing the grant, the same department is making it nearly impossible for the tribal nation to access the money.
“It is because literally the feds cannot get out of their own way,” said Ray Wiseman, general manager of Yakama Power, the tribally owned utility.
The bureaucratic whiplash stems from the fact that while one part of the Energy Department hands out money for clean energy projects, another part decides which projects get access to the Northwest electrical grid. The Bonneville Power Administration’s process for approving connections comes with such exorbitant costs and is mired in such long delays that the federal grant could well expire before the tribe can touch a dime.
It’s a dilemma that persists despite the Biden administration’s explicit promise last year to help tribes create new sources of renewable power affordably and quickly.
Bonneville and the Energy Department blame the holdup on a glut of renewable energy proposals that are creating a need for massive transmission upgrades across the country. In a joint statement on behalf of Bonneville and its parent agency, Energy Department spokesperson Chris Ford said the government is required to put all energy proposals through the same process with the same costs.
But Ford added that federal agencies are “exploring different options within the law to both speed the process and reduce the costs the Yakama Nation would have to pay.”
The White House Council on Environmental Quality, which brokered the agreement pledging to help tribes build renewables, said in a statement the administration is coordinating with tribes and others in “taking action to deliver a clean, reliable electric grid and make federal permitting of new transmission lines more efficient.”
But council spokesperson Justin Weiss didn’t answer questions from Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica about why the Yakama project was stalled and what specific steps the White House has taken to help speed tribal energy connections.
Renewable energy supporters say the Yakama solar case shows that if the White House can’t keep the federal bureaucracy from undermining its own goals, then it’s making promises it can’t keep.
Nancy Hirsh, who’s worked since the 1990s for a coalition that advocates for clean power in the Northwest, said the situation is exactly what she feared would happen after the tribal agreement was signed.
“This is just the thing that we need to fix,” Hirsh said, “the left hand not connected with the right hand.”
An unprecedented promise
The Yakama reservation in Central Washington bears the scars of the federal government’s energy policies.
Transmission lines stretching across tribal properties were built a century ago without permission. The country’s largest nuclear waste cleanup site, Hanford, has poisoned parts of the tribe’s ancestral land under the Department of Energy’s watch.
Families on the reservation were displaced from their homes along the river to make way for massive reservoirs and hydroelectric dams. Those dams nearly wiped out runs of wild salmon that are vital to Indigenous cultures and that the U.S. government swore in treaties it would preserve.
Soon, the White House began negotiations to end a decades-old lawsuit by tribes and environmental groups who want some of the Northwest’s federal dams torn down to keep local salmon populations from going extinct.
The result of the talks was what the administration called a “historic” deal. The tribes would put their lawsuit on hold. In return, the White House promised to help tribes develop up to 3 gigawatts of renewable energy. That could power all the homes in a city roughly the size of Portland, Oregon. More significantly to the tribes, it’s enough to replace the output of the four dams on the lower Snake River deemed most detrimental to salmon.
“It will take all of us committing to this partnership now and for years to come to lift the words off the page and bring this agreement to life,” White House senior adviser John Podesta said at the signing of the agreement with Northwest tribes in February. “I want you to know that President Biden and Vice President Harris and the whole administration are committed to making that happen.”
Yakama Nation Chair Gerald Lewis also voiced hope when he signed the agreement with the Biden administration. “The last time energy was developed in the Columbia Basin, it was done on the backs of tribal communities and tribal resources,” Lewis said at the time. “Now we have an opportunity to do better.”
The Yakama Nation’s proposal would seem to exactly fit the bill.
Its initial plan was to cover 10 miles of irrigation canals with solar panels and to outfit the canals themselves with small-scale hydroelectric turbines. That would generate enough electricity to power a few thousand homes on the reservation, which has a population of about 30,000.
In addition to avoiding the tribe’s culturally sensitive lands, the project wouldn’t encroach on any wildlife habitats. And covering the irrigation canals would shade the water so that less of it evaporates in the sun.
The Department of Energy awarded its $32 million grant for the project at the end of February. Soon after, the agency posted an interview about the plan with Lewis and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on its Facebook page bearing the caption, “Sometimes, the great ideas are the ones right in front of us.”
Washington’s U.S. senators, Democrats Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, each issued news releases announcing the grant and praising the project, saying the canals could boost water conservation by 20% and cut the reservation’s power bills by 15%.
But those ambitions quickly ran up against stark realities, according to the people directly involved in bringing the project to life.
“Everybody thinks that the federal government gave us 32 million bucks,” Wiseman, the general manager for Yakama Power, said. “They did not.”
Stuck in bureaucracy
In its landmark accord with tribes, and in documents supporting the accord’s implementation, the White House promised more than money. It vowed to muster the full clout of the federal government to achieve the plan’s goals. Specifically, the agreement said the energy department, working with Indigenous leaders, would find “legal and regulatory options” for getting projects connected to the grid faster and for making them affordable for tribes.
That didn’t prevent the first tribal project to come along — the Yakama Nation’s — from getting caught in a snare of bureaucracy.
In addition to the grant from the Energy Department’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, Yakama Power was promised a nearly $100 million rural clean energy loan from the Department of Agriculture. But it cannot access any of the federal money without first obtaining a “power purchase agreement,” which essentially offers proof that the electricity the tribal utility plans to generate has a destination.
That’s hard for the tribe to do because it can’t get a purchase agreement until its project connects to the grid, which is owned by Bonneville, itself an arm of the Energy Department. Bonneville’s earliest estimate of when it will finish studying connection requests such as the Yakama Nation’s is 2027, but the federal agency says it could be longer.
That’s just one of many steps. The tribe can’t distribute electricity from the new solar project until Bonneville completes upgrades to the section of its transmission system that serves the reservation, including the installation of a new electrical substation.
The federal agency’s estimate for what it would charge for the substation alone: $144 million. Building transmission lines to and from the new solar array would drive the cost higher still, but Bonneville hasn’t done those estimates yet. The Yakama would have to bear those costs.
The tribe had counted on some rate increases to pay for the solar array, but covering the unexpectedly high cost of the upgrade would add hundreds of dollars more to a household’s monthly utility bill, Wiseman said. That’s on a reservation where nearly 20% of residents have incomes below the poverty line.
Another financial hurdle: Inflation has driven up construction costs for the solar array itself in the two years since the project was proposed.
Even if the tribe can come up with all the extra money needed, time is working against the project. Bonneville says it will take five to seven years to build the substation after it’s paid for.
All the delays will push the tribe up against a 2031 deadline to use or lose its $32 million grant and $100 million loan. They were funded under the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, which both expire that year.
Wiseman is no longer confident of how many miles of canal, if any, the utility can cover with solar panels. He’s unsure whether Yakama Power will need to opt for a much smaller solar array that lacks the specialized hardware needed to suspend the panels above the irrigation canals.
“I have serious questions about whether or not these things will survive to go forward,” Wiseman said.
The green energy traffic jam
The Yakama Nation in many ways faces the same pressures that are holding back new wind and solar farms across the country.
The surge in such projects over the past decade has jammed up the system that grid operators like Bonneville Power Administration use when evaluating requests to connect to the grid. The onslaught of green power has also taxed a grid designed to carry much less energy. And yet the new supply is badly needed to meet soaring demand, driven in part by thearrival of energy-guzzling data centers in the past decade.
Bonneville is changing the way it studies energy proposals to streamline the process. But renewable developers, advocates and industry analysts have published a white paper with a list of more than 20 recommendations that they say can create the grid the Northwest needs and that, for the most part, they say Bonneville has not addressed.
In the meantime, despite the Biden administration’s agreement last year to help tribes, their projects have not moved to the head of the line.
Hirsh’s group, the clean and affordable energy coalition, was party to the lawsuit that the tribal deal was meant to settle. She said the government’s failure to deliver on its clean energy promises “could jeopardize the agreement.”
Yakama Nation leaders say because of the long history of energy development violating tribal rights, and because reservations were set up with marginal infrastructure, the federal government should not treat tribes the way it does any other energy developer.
The Department of Energy, however, says its lawyers have yet to find a way through federal energy regulations or treaty law to let the agency deal with tribal projects differently.
Wiseman continues to incur costs on behalf of Yakama Power, planning for the solar project while doubts linger over whether all the pieces will come together in time.
“If I can’t get the transmission access that we need — whether intentional, unintentional, whatever you want to call it — Bonneville will have single-handedly killed these projects,” Wiseman said. “And that’s why at this point, I feel incredibly frustrated, because beating them up doesn’t do me any good.”
This spring in Michigan, the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Potawatomi, or Gun Lake Tribe, received 4 million dollars from the Bureau of Indian Affairs Tribal Climate Resilience program, an initiative that aims to help tribes prepare for climate change. The money will be used to buy a fleet of electric vehicles, help the nation manage a gray water system, and install a solar array that will cut the tribe’s electricity bills by around 80 percent and make the nation more self-sufficient. Underneath the two-acre solar array will be gardens of native flowers like butterfly weed, purple prairie clover, and primrose to help with the tribe’s prairie restoration efforts.
“We need to be innovative and find ways to leave less of a carbon footprint,” said Gun Lake tribal council member Virginia Vanderband. “If we can generate enough energy for our infrastructure, great.” The tribe has other investments – real estate, a construction company, a grocery store – and while the green energy project is doing well, becoming part of the energy market is “not a focus”, Vanderband said.
That seeming-lack of interest in joining the growing green energy market is the focus of a recent economic study coming out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison details barriers – like federal red tape – that tribes face when starting green energy projects. If these prohibitive barriers are not addressed, researchers tribes across the United States will lose out on 19 billion dollars of revenue by 2050.
During the early 1800s tribes were forcibly relocated to reservations. Tribes were coerced into signing treaties that ceded land for settlers in exchange for lands and rights, a process that built the United States and its wealth. Many of the reservations that tribal nations were moved to were lands that settlers deemed less economically rich, however, today much of that land is perfect for solar and wind development.
Altogether, tribal lands represent an area the size of New Mexico, but not all nations have access to land for development, leaving out hundreds of tribes from the green energy market. Out of the 574 federally recognized tribes nearly 250 do not have reservations.
In 2022, approximately 100 solar farms on reservations generated about 2 percent of all solar energy in the U.S., while around 3,000 reservation wind turbines produced about 5 percent of the nation’s wind energy. However, the University of Wisconsin-Madison study found that of 169 utility-sized wind and solar projects on reservation land, only around 5 percent are tribally owned.
In many tribal communities, poverty rates remain high–the result of federal policies that have undermined Indigenous economies–and according to the study, “the top 25 percent of reservations in terms of renewable endowments are also currently the group with the lowest incomes.” But while these tribal communities have the most to gain in terms of energy independence and new income streams, the study found that the lands in question aren’t any more likely to be developed than national parks, forests, or wildlife refuges where development is not allowed.
“That’s striking,” said Dominic Parker, the author of the study. “You have reservation areas where there’s populations living. [Wind and solar] development is not expressly prohibited. And yet, you’re not seeing any more development than these nearby areas where it is expressly prohibited.”
One reason, according to Parker, is the long process of getting permissions from tribal and federal entities, a process he calls ‘white tape’, instead of ‘red’, to describe the patronizing relationship between federal entities and tribes. Tribes are not legally allowed to fully manage land, water, and other resources that are theirs that could contribute to growing their economies. As well, Parker’s research shows that green energy development companies often go to private land near reservations where “paternalistic” federal regulatory rules don’t apply.
But a big part of the green energy conversation, at least for Virginia Vanderband at Gun Lake, is keeping tribal sovereignty a priority. Just because energy initiatives are going green doesn’t mean that it’s the responsibility of tribes to go along with what the federal government wants.
“We have a social responsibility to the land to keep it clean, to only take what we need,” Vanderband said. “We must maintain our sovereignty first. We have the right to govern ourselves. This allows us to honor and preserve our culture and our way of life.”
The panic button hanging around Marcos’ neck evokes the death threat that pulled him out of the Mexican mountain forests of the Sierra de Manantlán and dragged him to the outskirts of Guadalajara. After years of intimidation, he fled his hometown after the body of his 17-year-old son was found lying on the side of a road. The boy was killed, the lawyers on the case say, because, like his father, he opposed the activities of the Peña Colorada mine, which since 1975 has been squeezing the Sierra in search of iron. Over the decades, the iron mine, Mexico’s largest, has depleted the region’s water reserves, deforested its hills, polluted its air, and created divisions in the community.
At the end of each day, after wandering a city with walls, monuments, and kiosks covered with the faces of missing people, Marcos, who is part of the Indigenous Nahua peoples, takes off his panic button, a direct line to the local police. He rarely sleeps. “My head pounds,” Marcos, whose real name Grist has decided to withhold due to recent death threats against him, said. He thinks of his wife, still at their farm in Ayotitlán, of the fallen fences, of the corn that nobody takes to town, of the coffee beans that rot because there is no one to pluck them, of his remaining children, of the cars that menacingly circle their house. The memory evoked by the device on his bedside table cannot be removed. It is a noose around the neck of a man who feels he’s been sentenced.
Missing person posters line a street in Guadalajara, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, in 2022. Ulises Ruiz/AFP via Getty Images
More than 13 defenders — mostly Indigenous — of the Sierra de Manantlán have been murdered since 1986, according to the nonprofit organization Tskini, which works with Marcos’ community to defend their lands and people. For centuries, the region’s residents have been massacred and disappeared for demanding their right to inhabit their ancestral lands. In recent decades, this task has gotten harder, as extractive industries plundered the mountains.
According to a report released this month from the watchdog group Global Witness, more than two-thirds of the 18 activists killed in Mexico last year were Indigenous, opposed to mining operations along the Jalisco-Colima-Michoacán Pacific coast, where the Sierra de Manantlán is located. The report named Latin America the deadliest region for environmental activists, accounting for 85 percent of the 196 land defenders murdered globally in 2023.
But while public discourse and policy have focused on addressing the most egregious cases of violence against environmental activists — such as assassinations, threats, or forced disappearances — little to no attention has been paid to the invisible traumas and mental health impacts experienced by those who defend the lives of rivers, mountains, ecosystems, animals, and the communities that live within their bounds.
“Around the world, those who oppose the abuse of their homes and lands are met with violence and intimidation,” the Global Witness report reads. “Yet, the full scope of these attacks remains hidden.”
Latin America’s environmental activists live amid a constant threat of violence that permeates their days and bodies and that, like polluted air, tears their insides apart.
An environmental defender in Honduras holds a plastic shell shot at close range toward activists with the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations as they protested the Agua Zarca Dam. Giles Clarke via Getty Images
Leaders experience insomnia, anxiety, paranoia, panic attacks, depression, isolation, and suicidal ideation, said Mary Menton, an assistant professor at Heriot-Watt University who works with environmental leaders in Brazil. “Some are unable to speak for days at the peak of a panic attack,” she added. A global study of 110 human rights workers, many of whom simultaneously identify as or work with land defenders, found they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, demotivation, conflicts with peers, family problems, alcoholism and drug abuse, and somatization, or the physical expression of psychiatric problems. An earlier online survey found that close to 20 percent of human rights defenders met all the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder and that nearly 15 percent had symptoms of depression.
In some of the Latin American countries where attacks against environmental defenders are particularly high — Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Honduras — governments have created protection mechanisms, providing bodyguards, satellite cell phones, and bulletproof vests, among other methods, to guarantee activists’ physical safety. Support for mental health in these systems, however, is close to nonexistent, said Lourdes Castro, coordinator of the Somos Defensores program, which monitors violence against human rights defenders in Colombia. Instead, psychological care falls to private or nonprofit organizations, which don’t have the resources to meet the growing need — in the rare cases when land defenders are open to, and trusting of, that kind of care. “We talk about the problem, the solution, the hearings, that there is going to be a meeting, but rarely about this,” Marcos said.
“Most [activists] don’t have the money to pay for it. And even if they did and had access to somebody,” said Menton, “then there’s also the resistance to it. Some people, for understandable reasons … they don’t trust very easily.” Added to this are the challenges of getting in and out of their territories — usually located in remote areas — or the unstable connection to the internet and telephone signal for virtual care.
As a response, psychologists, social workers, and lawyers have been building a network of safe houses and temporary shelters throughout Latin America that support the mental health of social leaders and human rights defenders and, increasingly, threatened environmental leaders. These shelters have become one of the few safe spaces to deal with individual and collective grievances, Menton said. Beyond addressing an individual’s mental state, the therapy in these spaces aims to address collective trauma, said Clemencia Correa, a Colombian psychologist exiled in Mexico since 2002 because of her work with civil war victims.
While the need to keep the locations of these places secret makes it impossible to have clear figures regarding their existence, there are at least 10 shelters in Central and South America that make up this growing regional support network. Through theater, art, and handicraft workshops, among other methods, their psychosocial approach is expanding beyond the shelter walls and slowly permeating the work of environmental organizations as well.
“It’s normalized to live under constant stress with mental health issues,” said Adriana Sugey Cadena Salmerón, a lawyer working with Marcos. In 2020, she and her colleague Eduardo Mosqueda founded Tskini, the organization that works with leaders of the town of Ayotitlán and places psychological health as a core priority. “If we start to pay attention, to care for each other, then I think we’ll be stronger,” she said.
Starting in the 1940s, Marcos’ community, the Nahua, watched as logging companies, supported by local and national governments, shaved the mountainous forests and grasslands of their ancestral Sierra de Manantlán. The region’s name comes from the Nahuatl word “amanalli,” which means “place of springs or weeping waters,” and it provides drinking supplies to almost half a million people across western Mexico.
Marcos’ father-in-law and Nahua leader spent decades defending the Sierra de Manantlán and advocating for the recognition of Indigenous lands. He was sent to jail in 1993 after leading one of those protests. Marcos helped organize a rally to demand his immediate release in Telcruz, in the Mexican state of Jalisco. Police broke up the demonstration with gunfire. Two of those bullets found a place to bury themselves: the bodies of Juan Monroy Elías and José Luis, Marcos’ younger brother. He was just 22 years old.
A painting in the offices of the nonprofit Tskini portrays the systematic murder of the Nahua at the beginning of the 20th century. María Paula Rubiano A.
In parallel to this struggle for land recognition, and after decades of pressure from environmental organizations and Indigenous leaders, the loggers eventually left in 1987, when most of the Sierra was declared a protected area. But one major extractive industry remained: the Consorcio Minero Benito Juárez-Peña Colorada iron mine, opened in 1975. The open pit mine, which spans over 96,000 acres, including nearly 3,000 of Nahua collectively owned lands, disfigured the landscape, replacing green mountains with mounds of crumbled stone. According to company numbers, the mine produces 3.6 million tons of iron pellets every year, and 4.1 million tons of iron concentrate, providing 30 percent of Mexico’s industry’s needs. Steel giants ArcelorMittal and Ternium — which own and operate the mine — didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
Murders, Menton said, are just one of the violent actions environmental leaders face around the globe. Several organizations report that leaders are increasingly facing threats, intimidation, judicial persecution, smear campaigns, repression, and daily microaggressions. In fact, Global Witness found that criminalization is now the most used tactic to silence environmental defenders. Marcos has been detained three times, the longest one lasting six days, during which he was beaten by police in Guadalajara, he said.
The intersection of all these forms of violence — that happen across time, space, and even generations — creates a feeling of permanent aggression, Menton wrote in 2021. “Living under this constant threat creates what we have called atmospheres of violence or climates of horror,” a slow violence that often goes unnoticed.
From the 1990s onwards, at least eight people throughout the Sierra were killed for their activism. Despite the creation of an ejido — legally recognized and collectively owned lands — in 1963, outsiders have infiltrated decision-making positions that govern the territory. After a controversial election process in 2005, Jesús Michel Prudencio, a Peña Colorada employee, became the ejido’s legal representative, known as the ejidal commissariat, and authorized the expansion of the mine. Subsequently, leaders from the community have been pressured to drop their campaigns against company-friendly candidates, sometimes being murdered for not doing so. Paramilitaries soon began to prowl the Sierra openly, and the criminal syndicate Jalisco New Generation Cartel began opening illegal mines on top of its drug trafficking activities.
An activist overlooks the El Tezoyo quarry, where tezontle and other stones are extracted, in Mexico State, Mexico, in 2018. Pedro Pardo/AFP via Getty Images
For 23 years, Marcos juggled his work as a school teacher with advocacy, sometimes teaching the kids of those in the community working for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. He led protests demanding payment from the mine for their use of community lands, pleaded with government officials for justice and collective protection, and was the face of lawsuits denouncing outside interference in the governing of Nahua lands. But that balancing act ended on the morning of October 26, 2020, after his eldest, then 17, dropped him off at school. Hours later, Marcos saw his body lying on the side of the road in the community of Rosita. The high school boy had begun to speak up on social media about the shady dealings of the ejidal commissariat. “I made the mistake of talking about the abuses, which obviously bothered him,” Marcos said. A year later, he left Ayotitlán. He arrived in Guadalajara, Mosqueda, his lawyer, said, “like a scared little mouse.”
“I almost lost my mind,” Marcos recalled. He couldn’t sleep. When he slept, he had nightmares. And he feared — and still fears — persecution against him. “I had to talk to priests, psychologists, [it was] hard. I am getting over it, but very little … I walk around all day with problems, the feeling that something will happen.”
Two more land defenders have been killed in the Sierra de Mantatlán since 2020. One of them was part of the National Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists program, which provided physical security measures. The other murder hasn’t been prosecuted. In 2023, Marcos received new threats, and a pick-up van parked outside his home for four hours.
Marcos receives counseling from a psychologist paid for by Tskini, as well as takes medication. He is also in graduate school, studying for his master’s in educational pedagogy. He sees his wife and children every two or three months, when his wallet and safety conditions allow. “Police visit during the day, but at night they leave, and the criminals are still free,” he said. The Jalisco prosecutors’ office investigating his son’s murder declined to comment on an active investigation.
One of the case files that Tskini handles in defense of the Nahua indigenous people of Sierra de Manantlán. María Paula Rubiano A.
Despite its limited resources, Tskini works with a mental health professional who cares for Marcos, the organization’s two lawyers, who also face threats through their work with leaders from Ayotitlán, and a second leader who also had to leave his home and settle in Guadalajara. Without the organization’s support, Marcos could not pay the taxi and bus fare to the appointment, or buy the medications prescribed by the specialist.
Marcos said defenders used to organize to demand the release of their leaders, or they would go as far as Mexico City or Guadalajara to expose abuses. Not anymore. Today, no one wants to sign the police report requesting an investigation into the death of José Isaac Santos Chávez, his colleague assassinated in 2021. No one wants to associate their name with the struggle for the Sierra. “They are afraid,” he said. “They know they’ll be harassed or forced to disappear.”
In Purépecha language, from the central Mexican state of Michoacan, Tskini means “from where something sprouts,” Cadena Salmerón said. In a climate of horror, she said, “we have to be well, we have to be focused, we have to have peace of mind.”
In a humble neighborhood south of Bogotá, Colombia, there is a house so unremarkable that it is easy to walk past. Except for the cat that wanders the nearby rooftops, its residents rarely go out and never after 8 pm. They are discreet, almost as nondescript as the building itself.
There is fierce persecution against those who live there — threatened social and environmental leaders. Military helicopters have overflown previous versions, looking for its inhabitants. Unknown men have entrenched themselves outside. That’s why, every now and then, the residents move and occupy another unassuming building.
Behind the metal door, however, it is anything but bland. In the back, in a colorful mural, a capybara, a jaguar, a snake, and a cup of coffee surround children playing in the sun; two women weave the map of Colombia; flowers, roots, birds, guitars, and flutes sprout from a heart. Photos and posters of assassinated leaders hang on the sky-blue walls of a room that doubles as a music space and library. A faded declaration of human rights hangs on the wall leading to a huge hall in the back.
A mural painted by human rights and environmental activists and their children in the Corporación Claretiana safe house south of Bogotá. María Paula Rubiano A.
Music room and gathering spaces in the Corporación Claretiana safe house south of Bogotá, designed to help residents tackle mental health issues that arise from their activism. Gustavo Torrijos/El Espectador & María Paula Rubiano A.
Inside, the residents — who usually stay for up to three months — sleep in bunk beds, cook and clean for each other, and spend their hours resting, reading, and talking to each other and the therapists in the organization. Some days, they go to the sewing room and work through their traumas by using their hands. Not all days are good: Sometimes someone wakes up screaming at dawn with a panic attack, in which case one of the psychologists rushes to the house to help them through it.
“We’ve seen many generations grow,” said Jaime Absalón León Sepúlveda, founder and director of the Corporación Claretiana Norman Pérez Bello, which runs the home and has been sheltering human rights defenders from all over Colombia since 2003. “At first it was about saving people from being killed and having a safe place where they could breathe, be with their family and begin to grieve.” But he soon realized they needed “therapeutic spaces, collective and individual, to deal with the crises.”
The work in the house south of Bogotá is based, above all, on a branch of psychology born between the bullets of the Central American civil wars in the ’70s and ’80s. Called liberation psychology or psychosocial therapy, it is a therapeutic alternative to traditional clinical work, focusing on conversations and tools like theater, painting, writing, and other artistic endeavors that allow patients to put their individual suffering within a political context. The method later spread throughout Latin America, serving victims of Colombia’s armed conflict; young people in the Brazilian favelas, or informal settlements; relatives of the disappeared; and torture survivors of the Chilean and Argentinian dictatorships.
Soon, centers focused on the mental health of human rights activists and land defenders started cropping up. In 2013, Correa, the Colombian psychologist, founded Aluna, an organization focused on this type of therapy in Mexico, where she’s been living in exile since 2002.
Correa left Colombia after helping to uncover a military intervention, known as “ Operation Genesis,” that had been planned by paramilitaries and the Colombian army to access the fertile lands — perfect for agribusiness — and forests in the Colombian Caribbean, an area known as Urabá and close to the Darien Gap. At first, she recalls, no one was able to tell them what had happened. “People said, ‘We don’t know, the bad guys kicked us out,’” Correa says. “They couldn’t name it.”
Everyone’s sense of identity was shattered, separated from the land they had long called home. Little by little, information started to trickle in: Bodies began appearing on the streets of Turbo, located before the start of the Darien Gap. At least two local officials disappeared. Days before the displacement in 1997, army helicopters dropped bombs over the area. “The monsters are here,” the children had said. The military came to some villages to tell them that if they didn’t leave in three days, they were going to kill them all. Then the paramilitaries came in. They burned down the houses. They dismembered the body of Afro-Colombian leader Marino López Mena in his small village on the banks of the Cacarica River.
“When we retraced these events with people, it was very painful. But being able to name it allowed us to try to understand so that this would not be totally hushed up,” explained Correa. Correa and her colleagues connected the operation to logging interests over the fertile lands of the Urabá region — a fact recognized a decade later by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and, more recently, by Colombia’s Truth Commission. With the allegations came threats to Correa and others. And then, exile.
When she landed in Mexico, Correa immediately contacted environmental and social organizations. She learned that although the country had not suffered decades of bloody civil war like Colombia, since the late 1950s, when guerrilla groups started to appear across the country, the government had waged a low-intensity war that, with the excuse of stopping rebel organizations, attacked government opponents, leftist leaders, students, and rural and Indigenous people. Correa saw how this “dirty war” was based on the same terror tactics used in Colombia: arbitrary detentions, torture, selective assassinations, massacres, and forced disappearances. And, like in Colombia, victims felt guilty, oscillating between apathy and paranoia. Some did not sleep, others lived in fear. A few drank excessively. All were terrified.
Alan Garcia, an environmental defender, survived being shot at close range by the Honduran Military during a protest against the Agua Zarca Dam. The same incident took his father’s life. Giles Clarke / Getty Images
Traditional psychology, developed through carefully manufactured and controlled experiments on college campuses in the United States, did not conceive the depth of these victims’ and activists’ wounds, Correa said. Nor did it know how to heal them. “We rely on communities’ capacities to build resilience, which more than resilience is resistance to keep on living,” León Sepúlveda explained about this line of work.
Correa’s organization, Aluna, instead applies an approach to victim support proposed by Ignacio Martín-Baró in the 1970s. The Spanish psychologist and priest, who graduated from Chicago University, devoted his life to unraveling the impacts of political violence in El Salvador, where a string of military governments and conservative presidents violently repressed any protest against social and economic inequality. Above all, Martín-Baró wanted to find ways to rebuild communities. His “liberation psychology,” as it’s known, states that if the causes of a wound are from an oppressive political and social context, to heal, people and communities should first understand that context and its key players. Then, after facing the impacts of that violence with psychosocial support, victims may shed their trauma and reaffirm themselves as political actors.
This new way of understanding their reality allows them to rebuild themselves personally and collectively, “enabling them not only to discover the roots of what they are, but also the horizon of what they can become,” Martín-Baró wrote in 1985. Under this method, healing is understood as a political act of freedom. Four years later, in 1989, Martín-Baró was assassinated by the Salvadoran army at the Central American University, where he was the head of the psychology department.
After the priest’s assassination, his thinking spread across Latin America. In 1998, the first International Congress of Liberation Psychology was held in Mexico City, then held annually until 2005 (since 2008, it was held every two years until 2016). Professionals from all over the region gathered to exchange ideas, experiences, and techniques. In 2008, Correa joined the gathering to talk about counseling victims of sexual torture. Around that time, León Sepúlveda had opened the doors of the first safe house of the Norman Pérez Bello Corporation, furnished with a couple of armchairs and beds donated by the Roman Catholic Claretian order, which he had abandoned. The earliest residents were victims of Colombia’s internal conflict, but throughout the years, it has hosted LGBTQ+ rights activists, youth advocates protesting the lack of opportunities in cities, victims of state violence and, more recently, environmental defenders.
In practice, psychosocial counseling takes many forms, said Ajax Sanhueza, director of Colectivo Casa, a human and environmental rights advocacy group working with Indigenous leaders in Bolivia since 2008. They worked with women from the Red Nacional de Mujeres en Defensa de la Madre Tierra, or the National Network of Women in Defense of Mother Earth, who decided they wanted to create short videos in which handmade dolls dressed as Bolivian cholas, representative of the threatened Indigenous leaders that voice them, denounce how mining activities threaten the water supplies of many Indigenous tribes, as well as calling for women’s self-care.
An activist protests against a copper project at the Samalayuca mine in Chihuahua state, Mexico, in 2019. David Peinado/NurPhoto via Getty Images
People must understand what has happened to them, on individual, collective, and historical levels, Correa explained. Suppose people don’t understand, for example, that their territory is an attractive place for certain industries or illegal economies. In that case, it is difficult for them to make sense of the terror they experience and take the appropriate steps to protect themselves, she noted.
It’s hard to tell how many organizations have used or currently use this type of therapy in Latin America. Mark Burton, a social psychologist who has studied this trend since its inception, wrote in 2004 that practicing psychologists do not systematize their experiences. Correa said that the lack of academic production is due, in part, to the fact that Latin American universities have not been interested in the practice for more than a decade. Diploma courses and lectures on the subject, such as the Martín-Baró International Seminar at the Javeriana University in Colombia or the diploma course for forcefully disappeared missing persons at the Autonomous Metropolitan University, Cuajimalpa, do not permeate the curriculum of psychology faculties, she said. “There’s a lot of prejudice against talking about a political approach, as though it would take away from the rigor of psychology,” she explained. Correa noted that such a position negates the fact that traditional psychology already carries ideological baggage. “One of Martín-Baró’s missions is the liberation of psychology itself.”
But networks do exist. As violence against environmental leaders in Brazil escalates, “this issue of mental health support and psychotherapy kept coming up again and again and again,” Menton said. Existing protocols are insufficient. “If you’re in the middle of a crisis, the last place you want to be is in a cold hotel room in a city where you don’t know anyone, and you don’t have a support network,” she said. “We were wondering, how do we create spaces to heal? This is all growing under the surface, and the idea of a house was there, like a dream.”
In 2018, after years of ruminating, Menton led the purchase of a property in the Brazilian Amazon with the organization Not1More and the Zé Claudio and Maria Institute. Aluna contributed its expertise by training volunteers in Brazil on psychosocial principles. Casa La Serena, a shelter located in Mexico City, has helped Menton and her colleagues imagine what amenities the house should have so that its inhabitants “feel safe,” she said, “feel that this is a place to breathe, sleep and rest.” So far, at least four adults have stayed in Casa de Respiro, and dozens have participated in workshops on self-care and holistic strategies for dealing with trauma, Menton added.
Jaime Absalón León Sepúlveda, founder and director of the Corporación Claretiana Norman Pérez Bello, at the safe house south of Bogotá. Gustavo Torrijos/El Espectador
At the Corporación Claretiana house south of Bogotá, a sewing workshop has been the main vehicle for providing support, León Sepúlveda said. Residents gather in a small space next to the large mural room every Saturday to talk and sew. “The names [of the activities] here are all about reactivating the possibilities of life. [That space is called] ‘Mending our history, weaving hope,’” León Sepúlveda said. “People talk, there is a catharsis there.”
In 2023, after 20 years in exile, Correa was reunited in Bogotá with León Sepúlveda, whom she had first met when he was young student priest who often gave refuge to rural farmers, Indigenous peoples, and Afro-Colombians fleeing war. Convened by the international organization Bread for the World, about 10 mental health shelters located in Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala are part of an effort, still in its infancy, to relocate the most at-risk leaders throughout the region. Also, Correa said, they are looking to create safe havens in rural areas, as one of the biggest challenges for leaders is adapting to a city lifestyle.
Caring for those who care for their communities and territories is a risky and sometimes traumatic job. León Sepúlveda has been threatened several times, and some of his closest collaborators have been killed. To cope with the burden, the defender plays Andean music with his children and friends, works in the fields, and writes poetry. Like the house’s inhabitants south of Bogotá, he cannot imagine abandoning his mission.
On a wet spring day in June, fog shrouded the Mission Mountains on the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwest Montana. Silver beads of rain clung to blades of grass and purple lupine. On a ridge overlooking St. Mary’s Lake in the southeastern corner of the reservation, the land was mostly cleared of trees after state-managed logging operations. Some trees remained, mainly firs and pines, spindly things that once grew in close quarters but now looked exposed without their neighbors.
Viewed from the sky, the logged parcel was strikingly square despite the mountainous terrain. It stood in contrast to the adjacent, tribally managed forest, where timber operations followed the topographic contours of watersheds and ridgelines or imitated fire scars from lightning strikes. “It’s not that they’re mismanaging everything, but their management philosophy and scheme do not align with ours,” said Tony Incashola Jr., the director of tribal resources for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, or CSKT, as he looked out the window of his Jeep at the landscape. “Their tactics sometimes don’t align with ours, which in turn affects our capability of managing our land.”
This nearly clear-cut, 640-acre parcel is state trust land and is a small part of the 108,886 state-owned acres, above- and belowground, scattered across the reservation — this despite the tribal nation’s sovereign status.
The Douglas fir and ponderosa pine trees that remained in the square would thrive on the occasional fire and controlled burn after logging operations, benefiting the next generation of trees. Instead, the area was unburned, and shrubs crowded the ground. “I see this stand right here looking the exact same in 20 years,” said Incashola. It’s his first time being on this land, despite a lifetime on the reservation — because it’s state land, the gate has always been locked.
A clear line divides forest managed by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe and recently harvested state-owned land. Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
A clear line divides forest managed by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe and recently harvested state-owned land. Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
Tony Incashola Jr., director of tribal Resource management for CSKT, looks out at state-owned parcels from an airplane on August 8. Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
Tony Incashola Jr., director of tribal Resource management for CSKT, looks out at state-owned parcels from an airplane on August 8. Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
Recently harvested timber sits on a parcel of state-owned land west of the town of Hot Springs, Montana, on the Flathead Reservation. In 2023, Montana made almost $162 million from activity on state trust lands.
Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
State trust lands, on and off Indian reservations, make up millions of acres across the Western United States and generate revenue for public schools, universities, jails, hospitals, and other public institutions by leasing them for oil and gas extraction, grazing, rights of way, timber, and more. The state of Montana, for example, manages 5.2 million surface acres and 6.2 million subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other underground resources, which distributed $62 million to public institutions in 2023. The majority of that money went to K-12 schools — institutions serving primarily non-Indigenous people.
States received many of these trust lands upon achieving statehood, but more were taken from tribal nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through a federal policy of allotment, in which reservations were forcibly cut up into small parcels in an effort to make Indigenous peoples farmers and landowners. The policy allowed for about 90 million acres of reservation lands nationwide to move to non-Indigenous ownership. On the Flathead Reservation, allotment dispossessed the CSKT of a million acres, more than 60,000 of which were taken to fund schools.
But the Flathead Reservation is just one reservation checkerboarded by state trust lands.
To understand how land and resources taken from Indigenous peoples and nations continue to enrich non-Indigenous citizens, Grist and High Country News used publicly available data to identify which reservations have been impacted by state trust land laws and policies; researched the state institutions benefiting from these lands; and compiled data on many of the companies and individuals leasing the land on those reservations. Altogether, we located more than 2 million surface and subsurface acres of land on 79 reservations in 15 states that are used to support public institutions and reduce the financial burden on taxpayers. In at least four states, five tribal nations themselves are the lessees — paying the state for access to, collectively, more than 57,700 acres of land within their own reservation borders.
However, due to instances of outdated and inconsistent data from federal, state, and tribal cartographic sources, our analysis may include lands that do not neatly align with some borders and ownership claims. As a result, our analysis may be off by a few hundred acres. In consultation with tribal and state officials, we have filtered, clipped, expanded, and otherwise standardized multiple data sets with the recognition that in many cases, more accurate land surveying is necessary.
The state trust lands that came from sanctioned land grabs of the early 20th century helped bolster state economies and continue to underwrite non-Indian institutions while infringing on tribal sovereignty. “The justification for them is very old. It goes back to, really, the founding of the U.S.,” said Miriam Jorgensen, research director for the Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development. The goal, she said, was to help settlers and their families gain a firmer foothold in the Western U.S. by funding schools and hospitals for them. “There’s definitely a colonial imperative in the existence of those lands.”
Although tribal citizens are a part of the public those institutions are supposed to serve, their services often fall short. On the Flathead Reservation, for example, Indigenous youth attend public schools funded in part by state trust lands inside the nation’s boundaries. However, the state is currently being sued by the CSKT, as well as five other tribes, over the state’s failure over decades to adequately teach Indigenous curriculum despite a state mandate to do so.
Arlee High School is a public school on the Flathead Reservation. Six tribes, including CKST, have sued the state of Montana for failing to implement its Indian Education for All curriculum in public schools over the past few decades, despite a mandate to do so. Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
Since 2022, the CSKT and the state of Montana have been negotiating a land exchange in which the tribe will see some 29,200 acres of state trust lands on the reservation returned, which could include the logged, 640-acre parcel near St. Mary’s Lake. In the trade, Montana will receive federal lands from the Department of the Interior and the Department of Agriculture, or potentially both, elsewhere in the state. Such a return has been “the want of our ancestors and the want of our tribal leaders since they were taken,” Incashola said. “It’s not a want for ownership, it’s a want for protection of resources, for making us whole again to manage our forests again the way we want to manage them.”
Tribal nations and states have struggled with state and federal governments over jurisdiction and land since the inception of the United States, says Alex Pearl, who is Chickasaw and a professor of law at the University of Oklahoma. But the potential return of state trust lands represents an opportunity for LandBack on a broad scale: an actionable step toward reckoning with the ongoing dispossession of territories meant to be reserved for tribes. “The LandBack movement that started as protests has become a viable policy, legally,” Pearl said.
An aerial view of dense forest on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
The Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation is one of the largest reservations in the U.S., stretching 4.5 million acres across the northeastern corner of Utah. But on closer look, the reservation is checkerboarded, thanks to allotment, with multiple land claims on the reservation by individuals, corporations, and the state of Utah. Altogether, the Ute Tribe oversees about a quarter of its reservation.
The state of Utah owns more than 511,000 surface and subsurface acres of trust lands within the reservation’s borders. And of those acres, the Ute Tribe is leasing 47,000 — nearly 20 percent of all surface trust land acreage on the reservation — for grazing purposes, paying the state to use land well within its own territorial boundaries. According to Utah’s Trust Lands Administration, the agency responsible for managing state trust lands, a grazing permit for a 640-acre plot runs around $300. In the last year alone, the Utes have paid the state more than $25,000 to graze on trust lands on the reservation.
Of all the Indigenous nations in the U.S. that pay states to utilize their own lands, the Ute Tribe leases back the highest number of acres. And while not all states have publicly accessible lessee information with land-use records, of the ones that did, Grist and High Country News found that at least four other tribes also lease nearly 11,000 acres, combined, on their own reservations: the Southern Ute Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Laguna, and Zuni Tribe. According to state records, almost all of these tribally leased lands — 99.5 percent — are used for agriculture and grazing.
The Pueblo of Laguna, Zuni, part of the Navajo Reservation, and Ramah Navajo, a chapter of Navajo Nation, are located in the state of New Mexico, which owns nearly 143,000 surface and subsurface acres of state trust lands across a total of 13 reservations. The Navajo Nation leases all 218 acres of New Mexico state trust lands on its reservation, while the Ramah Navajo leases 17 percent of the 24,600 surface state trust land acres within its reservation’s borders. The Pueblo of Laguna leases more than half of the 11,200 surface trust land acres in its territory, while the Zuni Tribe leases 37 of the 60 surface trust land acres located on its reservation. The nations did not comment by press time.
Cris Stainbrook, president of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, said that for tribes, the cost of leasing state trust lands on their reservations for grazing and agriculture is likely lower than what it would cost to fight for ownership of those lands. But, he added, those lands never should have been taken from tribal ownership in the first place.
“Is it wrong? Is it fundamentally wrong to have to lease what should be your own land? Yes,” said Stainbrook. “But the reality of the situation is, the chances of having the federal or state governments return it is low.”
In theory, tribal nations share access to public resources funded by state trust lands, but that isn’t always the case. For example, Native students tend to fare worse in U.S. public schools, and some don’t attend state-run schools at all. Instead, they enroll in Bureau of Indian Education schools, a system of nearly 200 institutions on 64 reservations that receive funding from the federal government, not state trust lands.
Beneficiaries, including public schools, get revenue generated from a variety of activities, including leases for roads and infrastructure, solar panel installations, and commercial projects. Fossil fuel infrastructure or activity is present on roughly a sixth of on-reservation trust lands nationwide.
While state agencies can exchange trust lands on reservations for federal lands off-reservation, the process is complicated by the state’s legal obligation to produce as much money as possible from trust lands for its beneficiaries. Still, some states are attempting to create statewide systematic processes for returning trust lands.
At the forefront are Washington, which is currently implementing legislation to return lands, and North Dakota, which is moving new legislation through Congress for the same purpose. But because of the lands’ value and the states’ financial obligations, it’s difficult to transfer complete jurisdiction back to Indigenous nations. Trust lands must be swapped for land of equal or greater value, which tends to mean that a transfer is only possible if the land in question doesn’t produce much revenue.
Details from the Jocko Prairie on the Flathead Reservation, part of a project the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have undertaken to build resilience against large, and more frequent, wildfires associated with climate change. Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
That’s the case with Washington’s Trust Land Transfer program, which facilitates exchanges of land that the state’s Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, deems unproductive. Those lands are designated as “unproductive” because they might not generate enough revenue to cover maintenance costs, have limited or unsustainable resource extraction, or have resources that are physically inaccessible. A 540-acre plot of land that was transferred to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife in a 2022 pilot program was considered financially unproductive because “the parcel is too sparsely forested for timber harvest, its soils and topography are not suitable for agriculture, it offers low potential for grazing revenue, it is too small for industrial-scale solar power generation, and it is located too close to the 20,000-acre Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge for wind power generation.”
Currently, Washington’s state constitution does not allow for the exchange of subsurface acreage; the DNR retains mineral rights to state trust lands even after exchange. Transfers are funded by the state, with the Legislature paying the DNR the value of the land to be exchanged so the agency can then purchase new land. The value of all the lands that can be exchanged is capped at $30 million every two years.
Even that money isn’t guaranteed: The legislature isn’t obligated to approve the funding for transfers. Additionally, the program is not focused solely on exchanges with Indigenous nations; any public entity can apply for a land transfer. Through the pilot program in 2022, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, Department of Natural Resources, and Kitsap County received a total of 4,425 acres of federal land valued at more than $17 million in exchange for unproductive trust lands. All three entities proposed using the land to establish fish and wildlife habitat, natural areas, and open space and recreation. None of the proposed projects in the pilot program had tribes listed as receiving agencies for land transfer. However, six of the eight proposals up for funding between 2025 and 2027 would be transferred to tribal nations.
In North Dakota, the Trust Lands Completion Act would allow the state to exchange surface state trust lands on reservations for more accessible federal land or mineral rights elsewhere. The legislation made it through committee in the U.S. Senate last year and, this fall, state officials hope to couple it with bigger land-use bills to pass through the Senate and then the House.
But one of the legislation’s main caveats is that it, like Washington, excludes subsurface acres: North Dakota’s constitution also prohibits ceding mineral rights. North Dakota currently owns 31,000 surface and 200,000 subsurface acres of trust lands on reservations. State Commissioner of University and School Lands Joe Heringer said that returning state trust lands with mineral development would be complicated because of existing development projects and financial agreements.
Right now, the only mineral development happening on reservation-bound state trust lands is on the Fort Berthold Reservation in the state’s northwestern corner, with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes.
Initial oil and gas leases are about five years, but they can stay in place for decades if they start producing within that time. “There’s already all sorts of leases and contracts in place that could get really, really messy,” Heringer said.
By design, subsurface rights are superior to surface rights. If land ownership is split — if a tribe, for instance, owns the surface rights while an oil company owns the subsurface rights — the subsurface owner can access its resources, even though the process might be complicated, regardless of what the surface owner wants.
“It’s not worthless, but it’s close to it,” Stainbrook said of returning surface rights without subsurface rights.
The Flathead Reservation is a checkerboard of state, tribal, federal, and private ownership due to federal allotment policies. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes lost 500,000 acres of their reservation, around 60,000 of which went to the state to fund public schools. Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
Still, Stainbrook acknowledges that programs to return state trust lands are meaningful because they consolidate surface ownership and jurisdiction and allow tribes to decide surface land use. Plus, he said, there’s a lot of land without subsurface resources to extract, meaning it would be left intact. But split ownership, with tribes owning surface rights and non-tribal entities holding subsurface rights, prevents tribes from fully making their own choices about resource use and management on their lands. And states are not required to consult with tribes on how these lands are used.
“In the sense of tribal sovereignty, it has not increased tribal sovereignty,” Stainbrook said. “In fact, I mean, it’s pretty much the status quo.”
Of the 79 reservations that have state trust lands within their boundaries, tribal governments of 49 of them have received federal Tribal Climate Resilience awards since 2011. These awards are designed to fund and assist tribes in creating adaptation plans and conducting vulnerability and risk assessments as climate change increasingly threatens their homes. But with the existence of state trust lands inside reservation boundaries, coupled with state-driven resource extraction, many tribal governments face hard limits when trying to enact climate mitigation policies — regardless of how much money the federal government puts toward the problem.
In 2023, a wildfire swept the Flathead Reservation, just west of Flathead Lake. Afterwards, the CSKT and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, which manages the state’s trust lands, discussed salvage timber operations — in which marketable logs are taken from wildfire-burned forests — on two affected state trust land parcels, both inside the reservation. The tribe approved a road permit for the state to access and salvage logs on one parcel, but not the other, since it wasn’t as impacted by the fire. Later, the tribe found out that the state had gone ahead with salvage operations on the second parcel, bypassing the need for a tribal road permit by accessing it through an adjacent private property.
State and tribal forestry management practices stand in contrast here, where the corner of a recently logged state trust land parcel abuts lands managed by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
That lack of communication and difference in management strategies is evident on other state trust lands on the reservation: One logged state parcel is adjacent to a sensitive elk calving ground, while another parcel, logged in 2020, sits atop a ridgeline and impacts multiple streams with bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout. The uniformity and scale of the state logging — and the prioritization of profit and yield — do not align with the tribes’ forestry plans, which are tied to cultural values and use of land, Incashola said. “Sometimes the placement of (trust lands) affects cultural practices, or precludes cultural practices from happening on those tracts,” he said. “We can’t do anything about it, because they have the right to manage their land.”
Montana’s Department of Natural Resources and Conservation did not make anyone available to interview for this story, but answered some questions by email and said in a statement that the department “has worked with our Tribal Nations to ensure these lands are stewarded to provide the trust land beneficiaries the full market value for use as required by the State of Montana’s Constitution and the enabling legislation from Congress that created these trust lands.”
While logging used to be the tribe’s main income source, it has diversified its income streams since the 1990s. Now, the tribe’s long-term goal is for its forests to return to pre-settler conditions and to build climate resiliency by actively managing them with fire. The state’s Montana Climate Solutions Plan from 2020 acknowledged the CSKT as a leader on climate and recommended that the state support tribal nations in climate resilience adaptation. However, that suggestion remains at odds with the state’s management of, and profit from, reservation lands. The 640-acre parcel near the Mission Mountains that Incashola had never been able to visit because of the locked gate, for example, abuts tribal wilderness and is considered a sensitive area. Since 2015, the state has made $775,387.82 from logging that area.
The legislation that included the Montana-CSKT land exchange passed in 2020, but progress has been slow. The exchange doesn’t include all the state trust land on the reservation, which means the selection process of those acres is ongoing. The lands within the tribally protected areas, as well as those near the Mission Mountain Wilderness, are of high priority for the CSKT. There are some state lands that are ineligible, such as those that do not border tribal land. But the state has also interpreted the legislation to exclude subsurface acres that could be used for mining or other extractive activities. The tribe is steadfast that subsurface acres are included in the legislation. The impasse has complicated negotiations.
“It’s out-and-out land theft,” said Minnesota State Senator Mary Kunesh of state trust lands on reservations. Kunesh, a descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, has authored two bills that returned state land to tribes, each with a decade or more of advocacy behind it.
On the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe’s reservation in Minnesota, for example, the tribe owns only about 5 percent of the reservation, although federal legislation recently returned more than 11,000 acres of illegally taken national forest. Meanwhile, the state owns about 17 percent. That ownership has an impact. Tribes in Minnesota do not receive revenue from state trust lands on their reservations, nor do tribal schools, Kunesh says. “Hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars that could have perhaps been used to educate, to create housing, to create economic opportunity have been lost to the tribes,” Kunesh said. Still, “it’s not that the tribes want money. They want the land.”
Land return is contentious, but Kunesh has seen support for it from people of all backgrounds while working to pass legislation. “We do need our non-Native communities to stand up and speak the truth as they see it when it comes to returning the lands, and any kind of compensation, back to the tribes.”
But those land returns will also require political support from senators and representatives at both the state and federal level. “Ultimately, it is up to Congress to work with States and other affected interests to find solutions to these land management issues,” the National Association of State Trust Lands’ executive committee said in an email.
In some states, legislators have indicated strong resistance. Utah lawmakers passed a law this year that allows the state’s Trust Land Administration to avoid advertising state land sales. The law gives Utah’s Department of Natural Resources the ability to buy trust land at fair market value, ultimately avoiding possible bidding wars with other entities, like tribes. The legislation came after the Ute Indian Tribe outbid the Department of Natural Resources when trying to buy back almost 30,000 acres of state trust land on their reservation.
“It’s going to have to take the general public to get up in arms over it and say, ‘This is just morally wrong,’” said Stainbrook of the Indian Land Tenure Foundation. “We haven’t gotten to that point where enough people are standing up and saying that.”
The sun shines through the trees of the tribally managed Jocko Prairie on the Flathead Reservation on August 15. The Self-Determination Act of 1976 allowed CSKT to develop their own forest management plan that included the return of the previously banned prescribed burns. Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
Near the southeast edge of the Flathead Reservation is a place called Jocko Prairie — though it hasn’t looked like a prairie for some time — with stands of large ponderosa pines and other trees crowding in, a result of federal fire-suppression practices on tribal lands. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have worked to restore the prairie by keeping out cattle, removing smaller trees, and reintroducing fire. Land that was once crowded with thickets of brush is now opening up, and as more sunlight reaches the ground, grasses and flowers have come back.
This year in early June, a sea of blue-purple camas spread out on the ground under the trees, reactivated by fire after decades of lying dormant. It was a return.
A meadow of wildflowers in the Jocko Valley on the Flathead Reservation in August. Tailyr Irvine / Grist / High Country News
CREDITS
This story was reported and written by Anna V. Smith and Maria Parazo Rose. Data reporting was done by Maria Parazo Rose, Clayton Aldern, and Parker Ziegler. Aldern and Ziegler also produced data visuals and interactives.
Original photography for this project was done by Tailyr Irvine. Roberto (Bear) Guerra and Teresa Chin supervised art direction. Luna Anna Archey designed the magazine layout for High Country News. Rachel Glickhouse coordinated partnerships.
This project was edited by Tristan Ahtone and Kate Schimel. Additional editing by Jennifer Sahn and Katherine Lanpher. Kate Schimel and Jaime Buerger managed production. Meredith Clark did fact-checking, and Annie Fu fact-checked the project’s data. Copy editing by Diane Sylvain.
Despite tribes’ status as autonomous, sovereign nations, lands on federal Indian reservations provide revenue to state governments to pay for public schools, jails, universities, hospitals, and other institutions. A new investigation from Grist and High Country News reveals that more than 2 million surface and subsurface acres within the boundaries of reservations are used to support public institutions and reduce the financial burden of taxpayers through the leasing of land for oil and gas operations, grazing, timber harvesting, and more.
Powered by publicly available data, this new investigation identifies the state institutions benefiting from these lands, and provides information on many of the individuals and companies that lease them. In the second, major story in our series on state trust lands, we continue to detangle the ways in which Indigenous lands and resources bankroll public institutions, often at the expense of tribal citizens, Indigenous land management practices, and tribal sovereignty and self-determination.
Here are five takeaways from our investigation, which you can read in full here:
1 79 reservations in 15 states are pockmarked by more than 2 million acres of state trust lands.
State trust lands, on and off Indian reservations, make up millions of acres across the Western United States and generate revenue for public schools, universities, jails, hospitals, and other public institutions. Montana, for example, manages 5.2 million surface acres and 6.2 million subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other underground resources, and distributed $62 million for public institutions in 2023 with the majority going to K-12 schools — institutions serving primarily non-Indigenous people. Approximately 161,000 acres are contained on six reservations.
2 In at least four states, five tribal nations are themselves paying to lease land inside their own reservations — almost 58,000 collective acres.
Of all the Indigenous nations in the U.S. we identified that pay states to utilize their own lands, the Ute Tribe leases back the highest number of acres. And while not all states have publicly accessible lessee information with land-use records, of the ones that did, Grist and High Country News found that at least four other tribes also lease nearly 11,000 acres, combined, on their own reservations: the Southern Ute Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Laguna, and Zuni Tribe. According to state records, the vast majority of these tribally leased lands — 99.5 percent — are used for agriculture and grazing.
3 Fossil fuel infrastructure or activity is present on roughly a sixth of on-reservation trust lands nationwide.
Beneficiaries, including public schools, receive revenue generated from a variety of activities, including leases for roads and infrastructure, solar panel installations and commercial projects. On reservations where states manage subsurface rights, land ownership can be split — if a tribe, for instance, owns the surface rights while an oil company owns the subsurface rights — the subsurface owner can access its resources regardless of what the surface owner wants.
4 Of the 79 reservations that have state trust lands within their boundaries, tribes living on 49 of them have received federal Tribal Climate Resilience awards since 2011.
Tribal Climate Resilience awards are designed to fund and assist tribes in creating adaptation plans and conducting vulnerability and risk assessments as climate change increasingly threatens their homes. But with the existence of state trust lands inside reservation boundaries, coupled with state-driven resource extraction, many tribal governments face hard limits when trying to enact climate mitigation policies — regardless of how much money the federal government puts toward the problem.
5 Some states are attempting to create systems for returning trust lands to Indigenous control and in other states, land exchanges have already occurred or are in-progress.
State agencies can exchange trust lands on reservations for federal lands off-reservation, but the process is complicated by the state’s obligation to produce as much money as possible from trust lands for its beneficiaries. At the forefront are Washington, which is currently implementing legislation to return lands, and North Dakota, which is moving new legislation through Congress for the same purpose. But because of the lands’ value and the states’ financial obligations, it’s difficult to transfer complete jurisdiction back to Indigenous nations. Trust lands must be swapped for land of equal or greater value, which tends to mean that a transfer is only possible if the land in question doesn’t produce much revenue.
Jonila Castro is an activist working with AKAP Ka Manila Bay, a group helping displaced communities along Manilla’s rapidly-developing harbor maintain their livelihoods and homes. In recent years, projects like the $15-billion New Manila International Airport have been accused of destroying mudflats and fish ponds, and have already displaced hundreds of families and fishermen who rely on the waters of Manila Bay to make a living. Castro’s work has been focused on supporting these communities and dealing with the environmental impacts of development.
But on a rainy night in September, Castro and a friend, while ending their day advocating for the rights of fishing communities, were allegedly abducted by the Philippine military for their work.
“They covered our mouths and brought us to a secret detention facility,” she said. The military interrogators asked them questions about their work in environmental justice, and accused them of being communists. “It’s actually the situation of many activists and environmental defenders here in the Philippines.”
Castro and her friend were eventually released two weeks later, but in December of 2023, the Philippine Department of Justice filed charges against them both for “embarrassing” and casting the Philippine military in a “bad light.” The military has denied Castro’s accusations.
A new study from Global Witness, an international organization that focuses on human rights and documenting infractions, finds that tactics like what Castro experienced are happening to land defenders across the planet, often with deadly results. In 2023, almost 200 environmental activists were killed for “exercising their right to protect their lands and environment from harm.” These killings are often carried out alongside acts of intimidation, smear campaigns, and criminalization by governments and often in concert with companies. The report says violence often accompanies land acquisition strategies linked to the developmental interests of agricultural, fossil fuel, and green energy companies.
“Governments around the world, not only in the Philippines, have the obligation to protect any of their citizens,” said Laura Furones, lead author of the report. “Some governments are failing spectacularly at doing that, and even becoming complicit with some of those attacks or providing an operating environment for companies.”
Indigenous peoples are the most vulnerable to these tactics. Last year, around half of those killed for their environmental activism were Indigenous or Afrodescendents. Between 2012 and 2023, almost 800 Indigenous people have been killed protecting their lands or resources, representing more than a third of all environmental defenders killed around the world in that same time frame.
Colombia has the highest death toll of environmental land defenders, and the number has gone up in 2023. There are 79 documented cases representing the highest annual total that Global Witness has accounted for since 2012. Of those cases, 31 people were Indigenous. Other Latin American countries like Brazil, Honduras, and Mexico have consistently had the most documented cases of murders of environmental defenders.
Furones said with the rise of green energy projects, mining will continue to grow, and with it, the potential for violence against land defenders. Mining operations have resulted in the most loss of life according to Global Witness, and while most of these deaths occurred in Latin American countries last year, between 2012 and 2023, many occurred in Asia. Around 40 percent of killings related to mining have happened in Asia since 2012 and the report indicates there are many mineral resources in Asia that are important for green energy technologies.
“The region has significant natural reserves of key critical minerals vital for clean energy technologies, including nickel, tin, rare-earth elements, and bauxite,” the report said. “This might be good news for the energy transition, but without drastic changes to mining practices it could also increase pressure on defenders.”
This year, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues also looked into the rise of criminalization that land defenders face, while reporting from the forum showed that there has been very little done to protect Indigenous peoples’ rights over the last decade. A recent report from Climate Rights International, also on the criminalization of climate activism with a focus on Western democracies, like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, found that governments are violating basic tenets of freedom of expression and assembly in order to crack down on climate activists. In the United Kingdom, for example, five people associated with the group Just Stop Oil were given four- and five-year prison sentences for “conspiring to cause a public nuisance” by blocking a major roadway in London in order to bring attention to the abundant use of fossil fuels. They are the longest sentences ever given for non-violent protests in Britain. Taken together, the reports highlight how criminalization has become a strategy to discredit climate activists.
In the Philippines, Jonila Castro said she would continue to protect the people and places of Manila, but she does not go anywhere alone and said she feels like she’s always looking over her shoulder. She is currently facing six months of prison for her activities.
“I think the government is thinking that we will be silenced because we’re facing charges,” she said. “But I can’t think of a reason not to continue, and that’s the same with many of the environmental defenders and activists here.”
A new report from the United Nations found that the southwest Pacific region faced more extreme drought and rainfall than average last year and dozens of disasters, including two cyclones in Vanuatu. The report underscores long-held concerns about how climate change is drastically changing life for Indigenous peoples of the Pacific.
“The world has much to learn from the Pacific and the world must also step up to support your initiatives,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, last week at the Pacific Island Forum. His address coincided with the release of the report.
The Pacific Islands Forum is the premier diplomatic body for the region, representing both Pacific peoples who achieved independent statehood since World War II and territories that remain under Western rule.
“When governments sign new oil and gas licenses, they are signing away our future,” Guterres added.
The report said 2023 was one of the top three hottest years on record for the southwest Pacific region. Higher temperatures wrought a severe, six-month marine heat wave off the coast of Aotearoa, also known as New Zealand, while the two cyclones that hit Vanuatu in 2023 damaged more than 19,000 homes and disrupted health care services for an estimated 185,000 people.
The report’s findings resonate with Brianna Fruea, a 26-year-old musician and climate activist from Samoa. She’s part of Pacific Climate Warriors, an organization dedicated to advocating for climate action, and traces her ancestry not only to Samoa but also Tuvalu.
“It’s almost like we need Western science to validate what our people have already been saying just for the world to hear us,” she said.
Fruea is living in Aotearoa now, but when she last visited home in Samoa, she realized it had become so hot that there was a pause in rugby. “They weren’t allowing kids to play in the field because kids were passing out,” she said, adding that pausing the sport in the past would’ve been unheard of.
But climate effects aren’t limited to contemporary culture. In Fruea’s ancestral home of Tuvalu and on other islands like the Marshall Islands, communities are grappling with the cultural disruption of considering migrating entire villages within their nations. Existing social structures like chief designations are often based on geography and the makeup of villages and internal migration has the potential to upend those traditional social structures.
“If one village ceases to exist and they have to go and merge into another village, who then becomes the chief? Do they lose that complete structure?” Fruea said, adding that even within Samoa, every village has different rules and regulations, and that merging two of them would be challenging culturally.
The report said that the amount of annual climate financing in the Pacific region has been growing, but the vast majority — 86 percent — is through project-based interventions like strengthening coastal infrastructure in Tuvalu, while direct budget support represents just 1 percent. Both Guterres and Fruea highlighted the need for more funding as a pressing concern.
“It’s really important because the Pacific experiences the climate crisis intensely,” Fruea said. “With the trajectory we’re at with climate change, we have to think about the unthinkable.”
Alaska’s permafrost is melting and revealing high levels of mercury that could threaten Alaska Native peoples.
That’s according to a new study released earlier this month by the University of Southern California, analyzing sediment from melted permafrost along Alaska’s Yukon River.
Researchers already knew that the Arctic permafrost was releasing some mercury, but scientists weren’t sure how much. The new study — published in the journal Environmental Research Letters — found the situation isn’t good: As the river runs west, melted permafrost is depositing a lot of mercury into the riverbank, confirming some of scientists’ worst estimates and underscoring the potential threat to the environment and Indigenous peoples.
Mercury is a naturally occurring substance, but it can also be man-made. When ingested, the silvery metal can wreak havoc on the neurological system. Pregnant women and children are especially at risk, which is one reason why many governments issue health limits on what types of fish people should eat when they’re pregnant.
Previously, researchers thought that thawing permafrost released a minimum of 40 kilograms of mercury per square kilometer, or up to 150, a huge range that left a lot of room for uncertainty. The new study found that the minimum mercury release is actually twice as high, spanning from around 86 kilograms per square kilometer to as much as 131, and the method of confirming this by sifting through soil makes scientists more confident in their assessments.
Josh West, a professor of earth sciences and environmental studies at USC and one of the study’s co-authors, said the impending mercury exposure is highly concerning.
“Permafrost soil contains more mercury than all the other soil on the planet, plus all the oceans, plus the atmosphere,” he said. “So there’s an enormous amount of mercury sitting in these frozen soils where climate change is happening faster than the rest of the world.
“It has that sense of a bomb that’s going to go off,” he added.
Scientists analyzed sediments in sandbars and riverbanks near two villages in the northern part of the Yukon Village Basin, Beaver and Huslia. The research team included not only USC and university partners but also the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council, an Indigenous nonprofit representing dozens of First Nations and tribal nations dedicated to protecting the Yukon River Watershed.
West cautions that there’s still a lot unknown about the situation: Researchers are continuing to look into whether the mercury that’s released is turning into methylmercury, a toxic version of the substance that can cause brain damage if consumed. They’re also looking into whether the permafrost melting into the Yukon River is causing mercury to enter the fish that nearby residents, including Native peoples, rely on to eat. Whether that’s actually occurring remains unclear, and underscores the need for more data.
But what is known is that the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, and the thawing permafrost is already forcing some communities to relocate.
“Water is life for Indigenous people in Alaska and when permafrost thaws it just creates a slew of problems,” said Darcy Peter, who is Koyukon and Gwich’in Athabascan from Beaver, Alaska, and works on climate adaptation at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. Diminishing salmon runs are already a problem in the Yukon, in part due to warmer waters from climate change. Peter says her people haven’t seen salmon for several years. “When we do fish the last thing we want to be worried about is high mercury levels.”
Mercury poisoning among Indigenous peoples is already a global problem.
Mercury pollution doesn’t only cause health problems or risk discouraging Indigenous fishing practices. It also is another way climate change threatens the traditional cultural practices that Native people have engaged in for millennia. It’s a threat to the cultural identity of Native peoples, not just their health and physical existence.
“Where I’m from in Beaver there’s no grocery stores. We build our own cabins. We haul our own water. We hunt our own food,” Peter said. “We definitely feel it on a physical scale, an emotional scale, and a financial scale – the decline of salmon and the presence of mercury on the Yukon River.”
A company developing an industrial-scale solar panel array on Badger Mountain in Eastern Washington has paused permitting activities on the project amid concerns about impacts to Indigenous cultural sites.
The decision comes on the heels of an investigation by High Country News and ProPublica this year, which found that a land survey funded by the developer, Avangrid Renewables, had omitted more than a dozen sites of archaeological or cultural significance on the public parcel included in the project area. This survey is required by the state before it can permit the project so construction can begin.
In a June 27 letter to the state agency responsible for approving the project, Avangrid wrote that it will be pausing project planning for two to three months “while we re-evaluate public comments, including from our project landowners and affected tribal nations.”
The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation have objected to the Badger Mountain solar project for years, according to tribal business councilmember Karen Condon. They officially registered their opposition in May 2023, citing the foods, medicines, archaeological heritage sites, and other cultural resources found on the mountain. They were joined shortly after by the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. Both tribal nations have the right to access and use public lands in their ancestral territory, which includes the state-owned parcel on Badger Mountain.
Due to concerns from tribal nations and state agencies, the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, whose members are appointed by the governor, had previously ordered a redo of the cultural resources survey.
“While we are pausing permitting activities, Avangrid is continuing to evaluate other elements of the Badger Mountain project,” a company spokesperson said in an email to High Country News and ProPublica.
The future of the Badger Mountain solar project is unclear. Avangrid’s spokesperson wrote, “We have a strong relationship with [Washington’s Department of Natural Resources] on our operating projects and value their participation in advancing clean energy in the state and will continue to work with them to advance new clean energy projects.”
The Department of Natural Resources, which acts as the landlord for the parcel and evaluates the environmental and cultural impacts of projects on it, said the pause is a chance to have more discussions with tribes and potential stakeholders. “Each time people [go] out to the area, more and more archaeological sites and plant resources are seen and more concerns arise,” Louis Fortin, scientific consultation manager at the department, wrote in an email to High Country News and ProPublica.
Fortin noted that some leases with private landowners expired in December 2023, and that some of the landowners are not renewing those leases. The majority of the project is on private lands, suggesting that a major portion of the project may no longer be viable for reasons unrelated to cultural resources. Avangrid declined to answer inquiries about private landowners’ concerns.
In March, a group of Wenatchi-P’squosa people and their supporters gathered on Badger Mountain to demonstrate against the proposed solar development, which would impact critical foodways and sites of archaeological heritage.
After hearing of Avangrid’s pause in operations, one of the Wenatchi-P’squosa organizers, Darnell Sam, told High Country News and ProPublica he isn’t confident tribal concerns will meaningfully alter the course of development. “I still don’t trust the process,” he said, noting that the developer has already invested millions of dollars in the project. Sam is the traditional territories coordinator for the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, where the Wenatchi-P’squosa people are enrolled, but said this view is his own and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of his office.
His mistrust, he explained, is due in part to what he’s seen his neighbors at the Yakama Nation go through. For years, the nearby Yakama Nation has opposed a pumped hydro storage project, which has also been the subject of a High Country News and ProPublica investigation into how a federal agency dodged its consultation obligations, about 200 miles south of Badger Mountain. Despite tribal objections, that development has continued to advance.
“We’re not against green energy,” Sam said. “But where’s the responsible place for it to be?”
This article was produced in partnership with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.
In 2019, construction began on a natural gas pipeline that would cut through the unceded homelands of the Wet’suwet’en Nation in western Canada. Wet’suwet’en land and water protectors were forbidden from coming near the construction area operated by Coastal Gaslink, owned by TC Energy. However, the project was met almost immediately with resistance and gained international attention due to the tribe’s use of traditional law. Under Wet’suwet’en law, the pipeline trespassed on Wet’suwet’en land. With no treaty signed with Canada or Britain, Wet’suwet’en argue that their laws are still applicable — a political status recognized by the Canadian supreme court — and they have the right to evict Coastal Gaslink, and its pipeline, from its homelands.
In 2021, Chief Dsta’hyl, a Wet’suwet’en hereditary chief, and a group of land and water protectors commandeered a battery from a excavator owned by a Coastal Gaslink contractor, then a week later blocked two roadways used by construction crews. In the aftermath, he was arrested for breaking a court order, known as an injunction, that barred the group from disrupting the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline. In early July of 2024, he was sentenced to 60 days of house arrest.
Hereditary chiefs, like Dsta’hyl, are tasked with preserving their tribe’s culture, land, and people, and represent a different, older legal order than the band council system — elected officials of the tribe’s six bands recognized by the Canadian government. While Coastal Gaslink consulted and received approval from the Wet’suwet’en band councils, the company did not get permission from the hereditary chiefs.
Chief Dsta’hyl’s nonviolent approach to resisting the pipeline caught the attention of Amnesty International, who named him Canada’s first prisoner of conscience, a distinction given to people who are incarcerated for their politics, religion, or ethnicity, as well as other personal and protected statuses. Amnesty International said that there are potentially thousands of prisoners of conscience across the world, and called for Chief Dsta’hyl’s immediate release.
Grist spoke with Chief Dsta’hyl at his home in Wet’suwet’en territory about his resistance to the Coastal GasLink pipeline, and his recognition as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
My English name is Adam Ganon, but my respected chief name is Dsta’hyl, which in our language means, “in the wake of a whale.” I’ve been one of the hereditary chiefs in the Sun House for well over 40 years now. I was in my mid 20s when I got the name. I have a lot of responsibility to the Sun House and our clan. Once you start doing work for your nation, you keep doing it, right from the time you take the name till you translate out of this world.
Q. You were arrested three years ago outside of your camp on Wet’suwet’en territory. Can you tell me how that went and where it happened?
A. It was cold and wet when they arrested me. I was not near the camp we had. I was just going for a drive and I was just doing a reconnaissance drive to check out what the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) were doing. Two Coastal GasLink trucks were following me, which I didn’t mind. But I guess they were on the same channel as the RCMP. So, once they knew that I was leaving the camp, they radioed ahead and when I got onto a bridge, the RCMP lights came on and they blocked me. That’s where they did the arrest.
Q. From what I understand, Coastal GasLink didn’t consult with the hereditary chiefs, they went to the band councils, which only have jurisdiction on reserve. But hereditary chiefs were found to have authority over traditional lands in 1997 by the Canadian supreme court. Can you tell me more about that?
A. In no way shape or form did Coastal GasLink ever communicate with their hereditary chiefs to get permission. What the provincial government did was encourage them to deal with the band councils and not to deal with the land owners, the actual hereditary chiefs, because band councils are just puppet governments for the federal government, and they only have jurisdiction on reserve and that’s only 2 square miles.
What we decided to do is move under Wet’suwet’en law, because the government wasn’t looking after us. The courts weren’t looking after us. Nobody was looking after our land. So, the hereditary chiefs decided that we were going to use our old trespass laws, that have been around for thousands of years, to basically deal with the trespassers on our territory.
Q. Can you explain what a hereditary chief is?
A. Hereditary chiefs come from different groups. In the Wet’suwet’en, we have 13 house groups. And in those 13 house groups, we have five clans. We have the Gilseyhu, which is the Big Frog clan. The Laksilyu is the Small Frog. Then we have the Gitdumden, which is the bear and wolf clan. Then we have the Tsayu, the Beaver clan, and the Laksamshu, which is the fireweed clan, which is us.
So, the hereditary chiefs, they get their name bestowed upon them. They go through the feasts there before they’re fully recognized by the rest of the hereditary chiefs.
When I got my name, one of the things I was groomed to know was the moment you accept that name you are no longer your own person. From that moment on you will only act in the best interest of your people. I have full responsibility, right to the day I die, to protect what we have.
One of the things that the matriarchs always said, back in the ’70s, I used to hear them say, “You know that you can sell your land and the money will be spent in a few years, and then you will have nothing?” So, what they said is, “We don’t sell our land because the land is just who we are.” If you don’t have your land, what are your children going to have, and what are their children going to have? It goes on generationally.
Q. The Canadian government recognizes the authority of the hereditary chiefs, so if they claim to recognize your authority, how can this pipeline have been built?
A. It’s a smoke screen. They’re trying to appease the nation and appease the other First Nations by making these claims. But the willingness to follow through is not entirely there. What they are doing is using it as a means to try and negotiate and chisel us out of more and more land. One of the the things that they are trying to do is deal only with the band councils for all the different land claims, which undermines all of the chiefs.
Q. I saw a video of you helping serve an eviction notice to the construction crew. I’d be scared. What were you feeling when you were doing that?
A. When you’re doing right, you’re not scared. When you’re doing something here that is real, there is no fear involved. Nothing brings fear to me, I’ve been like that my whole life. When I see injustice I have to work towards that, mitigating problems that we are facing. Come up with a solution. As a chief, our job is to mitigate all the situations, not to dwell on them and complain about them, but meet them head-on and meet them honestly.
Q. In 2020, a year after the pipeline’s construction, the Wet’suwet’en sued the Canadian government for its lack of movement on climate change. Can you talk about how climate change affects your work, and the land you’re on?
A. One of the things we are faced with is we have over 80 percent of our territories logged, which means it’s now just a moonscape. When spring comes, there’s no canopy to allow for the snow to melt slowly. We end up with drought because in the past, snow would be there for half the summer, so you wouldn’t get the really fast runoff that we have today.
My dad was in the logging industry his whole life and when I was young, one of the things that I observed is that they used fairly responsible forestry, because everything was selectively logged. And then all of a sudden in the late ’60s, the industry started pushing for clear-cut logging with these big multinational companies. They try to destroy what little we have.
It disrupts the wildlife, all of the larger mammals that we live on. All the moose, elk, and deer are being displaced. We’ve been displaced. Bears have been displaced. Everything has been displaced.
The province wanted to cull moose, and we already have a shortage of moose in our territories, and they just wanted to cull more to starve us out. It’s like the same thing with bison on the prairies, they killed all the buffalo to try and starve all the First Nations People out. Just dastardly tactics there to try and eliminate First Nations people.
Climate change is very serious here. Because you look at what oil and gas has done. They call it natural gas, too, and it’s pretty much all hydraulically fracked gas, which disrupts all of the water tables and aquifers. It destroys water.
Q. While being trained as a hereditary chief, did your dad talk about being a part of the logging industry, and how the industry was turning more extractive?
A. My dad never ever talked about anything like that. My mom was more concerned. She was the one that started to groom me as a hereditary chief at 13. She made me think about it and told me, “The moment you take that name, you will no longer be your own person. From this day on you are going to belong to your people, and you will act in the best interest for your people from that day onward.” It’s a big responsibility that was bestowed upon not just myself, but upon any chief.
Q. In your spirit, how are you feeling about this fight right now as you are under house arrest?
A. It’s bringing me strength to what I’m going through right now. It just makes me stronger. Wet’suwet’en laws have to be recognized across the country, and I’ll keep up the fight.
On Aug. 8, 2023, 13-year-old Kaliko was getting ready for her hula class at her mother’s house in West Maui. The power was out, and she heard there was a wildfire in Lāhainā, where her dad lived, but she didn’t think much of it. Wildfires happened all the time in the summer.
Within hours, Kaliko learned this wasn’t a normal fire, and that her dad’s house was gone. The Lāhainā fire consumed the town, killing 102 people and destroying more than 2,000 buildings, the flames fanned by a potent combination of climate change and colonialism.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the deadliest wildfire in modern United States history, one that changed Hawaiʻi forever and made Kaliko more determined to defend her community.
The wildfire on Maui killed more than 100 people who are honored in this memorial. Lindsey Wasson / AP Photo
This summer she was part of a group of plaintiffs who forced the state of Hawaiʻi to agree to decarbonize its transportation system, which is responsible for half of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. (Grist is only using her first name because she is a minor and filed the lawsuit without her surname.)
Now 14, she has spent the past year going to protests and testifying at water commission meetings to defend Indigenous water rights. She sees her advocacy as part of her kuleana, a Hawaiian word that connotes both a privilege and responsibility, to her community in West Maui where her Native Hawaiian family has lived for 19 generations.
“I’m from this place, it’s my main kuleana to take care of it like my kupuna have in the past,” she said, referring to her ancestors.
Across the country and globe, young people are filing lawsuits to try to hold governments and companies accountable for their role in promoting climate change. At the center of many are Indigenous youth like Kaliko who feel an enormous urgency and responsibility to step up and protect their land and cultural resources from this latest colonial onslaught on their way of life.
In May, eight Alaska residents age 11 to 22 — half of whom are Alaska Native — sued the state to block a liquid natural gas pipeline project that’s expected to triple the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. In June, Indigenous youth and environmental groups in New Mexico won a key initial victory in a lawsuit challenging the oil and gas industry.
In July, the Montana Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Held v. Montana, a lawsuit brought by Montana youth challenging the state’s law that forbids agencies from considering climate change in their environmental reviews. The plaintiffs include Native American youth who say worsening wildfires and warmer days are making it harder to continue their cultural traditions.
In the immediate aftermath of the Lāhainā wildfire, drone photos captured huge swaths of burned-out land on the once idyllic coastline. Jae C. Hong / AP
It’s not just the United States. In 2022, Indigenous youth in Australia won a major victory against a destructive coal project. A few years earlier, Indigenous youth in Colombia joined a broader youth lawsuit that affirmed the rights of the Amazon to protection and conservation.
Korey G. Silverman-Roati, a fellow at the Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said there’s growing recognition that not only are Indigenous people uniquely susceptible to climate impacts but their unique human rights protections can lend extra power to climate cases.
The lawsuit Kaliko helped bring wasn’t centered on Indigenous legal rights but most of the plaintiffs were Native youth like her, and they collectively secured one of the most successful outcomes in the history of U.S. climate litigation. “That might be a signal to future folks interested in bringing climate litigation that these might be especially persuasive plaintiffs,” Silverman-Roati said.
New Mexico Indigenous and environmental groups sue the state to stop oil and gas pollution. Morgan Lee / AP
To Katy Stewart, who works at the Aspen Center’s Center for Native American Youth, the willingness of Indigenous youth like Kaliko to take the lead in these cases makes sense. Her organization recently surveyed more than 1,000 Indigenous youth and conducted focus groups to learn what they care about. When it came to climate change, emotions ran hot.
“What we are seeing and hearing a lot was anger, frustration and a want to do something,” she said. “It was hopeful to me that there wasn’t sort of a ‘giving up and this is over for us,’ more of, ‘we need to do something because we’re the ones seeing this right now.’”
For teenagers like Kaliko, litigation offers an opportunity to force change in a political and economic system that has long resisted calls to climate action. It also feels like a necessary step to protect her home.
“It’s really important to me that other kids don’t have to go through what I’ve experienced and that’s what drives me to do this stuff,” Kaliko said. “But it’s really just like the thought of, ‘If I don’t do it, then who will?’”
When Johnny Juarez from Albuquerque thinks of climate change, he thinks of New Mexico’s oil fields, vast and expansive and dominant in the state’s economy. Juarez is 22, and in the time he’s been alive, the state’s oil production has ramped up 10 times.
New Mexico has the second-highest oil production of any U.S. state, fueling a multi-billion dollar revenue surplus last year. Jeri Clausing / AP
The drilling has expanded even though there’s scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is causing incredible damage to the earth. It’s ramped up despite harmful air pollution affecting neighboring communities, and regardless of the deadly risks to workers, such as in the case of Randy Yellowman, a 47-year-old Native American man killed in an explosion in 2019.
Talking about the harms of the oil and gas industry is hard in New Mexico, though, because it’s such an entrenched economic driver. Yellowman had been on the job 17 years when he was killed. Juarez, an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Laguna, knows Native families whose parents and grandparents worked in the oil fields and see it as a viable career for themselves and their children.
Johnny Juarez is one of the plaintiffs in a climate lawsuit in New Mexico.
Courtesy of Joshua Mike-Bidtah
“What a just transition looks like to us is centering those families that are going to be most impacted and making sure that they get the support they need,” Juarez said. Juarez has talked a lot about the “just transition” in his job as a community organizer, the concept of moving away from fossil fuels to rely instead on green energy and doing so in a way that respects the rights of marginalized peoples.
He thinks it’s an essential step, and that’s one of the reasons he’s one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit in New Mexico that contends the state is violating its constitution by failing to control pollution caused by the fossil fuel industry.
To Juarez, suing to stop the fossil fuel industry feels like a necessary continuation of his family’s legacy of standing up against environmental racism. Long before he was born, his great-grandfather sued the Jackpile Mine, a gigantic open-pit uranium mine, for violating their property rights. The family lost their suit, and decades after the mine closed, Indigenous families continue to deal with the environmental fallout of the mine.
Juarez’s family left the reservation because of the uranium pollution, and Juarez grew up in Albuquerque, where he was raised by his grandfather, a former sheep-herder and graduate of a federal Indian boarding school. Still, they returned to the reservation to celebrate feast days and Juarez’ childhood is peppered with memories of fishing with his grandfather and watching cultural dances.
Johnny Juarez as a child sitting with his grandfather
Courtesy of Johnny Juarez
“As Pueblo people, we’re really fortunate that, despite very violent attempts, we were never removed from our ancestral homelands and reside exactly where the colonizers found us,” he said. Environmental justice feels like another birthright.
“This was actually a fight that I was really born into,” Juarez said. “The fossil fuel industry and fossil fuel extraction and fracking and oil and gas exploration is really just the next chapter in colonial extractivism in New Mexico.”
That’s exactly how Beze Gray of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation in Canada feels. In 2019, they joined a group of seven young people, three of whom are Indigenous, who sued the government of Ontario for weakening its climate goals. Gray grew up in the shadow of dozens of chemical plants and oil refineries and saw firsthand how their pollution hurt their community. Now, compounding that harm are climate change-fueled shorter winters that are making it tougher to continue Indigenous ways of living.
“We used to have a month to do sugar bushing and now it’s spread out into days,” Gray said of their traditional practice of collecting maple water and boiling it into sugar. “This feeling of loss and grief of experiencing life with climate change — it impacts so many of our traditional ways.”
Beze Gray is a plaintiff in a lawsuit in Canada challenging Ontario’s climate policy. David LeBlanc / Ecojustice
Even though Juarez’s lawsuit passed its first legal hurdle, it’s far from clear whether it’ll be successful. Gray’s case, too, has faced setbacks and is awaiting a ruling on appeal. Many climate lawsuits don’t go anywhere — a court decides that the people suing don’t have standing, or the law doesn’t say what the plaintiffs think it does, or a judge decides that their concerns are valid but they sued the wrong defendants the wrong way.
Those disappointments have taught plaintiffs to be persistent. Our Children’s Trust is an Oregon-based nonprofit that has spearheaded many of the youth-led lawsuits in the U.S., including the cases in Montana and Hawaiʻi. When their attorney Andrew Well talks about their Alaska case, he clarifies that their current litigation is called Sagoonick v. State of Alaska II. A previous lawsuit, Sagoonick v. State of Alaska, with the same named plaintiff, failed after a judge ruled that the youth couldn’t sue the state for its systemic actions but could challenge particular state agency decisions. So that’s what they’re doing this time, challenging the state’s support of a proposed 800-mile liquified natural gas pipeline stretching from north to south.
Sagoonick was just 15 when the first lawsuit was filed. Over the past 10 years, climate change in Alaska has accelerated, with the state warming twice as fast as the rest of the country. Permafrost is thawing, salmon are disappearing from the Yukon River, and crabs are missing from the Bering Sea. By the time this next case resolves, the Alaska that she grew up with may not exist.
Permafrost melts in the town of Quinhagak on the Yukon Delta in Alaska. MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images
Stewart from the Center for Native American Youth said not only are Indigenous youth watching their climate change firsthand, but they’re also experiencing climate loss on top of existing trauma. Youth like Juarez are just a generation or two away from government boarding schools that ripped Indigenous children away from their homes in an attempt to assimilate them. Now, many are in the process of trying to reclaim the cultures and languages that were stolen from generations before, but are confronting the reality that a warmer earth could prevent many traditions from persisting.
Becoming plaintiffs in climate lawsuits is a way of combating that grief and turning it into something productive.
“If you can take this despair and anger and frustration and be able to put it somewhere, that does wonders for your own self esteem and your own belief in the future and your own hope for the future,” Stewart said. “The starting point of believing that you matter is being listened to. And I think we’re seeing young people stepping into that role and having hope that things can get better.”
A sign is seen at a roadside memorial dedicated to the Maui wildfires April 2024. Marco Garcia / AP
Holding onto that hope isn’t easy. The day Lāhainā burned, Kaliko was shocked, but thinks it may have been easier for her to stomach the loss because it wasn’t the first time she had lost a home.
She was just eight years old back in 2018 when a tropical storm hit Maui. No such storm had ever made landfall on the island before, but her mom had a bad feeling about this one and so she told Kaliko to pack up some of her things and they left.
Theirs were the only family in the valley they knew of that evacuated, and when they came back, theirs was the only house that had been completely destroyed by flooding. Gone were the paintings in Kaliko’s bedroom, including the pretty one of the cardinal above her bed. Gone were her dresses, including her favorite pink-and-green one with a lei on it.
In that way, the grief of the Lāhainā wildfire felt familiar. But this time, her whole life was upended. Suddenly, school was completely online. Then she and her classmates were moved to a temporary campus. She couldn’t go to the beaches where she used to swim after the state blocked off the burn area. She didn’t see her friends as often because they were moving around a lot and missing a lot of classes.
Kaliko dances at a celebration of the climate settlement at ʻIolani Palace in late June in Honolulu.
Elyse Butler / Earthjustice
Kaliko felt grateful that she had her mom’s house, that she hadn’t been in Lāhainā the day of the fire, and that she hadn’t lost loved ones the same way that other kids did. But she also felt scared.
“This is just going to keep happening,” she thought. The realization is motivating her to join the Department of Transportation’s youth council created by her lawsuit’s settlement so that she can hold the state accountable to its decarbonization promises.
More recently, in a lot of ways, life has gone back to normal. This summer, she attended her eighth grade banquet, graduated from middle school, and competed in the state championships with her outrigger canoe paddling team.
Still, she feels acutely aware that everything can change overnight. And she doesn’t want what happened to her to happen to anyone else.
Twenty-one years from now — the deadline for the state of Hawaiʻi to decarbonize its transportation system — Kaliko hopes to still be living at home, doing what she can to make a difference.
“I want to mainly be advocating for my community,” she said. “I don’t think I can imagine myself doing anything else.”
Julie Cassadore was stunned when the wildfire ripped through the San Carlos Apache Reservation this July. “The whole downtown was on fire,” she said. “It was just huge, huge, huge clouds of black smoke, and you could hear what sounded like propane tanks exploding. I saw people running with their children.”
“We were driving around burnt dogs with their burnt paws,” she said. “We were doing that all night.”
But San Carlos doesn’t have an animal shelter of its own, so Cassadore has worked hard the last month to find safe homes for the 20 animals rescued that night.
The Watch Fire began with arson, but high temperatures and drier conditions driven by climate change exacerbated the blaze. As global temperatures rise and events like wildfires become more extreme, the stakes are rising for Indigenous communities and their animals. A lack of animal shelters and foster homes are driving higher euthanasia rates while intense heat puts dogs and cats without homes in serious danger. Between the nationwide shortage of veterinarians, underfunded infrastructure in Indigenous communities, and an increase in the animals in need of care, climate change is impacting the beloved “rez dog” in a myriad of ways.
Much of the problem has roots in the COVID-19 outbreak. In 2020, as the virus spread and lockdowns were put in place, animal spay and neuter clinics across the country were shut down. On the Leech Lake Reservation, for instance, puppy season used to generally begin in the spring. Now, it lasts nearly all year. “Puppy season has been going on on the reservation for over two years now, and in 15 years of doing this I have never seen it like this,” said Jennifer Fitzer of Leech Lake Legacy, an animal rescue organization on the Reservation.
“Pre-pandemic I had easily 20 spots every weekend,” said Fitzer. Now, she says, it’s difficult to find places for even one dog. “It is a very, very, very hard time in animal rescue right now.”
Fitzer adds that with summers getting hotter, she’s seeing more and more animals suffering from dehydration.
Norman Begay is Díne and the animal control program manager on the Navajo Nation. He said that his office gets calls for about 20 dogs a day, and estimates that there are around 180,000 unhoused dogs on the reservation. His office only has 12 officers and no adoption program to keep animals long term. “It’s a liability,” he said. “Some of these dogs are dangerous.” In 2021 a 13-year-old girl on the reservation was killed by a pack of dogs.
Of the animals that are picked up on Navajo Nation, heat is still an issue. “If it’s too hot out, we can’t have dog walkers take them out in the middle of the day,” said Stacie Voss, shelter manager at the Farmington Animal Shelter in Arizona, a two-hour drive away from Navajo Nation. She said summer is their busy season and that 15 percent of their intake comes from the Navajo Nation.
There are no statistics on how many unhoused animals live in Indigenous communities, but the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals estimates that 6.5 million dogs and cats entered U.S. shelters in 2023. Only 4.8 million were adopted.
“Shelters across the country are more crowded,” wrote Partners with Native Americans, a nonprofit that provides funding for animal care in tribal communities. “It has become more difficult to relocate dogs to off-reservation shelters for adoption.”
Because euthanasia rates increase exponentially in areas without accessible spay or neuter clinics, tribes have been working to curb animal populations in creative ways. On the Wind River Reservation, the Northern Arapaho Tribe converted a mobile COVID testing vehicle into a mobile spay and neuter clinic to help deal with the unhoused animal population, while the Partnership with Native Americans, a nonprofit that provides financial assistance to Indigenous communities, has committed to investing $100,000 a year for tribal spay and neuter clinics, foster homes, and education efforts to support the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Tribe, Navajo Nation, White Mountain Apache Reservation, and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. The Humane Society of Western Montana has partnered with the Blackfeet Nation, Chippewa Cree Tribe, and the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribe to provide spay and neuter clinics, vaccines, and adoption help.
A few years ago, Julie Cassadore, from San Carlos Apache, said nearby shelters wouldn’t take animals from her reservation due to discrimination. “Bottom line, you aren’t helping us because we are Apaches,” she recalls telling a nearby shelter that refused to take dogs from San Carlos.
But that moment inspired her to start the Geronimo Animal Rescue Team, and this year, she won the More Than A Pet Community Hero Award from the Humane Society, with the help of her all-Apache volunteer team. Now, she has support from the San Carlos Tribal Council to build an animal shelter on the reservation — a step that Cassadore said will help more animals as the days get hotter.
“People can come and be able to foster and adopt our dogs, instead of us having to take them off the reservation,” she said. “We hope for that to happen.”
The one-story home 100 yards from Lāhainā Harbor where Tiare Lawrence grew up was a typical Hawaiʻi plantation home, a historic architectural style with a wide-hipped roof, a wooden light blue exterior, and a purple bougainvillea bush in the front yard.
It’s where her grandmother grew up, and her mother and aunties and uncles too. For more than a century, her family held onto the home, even as the number of Native Hawaiian families in Lāhainā dwindled, property taxes rose, and the town around them morphed into a tourism hub. In high school, Lawrence would wake up at dawn before school and carry her surfboard from the carport to her favorite surf spot, paddling as the sun’s rays softly lightened the West Maui sky.
Her voice breaks when she talks about it now: the banana patch her grand-uncle tended, the countless family gatherings, the family photos now lost forever after the house burned in a vicious wildfire last summer.
Thursday will mark one year since a wildfire ripped through Lāhainā, killing more than 100 people in the deadliest wildfire in modern United States history. The violent inferno devastated the coastal community, burning more than 2,000 buildings and displacing thousands of residents. This week, the community has scheduled many events to commemorate the disaster: surfers will paddle out en masse, families will gather at the Lāhainā Civic Center, and more than 100 Kānaka Maoli sixth graders will put on a stage production to honor the history of the town, once the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
The anniversary comes on the heels of a $4.037 billion tentative settlement announced Friday. In the wake of the fires, victims filed hundreds of lawsuits against the utility believed to have sparked the fire and the landowners whose dry grasslands served as ready fuel. Settlement talks were delayed in part due to a fight over who should get paid first, the victims or insurance companies. More than 100 insurers filed lawsuits to recoup billions they’ve already paid out.
A public hillside memorial to the victims of the worst U.S. wildfire in modern history in Lāhainā,
Mario Tama / Getty Images
That issue still hadn’t been resolved when Hawaiʻi Gov. Josh Green announced Friday that the parties had reached a proposed settlement. The bulk of the money — $1.99 billion — will come from Hawaiian Electric, an amount that’s expected to enable the utility to avoid bankruptcy. It’s not yet clear how the rest of the funding will be split up amongst other defendants, which include the State of Hawaiʻi and Maui County as well as private entities. Insurers have 90 days to resolve their claims in the wake of the tentative agreement.
So there are still many unanswered questions about when Maui residents will actually get their money, and how the funding would be split amongst survivors, attorneys, and insurance companies. But once those questions are answered, the settlement could be a crucial boost to displaced families and a remarkably quick conclusion to litigation that elsewhere has dragged on for years.
It would also be yet another data point underscoring the high cost of wildfire disasters, which are expected to grow more frequent as climate change worsens. Last year, PacifiCorp agreed to pay $299 million to victims of the 2020 Archie Creek fire in Oregon, with plaintiffs receiving an average of $646,000 each. In California, Pacific Gas and Electric settled claims related to the deadly Camp Fire that killed 85 people for $13.5 billion as part of their bankruptcy case.
On the West Coast, the pattern of devastation followed by lawsuits and large settlements has become a familiar cadence, one that’s been criticized for its lack of effectiveness in making victims whole. Sometimes, recipients see big tax bills that cut into needed payouts. Others argue the litigation is merely a Band-Aid on the underlying problem of climate change, allowing the federal government — it generally isn’t a defendant — to continue to duck its role in facilitating fossil fuel emissions.
In Hawaiʻi, grassroots organizations are concerned that individual settlements will fall short of addressing the expensive infrastructure improvements that are needed in order for the community to truly rebuild. Several groups like the Lāhainā Community Land Trust sent a letter to litigation parties in July urging them to consider including funding for a master-planned community and other necessities in the discussions. Four billion is a third of the $12 billion estimated overall cost of the disaster.
“We have one shot to do this right,” the organizations posted on social media. “And while individual cash payouts are crucial to the immediate relief of many, they donʻt get us much closer to that collective objective.”
Not everyone is tracking the settlement closely. Randy Dadez, whose rental home burned down in the fire, hadn’t seen last week’s headlines about a looming settlement because he’s been busy working as a shuttle driver for a West Maui hotel and taking care of his wife and four kids.
“I have zero thought about money to be honest with you,” he said. “To be honest, money is the furthest thing from my mind.”
Instead, he’s worrying about his four kids, aged 9 through 22, and the stress they’ve been under since they became homeless in the disaster. For months they bounced around between hotels: first the Fairmont, then the Hyatt, then a long stretch in Honua Kai Resort, then the Royal Lahaina. It wasn’t until last month that the Federal Emergency Management Administration finally moved them into a house. But they’re only there until February. After that, Dadez doesn’t know what’s next.
Of course money would help, he said. His dad’s house, which had been in the family since 1938, burned down, and it didn’t have insurance. Rebuilding would be costly: home construction costs on Maui can easily run $350 per square foot, or more than half a million dollars for a 1,500-square-foot house.
But Dadez is skeptical about how far any settlement money would actually go, and is a lot more concerned with juggling his daily responsibilities, including ferrying his wife and children to and from medical appointments for migraines, scoliosis, anxiety, and various other maladies.
“All I pray for is that we have good health and I tell the Lord if there’s anything extra, it’s OK,” he said.
Lawrence, the Native Hawaiian community organizer, is also watching settlement news skeptically. She wasn’t living at her family home the day of the fire. But her grand-uncle, her sister, and her brother were all in Lāhainā and managed to escape. Lawrence has spent the past year raising money for disaster relief and coordinating community projects. She’s also watched family after family leave, moving to Oregon, Washington state, and Las Vegas. What she wants most of all is for the settlement money to go to Lāhainā families to enable them to rebuild their community. She thinks of her 82-year-old grand-uncle. He’s doing OK, but doesn’t have decades to wait.
“He, like everyone else, would rather be home,” she said.
The green transition will deepen entrenched socioeconomic barriers for Indigenous peoples — unless Western forms of science and ongoing settler colonialism are addressed by researchers. That’s according to a new study out this month focused on the use, and abuse, of Indigenous knowledge to solve climate change. Despite disenfranchisement, researchers added, Indigenous nations remain the best stewards of the land.
Focused on environmental oral histories of the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware, the study examined how the nation strengthened tribal sovereignty by revitalizing connections to land. This has included re-introducing freshwater mussels into the ecosystem as a way to clean local waterways, and growing ancestral plants for food, medicine, and textiles in urban areas.
“We as a people, and all the Native people on the East Coast, have been dealing with environmental changes for thousands of years,” said Dennis White Otter Coker, the principal chief of the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware, in the report.
Researchers argue that it is impossible to separate the effects of climate change from the history of land dispossession and violence endured by Indigenous peoples, and contend that that legacy continues in Western science practices aimed at finding climate solutions. For example, previous studies have found that organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are biased towards Western sciences over Indigenous knowledge, and their reports “problematically unquestioned,” regardless of the international organization’s own reports finding colonialism to be a key factor in climate change.
“Western Science is really what dominates the way we talk about climate adaptation,” said Lyndsey Naylor, an author on the paper from the University of Delaware. She added that Western science has a hard time meaningfully integrating tribal projects into research, sometimes dismissing their insights completely. Western researchers often have an extractive relationship with tribes where institutions will come into communities, take what they need, and leave.
“Indigenous knowledge is either subsumed [or] appropriated,” Naylor said. “Or like, ‘Hey that’s cute, but we know what we are doing.’”
But despite biases by governments toward Western sciences, Indigenous nations are integrating traditional knowledge to fight climate change across the world. From the plains in North America, where tribes are reintroducing buffalo as a way to support healthy habitats and ecosystems, to the Brazilian Amazon, where Indigenous-protected territories show 83 percent lower deforestation rates than settler-controlled areas. Indigenous science, and control, hold keys to fighting climate change.
However, those Indigenous innovations still face challenges, notably from the green transition. In Arizona, for example, the San Carlos Apache have been fighting for years to protect Oak Flat — an area of the highest religious importance to the tribe and a critical wildlife habitat — from copper mining. The proposed mine would be integral to the production of batteries for electric vehicles while entrenching long-term climate impacts and destroying an integral piece of the Apache’s culture and wiping out important ecology in the area.
Faisal Bin Islam, a co-author on the study who specializes in the effects of climate change in colonial contexts, said that Western science has a “savior complex,” and continuing to ignore historical and contemporary colonial violence in Indigenous communities only deepens those ways of thinking.
“In a settler colonial future, we might end up inventing a technology or process that reduces emissions significantly to avert the consequences of climate change,” he said. “However, it will not end colonial dispossession and violence.”
In Oklahoma, Indigenous communities are the most likely to be at risk of flooding, with one recent study showing the danger increases by more than five times when compared to surrounding areas.
The reason for the risk: location.
“We get stuck in places where nobody else wants to live,” said Theresa Tsoodle, who is Pawnee from Andarko, a small community in central Oklahoma and who led the new analysis.
A researcher for the University of Oklahoma, Tsoodle said that the study suggests future flooding can be mitigated by federal and state agencies working with tribes to better understand the ecology of the area.
“We’re on these lands where the soil might be poor, and wetlands — that would help drain surface water — are missing,” she said.
Help might be on the way. The United States Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced last week that $120 million are available to fund tribal efforts to become more resilient to climate-fueled extreme weather, including flooding in places like Oklahoma.
Oklahoma’s State Climatologist Gary McManus said that while spring is the official flooding season for the area, it is now a problem to worry about all year. Like in many parts of the world, climate change in Oklahoma, is creating an atmosphere more prone to severe bouts of precipitation, from snow to sleet to and rain.
“With the warming of the atmosphere, we have more evaporation and warmer air, more of that water vapor. It lends itself to more intense weather events,” he said.
Floods cause a lot of damage, like loss of life, property damage, and soil erosion. And other weather events such as wildfires and heat waves can make the ground hard and less absorbent, increasing the risk of flooding. And for many tribes, recovering from a flood can take years, if it happens at all.
According to her research, Tsoodle can see the Indigenous population in Oklahoma growing to nearly 600,000 people by the end of the century. But the larger the population, the more vulnerable, she said.
Implementing traditional knowledge from tribes into flood policy could be something as nature-based as ensuring that livestock graze sustainably, to ensure soil quality.
This recent injection of federal funds from the government can help get some of these recommendations off the ground, as many tribal nations might not have the money to implement some of these supports.
But Tsoodle said that’s only half the battle. For tribal knowledge to be integrated into infrastructure and methodology, it has to come from tribal members.
“Funding is some part of it,” she said. “The paradigm shift is not necessarily top-down, but community driven and inclusive.”
As a kid, Mary Kunesh watched her dad travel from reservation to reservation in northern Minnesota, working as a pro bono attorney for tribal nations who needed legal assistance. She heard stories from her grandfather about her family’s history, filled with brave Lakota women like her aunt Josephine Gates, the first tribal chair of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
As a child, Kunesh learned how the U.S. forced Native people from their homelands, agreed to provide housing, education and economic opportunities in exchange, then reneged on those agreements. She learned how settlers changed the landscape by erasing forests and eliminating buffalo, and how dam construction displaced Indigenous peoples, again, making it possible for mills and factories to pollute the water and air.
But as Kunesh got older, she realized that history wasn’t widely known: Non-native people around her often accepted reservations as normal and didn’t realize just how tribal nations arrived there.
Now, Kunesh is the first Native person to serve in the Minnesota Senate.
“There are a lot of people who say, well that was then, we should just forget about the past and move on. But no, legally, those lands belong to the tribe, and they should be returned to the tribe to be the steward of the land,” she said.
Grist spoke with Kunesh about what motivates her, and what she sees as the future of the Land Back movement.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Minnesota Democratic Sen. Mary Kunesh, of New Brighton, speaks at the State Capitol in St. Paul, Minnesota, with members of the People of Color and Indigenous Caucus on, Monday, May 22, 2023.
Trisha Ahmed / AP Photo
Q. How would you describe the connection between the land back movement and climate change?
A. A lot of the lands here in Minnesota that we’re asking to be returned have been stripped of all of their timber. They’re commercialized — the lake, and the shorelines are commercialized, and have a lot of people coming and going and bringing in invasive species, not treating the environment the way that they should. When it was just the Indigenous people on the lands, the lands were healthy, the four legged animals were in sync with the seasons and it was a symbiotic relationship with the human beings. It’s important that we allow the tribes to go back to their Indigenous roots of caring for the lands and I think we’ll see a really positive outcome from doing just that.
I was up in Washington, DC last week and ended up sitting next to an Anishinaabe woman from Red Lake that I had been corresponding with and we had a really good discussion about how important it is to retain the stewardship of the lands to the Indigenous people. I didn’t know this, but northern Minnesota used to have a very strong and robust caribou population. And now they are all gone. The whitetail deer have replaced them, but it’s because all of the white oak forests have been cut down. And those white oak trees, the lichen likes to grow on it and that’s what the caribou ate. So once those forests were gone, the caribou were gone. That’s another example of how through colonization and timber destruction, we pushed away a whole part of the environmental cycle in northern Minnesota. So it’s vitally important that the Indigenous people are able to recover their lands and manage and care for the lands the way that the ancestors have done for hundreds of years.
Q. One of the bills you succeeded in passing this year requires the state of Minnesota to offer to sell state lands within a reservation’s borders, or just outside, to that tribe first, at its appraised value. Why did you push for that measure?
A. I think it is really important because, number one, it allows the tribe to expand tribal lands that are connected to them, but it also helps to provide a buffer around those tribal lands. Often these are lands that might be wooded land, these might be natural bogs, they might be wild rice lakes. They might be the site of medicinal and sacred plants that have been here forever. I think it honors the sovereign rights of the nations, that they too have the right to to purchase lands just like anybody else. And why would we not at least provide that? Sometimes those lands sit there for decades as tax forfeited land and it’s not generating any taxes at all. And this is certainly a way to help some of those counties that tell us time and time again, “We’re the poorest county in Minnesota, and don’t take our lands.” This is a way to work with those counties to generate the income that they need.
Q. What would you say to critics who say that Indigenous people shouldn’t have to buy back their lands?
A. I would agree with them. In general I don’t believe that the tribes should have to pay for those lands at all. But if that’s part of the deal and the tribe agrees to it, then they should be able to express and use their sovereignty to make their own individual agreements.
Q. What has been surprising to you about this work?
A. We have a really strong base of support by non-Indigenous people here in Minnesota. Many of the faith-based organizations, environmental organizations, those that are sensitive to the inequities and the racism in Minnesota towards our Indigenous people, are very much in support of these land back bills and very happy to come in and write letters to the newspaper, and come and testify when we have hearings at the Capitol. So this isn’t just an Indigenous only movement. There are many, many organizations and individuals who do not identify as Native who who support the work that we do.
They recognize the injustice of this and the destruction to the Indigenous people that lived on the lands before Europeans came to it. It’s an opportunity to not undo but pay the piper for what happened to the Indigenous people, recognizing the fact that they never got their due for all these hundreds of years. And so for them, I think they feel it really is a moral issue and are willing to stick their necks and oftentimes their money and their time out for this.
Q. What advice do you have for other Indigenous advocates who are hoping to make Land Back and similar goals happen in their own communities?
A. I think the first thing that I would counsel our people in — and this is a really hard thing for most of them — is to become involved in the community. For so long, Native people were not encouraged or welcomed into City Council or school boards or those positions of decision-making for the community. They felt unwelcome. They felt racially separated. They felt threatened and they didn’t feel heard or recognized. And with the rise in Native folks starting to run for these positions, I think has made a really big difference.
I’m the first Native woman to serve in the Minnesota Senate in history. And that’s a sad thing. You know, people say, “Oh, hooray, the first, the first!” But we have to stop being the first. We have to be the second, fourth, eighth, 50th. When I was elected to the Minnesota House, there were only two Native women before me that served in the House. And so my suggestion would be please start stepping up and serving in ways in your community, not only to show that tribal people are involved in their community, but they also bring such a unique voice to the issues at hand. And it might be hard to speak about those issues, especially when they’re really personal, it might be hard to advocate for your people when you’re outnumbered and historically have been treated so poorly. But the more and more of us that get into positions where we can talk about the hardships and the historic trauma that our people have had and work for positive change, I think it will serve all of our communities, Indigenous anywhere, whether it’s South America, Australia, New Zealand, North America, wherever — even the Sami people over in Finland. But we do have to start showing up, and we do have to start putting ourselves in positions where we can make decisions that are going to be good not just for our own folks, but for all of the communities that we represent or the states that we represent.
Be present. Be vocal. Write letters to the editor about important issues and work with your community in ways that are going to build trust and collaboration so when an opportunity to do things like returning land, when there’s a huge opposition, maybe you’re in a position to speak to it or advocate for it or educate people around the issues. But we can’t sit back anymore and not participate. And the other thing is please participate in elections and know who represents you and are they representing you and your community in the best way? And if not, either become that candidate or support candidates that represent your values and your goals in life, not just for today or tomorrow or the next ten years, but like we say, for the next seven generations.
Q. If all goes well with Land Back efforts, what could happen next?
A. What I would really like to see is the ability for the tribes to manage the lands that they were promised, and that the United States and Minnesota validate and honor the treaties as they were written and then not get in the way or not try to micromanage the tribes when those lands are returned. Let them do it through their own, sovereign governments. I think we will be a better state for that. I think environmentally, we certainly will. Especially when we are concerned about mining in Minnesota and the waterways of Minnesota. The last thing we want to see is any of those things polluted or destroyed, but also we could see the return to some of the Indigenous lands, the bog lands, the prairie lands, the woodlands, that support the environment in a really good, healthy way. Through co-managing or co-stewarding Minnesota will become a healthier place, a happier place, and a place where the racial tensions that have existed — that most people won’t acknowledge — become almost nonexistent.
In 1895, Queen Liliʻuokalani spent nearly eight months imprisoned in an upstairs bedroom in Iolani Palace in Honolulu. She had been put there by American businessmen backed by the United States military who had overthrown the Hawaiian Kingdom, an internationally recognized sovereign nation.
She spent her days in confinement translating the creation story of the Hawaiian people into English, line by line.
She would never be allowed to rule over her people again. The U.S. annexed Hawaiʻi over the protests of the Native people, and the islands became a territory and then a state. But now the work of the imprisoned queen is resurfacing in the international debate over whether to mine the seabed for minerals that could accelerate the energy transition away from fossil fuels.
Queen Liliuokalani, the last royal leader of Hawaiʻi, in a photo from 1887.
Bettmann / Getty Images
Solomon Kahoʻohalahala, a Native Hawaiian activist from the island of Lānaʻi, has been pouring over the queen’s translation, known as the Kumulipo, and bringing it to the attention of state and international lawmakers to make the case that the ocean is sacred to Hawaiians and deep-sea mining would irreparably harm it.
“The ocean doesn’t know any boundaries. The fish and the animals don’t know boundaries,” Kahoʻohalahala said. “We are the people that have subsisted and we have lived here, so we need to protect it all.”
Locally, his message is resonating: On Monday, Hawai’i Gov. Josh Green signed into law a ban on seabed mining in the state’s surrounding waters, making Hawai’i the fourth state to do so following Oregon, Washington and California. The ban prevents any permits from being issued for extracting minerals within state waters. The new law comes on the heels of a letter a dozen members of Congress sent to President Joe Biden last month asking him to support a moratorium on deep-sea mineral extraction.
The mining of minerals like cobalt, which can be used to make electric-vehicle batteries, has the potential to jumpstart a multi-billion-dollar industry that could accelerate the green transition away from reliance on oil and gas. But opponents are concerned about the potential for irreparable harm to sea creatures that have spent millions of years untouched.
To Kahoʻohalahala, the ban in his home archipelago is meaningful, as are efforts to put pressure on the Biden administration. But the U.S. doesn’t have a seat at the International Seabed Authority because it hasn’t ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas. And that’s where the most important negotiations are happening that could determine whether permits are granted to allow corporations to mine the high seas.
The agency hasn’t yet approved its agenda for this month’s gathering, but the stakes are high.
Member states are expected to vote on a new secretary-general, which features two candidates with far different views on the future of mining. The New York Times reported last week that the election is already embroiled in scandal amidst allegations of bribery for votes and similar corruption.
There’s also increasing interest in deep-sea mining from places like American Samoa. It’s possible that the agency could receive proposals this summer from companies and governments who want approval for their mining plans.
That’s why Kahoʻohalahala feels it’s urgent to ensure Indigenous peoples have a voice in any decision making. He wants the International Seabed Authority Council to establish a Committee on Intangible Underwater Cultural Heritage which can advise the Council on how mining proposals might affect Indigenous peoples’ cultural connection to the ocean.
Solomon Kahoʻohalahala, a Native Hawaiian activist, speaks out against deep-sea mining during a press conference in Honolulu in December 2023.
Anita Hofschneider / Grist
“The colonial perspective and that of deep sea mining is that the deep sea is an area of vast voidness and there is nothing there. They have determined that this really belongs to no one,” he said. “No one had ever considered that the Indigenous people of Oceania have a connection and relationship to what they’re calling the high seas.”
Kahoʻohalahala grew up in a family of farmers and fishers on the Hawaiian island of Lānaʻi, and spent years working in local and state advocacy for Indigenous rights and conservation before starting to participate in international conservation and biodiversity meetings in the last decade.
Two and a half years ago, he heard about the International Seabed Mining Authority. He attended an agency meeting in Kingston as an observer representing Greenpeace. There he realized that the agency was considering permitting mining on the ocean floor in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, about 500 miles south of Hawaiʻi.
Since then, he has become Hawaiʻi’s leading activist against seabed mining.
“My commitment is to make sure that we’re doing what is responsible for us to do as kupuna looking forward for the next several generations, 100 years from now,” he said, using the Hawaiian word for elders. “I hope that our great mo’opuna (grandchildren) will say our tutus (grandparents) were involved in caring for this space, and that is why we can still be here 100 years from now.”
Kahoʻohalahala thinks of Queen Liliʻuokalani often. He thought about her on Monday as he stood in the Hawaiʻi governor’s office, a stone throw from the palace where she was imprisoned.
“(I am) thankful that our Queen, in her darkest hours, at Iolani Palace took the time to translate this into English, to help us to be advocates of our own cultural connection, which ties us all to all ecosystems,” Kahoʻohalahala said.
Skiing, hiking, and other outdoor recreational pastimes have lent Colorado a woodsy — and environmentally friendly — reputation. This image is at odds with the state’s first and biggest industry: mineral extraction. From 1858 to 2022, mineral extraction in Colorado has amounted to a $546 billion dollar industry. The state remains one of the leaders in coal and gold, but the state is also home to oil, natural gas, limestone, and helium mining.
Contrary to the carefree spirit of those outdoor activities that the state is known for, the growth of mining, and the development of its extractive practices, all have origins in the genocide and forced displacement of Indigenous peoples native to the region. A new report by a nonprofit organization called People of the Sacred Land traces the history of how state and federal officials have “systematically undermined Tribal sovereignty and Native self-governance through tactics like genocide and illegal land dispossession to exploit the wealth and resources of Tribal Nations.” The report, which results from a two-year study, also contends that tribes like the Arapaho and Cheyenne never gave up their mineral rights in Colorado and are entitled to compensation appropriate to how much land was stolen.
Rick Williams, who is Lakota and Cheyenne, is the executive director of People of the Sacred Land, and he said that the report shows how the history of Indigenous people in Colorado hasn’t been adequately understood. The three-part report is an attempt to correct the inadequate awareness and education. The second part of the report is a Historic Economic Loss Assessment, which offers a quantitative accounting of the economic impacts that American expansion into the territory has had on the Indigenous tribes.
“It has everything to do with the people living today, because it’s those people who are benefiting from the wealth of the land, the resources of the land, the water, the oil, the gas, the gold,” he said.
Colorado has made $1.9 trillion dollars from these dispossessed lands, which includes earnings from recreation, timber, mineral extraction, and real estate. The TREC commission thinks there should be some recognition, and compensation, to tribes for land rights they never consented to giving up.
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Starting in the late 18th century, a series of legislations established that settlers could not purchase land in the Colorado territory, but many settlers did so anyway, buying land from territorial governments and effectively excluding the tribes from the process. The report names Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo as illegally established on unceded Native lands. The United States was supposed to protect land belonging to tribes, but as settlers were drawn to the area via the gold rush, the United States failed to protect the land and eventually stopped trying, according to the report.
In the mid 1800s, tribes were often removed from their land under the threat of violence, or coerced into signing treaties under duress to make room for more settlers, who were interested in the newly established Colorado Territory. But the tribes were never fairly compensated.
Even if one is to accept the letter of such treaties, mineral rights were often not specified as part of what the tribes were ceding. Therefore, the commission argues, if a tribe didn’t specifically give up its mineral right, then the right remains with the tribes even after all these years into colonization. Furthermore, the TERC report argues that the financial injuries borne by the region’s tribes should be recalculated.
“Considering most contracts have recognized mineral and water rights unless specifically stated, they weren’t ceded,” Dallin Maybee, who is Northern Arapaho and a legal scholar and commissioner on the report, said. “It’s no secret that the wealth of the country was built on the back of natural resources extracted from Indigenous lands who were diminished as westward expansion occurred.”
Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources Chris Arend said in response to the findings of the report, “The state of Colorado is committed to working with Tribal Nations to protect their lands, and further consulting with the Tribal governments on these comprehensive issues.”
Colorado’s long history of mining has contributed to deforestation and water and air pollution. “Mining is an inherently destructive and invasive process, and it continues to impact the surrounding land, water, atmosphere, flora, and fauna long after sites have been abandoned.” the report said. Even unused mines still pose a danger to the environment. Currently there are 23,000 abandoned mines that impair the water quality of streams in Colorado.
Clint Carroll, who is Cherokee, is an environmental researcher and professor of Indigenous Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He says the report outlines steps Colorado and these settler communities can take to help Indigenous communities today.
“If you can’t name and point to it in this way, decolonization becomes somewhat a utopian dream,” he says. He mentioned that he plans on assigning reading from the TREC report in his Indigenous Environmental Issues course. “People are missing a huge part of the picture. And this is a document that helps pave the way for non-Native people to understand.”
Beneath a setting sun, marchers clad in feathered headdresses and hand woven clothing streamed across the Alto Beni River bridge on a muggy June evening, calling out:
“Agua si! Minería no!”
“Viva Amazonia!”
The march marked the opening of a four-day gathering known as the Pan-Amazon Social Forum (FOSPA), a semi-annual incubator where activists and leaders from Indigenous, Afro-descendant and other land-based communities exchange ideas for defending nature and the people of the Amazon rainforest.
Attendees, young and old, brown, Black and white, chanting “Water, yes! Mining no!” clasped signs representing dozens of organizations and causes, from “Women in the Northern Amazon” to “Nunca Más Un Mundo Sin Nosotros,” or Never Again a World Without Us.
For the 1,400 who descended on this small, bucolic Amazonian town, most of whom hail from Indigenous and other local communities across the nine Amazonian countries—Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana—the meeting was a welcome change from the formal United Nations’ Conference of the Parties (COPs). COPs on climate change and biodiversity, which are dominated by government delegations, have been criticized for being captured by industry lobbyists.
Amazonian marchers wave the Colombian flag (left)and Bolivian Aimara wiphala flag (right) during FOSPA.
Katie Surma/Inside Climate News
“FOSPA is one of the few spaces for us to have our own dialogues,” said Vanuza Abacatal, the leader of a 314-year-old Quilombola community in Pará, Brazil. Abacatal’s community has struggled to defend its autonomy and maintain its way of life in the face of an encroaching agricultural frontier, mining and deforestation.
Beyond feeling that international negotiations are disconnected from their lives, the marchers here in Rurrenabaque and San Buenaventura, the small Bolivian towns hosting the conference, say governmental climate talks have failed. They cite the Paris Agreement’s target to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
In 2023, global average temperatures breached 1.5 C for 12 months in a row, the European climate service Copernicus announced in February, and the world’s current warming trajectory will put global temperature rise at 2.8 degrees Celsius by 2100. Scientists say that amount of warming will be disastrous for the Amazon. Current levels of warming are already changing the forest’s hydrological cycles, drying it out and making it more susceptible to fire. As more forest is lost, more carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, worsening global warming in a reinforcing cycle.
Climate change is just one of several human-driven forces that has, over the last century, caused about 20 percent of the Amazon to be lost and an even larger portion to be degraded. Agriculture, cattle rearing, mining, oil extraction and logging are all contributing factors. Loss of the Amazon, which is happening at a pace of roughly four soccer fields per minute, has already reached a point where some portions of the forest can no longer regenerate and have become grasslands. Directly affected are 47 million people living in the Amazon region who depend on the forest for their livelihoods, fresh water and other resources.
The marchers here at FOSPA are witnessing the Amazon’s destruction first hand. “We are being suffocated by large enterprises,” Abacatal said.
Indigenous women march with a sign that reads “Free Territories and Bodies, in defense of Aguarague and Tariquia Tarija” during FOSPA on June 12.
Katie Surma/Inside Climate News
She and other Amazonian inhabitants are simultaneously the most impacted by the loss of the forest and, they have long argued, best positioned to safeguard what remains of it. Their peoples’ centuries of experience living within the forest has endowed them with valuable knowledge about it.
Research is quickly catching up to them, with study after study confirming that Indigenous communities with secure land tenure have the best conservation outcomes, even when located near urban areas. And, increasingly, scientists are partnering with some Indigenous and local communities to identify key biodiversity hotspots and prioritize those areas, like animal reproduction and migration zones, for conservation.
With those bona fides, participants said they are ramping up their ambitions since the last FOSPA, held in 2022 in Belem, Brazil. That conference, like the nine before it dating to 2002, generated an accounting of the threats facing the forest and called on governments to do more to protect it.
But in the intervening two years since Belem, millions of acres of the Amazon have been cleared, burned or degraded; threats to inhabitants like mining and drug trafficking grew; and governmental talks in a separate conference in Belem in 2023 among the leaders of the nine Amazonian nations concluded without an agreement on stopping illegal deforestation by 2030. Instead, that Brazil-led summit ended with a vague text promising to cooperate on staunching illegal deforestation and promoting sustainable development.
So, with the stakes as high as ever, FOSPA attendees in Rurrenabaque had a deadline in sight: Within four days, they had to deliver a written prescription for what the world must do to prevent “climate and ecological collapse.”
‘Original people without our land are nothing’
On the second day of the conference, in an Indigenous community outside Rurrenabaque, dozens of people focused their attention on Mari Luz and Emilsen Flores, Peruvian Kukama leaders. They were gathered inside a rainforest pavilion where nearly everyone had broken out into a sweat in the tropical heat. The pavilion had been set up with white plastic chairs, though some local men remained standing outside, their heads poking over the structure’s walls.
Luz, speaking in a gentle voice, unspooled how she, Flores and other Kukama women won a historic Peruvian court ruling in March, establishing that the heavily polluted Marañon River is a living being with inherent rights.
It was a major victory in the rights of nature movement, which aims to garner legal recognition of the rights of rivers, forests and whole ecosystems to exist. The movement is largely seen as translating into law the worldviews of Indigenous peoples.
Emilsen Flores (center) and Mari Luz (right), Peruvian Kukama leaders, speak to attendees of the FOSPA conference on June 13 in Bella Altura, Bolivia.
Katie Surma/Inside Climate News
As Luz spoke, glasses of fresh papaya juice and chicha, a customary drink made from fermented corn, were passed around to the mix of conference attendees and Tacana people from the host community, Bella Altura.
She began in 2000, when environmental organizations from Europe came to meet with locals about the vast oil-related pollution in the Loreto region of Peru, which had been ongoing since 1974. For Luz and the others, who depended on the Marañon River for food, water and transportation, the contamination had been catastrophic.
During the male-dominated meetings, Luz and other women had sat quietly, she explained, listening to the discussion about human rights. But later, the women met amongst themselves to discuss what they had heard. Luz recalled: “We women said, ‘We’re supposed to have rights. How can oil projects be forced on us when we don’t want them?’”
The women quietly formed their own federation, the Huaynakana Kamatahuara kana, meaning “working women,” she said, with the aim of protecting their environment, rights and culture. And then, in what would prove to be a propitious encounter, Luz was introduced to environmental lawyers at the Peru-based Institute of Legal Defense. She wanted to know whether the Marañon River, like her, had rights.
“Do rivers have rights?” reads an illustration depicting the story of the Peruvian Kukama women who won a landmark victory in March establishing that the heavily polluted Marañon River is a living being with inherent rights.
Katie Surma/Inside Climate News
A dialogue ensued, with Luz educating the lawyers about her peoples’ view of the world. Nature is alive, she told them, and every being has a spirit. Those spirits live in the mountains and beneath the river, maintaining all the life within it.
The lawyers, in turn, told Luz and the Kukama women’s federation about the burgeoning body of law known as the “rights of nature.”
Thus began a 10-year partnership that culminated four months ago in a trial court ruling in favor of the Marañon River’s rights. Luz was blunt about the difficulties throughout. She and her family had been threatened with violence. “To be famous is very dangerous,” she said. To attend court hearings, she had to leave her rural home in the middle of the night, traveling by motorized canoe for hours, often in drenching rain.
At times, she had to sell off chickens to pay for fuel for the boat trips. Government officials demeaned her and fined her 100,000 Peruvian Soles (about $26,000 USD), she said, for her advocacy. Men in her village denigrated her. “There is a lot of machismo; they treat women like objects,” she said.
Luz, who became more animated the longer she talked, said that over the years, she had invited men in her village to the women’s federation meetings, swaying around 70 to 80 percent of them over to the women’s cause. “We’ve grown from the bottom,” she said.
The “just energy transition” working group at FOSPA discussed issues ranging from access to energy to carbon credit schemes and ecosystem restoration.
Katie Surma/Inside Climate News
Across the pavilion from Luz and Flores, a half dozen teenage Tacana girls watched the women with focused concentration. Other people in the crowd, including members of Brazilian and Bolivian Indigenous communities, took notes.
Luz emphasized that the Kukama women are continuing to fight—the government and other defendants have appealed the trial court ruling, and those appeals are pending. Even if they win on appeal, enforcing the river’s rights to exist, flow and be free from pollution will not be easy, she said.
In the crowd, heads nodded. Like Luz, many of the people gathered there had lost, or never had, faith that their state legal systems would protect them. Luz’s story emphasized what most already knew: No one was coming to save them. Real solutions, they said in a question and answer session following Luz’s talk, could only come through their own struggles, experiences and efforts.
One audience member asked Luz why she continued fighting.
“Original people without our land are nothing,” she said. “Now that we know our rights and nature’s rights, we need to claim them.”
A just transition
A few miles away, in the town of San Buenaventura, attendees of the conference’s “just energy transition” group arrived via motorized tuk tuks at a meeting hall at the end of a dirt road.
After more than a year of meeting over the internet, the group was now drilling down on a final list of proposals for what a transition away from fossil fuels ought to look like.
With a microphone passed around for three-minute orations, the session had faint echoes of a U.N. summit. Except here there were no three-piece suits or backroom dealmaking by representatives from the fossil fuel, agriculture or mining industries.
Members of the “just energy transition” group draft their findings following four-days of deliberations on the issues.
Katie Surma/Inside Climate News
Rather, participants’ policy proposals were braided together with their own lived experience with illegal mining in the Bolivian Amazon, or decades of oil pollution in Ecuador’s Oriente.
There was broad consensus that the lack of electric power access for local communities throughout the Amazon was a major problem that had to be solved. In some cases, transmission lines had been installed adjacent to, or across from, forest communities but had never been connected. One woman told the group that her community in Brazil has no phone or internet. Instead, they have to communicate with an old-school radio. “If people don’t know what’s happening, they can’t participate in the debate about it,” she said.
Without energy, people also cannot access education, obtain health services or build sustainable economies, J. Gadir Lavadenz Lamadrid, a La Paz-based campaign coordinator for Global Forests Coalition, told the gathering. That makes communities vulnerable when mining or oil companies approach them to initiate projects on, or affecting, community land, he said.
Indeed, throughout Latin America, which produces a substantial share of the world’s fossil fuels, hydroelectric power and minerals used in zero-carbon technologies, 17 million people lack access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency.
The region is also one of the most economically unequal parts of the world, making energy affordability part of the problem—even for communities enduring the brunt of the impacts from energy supply chains.
As the microphone was passed around the room, a woman from Argentina’s lithium producing region said her community’s water and soil have been contaminated from lithium brine operations. But those affected, she said, have never been compensated for the destruction, which has not been remediated. When the community demanded that the provincial government provide them with consistent renewable energy, they were told they had to purchase batteries to store it. “We don’t have the money to do that,” she said.
A mural in San Buenaventura, Bolivia depicts an Indigenous man and Amazonian wildlife, including fish overlaid with the abbreviation “Hg” for mercury on the periodic table. Studies show rivers in the Bolivian Amazon are riddled with mercury poisoning, linked to illegal gold mining operations in the region.
Katie Surma/Inside Climate News
The discussion moved on to a blistering criticism of the overconsumption habits of people living in wealthy countries, including the idea that the climate crisis can be solved by individuals purchasing electric vehicles. The group, some of whom live in the shadow of mining operations for zero-carbon technology inputs, called for more investment in public transport and a cultural shift away from wealthy countries’ consumer-driven culture.
There was also broad consensus that carbon and biodiversity offsets and credits were “false solutions” that come at the Amazonian communities’ expense. Indigenous and traditional groups in the forest, numerous speakers said, are rarely consulted about such projects.
Just days before FOSPA kicked off, Brazilian police cracked down on a scheme that allegedly provided carbon offsets to large Western corporations for rainforest preservation despite continued illegal logging. The conferees in San Buenaventura called for the funding and financing behind offset projects to instead be directed toward Indigenous and other local communities that are living sustainably in the forest.
Across 16 working groups at the conference, the issues debated were, unlike the U.N.’s annual climate COPs, rooted in the proposition of what is best for the Earth and, specifically, the Amazonian ecosystem. Ending $7 trillion in annual subsidies to extractive industries. Expanding agroecology and ecotourism. Enforcing Indigenous land rights and the right to free, prior and informed consent. Protecting environmental defenders, who are increasingly threatened, imprisoned, assaulted and killed for resisting development and extractive activities.
Since 2014, nearly 300 environmental defenders have been killed in the Amazon, a statistic widely considered to be an undercount since the violence often takes place in remote areas. For many at FOSPA, the violence inflicted on people defending the forest is indistinguishable from the ravaging of the rainforest itself: “We are nature, defending nature,” was a common refrain.
There were also big new ideas hatched, like a detailed proposal for an Amazon-Andean treaty aimed at preserving the region’s hydrological cycles, recognizing water bodies as rights-bearing entities and creating a Permanent Assembly of Andean and Amazonian people to act as guardians for the water systems.
The proposal includes a description of the region’s water cycle, which begins high in Andean glaciers, flows down through rivers, cycling through Amazonian flora and fauna, and eventually moves out into the Atlantic Ocean. When one part of the cycle is altered, the entire system is affected, speakers explained: When the Amazon burns, ash from the fires lands high in the Andes, turning glaciers black, drawing in more heat and accelerating their melt rates. Loss of Andean glaciers will have downstream impacts, including the ability of millions of people to access drinking water, they said. Climate change is also affecting the region’s hydrological cycle, with droughts and heat waves stressing water sources.
Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s former U.N. ambassador and one of the conference’s organizers, said the proposed treaty is the first water-focused treaty that is non-anthropocentric, meaning that it is centered on what is in the best interest of the hydrological cycle rather than only addressing human interests.
“This is the beginning of a new kind of multilateralism,” said Solon, who in 2010 played a central role in launching a global rights of nature movement that now has pushed through laws in over 30 countries.
‘Without the Amazon there is no solution to the climate crisis’
For the last day of FOSPA, conferees packed into Rurrenabaque’s colosseum stadium against a backdrop of misty rainforest draped over mountainous cliffs.
“Without the Amazon there is no solution to the climate crisis. Without a solution to the global climate crisis, it will not be possible to save the Amazon,” the document began.
Representatives of communities from across the Amazon rainforest gather inside the “Colosseo” in Rurrenabaque, Bolivia on June 15 for the closing of FOSPA.
Katie Surma/Inside Climate News
The communique called for the end of new investments in fossil fuel projects in the Amazon region and listed eight steps to end deforestation, including the demarcation and titling of Indigenous peoples’ lands and the sanctioning of institutions that finance activities causing deforestation.
With many in the stands filming the stage with their cell phones, representatives from three Ecuadorian Indigenous groups were asked to consider hosting the next FOSPA conference.
The request was made largely on the basis of Ecuador’s landmark 2023 referendums, where 59 and 68 percent of voters, respectively, voted to end oil operations in a portion of Yasuni National Park and mining operations in the Chaco Andino cloud forest outside of Quito. Since the vote, Ecuador’s government has suggested that it may postpone compliance with the Yasuni referendum on national security grounds. Whether the country complies with the referendum is largely seen as a litmus test for the viability of plebiscites aimed at keeping fossil fuels in the ground. At FOSPA, participants batted around the idea of using similar tactics to block Brazil from pursuing controversial oil operations at the mouth of the Amazon River.
The Yasuni and Chaco referendums are Amazon-grown tactics that participants aim to begin exporting. Pepe Manuyama, an Indigenous leader based in Iquitos, Peru, told other attendees they needed to lean into the political world of their home countries with the aim of promoting globally the Amazonian worldview—that nature is a living being, that it is possible for humans to thrive without unsustainably exploiting the Earth, and that humans and nature are interdependent.
“We need to build a new world,” he said. “From the Amazon, we can offer a different paradigm.”
President Biden’s administration wants to create the largest non-contiguous protected ocean area in the world, but a new paper says the effort is failing to take into account the rights and perspectives of the Indigenous peoples most affected by the change.
The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument was established in 2009 and currently preserves nearly half a million square miles of ocean surrounding seven islands in the central and western Pacific. The Biden administration is seeking to strengthen environmental protections by overlaying and expanding the area of protection up to 770,000 square miles and designating it as a national marine sanctuary. The monument already bans commercial resource extraction like deep-sea mining, but the proposed sanctuary would both expand the protected waters and give the whole area an additional layer of federal protection.
The expansion would also make a dent in the Biden administration’s goal to conserve 30 percent of the country’s land and waters by 2030.
Map of the proposed Pacific Remote Islands National Marine Sanctuary.
Courtesy of NOAA
However, according to Angelo Villagomez and Steven Manaʻoakamai Johnson, authors of the peer-reviewed article in Environmental Justice, the Biden administration has privileged Native Hawaiian perspectives (who are supportive of the expansion, which does not extend to the archipelago) over those of other Indigenous Pacific Islanders, namely Micronesians and Samoans, who have less political power in the U.S. system and have voiced more concerns about the proposal.
“Anti-Micronesian bias and colonialism are harming efforts to protect and manage waters surrounding U.S. overseas territories in the Pacific Islands,” the authors wrote. “The proposal is problematic because it has failed to meaningfully include the Indigenous people who live closest to the region and who have the strongest historical and cultural ties to the islands — Micronesians and Samoans.”
Villagomez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who is Chamorro and grew up on the Mariana Islands, has been advocating for ocean-protected areas for more than 15 years. When he began this work, back in 2007, Villagomez sought to organize support in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands for the Marianas Trench National Marine Monument, which conserves nearly 100,000 square miles of water in the Marianas archipelago. Although the proposal faced pushback from locals who were concerned that the move infringed on Indigenous sovereignty, Villagomez thought the monument would not only help the planet but also bring federal jobs to the territory. He was in the room celebrating when then-President George W. Bush signed the monument into existence in 2009, hailed as a major environmental achievement.
For years afterward, Villagomez watched as government jobs for the monument were concentrated in Hawaiʻi. The office was located in Honolulu, thousands of miles away from the monument. Research vessels were being outfitted out of Honolulu and staffed with people who were from Hawaiʻi and other states. It was disappointing to see that these benefits weren’t helping the people of the Northern Marianas, which has a much more fragile economy. After all, he had seen how the 2006 Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Monument in the northern Hawaiian islands had given Hawaiʻi a boost of prestige and research funding.
“We were working under the assumption that [the Marianas monument] would operate like [the one in] Hawaiʻi,” Villagomez said. “But the difference is Hawaiʻi has two senators, and they have representation in the House of Representatives, and they can vote for president. And we just don’t have the political power to bring the dollars to our islands the way that Hawaiʻi does.”
Only recently has an office for the Marianas Trench monument opened in the Commonwealth. And just last month — 15 years after monument designation — the Interior Department released a proposed management plan for the Marianas Trench monument. Villagomez thinks the delays reflect a broader disregard for the territories that he’s seeing unfold again in the Pacific Remote Islands sanctuary designation effort.
“The process of colonization doesn’t only play out with the colonizer and the colonized, but it also plays out in relationships between colonized people,” said Steven Manaʻoakamai Johnson, Villagomez’s co-author who is an assistant professor of natural resources and the environment at Cornell University. “In this case, what we’re trying to highlight is that the Hawaiian perspective and the Hawaiian voice is being privileged, above that of the Micronesian and Samoan voice.”
For instance, the official community group advising government agencies about the monument includes a designated Native Hawaiian representative but not an equivalent role for other Indigenous peoples, Villagomez and Johnson wrote.
Similarly, in documents describing the cultural importance of the islands, advocates for the marine sanctuary often describe the sacrifices of Native Hawaiians who lived on Howland, Baker, and Jarvis Islands during World War II, and ignore the comparable sacrifices of Indigenous Chamorros killed on Wake Island and the fact that most of the islands within the monument’s coverage are part of the Micronesian region, Villagomez and Johnson wrote.
Sarah Marquis at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the agency plans to release a draft plan for the sanctuary designation later this year and will accept further public input on the proposal then. “We cannot comment on specific papers or articles at this stage of designation,” she said.
“It’s really important when we are critiquing frameworks that we feel like do not support our communities and our perspectives that we also highlight people, organizations, and communities that are working in that space to make those changes,” Lewis said.
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Villagomez said a major impetus for releasing the paper is the importance of Pacific territories to the U.S.’s ocean conservation goals: 29 percent of the country’s ocean territory surrounds Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and 99 percent of the country’s protected ocean areas are in the Pacific region. Villagomez said he would like to see the territories accrue benefits from those protected areas, such as jobs and funding, but said sometimes they can’t even get their own people on the boats that explore those waters.
In American Samoa, political leaders have long opposed monuments that restrict commercial fishing. Even though conservation supporters point to a recent study that shows relatively few ships that dock in Pago Pago, its primary port, actually fish in the proposed Pacific Remote Islands sanctuary area, fears about economic harm persist. These concerns are particularly resonant when the islands’ struggling economies continue to fuel major outmigration and make it difficult for territories to provide essential medical care for their residents.
In the Northern Mariana Islands, commercial fishing is not a major industry, but critics of the marine monuments have argued that closing off large portions of the ocean to potential economic activity violates their right to Indigenous economic self-determination and is especially egregious when those same areas remain open to U.S. military undersea sonar training and explosive testing.
“Our already disadvantaged and marginalized communities carry a disproportionate burden for meeting national conservation goals,” the governors of American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam wrote in a joint letter to Biden last year.
Villagomez and Johnson both support ocean conservation but argue that any marine sanctuary designation should include dedicated funding for the affected territories and peoples, and urge NOAA to create such a fund.
“It’s the territories who are living with the decisions,” Villagomez said. “But it’s people in Washington D.C. and Honolulu who are forcing the territories to carry these burdens for the rest of the country.”
After a decade of work, the Tule River Tribe has released nine beavers into the nation’s reservation in the foothills of California’s southern Sierra Nevada mountains. The beavers are expected to make the landscape more fire and drought resistant. Beaver dams trap water in pools, making the flow of water slower so the surrounding ecosystem can reap the benefits of the moisture while making it more difficult for forest fires to start. They can also help a forest heal after a fire by rehydrating the area.
“We’ve been through numerous droughts over the years,” Kenneth McDarmet said, who is a Tule River tribal member and former councilman. “It’s going to be wonderful to watch them do their thing.”
Around 80 percent of the Tule River Reservation’s drinking water comes from the Tule watershed. Because the area is so important for the health of the community, the tribe has been preparing the area since 2014, building man-made dams to help the new beavers adapt more quickly.
Temperatures worldwide are expected to get hotter, increasing drought and creating conditions that make wildfires bigger and more deadly. In California, some of the worst wildfires on record have happened in the last five years partly due to drought. In 2020, three fires burned almost a million acres in the Sierra Nevada Forest, and in 2021 a wildfire burned an additional 1.5 million acres. Bringing beavers back may offer a break.
Prior to colonization, the North American beaver population was estimated to be around 200 million. But in the 1800’s, beavers were hunted for their pelts by settlers, decimating the population, while farmers and landowners viewed — and still view them — as pests. Today, the beaver population is estimated to be about 12 million.
But in recent years there has been a growing interest in traditional ecological knowledge from tribes, and the beaver has become celebrated as an ecological engineer.
In 2022, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, or CDFW, secured funding for the Beaver Restoration Program, a program designed to restore the beaver population and support conservation efforts. In 2023, the CDFW recognized beavers as a keystone species, an animal that affects other animals on the landscape like bison or bees, and thus influences the ecosystem in major ways. Their absence typically has negative effects on the landscape and its interconnected ecosystems.
Today, the CDFW program partners with tribes, non-profit organizations, land-owners, and state and federal entities to restore beaver populations and habitats in an effort to improve climate change, drought, and wildfire resilience in California.
“We expect better habitat conditions for native critters on the land,” said Krysten Kallum, a public information officer with the CDFW. “It creates a refuge for plants and wildlife.”
More water means more plants that can attract other types of animals to the area. The CDFW expects to see better habitat development for amphibians like the western pond turtles, southern mountain yellow-legged frogs, and southwestern willow flycatchers, which will help increase biodiversity.
McDarment, of Tule River, said that tribal pictographs show beavers living in the area, and it’s good to see them here again.
“My hope is to have beaver throughout the reservation,” he said.
After decades of advocacy, the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe will see 18 acres of land returned to them by the state of Minnesota. The move comes after lawmakers passed legislation last month to formally return state trust lands inside the boundaries of the Mille Lacs Band’s reservation.
Minnesota’s returning of Indigenous land is part of a much broader global landback movement that has been gaining momentum in part due to studies that show Indigenous guardianship leads to more effective ecological outcomes. As conserving biodiversity grows more critical amid rising global temperatures, Indigenous self-determination and traditions of relating to land and waters are increasingly recognized as vital climate solutions.
“This is a great opportunity for us as the Mille Lacs Band to preserve that land in a way that is respectful of nature,” said Kelly Applegate, commissioner of natural resources at the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. He said the land transfer is expected to be complete over the next month. “Whatever we do, it’ll be in a lens of environmental protection.”
The Mille Lacs’ lands in question are known as state trust lands. These trust lands, established at statehood, are grants of land from the federal government primarily created to support education and are found across the western United States. On the Mille Lacs reservation, those 18 acres represent only a fraction of the 2.5 million acres of state trust lands across Minnesota, including nearly 344,000 acres inside the borders of eight reservations. Trust lands in Minnesota typically generate revenue for education through mining, timber, and land sales, and for the 2023-24 school year, trust lands generated almost $49 million for public and charter schools. The trust lands on Mille Lacs, however, have only generated about $45 annually.
“Designating [that land] as a school trust parcel — we had no say in that, it was just a designation that was put upon that land without our original approval,” said Applegate, adding that tribal members never stopped occupying the land in question. He said the band is home to more than 5,000 enrolled members and never relinquished title to the land.
The Mille Lacs measure was 1 of several bills considered by the Minnesota Legislature this year that sought to return land to Indigenous nations and was authored by Senator Mary Kunesh, who has ancestral ties to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and is the first Native woman to serve in the Minnesota Senate.
A bill to return 3,400 acres from the University of Minnesota to the Fond du Lac Band didn’t pass, but university officials said they’re still committed to returning the property. State lawmakers also considered proposals to give back state land to the Red Lake Nation and return land within White Earth State Forest to White Earth Nation. Both measures died after facing opposition.
The Mille Lacs measure sets aside $750,000 of state funds for the state commissioner of natural resources to pay project costs such as valuation expenses, closing costs, and legal fees to complete the transfer, but not everyone is happy about the legislation. The Mille Lacs County Board of Commissioners issued a press release condemning the purchase. Dillon Hayes, county administrator of Mille Lacs County, said the transfer violates the state constitution, specifically a requirement that the state must put the land up for public auction.
“Right, wrong, or otherwise, we really have a process to follow. We have a constitution in the state of Minnesota,” said Hayes. “The board believes that we should be following that process.”
Hayes said that the estimated value of the parcel within the reservation exceeds more than $1 million due to rising property values, and that state schools are missing out on funding not only from the $750,000 appropriated to purchase the property but also from the higher price the land could have fetched at auction.
“Federally recognized Indian tribes, like the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, possess the financial means to purchase such lands at public sale,” the board wrote in a press release last week. “This legislation unfairly advantages the tribe at the expense of our local schools and taxpayers.”
Applegate said it’s unfortunate that the county isn’t supportive.
“We’re in a new era of restoring land back to Indigenous people, and people shouldn’t feel threatened by that,” Applegate said. “We’re the original caretakers of all of this land, and who better to manage it than the tribal nations?”
In 2019, Australia was on the cusp of approving a new coal mine on traditional Wirdi land in Queensland that would have extracted approximately 40 million tons of coal each year for 35 years. The Waratah coal mine would have destroyed a nature refuge and emitted 1.58 billion tons of carbon dioxide.
But that didn’t happen, thanks to the advocacy of Murrawah Maroochy Johnson, a 29-year-old Wirdi woman of the Birri Gubba Nation, who led a lawsuit against the coal company in 2021, and won.
The case was groundbreaking in many ways, but perhaps most strikingly, Johnson’s work helped set a new legal precedent that pushed members of the court to travel to where First Nations people lived in order hear their testimonies and perspectives, instead of expecting Indigenous people to travel long distances to settler courts. The lawsuit was also the first to successfully use Queensland’s new human rights law to challenge coal mining, arguing that greenhouse gas emissions from the Waratah coal mine would harm Indigenous peoples and their cultural traditions. Because of the litigation, the mine’s permit was denied in 2022, and its appeal failed last year.
Because of her work, Johnson is now among several of this year’s winners of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize honoring global grassroots environmental activism.
The last few years have been transformative for Johnson, who is the mother of a toddler and expecting her second baby in a few weeks. Grist spoke with her to learn about what motivates her, how she views the climate crisis, and what other young Indigenous activists can learn from her work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. You have been working on behalf of your people since you were 19 years old. What drives you to do this work?
A. It’s definitely not a choice. First contact here was just 235 years ago. At that point, terra nullius was declared, which said that the land belonged to nobody, which essentially means that the first interaction with colonizing invading powers was one of dehumanization. They saw us here, but to say that the land belonged to no one really says that we are subhuman. They deemed us of a status where we couldn’t own our own land even though they saw us here inhabiting our own lands, living and thriving. And so there’s a long legacy of resistance in first contact frontier wars but also through advocacy over the generations. I’m just a young person who gets to inherit that great legacy.
I was raised by very strong parents. My father, my grandfather, my great-grandparents, were all resistance fighters. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with inheriting that legacy and feeling like you need to do your part. But also, I feel like it’s not a choice because at the end of the day, what’s real is our people, our law, our custom — no matter the colonial apparatus attempts to disappear us, dilute us, absorb us into homogenous Australian mainstream and complete the assimilation process. To me, that’s continued injustice that our people face. And every First Nations person, I feel, every Indigenous person, has an obligation to resist that as well. Because at the end of the day, we First Nations people here in Australia, we are the oldest continuous living culture on the planet, and what comes with that is the fact that we have the oldest living creation stories, we have the oldest living law and custom. That in and of itself is so significant that we can’t just allow it to be washed away. I think that there has to be a continued active effort, by my generation and all future generations, to maintain our ways.
For us, colonial, Western, white contact is just such a small blip in time for how long our people have been here and how long we’ve maintained our ways and law and custom and culture. We have to collectively acknowledge that we have a duty of care and responsibility to maintain the way of our people. I’m really proud of being able to inherit that and also having a responsibility to protect and maintain it.
Q. Can you tell me about your perspective on climate change?
A. It’s always called human-induced climate change, but I think that that term doesn’t allow for colonial powers to be held accountable, or big polluters. I think it’s actually more accurate to say that it’s colonial-induced climate change, because it’s actually the process of colonization violently extracting and exploiting the resources of Indigenous nations, peoples’ land, especially in the Global South, that’s resulted in the crisis of climate change that we face today.
I see climate change not just as a crisis, but also an opportunity. In one sense, if what remains of our cultural knowledge is so intimately dependent on our land, and having access to our lands and waters, then climate change is a huge threat. For example, in the Torres Strait and throughout the Pacific, what do you actually do when your country, your homelands, your territory disappears because of the impacts of climate change? What does that mean for our identity that actually derives from being the people of that unique country and that unique place? Climate change could really signal finality of our diverse and distinct and unique cultural identities as Indigenous and First Nations people in the sense that land may become so changed or so disappeared that our people are no longer able to resonate or recognize or identify with it anymore or learn from it anymore. So that’s really scary.
But I think the other side is an opportunity because climate change creates a sense of urgency. It’s that sense of urgency that is going to be pushing our peoples to work collectively as Indigenous and First Nations people around the world, to highlight the importance of the shift required to address climate change, but also to recenter our traditional systems of caring for country and sustainability and living in harmony with the land as a solution to climate change — really combat this normalization of colonial history and the global system and power systems as unquestionable.
Q. That reminds me of how, on the video announcing your Goldman Prize, you mentioned that “there’s a lot to be learned from our ways of being.” Can you expand on that idea?
A. We’re at this moment where we can really take the best of our traditional ways of being and really use that to influence the decisions that we make about our future. What real climate justice is, to me, is really drawing on the greatest strengths that we have in terms of our traditional law and custom, using that as a guidance system in terms of the decisions we make about what the future looks like.
If you’re going to shift the entire global economy and global structure of how business is done, then you want to be talking to the experts. So you want to be talking to First Nations people and knowledge holders. I think climate change will ultimately lead those who are committed to the current system to be forced to be exposed to the reality that a lot of First Nations people have been living with for a long time: that this current global system doesn’t work for us. In the context of capitalism, it’s designed to work against us and facilitate outcomes for very few.
Climate change is here because of the current global systems, and that means that, eventually, the system will become obsolete. It already is when it comes to the survival of humanity. I think that ultimately people will come to see that the system doesn’t work for them. It’s never been designed to work for the masses.
So, I really see a huge shift towards leadership from First Nations people. Indigenous or non-Indigenous, people — this is my hope here in Australia — start to act in accordance with traditional principles of caring for country law and custom and really reestablishing old ways, governing ways, of these lands. I think that’s the only way to really address climate change. And maybe I’ve got a huge imagination, but I see it as part of my responsibility to work as hard as I can towards that goal of creating that reality, one in which a modern society essentially adheres to First Nations law and custom in a modern context.
Q. You’ve talked a lot about the importance of drawing from traditional knowledge. When I think about what it means to be Indigenous, I think about both the knowledge we have and also the challenge in bringing that forward because of how colonialism has eroded our ties to both culture and land. What would you say to Indigenous people who care about land and culture, but are feeling disconnected from both? How do they find their way back?
A. This is one that I actually really struggle with sometimes because in the Australian context here, we had the Stolen Generation, when Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their parents and indoctrinated. So you have whole generations that have been dispossessed of their cultural inheritance, of their families, and also their peoples have been dispossessed of future generations as well. The colonial process was a finely tuned machine by the time it came through the South Pacific and Australia. In one sense, we’re fortunate that it was only just over 230 years ago first contact happened, but at the same time, this colonial apparatus was so finely tuned that they didn’t need as long to do as much damage as they’ve been able to do.
Being in a settler colony, we’re dealing with mass incarceration, mass suicide rates, and the disappearing of our people. It feels like it’s hard to catch up. We can’t take a break or catch our breath because we’re dealing with the very real, frontier issues of losing our people. But at the same time, what’s required for healing and to actually rebuild our cultural strength is time. And actually being able to take the time to be on country, to sit with country, to learn, and to reconnect.
It’s this really delicate tug of war that all First Peoples who have been subject to colonialism have to face, and we have to sort of grapple with on a daily basis, what do we put our energy into? Am I fighting forced child removals and assimilation on the daily? Am I fighting the education system? Am I doing land and country work and going through the legal system? Or am I just sort of operating as an individual, sovereign person, under our own law and custom and that’s how I resist and maintain my strength? It’s so vast in terms of how we have to split ourselves up in a way to deal with the issues at hand, which essentially is the disappearance of our people, but also our way of life and custom.
At the end of the day, for me, I just have to take heed from my ancestors and my own people that we’ve seen the end of the world before. My great grandparents and their generation saw the end of their world already, and they’ve been fighting. They were in the physical frontier on the front line, and survived that, and saw everything that they knew to be ripped away from them. So I have to just acknowledge that I’m very lucky to be born in the generation I’m born in, with so much more opportunity. But at the same time, there is that huge gap in familiarity with culture and our ways.
Q. Before your successful litigation against the Warratah mine, you fought against the Carmichael mine, filing lawsuit after lawsuit. But the mine still opened in 2021 and is now in operation. How do you handle such setbacks, and the grief of climate trauma and colonialism? What would you say to other Indigenous activists who are dealing with similar challenges?
A. Being a young person, going through that, it’s really hard. You’re up against the actual powers that be of the colonial apparatus: the state government, the federal government, the mining lobby itself, and this idea that our traditional lands should be destroyed for extraction and exploitation for the benefit of everybody else. For the benefit of the state in terms of royalties, and for the benefit of the rest of settler Australia, where we, the people and our lands, are the collateral damage. And so for a long time I was very heartbroken, very depressed. For a long time I didn’t know what my next steps were.
But the reality is that I feel very much so guarded by my ancestors and all our people. I had time to mourn and get back on my feet before the opportunity to join the Youth Verdict case against the Waratah coal mine came along.
All I can say is we kept going. We’re fighting for our people, every single day. And something that I was always reminded of along the way was that even though it might not be the silver bullet that makes significant change, it’s still important that we create our own legacy of resistance and that we do our best every day to maintain what we hold dear.
We’ve got to do the work because we’ve got to do the work. It stands on its own and it’s our obligation as traditional custodians every day to do the work of maintaining and protecting country. We put on the record that we don’t consent, this isn’t free prior and informed consent as we are entitled under the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And every step of the way, just maintaining that resistance, even if it’s just telling our story and challenging the prevailing, dominant, colonial narrative, I think is important to do every single day.
So in terms of advice, I think it’s to keep going. Take a break when you need to. And have a cry, because I cried for like eight years straight, but I think just knowing what some of my own people have been through and the horrors that they had to deal with, it’s the responsibility that we inherit to maintain the fight and continue on as best we can.
We might not be able to solve everything in one or two generations. But again, we’re the oldest living culture on the face of the earth. So, in that respect, we’ve been here the longest and, as long as my generation and our future generations maintain our own identities, cultural identities and resistance as best as we can, we’ll be here long into the future as well.
Allie “Nokko” Johnson is a member of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, and they love teaching young tribal members about recycling. Johnson helps them make Christmas ornaments out of things that were going to be thrown away, or melts down small crayons to make bigger ones.
“In its own way, recycling is a form of decolonization for tribal members,” Johnson said. “We have to decolonize our present to make a better future for tomorrow.“
The Coushatta Reservation, in southern Louisiana, is small, made up of about 300 tribal members, and rural — the nearest Walmart is 40 minutes away. Recycling hasn’t been popular in the area, but as the risks from climate change have grown, so has the tribe’s interest. In 2014, the tribe took action and started gathering materials from tribal offices and departments, created recycling competitions for the community, and started teaching kids about recycling.
Recently, federal grant money has been made available to tribes to help start and grow recycling programs. Last fall, the Coushatta received $565,000 from the Environmental Protection Agency for its small operation. The funds helped repair a storage shed, build a facility for the community to use, and continue educational outreach. But it’s not enough to serve the area’s 3,000 residents of Native and non-Native recyclers for the long haul.
Typically, small tribes don’t have the resources to run recycling programs because the operations have to be financially successful. Federal funding can offset heavy equipment costs and some labor, but educating people on how to recycle, coupled with long distances from processing facilities, make operation difficult.
But those figures don’t truly illuminate the scale of the world’s recycling product. Around 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have been manufactured since the 1950’s and researchers estimate that 91 percent of it isn’t recycled. In the United States, the Department of Energy finds that only 5 percent is recycled, while aluminum, used in packaging has a recycling rate of about 35 percent. The recycling rate for paper products, including books, mail, containers, and packaging, is about 68 percent.
There are no nationwide recycling laws in the U.S., leaving the task up to states, and only a handful of states take it seriously: Ten have “bottle bills,” which allow individuals to redeem empty containers for cash, while Maine, California, Colorado, and Oregon have passed laws that hold corporations and manufacturers accountable for wasteful packaging by requiring them to help pay for recycling efforts. In the 1960s, the U.S. recycling rate across all materials — including plastic, paper, and glass — was only 7 percent. Now, it’s 32 percent. The EPA aims to increase that number to 50 percent nationwide by 2030, but other than one law targeted at rural recycling moving through Congress, there are no overarching national recycling requirements to help make that happen.
In 2021, Louisiana had a recycling rate of 2.9 percent, save for cities like New Orleans, where containers are available for free for residents to use to recycle everything from glass bottles to electronics to Mardi Gras beads. In rural areas, access to recycling facilities is scarce if it exists at all, leaving it up to local communities or tribal governments to provide it. There is little reliable data on how many tribes operate recycling programs.
“Tribal members see the state of the world presently, and they want to make a change,” said Skylar Bourque, who works on the tribe’s recycling program. “Ultimately, as a tribe, it’s up to us to give them the tools to do that.”
But the number one issue facing small programs is still funding. Cody Marshall, chief system optimization officer for The Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit, said that many rural communities and tribal nations across the country would be happy to recycle more if they had the funds to do so, but running a recycling program is more expensive than using the landfill that might be next door.
“Many landfills are in rural areas and many of the processing sites that manage recyclables are in urban areas, and the driving costs alone can sometimes be what makes a recycling program unfeasible,” he said.
The Recycling Partnership also provides grants for tribes and other communities to help with the cost of recycling. The EPA received 91 applications and selected 59 tribal recycling programs at various stages of development for this year, including one run by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma, which began its recycling program in 2010. Today, it collects nearly 50 metric tons of material a year — material that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill.
“Once you start small, you can get people on board with you,” said James Williams, director of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s Environmental Services. He is optimistic about the future of recycling in tribal communities. “Now I see blue bins all through the nation,” he said, referring to the recycling containers used by tribal citizens.
Williams’ department has cleaned up a dozen open dumps in the last two years, as well as two lagoons — an issue on tribal lands in Oklahoma and beyond. Illegal dumping can be a symptom of lack of resources due to waste management being historically underfunded. Those dumping on tribal land have also faced inadequate consequences.
“We still have the issue of illegal dumping on rural roads,” he said, adding that his goal is to clean up as many as possible. “If you dump something, it’s going to hit a waterway.”
According to Williams, tribes in Oklahoma with recycling programs work together to address problems like long-distance transportation of materials and how to serve tribal communities in rural areas, as well as funding issues specific to tribes, like putting together grant applications and getting tribal governments to make recycling a priority. The Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma also partners with Durant, a nearby town. Durant couldn’t afford a recycling program of their own, so they directed recycling needs to the tribe.
This year’s EPA grant to the Muscogee program purchases a $225,000 semitruck, an $80,000 truck for cardboard boxes, and a $200,000 truck that shreds documents. Muscogee was also able to purchase a $70,000 horizontal compactor, which helps with squishing down materials to help store them, and two $5,000 trailers for hauling. Williams’ recycling program operates in conjunction with the Muscogee solid waste program, so they share some of their resources.
Returns on recycled material aren’t high. In California, for instance, one ton of plastic can fetch $167, while aluminum can go for $1,230. Corrugated cardboard can also vary wildly from $20 to $210 a ton. Prices for all recycled materials fluctuate regularly, and unless you’re dealing in huge amounts, the business can be hard. Those who can’t sell their material might have to sit on it until they can find a buyer, or throw it away.
Last year, Muscogee Creek made about $100,000 reselling the materials it collected, but the program cost $250,000 to run. The difference is made up by profits from the Muscogee Creek Nation’s casino, which helps keep the recycling program free for the 101,252 tribal members who live on the reservation. The profits also help non-Natives who want to recycle.
The Coushatta Tribe serves 3,000 people, Native and non-Native, and they have been rejected by 12 different recycling brokers – individuals that act as intermediaries between operations and buyers – due to the distance materials would have to travel.
Allie Johnson said she couldn’t find a broker that was close enough, or that was willing to travel to the Coushatta Tribe to pick up their recycling. “We either bite the cost,” she said, “or commute and have to pay extra in gas. It’s exhausting.”
Currently, the only place near them that’s buying recyclables is St. Landry Parish Recycling Center, which only pays $0.01 per pound of cardboard. A truck bed full of aluminum cans only yields $20 from the nearest center, 90 minutes away. That’s how much the tribe expects to make for now.
Still, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana is not giving up.
With this new injection of federal money, they will eventually be able to store more materials, and hopefully, make money back on their communities’ recyclables. Much like the Muscogee Creek Nation, they see the recycling program as an amenity, but they still have hopes to turn it into a thriving business.
In the meantime, the Coushatta keep up their educational programming, teaching children the value of taking care of the Earth, even when it’s hard.
