This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN.
Last week a United States federal judge rejected a request from Indigenous nations to stop SunZia, a $10 billion dollar wind transmission project that would cut through traditional tribal lands in southwestern Arizona.
Amy Juan is a member of the Tohono O’odham nation at the Arizona-Mexico border and brought the news of the federal court’s ruling to New York last week, telling attendees of the the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, that she was disappointed but not surprised.
“We are not in opposition to what is called ‘green energy,’” she said. “It was the process of how it was done. The project is going through without due process.”
It’s a familiar complaint at Indigenous gatherings such as the one this week, and last, at the U.N., where the general consensus among Indigenous peoples is that decision makers behind green energy projects typically don’t address community concerns.
According to Pattern Energy, the Canadian-owned parent company of SunZia, the wind transmission project is the largest clean energy infrastructure initiative in U.S. history, and will provide power to 3 million Americans, stretching from New Mexico to as far as California.
Now on track to be finished in 2026, the transmission pipeline is a cornerstone of the Biden administration’s transition to green energy.
The 550-mile high-voltage line has a 50-mile long section that cuts through the San Pedro Valley and Indigenous nations that include the Tohono O’odham, Hopi, Zuni and San Carlos Apache.
The suit against the U.S. Bureau of Land Management was filed in January. The lawsuit called the valley “one of the most intact, prehistoric and historical … landscapes in southern Arizona,” and asked the court to issue restraining orders or permanent injunctions to halt construction.
The tribes fear the pipeline will irreversibly damage the land both ecologically and culturally.
The federal court chided the tribes for not filing suit earlier, noting they had a window of six years to file from 2015, when the project was originally approved. “Plaintiffs’ 2024 challenge to the [project] is therefore untimely,” the judge’s decision read.
The tribes had been actively pushing for alternative routes and for more in-depth reviews of the land in question for years. Their argument is that the six-year timeline began last fall, not earlier.
Juan said these miscommunications or differing interpretations of the law can be compounding factors that stand between Indigenous rights and equitable green energy projects.
“There is really no follow through when tribes express their concerns.” she said.
Back at the U.N. the ruling was a reminder that the U.S. doesn’t recognize the tenets of “free, prior and informed consent” as outlined in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. Those tenants are meant to insure that Indigenous land isn’t used without input and permission from the Indigenous peoples involved.
Andrea Carmen, who is Yaqui, was at the U.N. forum on behalf of the International Indian Treaty Council, a group that advocates for Indigenous rights around the world. The council is advocating for a moratorium on green energy projects for all U.N. entities “until the rights of Indigenous peoples are respected and recognized.”
“It’s hard to convince governments and businesses to deny these big energy projects without outside intervention,” she said.
“They are doing the same thing as fossil fuel,” she added. “It’s just more trendy.”
In December, Catherine Muruparanga-Ikenn used a power tool to erase the words on a museum display of the Treaty of Waitangi, an 1840 document that asserted British sovereignty over Aotearoa, also known as New Zealand.
For years, many Māori, like Muruparanga-Ikenn, had criticized their national museum for displaying the English-language agreement that their ancestors did not endorse, wrongly suggesting the Māori people had agreed to relinquish their sovereignty. Activists had spent years waiting for the museum to change the display; when nothing happened, they took matters into their own hands. Her case is now in court.
Murupaarnga-Ikenn is now in New York City this week, attending the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the largest annual global gathering of Indigenous advocates and leaders. There, she spoke on the United Nations General Assembly floor on Wednesday, drawing a connection between the disillusionment her people feel with their state government and the frustration Indigenous people feel with the United Nations as a whole.
A decade ago, global leaders stood in that same room and agreed to respect and promote the rights of Indigenous peoples. At the World Conference of Indigenous Peoples in 2014, they negotiated a 40-paragraph agreement — known as an outcome document — loaded with promises like providing equal access to health care for Native peoples; respecting their contributions to ecosystem management; and working with Indigenous peoples to address the effects of extractive industries. To date, little has been accomplished, and now many like Murupaarnga-Ikenn want the United Nations to urgently course-correct.
“Ten years on from the adoption of the outcome document, what I see is the U.N. is suffering a crisis of Indigenous peoples’ mistrust,” Murupaarnga-Ikenn said.
Wednesday’s meeting, where Murupaarnga-Ikenn spoke, was particularly important because it featured Dennis Francis, the president of the General Assembly, a high-ranking official of the United Nations, second only to the secretary-general, António Guterres.
But unlike the conference in 2014, this conversation focused heavily on the climate crisis. The original outcome document features the phrase “climate change” only once.
“It is thanks to Indigenous peoples, as guardians as 80% of the world’s biodiversity, that the sophisticated traditional knowledge and practices they employ, that we have seen gains in the conservation and sustainable use of our increasingly threatened biodiversity,” Francis said in his remarks to attendees. “We must harness the potential of Indigenous knowledge and innovations to mitigate the effects of climate change.”
A decade ago, the world hadn’t yet experienced month after month of record-shattering heat. Global leaders hadn’t met in Paris to sign international agreements to prevent catastrophic warming. Far fewer people drove electric cars and relied upon renewable energy. The European Union and the U.S. had yet to sign their landmark climate laws.
Now, the United Nations’ weather agency is warning that the world is close to surpassing 1.5 degrees of warming. Scientists are proving that climate change is already exacerbating extreme weather events like heavy rainfall. And leaders say now is more important than ever for U.N. member states to take seriously both the concerns of Indigenous peoples and the potential for their traditional knowledge and practices to provide much-needed solutions.
“So many brothers and sisters have come to this meeting year after year to call to humanity, to states, to multinationals, to ask them to comply with these agreements,” said Leonidas Iza Salazar, a Kichwa-Panzaleo activist from Ecuador, who spoke on behalf of Central and South America and the Caribbean region at Wednesday’s meeting.
In the 2014 outcome document, such promises include recognizing Indigenous peoples’ knowledge when creating national climate change response plans and protecting Indigenous rights, which include “free, prior and informed consent” to projects on their land. This would mean giving Indigenous peoples the opportunity to agree to energy developments like pipelines and lithium mining on their land before such projects are underway.
“However after 10 years of having established these mechanisms and having this declaration, the states — rather than creating conditions to meet the commitments they have made to the Indigenous peoples of the world — they have forged ahead with economic policies, mining, extraction, despoiling Mother Earth without limits,” Salazar said. “All of that has brought with that terrible consequences.”
Throughout Wednesday’s meeting, Indigenous peoples took turns sharing their frustration and disappointment with the lack of follow through from state governments, whose officials intermittently stood up to describe their progress and restate their commitments to Native peoples and nations.
Some state governments were more willing to embrace reform than others: a representative from Colombia said the country would support enhanced participation of Indigenous peoples in the U.N. system through the creation of a separate status for them. Right now, Indigenous nations are lumped in with non-governmental organizations in the U.N. system like advocacy groups, and can’t serve on key committees where important conversations happen between U.N. member states.
Many Indigenous advocates spoke up about the need for such enhanced participation in United Nations processes, which states promised to consider in the outcome document. Indigenous peoples’ status at the U.N. still hasn’t changed in the last decade.
Ghazali Ohorella, an Alifuru Indigenous rights advocate from the Maluku islands in Indonesia, spoke on behalf of the Pacific region and was one of several advocates who urged Francis, president of the General Assembly, to schedule a high-level meeting in 2027 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the signing of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Those meetings, Ohorella said, are a key part of Indigenous advocates’ efforts to hold states accountable for their promises. And while there’s no way to actually hold states accountable, a major event can help Indigenous advocates shine a light on failures, highlight any successes and ensure their concerns are not forgotten.
“The thing is, with Indigenous peoples, because we’re like a mighty mouse fighting an 800-pound gorilla, you need to keep the pressure on,” Ohorella said. “What we’re here to do is definitely to challenge the status quo and make sure that we’re not just participating in the system, we’re changing it.”
That optimism resonates with Murupaarnga-Ikenn from Aotearoa. Murupaarnga-Ikenn used to attend the Permanent Forum frequently but then got disillusioned by the lack of progress and stopped attending.
But recently she decided it was time to come back. A new right-wing government elected last fall in Aotearoa pledged to roll back many of progressive Indigenous policies that Māori peoples spent decades fighting for. Already, the new government abolished the Māori health agency, despite entrenched health disparities, is minimizing the use of the Māori language, and exploring how to withdraw the country’s support of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Thousands have taken to the streets to protest the changes.
Murupaarnga-Ikenn feels like this is the time to speak out again, and to find allies internationally. Yet halfway through the first week of the Permanent Forum, she’s already frustrated with how repetitive the gathering has been as Indigenous advocates ask state governments over and over to respect their rights.
“You just want to keep on doing this for another 100 years?” she said. “Good on you, but not me. And certainly not our young people. Because there will be nothing left, nothing left to salvage if we keep on doing this, and only this.”
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN.
When around 70,000 Indigenous Maasai were expelled from their lands in northern Tanzania in 2022, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. For years, the Tanzanian government has systematically attacked Maasai communities, imprisoning Maasai leaders and land defenders on trumped-up charges, confiscating livestock, using lethal violence, and claiming that the Maasai’s pastoralist lifestyle is causing environmental degradation—a lifestyle that has shaped and sustained the land that the Maasai have lived on for centuries. This rise in criminalization, especially in the face of mining, development, and conservation is being noted in Indigenous communities around the world and was the key focus of a report released this week at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, the largest gathering of Indigenous activists, policymakers, and leaders in the world.
“It’s a very serious concern because the Indigenous people who have been resisting the taking over of their lands and territories, they are the ones who most commonly face these charges and criminalization,” Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples told a packed panel on the topic on Tuesday. “There is a need to focus on criminalization because this is what brings fear to Indigenous communities and it is also what curtails them in their capacity to assert their right to self-determination.”
The report “Criminalization of Indigenous Peoples’ human rights” lays out the mechanisms by which Indigenous Peoples around the world are increasingly facing criminalization and violations of their rights with impunity. Indigenous land, subsistence and governance rights are often poorly implemented if at all, leading to violations when they intersect with government and third party interests, especially in extractive industries and conservation. In addition to historical discrimination, a lack of access to justice for Indigenous rights holders—including environmental and human rights defenders, journalists, and communities—leads to higher rates of arrests and incarcerations. The report provides recommendations for UN bodies, states, and other relevant actors to better address this growing threat.
The use of criminal law to punish and dissuade people from protesting or speaking out is typically the way people understand criminalization, said Fergus Mackay, a Senior Legal Counsel and Policy Advisor to Indigenous Peoples Rights International, an organization that works to protect Indigenous Peoples rights defenders. But the bulk of criminalization Indigenous Peoples face actually stems from the inadequate recognition or non-recognition of their rights by governments. “The lack of recognition of Indigenous rights in national legal frameworks is at the heart of this issue,” Mackay said.
This is especially prevalent when those rights intersect with public or protected lands, or areas that overlap with extractive interests, conservation, or climate mitigation measures. For example in Canada, First Nations Fishermen are being arrested and harassed by federal fisheries officers for fishing–rights protected by treaty. In the Democratic republic of the Congo, Baka Indigenous peoples have been beaten, imprisoned, and prevented from using their customary forest by eco guards hired to protect wildlife. A 2018 study estimated that more than a quarter million Indigenous peoples have been evicted due to carbon-offset schemes, tourism, and other activities that lead to the creation of protected areas.
“The criminalization of Indigenous People could also be considered the criminalization of the exercise of practicing Indigenous rights,” said Naw Ei Ei Min, a member of Myanmar’s Indigenous Karen peoples and an expert UNPFII member at Tuesday’s panel.
Defamation and smear campaigns through social media are often used in the lead-up to false criminal charges, especially when Indigenous peoples speak up against government-supported private companies investing in large-scale projects on their traditional lands, said Tauli-Corpuz. Berta Cárceres, the renowned Indigenous Lenca environmental defender who opposed the development of the Agua Zarca dam in Honduras, had previously been detained on fabricated allegations of usurpation of land, coercion and possession of an illegal firearm before she was killed in 2016. Tauli-Corpuz, the former Special Rapporteur, along with around 30 other Indigenous leaders, was herself placed on a terrorist list in 2018 by the Philippine government, a move that was criticized harshly by the UN.
Criminalization comes with serious consequences. In 2021, of the 200 land and environmental defenders killed worldwide, more than 40 per cent were Indigenous. According to Indigenous Peoples Rights International, an organization founded in part to address the growing concern over criminalization of Indigenous Peoples, despite representing only 6% of the global population, Indigenous defenders suffered nearly 20% of attacks between 2015 and 2022 and were much more likely to experience violent attacks.
The UN report also pointed to the high rates of incarceration of Indigenous People, and their disproportionate risk of arrest. In Canada, dozens of members of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation, who have long protested the creation of the Coastal GasLink pipeline that will cross their unceded territory, have been arrested and await trial in Canada. That trial is currently on hold because of allegations of excessive force and harassment of the police.
In countries like New Zealand and Australia, Indigenous peoples are already massively overrepresented in prisons. In Australia, despite making up only 3% of the population, Aboriginal Australians make up almost 30% of the incarcerated population. “This really speaks about the racism and discrimination that exists, which is the foundation for filing the criminalization cases against them,” said Tauli-Corpuz.
Indigenous journalists were included in this year’s report as being increasingly at risk of criminalization. In 2020 Anastasia Mejía Tiriquiz, a Guatemalan Kʼicheʼ Mayan journalist was arrested and charged with sedition after reporting on a protest against the municipal government. And just this year, Brandi Morin, an award-winning Cree/Iroquois/French journalist from Treaty 6 territory in Alberta was arrested while covering an Indigenous-led homeless encampment in Edmonton.
Indigenous Peoples are also affected by the growing use of criminal law to deter free speech and protests. Since the Indigenous-led protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock reservation in 2016 lawmakers in two dozen states in the US have taken up bills that ratchet up penalties for pipeline protesters. Globally, laws targeting everything from anti-terrorism, national security, and free speech only add to the ability for states to lay criminal charges on Indigenous activists.
Olnar Ortiz Bolívar, an Indigenous Baré lawyer from Venezuela who works to defend the rights of Indigenous communities, has been the target of both physical violence and harassment for his work in the Amazon, an area where illegal miners, criminal organizations, and the government are competing for control of resources, especially gold. He has been an outspoken critic of the Government-designated mining area in southern Venezuela known as the Orinoco Mining Arc. Now he fears that a new bill introduced by the Maduro regime into congress, that effectively turns dissent against the government and protesting into a criminal act, will severely affect his ability to continue to speak out against such projects.
“It’s a contradiction because we have rights in theory, but we don’t have the right to practice those,” he said. “What they are doing is taking away the freedom of expression of Venezuelans and, evidently, of the Indigenous People, who are increasingly vulnerable.”
As countries attempt to reach their goals of protecting 30% of their lands and waters by 2030 along with growing demand for transition minerals, criminalization of Indigenous Peoples is likely to grow, say experts. A survey of more than 5000 existing “energy transition mineral” projects found that more than half were located on or near Indigenous Peoples’ lands; for unmined deposits, that figure was much higher.
The report set forth a series of recommendations to counteract criminalization, emphasizing the importance of revising national laws, improving measures to protect Indigenous human rights defenders and access to justice, and promoting efforts to prevent, reverse and remedy criminalization and its consequences.
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN.
Sometimes when a storm hits and the waves are high in the Straits of Mackinac, which connects Great Lakes Michigan and Huron, Whitney Gravelle wonders if she’ll get a call: Maybe there will be a breach, and oil from the Line 5 pipeline under the strait will spill into her homelands. Gravelle, president of the Bay Mills Indian Community, has been working to decommission Line 5, run by Enbridge Inc., for years. The pipeline was built in the strait in 1953, without consultation with Bay Mills or other tribes. In 2010, a nearby pipeline also overseen by Enbridge spilled 1 million gallons of oil into Michigan waters.
“I have routine nightmares about Line 5,” Gravelle said. “I think it’s because we are so involved in the issue — we work on it every single day.”
In 2023, Gravelle brought the issue of Line 5 in front of the UN Permanent Forum of Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, the largest annual gathering of Indigenous peoples in the world. In response, the UN recommended that the U.S. and Canada decommission the pipeline because of its “real and credible threat” to Indigenous rights. That has not yet happened. This week Gravelle was at UNPFII again to bring attention to Line 5.
Gravelle was also there to speak on a panel about how the United States has — or hasn’t — applied the UN Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Also known as UNDRIP, the declaration is the international standard for Indigenous rights. While legally non-binding, UNDRIP encompasses the rights of Indigenous peoples to maintain lifeways, language, sovereignty and political autonomy, free from assimilation and colonizing forces.
The discussion — put on by the Implementation Project, a partnership between the Native American Rights Fund and University of Colorado Law School — included U.S. officials like Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, also a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community, and others from the Department of Commerce and Agency for International Development. There, Newland highlighted the Biden administration’s recent policies to increase inclusion of tribal nations’ priorities and perspectives.
U.S. history with the declaration is rocky. When Indigenous leaders from across the globe first introduced it in 2007 the U.S. voted against it, saying that it “should have been written in terms that are transparent and capable of implementation.” Three years later, under the Obama administration, the U.S. became the last country to adopt UNDRIP, acknowledging it as a “moral and political force.” But today, there is still a “vast implementation gap,” said former UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples James Anaya at the forum Tuesday.
then-United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples, James Anaya, left, listens to a resident of New Andoas, 3,850 km north-east of Lima during his visit on December 11, 2013, to indigenous communities affected by the contamination caused by industrial and petroleum operation residuals by the companies Oxi and Pluspetrol in the Loreto region. The contamination was denounced by the indigenous communities in the north eastern territories of Peru, in the basins of the rivers Pastaza, Tigre and Corrientes. AFP PHOTO/CRIS BOURONCLE (Photo credit should read CRIS BOURONCLE/AFP via Getty Images)
The declaration is an articulation of basic human rights to things like life, religion and self determination in an Indigenous context, said Kristen Carpenter, a law professor at CU Boulder and past appointee to the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which helps governments implement UNDRIP. “United States law and policy often still fall short of those basic human rights. It’s easy to get lost sometimes in the nuts and bolts and the very difficult work of policy,” Carpenter said at the discussion Monday. “But this work could not be more important, in my perspective, because of the issues that are on the table.”
In the U.S., concerns range from land protection to cultural continuity to reckoning with America’s past policies of genocide. A critical part of the declaration is that governments should get Indigenous nations’ informed consent on projects and policies that could impact them. And while UNDRIP considers such consent to be the bare minimum, many countries, including the U.S., interpret it as the highest standard, and have failed to enact it.
Free, prior and informed consent could give tribes and Indigenous communities more control over decisions that currently rest solely with the federal government, like Line 5 or the massive copper mine proposed at Oak Flat that is opposed by the San Carlos Apache Tribe.
Consultation with tribes has been federal policy — in name, if not in practice — since 2000, but has been widely interpreted by agencies and officials. Even though the U.S. hasn’t adopted consent as the basis for its relationships with Indigenous nations, it has begun to incorporate it into specific policies, Newland said at the forum discussion on Monday.
Last December, for example, the department revised the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, first passed in 1990, which determines how burial sites, sacred objects and human remains are handled and returned to tribal nations. The revision uses consent language directly from the declaration, and includes the requirement that federally funded museums, agencies and universities receive the free, prior and informed consent of descendants or tribes before exhibition, research or access to human remains or sacred objects. The change has already been impactful, if narrow, and some museums have taken action to avoid violating the law.
Newland also said the department has instituted a new model to find consensus with tribes when an activity impacts tribal health, jurisdiction, sacred sites and rights. The policy applies to everything from mining to green energy development.
In addition to improvements in consultation policies, Newland cited the Department of Interior’s report on the history of boarding schools in the U.S. as one way the department is upholding article 8 of the declaration, which deals with forced assimilation. The department is also in the process of consulting with tribal nations on a 10-year national plan for Indigenous language revitalization.
While acknowledging the Interior Department is the “shining star” of tribal consultation in the U.S., Gravelle said that’s just not the case with other agencies the tribe has to engage with, such as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The result is an uneven dynamic across the government. “We touch so many different federal agencies,” Gravelle said. “They all have to honor those obligations that were made with our tribal nations, and yet we continue to see that failure over and over again.”
There is also the shifting ground of policy changes from one administration to the next. The changes at the Department of Interior are positive, but can be undone — or go unused — by a new administration. “It does continuously feel like that you are trying to prove that you are worthy of life, and that you are worthy of having a home, and that you are worthy of being able to raise your children with your cultural values on the lands that your ancestors lived,” Gravelle said of the struggle to be heard by federal governments.
That domestic discord, Gravelle said, “has prevented the United States from emerging as a leader, especially in the international field when it comes to international Indigenous rights.”
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, High Country News, ICT, Mongabay, Native News Online, and APTN.
“We are in the fight of our lives and in the front lines every day,” Gomes said.
This week, Gomes will continue her work fighting for Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty when she speaks at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York — the largest gathering of Indigenous leaders, activists, and policymakers on the planet. Beginning today, the 23rd annual event runs until April 26 and will focus on “emphasizing the voices of Indigenous youth” like Gomes, who is now one of three co-chairs of the Global Indigenous Youth Caucus.
“We are intrinsically of our lands and of our waters, of our mountains and of our oceans, and then laying down our bodies in turn to preserve what we have left,” she said. “So I think that’s what I’m looking forward to, is just being with people who understand the walk that we walk and the honor and privilege that we do it with.”
The forum was established more than two decades ago as a permanent advisory body for Indigenous Peoples at the U.N., and is a uniquely influential venue for attendees to ensure their perspectives are heard. Indigenous Peoples and nations can’t vote at the U.N. like member states, but the forum has the ability to make official recommendations as an adviser to the Economic and Social Council, one of the six main U.N. bodies that helps facilitate multinational agreements on sustainable development. The forum has 16 members that serve three-year terms, with eight nominated by state governments and eight by Indigenous organizations.
“The importance of the Permanent Forum is that it puts pressure on other parts of the United Nations to take appropriate action regarding Indigenous Peoples,” said Andrea Carmen, executive director of the International Indian Treaty Council.
The existence of the forum is itself a product of Indigenous advocacy. Mililani Trask, a longtime Native Hawaiian activist and one of the first members of the Permanent Forum, said advocates used to have to sit and listen while U.N. members discussed issues relevant to them. She said that Indigenous advocates wanted a permanent space where they could speak on the floor.
“Once we were established as a body, it shifted the balance of power,” Trask said. It meant, “we have a basis in working with governments in partnerships instead of going to the gun.”
Trask also said that the forum elevated Indigenous expertise.
“When the forum came into existence it was the first time that non-white Indigenous international legal experts came to the forefront,” Trask said. Member states “didnʻt think that we had any.”
She said the advisory body had a huge influence on the eventual adoption of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples five years later in 2007. The U.N. document outlines the rights of Indigenous Peoples and has been a key tool for Indigenous advocates who seek to hold states and corporations accountable for human rights violations. It’s not legally binding, but it provides an international standard that Indigenous people can point to when their rights are violated.
Just two years ago, the venue enabled the Yaqui Nation in Mexico to regain their sacred Maaso Kova from a museum in Stockholm, Sweden. The deer head is used in ceremonial dances and was taken as part of the colonial enslavement and suppression of the Yaqui people. The return of the Maaso Kova in 2022 was what The New York Times reported as the “first successful repatriation of cultural artifacts to an Indigenous group overseen by the United Nations under its Declaration of Indigenous Rights.”
Andrea Carmen, who is also Yaqui, said it wouldn’t have happened without the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
The forum doesn’t accept human rights complaints, or initiate investigations, like the Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. But veteran attendees like Carmen say it is an opportunity to meet high-level officials from the U.N. and state governments, bring awareness to important issues, and create community with other Indigenous Peoples from around the world. The latter is what Gomes is most looking forward to as she prepares her remarks to open Tuesday’s discussion on self-determination and Native youth.
“So many of us, although we’re young people, we’ve already experienced being land defenders and water defenders and literally using our physical bodies to defend Earth Mother,” she said.
This year’s focus will be on how to strengthen those self-determination rights with an eye toward Indigenous youth like Gomes. Gomes is hopeful that the theme will result in more youth attending for the first time. Bryan Bixcul, who is Maya Tz’utujil from Guatemala and works as an advocacy coordinator at the nonprofit Cultural Survival, is one of them.
“A lot of things are being discussed at the international level, but the implementation happens at the national level,” said Bixcul.
Among other events, he’s looking forward to a conversation on the first day of the forum about ongoing efforts to replace fossil fuel energy production with cleaner alternatives like solar and wind that release fewer carbon emissions. Indigenous Peoples’ territories are critical to the success of the energy transition as land they manage holds an estimated 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity, but new mining projects and conservation areas have frequently overlooked their rights. Last year, the Permanent Forum commissioned a group of experts to meet and discuss the green energy transition and its effect on Indigenous Peoples. The resulting report is on the agenda for this year’s forum and spells out a long list of ways that governments and corporations can and should respect Indigenous rights, such as passing laws to require clean energy projects to respect the right for Indigenous people to consent to projects on their land.
Bixcul is also helping to organize a workshop for youth on April 18 to help build solidarity and learn effective advocacy strategies to bring back home. Side events like this are a critical part of the gathering this week and next because they facilitate discussions and connections between activists who have to abide by official time limits for speeches during the main agenda.
“We think it’s very important for communities to outline their priorities — their self-determined priorities — so that as they are facing threats, now or in the future, they are prepared to be engaged in these conversations with corporations,” he said.
One tangible output of the forum will be a report that summarizes recommendations collected during the forum, which advocates can reference as they continue their work in their home countries and in other United Nations bodies. For example, in last year’s report, the Permanent Forum condemned the use of the term “Indigenous Peoples and local communities,” arguing that Indigenous Peoples should be separated from local communities instead of being lumped together, which could diminish the former’s rights. The IPLC acronym continues to be used, but Indigenous advocates have repeatedly pointed to the forum’s statement to bolster their argument for its disuse. They’re concerned that the language could have major implications for who gets access to global funding to mitigate climate change and whether Indigenous people get a say in land decisions, including the expansion of conservation areas.
Last year’s forum also called for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to conduct a special report led by Indigenous experts to analyze climate change’s effects and opportunities for Indigenous peoples. The recommendation wasn’t immediately taken up by IPCC but Carmen from the International Indigenous Treaty Council said that’s typical.
“These things take some time,” she said.
Many of the topics at this year’s Permanent Forum arenʻt new: Last year, there was a particular focus on climate, and planned sessions on land defenders and militarization have been discussed before. But one agenda item that wasn’t there last year is a meeting with the president of the General Assembly to discuss the outcome document from the 2014 World Conference on Indigenous Peoples, a report from the General Assembly meeting a decade ago that lists a series of commitments by U.N. member states’ to Indigenous rights, such as implementing policies that promote the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Carmen said such a high-level meeting hasnʻt happened for a few years and plans to use the opportunity to ask about the creation of a new U.N. body dedicated to the repatriation of Indigenous items.
The Permanent Forum can be challenging to navigate for Indigenous youth, especially those who are from more rural areas, need visas, or face language barriers. But Gomes said she has been inspired by how many Indigenous people attend despite such hurdles.
“We find a way to navigate in these systems that weren’t designed by us, or for us,” she said.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
Those involved in the Line 5 pipeline controversy have been waiting for the United States Department of Justice — and the Biden administration — to come forward with its opinion on a case that involves tribal sovereignty and foreign relations.
But when the legal brief came down on Wednesday, no one was satisfied.
The Justice Department amicus brief backed claims from a Wisconsin tribe that Enbridge, a Canadian company, was trespassing on its lands by continuing to operate the Line 5 pipeline there. The 71-year-old pipeline carries up to 540,000 barrels of oil and natural gas liquids daily from Superior, Wisconsin to Sarnia, Ontario.
The DOJ also agreed that Enbridge has been trespassing on the band’s lands for over a decade, and specified the company should pay more than the court-ordered $5.15 million to the band, since the company has made over $1 billion in that time.
“We are grateful the U.S. urged the court not to let Enbridge profit from its unlawful trespass,” said Robert Blanchard, chairman of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, located in northern Wisconsin.
But, Blanchard added in a statement, they’re disappointed the U.S. didn’t call for the company to stop trespassing immediately: “Enbridge should be required to promptly leave our Reservation, just like other companies that have trespassed on tribal land.”
The legal trail began in 2019, when the band sued Enbridge for trespassing. The district ruling came out last June. Both Enbridge and the band appealed.
In their appeal, Enbridge and the Canadian government pointed to the 1977 Transit Pipeline Treaty between the United States and Canada, which promised an uninterrupted flow of oil and gas products between the nations.
Both Enbridge and Canada argue that shutting down the pipeline before relocating it would violate the pipeline treaty, and would impact energy supplies across the northern U.S. and Canada.
The court waiting for the DOJ brief, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, was looking for guidance on that question.
But the department stopped short of saying how the court should interpret the 1977 treaty, only recommending that the case be sent back to the district court to more fully consider public interests, including diplomatic relations with Canada, energy concerns around Line 5, and protecting the band’s sovereign rights.
“The brief does not provide an interpretation of the transit treaty’s provisions, and that was pretty stunning, given that the court asked specifically for that interpretation,” said the band’s attorney, Riyaz Kanji.
The Bad River Band disagrees with Enbridge and Canada’s interpretation of the pipeline treaty. The band refers to its 1854 treaty with the U.S., which recognizes its sovereign authority over those lands.
Even if the pipeline treaty applies, according to the band, it still allows for pipelines to be regulated, including for pipeline safety and environmental protection.
That has worried the band’s supporters. Some say the U.S. is failing to meaningfully support tribal sovereignty, instead protecting its interests with Canada.
“From the point of view of the tribe and its allies, this is incredibly concerning that the United States is not advocating for the shutdown or removal of that pipeline” said Matthew Fletcher, a citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and a law professor at the University of Michigan.
Other Great Lakes tribes have argued that accepting Canada and Enbridge’s interpretation of the pipeline treaty would undermine foundational principles of tribal sovereignty and would have major implications for property rights.
In a letter to the Biden administration in late February, representatives from 30 tribal nations across the region said the U.S. should fulfill its trust responsibility by rejecting that interpretation of the pipeline treaty.
Enbridge declined Grist’s request for an interview. In an emailed statement company spokesperson Ryan Duffy said, “The Government of Canada has made its position clear. Such a shutdown is not in the public interest as it would negatively impact businesses, communities and millions of individuals who depend on Line 5 for energy in both the U.S. and Canada.”
The band, Enbridge and Canada have until April 24 to respond to the DOJ’s brief. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals will then decide how to move forward.
Editor’s note: Enbridge is an advertiser with Interlochen Public Radio. Advertisers have no role in IPR’s editorial decisions.
When it comes to a green future, money isn’t everything.
In the case of Indigenous peoples, there also needs to be a variety of support and cultural understanding.
That’s according to Kimberly Yazzie, a Diné researcher in ecology at Stanford University, who has seen how Indigenous communities have been harmed in the race to establish wind, solar and mining projects.
“There’s this history of tribes not getting a fair deal, and so this history needs to be addressed,” she said. “There’s work that needs to be done.”
As lead author in an article published this week in Science, she outlined ways Indigenous peoples can move forward on the journey to save the planet.
Many green projects over the last few years have been criticized for not including tribes in important decisions that infringes or even destroys ancestral land.
Yazzie cautioned that building a just and equitable energy future will take relationship building, research, and consultation. That can take time, she admitted, and while it’s not a luxury many feel we have, it’s essential so mistakes of the past are not repeated.
“To go fast, start slow,” she said.
The three big takeaways from the paper include: flexible application deadlines, equal access to updated and accurate information, and resources to build stronger infrastructure within tribes for projects. Since 2021, federal money has been available for tribal renewable energy projects — an amount that now stands at around $14 billion dollars — and Yazzie hopes that the paper can help tribes access those dollars.
Strict deadlines, for instance,can shut tribes out from funding due to how long it takes to identify resources, secure other funding sources, and tailor competitive applications. The paper calls for rolling deadlines, and specifically mentions the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program as an example of how more applications should accept applications at any time.
A second solution includes increasing access to updated and accurate information for tribal green energy projects. Although the federal government has a database, it can be hard to find state or private information. One solution could be a database updated with funding sources, not only from federal programs but philanthropic organizations, with funding amounts and requirements clearly outlined for easy reference. Or having readily available technical information or experts to answer nuts-and-bolts type questions about solar and electrical projects.
Clara Pratte is a Diné researcher and a tribal government consultant. She’s a co-author on the paper and said that having a more effective way to share information was very important.
“There’s no best practice guide on how to run projects like these,” she said. “And at the end of the day, we want better, more mindful, culturally competent development to happen on tribal lands.”
It’s also important that funding goes to the people on the ground and not just to the project, a way to make sure tribal members are involved. Pratte specifically said the role of “tribal energy champions” can make or break a idea. These are tribal members who stick with a given endeavor through the very early stages till its completion, and can pool information and resources from other tribal energy projects.
Pratte said that ideally this work would be done by tribal members who have cultural knowledge valuable to the ethical development of these projects.
“Just because it’s ‘green’ doesn’t mean it’s going to be done in a thoughtful way, so I think tribes and tribal people really have to be at the forefront of defining what that process looks like,” she said.
Yazzie said she’d also like to take a closer look at the future, especially when the Biden administration’s financial support ends.
“I think a question we’re going to have to ask ourselves is what are we going to do when that administration changes and when funding programs run out,” she said.
With decades of experience, Reno Red Cloud knows more than anyone about water on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. As climate change makes fire season on the reservation — which covers more than two million acres — more dangerous, he sees a growing need for water to fight those fires.
Red Cloud is the director of water resources for the Oglala Sioux Tribe and he recently received nearly $400,000 in federal funding to revive old wells that have been dormant for decades. He thinks the wells can produce over a million gallons of water a day. But there’s one catch: they have elevated levels of arsenic.
“We have to look at using these wells,” he said. “They are just sitting there. Instead of plugging them, like a band-aid, let’s utilize them for the future of drought mitigation.”
The Oglala Sioux’s water needs have doubled in recent years, with longer and hotter summers and, of course, drought. With more wildfires on the horizon, the water Red Cloud envisions could not only add to the quality of life for those on the reservation, but he sees this as a climate solution for reservations across the nation.
“We think other reservations could do the same,” he said.
Arsenic can’t be seen, smelled, or tasted. It is a natural element found in the upper parts of the earth’s crust, and while a big dose of it is fatal, the more common issue is consumption of low levels of arsenic over long periods of time.
Jaymie Meliker, a professor at Stony Brook University in New York and an authority on arsenic in drinking water, said the water Red Cloud wants to use should be safe to use to fight fires.
“Nothing is really toxic,” he said. “One of the first things they teach you in toxicology is (that) it’s the dose that makes the poison.”
He said the concentration of arsenic in the soil is measured in parts per million while in the water it is measured in parts per billion. “(It’s) still a thousand fold as small as the levels that are already in the soil, back into the soil. I don’t see a big risk from that at all.”
The wells were installed in the 1970s when the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development funded and developed them for home projects on reservation land. Back then, the acceptable level of arsenic in a water supply was 50 parts per billion, and then in 2001 the Environmental Health Agency changed it to 10 parts per billion. When that happened, the pumps were plugged up and there were no plans to use them.
Understandingly, some in the area are hesitant when they hear about arsenic. The water many drink on Pine Ridge is pumped in from the Missouri River but the reservation has many private wells with elevated levels of arsenic. Tribes throughout the U.S. are disproportionately affected by elevated levels of arsenic in their private wells, such as those on the Navajo Nation.
A paper outlining a two-year study on arsenic in drinking water among Indigenous communities in the Northern Plains confirmed that those populations have higher levels of arsenic in their water. Prolonged arsenic exposure can lead to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancers and other serious health conditions.
The World Health Organization offers guidelines on the subject, saying, “low-arsenic water can be used for drinking, cooking and irrigation purposes, whereas high-arsenic water can be used for other purposes such as bathing and washing clothes.”
A funding summary of the tribes project said there was speculation on if the water should be used for agriculture and livestock. So, even though Red Cloud is interested in potentially using this water for livestock and agriculture, there is still more research to be done to look at the viability of these wells for other uses.
Red Cloud helped write the 2020 Oglala Sioux’s Drought Adoption Plan. New water sources were the first solution to mitigate drought in that report He hopes that other tribes look at their old wells on reservation lands to see if they can help mitigate drought — or if it’s better to just plug them up and let them sit.
“The bottom line is we’re looking to deal with extended drought and the increasing intensity of wildfires,” he said.
Now 30, Big Wind spent most of their 20s fighting extraction projects. They were at Standing Rock, then, immediately after, traveled east to fight the construction of the Tennessee Gas pipeline. A Northern Arapaho tribal member from the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, Big Wind learned important financial lessons during those actions: Working collectively in resistance camps means resources are pooled and shared. That’s because climate work, at least at the individual level, doesn’t pay much.
“You’re not really using money inside a camp, even though it’s helping get resources to function,” said Big Wind. “There’s so much possibility, because nobody had to worry about their basic necessities,” they said.
Outside of the camps is where people like Big Wind have to worry.
A member of the 30×30 White House Advisory Committee, and a long-time climate activist, Big Wind spoke in Dubai at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December and, from a young age, has crowdfunded conservation initiatives on the Wind River Reservation.
“I’m not getting paid to go to these things,” said Big Wind, “by these institutions, by the feds, or by the international community.” Big Wind’s day job with the Wyoming Outdoor Council helps pay for some of these trips, and they continue to rely on crowdfunding to support travel.
The unpaid labor that Big Wind provides to fight climate change is at the heart of a new paper published in Cambridge University Press called “Wages for Earthwork” — “earthwork” being the term to describe labor that takes care of the planet and provides benefits to all. That work should be compensated, argues essay author David Temin, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan.
“If we’re going to think about a just transition to a world without fossil fuels, we need to put a lot of this invisible labor at the center,” Temin said. “A lot of this is obvious to Indigenous communities. Everyone is implicitly benefiting from this.”
The argument may seem quite basic, but the exploitation of unpaid earthwork has far reaching economic dimensions. Take unpaid housework or childcare: labor that maintains society and allows for the economy to continue operating but that is invisible in everything from labor markets to gross domestic products. Because productivity in most economies is a matter of goods and services, unpaid labor — like eldercare or earthwork — lies outside the market.
“The parallel is absolutely apt,” said Erin Hatton, a professor at the University at Buffalo who specializes in gender and labor markets. “Because of our capitalist system, labor outside the home has a measure of respect.”
Earthwork, Hatton says, broadens that definition of home by taking care of the Earth as one would tend to a household where everyone lives. “It’s a home more broadly constructed,” she said.
Whereas unpaid housework and childcare have historically fallen to women, unpaid earthwork typically falls to Indigenous peoples, who are expected to steward land and share traditional ecological knowledge for free, says Micheal Mikulewicz, a professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “The argument is they should be grateful that we are actually asking and trying to help, which doesn’t help them put food on the table,” Mikulewicz said.
The federal government does provide applications to grants pointed at tribal nations and organizations. This year, the Biden administration awarded $120 million dollars to 146 Indigenous-led projects for everything from climate-adaptation planning to community-led relocation and habitat restoration. But that doesn’t account for all the labor that has been done without federal funding. Also, grant-funding tends to privilege organizations with the means to pay grant writers, which can leave smaller organizations at a disadvantage.
“We don’t really talk about the amount of work and labor that will be necessary to adapt to climate change,” said Mikulewicz. “Actually making changes in our economy, in our society, in the way our economic system works, or even the way we grow food for that matter. The phases of adaptation are really, really diverse.”
Mikulewicz adds that there are no easy answers to solving these imbalances, but that compensating Indigenous climate labor is a step in the right direction and could open the possibility of broader, more fruitful alliances between environmentalists and labor.
According to Temin, the paper’s author, solutions could range from hourly wages to pressuring non-Indigenous conservation organizations to pick up the tab, but he recognizes that answers are typically dependent on situations with no one-size-fits-all approach to compensation. The funds to help from large conservation organizations are not making it into the hands of local Indigenous communities.
However, Temin said the best way for Indigenous peoples to start seeing real forms of compensation is for governments to strengthen tribal sovereignty and return traditional lands to Indigenous stewardship.
“The most important component is securing land tenure rights and supporting local communities’ efforts to protect themselves and their territories against environmentally damaging extractive development projects and conservation projects that kick them off their own land,” he said.
Big Wind, on the Wind River Reservation, agrees. “I don’t think money is going to solve it. But I also feel like we do have a responsibility to ensure that we are taking care of the people who are working for all of us.”
AnnDionne Seletin normally finished work as a housekeeper at The Westin in West Maui after 5 p.m. but August 8 was different. With a hurricane passing south of the island and the power out, most guests were riding things out in their rooms and didn’t want to be bothered. So Seletin, her husband, and three aunts who also worked at the hotel headed home early, driving through Lāhainā in the mid-afternoon as an inferno approached.
They spent two hours stuck in gridlocked traffic, watching branches fly through the sky and the orange glow of flames on the hillside inch closer and closer. As a black cloud descended on their line of cars and more people hurried out of their driveways into the caravan, fear evident in their faces, Seletin and her aunties prayed silently, in English and Pohnpeian, the native language of their home island in Micronesia, Pohnpei.
Their prayers were answered that day: They survived the Lāhainā wildfire that killed more than 100 people in the coastal historic town, the deadliest blaze in modern U.S. history.
Tourism skidded to a halt. Six months later, Seletin started working with wildfire survivors who were Indigenous Pacific migrants like herself: Families who migrated from the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau. That’s when she learned that despite treaties between their countries and the United States that allow her community to live and work here legally and indefinitely, a mistake in the drafting of a law 28 years ago prevented them — some of them homeless — from getting access to help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Now, Congress has passed a law restoring access to FEMA and other key federal programs to citizens of these countries living in the U.S. It ends nearly three decades during which people such as Seletin, an estimated tens of thousands, had been cut off from governmental safety net programs.
The community of legal migrants from Pacific island nations is known as the Compact of Free Association or COFA citizens. That COFA citizens weren’t eligible for any aid is attributed to an inadvertent mistake in drafting the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. The new law that corrects this error was included in the federal spending bill approved last month.
Members of this community who were denied crucial support in the wake of Lāhainā’s destruction are expected to be the first to benefit.
“Just knowing that there’s people that actually care about the COFA citizens, it’s amazing,” said Seletin, the surprise evident in her voice. “We’re very grateful.”
That fact people care surprises Seletin because for most of her life, she’s heard that people like her are not welcome in Hawaiʻi. Her parents moved to Maui from Pohnpei when she was 6, seeking a better life for her and her siblings. At first, that meant splitting up the family by leaving her older brothers with relatives on their home island more than 3,000 miles away. Her father got a job on a pineapple plantation, an experience that reflects the immigrant story so often celebrated in Hawaiʻi.
But there was one key difference. Seletin is a citizen of Pohnpei, in the Federated States of Micronesia, one of three Pacific island nations that gained independence and a seat at the United Nations in the 1980s and 1990s following a century of colonial rule.
The United States gained control over the islands from Japan during World War II and supported their independence with the understanding that the U.S. military would still retain strategic power over their lands, airspace and surrounding waters, a portion of the western Pacific region that rivals the size of the continental U.S. The international agreements securing these military rights, known as the Compacts of Free Association, have been increasingly recognized as critical to U.S. national security amidst growing concerns about China.
As part of the compacts, the U.S. to a large extent maintains an open border policy with the three nations: their citizens can live and work in the U.S. and vice versa with no need for a visa. When the treaty with the Federated States of Micronesia was signed in 1986, people who moved to the U.S. were eligible for the same federal programs, such as federal disaster aid, that long-term permanent residents can access.
But just 10 years later, COFA citizens’ eligibility was stripped in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. It wasn’t just FEMA: the community lost access to Medicaid and food stamps. They could work in the U.S. legally for decades, but if they suddenly became disabled they could no longer collect Social Security disability insurance.
Many COFA migrants who moved to the U.S. for work and education never needed to rely on these safety nets. But others who were too sick to work, or struggling to raise families on low salaries and high rents, quickly realized that they had been paying taxes into a system that excluded them when they needed help most.
The Lāhainā wildfire gave momentum to longstanding community advocacy to reverse this systematic exclusion and ongoing efforts by Hawaiʻi congressional leaders, Senator Mazie Hirono and Representative Ed Case, to restore their eligibility.
The bill was included in a broader measure to renew the treaties with the Federated States of Micronesia and Republic of the Marshall Islands. The law provides funding to the countries and also extends veteran’s health benefits to COFA citizens who serve in the U.S. military at high rates and previously were denied care.
After the bill became law this month, FEMA announced it will reopen its cash assistance application window for COFA citizens affected by the Maui wildfires. Agency spokesman Todd Hoose said he’s not sure yet how many people it’ll help — he’s heard estimates as low as a few dozen people or as high as 200. The COFA community in Lāhainā was small, but growing; much bigger was the Filipino community, which included immigrants of mixed legal status. Undocumented people remain excluded from federal disaster cash assistance.
“We do not yet have the process, but we are encouraging folks to help us identify those who are potentially eligible,” Hoose said.
Even though there’s still so much unknown, Seletin is excited. In the months since the wildfire, FEMA has spent tens of millions of dollars to help affected families stay housed. She knows people who have been sleeping in their cars and struggling to feed their kids. As a middle schooler on Maui, she felt ashamed to be Micronesian, but now at age 24, she’s proud of it, and wants to continue to help her people get back on their feet.
Rising sea levels, worsening storms, and other climate change-related effects are expected to increase outmigration from the island nations, especially the low-lying atolls of the Marshall Islands, to more mountainous islands like Guam and Oʻahu and other parts of the U.S. The Maui wildfire will not be the last time that members of the Micronesian diaspora will be in need of federal disaster assistance. And next time, they’ll have the right to receive it right away.
Earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to stop the construction of a copper mine in Arizona on land sacred to the San Carlos Apache Tribe as well as other Indigenous nations. Chí’chil Biłdagoteel, also known as Oak Flat, sits atop the third largest copper deposit on the planet and is essential to green energy projects. The operation, which will be run by Resolution Copper, a subsidiary of mining companies Rio Tinto and BHP, will leave a crater nearly 1,000 feet deep and 2 miles wide.
“Oak Flat is like Mount Sinai to us — our most sacred site where we connect with our Creator, our faith, our families and our land,” said Wendsler Noise of Apache Stronghold, a nonprofit fighting to protect the area. “We vow to appeal to the Supreme Court.”
Over the years, Oak Flat has developed a storied history. In 2014, Oak Flat was a part of a military spending bill that would allow the government to “swap” the area with other land in Arizona. In 2016, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in an attempt to protect it, and in 2021 the Apache Stronghold sued the government, arguing that the land was reserved for the Western Apaches in an 1852 treaty. Then, in 2023, Apache Stronghold made the case that the land transfer would keep them from exercising their religion. The court disagreed.
The issue before the court illustrates a battle between religion, Indigenous rights, and potential solutions to the climate crisis. For tribal nations like the San Carlos Apache who practice what are known as “land-based religions” — ceremonial practices that are inextricably tied to areas Indigenous peoples have relationships with — preserving those lands with religious significance is paramount to the survival, and transmission, of both culture and values to the next generation.
But for developers, the proposed mine would support a few thousand jobs for the surrounding community, inject $61 billion into the local economy, and provide a critical supply of copper for everything from electric vehicles to energy storage systems. By 2031, the world will need almost 37 million metric tons of copper to continue the process of green-energy electrification. Resolution Copper said that Oak Flat could provide a quarter of U.S. copper production.
At the heart of Apache Stronghold’s legal case is something called “substantial burden” — there must be proof that the government has interfered with an individual’s right to practice their religious beliefs. Substantial burden protects U.S. citizens from government interference, unless the government has a really good reason. That means Apache Stronghold’s claim needs to be justified with a high level of scrutiny.
If the case goes to the Supreme Court, and Apache Stronghold wins, the federal government would need to show a compelling reason to destroy Oak Flat.
“If the Supreme Court finds that land transfer of Oak Flat is a substantial burden on Apache religious practice, then the court sends the case back down to the lower court,” said Beth Margaret Wright, who is from the Pueblo of Laguna and is an attorney with the Native American Rights Fund. “Then that would be on the government to prove that the land transfer is narrowly tailored toward a compelling government interest.”
Wright said that’s a pretty high bar for the government to meet, and it’s complicated by the court’s history with land-based religions.
According to the court’s recent decision, Oak Flat is similar to an older case out of California: Lyng v. The Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association. In the 1980s, the United States Forest Service was sued by the Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association over the proposed construction of a road. The Yurok, Karuk, and Tolowa tribes argued the road would irreparably damage an area where tribal members conducted religious ceremonies.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could do what it wanted with its land and said that the government couldn’t be held responsible for the religious needs of its citizens — a kind of “slippery slope” that recognized that a favorable ruling for the tribes would provide a veto button for other Indigenous nations on public projects in the future. In its ruling, the Supreme Court acknowledged that there were deeply held religious beliefs tied to the land, but the road was built anyway.
Joe Davis, an attorney with Becket Law, the firm defending Apache Stronghold, said the narrow focus on Lyng is what is at issue with Oak Flat: He says it’s the wrong framing.
Five years after the Lyng decision, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, was passed. Because RFRA was written to expand religious protections, the Apache Stronghold seeks the expanded protections under RFRA to be applied to Oak Flat.
“This is a case, at its heart, about the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which uses different language and is broader than the First Amendment,” said Davis.
And that argument has some history with the courts. In 2012, Becket also defended Hobby Lobby at the Supreme Court and won using the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In that case, the court decided that under RFRA, the family that owns Hobby Lobby could opt out of providing birth control to employees under federal insurance laws due to religious beliefs. Essentially, the court found that the federal government was imposing a substantial burden because the use of birth control violated the owners’ religious freedoms.
“Hobby Lobby shows that RFRA is very powerful,” said Davis. “This case is an opportunity for the Supreme Court to make good on the promise of RFRA.”
The Ninth Circuit decided that in Oak Flat, substantial burden wasn’t met, citing the Lyng case. But the Lyng case doesn’t define substantial burden, RFRA does, and Davis argues that the court made a leap applying substantial burden when the concept wasn’t used in the Lyng case. Basically, the court didn’t use the broad protections offered by RFRA and instead applied a ruling from a pre-RFRA world.
If the case gets picked up by the U.S. Supreme Court, and Apache Stronghold wins, this would help clarify substantial burden. But with that clarity, there may come many more legal battles testing the limits of the First Amendment for Indigenous peoples.
“It might help us in the sense that now a substantial burden is more encompassing of land-based religions,” said Beth Margaret Wright with the Native American Rights Fund. “But it doesn’t necessarily mean that our land-based religions and practices are forever protected.”
A spokesperson with the U.S. Forest Service, the agency named in the lawsuit, declined to comment citing ongoing litigation.
Up to 10 informants managed by the FBI were embedded in anti-pipeline resistance camps near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation at the height of mass protests against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016. The new details about federal law enforcement surveillance of an Indigenous environmental movement were released as part of a legal fight between North Dakota and the federal government over who should pay for policing the pipeline fight. Until now, the existence of only one other federal informant in the camps had been confirmed.
The FBI also regularly sent agents wearing civilian clothing into the camps, one former agent told Grist in an interview. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA, operated undercover narcotics officers out of the reservation’s Prairie Knights Casino, where many pipeline opponents rented rooms, according to one of the depositions.
The operations were part of a wider surveillance strategy that included drones, social media monitoring, and radio eavesdropping by an array of state, local, and federal agencies, according to attorneys’ interviews with law enforcement. The FBI infiltration fits into a longer history in the region. In the 1970s, the FBI infiltrated the highest levels of the American Indian Movement, or AIM.
The Indigenous-led uprising against Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access oil pipeline drew thousands of people seeking to protect water, the climate, and Indigenous sovereignty. For seven months, participants protested to stop construction of the pipeline and were met by militarized law enforcement, at times facing tear gas, rubber bullets, and water hoses in below-freezing weather.
After the pipeline was completed and demonstrators left, North Dakota sued the federal government for more than $38 million — the cost the state claims to have spent on police and other emergency responders, and for property and environmental damage. Central to North Dakota’s complaints are the existence of anti-pipeline camps on federal land managed by the Army Corps of Engineers. The state argues that by failing to enforce trespass laws on that land, the Army Corps allowed the camps to grow to up to 8,000 people and serve as a “safe haven” for those who participated in illegal activity during protests and caused property damage.
In an effort to prove that the federal government failed to provide sufficient support, attorneys deposed officials leading several law enforcement agencies during the protests. The depositions provide unusually detailed information about the way that federal security agencies intervene in climate and Indigenous movements.
Until the lawsuit, the existence of only one federal informant in the camps was known: Heath Harmon was working as an FBI informant when he entered into a romantic relationship with water protector Red Fawn Fallis. A judge eventually sentenced Fallis to nearly five years in prison after a gun went off when she was tackled by police during a protest. The gun belonged to Harmon.
Manape LaMere, a member of the Bdewakantowan Isanti and Ihanktowan bands, who is also Winnebago Ho-chunk and spent months in the camps, said he and others anticipated the presence of FBI agents, because of the agency’s history. Camp security kicked out several suspected infiltrators. “We were already cynical, because we’ve had our heart broke before by our own relatives,” he explained.
“The culture of paranoia and fear created around informants and infiltration is so deleterious to social movements, because these movements for Indigenous people are typically based on kinship networks and forms of relationality,” said Nick Estes, a historian and member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe who spent time at the Standing Rock resistance camps and has extensively researched the infiltration of the AIM movement by the FBI. Beyond his relationship with Fallis, Harmon had close familial ties with community leaders and had participated in important ceremonies. Infiltration, Estes said, “turns relatives against relatives.”
Less widely known than the FBI’s undercover operations are those of the BIA, which serves as the primary police force on Standing Rock and other reservations. During the NoDAPL movement, the BIA had “a couple” of narcotics officers operating undercover at the Prairie Knights Casino, according to the deposition of Darren Cruzan, a member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma who was the director of the BIA’s Office of Justice Services at the time.
It’s not unusual for the BIA to use undercover officers in its drug busts. However, the intelligence collected by the Standing Rock undercovers went beyond narcotics. “It was part of our effort to gather intel on, you know, what was happening within the boundaries of the reservation and if there were any plans to move camps or add camps or those sorts of things,” Cruzan said.
A spokesperson for Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who oversees the BIA, also declined to comment.
According to the deposition of Jacob O’Connell, the FBI’s supervisor for the western half of North Dakota during the Standing Rock protests, the FBI was infiltrating the NoDAPL movement weeks before the protests gained international media attention and attracted thousands. By August 16, 2016, the FBI had tasked at least one “confidential human source” with gathering information. The FBI eventually had five to 10 informants in the protest camps — “probably closer to 10,” said Bob Perry, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Minneapolis field office, which oversees operations in the Dakotas, in another deposition. The number of FBI informants at Standing Rock was first reported by the North Dakota Monitor.
According to Perry, FBI agents told recruits what to collect and what not to collect, saying, “We don’t want to know about constitutionally protected activity.” Perry added, “We would give them essentially a list: ‘Violence, potential violence, criminal activity.’ To some point it was health and safety as well, because, you know, we had an informant placed and in position where they could report on that.”
The deposition of U.S. Marshal Paul Ward said that the FBI also sent agents into the camps undercover. O’Connell denied the claim. “There were no undercover agents used at all, ever.” He confirmed, however, that he and other agents did visit the camps routinely. For the first couple months of the protests, O’Connell himself arrived at the camps soon after dawn most days, wearing outdoorsy clothing from REI or Dick’s Sporting Goods. “Being plainclothes, we could kind of slink around and, you know, do what we had to do,” he said. O’Connell would chat with whomever he ran into. Although he sometimes handed out his card, he didn’t always identify himself as FBI. “If people didn’t ask, I didn’t tell them,” he said.
He said two of the agents he worked with avoided confrontations with protesters, and Ward’s deposition indicates that the pair raised concerns with the U.S. marshal about the safety of entering the camps without local police knowing. Despite its efforts, the FBI uncovered no widespread criminal activity beyond personal drug use and “misdemeanor-type activity,” O’Connell said in his deposition.
The U.S. Marshals Service, as well as Ward, declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation. A spokesperson for the FBI said the press office does not comment on litigation.
Infiltration wasn’t the only activity carried out by federal law enforcement. Customs and Border Protection responded to the protests with its MQ-9 Reaper drone, a model best known for remote airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, which was flying above the encampments by August 22, supplying video footage known as the “Bigpipe Feed.” The drone flew nearly 281 hours over six months, costing the agency $1.5 million. Customs and Border Protection declined a request for comment, citing the litigation.
The biggest beneficiary of federal law enforcement’s spending was Energy Transfer Partners. In fact, the company donated $15 million to North Dakota to help foot the bill for the state’s parallel efforts to quell the disruptions. During the protests, the company’s private security contractor, TigerSwan, coordinated with local law enforcement and passed along information collected by its own undercover and eavesdropping operations.
Energy Transfer Partners also sought to influence the FBI. It was the FBI, however, that initiated its relationship with the company. In his deposition, O’Connell said he showed up at Energy Transfer Partners’ office within a day or two of beginning to investigate the movement and was soon meeting and communicating with executive vice president Joey Mahmoud.
At one point, Mahmoud pointed the FBI toward Indigenous activist and actor Dallas Goldtooth, saying that “he’s the ring leader making this violent,” according to an email an attorney described.
Throughout the protests, federal law enforcement officials pushed to obtain more resources to police the anti-pipeline movement. Perry wanted drones that could zoom in on faces and license plates, and O’Connell thought the FBI should investigate crowd-sourced funding, which could have ties to North Korea, he claimed in his deposition. Both requests were denied.
O’Connell clarified that he was more concerned about China or Russia than North Korea, and it was not just state actors that worried him. “If somebody like George Soros or some of these other well-heeled activists are trying to disrupt things in my turf, I want to know what’s going on,” he explained, referring to the billionaire philanthropist, who conspiracists theorize controls progressive causes.
To the federal law enforcement officials working on the ground at Standing Rock, there was no reason they shouldn’t be able to use all the resources at the federal government’s disposal to confront this latest Indigenous uprising.
“That shit should have been crushed like immediately,” O’Connell said.
There are three main forces driving the conflict on the Colorado River. The first is an outdated legal system that guarantees more water to seven Western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — than is actually available in the river during most years. The second is the exclusion of Native American tribes from this legal system, which has deprived many tribes of water usage for decades. The third is climate change, which is heating up the western United States and diminishing the winter snowfall and rainwater that feed the river.
The states and tribes within the Colorado River basin have been fighting over the waterway for more than a century, but these three forces have come to a head over the past few years. As a severe drought shriveled the 1,450-mile river in 2022, negotiators from the seven states crisscrossed the country haggling over who should have to cut their water usage, and how much. As the arguments dragged on, the Biden administration chastised states for letting the water levels in the river’s two main reservoirs fall to perilous lows. The Navajo Nation, the largest tribe on the river, went before the Supreme Court to argue for more water access.
These issues are all converging ahead of this fall’s presidential election, which could upend negotiations by ushering in a new Congress and new leadership at the federal Bureau of Reclamation, which controls the river. With the clock running out, two major deals are now taking shape. They could fundamentally alter the way states and tribes use the river, bringing about a fairer and more sustainable era on the waterway — if they don’t fall apart by November.
The first deal would see the states of the river’s so-called Lower Basin commit to lowering their water usage by as much as 20 percent even during wetter years, addressing a decades-old water deficit driven by Arizona and California. There are still questions about how much water the states of the Upper Basin, led by Colorado and Utah, will agree to cut, but state leaders expressed optimism that a final agreement between all seven states will come together in the next few months.
“This is not a problem that is caused by one sector, by one state, or by one basin,” said John Entsminger, the lead river negotiator for Nevada, in a press conference announcing the Lower Basin’s plan to cut water usage. “It is a basin-wide problem and requires a basin-wide solution.”
The second deal would deliver enough new river water to the Navajo Nation to supply tens of thousands of homes, ending a decades-long legal fight on a reservation where many residents rely on deliveries of hauled water.
If both of these deals come to fruition, they would represent a sea change in the management of a river that supplies 40 million people with water. But neither one is guaranteed to come together, and the clock is ticking as the election nears.
The last time the seven river states drafted rules for how to deal with droughts and shortages was in 2007, long before the current megadrought reached its peak, and these rules are set to expire at the end of 2026. This deadline has triggered a flurry of talks among state negotiators, who are trying to reach a deal on new drought rules this spring. This would give the Biden administration time to codify the new rules before the presidential election in November, which states fear could tank the negotiations by thrusting a new administration into power.
The furious pace of negotiation is nothing new, but states have until now only managed to agree on short-term rules that protect the river over the next three years. Last summer, the states agreed to slash water usage in farms and suburbs across the Southwest in exchange for more than a billion dollars of compensation from the Inflation Reduction Act passed by Congress. That agreement helped stave off a total collapse of the river system, but it never represented a permanent solution to the river’s water shortage.
As the states turn their attention to a long-term fix, the political coalitions on the river have shifted. The marquee conflict last year was between California and Arizona, the two largest users, who disagreed over how to spread out painful water cuts. California argued that its older, more senior rights to the river meant that Arizona should absorb all the cuts even if it meant drying out areas around Phoenix. Arizona argued in turn that California’s prosperous farmers needed to bear some of the pain. In the end, the money from the Inflation Reduction Act helped paper over those tensions, as did a wetter-than-average winter that restored reservoir levels.
But now California and Arizona are on the same side. The two states, which along with Nevada make up the river’s “Lower Basin,” have pledged to cut water usage by as much as 1.5 million acre-feet even when reservoir levels are high, without federal compensation like that provided by the Inflation Reduction Act. The details still need to be hashed out, but these cuts would likely mean far less cotton and alfalfa farming in the region around Phoenix, tighter water budgets in many Arizona suburbs, and a decline in winter vegetable production in California’s Imperial Valley, an agricultural hub that is considered the nation’s “salad bowl.”
This cut would free up enough water to supply almost 3 million households annually and would address the longstanding issues in the river’s century-old legal framework, which relied on faulty measurements of the river’s flow and thus guaranteed too much total water to the states. Experts have estimated the overdraft to be around 1.5 million acre-feet, the same amount that the Lower Basin is now signaling that it’s willing to give up, even before drought measures kick in.
An irrigation canal carries water from the Colorado River to irrigate a farm growing leaf lettuce and broccoli near Yuma, Arizona. The states of the Lower Basin have agreed to give up a large chunk of their water even during wetter years. Jon G. Fuller / VWPics / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The harder question is what to do during the driest years. The Lower Basin states are arguing that the seven states of the river should reduce their water usage by almost 3.9 million acre feet during the driest years, equivalent to about a third of the river’s total average flow. The Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico have a very different view: in a competing plan also released on Wednesday, they argued that the Lower Basin states should absorb the entirety of that 3.9 million acre-feet cut.
“If we want to protect the system and ensure certainty for the 40 million people who rely on this water source, then we need to address the existing imbalance between supply and demand,” said Becky Mitchell, the lead Colorado River negotiator for the state of Colorado, in a press release following the release of the Upper Basin’s plan. “That means using the best available science to work within reality.”
A representative from Colorado said the Upper Basin would keep investing in voluntary programs that pay farmers to use less water, but insisted that Arizona and California should bear the brunt of drought response.
Disagreement between the two regions is nothing new. The Upper Basin has often argued during past dry spells that, since it’s the Lower Basin that pulls water from Lake Powell and Lake Mead, it’s the Lower Basin that should cut usage when those reservoirs run low.
But the commitment by Arizona and California to slash their water consumption for good even during wet years represents a significant breakthrough from previous talks, according to John Fleck, a professor at the University of New Mexico who has studied the Colorado River for decades. Fleck believes the Upper Basin states should make a voluntary commitment in turn, even though they have never used their full share of the river’s water.
“The idea behind what the Lower Basin is proposing is, ‘We recognize that we have to forever and permanently fix the structural deficit,’” he said. “That’s huge. My concern is that the Upper Basin’s approach to these negotiations is passing up an opportunity for a really useful compromise.”
Entsminger, the Nevada negotiator, conceded that wide gaps remain between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin proposals, but expressed optimism that the states would find an agreement.
“I know the sexy headline is going to be, ‘four versus three, states on the brink,’ but we are at one step in this process,” he said.
The other major water deal coming into focus would also rectify a longstanding issue in the river’s legal framework: its exclusion of Native American tribes. The dozens of tribal nations along the Colorado River have theoretical rights to river water, but they must sue the federal government to realize those rights, under a precedent known as the Winters doctrine. Some of those tribes, like Arizona’s Gila River Indian Community, have settled with the government for huge volumes of water, but others have been tied up in court for years.
The Navajo Nation, whose reservation stretches across much of Arizona and New Mexico, is among the largest tribes with so-called un-settled rights. The tribe has been suing the federal government for decades to obtain rights to the Colorado River as well as other waterways. Last year, the Supreme Court appeared to deal the Nation a serious setback when it ruled that the Biden administration didn’t have an obligation to study the Nation’s potential rights to the Colorado River.
In the aftermath of that Supreme Court defeat, tribal leaders set to work hashing out a landmark settlement that covers not only the Colorado River but also several of its tributaries, working with federal and state governments to resolve decades of litigation across numerous different court cases.
The work has now culminated in a sprawling legal agreement between the Navajo, the neighboring Hopi and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribes, the Biden administration, Arizona, and more than a dozen other water users in the Southwest. The agreement would deliver at least 179,000 acre-feet of fresh water to parts of the reservation that currently rely on depleted aquifers or bottled water deliveries, enough to supply almost half a million average homes annually. This new water would come from entities like the state of Arizona and the Salt River Project water utility, who are voluntarily giving up their water to the Navajo to avoid the threat of further litigation. (The average Navajo Nation household uses around 7 gallons of water per day, less than a tenth of the national average.)
Not only would the settlement revolutionize water access on the Navajo and Hopi reservations, it will also resolve a huge uncertainty for Lower Basin states. A trial victory for the Navajo Nation would likely have slashed Arizona’s water supply, potentially reallocating much of Phoenix’s water system to the tribe.
“Given the background of climate change and the [seven-state] negotiations, just knowing what rights everyone has is really good,” said Heather Tanana (Diné), a law professor at the University of Utah who studies tribal water rights. “There’s this certainty now.”
But the success of this deal is far from a foregone conclusion, Tanana added. The settlement needs to be ratified by Congress and signed by the president. Congress must also provide billions of dollars for infrastructure that would pipe water from the Colorado River and its tributaries across the reservation. Tribal leaders are optimistic that the current Congress will support the deal, but they’re anxious that lawmakers won’t push it through before the November election. Past water settlements on the reservation have taken years to secure congressional approval and decades to actually construct.
The outlines of a potential solution are visible in both the interstate negotiations and the Navajo settlement, but both deals are a long way from being finalized. Time is of the essence; many observers are concerned that a second Trump administration would take a more lax approach to water management on the Colorado River than the Biden administration has, and that a shift in the control of Congress could scramble support for the Navajo deal.
The political jockeying of the next few months will go a long way toward determining the river’s future, said Elizabeth Koebele, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, who studies water negotiations.
“These decisions now are very consequential for whether we’re going to pivot toward long-term sustainability in the basin,” she said.
Before Jon Eagle Sr. began working for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, he was an equine therapist for over 36 years, linking horses with and providing support to children, families, and communities both on his ranch and on the road. The work reinforced his familiarity with the land, and allowed him to explore the rolling hills, plains, and buttes of the sixth-largest reservation in the United States. But when he became Standing Rock’s tribal historic preservation officer, he learned that the land still held surprises, the biggest one being that much of that land didn’t belong to the tribe. Standing Rock straddles North and South Dakota, and both states own thousands of acres within the tribe’s reservation boundaries.
“They don’t talk to us at all about it,” Eagle said. “I wasn’t even aware that there were lands like that here.”
It wasn’t until John Eagle Sr. became Standing Rock’s tribal historic preservation officer that he learned that much of the reservation didn’t belong to the tribe. Stephen Yang
On the North Dakota side, nearly 23,500 acres of Standing Rock are managed by the state, along with another 70,000 of subsurface acres, a land classification that refers to underground resources, including oil and gas. The combined 93,500 acres, known as trust lands, are held and managed by the state and produce revenue for its public schools and the Bank of North Dakota. The amount of reservation land South Dakota controls is unknown; the state does not make public its trust land data and did not supply it after a public records request.
And Standing Rock isn’t alone.
Data analyzed by Grist and High Country News reveals that a combined 1.6 million surface and subsurface acres of state trust lands lie within the borders of 83 federal Indian reservations in 10 states.
Grist / Maria Parazo Rose / Clayton Aldern
State trust lands, which are managed by state agencies, generate millions of dollars for public schools, universities, penitentiaries, hospitals, and other state institutions, typically through grazing, logging, mining, and oil and gas production. Although federal Indian reservations were established for the use and governance of Indigenous nations and their citizens, the existence of state trust lands reveals a truth: States rely on Indigenous land and resources to support non-Indigenous institutions and offset state taxpayer dollars for non-Indigenous people. Tribal nations have no control over this land, and many states do not consult with tribes about how it’s used.
Even in the obscure world of trust lands, states’ holdings within reservations have been almost completely unknown until now. Many of the experts Grist and High Country News reached out to, including longtime policymakers and leaders on Indigenous issues, were unfamiliar with state trust lands’ history and acreage. However, what sources did make clear is that the presence of state lands on reservations complicates issues of tribal jurisdiction in regards to land use and management and undercuts tribal sovereignty. According to Rob Williams, University of Arizona law professor and citizen of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, this has broad implications for everything from the handling of missing and murdered Indigenous people to tribal nations’ ability to confront climate change.
“When there’s clarity about jurisdiction over Indian lands, it is easier for tribes to work with others to protect public safety, public health, and the natural environment,” said Bryan Newland, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs at the Department of Interior and citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community. “It’s been the longstanding policy of the department to reduce ‘checkerboard’ jurisdiction within reservations by consolidating tribal lands and strengthening the ability of tribes to exercise their sovereign authorities over their own lands.”
The creation of Indian reservations was followed closely by states entering the union, as were successful attempts by state governments to carve up and dissolve those tribal lands.
Once states became part of the U.S., they received millions of acres of recently ceded tribal lands, many of which became trust lands. But as more settlers moved west, states pushed for more land. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. government responded by carving up Indian reservations, parceling out small amounts of land to individual tribal members, then handing over “surplus” lands for states, settlers, and federal projects. Known as the Allotment Era, the federal policy moved approximately 90 million acres of reservation lands nationwide from tribal hands to non-Native ownership.
According to Monte Mills, professor of law at the University of Washington and director of the Native American Law Center, allotment served a dual purpose: It broke up tribal power and gave non-Native citizens access to tribal lands and natural resources.
The allotment system, Mills explained, provided “a whole other set of opportunities for non-Indian settlers to get access to surplus lands and for the states to come in and get more state trust lands on lands that had been expressly off-limits.”
As Rob Williams put it, “The conquest was by law.”
“The implications of that policy are just devastating,” Williams said. “It’s hard to think of a single problem in Indian law that you can’t blame it in part on.”
For example, nearly 512,000 acres of surface and subsurface acres on the Ute Tribe’s Uintah and Ouray Reservation came into Utah’s possession after a series of murky state and federal policies and land transfers. In 1898, just two years after Utah became a state, Congress began allotting land to individual tribal members without the tribe’s consent. A quarter of the tribe’s 4 million-acre reservation was taken by President Theodore Roosevelt for a national forest, while other land went to provide townsites and establish trust lands. By 1933, 91 percent of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation had been allotted.
In other cases, as with the Yakama Nation, states acquired parcels when reservation boundaries were redrawn. Shortly after the tribe ceded over 12 million acres in central Washington, the agreed-upon map of its new reservation simply disappeared, sparking nearly a century of border disputes between the Yakama Nation, the state, and the federal government, specifically over a 121,000-acre section known as Tract D. In the 1930s, the map was rediscovered by an employee in the federal Office of Indian Affairs — apparently misfiled under “M” for Montana. In 2021, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the land was still a part of the original reservation. But in the meantime, Washington state had established trust lands inside Tract D. Today, 108,000 surface, subsurface, and timber acres inside the recently recognized borders of the Yakama Nation are still providing revenue for the state’s K-12 schools, scientific schools, and penal and reform institutions. This makes up 78 percent of all state trust lands on the Yakama Reservation.
Washington’s Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, is responsible for managing these lands. An agency spokesperson said, “The Yakama Treaty retained many rights for tribal members on public lands throughout the ceded territory of the Yakama, and DNR’s management of these trust lands continues to be done with much input from the Yakama Nation.”
Within the lines
In at least 10 states, trust lands are present within the reservation boundaries of 40 tribal nations.
State trust lands
Federal Indian reservations
Yakama
Standing Rock
Uintah and Ouray
Flathead
Grist / Maria Parazo Rose / Clayton Aldern
Michael Dolson has spent most of his life on the western side of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes’ Flathead Reservation on his family’s ranch, started by his great-grandparents before allotment. Today, a map of the reservation shows large squares of state trust land parcels located not far from his family’s land: a total of 108,000 surface and subsurface acres that fund Montana’s K-12 schools and the University of Montana.
Dolson — now the tribe’s chairman — says that the state lands on the reservation are managed separately; the tribe has no input over how or whether Montana decides to log or lease them. Since different groups have different objectives, Dolson says, this complicates the tribe’s ability to manage its own reservation.
“I think we’ve gotten used to lands on the rez being owned by others, and they make use of those lands the way they want to,” Dolson said. “Do we appreciate that? Well, no. Especially when it’s parcels that have some sort of cultural significance to us, and we have no control over it, even though they’re on our own reservation.”
For more than a decade, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have carefully planned for climate change, documenting and developing tools, like drought-resiliency plans, to limit the impacts it could have. Meanwhile, Montana continues to prioritize oil and gas and coal production, making extraction one of the biggest sources of its trust land revenue.
Like many other tribes, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes has had to buy back its own land, at or above market value. After allotment, less than a third of the reservation — about 30 percent — remained in tribal ownership. According to Dolson, about 60 percent of the Flathead Reservation, or 791,000 acres, is currently back in tribal ownership, following decades of strategic work. Yet Montana still controls 8 percent of the reservation as state trust land.
States are legally obliged to make money from state trust lands to benefit state institutions, so they are unlikely to return any land without getting something in exchange. But the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes may have created a model for how tribes can negotiate for large-scale transfers of land back to tribal ownership. In 2020, Congress passed a water-rights settlement that cleared the way for a transfer of nearly 30,000 acres of Montana state trust land back to the tribe. In exchange, the state will receive federal lands elsewhere; the acreage is currently in the process of being selected over the next five years. It’s a creative and unique arrangement, but one that presents opportunities — if states are willing to work with tribes.
Jon Eagle Sr. believes that systematic land theft has hampered tribes’ ability to manage the environment and protect their communities. The checkerboard parcels that allotment created are hard to manage; land-use policy is more effective over large, cohesive swaths of land. And returning land to tribal control gets complicated when state trust lands are involved: States don’t want to lose out on tax revenue.
The Biden administration’s policy is to assist tribes in reacquiring tribal homelands. But the policy is silent on the issue of state trust lands on reservations. There is currently no clear mechanism to return those lands to tribes. That means tribal nations have to work with states or else buy land outright — something the Ute Tribe tried unsuccessfully to do in 2019.
In 1969, Utah received 28,000 acres of land from the federal government inside the Ute’s reservation. Much of this land, known as Tabby Mountain, was converted to trust lands, and over the next 60 years it produced nearly $3.2 million in hunting and leasing revenue for state institutions, including Utah State University. In 2018, when the state put Tabby Mountain up for sale, the tribe was the highest bidder, offering nearly $47 million.
But shortly afterward, the state suspended the sale indefinitely, leaving the tribe unable to buy back its own land. Based on complaints filed by a whistleblower, the Utes allege that the state agencies responsible for the sale rigged the bidding process in order to prevent the tribe from reacquiring the land. The case is still in court.
According to Rob Williams at the University of Arizona, “The big issue now — and this is the burden on the tribes — is land back.”
Ariana Tibon was in college at the University of Hawaiʻi in 2017 when she saw the photo online: a black-and-white picture of a man holding a baby. The caption said: “Nelson Anjain getting his baby monitored on March 2, 1954, by an AEC RadSafe team member on Rongelap two days after ʻBravo.ʻ”
Tibon had never seen the man before. But she recognized the name as her great-grandfatherʻs. At the time, he was living on Rongelap in the Marshall Islands when the U.S. conducted Castle Bravo, the largest of 67 nuclear weapon tests there during the Cold War. The tests displaced and sickened Indigenous people, poisoned fish, upended traditional food practices, and wrought cancers and other negative health repercussions that continue to reverberate today.
A federal report by the Government Accountability Office published last month examines what’s left of that nuclear contamination, not only in the Pacific but also in Greenland and Spain. The authors conclude that climate change could disturb nuclear waste left in Greenland and the Marshall Islands. “Rising sea levels could spread contamination in RMI, and conflicting risk assessments cause residents to distrust radiological information from the U.S. Department of Energy,” the report says.
In Greenland, chemical pollution and radioactive liquid are frozen in ice sheets, left over from a nuclear power plant on a U.S. military research base where scientists studied the potential to install nuclear missiles. The report didn’t specify how or where nuclear contamination could migrate in the Pacific or Greenland, or what if any health risks that might pose to people living nearby. However, the authors did note that in Greenland, frozen waste could be exposed by 2100.
“The possibility to influence the environment is there, which could further affect the food chain and further affect the people living in the area as well,” said Hjalmar Dahl, president of Inuit Circumpolar Council Greenland. The country is about 90 percent Inuit. “I think it is important that the Greenland and U.S. governments have to communicate on this worrying issue and prepare what to do about it.”
The authors of the GAO study wrote that Greenland and Denmark haven’t proposed any cleanup plans, but also cited studies that say much of the nuclear waste has already decayed and will be diluted by melting ice. However, those studies do note that chemical waste such as polychlorinated biphenyls, man-made chemicals better known as PCBs that are carcinogenic, “may be the most consequential waste at Camp Century.”
The report summarizes disagreements between Marshall Islands officials and the U.S. Department of Energy regarding the risks posed by U.S. nuclear waste. The GAO recommends that the agency adopt a communications strategy for conveying information about the potential for pollution to the Marshallese people.
Nathan Anderson, a director at the Government Accountability Office, said that the United States’ responsibilities in the Marshall Islands “are defined by specific federal statutes and international agreements.” He noted that the government of the Marshall Islands previously agreed to settle claims related to damages from U.S. nuclear testing.
“It is the long-standing position of the U.S. government that, pursuant to that agreement, the Republic of the Marshall Islands bears full responsibility for its lands, including those used for the nuclear testing program.”
To Tibon, who is back home in the Marshall Islands and is currently chair of the National Nuclear Commission, the fact that the report’s only recommendation is a new communications strategy is mystifying. She’s not sure how that would help the Marshallese people.
“What we need now is action and implementation on environmental remediation. We don’t need a communication strategy,” she said. “If they know that it’s contaminated, why wasn’t the recommendation for next steps on environmental remediation, or what’s possible to return these lands to safe and habitable conditions for these communities?”
The Biden administration recently agreed to fund a new museum to commemorate those affected by nuclear testing as well as climate change initiatives in the Marshall Islands, but the initiatives have repeatedly failed to garner support from Congress, even though they’re part of an ongoing treaty with the Marshall Islands and a broader national security effort to shore up goodwill in the Pacific to counter China.
The University of Arizona this week delayed implementation of its climate action plan citing a $177 million budget deficit. Despite rising revenues, the university has been grappling with low cash reserves due to overspending, and is now dealing with hiring freezes, flat-lined salaries, and potential layoffs. Now, the university’s climate commitments may be on the chopping block.
Nick Prevenas, director of media relations at the University of Arizona, said the administration is “currently reassessing how to approach the final steps in the development of the university’s Sustainability and Climate Action Plan to ensure it best supports the university’s Financial Action Plan.”
Six working groups and two technical teams spent last fall working on nearly 100 recommendations to decrease carbon emissions at the university, including upgrading facilities, incentivizing cleaner transportation options, and improving public awareness of sustainability issues. The list of final recommendations includes divesting from fossil fuels by 2030, creating positions to oversee socially conscious investing, and creating policy to deal with donations from individuals or groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry. According to Prevenas, 6 percent of the University of Arizona Foundation’s endowment is currently made up of privately managed fossil fuel investments, which is valued at about $75 million.
It is now unclear when or if those proposals will be put into action, and Prevanas did not respond to direct questions about how long implementation may be delayed.
“We are the only public university in Arizona that doesn’t have a climate action plan,” said Samantha Gonsalves-Wetherell, a senior at the University of Arizona who has been a leader in the campus divestment movement. “It shows a lack of responsibility and accountability.”
“Weak economic performance and an unstable future for fossil fuels have made it clear that divestment can be achieved without financial harm to any individual investment fund,” the analysis says. “Divestment is a defensive tool employed to protect investors from the loss of value — losses as certain as climate change’s global reach.”
The news comes just weeks after a Grist investigation found that Arizona is among several universities that rely on fossil fuel production, mining, and other extractive industries to earn revenue from land taken from Indigenous peoples. Divestment activists at the University of Arizona have called the practice shocking, but not shocking.
Nadira Mitchell, a Diné student at the university who is currently serving as Miss Native American University of Arizona, was among those disappointed by Grist’s findings, and the delay in the climate action plan compounds her frustration.
“If sports funding isn’t cut and the climate action plan is,” she said, “that kind of shows what the university’s priorities are.”
Indigenous nations, farmers, and ranchers throughout the Klamath Basin in the Pacific Northwest reached an agreement on Wednesday to collaborate on ecosystem restoration projects and to improve water supply for agriculture.
The memorandum between the Klamath Tribes, Yurok Tribe, and Klamath Water Users Association, which represents agricultural producers across 17,000 acres in both California and Oregon, serves as a major step in a long-running battle over access to water as the Klamath River dries up and federal officials cut flows to tribes and producers.
Drought in the region has often pitted Indigenous peoples and endangered fish against more than 1,000 farms that rely on the same water for their crops. In 2001, the Bureau of Reclamation shut off irrigation water to farmers in the midst of a drought, prompting protests from farmers and illegal water releases. Two decades later, amid another drought, the agency cut water to farmers to preserve endangered suckerfish, again heightening tensions. ”It’s not safe for Natives to be out in farmland during a drought year,” Joey Gentry, a member of the Klamath Tribes, told Inside Climate News after the 2021 water cuts.
In 2022, tribes won a long-running campaign to convince the federal government to remove four dams that stopped salmon from reaching their spawning grounds, marking a major win for Indigenous communities that rely on the Klamath. Now, Clayton Dumont, chairman of the Klamath Tribes, says the new agreement goes even further.
“We’re nowhere near finished, but this is a really strong beginning,” he said. “Getting adversaries like this together in a room and having to sit through a lot of bitterness to get to a point where we are now, I think it’s not just commendable, it’s pretty miraculous.”
Klamath Tribes were forced to cede 23 million acres in Oregon and California to settlers in exchange for a reservation, but an 1864 treaty gave the tribe the right to hunt and fish on those ceded lands forever. However, fishing hasn’t been consistently possible with drought and conflicting demands for water.
“What’s at stake is our very livelihood, our culture, our identities, our way of life,” Dumont said.
In the next month, tribes and agricultural producers will meet to decide on restoration projects that could be completed within the next two years and supported through existing federal or state programs. After the priorities are decided, officials from the U.S. Department of the Interior will identify both existing funding and new funding sources for the projects. The agency also plans to release more than $72 million to modernize agricultural infrastructure and restore the ecosystem in Klamath Basin.
Officials from the Klamath Water Users Association said in a press release that working together with the tribes will make both parties more effective in obtaining state and federal funding to support the region.
“I am hoping that this MOU will be the first step to bring all the different entities together to work on a solution to the conflicts over water that have hampered this region for decades,” said Tracey Liskey, president of the Klamath Water Users Association Board of Directors. “The water users want fish in our rivers and lakes and water in our irrigation ditches. This way, we all can have a prosperous way of life in the basin.”
Dumont says it helped that the administrations locally, statewide, and federally were all supportive of this agreement. However, he added that there’s no guarantee that the MOU will have any staying power after November.
“If the election goes the wrong way, all of this could dry up really quickly,” Dumont said.
This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, where Adam Federman is a reporting fellow.
On the morning of March 5, 2012, Debra White Plume received an urgent phone call. A convoy of large trucks transporting pipeline servicing equipment was attempting to cross the Pine Ridge Reservation near the town of Wanblee, South Dakota. White Plume, a prominent Lakota activist, immediately dropped what she was doing and headed to the site, where, within a few hours, a group of about 75 people from the Pine Ridge Reservation gathered.
More than a dozen cars formed a blockade along one of the roads that runs through the reservation. Plume and other activists were outspoken critics of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, part of a larger network carrying oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Many Indigenous nations in South Dakota, whose land the convoy was attempting to pass through on its way to the Canadian tar sands, fiercely objected to the project.
“We have resolutions opposing the whole entity of the tar sands oil mine and the Keystone XL pipeline,” White Plume declared after arriving at the site where the trucks had been stopped. “They need to turn around and go back. … They are not coming through here.” But the trucks were so big and unwieldy that the drivers said it would be dangerous, if not impossible, to turn them around.
The standoff in Wanblee was a relatively small protest compared to subsequent actions against the Keystone XL pipeline, which drew tens of thousands into the streets of Washington, D.C., and garnered national attention. Police arrested five activists, including White Plume (who died in 2020) and her husband, Alex White Plume Sr., on charges of disorderly conduct, and released them later that day. Beyond a few stories in Indigenous news outlets and regional papers, the protest hardly registered. Though tribes and landowners in the region had begun organizing around Keystone XL in 2011 and 2012, the pipeline had not yet become the galvanizing force for one of the largest campaigns in the history of the modern environmental movement.
Debra White Plume is arrested by U.S. Park Police in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., during a protest against the Keystone XL pipeline in September 2011. Luis M. Avarez / AP Photo
But the events in Wanblee did capture the attention of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which began tracking Native groups campaigning against the pipeline in early 2012. According to documents obtained by Grist and Type Investigationsthrough a Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI’s Minneapolis office opened a counterterrorism assessment in February 2012, focusing on actions in South Dakota, that continued for at least a year and may have led to the opening of additional investigations. These documents reveal that the FBI was monitoring activists involved in the Keystone XL campaign about a year earlier than previously known.
Their contents suggest that, long before the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines became national flashpoints, the federal government was already developing a sweeping law enforcement strategy to counter any acts of civil disobedience aimed at preventing fossil fuel extraction. And young, Native activists were among its first targets.
“The threat emerging … is evolving into one based on opposition to energy exploration related to any extractions from the earth, rather than merely targeting one project and/or one company,” the FBI noted in its description of the Wanblee blockade.
The 15-page file, which is heavily redacted, also describes Native American groups as a potentially dangerous threat and likens them to “environmental extremists” whose actions, according to the FBI, could lead to violence. The FBI acknowledged that Native American groups were engaging in constitutionally protected activity, including attending public hearings, but emphasized that this sort of civic participation might spawn criminal activity.
To back up its claims, the FBI cited a 2011 State Department hearing on the pipeline in Pierre, South Dakota, attended by a small group of Native activists. The FBI said the individuals were dressed in camouflage and had covered their faces with red bandanas, “train robber style.” According to the report, they were also carrying walking sticks and shaking sage, claiming to be “Wounded Knee Security of/for Mother Earth.”
“The Bureau is uncertain how the NA group(s) will act initially or subsequently if the project is approved,” the agency wrote.
Members of the Oglala Lakota Tribe participate in a protest against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline on October 13, 2014, in Pierre, South Dakota. Andrew Burton / Getty Images
The FBI also singled out the “Native Youth Movement,” which it described as a mix between a “radical militia and a survivalist group.” In doing so, it appeared to conflate a specific activist group originally founded in Canada in the 1990s with the broader array of young Native activists who opposed the pipeline decades later. Young activists would play an important role in the Keystone XL campaign and later on during protests against the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock, but the movement had little in common with militias or survivalists, terms typically used to describe far-right groups or those seeking to disengage from society.
The FBI declined to respond to questions for this story. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the Minneapolis field office said the agency does not typically comment on FOIA releases and “lets the information contained in the files speak for itself.”
The FBI was not the only federal agency keeping tabs on Keystone XL pipeline protesters in the early years of the anti-pipeline movement. According to additional records obtained by Grist and Type Investigations, an obscure intelligence division within the U.S. State Department, which had jurisdiction over the pipeline because it crossed an international boundary, collected hundreds of pages of records on Keystone activists, landing one of them in jail on charges of trespassing (which were eventually dropped). Working in tandem with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, the State Department created an email account to “track all Keystone XL protest incidents” and monitored events in cities across the country, including in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Houston, and Honolulu. The task force even highlighted candlelight vigils held in several major cities in 2014, describing one group of protesters as “peaceful, holding candles and signs.” These records reveal for the first time that the State Department was also involved in monitoring activists from late 2013 through the Obama administration’s decision to reject the pipeline in November 2015, though the case file wasn’t officially closed until November 2016.
A U.S. Park Police officer motions journalists away from a group of environmental activists gathered outside the White House in Washington, D.C., in August 2011. J. Scott Applewhite / AP Photo
The State Department was especially interested in the work of environmental groups D.C. Action Lab and 350.org, as well as the “pledge of resistance,” organized by groups including CREDO, a mobile phone company that supports progressive causes, which called for activists to engage in civil disobedience to stop President Barack Obama from approving the Keystone XL pipeline. By late 2015, tens of thousands of people had signed the pledge and environmental groups held direct action trainings in dozens of cities. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security and state and local law enforcement agencies along the proposed pipeline route, according to previous reporting in The Guardianand other news outlets, were also intimately involved in investigating these activities, creating an unprecedented domestic surveillance network that is only now fully coming into focus.
In a written response, a State Department official said the purpose of tracking Keystone XL protesters was to “provide law enforcement with situational awareness of activities that could impact the security of State Department personnel, facilities, or activities.”
The department said it takes any potential threats against its personnel in the United States seriously but declined to comment on whether Keystone XL pipeline protesters had engaged in such behavior. In addition, the department declined to comment on why it singled out specific groups such as D.C. Action Lab and 350.org, as well as the CREDO campaign. The department said it is committed to upholding freedom of speech and assembly, “while also maintaining our security responsibility of protecting our facilities and U.S. personnel from those who may violate applicable laws.”
Environmental activists and attorneys who reviewed the new documents told Grist and Type Investigations that law enforcement’s approach to the Keystone XL campaign looked like a template for the increasingly militarized response to subsequent environmental and social justice campaigns — from efforts to block the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock to the ongoing protests against the police training center dubbed “Cop City” in Atlanta, Georgia, which would require razing at least 85 acres of urban forest.
Private security guards hold back dogs near Dakota Access Pipeline protesters near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, on September 3, 2016.Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images
Protesters gathered in front of the New York City Public Library for a rally against the Dakota Access Pipeline are seized by police officers in March 2017.Andy Katz / Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
The FBI’s working thesis, outlined in the new documents, that “most environmental extremist groups” have historically moved from peaceful protest to violence has served as the basis for subsequent investigations. “It’s astonishing to me how such a broad concept basically paints every activist and protester as a future terrorist,” said Mike German, a former FBI special agent who is now a fellow at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.
Sabrina King, an organizer with the conservation group Dakota Rural Action from 2012 to 2016, who went on to work for the ACLU in South Dakota, North Dakota, and Wyoming, spent nearly a month at Standing Rock. She believes the FBI’s characterization of the activist community — and Native youth in particular — as potential extremists helped set the stage for the increasingly aggressive government actions, including the use of FBI informants and heavily armed state and local police departments, directed at environmental protesters around the country in later years, from Standing Rock to the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota.
“This is the direct line to Standing Rock,” said King, who reviewed the newly obtained FBI documents. “None of that just happened. These law enforcement agencies had literally been training for [years]for Keystone, but then they used it on Dakota Access.”
In the years after the Wanblee blockade, the campaign opposing Keystone XL gained broad public appeal. It tapped into both local concerns over damage to land and water and also a rapidly growing national movement to end fossil fuel extraction altogether. It minted a multigenerational coalition of activists, many of whom had not been previously engaged in environmental politics.
The campaign also openly embraced nonviolent direct action, which marked a new chapter for some environmental organizations. In 2013, for example, the Sierra Club broke its long-standing prohibition on members engaging in civil disobedience — earning it a mention in the newly obtained FBI files. That year, activists, including the Sierra Club’s then-executive-director Michael Brune, used zip ties to attach themselves to the White House fence, resulting in mass arrests. The campaign included mainstream liberals who supported Obama and felt he could be persuaded to block the pipeline, as well as veterans of the environmental movement who had long been willing to engage in confrontational direct action.
From left to right: Social justice activist Julian Bond, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, and activist Bill McKibben are arrested as they refused to leave the sidewalk in front of the White House on February 13, 2013. Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post via Getty Images
This alliance posed an unexpected threat to companies involved in fossil fuel extraction, including TransCanada, the company behind the pipeline, and set off alarms within the federal government. Hundreds of pages of FBI and State Department files released through the Freedom of Information Act over the last decade highlight an increasingly close relationship between law enforcement agencies and the fossil fuel industry. The newly obtained documents show that, as early as 2012, the FBI was describing TransCanada, a multinational corporation headquartered in Calgary, Canada, as a “domain stakeholder” with direct access to the White House.
“Resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline was really the first pipeline campaign that I recall that there was organization on both sides of the fight,” said Lauren Regan, executive director of the nonprofit Civil Liberties Defense Center, which provided legal support to dozens of activists arrested during the campaign. “As we were collecting public records documents, organizers were shocked at how much running time TransCanada had with state and federal governments before any of them sensed that something was happening.”
Previously reported documents show that, less than two months after the FBI opened its investigation into Native activists, the agency held a “strategy meeting” with TransCanada and industry partners in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, an hour away from Cushing, where many of the nation’s major pipelines converge. (In 2012, Obama delivered a campaign speech in Cushing announcing that he would fast-track the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline.) Representatives from the Department of Homeland Security, the National Guard, and state and local police departments were also present. Indeed, the author of the February 2012 FBI file from the bureau’s Minneapolis field office noted that they would be attending the “regional working group meeting” to “ensure coordination and resource management between bureau field offices affected and the domain stakeholder, TransCanada Corporation.”
By the end of 2012, the FBI’s Houston field office also began collecting information for a domestic terrorism assessment that focused on Tar Sands Blockade, a scrappy coalition committed to nonviolent direct action, which had been at the center of the campaign to block construction of the pipeline in Texas. In one of their most prominent actions, Tar Sands Blockade had teamed up with a private landowner and set up tree-sits in the pathway of the pipeline. The FBI closely tracked protest activity among members of the group, one of whom later ended up being placed on a U.S. government watchlist for domestic flights, and cultivated at least one informant, according to files obtained in 2015 and previously reported in The Guardian. The investigation was initially opened without prior approval from the chief division counsel and the special agent in charge, in violation of FBI rules pertaining to “sensitive investigative matters” involving the activities of political organizations.
Protester Perry Graham climbs a flagpole to hang a sign to protest a pipeline by LyondellBasell, on March 27, 2013, in Houston, Texas. Nick de la Torre / Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
Meanwhile, starting in late 2012, TransCanada began delivering its own briefing to local law enforcement agencies along the proposed pipeline route. The PowerPoint presentations, which included profiles of organizers at 350.org, Rainforest Action Network, and Tar Sands Blockade, encouraged law enforcement to pursue federal anti-terrorism charges in conjunction with the FBI.
At the same time, tribes and landowners in South Dakota were busy raising awareness about the pipeline and the threats it posed to groundwater and Indigenous treaty rights. In September 2011, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, along with First Nation Chiefs of Canada, held an “emergency summit” in South Dakota, after which they issued the Mother Earth Accord, also referenced in the new FBI files. The agreement, signed by most tribes in the state, called for a moratorium on tar sands development and an end to the shipping of equipment for the pipeline through the United States and Canada.
The blockade in Wanblee was one of several actions the FBI cited to support its conclusion that the movement could potentially turn to violence. The counterterrorism assessment documents other public meetings, including a protest held by the Oglala Lakota Nation in early February 2012, that the FBI acknowledged was “protected First Amendment activity.” The FBI warned that, after Wanblee, any commercial vehicles associated with the pipeline could now be held “hostage” by Native Americans “who oppose the exploration, extraction, refinement, and/or distribution of petroleum-based products.” The FBI file included the names of those arrested and noted that South Dakota’s U.S. attorney had considered prosecuting the activists under the Hobbs Act, a 1946 law designed to prevent racketeering in interstate commerce, typically through robbery or extortion. Violating the act can carry a punishment of up to 20 years in prison.
Along with monitoring protest activity, the agency was particularly concerned with the activities of Native youth. Certainly, Native youth played an important role in the Keystone XL campaign, and later in organizing opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline. But their actions hardly seemed like the work of a radical militia. In 2015, members of the Lakota Nation’s Cheyenne River Sioux tribe formed the One Mind Youth Movement, a kind of mutual aid society for teens struggling with suicide and depression. Eventually they turned their attention to the Keystone XL campaign and began networking with activists in other parts of the country and around the world. At Standing Rock, members of One Mind formed the International Indigenous Youth Council, which was known for its efforts to defuse tensions between law enforcement and protesters, even drawing criticism from some activists who felt they were too conciliatory.
The FBI saw things differently. According to the newly obtained files, the Minneapolis office appears to have opened another inquiry into what it described as the “Native Youth Movement” to “marshal information about extremist groups in Indian Country targeting a myriad of issues, to include threats to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.” Those records may never be released, however. The FBI denied a Freedom of Information Act request for the material, and asserted that releasing the “investigative file” would reveal intelligence sources and methods or law enforcement techniques and procedures. In October, the Department of Justice rejected an appeal filed by Grist and Type Investigations, stating that “disclosure of the information withheld would harm the interests protected by these exemptions.”
Shortly after Obama and the State Department rejected the Keystone XL pipeline in 2015, Paula Antoine, the director of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Sicangu Oyate Land Office, headed north to the Standing Rock reservation to meet with elders interested in establishing a prayer camp on the banks of the Missouri River. During the fight over Keystone XL, Antoine had helped to set up the first “spirit camp” near the community of Ideal, South Dakota, where she was raised. The idea caught on. Lewis Grassrope, a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribal Council, set up a camp on land belonging to his mother a few miles from the Missouri River. A third camp was erected on the Cheyenne Sioux Reservation. Each served as a gathering place for organizers and activists involved in the Keystone XL campaign. Now, activists spearheading the campaign to block the Dakota Access pipeline wanted to do the same thing.
“To me it [KXL] was like the precursor to No DAPL,” Grassrope said, referring to the campaign to block the Dakota Access pipeline. “We knew that the fight was coming, we just didn’t know when.”
Lewis GrassRope speaks at a 2023 political event in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Gilbert Carrasquillo / GC Images
The spirit camp at Standing Rock started out small and was maintained by a group of local activists and their allies. But by the fall of 2016, it had become the focal point of the growing movement to block the pipeline. Thousands of people taking on the mantle of “water protectors” eventually descended on the region. Standing Rock would capture the world’s attention.
But as the newly obtained files show, after years of tracking Keystone XL protesters, the fossil fuel industry and law enforcement had prepared for this moment. Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the pipeline, hired a private security firm that monitored activist groups and produced dozens of intelligence reports, which were later leaked and reported by The Intercept. This information was shared with law enforcement and the FBI, blurring the lines between public and private partnerships, with the fossil fuel industry at the center. The security firm, TigerSwan, collected intelligence on activists and used an ex-Marine to infiltrate anti-pipeline actions. At the same time,a Department of Homeland Security-funded fusion center in North Dakota developed a “links chart” to map out the leadership of the movement, focusing almost exclusively on Native American activists.
“We all had people following us,” said Antoine. “They knew who we were.”
As the encampment grew, the National Guard was eventually enlisted in what became one of the largest police and military deployments in North Dakota’s history, according to historian Nick Estes’s Our History is the Future, his book about the pipeline fight. “Cops in riot gear conducted tipi-by-tipi raids … They dragged half-naked elders from ceremonial sweat lodges, tasered a man in the face, doused people with CS gas and tear gas, and blasted adults and youth with deafening LRAD sound cannons,” Estes writes. Law enforcement also appeared to undermine parts of the movement from the inside. Red Fawn Fallis, a Lakota activist, was sentenced to a nearly five-year prison term for possession of a handgun, following a skirmish with police at Standing Rock. According to reporting by Will Parish in The Intercept, she had been involved in a romantic relationship with an FBI informant. It was later revealed that the weapon belonged to him.
Even after the camps at Standing Rock had been broken down and the last protesters had gone home, the surveillance continued. Grassrope, now 46, returned to the spirit camp he’d established on the Lower Brule reservation and, along with a handful of others, lived in tipis, yurts, and military tents. One day, the FBI called and said they wanted to inspect the camp. “They were pinpointing certain camps created after Standing Rock,” Grassrope said, which they believed were preparing to turn their attention, once again, to the Keystone XL pipeline, which then-President Donald Trump had revived.
Lauren Regan of the Civil Liberties Defense Center said that the fossil fuel industry and law enforcement agencies have continued to strengthen their partnership. In particular, the oil and gas industry’s information-sharing networks have become more sophisticated. In some cases, corporations have made direct payments to state and local law enforcement. For example, Enbridge, a Canadian multinational that recently upgraded its Line 3 pipeline, which cuts through tribal land in Minnesota, reimbursed state and local law enforcement to the tune of more than $8.5 million for their work policing protests against the pipeline.
More broadly, using the playbook that TransCanada developed, the industry has continued to push lawmakers to pursue enhanced felony charges for pipeline protesters. Lawmakers in nearly 20 states have passed legislation criminalizing actions that target “critical infrastructure.”
“It was definitely part of the state and law enforcement strategy to escalate repression to the point people wouldn’t want to continue taking action,” said Ethan Nuss, a senior campaigner at Rainforest Action Network who was involved in protests targeting the Keystone XL pipeline and Line 3.
Since the Keystone and Dakota Access pipeline fights, the law enforcement response to the environmental movement, and mass protest in general, has remained severe. In January 2023, six Georgia state troopers shot and killed Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, a 26-year-old medic involved in protests around the building of the police training center in Atlanta known to activists as Cop City. An autopsy requested by the family revealed that Tortuguita, as Terán was known, was likely sitting on the ground with both arms raised when they were killed, and an autopsy by DeKalb County found that they had been shot at least 57 times — the first time an environmental activist has been shot and killed by police on U.S. soil. Meanwhile, the state has charged dozens of protesters in Atlanta with domestic terrorism. And according to reporting by Grist and Type Investigations, the FBI has been tracking disparate groups involved in the campaign, some as far away as Chicago.
Despite this crackdown, however, actions targeting fossil fuel infrastructure continue to pop up across the country. In October, police in Virginia arrested three activists and charged them with trespassing and obstruction after they attached themselves to equipment used in building the last leg of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Fast-tracked as part of negotiations over the Inflation Reduction Act, the 303-mile pipeline stands to release up to 40 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere every year once it is completed, according to its environmental impact statement. The developer has since sued two of the protesters, citing congressional approval of the project and arguing that the action caused “substantial delays and expenses” for the company.
“With the global warming crisis at its height, these fights are going to happen more regularly,” said Grassrope. “We have to move faster.That is what it comes down to.”
For the activist community, the Keystone XL campaign still serves as a source of inspiration. When the project was officially terminated in June 2021, Paula Antoine took her granddaughter out to the spirit camp on the Rosebud Sioux reservation. She made an offering and prayed, as she had many times before, for the continued protection of the land.
Samantha Gonsalves-Wetherell, a senior at the University of Arizona, has spent years urging university officials to take climate change seriously. As a leader of UArizona Divest, she and her classmates have been pushing the university toward three goals: to divest from fossil fuels by 2029; commit to no further investments in fossil fuels; and to implement socially responsible investing goals.
“It’s hard to both combat the climate crisis and also fund it,” said Gonsalves-Wetherell. She has met with university officials to ask them what stocks the university has invested in and how much revenue oil and gas investments bring in.
But until now, she had no idea that the university, like more than a dozen other land-grant universities created through the Morrill Act, earned millions more through another route: nearly 700,000 acres of land taken from Indigenous nations that is set aside for oil, gas and mineral leases.
A Grist investigation published earlier this week reported that 14 universities — including the University of Arizona — receive millions in annual income from more than 8 million acres of surface and subsurface land taken from 123 Native nations. Over the past five years, these properties have generated more than $2.2 billion. Nearly a fourth of the trust lands are dedicated to fossil fuels or mineral mining including coal mining.
University activists who have been lobbying their universities to pull their endowments out of fossil fuels say Grist’s findings are in line with what they’ve come to expect from their schools: a willingness to turn a blind eye to their complicity in climate change and societal injustice.
When Claire Sullivan, a senior at Colorado State University, learned of Grist’s findings, she thought of the land acknowledgement she’s seen on every syllabus and plastered on many walls all over campus.
The two-paragraph statement ends with this note: “Our founding came at a dire cost to Native Nations and peoples whose land this University was built upon. This acknowledgment is the education and inclusion we must practice in recognizing our institutional history, responsibility, and commitment.”
According to Sullivan, CSU says all of its fossil fuel investments are indirect, but it hasn’t made any promises to avoid direct investments or phase out any existing ones, despite the disproportionate harm that climate change is wreaking on Native peoples. Sullivan’s exasperation at the university’s intractable stance is topped only by her awe at what she describes as their hypocrisy.
“It’s just crazy that you could be making this commitment outwardly and just be doing the opposite in practice,” she said.
Not every divestment campaign has been so frustrating. Many university activists, such as at Harvardand Yale, have seen success. Gracelyn McClure is a senior and environmental sciences major at the University of Minnesota. She was only a sophomore when school officials decided to withdraw its investments from fossil fuels by 2028. It was a huge victory, but McClure said the group’s advocacy work isn’t over.
The group has been meeting with university officials to try to ensure that as contracts for fossil fuel investments expire, the money is being shifted into investments that aren’t similarly harmful. For example, they’ve asked the school not to reinvest in mining that’s opposed by Indigenous peoples.
Even though the initial campaign was successful, the students haven’t yet been able to garner any new promises to avoid nuclear energy or other mining that they fear could harm Native peoples. “They’re not super receptive all the time to our asks,” McClure said of the administration. But she thinks working with Native nations to ensure that reinvestment isn’t negatively affecting their communities isn’t asking for much.
“It’s the least that the university can do, considering how much they profited from Native land, and bodies too,” she said.
A spokesman for the University of Minnesota said the university has been working with tribal nations to address its history of stolen land, including returning about 3,400 acres to the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. The spokesman also cited the school’s investments in Native student tuition waivers, Indigenous language revitalization and staff training.
He added that the school can’t speak to land managed by the state. The University of Arizona and Colorado State University did not comment on the trust lands revenue.
Many students at universities that have pledged to divest from fossil fuels have been turning their attention to different but related causes, says Alicia Colomer, managing director at Campus Climate Network, which supports student climate activists. She worked on the successful New York University divestment campaign and says some of the newer student demands include asking schools to stop putting fossil fuel executives on their boards and stop accepting research money from oil companies.
To her, learning about the trust lands revenue feels like more of the same problem: “shocking but not shocking.”
She hopes students can sway their institutions to stop practices that are harmful to Indigenous lands and people.
Nadira Mitchell, a Navajo student at University of Arizona, hopes to be part of that change. She’s studying natural resources at the university in the hopes that she will be able to work for her tribal nation one day and make a difference. It has felt isolating to be one of the only Native students in her environmental courses.
Now, she’s struck by the juxtaposition between how Indigenous people like her own are disproportionately harmed by climate change and university’s investments in fossil fuels.
Stolen Indigenous land is the foundation of the land-grant university system. Climate change is its legacy.
Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
This project was supported by the Pulitzer Center, the Data-Driven Reporting Project, and the Bay & Paul Foundation.
Alina Sierra needs $6,405. In 2022, the 19-year-old Tohono O’odham student was accepted to the University of Arizona, her dream school, and excited to become the first in her family to go to college.
Her godfather used to take her to the university’s campus when she was a child, and their excursions could include a stop at the turtle pond or lunch at the student union. Her grandfather also encouraged her, saying: “You’re going to be here one day.”
“Ever since then,” said Sierra. “I wanted to go.”
Then the financial reality set in. Unable to afford housing either on or off campus, she couch-surfed her first semester. Barely able to pay for meals, she turned to the campus food pantry for hygiene products. “One week I would get soap; another week, get shampoo,” she said. Without reliable access to the internet, and with health issues and a long bus commute, her grades began to slip. She was soon on academic probation.
“I always knew it would be expensive,” said Sierra. “I just didn’t know it would be this expensive.”
Bean Yazzie / Grist
Alina Sierra poses for a photo while wearing a locket containing the ashes of her godfather. “He would tell me, like, ‘Further your education, education is power,’” she said. “Before he passed away, I promised him that I was going to go to college and graduate from UofA.” Bean Yazzie / Grist
Alina Sierra reflects on her decision to leave University of Arizona and enroll in Tohono O’odham Community College. She’s glad she made the switch. “It’s free, they take care of your books and tuition,” she said of TOCC. In contrast, she still owes her former school over $6,000.
Bean Yazzie / Grist
She was also confused. The university, known colloquially as UArizona, expressed a lot of support for Indigenous students. It wasn’t just that the Tohono O’odham flag hung in the bookstore or that the university had a land acknowledgment reminding the community that the Tucson campus was on O’odham and Yaqui homelands. The same year she was accepted, UArizona launched a program to cover tuition and mandatory fees for undergraduates from all 22 Indigenous nations in the state. President Robert C. Robbins described the new Arizona Native Scholars Grant as a step toward fulfilling the school’s land-grant mission.
Sierra was eligible for the grant, but it didn’t cover everything. After all the application forms and paperwork, she was still left with a balance of thousands of dollars. She had no choice but to take out a loan, which she kept a secret from her family, especially her mom. “That’s the number one thing she told me: ‘Don’t get a loan,’ but I kind of had to.”
Cacti grow behind a sign for the University of Arizona.
Bean Yazzie / Grist
Established in 1885, almost 30 years before Arizona was a state, UArizona was one of 52 land-grant universities supported by the Morrill Act. Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, the act used land taken from Indigenous nations to fund a network of colleges across the fledgling United States.
By the early 20th century, grants issued under the Morrill Act had produced the modern equivalent of a half a billion dollars for land-grant institutions from the redistribution of nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous lands. While most land-grant universities ignore this colonial legacy, UArizona’s Native scholars program appeared to be an effort to exorcise it.
But the Morrill Act is only one piece of legislation that connects land expropriated from Indigenous communities to these universities.
In combination with other land-grant laws, UArizona still retains rights to nearly 687,000 acres of land — an area more than twice the size of Los Angeles. The university also has rights to another 703,000 subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other resources underground. Known as trust lands, these expropriated Indigenous territories are held and managed by the state for the school’s continued benefit.
A parcel of land in Willcox, Arizona, granted to the University of Arizona. Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
State trust lands just might be one of the best-kept public secrets in America: They exist in 21 Western and Midwestern states, totaling more than 500 million surface and subsurface acres. Those two categories, surface and subsurface, have to be kept separate because they don’t always overlap. What few have bothered to ask is just how many of those acres are funding higher education.
The parcels themselves are scattered and rural, typically uninhabited and seldom marked. Most appear undeveloped and blend in seamlessly with surrounding landscapes. That is, when they don’t have something like logging underway or a frack pad in sight.
In 2022, the year Sierra enrolled, UArizona’s state trust lands provided the institution $7.7 million — enough to have paid the full cost of attendance for more than half of every Native undergraduate at the Tucson campus that same year. But providing free attendance to anyone is an unlikely scenario, as the school works to rein in a budget shortfall of nearly $240 million.
A tribute to the University of Arizona’s wildcat mascot stands near a building on campus.Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
A parcel of land in Willcox, Arizona, granted to the University of Arizona.Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
Alina Sierra holds up her old student ID from the University of Arizona.Bean Yazzie / Grist
UArizona’s reliance on state trust land for revenue not only contradicts its commitment to recognize past injustices regarding stolen Indigenous lands, but also threatens its climate commitments. The school has pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2040.
The parcels are managed by the Arizona State Land Department, a separate government agency that has leased portions of them to agriculture, grazing, and commercial activities. But extractive industries make up a major portion of the trust land portfolio. Of the 705,000 subsurface acres that benefit UArizona, almost 645,000 are earmarked for oil and gas production. The lands were taken from at least 10 Indigenous nations, almost all of which were seized by executive order or congressional action in the wake of warfare.
Over the past year, Grist has examined publicly available data to locate trust lands associated with land-grant universities seeded by the Morrill Act. We found 14 universities that matched this criteria. In the process, we identified their original sources and analyzed their ongoing uses. In all, we located and mapped more than 8.2 million surface and subsurface acres taken from 123 Indigenous nations. This land currently produces income for those institutions.
“Universities continue to benefit from colonization,” said Sharon Stein, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of British Columbia and a climate researcher. “It’s not just a historical fact; the actual income of the institution is subsidized by this ongoing dispossession.”
The amount of acreage under management for land-grant universities varies widely, from as little as 15,000 acres aboveground in North Dakota to more than 2.1 million belowground in Texas. Combined, Indigenous nations were paid approximately $4.3 million in today’s dollars for these lands, but in many cases, nothing was paid at all. In 2022 alone, these trust lands generated more than $2.2 billion for their schools. Between 2018 and 2022, the lands produced almost $6.7 billion. However, those figures are likely an undercount as multiple state agencies did not return requests to confirm amounts.
This work builds upon previous investigations that examined how land grabs capitalized and transformed the U.S. university system. The new data reveals how state trust lands continue to transfer wealth from Indigenous nations to land-grant universities more than a century after the original Morrill Act.
It also provides insight into the relationship between colonialism, higher education, and climate change in the Western United States.
Nearly 25 percent of land-grant university trust lands are designated for either fossil fuel production or the mining of minerals, like coal and iron-rich taconite. Grazing is permitted on about a third of the land, or approximately 2.8 million surface acres. Those parcels are often coupled with subsurface rights, which means oil and gas extraction can occur underneath cattle operations, themselves often a major source of methane emissions. Timber, agriculture, and infrastructure leases — for roads or pipelines, for instance — make up much of the remaining acreage.
By contrast, renewable energy production is permitted on roughly one-quarter of 1 percent of the land in our dataset. Conservation covers an even more meager 0.15 percent.
However, those land use statistics are likely undercounts due to the different ways states record activities. Many state agencies we contacted for this story had incomplete public information on how land was used.
“People generally are not eager to confront their own complicity in colonialism and climate change,” said Stein. “But we also have to recognize, for instance, myself as a white settler, that we are part of that system, that we are benefiting from that system, that we are actively reproducing that system every day.”
Students like Alina Sierra struggle to pay for education at a university built on her peoples’ lands and supported with their natural resources. But both current and future generations will have to live with the way trust lands are used to subsidize land-grant universities.
In December 2023, Sierra decided the cost to attend UArizona was too high and dropped out.
UArizona did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Alina Sierra stands on a dead-end street near her home.
Bean Yazzie / Grist
Acreage now held in trust by states for land-grant universities is part of America’s sweeping history of real estate creation, a history rooted in Indigenous dispossession.
Trust lands in most states were clipped from the more than 1.8 billion acres that were once part of the United States’ public domain — territory claimed, colonized, and redistributed in a process that began in the 18th century and continues today.
The making of the public domain is the stuff of textbook lessons on U.S. expansion. After consolidating states’ western land claims in the aftermath of the American Revolution, federal officials obtained a series of massive territorial acquisitions from rival imperial powers. No doubt you’ve heard of a few of these deals: They ranged from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 to the Alaska Purchase of 1867.
Backed by the doctrine of discovery, a legal principle with religious roots that justified the seizure of lands around the world by Europeans, U.S. claims to Indigenous territories were initially little more than projections of jurisdiction. They asserted an exclusive right to steal from Indigenous nations, divide the territory into new states, and carve it up into private property. Although Pope Francis repudiated the Catholic Church’s association with the doctrine in 2023, it remains a bedrock principle of U.S. law.
Starting in the 1780s, federal authorities began aggressively taking Native land before surveying and selling parcels to new owners. Treaties were the preferred instrument, accompanied by a range of executive orders and congressional acts. Behind their tidy legal language and token payments lay actual or threatened violence, or the use of debts or dire conditions, such as starvation, to coerce signatures from Indigenous peoples and compel relocation.
By the 1930s, tribal landholdings in the form of reservations covered less than 2 percent of the United States. Most were located in places with few natural resources and more sensitive to climate change than their original homelands. When reservations proved more valuable than expected, due to the discovery of oil, for instance, outcomes could be even worse, as viewers of Killers of the Flower Moon learned last year.
The public domain once covered three-fourths of what is today the United States. Federal authorities still retain about 30 percent of this reservoir of plundered land, most conspicuously as national parks, but also as military bases, national forests, grazing land, and more. The rest, nearly 1.3 billion acres, has been redistributed to new owners through myriad laws.
A missile range and military museum on a land-grant parcel in White Sands, New Mexico.Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
Signs mark oil activity on parcels granted to Texas A&M in Pyote, Texas.Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
A waste pond on a land-grant parcel in Carlsbad, New Mexico.Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
When it came to redistribution, grants of various stripes were more common than land sales. Individuals and corporate grantees — think homesteaders or railroads — were prominent recipients, but in terms of sheer acreage given, they trailed a third group: state governments.
Federal-to-state grants were immense. Cram them all together and they would comfortably cover all of Western Europe. Despite their size and ongoing financial significance, they have never attracted much attention outside of state offices and agencies responsible for managing them.
The Morrill Act, one of the best known examples of federal-to-state grants, followed a well-established path for funding state institutions. This involved handing Indigenous land to state legislatures so agencies could then manage those lands on behalf of specifically chosen beneficiaries.
Many other laws subsidized higher education by issuing grants to state or territorial governments in a similar way. The biggest of those bounties came through so-called “enabling acts” that authorized U.S. territories to graduate to statehood.
Every new state carved out of the public domain in the contiguous United States received land grants for public institutions through their enabling acts. These grants functioned like dowries for joining the Union and funded a variety of public works and state services ranging from penitentiaries to fish hatcheries. Their main function, however, was subsidizing education.
Tribal Land Cession Boundaries
1784-1894
1783
Public Land Survey System Townships
Washington State Trust Lands
Washington State Trust Lands
Connected to Washington State University
Since time immemorial, Indigenous peoples have lived with, and
cared for, the lands they call home.
But as settlers moved west, U.S. government and military officials
forced those communities from their lands, sometimes through the
signing of treaties, sometimes through military action.
Once ceded, those lands became territories and then states. With
statehood, those lands became part of America's real estate
system.
Lands inside newly formed states were overlaid with the Public
Land Survey System — a rectangular survey system designed by
early colonists to map newly acquired Indigenous lands.
One 6-by-6 mile square on the grid is known as a
township.
Inside each township are 36 more 1-by-1 mile squares called
sections.
In most states, sections 16 and 36 of every township were
automatically set aside to fund K-12 schools, known as common
schools at the time.
From the remaining 34 sections, states could choose which lands
would benefit other public institutions, like hospitals,
penitentiaries, and universities.
In the years since statehood, some of these lands have been sold
or swapped, but most Western states have held onto their trust
lands.
Spread across the Western U.S. land grid, trust lands are often
unseen, landlocked, and anonymous on the landscape.
Primary and secondary schools, or K-12 schools, were the greatest beneficiaries by far, followed by institutions of higher education. What remains of them today are referred to as trust lands. “A perpetual, multigenerational land trust for the support of the Beneficiaries and future generations” is how the Arizona State Land Department describes them.
Higher education grants were earmarked for universities, teachers colleges, mining schools, scientific schools, and agricultural colleges, the latter being the means through which states that joined the Union after 1862 got their Morrill Act shares. States could separate or consolidate their benefits as they saw fit, which resulted in many grants becoming attached to Morrill Act colleges.
Originally, the land was intended to be sold to raise capital for trust funds. By the late 19th century, however, stricter requirements on sales and a more conscientious pursuit of long-term gains reduced sales in favor of short-term leasing.
The change in management strategy paid off. Many state land trusts have been operating for more than a century. In that time, they have generated rents from agriculture, grazing, and recreation. As soon as they were able, managers moved into natural resource extraction, permitting oil wells, logging, mining, and fracking.
Land use decisions are typically made by state land agencies or lawmakers. Of the six land-grant institutions that responded to requests for comment on this investigation, those that referenced their trust lands deferred to state agencies, making clear that they had no control over permitted activities.
What happens on state trust lands?
State agencies likewise receive and distribute the income. As money comes in, it is either delivered directly to beneficiaries or, more commonly, diverted to permanent state trust funds, which invest the proceeds and make scheduled payouts to support select public services and institutions.
These trusts have a fiduciary obligation to generate profit for institutions, not minimize environmental damage. Although some of the permitted activities are renewable and low-impact, others are quietly stripping the land. All of them fill public coffers with proceeds derived from ill-gotten resources.
Marty Two Bulls Jr. / Grist
For a $10 fee last December, anyone in New Mexico could chop down a Christmas tree in a pine stand on a patch of state trust land just off Highway 120 near Black Lake, southeast of Taos. The rules: Pay your fee, bring your permit, choose a tree, and leave nothing behind but a stump less than 6 inches high.
“The holidays are a time we should be enjoying our loved ones, not worrying about the cost of providing a memorable experience for our kids,” said Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard, adding that “the nominal fee it costs for a permit will directly benefit New Mexico public schools, so it supports a good cause too.” The offer has been popular enough to keep the program running for several years.
The New Mexico State Land Office, sometimes described by state legislators as “the most powerful office you’ve never heard of,” has been a successful operation for a very long time. Since it started reporting revenue in 1900, it’s generated well over $42 billion in 2023 dollars.
All that money isn’t from Christmas trees.For generations, oil and gas royalties have fueled the state’s trust land revenue, with a portion of the funds designated for New Mexico State University, or NMSU, a land-grant school founded in 1888 when New Mexico was still a territory.
An aerial view of New Mexico State University, including Hadley Hall.
New Mexico State University, as seen in an aerial view, is a land-grant school founded in 1888. Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
Students walk past Piñon Hall on New Mexico State University’s campus. The university, which still receives revenue from stolen Indigenous land parcels, has an American Indian Student Center. Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
The oil comes from drilling in the northwestern fringe of the Permian Basin, one of the oldest targets of large-scale oil production in the United States. Corporate descendants of Standard Oil, the infamous monopoly controlled by John D. Rockefeller, were operating in the Permian as early as the 1920s. Despite being a consistent source of oil, prospects for exploitation dimmed by the late 20th century, before surging again in the 21st. Today, it’s more profitable than ever.
In recent decades, more sophisticated exploration techniques have revealed more “recoverable” fossil fuel in the Permian than previously believed. A 2018 report by the United States Geological Survey pegged the volume at 46.3 billion barrels of oil and 281 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, which made the Permian the largest oil and gas deposit in the nation. Analysts, shocked at the sheer volume, and the money to be made, have taken to crowning the Permian the “King of Shale Oil.” Critics concerned with the climate impact of the expanding operations call it a “carbon bomb.”
A parcel of land in Carlsbad, New Mexico, granted to New Mexico State University. Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
As oil and gas extraction spiked, so did New Mexico’s trust land receipts. In the last 20 years, oil and gas has generated between 91 and 97 percent of annual trust land revenue. It broke annual all-time highs in half of those years, topping $1 billion for the first time in 2019 and reaching $2.75 billion last year. Adjusted for inflation, more than 20 percent of New Mexico’s trust land income since 1900 has arrived in just the last five years.“
Every dollar earned by the Land Office,” Commissioner Richard said when revenues broke the billion-dollar barrier, “is a dollar taxpayers do not have to pay to support public institutions.”
Trust land as a cost-free source of subsidies for citizens is a common framing. In 2023, Richard declared that her office had saved every New Mexico taxpayer $1,500 that year. The press release did not mention oil or gas, or Apache bands in the state.
Virtually all of the trust land in New Mexico, including 186,000 surface acres and 253,000 subsurface acres now benefiting NMSU, was seized from various Apache bands during the so-called Apache Wars. Often reduced to the iconic photograph of Geronimo on one knee, rifle in hand, hostilities began in 1849, and they remain the longest-running military conflict in U.S. history, continuing until 1924.
In 2019, newly elected New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham began aligning state policy with “scientific consensus around climate change.” According to the state’s climate action website, New Mexico is working to tackle climate change by transitioning to clean electricity, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, supporting an economic transition from coal to clean energy, and shoring up natural resource resilience.
A parcel of land in Carlsbad, New Mexico, leased to New Mexico State University
Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
“New Mexico is serious about climate change — and we have to be. We are already seeing drier weather and rising temperatures,” the governor wrote on the state’s website. “This administration is committed not only to preventing global warming, but also preparing for its effects today and into the future.”
No mention was made of increasingly profitable oil and gas extraction on trust lands or their production in the Permian. In 2023, just one 240-acre parcel of land benefiting NMSU was leased for five years for $6 million.
NMSU did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
More than half of the acreage uncovered in our investigation appears in oil-rich West Texas, the equivalent of more than 3 million football fields. It benefits Texas A&M.
Take the long drive west along I-10 between San Antonio and El Paso, in the southwest region of the Permian Basin, and you’ll pass straight through several of those densely packed parcels without ever knowing it — they’re hidden in plain sight on the arid landscape. These tracts, and others not far from the highway, were Mescalero Apache territory. Kiowas and Comanches relinquished more parcels farther north.
A flare glows on a land-grant parcel in Pyote, Texas, associated with Texas A&M. Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
In the years after the Civil War, a “peace commission” pressured Comanche and Kiowa leaders for an agreement that would secure land for tribes in northern Texas and Oklahoma. Within two years, federal agents dramatically reduced the size of the resulting reservation with another treaty, triggering a decade of conflict.
The consequences were disastrous. Kiowas and Comanches lost their land to Texas and their populations collapsed. Between the 1850s and 1890s, Kiowas lost more than 60 percent of their people to disease and war, while Comanches lost nearly 90 percent.
If this general pattern of colonization and genocide was a common one, the trajectory that resulted in Texas A&M’s enormous state land trust was not.
Texas was never part of the U.S. public domain. Its brief stint as an independent nation enabled it to enter the Union as a state, skipping territorial status completely. As a result, like the original 13 states, it claimed rights to sell or otherwise distribute all the not-yet-privatized land within its borders.
Following the broader national model, but ratcheting up the scale, Texas would allocate over 2 million acres to subsidize higher education.
Texas A&M was established to take advantage of a Morrill Act allocation of 180,000 acres, and opened its doors in 1876. The same year, Texas allocated a million acres of trust lands, followed by another million in 1883, nearly all of it on land relinquished in treaties from the mid-1860s.
A Texas-sized trust
Texas A&M benefits from more than half of the state trust lands held
on behalf of universities.
Today, the Permanent University Fund derived from that land is worth nearly $34 billion. That’s thanks to oil, of course, which has been flowing from the university’s trust lands since 1923. In 2022 alone, Texas trust lands produced $2.2 billion in revenue.
The Kiowa and Comanche were ultimately paid about 2 cents per acre for their land. The Mescalero Apache received nothing.
Texas A&M did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
Marty Two Bulls Jr. / Grist
For more than a century, logging has been the main driver of Washington State University’s trust land income, on land taken from 21 Indigenous nations, especially the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. About 86,000 acres, more than half of the surface trust lands allocated to Washington State University, or WSU, are located inside Yakama land cessions, which started in 1855. Between 2018 and 2022, trust lands produced nearly $78.5 million in revenue almost entirely from timber.
But it isn’t a straight line to the university’s bank account.
“The university does not receive the proceeds from timber sales directly,” said Phil Weiler, a spokesperson for WSU. “Lands held in trust for the university are managed by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, not WSU.”
Washington State’s mascot, Butch, leads the student section during a game.
David Ryder / Getty Images
Left, A trail cuts through a clearcut timber parcel granted to Washington State University. Right, Students exit Washington State University. Google Earth, David Ryder / Getty Images
This parcel granted to Washington State University is leased for timber extraction.
Google Earth
In 2022, WSU’s trust lands produced about $19.5 million in revenue, which was deposited into a fund managed by the State Investment Board. In other words, the state takes on the management responsibility of turning timber into investments, while WSU reaps the rewards by drawing income from the resulting trust funds.
“The Washington legislature decides how much of the investment earnings will be paid out to Washington State University each biennium,” said Weiler. “By law, those payouts can only be used to fund capital projects and debt service.”
This arrangement yielded nearly $97 million dollars for WSU from its two main trust funds between 2018 and 2022, and has generally been on the rise since the Great Recession. In recent decades, the money has gone to construction and maintenance of the institution’s infrastructure, like its Biomedical and Health Sciences building, and the PACCAR Clean Technology Building — a research center focused on innovating wood products and sustainable design.
That revenue may look small in comparison to WSU’s $1.2 billion dollar endowment, but it has added up over time. From statehood in 1889 to 2022, timber sales on trust lands provided Washington State University with roughly $1 billion in revenue when Grist adjusted for inflation. But those figures are likely higher: Between 1971 and 1983, the State of Washington did not produce detailed records on trust land revenue as a cost-cutting measure.
Meanwhile, WSU students have demanded that the university divest from fossil fuel companies held in the endowment. But even if the board of regents agreed, any changes would likely not apply to the school’s state-controlled trust fund, which currently contains shares in ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, and at least two dozen other corporations in the oil and gas sector.
“Washington State University (WSU) is aware that our campuses are located on the homelands of Native peoples and that the institution receives financial benefit from trust lands,” said Weiler.
Marty Two Bulls Jr. / Grist
In states with trust lands, a reasonably comfortable buffer exists between beneficiaries, legislators, land managers, and investment boards, but that hasn’t always been the case. In Minnesota’s early days, state leaders founded the University of Minnesota while also making policy that would benefit the school, binding the state’s history of genocide with the institution.
Those actions still impact Indigenous peoples in the state today while providing steady revenue streams to the University.
Henry Sibley began to amass his fortune around 1834 after only a few years in the fur trade in the territory of what would become Minnesota, rising to the role of regional manager of the American Fur Company at just 23. But even then, the industry was on the decline — wild game had been over-hunted and competition was fierce. Sibley responded by diversifying his activities. He moved into timber, making exclusive agreements with the Ojibwe to log along the Snake and Upper St. Croix rivers.
His years in “wild Indian country” were paying off: Sibley knew the land, waterways, and resources of the Great Lakes region, and he knew the people, even marrying Tahshinaohindaway, also known as Red Blanket Woman, in 1840 — a Mdewakanton Dakota woman from Black Dog Village in what is now southern Minneapolis.
Sibley was a major figure in a number of treaty negotiations, aiding the U.S. in its western expansion, opening what is now Minnesota to settlement by removing tribes. In 1848, he became the first congressional delegate for the Wisconsin Territory, which covered much of present-day Minnesota, and eventually, Minnesota’s first governor.
But he was also a founding regent of the University of Minnesota — using his personal, political, and industry knowledge of the region to choose federal, state, and private lands for the university. Sibley and other regents used the institution as a shel corporation to speculate and move money between companies they held shares in.
University of Minnesota mascot Goldy the Gopher during a football game in 2022 in Minneapolis.
Nick Wosika / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
Left, a mining parcel granted to the University of Minnesota. Right, University of Minnesota mascot Goldy the Gopher during a football game in 2022 in Minneapolis. Google Earth, Nick Wosika / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
A mining parcel granted to the University of Minnesota.
Google Earth
In 1851, Sibley helped introduce land-grant legislation for the purpose of a territorial university, and just three days after Congress passed the bill, Minnesota’s territorial leaders established the University of Minnesota. With an eye on statehood, leaders knew more land would be granted for higher education, but first the land had to be made available.
That same year, with the help of then-territorial governor and fellow university regent Alexander Ramsey, the Dakota signed the Treaty of Traverse De Sioux, a land cession that created almost half of the state of Minnesota, and, taken with other cessions, would later net the University nearly 187,000 acres of land — an area roughly the size of Tucson.
Among the many clauses in the treaty was payment: $1.4 million would be given to the Dakota, but only after expenses. Ramsey deducted $35,000 for a handling fee, about $1.4 million in today’s dollars. After agencies and politicians had taken their cuts, the Dakota were promised only $350,000, but ultimately, only a few thousand arrived after federal agents delayed and withheld payments or substituted them for supplies that were never delivered.
The betrayal led to the Dakota War of 1862. “The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state,” said Governor Ramsey. Sibley joined in the slaughter, leading an army of volunteers dedicated to the genocide of the Dakota people. At the end of the conflict, Ramsey ordered the mass execution of more than 300 Dakota men in December of 1862 — a number later reduced by then-president Abraham Lincoln to 39, and still the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
That grisly punctuation mark at the end of the war meant a windfall for the University of Minnesota, with new lands being opened through the state’s enabling act and another federal grant that had just been passed: the Morrill Act. Within weeks of the mass execution, the university was reaping benefits thanks to the political, and military, power of Sibley and the board of regents.
Between 2018 and 2022, those lands produced more than $17 million in revenue, primarily through leases for the mining of iron and taconite, a low-grade iron ore used by the steel industry. But like other states that rely on investment funds and trusts to generate additional income, those royalties are only the first step in the institution’s financial investments.
Today, Sibley, Ramsey, and other regents are still honored. Their names adorn parks, counties, and streets, their homes memorialized for future generations. While there have been efforts to remove their names from schools and parks, Minnesota, its institutions, and many of its citizens continue to benefit from their actions.
Less than half of the universities featured in this story responded to requests for comment, and the National Association of State Trust Lands, the nonprofit consortium that represents trust land agencies and administrators, declined to comment. Those that did, however, highlighted the steps they were making to engage with Indigenous students and communities.
Still, investments in Indigenous communities are slow coming. Of the universities that responded to our requests, those that directly referenced how trust lands were used maintained they had no control over how they profited from the land.
And they’re correct, to some degree: States managing assets for land-grants have fiduciary, and legal, obligations to act in the institution’s best interests.
But that could give land-grant universities a right to ask why maximizing returns doesn’t factor in the value of righting past wrongs or the costs of climate change.
“We can know very well that these things are happening and that we’re part of the problem, but our desire for continuity and certainty and security override that knowledge,” said Sharon Stein of the University of British Columbia.
A parcel of land in Pyote, Texas. Eliseu Cavalcante / Grist
That knowledge, Stein added, is easily eclipsed by investments in colonialism that obscure university complicity and dismiss that change is possible.
Though it’s a complicated and arduous process changing laws and working with state agencies, universities regularly do it. In 2022, the 14 land-grant universities profiled in this story spent a combined $4.6 million on lobbying on issues ranging from agriculture to defense. All lobbied to influence the federal budget and appropriations.
But even if those high-level actions are taken, it’s not clear how it will make a difference to people like Alina Sierra in Tucson, who faces a rocky financial future after her departure from the University of Arizona.
Alina Sierra reflects on her decision to leave the University of Arizona and enroll in Tohono O’odham Community College. She’s glad she made the switch. “It’s free, they take care of your books and tuition,” she said of TOCC. In contrast, she still owes her former school over $6,000. Bean Yazzie / Grist
In 2022, a national study on college affordability found that nearly 40 percent of Native students accrued more than $10,000 in college debt, with some accumulating more than $100,000 in loans. Sierra is still in debt to UArizona for more than $6,000.
“I think that being on O’odham land, they should give back, because it’s stolen land,” said Sierra. “They should put more into helping us.”
In January, Sierra enrolled as a full-time student at Tohono O’odham Community College in Sells, Arizona — a tribal university on her homelands. The full cost of attendance, from tuition to fees to books, is free.
The college receives no benefits from state trust lands.
CREDITS
This story was reported and written by Tristan Ahtone, Robert Lee, Amanda Tachine, An Garagiola, and Audrianna Goodwin. Data reporting was done by Maria Parazo Rose and Clayton Aldern, with additional data analysis and visualization by Marcelle Bonterre and Parker Ziegler. Margaret Pearce provided guidance and oversight.
Original photography for this project was done by Eliseu Cavalcante and Bean Yazzie. Parker Ziegler handled design and development. Teresa Chin supervised art direction. Marty Two Bulls Jr. and Mia Torres provided illustration. Megan Merrigan, Justin Ray, and Mignon Khargie handled promotion. Rachel Glickhouse coordinated partnerships.
This project was edited by Katherine Lanpher and Katherine Bagley. Jaime Buerger managed production. Angely Mercado did fact-checking, and Annie Fu fact-checked the project’s data.
Special thanks to Teresa Miguel-Stearns, Jon Parmenter, Susan Shain, and Tushar Khurana for their additional research contributions. We would also like to thank the many state officials who helped to ensure we acquired the most recent and accurate information for this story. This story was made possible in part by the Pulitzer Center, the Data-Driven Reporting Project, and the Bay & Paul Foundation.
The Misplaced Trust team acknowledges the Tohono O’odham, Pascua Yaqui, dxʷdəwʔabš, Suquamish, Muckleshoot, puyaləpabš, Tulalip, Muwekma Ohlone, Lisjan, Tongva, Kizh, Dakota, Bodwéwadmi, Quinnipiac, Monongahela, Shawnee, Lenape, Erie, Osage, Akimel O’odham, Piipaash, Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Diné, Kanienʼkehá:ka, Muh-he-con-ne-ok, Pαnawάhpskewi, and Mvskoke peoples, on whose homelands this story was created.
As America grew westward in the 19th and 20th centuries, the federal government took land from Indigenous peoples and gave it to states for the creation of public colleges known as land-grant universities. A new Grist investigation reveals how many of these institutions continue to profit from this stolen land, largely through extractive industries including oil and gas production, mining, and logging.
Using publicly available data, our investigation locates millions of acres taken from more than a hundred Indigenous nations to provide ongoing sources of revenue for educational institutions. Our reporting reveals how Indigenous lands and resources bankroll land-grant universities, historically and today, and provides insight into the relationship between colonialism, higher education, and climate change.
Here are five takeaways from our investigation:
1 Fourteen land-grant universities generate revenue from 8.2 million surface and subsurface acres of Indigenous land.
State trust lands just might be one of the best kept public secrets in America: They exist in 21 Western and Midwestern states, totaling more than 500 million surface and subsurface acres. They are held and managed by state agencies and primarily exist to subsidize education. Using data from these state agencies, Grist located trust lands associated with specific land-grant institutions to determine where they are located and how they are used to benefit those colleges. “A perpetual, multigenerational land trust for the support of the beneficiaries and future generations” is how the Arizona State Land Department describes them.
2 Those 8.2 million acres were taken from at least 123 Indigenous nations through more than 150 land cessions, a legal term for the surrendering of territory.
Grist was able to compare state trust land data with federal data known as the Schedule of Indian Land Cessions, which documents Indigenous land cessions in the continental United States using extensive information on treaties and other land seizures. By joining these different datasets, we were able to get a glimpse of just how many Indigenous nations were impacted by the creation of these institutions.
3 Indigenous nations were paid approximately $4.3 million in 2023 dollars for these lands. In many cases, however, nothing was paid at all.
Based on accounting of historical payments to Indigenous nations by the Indian Claims Commission and the Court of Claims, Grist was able to identify the price paid per acre for each land cession and calculate the total amount paid to tribes for trust lands that benefit universities today. It’s important to note that in many cases, Indigenous nations were never compensated for the taking of their territory, and as our reporting reveals, those lands have continued to provide steady revenue streams to land-grant institutions. “Universities continue to benefit from colonization,” said Sharon Stein, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of British Columbia. “It’s not just a historical fact; the actual income of the institution is subsidized by this ongoing dispossession.”
4 Nearly 25 percent of land-grant university trust lands are designated for either fossil fuel production or the mining of minerals like coal and iron-rich taconite.
Utilizing datasets from state land agencies, we were able to determine what activities generated revenue for land-grant universities. While much of our focus is on the energy industry due to its massive climate impact, we found that grazing is permitted on about a third of the land, or approximately 2.8 million surface acres. Timber, agriculture, and infrastructure leases — for roads or pipelines, for instance — make up much of the remaining acreage. However, despite the somewhat smaller footprint that timberlands represent in our dataset, they are still significant sources of revenue: From statehood in 1889 to 2022, timber sales on trust lands in Washington provided Washington State University with at least $1.1 billion in revenue when adjusted for inflation.
5 In 2022, state trust lands generated more than $2.2 billion in revenue. Between 2018 and 2022: approximately $6.6 billion.
Trust land activities provide significant streams of income to land-grant schools, but most importantly, they subsidize higher education so citizens don’t have to. “Every dollar earned by the land office,” Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard of New Mexico said when revenues broke the billion-dollar barrier, “is a dollar taxpayers do not have to pay to support public institutions.”
In 1862, the Morrill Act allowed the federal government to expropriate over 10 million acres of tribal lands from Native communities, selling or developing them in order to fund public colleges. Over time, additional violence-backed treaties and land seizures ceded even more Indigenous lands to these “land-grant universities,” which continue to profit from these parcels.
But the Morrill Act is only one piece of legislation that connects land taken from Indigenous communities to land-grant universities. Over the past year, Grist looked at state trust lands, which are held and managed by state agencies for the schools’ continued benefit, and which total more than 500 million surface and subsurface acres across 21 states. We wanted to know how these acres, also stolen Indigenous land, are being used to fund higher education.
To do this, we needed to construct an original dataset.
Gristlocated all state trust lands distributed through state enabling acts that currently send revenue to higher education institutions that also benefited from the Morrill Act.
We identified their original Indigenous inhabitants and caretakers, and researched how much the United States would have paid for each parcel. The latter is based on an assessment of Indigenous territorial history, according to the U.S. Forest Service, associated with the land the parcels are on.
We reconstructed more than 8.2 million acres of state trust parcels taken from 123 tribes, bands, and communities through 121 land cessions, a legal term for the surrendering of land. (It is important to note that land cession histories are incomplete and accurate only to the view of U.S. law and historical negotiations, not to Indigenous histories, epistemologies, or historic territories not captured by federal data.)
This unique dataset was created through extensive spatial analysis that acquired, cleaned, and analyzed data from state repositories and departments across more than 14 states. We also reviewed historical financial records to supplement the dataset.
This information represents a snapshot of trust land parcels and activity present in November 2023. We encourage exploration of the database and caution that this snapshot is likely very different from state inventories 20, 50, or even 100 years ago. Since, to our knowledge, no other database of this kind exists — with this specific state trust land data benefitting land-grant universities — we are committed to making it publicly available and as robust as possible.
To identify what types of activities take place on state trust land parcels, we collected and compared state datasets on different kinds of land use. The activities in these data layers include, but are not limited to: active and inactive leases for coal, oil and gas, minerals, agriculture, grazing, commercial use, real estate, water, renewable energies, and easements. We then conducted spatial comparisons between these layers, explained further in Step 5 (see index below).
Users can also go to GitHub to view and download the code used to generate this dataset. The various functions used within the program can also be adapted and repurposed for analyzing other kinds of state trust lands — for example, those that send revenue to penitentiaries and detention centers, which a number of states do.
If you republish this data or draw on it as a source for publication, cite as: Parazo Rose, Maria, et al. “Enabling Act Indigenous Land Parcels Database,” Grist.org, February 2024.
STL Parcel: State trust land parcels, or land granted to states through enabling acts. The word “parcel” refers to defined pieces of land that can range in size and are considered distinct units of property.
PLSS Number: The surveying method developed and used in the United States to plat, or divide, real property for sale and settling.
CRS System: A coordinate reference system that defines how a map projection in a GIS program relates to and represents real places on Earth. Deciding what CRS to use depends on the regional area of analysis.
Dataframe: A dataframe is a “two-dimensional” way of storing and manipulating tabular data, similar to a table with columns and rows.
REST API: An API, or application programming interface, is a type of software interface that allows users to communicate with a computer or system to retrieve information or perform a function. REST, also known as RESTful web services, stands for “representational state transfer” and has specific constraints. Systems with REST APIs optimize client-server interactions and can be scaled up efficiently.
Deduplication: Deduplication refers to a method of eliminating a dataset’s redundant data. In a secure data deduplication process, a deduplication assessment tool identifies extra copies of data and deletes them, so a single instance can then be stored. In our methodology, we deduplicated extra parcels, which we explain in further detail in Step 4.
To reconstruct the redistribution of Indigenous lands and the comparative implications of their conversion to revenue for land-grant universities, we followed procedures that can be generally categorized in seven steps:
We identified 14 universities in 14 states that initially benefited from the Morrill Act of 1862 and currently receive revenue benefits from state trust lands granted through enabling acts.
Initially, 30 states distributed funds to higher education institutions, including land-grant universities, according to their enabling acts. We contacted all 30 states via phone and email to confirm whether they had state trust lands that currently benefitted target institutions. Multiple states continue to distribute revenue generated from state trust lands to other higher education institutions, as well as K-12 schools. However, those states are not included in our dataset as the lands in question are outside the scope of this investigation.
In other words, multiple states have trust lands that produce revenue for institutions, but only 14 have trust lands that produce revenue for land-grant universities.
Data acquisition
Once we clarified which states had relevant STL parcels, the next step was to acquire the raw data of all state trust lands within that state so we could then filter for the parcels associated with land-grant institutions. We started by searching state databases, typically associated with their departments of natural resources, or the equivalent, to find data sources or maps. While most of the target states maintain online spatial data on land use and ownership, not all of that data is immediately available to download or access. For several states, we were able to scrape their online mapping platforms to access their REST servers and then query data through a REST API. For other states, we directly contacted their land management offices to get the most up-to-date information on STL parcels.
(Please see Table 1 for a list of the data sources referenced for each state, as well as all state-specific querying details.)
After acquiring the raw data, we researched which trust names were associated with the 14 identified universities. As mentioned above, each state maintains trust lands for multiple entities ranging from K-12 schools to penitentiaries, and each state has unique names for target beneficiaries in their mapping and financial data. We used these trust names to manually filter through the raw data and select only the parcels that currently send revenue to university beneficiaries and checked those names with state officials for accuracy.
Once identified and filtered, we reviewed that raw data to identify whether there were any additional fields that would be helpful to our schema (typically locational data of some kind, like PLSS, though this occasionally included activity or lease information) and included those fields as part of the data we extracted from state servers or the spatial files we were given, in addition to the geometric data that located and mapped the parcels themselves.
It’s important to note that we could not find information for 871 surface acres and 5,982 subsubsurface acres in Oklahoma, because they have yet to be digitally mapped or because of how they are sectioned on the land grid. We understand that this acreage does exist based on lists of activities kept by the state. However, those lists do not provide mappable data to fill these gaps. In order to complete reporting on Oklahoma, researchers will need to read and digitize physical maps and plats held by the state — labor this team was unable to provide during the project period.
Please also note that our dataset is partially incomplete due to the Montana Department of Natural Resources & Conservation’s delay in responding to a public records request by the time of publication. In the summer of 2023, we requested a complete dataset of state trust lands that send revenue to Montana State University. However, when we conducted a data review fact check with the Montana DNR this winter, they informed us that the data they supplied was incomplete and thus, inaccurate. We currently have a pending public records request that has yet to be returned.
(Please see Appendix A for specific notes on the data processing for OK.)
Data cleaning
When working with this data, one of the main considerations was that nearly all the data sources came in different and incompatible formats: The coordinate reference systems, or CRS, varied and had to be reprojected, the references to the trust names were inconsistent, and some files contained helpful fields, like location-specific identifiers or land use activity, while others were missing entire categories of information. Once we narrowed down the data we wanted, we cleaned and standardized the data, and sorted it into a common set of column names. This was particularly difficult for two states, Oklahoma and South Dakota, which required custom processing based on the format and quality of the initial data provided.
(Please see Appendix A for specific descriptions of the data processing for OK and SD.)
This process required a significant amount of state-specific formatting. This included processes such as:
Querying certain fields in the source data to capture supplemental information, and then writing code to split or extract or take extra characters out of the values and assign the information to the appropriate columns.
Processing files that, either because of the way we had to query servers or because of how state departments sent us data, were split up by activity type, in a way that allowed us to capture all of the information so it wouldn’t be lost in downstream processes.
Creating functions that built off of information in the dataset to create new columns — like the net acres column, for example, for which we created an Idaho-specific function that calculated net acreage based on the percentage of state ownership, as indicated in the trust names.
Dataset merge
After all the data had been processed and cleaned, we needed to merge the various state files. The querying process ended up producing multiple files for each state, based on the number of trust names we were filtering for, as well as the rights type. Arizona, for example, had six trusts that sent revenue to the University of Arizona, each containing surface and subsurface acreage. Thus, we had 12 total AZ-specific files, since we generated six files, one for each trust, for surface acres, and another for subsurface acres.
These generated files are uniform to themselves, which means additional adjustments needed to be made for them to merge properly. So, before we merged all of a state’s files, we took each one — separated by rights type and trust name — and deleted the duplicate geometries that existed. We wanted to avoid repeating parcels that contained the same information because of the impact it would have on the acreage summaries, which is why we take a single file and delete information that contains the same rights type and trust name. In the process of geometric deduplication, we have taken particular care to aggregate any information that may be different — which, in our work, was mostly related to activity type. In these cases, if we deduplicated two parcels that were the same except for land use activity type that we noted in the raw data (not identified later in the activity match process), we combined both activities into a list in the activity field.
We can look at how the deduplication process plays out with an example in Montana and how it affects acreage. In our analysis, we report that Montana has 104,585.7 subsurface acres in its state trust land portfolio. However, that number refers to unique subsurface parcels in Montana. This is because we acquired the subsurface data as three separate files, identifying parcels affiliated with coal, oil and gas, or other minerals. Our process found parcels from different files that overlapped. So, we deleted the extra parcels and combined the activities. That way, we could use the main spreadsheet to determine that Montana’s subsurface acreage is broken down like this:
Coal: 2,013.4 acres
Oil and gas: 103,341.09 acres
Other minerals: 1243.51 acres
The sum of Montana’s subsurface acreage, by that analysis, is 106,598.
The difference in numbers is because some subsurface acres have multiple activities occurring on them. Our deduplication process identifies those acres with multiple activities and reduces that number to 104,585.7 acres.
As a note, we initially combined parcels that were geometric duplicates but had different rights types (for example, one had surface and the other had subsurface) to reflect that a parcel had both surface and subsurface rights. However, we found that this led to inaccuracies. In this final dataset, parcels have either surface or subsurface rights (or timber, in the case of Washington). Users should take care to note that instances of seemingly duplicated land parcels reflect this adjustment.
Prior to merging all state files into a single file, we calculated parcel acreage in the original source projection. Though most states record acreage of trust land parcels, several do not. So to assign acreage to parcels that had no area indicated and to create a consistent area measurement, we spatially calculated the acreage of all parcels through GIS to supplement the state-reported acres column. For accuracy, we calculated the acreage of the parcels in their initial source CRS and cross-referenced calculations with state agencies.
Mapping the land use activity
To identify what types of activity currently takes place on these parcels, we collected datasets on different kinds of land use from states, including, but not limited to, active and inactive leases for coal, oil and gas, minerals, agriculture, grazing, commercial use, real estate, water, renewable energies, and easements. We searched state databases or contacted land use offices to acquire spatial data, and we queried data through REST APIs. Initially, we called on state servers each time we ran our activity match operations, but the processing time was too inefficient, so we converted the majority of the datasets to shapefiles for faster processing.
It is important to note that states manage and track land use activity data in a variety of ways. Some states have different datasets for each type of activity, while some combine all land use activity into a single file. Some states indicate whether a certain lease or activity is presently active or not, some specify its precise status (prospecting, drilling, etc.), and some don’t include that information at all. Activities might be broadly classified as easement, agriculture, oil and gas, or coal — however, there might be a more specific description about its nature such as “Natural Gas Storage Operations,” “Access Road,” or “Offset Gas Well Pad.” Some states use numbers that require a key to interpret the activity. To accommodate these variations, we used the activity description that struck the best balance between being detailed and being clear, which either meant calling on the value of a specific column or titling the data layer as something general (“Oil and Gas”) and using that as the activity name. Users can look at the activity_match.py and state_data_sources.py files for further detail.
To identify how state trust land parcels are used, we gathered state datasets with spatial information on where land use activities take place. The data came as either points or polygons.
Users should note that, in the case of South Dakota, very few datasets on state land use activity were publicly accessible. Though we filed public records requests to obtain information, the state did not return our requests, leaving the activity fields for that state mostly empty of content apart from parcel locations. Because there were so many data points in the information coming from states that were being matched against each row in the Grist dataset, we needed to find a way to expedite the process. Ultimately, we organized the activity datasets from each state into their own R-trees, tree data structures that are used to index multidimensional information, which allowed us to group together nearby parcels (which we will use from here on to mean polygons or points). For point data, we established bounding “envelopes” around each point to create the smallest appropriate polygon. In the diagram below, you can see an example of how nearby parcels are grouped together.
Grist
This data structure works by collecting nearby objects and organizing them with their minimum bounding rectangle. Then, one activity-set-turned-R-tree was compared to our trust land dataset at a time. In that process, a comparison looked at one Grist parcel through an activity’s R-tree, which is like a cascading way of identifying what parcels are close together. Whenever a query is conducted to compare another dataset against information in this R-tree, if a parcel does not intersect a given bounding rectangle, then it also cannot intersect any of the contained objects.
In other words, instead of comparing every parcel in our trust land dataset to every single other activity parcel in all of the state datasets, we are able to do much faster comparisons by looking at bigger areas and then narrowing down to more specific parcels when it’s relevant.
When the R-trees were established, we also had a process that looked at the distance from bounding rectangles in a state activity dataset’s tree structure and the closest points in the Grist state trust lands dataset. We only tracked that an activity was present on a trust land parcel if it overlapped and was the same geometric feature. That first method of geographic overlap test was called on Geopandas GeoSeries operations, seeing if a Grist-identified parcel contained, crossed, covered, intersected, touched, or was within an activity parcel. If any of the conditions were true, we “kept” that data, and marked that activity as present on the associated parcel.
We also had a second set of containment criteria that, if met, resulted in that activity being recorded as present. If we pulled in an activity parcel and, in comparing it to our trust land parcel dataset, found that it was the same geographic location, size (in acreage), and shape (via indices), we considered it to be a “duplicate parcel,” and recorded the presence of the relevant activity. We included all activities as a full list in the “activity” field associated with any given parcel.
Additionally, it is important to note that we made three kinds of modifications specific to the various land use activity layers, depending on the available data. First, there were some layers that had a field within the dataset indicating whether or not it was active. For those, we were able to assign an activity match only if that row was reported as active. Second, there were several layers that had relevant details we could use to supplement the activity description, which we included. Lastly, we only included activities relevant to the rights type associated with a parcel. If a parcel had subsurface rights, for example, then we did not indicate activities that may have happened on the surface — say, agriculture or road leases. Similarly, if a parcel had surface rights, we did not include subsurface activity, like minerals or oil and gas. We made additional adjustments to layers that contained “miscellaneous” data, containing activities that were surface or subsurface activities in the same layer. For those layers, we created a list of subsurface activity terms that would appear on surface-rights based parcels. This way, we ensured that the miscellaneous data layers could be read in their entirety, without misattributing activities.
Users can look at the activity_match.py and state_data_sources.py files for further detail.
Lastly, we generalized land use activities in order to create the data visualizations that accompany the story — specifically, the land use activity map. For user readability, we wanted to give an overarching perspective on how much land is used for some of the most prevalent activities. To do this, we manually reviewed all the values in the activity field and created lists that categorized specific activities into subsets of broader categories: fossil fuels, mining, timber, grazing, infrastructure, and renewable energy. With fossil fuels, for example, we included any activities that mentioned oil and gas wells or oil and gas fields, offset well pads, tank batteries, etc. Or, with infrastructure, we included activities that mentioned access roads or highways, pipelines, telecommunications systems, and power lines, among others. Some parcels are associated with multiple land uses, such as grazing cattle and oil production. In these cases, the acreage is counted for each practice. These lists then informed what parcels showed up in the six broad categories we featured in the land use map. (For further detail, users can explore the GitHub repo for our webpage interactives.)
Join to USFS Cession data
For a more comprehensive understanding of the dataset in its historical context, we joined the stl_dataset_extra_activities.geojson file to cession data from the U.S. Forest Service, or USFS. This enabled us to see the treaties or seizures that transferred “ownership” of land from tribal nations to the U.S. government. We have included steps here on how to conduct these processes in Excel and QGIS, which is a free and open access GIS software system. Similar operations exist in programs like ArcGIS. The steps to conduct the join can be found in our README file and in stl_dataset_extra_activities_plus_cessions.csv on GitHub.
Calculate financial information
Based on accounting of historical payments for treaties performed for legal proceedings undertaken by the Indian Claims Commission and the Court of Claims, we identified the price per acre for Royce cession areas underlying the parcels in the dataset. Using the average price per acre for cessions, we calculated the amount paid to Indigenous nations for each parcel.
Some parcels were overlapped by multiple cession areas. In those cases, to calculate the total paid to Indigenous nations for a parcel, we added the amount paid for each individual overlapping cession together.
To adjust for inflation we used CPI-based conversion factors for the U.S. dollars. For more on conversion factors, see here. We derived inflation adjustment factors from the tabular data available here.
For example, if Parcel A had 320 acres and overlaps Cession 1 where the U.S. bought the land for $0.05 per acre, part of Cession 2 that was seized and had no associated payment, and part of Cession 3 where the U.S. bought the land for $0.30 per acre, we calculated:
Price of parcel = (Total acreage x Price described in Cession 1) + (Total acreage x Price described in Cession 2 …) etc.
So:
Parcel A Price = (320*Cession1Price[$0.05]) + (320*Cession1Price[$0]) + (320*Cession1Price[$0.30])
Parcel A Price = $16 + $0 + 96
Price of parcel A = $112.00
A total of $112 is the price the federal government would have paid to tribal nations to acquire the land. In our dataset, the financial information on cessions has already been adjusted for inflation and can be considered as the amount paid in 2023 dollars.
Note that there are some Royce Cession ID numbers that we determined, after further research, were not actually land cessions. Rather, they described reservations created. We excluded these areas from our payment calculation.
We do not yet have financial information for cession ID 717 in Washington. The cession in question is 1,963.92 acres, and its absence means that the figures for price paid per acre or price paid per parcel are not complete for Washington.
It is also important to note that when documenting Indigenous land cessions in the continental United States, the Royce cession areas are extensive but incomplete. Although they are a standard source and are often treated as authoritative, they do not contain any cessions made after 1894 and likely miss or in other ways misrepresent included cessions prior to that time. We have made efforts to correct errors (primarily misdated cessions) when found, but have, in general, relied on the U.S. Forest Service’s digital files of the Royce dataset. A full review, revision, and expansion of the Royce land cession dataset is beyond the scope of this project.
Generate summary statistics
We wanted to aggregate this information so people could analyze the parcel data associated with a specific university or with a specific tribal nation. We generated two summary datasets: First, we combined all of the parcels by university to show their related tribes and cessions and how much the U.S. would have paid for these lands that they then gave to the universities. We created a second equivalent summary analysis that organizes information by present-day tribes and shows the associated universities, cessions, and payments. This step was accomplished after merging land cession and U.S. Forest Service data for better ease interacting with tribal leaders and impacted communities, as well as the removal of historic names, some of which are considered offensive today.
Please note that there were seven instances of tribes with similar names that we manually combined into a single row.
Bridgeport Indian Colony, California, and Bridgeport Paiute Indian Colony of California
Burns Paiute Tribe of the Burns Paiute Indian Colony of Oregon and Burns Paiute Tribe, Oregon
Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation and Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, Washington
Nez Perce Tribe of Idaho and Nez Perce Tribe, Idaho
Quinault Tribe of the Quinault Reservation, Washington, and Quinault Indian Nation, Washington
Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Reservation, Oregon, and Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Oregon
Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Reservation, Idaho, and Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Reservation of Idaho
This user guide is designed for both general users and experienced researchers and coders. No coding skills are necessary to work with this dataset, but a basic working knowledge of tabular data files in Excel is required, and for more experienced users, knowledge of GIS.
Over the past year, Gristhas located all state trust lands distributed through state enabling acts that currently send revenue to higher education institutions that benefited from the Morrill Act. We’ve also identified their original Indigenous inhabitants and caretakers, and researched how much the United States would have paid for each parcel, based on an assessment of the cession history (according to the U.S. Forest Service’s record of the land associated with each parcel). We reconstructed more than 8.2 million acres of state trust parcels taken from 123 tribes, bands, and communities through 121 different land cessions — a legal term for the giving up of territory.
It is important to note that land cession histories are incomplete and accurate only from the viewpoint of U.S. law and historical negotiations, not to Indigenous histories, epistemologies, or historic territories not captured by federal data. The U.S. Forest Service dataset, which is based on the Schedule of Indian Land Cessions compiled by Charles Royce for the Eighteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution (1896-1897), covers the period from 1787 to 1894.
This information represents a snapshot of trust land parcels and activity as of November 2023. We encourage exploration of the database and caution that this snapshot is likely very different from state inventories 20, 50, or even 100 years ago. Since, to our knowledge, no other database of this kind — with this specific state trust land data benefitting land-grant universities — exists, we are committed to making it publicly available and as robust as possible.
For additional information, users can read our methodology or go to GitHub to view and download the code used to generate this dataset. The various functions used within the program can also be adapted and repurposed for analyzing other kinds of state trust lands — for example, those that send revenue to penitentiaries and detention centers, which is present in a number of states.
Note: If you use this data for your reporting, please be sure to credit Grist in the story and please send us a link.
This database contains a GeoJSON and CSVs, as well as a multi-tab spreadsheet that aggregates and summarizes key data points.
GeoJSON
National_STLs.geojson
CSVs
National_STLs.csv
Tribal_Summary.csv
University_Summary.csv
Excel
GRIST-LGU2_National-STL-Dataset.xlsx, with protected tabs that include:
– Main Spreadsheet – Tribal Summary – University Summary
The data can be spatially analyzed with the JSON file using GIS software (e.g. ArcGIS or QGIS), or analyzed with the CSVs or Excel main spreadsheet. To conduct analysis without using the spatial file, we recommend using the National_STLs_ALL_Protected.xlsx sheet, which includes tabs for the summary statistics sheets. The CSVs will mostly be useful for importing the files into GIS software or other types of software for analysis.
Tips for using the database
Summary statistics
To understand the landscape of state trust land parcels at a quick glance, users can reference the summary statistics sheets. The Tribal_Summary.csvand the University_Summary.csvshow the total acreage of trust lands associated with each tribe or university, as well as context on what cessions and tribes are affiliated with a particular university or, conversely, what universities and states are associated with individual tribal nations.
For example, using the University_Summary.csv a user can easily generate the following text:
“New Mexico State University financially benefits from almost 186,000 surface acres and 253,500 subsurface acres, taken from the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, Comanche Nation, Fort Sill Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, Jicarilla Apache Nation, Kiowa Tribe, Mescalero Apache Tribe, Navajo Nation, San Carlos Apache Tribe, Tonto Apache Tribe, and White Mountain Apache Tribe. Our data shows that this acreage came into the United States’ possession through 8 Indigenous land cession events for which the U.S. paid approximately $59,000, though in many cases, nothing was paid. New Mexico engages primarily in oil and gas production, renewables, and agriculture and commercial leases.”
Grist
To do so, simply fill in the sections you need from the tabular data of the university summary tab: [column B] benefits from almost [column D] surface acres and [column C] subsurface acres, taken from [column H] tribe (or [column G] total number of tribes). Our data shows that this acreage came into the United States’ possession through [column K] cessions (column K shows total number of cessions) for which the U.S. paid approximately [column F] though in many cases, nothing was paid. New Mexico engages primarily in [National_STLs.csv, column K].
Using Tribal_Summary.csvusers can also center stories through Indigenous nations. For example: “The Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma ceded almost 66,000 surface acres and 82,500 subsurface acres, through 2 land cession events, for the benefit of Colorado State University, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Wyoming. For title to those acres, the United States paid the Cheyene and Arapaho Tribes approximately $6.00.”
Grist
Similarly to the university tab, one can plug in relevant information: [column B] ceded almost [column F] surface acres and [column E] subsurface acres, through [column C] land cession events, for the benefit of [column H].
To get information on how much the United States paid tribes, if anything, filter for the parcels of interest in the ‘Main Spreadsheet’ of the National_STLs.xlsx file and add the price paid per parcel column [column X].
Navigating the data
For users who want to conduct analysis on and understand the landscape of state trust lands without using the spatial file, they can use the protected Excel sheet. (The sheet is protected so that cell values are not accidentally rewritten while users search the information.)
As an example, if users wanted to do research on a specific institution, they can adjust multiple columns at once in the Excel main spreadsheet to quickly isolate the parcels they are specifically interested in.
Say a user wanted to figure out how many acres of state trust lands specifically affiliated with the Navajo Nation are used for grazing in Arizona.
Start by opening the protected National_STLs.xlsx sheet.
In column B, click the drop-down arrow and select so that only Arizona parcels are showing.
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Then, go to column K and use the drop-down menu to select parcels where “grazing” is listed as one of the activities. It’s important to note that many parcels have multiple activities attached to them.
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Then, go through all of the present_day_tribe columns (AA, AE, AI, AM, AQ, AU, AY, BC) and filter for rows that list the Navajo Nation as one of the tribes. It is not always the case that tribes are present in all eight of the columns, and most parcels do not intersect with multiple cession areas.
When filtering through a column for specific entries, like selecting all parcels with any grazing present (even if other activities are there), we recommend users open up the filtering drop-down menu, unselect all entries, and then type the query you’re interested in in the search bar, and select the results that show up.
We find a total of 20,278 acres in Arizona that have grazing activity on Navajo land.
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This kind of approach can be used to filter for any combination of parcels, and we encourage you to explore the data this way.
Visualizing parcels
To visualize this data, users can use the GeoJSON file in a GIS program of their choice. If users are unfamiliar with how to filter for specific parcels through those programs, they can identify the exact parcels they want in Excel and then use that to select parcels in a GIS program.
First, identify the specific parcels of interest using filters (like in the situation described above), and then copy the list of relevant object IDs (in column A) into its own CSV file.
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Then, in the GIS software, import the CSV file and join it to the original National_STLs.geojson file.
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After the file is joined, there will be an additional column to the National_STLs layer, and users can filter out the blank rows (which would be blank because they did not match with parcels of interest in the CSV file) and select the polygons that represent the parcels the user is interested in.
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In QGIS, you can use the “Zoom to Layer’” button to visualize the resulting query.
Grist
As an alternative to performing the filtering in Excel and executing the self-join as described above, users may also filter the dataset directly in the GIS program of their choice using structured queries. For example, to replicate the query illustrated above, use the following filter expression in QGIS on the main GeoJSON file:
Grist
Calculating acreage
The acreage of trust lands within a state has been determined as consisting of acres with surface rights or subsurface rights. For further background on this process, please see our methodology documentation.
We also included a column for net acreage, since in some places — like North Dakota and Idaho — the state only has partial ownership over some of the parcels. If the field is blank, the state has 100 percent ownership of the parcel. To calculate this, we multiplied the acreage of a parcel by percentage of ownership.
Missing cession payment
We do not yet have financial information for cession ID 717 in Washington. The cession in question is 1,963.92 acres, and its absence means that the figures for price paid per acre or price paid per parcel are not complete for Washington.
It is also important to note that when documenting Indigenous land cessions in the continental United States, the Royce cession areas are extensive but incomplete. Although they are a standard source and are often treated as authoritative, they do not contain any cessions made after 1894 and likely miss or in other ways misrepresent included cessions prior to that time. We have made efforts to correct errors (primarily misdated cessions) when found, but have, in general, relied on the U.S. Forest Service digital files of the Royce dataset. A full review, revision, and expansion of the Royce land cession dataset is beyond the scope of this project.
Missing Oklahoma lands
It’s important to note that we could not find information for 871 surface acres and 5,982 subsubsurface acres in Oklahoma, because they have yet to be mapped, digitally, or because of how they are sectioned on the land grid. We understand that this acreage does exist based on lists of activities kept by the state. However, those lists do not provide mappable data to fill these gaps. In order to complete reporting on Oklahoma, researchers will need to read and digitize physical maps and plats held by the state — labor this team has been unable to provide.
Additional WGS84 files in data generation
In addition to the GeoJSON files output at each step, our workflow produces a version of each GeoJSON file using the World Geodetic System 84 (WGS84) datum and a spherical geographic coordinate system (EPSG:4326). This is the standard coordinate reference system (CRS) for all GeoJSON files according to the specification; prior versions of the specification supported alternate CRSs, but have since been deprecated. In the source code, we rely on GeoPandas’.to_crs method to perform the transformation to EPSG:4326.
WGS84 versions of GeoJSON files are necessary when mapping datasets using popular web-mapping libraries like Leaflet, Mapbox, MapLibre, and D3. These libraries all expect data to be encoded using EPSG:4326; they expose various projection APIs to reproject data on-the-fly in a browser. You should use the _wgs84 versions of the pipeline’s GeoJSON files if you’re trying to visualize the datasets using one of these libraries. For QGIS users, ensure your project CRS is set to EPSG:4326 before uploading these GeoJSON files.
Using the code
Users will be able to explore the codebase on the GitHub repository, which will be made public upon the lifting of Grist’s embargo. Further details on how to run each step and an explanation of all required files are available in the README.md document.
Creative Commons license
This data is shared under a Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 license (“Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International”). The CC BY-NC license means you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format; and remix, transform, and build upon the material. Grist cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms. These terms include giving appropriate credit, providing a link to the license, and indicating if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner. Furthermore, you may not use the material for commercial purposes, and you may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
If you republish this data or draw on it as a source for publication, cite as: Parazo Rose, Maria, et al. “Enabling Act Indigenous Land Parcels Database,” Grist.org, February 2024.
File Descriptions
National_STLs.geojson
The schema for this document is the same as the National_STLs.csvand National_STLs_Protected.xlsxfiles.
This spreadsheet contains 41,792 parcels of state trust lands that benefit 14 universities. Each row describes the location of a unique parcel, along with information about the entities currently managing the land, what rights type and extractive activities are associated with the parcel, which university benefits from the revenues, and its historic acquisition by the United States, as well as the original Indigenous caretakers and the current tribal nations in the area.
An important note about rights type: Washington categorizes timber rights as distinct from surface rights, and we present the data here accordingly. Note that other states do not adhere to this distinction, and thus timber parcels in other states are considered surface parcels. If you would like to generate national summaries of surface rights in a more colloquial sense, consider adding Washington’s timber parcels to your surface calculations.
The file contains the following columns:
object_id
A unique, Grist-assigned identifier for the specific state trust land parcel
state
State where parcel is located
state_enabling_act
Name of the enabling act that granted new territories statehood, along with stipulations of bestowing Indigenous land as a part of the state trust land policy
trust_name
Beneficiaries of state trust land revenue can be identified within state government structure by the trust name; we used the trust name to identify the funds that were specifically assigned to the universities we focused on
managing_agency
Name of the state agency that manages the state trust land parcels
university
Land-grant university that receives the revenue from the associated state trust land parcel
acres
Reported acreage of the state trust land parcel from the original data source by the state
gis_acres
Acreage calculated by analyzing the parcels in QGIS
net_acres
The net acreage of a parcel, determined by the percentage of state ownership related to that parcel specifically.
rights_type
Indicates whether the state/beneficiary manages the surface or subsurface rights of the land within the parcel, or both
reported_county
County where parcel is located, as reported by the original data source
census_bureau_county_name
County where parcel is located, based on a comparative analysis against Census Bureau data
meridian
A line, similar to latitude and longitude lines, that runs through an initial point, which together with the baseline form the highest level framework for all rectangular surveys in a given area. It is also the reference or beginning point for measuring east or west ranges.
township
36 sections arranged in a 6-by-6 square, measuring 6 miles by 6 miles. Sections are numbered beginning with the northeasternmost section (#1), proceeding west to 6, then south along the west edge of the township and to the east (#36 is in the SE corner)
range
A measure of the distance east or west from a referenced principal meridian, in units of 6 miles, that is assigned to a township by measuring east or west of a principal meridian
section
The basic unit of the system, a square piece of land 1 mile by 1 mile containing 640 acres
aliquot
Indicates the aliquot part, e.g. NW for northwest corner or E½SW for east half of southwest corner, or the lot number.
block
A parcel of land within a platted subdivision bounded on all sides by streets or avenues, other physical boundaries such as a body of water, or the exterior boundary of a platted subdivision.
data_source
Data on state parcels was acquired either from a records request to state agencies or from requests to a state server; if a state server was used, the website is recorded here
parcel_count
In our merge process, we combined some parcels, particularly in Minnesota, and this column captures how many parcels were aggregated together, to maintain accurate parcel count and acreage
agg_acres_agg
The sum of acres across all parcels contained in a given row. For most states, this field will equal that of the acres field. For Minnesota, some small parcels were combined during the spatial deduplication process, and this field reflects the sum of the corresponding acres field for each parcel. (See methodology for more information.)
all_cession_numbers
Refers to all the land cessions (areas where the federal government took the Indigenous land that later supplied state land) that overlap with this given parcel
price_paid_for_parcel
The total price paid by the U.S. government to tribal nations
cession_num_01-08
A single cession that overlaps a given parcel
price_paid_per_acre
The price the U.S. paid (or didn’t pay) per acre, according to the specific cession history
C1[-C8]_present_day_tribe
As listed by the U.S. Forest Service, the present day tribe(s) associated with the parcel
C1[-C8]_tribe_named_in_land_cessions_1784-1894
As listed by the U.S. Forest Service, the tribal nation(s) named in the land cession associated with the parcel
Tribal_Summary.csv
This spreadsheet shows summary statistics for all state trust land data we gathered, organized by the present-day tribes listed by the U.S. Forest Service.
present_day_tribe
As listed by the U.S. Forest Service, the present day tribe(s)
cession_count
Total number of cessions associated with a present-day tribe
cession_number
List of cessions associated with a present-day tribe
subsurface_acres
Total number of subsurface acres associated with a present-day tribe
surface_acres
Total number of surface acres associated with a present-day tribe
timber_acres
Total number of timber acres associated with a present-day tribe (only relevant in Washington state)
unknown_acres
Total number of acres with an unknown rights type (only relevant for two parcels in South Dakota)
university
Universities that receive revenue from the parcels associated with a present-day tribe
state
States where the parcels associated with a present-day tribe are located
Total number of acres with an unknown rights type (only relevant for two parcels in South Dakota)
university
Universities that receive revenue from the parcels associated with a present-day tribe
state
States where the parcels associated with a present-day tribe are located
University_Summary.csv
This spreadsheet shows summary statistics for all state trust land data we gathered, organized by land-grant university.
university
Land-grant institution that receives revenue from specific state trust land parcels
subsurface_acres
Total number of subsurface acres associated with a present-day tribe
surface_acres
Total number of surface acres associated with a present day tribe
timber_acres
Total number of timber acres associated with a present day tribe (only relevant in Washington state)
unknown_acres
Total number of acres with an unknown rights type (only relevant for two parcels in South Dakota state)
price_paid
Sum of the price that the U.S. federal government paid to tribes for all the parcels associated with a particular university (the sum of the price paid per parcel column)
present_day_tribe_count
Total number of present-day tribes associated with a land-grant university
present_day_tribe
List of present-day tribes associated with a land-grant university
tribes_named_in_cession_count
Total number of present-day tribes associated with a land-grant university
tribes_named_in_cession
List of present-day tribes associated with a university
cession_count
Total number of cessions associated with a land-grant university
all_cessions
List of cessions associated with a land-grant university
* WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains images and references to a person who has recently passed away.
One of Australia’s most renowned and respected Aboriginal activists, Yankunytjatjara woman Lowitja O’Donoghue has passed away this morning. She was 91 years of age.
Dr O’Donoghue, a former nurse, was a government-appointed chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, and helped draft Native Title legislation that came from the historic Mabo High Court win in 1992.
She was the first Aboriginal woman to receive an Order of Australia (in 1976), awarded in recognition of her work as a member of the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement, and later as Regional Director of the Australian Department of Aboriginal Affairs.
Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue, pictured in 1979 on her wedding day with Gordon Smart. (IMAGE: O’Donoghue family)
Deb Edwards, niece of Dr O’Donoghue and a spokesperson for the O’Donoghue family and the Lowitja O’Donoghue Foundation, issued the following written statement, a short time ago.
“Today we announce with great sadness and sorrow in our hearts, the passing of our dearly loved Aunty and Nana Lowitja.
Yankunytjatjara woman, Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue AC CBE DSG, aged 91, died peacefully on Sunday 4 February 2024 on Kaurna Country in Adelaide, South Australia with her immediate family by her side.
Our Aunty and Nana was the Matriarch of our family, whom we have loved and looked up to our entire lives. We adored and admired her when we were young and have grown up full of never-ending pride as she became one of the most respected and influential Aboriginal leaders this country has ever known.
Aunty Lowitja dedicated her entire lifetime of work to the rights, health, and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We thank and honour her for all that she has done – for all the pathways she created, for all the doors she opened, for all the issues she tackled head-on, for all the tables she sat at and for all the arguments she fought and won.
We thank her for being a formidable leader who was never afraid to listen, speak and act. Always with strength, determination, grace, and dignity.
She was admired and respected universally, sought after to meet with dignitaries of the highest standing from all over the world, whilst being equally as loved in her own nation.
We thank her for being a loving and devoted daughter, sister, Aunty and Nana to our families, always ensuring that we were looked after and cared for. As an Australian ‘National Living Treasure’, we shared her with admirers far and wide, but we always loved having her home close to us.
We ask that you continue to honour Aunty Lowitja’s legacy through using your Voices to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and to share the stories of her incredible life, which always had our First Peoples at the heart of all that she worked for and achieved.
Aunty Lowitja’s legacy will continue through the work of the Lowitja O’Donoghue Foundation, which was established with her blessing on her 90th birthday in 2022.
It was her wish that future generations would learn and prosper from the pathways she had created, and that through the Foundation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be supported with strong impact through new opportunities and positive outcomes.
We acknowledge that many will feel a deep loss upon the news of her passing.
There will only ever be, one, Lowitja O’Donoghue. She who always believed that ‘we shall overcome some day.’
Thank you Aunty, you are home now, eternally safe in the arms of your family and beloved husband Gordon, who have been waiting for you in Spirit. You are forever and always in our hearts.
We acknowledge and share our immense gratitude for the health professionals and care staff who have cared for and supported our Aunty in recent years.
At this time, we graciously ask for privacy for our family, whilst we make arrangements to honour Aunty Lowitja.”
In December, a federal judge found that Enel Green Power, an Italian energy corporation operating an 84-turbine wind farm on the Osage Reservation for nearly a decade, had trespassed on Native land. The ruling was a clear victory for the Osage Nation and the company estimated that complying with the order to tear down the turbines would cost nearly $260 million.
Attorneys familiar with Federal Indian law say it’s uncommon for U.S. courts to side so clearly with tribal nations and actually expel developers trespassing on their land. But observers also see the ruling as part of a broader trend: Gone are the days when developers could ignore Indigenous rights with impunity. Now, even if projects that threaten Native land and cultural resources ultimately proceed, they may come with years-long delays that tack on millions of dollars. As more companies look to build wind and solar farms or mine minerals for renewable energy, failing to recognize Indigenous sovereignty could make the clean energy transition a lot more expensive and much further away.
“I think tribes are starting to see that they have more leverage than they thought, and that they’ve previously exercised, over all this infrastructure that’s on their land,” said Pilar Thomas, an attorney, member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona and former deputy director of the Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs at the U.S. Department of Energy. “They want to make sure that they’re getting their fair share.”
Rick Tallman, a program manager at Colorado School of Mines’ Center for Native American Mining and Energy Sovereignty who has spent more than two decades working on financing and consulting for clean energy projects, calls the Osage Nation ruling a wake-up call.
“If you’re going to develop energy in the U.S. you’ve got to do it with the support of tribal communities,” he said.
According to Tallman, investors don’t like uncertainty. He said a lot of infrastructure funders are very conservative and won’t back a project unless they are confident it will succeed, which includes getting the buy-in of affected Indigenous Nations. There’s no upper limit to how much the project could cost if investors don’t get it right.
Marion Werkheiser, founding partner of Cultural Heritage Partners, said the costs are so high that some renewable energy projects never even get off the ground, citing the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound that was opposed by members of the Wampanoag Tribe.
And it’s not just a U.S. trend; Indigenous peoples around the world are fighting to enforce their rights, especially the right to free, prior and informed consent to projects on their land–a concept enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. However, the U.S. hasn’t codified that into law, and compliance globally is spotty.
“Renewable energies are actually not that good in respecting Indigenous rights,” said Genevieve Rose from the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. “They have this feeling that because they bring up something good, something green, that they are automatically a good thing.”
But her colleague David Berger said there’s more awareness and resistance from Indigenous peoples, and companies are being forced to factor in those costs. He pointed to Norway, where the state-owned company that developed an illegal wind farm has agreed to pay Indigenous Sámi people about $675,000 every year for the next 25 years for violating their rights. “What’s good is you have that legal structure so communities can push back,” Berger said.
Wesley Furlong, an Anchorage-based senior staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, said more tribes are filing lawsuits in the U.S., partly because the legal landscape is changing. For example, the National Historic Preservation Act, a federal law managing the preservation of historic resources, has been around since 1966, but it was only in 1999 that the federal government codified regulations related to communicating with tribes about projects that affect them, and the rules weren’t fully in effect until 2004. Some tribes are just now learning about their rights.
Another reason for the increase in lawsuits is because some tribal nations have more resources to fund litigation. “Indian gaming has been a game-changer for tribes to be able to raise revenue and hire attorneys,” Furlong said.
That combination of more legal tools, more financial resources and more education about Native rights, Furlong said, has led to more tribes getting involved in energy developments on their traditional and ancestral territories, including lands with historic connections and are not owned by a tribe. And he only expects that to continue: Most of the U.S. reserves of lithium, copper, cobalt and nickel — metals key to the clean energy transition — are within 35 miles of Federal Indian Reservations, according to a study by the investment firm MSCI.
That’s something renewable energy developers need to be aware of, said Thomas. “I am a staunch believer that if you are within spitting distance of a tribe that you should be engaged in outreach to the tribe,” she said.
Not every project is going to get buy-in, she adds, but she encourages companies to have patients and continue to reach out to tribes even if they don’t respond. Furlong from the Native American Rights Fund said project proponents may erroneously assume that tribes will always be opposed, forgetting that tribal governments want what’s in the best interest of their citizens.
Bottom line, it’s much less costly for companies to invest in tribal consultations and get them right from the get-go, says Daniel Cardenas, the head of the National Tribal Energy Association and a member of the Pit River Tribe who has consulted with tribes and companies regarding fossil fuel projects. “The cost of engagement is almost nothing compared to the cost of what they’re going to have to pay [if they don’t do it right],” he said of developers.
Werkheiser has seen some progress, with some banks, insurance companies and energy developers adopting Indigenous peoples policies to guide their investments and some companies undergoing voluntary certifications to show their projects are ethical and respectful of Indigenous rights. “Financial institutions are recognizing that this is a real business risk and they’re building it into the cost of capital for these companies,” she said.
But overall, change is slow, she said.
“For the most part, the renewable energy developers are repeating the mistakes that fossil fuels developers have made over the years,” she said. “They’re not engaging with tribes early as potential partners and information sources during their planning process, and they are basically deferring their own relationship with tribes to the federal government.”
That’s a mistake, said David Kane, a consultant who leads WindHorse Strategic Initiatives. Energy companies often mistakenly perceive tribal chairs as though they are the equivalent of small-town mayors, rather than recognizing them as heads of state.
Because of that, he says companies often disrespect tribes from the beginning by sending lower-level representatives to liaise with them, and many companies may never even step foot on a reservation or go before tribal councils. Developers often complain that it takes a long time to build relationships with tribal members but Kane says it’s better to do so before projects get underway.
“There’s still a lot of mistrust of white men and with good reason,” he said. And the energy industry, including renewables, he said, is still predominantly white and male.
Another challenge is that sometimes companies assume what will work with one tribe will work with another, said Cardenas from the National Tribal Energy Association.
“There’s 574 tribes, and each one operates differently and independently,” he said. “So if you know one tribe, you just know one tribe.”
He thinks tribal nations should be seen as partners, even sponsoring partners, with shared equity in the developments. There’s growing interest: Over the past two decades, tribal nations have pursued hundreds of clean energy projects, with the Inflation Reduction Act recently increasing funding for such projects.
But in the meantime, costly litigation continues. Last week in the U.S., four tribal nations sued a developer to prevent a $10 billion wind energy transmission line from going into operation. And in Oklahoma, the Osage Nation is now seeking damages from Enel. A judge still needs to decide how much that will cost the company.
On a windy day last August, President Joe Biden signed a proclamation protecting the canyons, cliffs, and plateaus surrounding the Grand Canyon National Park, nearly a million acres abutting the Navajo Nation and Havasupai Indian Reservation.
To Carletta Tilousi, one of the leaders of the Havasupai Tribe who have called the Grand Canyon home for more than 800 years, Biden’s presence and his words felt momentous. “Finally, the small voices of Indigenous people have been heard in the White House,” she thought.
But she knew the fight was not over. The monument prevented hundreds of mining claims, but two uranium mines were grandfathered in, in part due to an 1872 law that guaranteed their right to operate. And now, nearly 40 years after first gaining permission to extract uranium, a Colorado-based company is cashing in.
On December 21, Energy Fuels Resources announced it had started mining uranium at Pinyon Plain Mine, which lies within the borders of the national monument and has lain dormant until now.
The 17-acre Pinyon Plain Mine is 12 miles from the Grand Canyon, six miles from the Grand Canyon National Park, and four miles north of Red Butte, a site sacred to the Havasupai people where Biden gave his August address. The Havasupai Tribe sued along with environmental groups to prevent the mine from starting production, but lost its case in 2022.
Energy Fuels plans to operate the mine for three years to six years and estimates that it will generate 2 million pounds of uranium, says Curtis Moore, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development.
“After mining operations are complete, the Pinyon Plain area will be fully reclaimed and returned to its natural state,” the company has promised. “There will be virtually no evidence a mine ever occupied the site.”
Amber Reimondo is doubtful. She’s energy director at the Grand Canyon Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the Grand Canyon and the Colorado Plateau that sued to prevent the mine along with the Havasupai Tribe, and says uranium mining threatens the aquifer in the greater Grand Canyon area.
“Of course we want to reduce carbon emissions, [but] we want to make sure that we do that in a way that doesn’t continue to impact Indigenous communities,” she said.
According to Reimondo, water systems in the landscape are complex and interconnected. Energy Fuels’ mining process involves drilling a mine shaft through shallow aquifers into uranium deposits, and water flows into the shaft, mixing with the ore, before being pumped out. The concern is that contaminated water will be mixed back into the groundwater.
To date, the company has removed about 49 million gallons of water from the shaft, leaving it to evaporate in an aboveground pool or sharing it with local ranchers for their cattle once treated to EPA standards. Reimondo worries that water could eventually contaminate not only drinking water sources but the creeks and waterfalls throughout the Grand Canyon.
“It’s really, really difficult for researchers to understand exactly what that risk is, because the region is so highly fractured and because we don’t know exactly where water flows to and from,” Reimondo said.
Energy Fuels’ Curtis Moore thinks that concern is overblown. He said that the water that the company pumps out of the shaft is already highly concentrated in uranium because it has been in contact with the rocks long before their mining operations started.
“Their implication is that we are contaminating groundwater, which is simply false — it’s naturally not appropriate for human consumption,” he said. He pointed to a 2022 permit from the state of Arizona that concluded the geology of the mine site — like the slope of the land and type of rock — are “expected to prevent any potential impacts to groundwater resulting from mining operations.”
That potential for negative long-term effects are what Havasupai Tribe members are concerned about. Dianna Uqualla, a Havasupai Tribal Council member, says if there’s pollution in the aquifer years from now, she doubts anyone will take responsibility.
“Who’s going to pay the price?” she asked. “Who’s going to be the one to say, ‘Yeah, I did it’? I don’t think anybody’s going to do that. They’re just going to say, ‘Well, one less tribe, and we’re happy for that,’ is what the non-Natives will probably think.”
Despite that ban, once mined, the uranium ore from Pinyon Plain Mine will be trucked to the White Mesa Mill in southern Utah along state and federal highways, including through Navajo Nation. Navajo President Buu Nygren has implored the federal government to step in on the matter.
Once the ore makes it to White Mesa Mill, the company will extract natural uranium concentrate from the uranium ore, before selling the powder to U.S. nuclear power facilities, which arrange for the concentrate to be sent to other facilities for conversion and enrichment.
Moore says that uranium mining is much safer and better regulated than it was decades ago, and trucking the uranium ore is safe. Uqualla and Tilousi remain skeptical.
Tilousi wishes that Congress would update the 1872 mining law that allowed Energy Fuels to continue operating a mine on a national monument. That’s something the Biden administration has recommended too, in part because the law allows companies to hold mining rights for long periods of time, which sows distrust among local communities including Indigenous peoples.
Tilousi is hopeful reform can happen but doesn’t expect it anytime soon.
“As a Native American living in this country, we are always fighting something,” Tilousi said. “It seems like we are always fighting for our existence.”
When salmon all but vanished from western Alaska in 2021, thousands of people in the region faced disaster. Rural families lost a critical food source. Commercial fisherfolk found themselves without a major stream of income. And Alaska Native children stopped learning how to catch, cut, dry, and smoke fish — a tradition passed down since the time of their ancestors.
Behind the scenes, the salmon shortage has also inflamed a long-simmering legal fight among Native stakeholders, the Biden administration, and the state over who gets to fish on Alaska’s vast federal lands.
At the heart of the dispute is a provision in a 1980 federal law called the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which gives rural Alaskans priority over urban residents to fish and hunt on federal lands. Most rural families are Indigenous, so the law is considered by some lawyers and advocates as key to protecting the rights of Alaska Natives. State officials, however, believe the law has been misconstrued to infringe on the state’s rights by giving federal regulators authority over fisheries that belong to Alaskans.
Now, a lawsuit alleges the state has overstepped its reach. Federal officials argue that state regulators tried to usurp control of fishing along the Kuskokwim River in western Alaska, where salmon make up about half of all food produced in the region. The suit, originally filed in 2022 by the Biden administration against the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, escalated this fall when the state’s lawyers effectively called for the end of federal oversight of fishing across much of Alaska. Indigenous leaders say the state’s actions threaten Alaska Native people statewide.
“What’s at stake is our future,” said Vivian Korthuis, chief executive officer of the Association of Village Council Presidents, a consortium of more than 50 Indigenous nations in western Alaska that’s one of four Alaska Native groups backing the Biden administration in the case. “What’s at stake is our children. What’s at stake is our families, our communities, our tribes.”
The lawsuit is a microcosm of how climate change is raising the stakes of fishing disputes around the world. While tensions over salmon management in Alaska aren’t new, they’ve been exacerbated by recent marine heat waves in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska and rising temperatures in rivers like the Yukon and Kuskokwim, where king, chum, and coho salmon populations have plummeted. In warmer waters, salmon burn more calories. They’re more likely to become malnourished and less likely to make it to their freshwater spawning grounds. With fewer fish in places like western Alaska, the question of who should manage them — and who gets access to them — has become even more urgent.
The Alaska dispute erupted in 2021, when state regulators on the Kuskokwim issued fishing restrictions that conflicted with regulations set by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. People along the river, who are predominantly Yup’ik, were forced to navigate contradictory rules about whether and when they could fish legally — adding to the pain and frustration of an already disastrous season shaped by the coronavirus pandemic and historic salmon shortages.
“We can face large penalties and fines if we make mistakes,” Ivan M. Ivan, an elder in the Yup’ik village of Akiak, said in an affidavit.
The conflict spilled into 2022, another year of abysmal salmon returns, when state and federal regulators again issued contradictory restrictions. Alaska officials blamed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for opening up fishing prematurely, before salmon had begun their migration upstream, and with an “apparent lack of concern” for the species’ conservation. The Biden administration sued, arguing that the state illegally imposed its own rules in the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, a federal reserve of wetlands and spruce and birch forest that encircles more than 30 Indigenous communities.
The fight played out quietly for more than a year — until September, when the state’s attorneys filed a brief that explicitly asked the court to undo legal precedent widely viewed as a safeguard for rural, mostly Indigenous families who depend on salmon. That move caused Alaska’s biggest Indigenous organization, the Alaska Federation of Natives, to join three smaller Native groups that had intervened on behalf of the federal government.
Those organizations are concerned that the state wants to reverse a string of court decisions, known as the Katie John cases, which held that rural Alaskans have priority to fish for food in rivers that flow through federal conservation areas, including long sections of the Yukon, Kuskokwim, and Copper rivers. Alaska Native leaders fear that doing away with that priority would endanger salmon populations and limit access for locals by opening fishing up to more people.
“It really will put a lot of pressure on stocks,” said Erin Lynch, an Anchorage-based attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, which is representing the Association of Village Council Presidents.
That concern isn’t limited to western Alaska. Ahtna Inc., a corporation owned by Indigenous shareholders in the Copper River region — some 500 miles east of the Kuskokwim — has also sided with the Biden administration. Without federal protections on the Copper River, Ahtna anglers would risk getting “pushed out,” according to John Sky Starkey, a lawyer representing Ahtna.
“There are only so many fish. There are only so many places [to fish],” Starkey said. “It’s a significant danger.”
State officials see the issue differently. They say there would be no threat of overfishing or competition between urban and rural residents, partly because rivers like the Yukon and Kuskokwim are so hard to reach from cities like Anchorage. They note that state law explicitly protects the subsistence rights of all Alaskans, including Alaska Natives. And they blame the feds for picking the fight by taking the issue to court.
“We did not initiate this lawsuit,” said Doug Vincent-Lang, commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “We provide for subsistence priority, and we take that seriously.”
The state’s lawyers also claim that federal policy is unfair for Alaska Natives who have moved to cities because it bars them from fishing with relatives in rural areas. Some Indigenous leaders see it as flawed, too, but they disagree with the state about the solution. Rather than do away with federal management, they have called on Congress to strengthen protections for Alaska Natives.
The case, now before the U.S. District Court for Alaska, is likely to heat up even more in the coming months. A ruling is expected in the spring.
Sámi reindeer herders have reached a partial agreement with Norway over the Fosen wind farm, Europe’s largest onshore wind power project located in Central Norway, closing one chapter of a more than 20-year conflict over the wind turbines.
In October 2021, Norway’s Supreme Court ruled that the Fosen wind farm violated the Sámi’s human rights, sparking multiple demonstrations in Oslo, the nation’s capital. The latest demonstration marked the two-year anniversary of the ruling and drew attention to Norway’s refusal to take on the case, resulting in 11 ministries being closed and entrances to Statskraft, the state-owned company behind the project, being blockaded by human rights campaigners. Sámi youth eventually met with King Harald V of Norway in a final effort to secure support.
“I am happy that those in south Fosen now have security and a guarantee that they can continue their livelihood and culture with reindeer husbandry,” said Silje Karine Muotka, President of the Sámi Parliament of Norway. “But what has happened here is gravely serious. It is a human rights violation.”
The agreement, reached earlier this week, only covers reindeer herders to the south of the Fosen wind farm, but there are two communities, known as “siidas,” that have been impacted by the project. For siidas to the south of Fosen, Statskraft will pay 7 million Norwegian crowns ($674,211) each year, for 25 years — the expected lifespan of the wind turbines. The wind farm will continue operating for that time, after which the south Fosen siida will be able to decide on the project’s future, preventing Statkraft from applying for license extensions or renewals at the site without Sámi consent. As well, the Norwegian government will help reindeer herders to use additional winter grazing areas near the Fosen reindeer-herding district with the aim of securing those lands by the winter of 2026.
“The Fosen case has been challenging for all parties,” said Terje Aasland, Minister of Petroleum and Energy. “I am therefore pleased that the parties and the state, through the mediation process, have arrived at a mutually agreed, good, and forward-looking solution. My hope is that this will enable new generations to continue reindeer herding at Fosen.”
However, no agreement has been made with the impacted siida north of Fosen, which has continued to demand the demolition of more than 40 wind turbines which are owned by a different company, Aneo — a Norwegian renewables group.
“I do not want to criticize the south Fosen siida, though I do imagine that the government now sees this as a possibility to invade first and solve it later with payment,” said Terje Haugen, a reindeer herder from the impacted siida. “We in the north Fosen district are standing firmly in our decision.”
A representative from Aneo could not be reached for comment by publication. Minister Aasland said that it’s the government’s position that the best solution for all parties will be to reach an amicable agreement.
Around 98 percent of electricity in Norway comes from renewable resources, and nearly 20 percent is exported to the European Union. The Fosen wind park produces enough energy to power the nearby city of Trondheim, population 220,000.
“I can’t imagine that it is a good business idea for governments and companies to continue invasions and breaking human rights, and then to repair it,” said Muotka. “Never again Fosen is what I say, and hope.”
The Line 5 oil pipeline that snakes through Wisconsin and Michigan won a key permit this month: pending federal studies and approvals, Canada-based Enbridge Energy will build a new section of pipeline and tunnel underneath the Great Lakes despite widespread Indigenous opposition. You may not have heard of Line 5, but over the next few years, the controversy surrounding the 645-mile pipeline is expected to intensify.
The 70-year-old pipeline stretches from Superior, Wisconsin, through Michigan to Sarnia, Ontario, transporting up to 540,000 gallons of oil and natural gas liquids per day. It’s part of a network of more than 3,000 miles of pipelines that the company operates throughout the U.S. and Canada, including the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota where hundreds of opponents were arrested or cited in 2021 for protesting construction, including citizens and members of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians and White Earth Band of Ojibwe.
Now, Enbridge Energy, with the support of the Canadian government, is seeking approvals to build a new $500 million conduit to replace an underwater section of Line 5 in the Straits of Mackinac, while facing lawsuits backed by dozens of Indigenous nations as well as the state of Michigan.
A key concern is the aging pipeline’s risk to the Great Lakes, which represent more than a fifth of the world’s fresh surface water. Environmental concerns are so great that three years ago, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer ordered Enbridge’s dual pipelines that run for 4 miles at the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac to cease operations.
“The state is revoking the easement for violation of the public trust doctrine, given the unreasonable risk that continued operation of the dual pipelines poses to the Great Lakes,” the governor’s office said at the time.
The move came just a year after the Bad River Band tribal nation filed a lawsuit against Enbridge regarding another, separate section of Line 5 in Wisconsin located across 12 miles of the Bad River reservation. The pipeline had been installed in 1953 and, at the time, had received easements to do so from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
But the easements expired, and in a court filing, the tribal nation said the company “has continued to operate the pipeline as if it has an indefinite entitlement to do so,” despite federal law that bans the renewal of expired right-of-way permits on Indian land and would require Enbridge to obtain new permits and approvals from the Band.
The Bad River won a key victory last summer when a Wisconsin judge ruled that the company must shut down the portion of its pipeline that trespasses on the reservation by 2026.
Enbridge has resisted calls to cease Line 5 operations. Instead, the company is appealing the Wisconsin judge’s decision, and has argued that building a new pipeline 100 feet below the lake bed through the Straits of Mackinac will virtually eliminate the chance of a spill.
“Line 5 poses little risk to natural and cultural resources, nor does it endanger the way of life of Indigenous communities,” company spokesperson Ryan Duffy said. “Line 5 is operated safely and placing the line in a tunnel well below the lake bed at the Straits of Mackinac will only serve to make a safe pipeline safer.”
To that end, Enbridge successfully appeared before the Michigan Public Service Commission, the state’s top energy regulator, this month and got permission to build a new concrete tunnel beneath the channel connecting Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The commission cited the need for the light crude oil and natural gas liquids that the pipeline transports, and said other alternatives like driving, trucking or hauling by barge or rail would increase the risk of a spill.
The commission’s approval contradicts Governor Whitmer’s efforts to shut down the pipeline. In the wake of the permit, the governor’s office told reporters the state commission is “independent.” Both of the governor’s appointees on the board voted in favor of the permit.
The approval doesn’t mean that the project will proceed, but it is encouraging for the company as it seeks federal clearance. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is in the process of putting together a draft environmental impact statement for the project. That document isn’t expected to be published until spring 2025.
In the meantime, Line 5 has gotten lots of support from the government of Canada, where Enbridge Energy is based. The government has repeatedly invoked a 1977 energy treaty between the U.S. and Canada to defend the pipeline.
That’s frustrating to Indigenous peoples who have seen their treaty rights repeatedly violated.
“What we’re simply trying to continue to preserve and protect is an Indigenous way of life, which is the same thing our ancestors tried to preserve and protect when they first entered into those treaty negotiations,” said Whitney Gravelle, chairperson of the Bay Mills Indian Community, one of numerous tribal nations opposing Line 5.
The Straits are also the site of Anishinaabe creation stories, the waters from which the Great Turtle emerged to create Turtle Island, what is currently called North America. Gravelle said that maintaining clean lakes where Indigenous people can fish is about more than just the right to fish. It’s about the continuation of culture.
“It’s about being able to learn from your parents and your elders about what fishing means to your people, whether it be in ceremony or in tradition or in oral storytelling, and then understanding the role that that fish plays in your community,” she said.
Last summer, José Francisco Calí Tzay, United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, called for suspending the pipeline’s operations “until the free, prior, and informed consent of the Indigenous Peoples affected is secured.” Free, prior, and informed consent is a right guaranteed to Indigenous Peoples under international law that says governments must consult Indigenous nations in good faith to obtain their consent before undertaking projects that affect their land and resources — consent that Bad River, for instance, has refused to give.
“Canada is advocating for the pipeline to continue operations, following the decision of a Parliamentary Committee that did not hear testimony from the affected Indigenous Peoples,” Calí Tzay wrote, adding the country’s support for the pipeline contradicts its international commitments to mitigate climate change in addition to the risk of a “catastrophic spill.”
Part of what makes Line 5 such a flashpoint is the importance of the Great Lakes and Enbridge’s spotty environmental record. As the Guardian reported last month, the Great Lakes “stretch out beyond horizons, collectively covering an area as large as the U.K. and providing drinking water for a third of all Canadians and one in 10 Americans.”
In 2010, two separate pipelines run by Enbridge ruptured, spilling more than a million gallons of oil between them into rivers in Michigan and Illinois. The Environmental Protection Agency found that Enbridge was at fault not only for failing to upkeep the pipeline but also for restarting the pipeline after alarms went off without checking whether it failed. The company eventually reached a $177 million settlement with federal regulators over the disaster.
A 2017 National Wildlife Federation analysis found that Line 5 has leaked more than a million gallons on 29 separate occasions. The section on the floor of the Straits of Mackinac has been dented by boat anchors dropped in the lakes, including from Enbridge-contracted vessels.
Despite Indigenous peoples’ concerns, Line 5 continues to gain momentum, in part because of the amount of energy it supplies to the U.S. and Canada and the countries’ continued dependence on fossil fuels. While the international community agreed to curb fossil fuels this month at COP28, there’s no agreed-upon timeline for actually doing so, and the consumer demand for affordable energy remains high, especially in light of inflation driving the prices of food and housing.
Meanwhile, more than 60 tribal nations, including every federally recognized tribe in Michigan, have said the pipeline poses “an unacceptable risk of an oil spill into the Great Lakes.”
“The Straits of Mackinac are a sacred wellspring of life and culture for tribal nations in Michigan and beyond,” the nations wrote in an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit challenging the pipeline.
To Gravelle from the Bay Mills Indian Community, the issue is deeply personal and goes beyond maintaining access to clean water and the ability to fish safely. Fishing is deeply intertwined with her peoples’ culture. When a baby is born, their first meal is fish, and when her people hold traditional ceremonies, they serve fish.
“Our traditions and who we are as a people are all wrapped up into what we do with fish,” Gravelle said. “Our relationship with the land and water is more important than any commercial value that could ever be realized from an oil pipeline.”
This story was produced by Grist, co-published with InfoAmazonia and is part of The Human Cost of Conservation, a Grist series on Indigenous rights and protected areas.
Albeiro Mendúa was still in elementary school when the blockade began. For 10 days in October of 1998, hundreds of Indigenous A’i Cofán peoples joined together to stop oil workers from entering the community. Outraged by crude oil that had spilled into their streams and rivers, the A’i Cofán demanded the closure of Dureno 1, the well responsible for the contamination, and that Petroecuador — the state petroleum company of Ecuador — leave the area.
“Before the oil companies came, the community always lived in peace and we were all friends,” said Mendúa. “As a child, I went out to play and there was harmony between families and leaders, but that has now changed.”
Over the course of the protest, the Ecuadorian military was called in to monitor the situation. But in the end, the pressure exerted by the A’i Cofán became too much for the company’s management to handle: The government accepted their demands and agreed to temporarily close the well.
Indigenous Ecuadorians and environmental activists rally in front of the state attorney’s office in downtown Quito in December 1998 to demand the government’s support in their litigation against the oil company Texaco. Martin Berenetti / AFP via Getty Images
In 1969, Texaco drilled the Dureno 1 well inside the territory of the A’i Cofán peoples. But by 1992, the well had changed hands, eventually becoming Petroecuador’s, as did the mineral estate; in Ecuador, Indigenous communities like the A’i Cofán often hold title to land, but the minerals underneath, like oil and gas, and copper or gold, belong to the state.
Since the discovery of oil, the A’i Cofán village of Dureno in the northeastern part of the Ecuadorian Amazon has been threatened by a growing energy industry coupled with explosive population growth, the expansion of agriculture, and intense deforestation. More than two-thirds of the deforestation in the last two decades took place between 1990 and 2000. At the same time, the region’s population grew at a rate of about 5 percent each year.
After the closure of the Dureno 1 well, the A’i Cofáns lived in peace. At the age of 18, Mendúa received a scholarship to attend university in the city of Cuenca, 432 miles away. He graduated in 2010, with a degree in Educational Sciences and Research in Amazonian Cultures. His next goal: take what he learned back home in defense of his community.
When he came home, he noticed a change. Petroecuador had returned, and this time, they had a new tactic: offer incentives to the community, divide, and drill. When it came to economic development or the protection of lands, families had begun fighting and friends were in conflict.
Albeiro Mendúa poses for a photo near a group of police officers. Courtesy of Albeiro Mendúa
At that time, his community survived by hunting, fishing, and collecting fruits, and Mendúa worked to develop projects that would protect their way of life, and their rights. For some time, Mendúa was vice president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, an Indigenous organization that represents nearly 1,500 communities across the Amazon, and now leads the Fundación Hijos de la Selva, or Children of the Rainforest Foundation, an environmental organization focused on Indigenous rights.
“We continue to fight and resist,” Mendúa said. “But the leaders must be vigilant, and we need to defend ourselves.”
The A’i Cofán peoples hold legal title to more than 1,500 square miles of land across five sovereign territories in Ecuador’s northeast, along the Aguarico and San Miguel rivers, that contain dense tropical rainforests rich with plants and animals. Along the Aguarico, which begins in the Andes Mountains and runs 230 miles, narrow channels and lagoons provide homes to dolphins, manatees, and caimans.
In 2008, Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition, also known by the acronym MAE, approached the A’i Cofán with a proposal to protect their homelands by paying residents to guard their forests.
An A’i Cofán guard manipulates a camera trap to report the entry of hunters and mining and oil companies on their lands in Sinangoe, Ecuador, on September 11, 2022.Rodrigo Buendia / AFP via Getty Images
A’i Cofán guards tour their territory, on the lookout for hunters and mining and oil companies on their lands in Sinangoe, Ecuador, on September 11, 2022.Rodrigo Buendia / AFP via Getty Images
At first, many residents rejected the idea, fearing it was a ploy by the Ecuadorian government to obtain control of their territory. However, after trying multiple times to court the A’i Cofán and meeting with community members during open assemblies, the A’i Cofán decided unanimously to sign an agreement with MAE, and in 2008, they did just that, joining a national program called Socio Bosque, a cornerstone initiative behind the government’s promise to develop incentives that protect nature and ecosystems from development.
“The decision was made together, with the participation of young people, elders, women, experts, and leaders,” Mendúa said. “We started with 27 square miles of conservation area, and it was there that we raised our guard. We worked hard on the recovery of flora and fauna, and the community respected the terms.”
Today, the Dureno region is one of 222 Socio Bosque sites throughout Ecuador, consisting of nearly 6,330 square miles of protected land of which almost 5,605 square miles belong to Indigenous communities and other collective landowners. In Dureno, the A’i Cofán receive about $54,000 each year through Socio Bosque, and the money is used to train forest guards, improve surveillance strategies, and protect the territory from illegal miners and other threats.
A’i Cofán leader Alexandra Narváez takes part in the first meeting of the Indigenous guard in charge of protecting Native territories from resource exploitation, in Sinangoe, Ecuador, on September 11, 2022. Rodrigo Buendia / AFP via Getty Images
“The A’i Cofán have always been caretakers of the forests without receiving anything in return,” said Medardo Ortiz, who is also a member and former treasurer of the A’i Cofán community in Dureno. He says the agreement allowed them “to obtain economic resources and cover the needs of families.”
Forests inside A’i Cofán territory are some of the last remaining areas of pristine forest in the Ecuadorian Amazon, covering nearly 7,000 square miles. Through the Socio Bosque program, about 800 community members receive payment, collectively, each year to protect 30 square miles of land from logging and agricultural land grabs while preserving the land. The money is a windfall in a region where 54.45 percent of the population lives under the poverty line — and the program works. By 2025, the program aims to protect 7,000 square miles of forest across Ecuador.
“In general, deforestation rates in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon have remained relatively unchanged or even decreased in some areas since the early 2000s,” said Santiago Lopez, an associate professor of geography and the environment at the University of Washington, Bothell. “Socio Bosque is a very helpful program that has allowed individuals and communities to financially benefit from preserving their forests.”
But the expansion of energy development in and around Dureno, again, threatens to undermine the Socio Bosque project, potentially upending decades of conservation efforts and imperiling millions of dollars in international funding tied directly to the state’s protected area program.
A’i Cofán guards prepare to fly a drone for surveillance of the Aguarico River in Sinangoe, Ecuador, on September 11, 2022. Rodrigo Buendia / AFP via Getty Images
Since 2012, Petroecuador has drilled 70 new oil wells across 155 square miles of rainforest near Dureno, creating the largest oil field in the country and increasing production by approximately 75,000 barrels per day. And in 2017, the Ecuadorian government announced plans to expand drilling.
Last year, Ecuador produced approximately 482,000 barrels of oil a day, most of which was sourced from the Amazon region. More than 60 percent of the Ecuadorian Amazon is under oil concession, with almost 28,000 square miles of oil blocks in operation. By 2025, production is expected to ramp up to 756,000 barrels per day.
Near Dureno, nearly 70 oil wells drilled before and after 2012 ring the Socio Bosque protected area, and two are producing oil inside the established boundaries. Frequent oil spills from those wells pollute the lands and waters that are connected to Socio Bosque, contaminating waterways and inflicting serious loss and damage on the region’s biodiversity, threatening its last undeveloped forests. Between 2012 and 2022, an estimated 969 cases of oil damage were reported on 51 different Indigenous lands across the country.
Grist / Clayton Aldern
“All the waste and pollution from that field goes into the rivers that cross the community,” said Alexandra Almeida, coordinator of oil affairs at Acción Ecológica, an environmental advocacy organization based in Quito, Ecuador. “A’i Cofán people in Dureno are very affected. They can no longer hunt or fish. It is really tragic.”
More broadly, a total of 68 oil wells are located within protected areas governed by Socio Bosque agreements, or within 31 miles of protected borders, while three oil fields owned by the state overlap Socio Bosque lands. One field, the Shushufindi block, produced nearly 12 percent of the country’s total crude oil production in 2022.
As oil exploration begins to eat into Ecuador’s forests, Socio Bosque provides a window into just how protected areas actually are when faced with the lure of oil and gas profit.
“I think it has good intentions,” said Kevin Koenig, the climate, energy and extractive industry director at Amazon Watch. “There’s a whole bunch of questions around if the program is really achieving what it is supposed to achieve.”
Ecuadorean Cofan Telia Chapal, left, and Mariana Anguinda, right, stand inside their home in the village of Dureno.
Rodrigo Buendia / AFP via Getty Images
In 2008, the Shuar Arutam peoples became the first community to contract with Socio Bosque. With homelands between the Santiago, Zamora, and Kuankus rivers in the southeastern region of Ecuador, the agreement covered nearly 800 square miles of land and supported almost 100,000 people in 27 Shuar communities.
The Shuar received an annual income of $452,000, which was used to conserve forests, improve community finances, and build educational facilities for their children. But despite signing contracts with the government, in 2019, Ecuadorian officials granted several mining concessions to Canadian, Chinese, and Australian companies within the established protected areas.
“Families who had never benefited from public institutions of the state were given resources for education, health, productive development,” said Jaime Palomino, president of the Shuar Arutam community. “The idea was good, but the Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition took advantage of this opportunity to distract us and continue advancing with the permits for mining concessions, which was not the vision of our people.”
A Shuar Arutam man listens to Ecuador President Rafael Correa speak during the 2014 opening of a village, Comunidad del Milenio Panacocha, in Ecuador’s Amazon region. The country’s government says it is using revenue from oil to build small villages equipped with basic services for the Indigenous communities living near extraction sites.
Dolores Ochoa / AP Photo
Environmental activists protest in 2012 outside China’s embassy in Quito, Ecaudor, holding a sign that reads in Spanish, “Chinese companies get out of Ecuador.”Dolores Ochoa / AP Photo
Throughout 2020, former President Josefina Tunki and other campaigners presented a series of demands to the Ecuadorian government, with the main goal of getting the contracts withdrawn. In response, they were subjected to threats and harassment by the mining companies and the state.
In 2020, Ecuadorian authorities carried out violent raids in the community. That same year, Josefina Tunki, who gained prominence as a key leader in the community’s resistance, received death threats from the vice president of the Canada-based mining company Solaris Resources, Federico Velásquez, who reportedly told her, “If you keep bothering me with national and international complaints, we will have to cut someone’s throat.”
As a result of the state granting concessions inside areas governed by Socio Bosque contracts, the MAE has terminated its contract with the Shuar Arutam peoples, claiming that the community failed to comply with the program’s requirements. According to a report issued by Amazon Watch on Socio Bosque, researchers called implementation “rife with irregularities and inconsistencies.”
“The government failed to provide support for proper implementation of the agreement and still allowed mining companies into [the Shuar Arutam peoples’] territory,” said the report. “The termination of the program has created even more economic difficulties for the [Shuar Arutam peoples], creating divisions among communities and families that could drive them into the arms of mining companies — a perverse outcome of a program aimed at forest protection.”
Torsten Krause, a senior lecturer in sustainability science at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies, has researched the conservation benefits of the Socio Bosque program.
“People were confused, because the state was coming in and asking them to join this conservation scheme for 20 years and then the same state, only a week later, came back and said they were looking to open a mine or auction the licensing rights for oil drilling there,” Krause said. “They were like, ‘Wait a second, you want us to sign this contract, but then you are also going to approve oil concessions?’ That’s confusing.”
Each Socio Bosque contract lasts 20 years, and the MAE pays landowners to protect their territory. To ensure compliance, the Quito-based Socio Bosque central office monitors each site using remote sensors and semi-annual field visits. Each time communities violate the terms of their contract, a payment is lost. If the violation is caused by someone outside the community — like an illegal logger, for instance — beneficiaries must report the incident to the central office within five days or lose a payment. After three consecutive violations, Socio Bosque can terminate the contract and force landowners to pay back a percentage of the payments received since the beginning of the contract.
In cases where landowners fail to meet their contractual obligations because of state-sponsored projects, communities are still required to pay.
“We acknowledge that there are still challenges to be addressed,” said Luis Suarez, the vice president of Conservation International in Ecuador. “We trust that through coordinated efforts among the government, civil society organizations, and international technical cooperation, these concerns can be addressed while respecting the rights of local communities and conserving nature.”
Socio Bosque areas are considered protected under the National System of Protected Areas of Ecuador and form part of the country’s national REDD+ scheme — a voluntary, international climate change mitigation program developed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change aimed at reducing deforestation and forest degradation by paying communities to stop development and conserve ecosystems. The goal is to incentivize conservation, improve living conditions of communities engaged in the work, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions on approximately 52 million square miles of forest areas in 60 countries.
Indigenous and civil society organizations often reject programs that provide payments for ecosystem services, also known as PES, which provide landowners and communities monetary transfers to improve conservation outcomes, as is the case with the U.N. REDD+ program, because they say it is “not a real solution to confront climate change.”
An activist from Via Campesina, an international movement of peasants, demonstrates against REDD, the U.N. program to reduce deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, next to riot police during the U.N. climate conference COP16 in Cancun, Mexico, in 2010. Eduardo Verdugo / AP Photo
A recent study from the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project into the main methodologies used by REDD+ found that project managers often “stretch reality and create a vast quantity of carbon credits for projects that have questionable climate impacts.” Their findings raise doubts about the effectiveness and credibility of REDD+ projects, with experts calling for more transparent carbon accounting and greater safeguards for Indigenous communities.
In Ecuador, the Socio Bosque program also has its critics. Instead of protecting land for conservation, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, or CONAIE, and the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, or CONFENIAE, argue Socio Bosque is a threat to Indigenous lands, traditions, and identities. For them, the program fails to address the true drivers of climate change, such as the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, agribusiness, and deforestation, which threaten the environment and their livelihoods.
In a letter addressed to the Secretary General of the U.N. in 2011, CONAIE said: “We oppose the policies that are being developed in Ecuador, such as the Socio Bosque plan, as well as the new environmental regulations that aim to commercialize our forests, water, and biodiversity. And we similarly reject private initiatives to grab land and sell environmental services.” To combat climate change, policies must respect the rights of Indigenous peoples and stop the expansion of oil and agribusiness, they argued.
Darwin Guerra, 11, stands by a pond laced with petroleum residue by his home outside the village of San Carlos, Oriente. Guerra’s family started to dig the pond to raise fish before abandoning the project because of the contaminated grounds.Ann Johansson / Corbis via Getty Images
Contaminated pools stand on an oil site that used to be operated by Texaco but today is owned by Petroecuador, in Shushufindi, Oriente, Ecuador. Ann Johansson / Corbis via Getty Images
More than $50 million has been invested in the Socio Bosque program since the project began. Most of the money comes from Ecuador but is supplemented by international institutions and private donors.
In 2014, Banco del Pacífico, a private sector bank based in Ecuador, signed a three-year contract with Socio Bosque to provide $8,635 a year toward conserving and restoring Ecuador’s ecosystems. That same year, General Motors signed a five-year contract, in which they promised to transfer $23 per 2.4 acres of protected area each year. But the program’s largest donor by far is KfW, a German state-owned investment and development bank, which signed a contract with Ecuador in June 2010 and has provided the program a total of $29.4 million.
“The existing legal framework of Ecuador creates the possibility that mining areas overlap with Socio Bosque areas, which in our view is definitively not ideal,” a representative of KfW said. “We consider the Socio Bosque program an overall success story in tropical forest protection. However, we surely also continue to carefully regard any upcoming changes, unintended impacts, or technical flaws of the program prior to any additional financing.”
Then there’s the details. When Petroecuador wants to drill for oil on a new site, they must obtain an environmental license. To do so, they have to get an intersection certificate from the MAE proving that the proposed drilling area doesn’t overlap with a nationally protected area. Under the National System of Protected Areas of Ecuador, Socio Bosque areas are protected, but Petroecuador denies this. “Our environmental licenses do not require intersection certificates for private areas within the Socio Bosque program,” said a representative of the company, adding that “Socio Bosque is not a protected area.”
According to Verónica Andrade Estrada, Socio Bosque’s technical director, in areas where concessions are granted by the Ecuadorian government for oil and gas development, “these areas are removed from the conservation polygon, since within the properties under conservation it is not possible to carry out extractive industries,” she said.
A Petroecuador oil rig in the Oriente region explores for oil in a field surrounded by an African palm plantation. Ann Johansson / Corbis via Getty Images
“According to our understanding of the legal framework, a breach of the agreement due to, for example, government-sponsored activities does not result in a partner being in breach of contract, and therefore the partner does not have to repay the incentive,” said a representative of KfW. “In this case, a mutually agreed termination of the agreement should be reached.”
Representatives with Socio Bosque did not respond to requests for clarification or detailed questions about communities needing to pay the state for its development activities in contractually protected areas.
While Socio Bosque channels $7.9 million in investments per year into the environment, that income pales in comparison to oil profits: In the first three months of 2023, the Ecuadorian government received $1.5 billion in income from Petroecuador’s oil exports.
“In order to maintain a harmonious coexistence with projects that are implemented to benefit the development of the country, Socio Bosque carries out a thorough review of the environmental management plans that are presented prior to the licensing of projects that overlap with Socio Bosque areas,” said the Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition. In those cases, they establish “specific preventive, mitigating, and compensatory measures” and, “if the state prioritizes resource extraction, the area is removed from the conservation scheme.”
In 2021, when Guillermo Lasso, the nation’s outgoing president, came to power, he announced that he wanted to “extract every last drop of benefit from our oil” in Ecuador. In 2022, his administration began negotiating with Silverio Criollo, former A’i Cofán president of Dureno, for more oil wells inside the Socio Bosque borders — a negotiation that ignited divisions within the community.
“It was a huge blow,” Albeiro Mendúa said. “We complained to the government and said that we had an agreement signed and that they should respect it.”
Members of the A’i Cofán community in Dureno set up a blockade to
prevent oil workers from accessing the entrance to the proposed oil site.
CONAIE
Just months after meeting with Criollo, the Ecuadorian government authorized the construction of 30 new oil wells by Petroecuador, and by June of 2022, the A’i Cofán had again constructed a blockade to prevent oil workers from entering the community. The standoff lasted until January 12, 2023, when members of Ecuador’s Armed Forces and the National Police tried to evict them, resulting in a violent confrontation that left six people seriously injured.
Then, on February 26, Mendúa’s brother, Eduardo, one of the most prominent faces in the community’s resistance to Petroecuador and then-president Criollo, was assassinated outside his home in his garden.
CONAIE, and other nongovernmental organizations, along with Mendúa’s family members, have accused Petroecuador of being responsible for the attack. Petroecuador denies the allegations and adds that the company has “been in constant conversations with the communities, and the A’i Cofán are fully informed about the intervention of the oil company in their territory,” said Petroecuador’s deputy manager María Soledispa.
Leonidas Iza, president of CONAIE, speaks during the funeral of Eduardo Mendúa while Albeiro Mendúa, sitting to his left, listens. CONAIE
“Dureno has become a conflict zone,” Mendúa said. “I have had to leave the community to live somewhere else for my personal safety.”
Mendúa now spends his days in exile from Dureno, campaigning against oil operations from a distance. Living at home, he says, comes with constant death threats from oil workers and community members in favor of oil exploration, and the murder of his brother makes for a reminder of how real those threats are.
In August, 60 percent of Ecuadorians voted to free Yasuní National Park, a 3,948-square-mile protected area and home to many uncontacted Indigenous communities, from oil exploration in a historic referendum. The outcome, which will require Petroecuador to leave over 726 million barrels of oil underground, was hailed as a victory by environmental advocates across the globe.
“It shows us that the greatest national consensus at this time is in the defense of nature, the defense of Indigenous peoples and nationalities, the defense of life,” said Pedro Bermo, a spokesperson for the environmental collective Yasunidos, in a statement.
A voter marks their ballot during the snap election in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on August 20. In a historic decision, Ecuadorians voted against oil drilling in Yasuni National Park, which is a protected area in the Amazon that serves as a biodiversity hotspot.Martin Mejia / AP Photo
Waorani Indigenous protesters attend an event promoting a “yes” vote on a referendum against extracting oil in Quito on August 14.Dolores Ochoa / AP Photo
But Mendúa feels less hopeful about the results. He says communities in territories outside of Yasuní aren’t safe. “We are sure, or at least I am, that the government will try to enter with force.”
Mendúa says he is now working to come up with alternative projects the community can undertake to protect their homes and keep oil companies away. He and others are fighting for the legal right to manage more of their historical and ancestral territories, which they believe would strengthen the survival of the Cofán peoples and represent a huge victory for conservation.
“We have the capacity to manage and defend these territories,” Mendúa said. “Our fight is not just for the Cofáns — we are also fighting against climate change.”
