Brazilian voters head to the polls this weekend to pick their next head of state, with a choice between right-wing incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, a former union leader from the country’s left-wing Workers’ Party and past president of Brazil.
After a tumultuous first term, Bolsonaro, commonly referred to in the media as the “Trump of the tropics,” faces an uphill battle for reelection — with major implications for the Amazon rainforest and climate policy worldwide.
According to recent polling from the group IPEC, Lula has been picking up steam in the final days of the campaign, solidifying a significant lead. Some 48 percent of polled voters said they currently support Lula; just 31 percent back Bolsonaro. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote on October 2, the election goes to a runoff on October 30. IPEC’s polling indicates that if the election were to take place today, Lula would likely receive 52 percent of the valid vote — after deducting null ballots — which points to a possible first-round victory.
Elected in 2018, Bolsonaro ran on a platform of pro-extraction, anti-Indigenous initiatives. Since taking office, he has stopped all Indigenous land titling, promoted land grabbing, and encouraged the opening of lands to mining, drilling, and agribusiness. He also appointed anti-environmentalist staff to regulatory agencies across the federal government and prevented enforcement of environmental policy.
“What Bolsonaro did was completely dismantle Brazilian environmental protections and rendered the environmental ministry all but useless,” said Claudio Angelo, head of climate policy and communications at Observatório do Clima, a group of 77 organizations that do research and advocacy around climate change in Brazil.
This environmental legacy, combined with high inflation rates and unemployment, soaring fuel prices, and the country’s widely criticized response to the COVID-19 pandemic, left Bolsonaro vulnerable to losing his reelection.
Lula was the president of Brazil for two terms between 2003 and 2010, and is generally viewed as having a better track record on environmental issues, though not without some flaws.
During his tenure, government agencies coordinated to reduce deforestation in Brazil by over 70 percent. Under Lula, the country also advocated for climate mitigation and adaptation funding from wealthy members of the United Nations, and secured international funding for Amazon conservation efforts. He was imprisoned for corruption charges in 2018, but in March of last year, the country’s Supreme Court annulled the convictions against him, ruling that the court that convicted him did not have jurisdiction to try him, thus restoring his political right to run for office.
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s former president, greets supporters outside of the Sindicato dos Metalurgicos do ABC, a metalworkers union, on November 9, 2019 in Sao Bernardo do Campo, Brazil.
Pedro Vilela/Getty Images
In his current campaign, the former president has spoken out against the destruction of the Amazon, promising to put an end to illegal mining and fight organized networks driving deforestation. But he will face challenges — many ranchers, farming companies, loggers, miners, and land speculators have been emboldened by Bolsonaro’s rhetoric and policies. Plus, Angelo adds, in contrast to his first tenure, they are now heavily armed as Bolsonaro has relaxed gun control laws.
“I think that Lula is very cautious to understand that this is a huge challenge and is completely different than it was in the past,” Izabella Teixeira, Lula’s campaign adviser on environmental issues and Brazil’s former environment minister, told New Scientist.
While Lula has voiced support for the transition to clean energy, he has also said he would expand oil production, particularly of the “pre-salt,” a reserve of petroleum off the coast of Brazil. While Brazil gets most of its electricity from hydropower, it is also Latin America’s top producer of oil.
During his presidency, environmentalists criticized Lula and his successor, Dilma Roussef, also of the Workers’ Party, for building the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, which displaced and impacted water flows for the Juruna tribe and several other Indigenous communities that had lived in the region for generations. More recently, activists decried Lula’s support for reconstructing the BR-319 highway through the Amazon. Two weeks ago, the former president’s environment minister, Marina Silva, who resigned in 2008 over objections to hydroelectric dam permitting, endorsed his candidacy after he agreed to implement a list of environmental policies that she proposed.
“Lula in 2022 is a different animal,” said Angelo. “He understands that Brazil’s international credibility relies on being a leader in the climate arena. And with Marina Silva’s proposals, we can now say that he is the candidate with the most advanced environmental package.”
“Bolsonaro represents the continuation of authoritarianism and of people who think like him, that share a love of the military dictatorship and were not happy with democratization,” Lilia Schwarcz, a senior lecturer of anthropology at the University of São Paulo, told the Washington Post. “Now they are emboldened to express these views.”
“Every day we see violence increasing, Indigenous Peoples being murdered and the destruction of our territories happening at an accelerated rate,” said Dinaman Tuxá, Executive Coordinator at Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), a national organization that unites Indigenous communities in support of their rights. “We demand the immediate demarcation of our lands and full protection of our rights and lives, as this is the only way in which we can continue to contribute to the fight against the climate crisis.”
APIB members focused their attention on President Jair Bolsonaro, who is in New York to make an address before the General Assembly and has pushed for development of the Amazon at the expense of Indigenous people. From 2019, when Bolsonaro took office, to 2021, Brazil lost over 13,000 square miles of Amazon forest. In just the first six months of this year, 1,500 square miles of forest were destroyed, the highest ever for that time period. Bolsonaro’s policies have also led to increasing violence against Indigenous land defenders–last year at least 27 people were killed protecting their territories. “Further allowing deforestation puts biodiversity, the lives of Indigenous Peoples and traditional communities, and the global climate at risk,” said Carol Pasquali, Executive Director at Greenpeace Brazil, which helped organize the protest. “World leaders must be accountable and put people and the planet first always.”
Filipino groups, including the Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment, gathered in front of the Philippine Consulate to protest President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. ahead of his speech at the U.N. Indigenous leaders are concerned that Marcos Jr.’s government will continue the nation’s history of directing violence toward Indigenous people. The protest also marked the 50th anniversary of Marcos Sr. declaring martial law and starting a years-long campaign during which over 3,000 people were killed, 70,000 imprisoned, and 34,000 tortured.
Indigenous activists are also using this week to push world leaders on concrete climate actions. Led by the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change (PISFCC), boats filled with activists sailed down the Hudson and East Rivers in New York to call on world leaders to support their calls for climate justice.
Indigenous people from Pacific Islands are often the most affected by rising sea levels and other climate impacts despite minimal contributions to the crisis, but have limited influence on the international level. “Our traditional knowledge is interrelated with our lands and this climate change is threatening to take this away, but we in Vanuatu will not be passive victims,” said Arnold Kiel Loughman, Attorney General of the Republic of Vanuatu, an island nation in the South Pacific Ocean. “We will do everything we can to defend the human rights of our people.”
Vanuatu and PISFCC are calling for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to issue an advisory opinion on climate change – non-binding legal advice provided to the United Nations which carries significant weight internationally. As of 2017, only 28 advisory opinions have been requested, on subjects ranging from use of nuclear weapons to United Nations expenses. To date, the International Court has never heard a case on climate change.
Advocates say the issuing of an opinion would put pressure on member states to review their policies and commitments, including strengthening the Paris Agreement by clarifying state’s obligations toward climate goals, and affirming Indigenous rights in the fight against climate change. For that to happen, the General Assembly must vote to send the case to the ICJ, which organizers believe is likely. Vanuatu and PSIFCC are calling for that vote and rallying support among countries through both diplomatic channels and public campaigning.
“The [International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion] campaign was born out of this sense of urgency,”said Vishal Prasad, a campaigner with PSIFCC. “We are campaigning for an advisory opinion that seeks to bring together human rights and impacts of climate change on future generations.”
International financing for projects like oil pipelines and deforestation that harm the environment and violate Indigenous rights are also the target of activists this week. Indigenous groups, including the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, staged a die-in in front of the New York Stock Exchange on Monday. “We start the week in Wall Street to ask decision makers what kind of projects they are supporting. We don’t want continued investment into the destruction of the Earth,” said Gustavo Sanchez, from Alianza Bosques. “We will all die if we continue like this.”
A coalition of Indigenous groups from Peru, including the Autonomous Territorial Government of the Wampis Nation, are calling on banks to divest from companies that destroy the Amazon, including Petroperú, a company they say is trying to build an oil pipeline on Indigenous land. The coalition presented a risk assessment to bank representatives that shows the environmental, financial, and moral cost to continuing with these investments.
“We all know global action has been significantly lacking,” Vishal Prasad said. “We are not just fighting for the rights of people now, but those that come after us.”
The Department of the Interior announced on Tuesday new guidance to help federal agencies strengthen collaboration with Indigenous Nations in the management of public lands, water, and wildlife. The new policy will support agreements designed to help tribes co-manage projects on public lands that make up 620 million acres divided among four major federal agencies.
For decades, Tribal governments have been fighting for a larger role in the management of public lands. Through unequal treaty agreements, and outright land seizures by the federal government, Indigenous Nations were removed, often violently, from their traditional territories which were then converted into public lands. Currently, federal agencies have a responsibility to provide services required to protect and enhance remaining Indigenous lands, resources, and governments in exchange for those expropriated territories.
The Department’s new guidance will help Indigenous communities deal with climate change, navigate limited water resources, and build sustainable food production, but is also a formalized recognition of historic injustices.
“By acknowledging and empowering tribes as partners in co-stewardship of our country’s lands and waters, every American will benefit from strengthened management of our federal land and resources,” said Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, in a statement.
In November 2021, the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and the Interior instituted the Tribal Homelands Initiative, which stated that agencies managing public lands and waters must consult and collaborate with Tribal governments as part of what are known as co-management policies. The principles of co-management tend to center on several key principles: the recognition of tribes as sovereign governments, their early and ongoing inclusion in any decision-making process, and the incorporation of Indigenous expertise in land management.
Increasingly, the principles of co-management and the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge in wide-ranging practices, from sustainable harvesting to fire management, have gained bi-partisan support. In a March 8 hearing by the House Committee on Natural Resources, Bruce Westerman, the ranking Republican from Arkansas, expressed his support for Tribal co-management policies. “We can learn a lot from tribes by the way they manage their land, in contrast to how the federal government does it,” he said.
Several co-management agreements between federal agencies and Indigenous communities over land and resource management have already been formalized since the November Tribal Homelands Initiative took effect. This April, the Rappahannock Tribe, whose territory lies on the eastern side of the eponymous river in Virginia, reacquired 465 acres from the Fish and Wildlife Service. In June, the Department of Interior transferred management of the Dworshak National Fish Hatchery in Idaho to the Nez Perce Tribe.
In June, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service formalized an agreement with five Indigenous Nations to co-manage Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument, ending a nearly six-year battle to formalize the pledge that began under the Obama administration.
“We are being asked to apply our traditional knowledge to both the natural and human-caused ecological challenges, drought, erosion, visitation, etc.,” said Carleton Bowekaty, lieutenant governor of the Zuni Pueblo, in response to the Bears Ears agreement. “What can be a better avenue of restorative justice than giving Tribes the opportunity to participate in the management of lands their ancestors were removed from?”
But Raúl Manual Grijalva, the chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources and a Democratic representative from Arizona, has expressed concerns about how the federal government will track the number and extent of co-management agreements in place, as well as how agencies will be held accountable for their implementation. Earlier this month, Grijalva, sent a letter to the U.S. Accountability Office requesting an examination of federal land management agencies’ efforts to implement co-management agreements with tribal governments.
The number of Native American households without indoor plumbing in Nevada is higher than the national average and increasing. The number of Safe Drinking Water Act violations—including bacteria and inorganic compounds found in drinking water—has also increased in facilities serving those communities. The number of Indigenous people affected by a lack of access to plumbing, hot water, a shower, or a toilet is also on the rise. That’s according to a new study that looked at water security in Native communities across Nevada.
Using data from the Environmental Protection Agency, researchers looked at both the current state, and trends, of water security for Native communities in Nevada. The findings support years of research on water inequality in Native communities across the country. The study, “Water security in Native American communities of Nevada,” was published by the Desert Research Institute (DRI) and the Guinn Center for Policy Priorities. “Water accessibility, reliability, and quality are major challenges for Native American communities in Nevada and throughout the Southwest,” said coauthor Maureen McCarthy, director of the Native Climate project at the Desert Research Institute.
There are twenty federally recognized tribes in Nevada, most of which live in rural areas. Rural tribal communities face a host of challenges to water access, including water scarcity, lack of infrastructure like piping and irrigation systems, and funding.
Tribes have a right to both water and infrastructure support from the federal government, but have been denied full access to both for decades. Tribal governments and natural resource departments struggle to secure funding to implement infrastructure projects or take legal action to claim water rights. The federal government also has a history of ignoring its own policies that give tribal water rights precedence, leaving thousands of people without adequate access to water. “Despite recent gains, continued efforts are needed to restore trust, build collaboration, and ensure the sustainable development of Native American communities in Nevada and elsewhere” the study reads.
These disparities come as western states face a historic drought and fierce competition for limited water resources. With the federal government’s announcement of new cuts to water from the Colorado River, tribes, states, and communities in the area are figuring out how to handle the new water reality. Although most tribes in Nevada do not directly receive Colorado River water, the scramble to conserve water along the Colorado River offers insight into the challenges facing tribal access in the area.
Water security issues—which are experienced by both urban and rural communities—can be connected to many other health and quality of life problems, such as overcrowding and disease. “Previous studies have found that Native American households are more likely to lack complete indoor plumbing than other households in the U.S., and our results show a similar trend here in Nevada,” said lead author Erick Bandala, assistant research professor of environmental science at DRI. “This can create quality of life problems, for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when lack of indoor plumbing could have prevented basic health measures like hand-washing.”
The study’s findings fit into a pattern that can be found across the country in communities of color, where neglect, racist policies, and lack of funding have led to water crises. Recently, Jackson, Mississippi’s long standing water crisis reached a breaking point, with the state and city declaring a state of emergency.
This story is published in collaboration with High Country News.
Amid historic drought in the Colorado River Basin, the Gila River Indian Community is taking a drastic step to protect their own water resources. In a statement last week, Governor Stephen Roe Lewis announced the tribe—located just south of Phoenix—would stop voluntarily contributing water to an important state reservoir. “We cannot continue to put the interests of all others above our own when no other parties seem committed to the common goal of a cooperative basin-wide agreement,” the statement reads.
Since 2021, Lake Mead, a crucial water supply for the region, has been boosted by voluntary water contributions from the Gila River Indian Community and the Colorado River Indian Tribes. The Colorado River is a crucial source of water in the West, supplying water to 40 million people across seven states and Mexico. For years, tribes and communities in those states have received river water based on a complex allocation system, but last week, the federal government announced historic water cuts that will force Arizona, the most impacted state, to reduce water withdrawals from the Lake Mead reservoir by 21 percent next year. Lake Mead’s levels are currently at a historic low of about 27 percent capacity.
By contributing their water to Lake Mead at affordable rates, the Gila River Indian Community was essentially subsidizing Arizona’s water supply while sacrificing an opportunity to sell that water at higher rates or put it to use on the reservation for agriculture or other industry. Now, facing cuts and other communities not willing to make sacrifices for the collective good, Gila River is putting its foot down. According to the statement, the lack of progress toward a sustainable water management plan left the tribe with no choice but to store the water independently rather than supporting the state water supply. “We are aware that this approach will have a very significant impact on the ability of the State of Arizona to make any meaningful commitment to water reductions in the basin state discussions,” Lewis said in the statement.
Meanwhile, the Colorado River Indian Tribes, which has also been contributing some of its water to help keep Lake Mead’s levels up, has opted to continue storing water in the reservoir. In a press release, chairwoman Amelia Flores reiterated her tribe’s commitment to an ongoing fallow and farming plan for their water allotments in response to the cuts. In other words, Colorado River Indian Tribes is sticking to a plan that forfeits the opportunity to maximize their agricultural and water revenues. “We recognize that the decades-long drought has reduced the water availability for all of us in the Basin,” Flores said. “We continue to conserve water and develop ways to use less water as we adjust to higher temperatures, more wind and less precipitation.”
These two decisions illustrate the difficult choices facing the thirty federally recognized tribes in the Colorado River Basin. Because tribes are sovereign governments, their water rights are determined with the federal government, rather than via the state, like cities and towns. Water rights allow tribes to maintain agricultural self-sufficiency, restore and steward the land, and support their communities. But to actually use their water, tribes face a unique set of challenges including inadequate infrastructure that limits some from accessing their water allocations. And for tribes still fighting to have their rights recognized, the ongoing shortage may make their battle even harder. As the region prepares for the cuts, tribes are working to ensure they have a voice during ongoing water management negotiations.
A sign shows where Lake Mead water levels were in 2002
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
A 1908 Supreme Court decision established that tribes have the right to draw from the rivers that pass through their reservations in order to enable their self-sufficiency. But in its ongoing colonization of the West, the federal government filled the needs of white settlers before those of Indigenous nations. Through the Bureau of Reclamation, founded in 1902, hundreds of dams and reservoirs were constructed to divert millions of gallons of water from the Colorado River and other waterways to serve the growing settler populations of the West. Between 1980 and 2000, the basin was thriving, with water levels at its reservoirs nearly at full capacity. But even after two decades of drought, the unprecedented 27 percent reservoir capacity took officials by surprise. The Lower Colorado River Basin, one of the Bureau’s 6 water regions, consists of the Mountain and Southwest states as well as much of Southern California and is where tensions between individual states and tribes around water conservation policies are coming to a head.
Twenty-two tribes in the basin have secured recognized water rights and allocations, which they reclaimed through a mix of legislation, settlement, and court decisions. These allocations total around 3.2 million acre-feet per year, which represents roughly a quarter of the river’s annual supply. Arizona’s total allocation is less than 3 million acre-feet per year. The Department of the Interior tasked Basin States and Tribes to come up with a voluntary water conservation plan to add 2 to 4 million more acre-feet of water to stabilize the Colorado River and its two largest reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell.
But according to a July 22 letter to Tanya Trujillo, Assistant Secretary for Water and Science at the Department of the Interior, leaders from fourteen tribes in the Colorado River Basin argued that they were not being adequately consulted by either states or the Department of the Interior on a viable conservation plan.
The letter cites the federal government’s legal obligations to tribes, notably an executive order issued by President Clinton in 2000 that requires federal departments and agencies to consult with tribal governments when planning policies that impact their communities. “We should not have to remind you – but we will again – that as our trustee, you must protect our rights, our assets, and people in addition to any action you take on behalf of the system,” the letter said.
Nora McDowell is the former chairwoman of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe and member of the Water and Tribes Initiative. She says that tribes have been forced to follow state and federal decisions about water use, even though tribes have successfully managed the river since time immemorial. She believes it is time for tribes to have a greater voice in conservation plans. “We always have been marginalized or not even consulted,” McDowell said of the ongoing conservation planning. “But the difference here is that we have the rights to that water.”
But twelve tribes are still fighting to get all of their water rights recognized. And as competition for water grows even fiercer, these tribes are left in an even more precarious position.
“The problems have existed for a long time on the river and the current situation is just exacerbating them and making it that much more fraught to try to negotiate water settlements,” Jay Weiner, water counsel for the Tonto Apache Tribe, which currently is in settlement negotiations, said. “There are political incentives for non-Indian water users essentially to try to put obstacles in the way of tribal development because otherwise that water is coming out of someone’s bucket.”
At least six cities in Arizona have declared water shortages because of the drought. And with water at dangerously low levels in both Lake Mead and Lake Powell, tribal water—whether in the form of voluntary contributions like the Colorado River Indian Tribes continues to make, or in the form of undeveloped tribal water rights—will play an important role in the region’s water supply. Because all water users have to cut back in response to the drought, tribes attempting to reclaim their water rights face negotiators reluctant to part with any water at all. Weiner, who also serves as water counsel for the Quechan Indian Tribe, says that the ongoing shortage has only further complicated ongoing settlements, “because as a practical matter right now, water rights users in the basin rely on those unquantified or undeveloped tribal water rights.”
A woman siphons water into a bucket on the Navajo Nation.
RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images
Meanwhile, even tribes with recognized water rights face an uphill battle to fully take advantage of their water allocations. Some tribes simply lack the necessary piping infrastructure for either farming or drinking water, are too geographically spread out, or have had their water resources contaminated by extractive industry.
On May 27, 18 years of negotiations came to a close when Congress passed a bill granting the Navajo Nation 81,500 acre-feet of water annually from Colorado River Basin sources within Utah. Yet it is estimated that between 30 percent and 40 percent of households on the Navajo Nation, spanning territory in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, do not have running water. It is unclear how much these new water cutbacks will impact development of critical infrastructure for the Navajo, which will take years.
Nora McDowell of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe believes it will take a collective effort to ensure a sustainable future for the Colorado River and water access in the region. That effort will require major changes to water management and tribes’ role in it. “It’s a critical time right now and people need to wake up and see what we’re dealing with,” she said. “We can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing for the last 100 years.”
I’ve often wondered what a fictional feature film set at Standing Rock, at the height of the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline resistance, might look like. What about, for instance, an unlikely-allies narrative about two Indigenous people who dislike each other but are forced to work together to fight the pipeline? What about a coming-of-age story about a reconnecting Native trying to find their identity through protest? Or a rom-com where two Indigenous people fall in love surrounded by state violence and chaos?
The upcoming feature-length movie, On Sacred Ground, opts for none of these. Rather, it follows the story of a (white) journalist and a (white) oil company executive who “find themselves on opposite sides of the fight” during the construction of the contentious pipeline. As for the Indigenous activists who led the actual protest effort on the North Dakota reservation, their narratives are shunted to the background in order to allow the main characters to plumb the depths of white guilt.
On Sacred Ground is hardly the first film to focus on Standing Rock. There have been some documentaries on the protests: Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock, co-directed by Myron Dewey, for example. The 2017 Vice television series, Rise, included two full-length episodes, Sacred Water and Red Power, End of the Line: The Women of Standing Rock. There was also Black Snake Killaz: A #NoDAPL Story. But to date, there have been surprisingly few “major” works on the subject, and arguably little self-reflection as a nation. This, despite an ever-growing chorus of voices demanding clean water, Indigenous stewardship of natural resources, and climate action — all central themes of the climate crisis, magnified through the actions of Indigenous people at Standing Rock.
On Sacred Ground touches on these ideas, but because the story is told from the white perspective, the needs of white characters and narratives inevitably supersede those of Indigenous stakeholders. How does one even begin to understand the lessons of NODAPL in a film set during the 2016 protests when the main protagonists are white people? Given the explosion of Indigenous-made television and film production occurring at multiple levels of the entertainment industry, On Sacred Ground decision’s to stick with a colonial-first gaze is, at best, puzzling, and, at worst, insulting. One must ask why filmmakers did not read the room.
The set-up is this: Daniel, is a burnt-out journalist dealing with a bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder due to his experience as a reporter covering the war in Iraq. He sleepwalks through his days in Lancaster, Ohio, struggling to fit in with those around him. Played lethargically by William Mapother, Daniel is distant, and inattentive to his wife, Julie, who is expecting a baby. He drives a beat-up Ford and lives in a modest house (because he’s a journalist, it’s safe to say he’s not drowning in riches).
Then comes a phone call from a fancy editor in Houston, played by Frances Fisher. She tells him she spotted his talent based on his previous work and wants to assign him to a story on the Standing Rock for the (fictional) Houston Daily. In reality, Fisher has scouted and recruited Daniel based on his low credit score (438), the knowledge that his last car was repossessed, and the fact that he is a Republican. The paper has oil and gas funding and a deep research budget, and Fisher figures that she can pressure Daniel to write an oil-friendly piece on the anti-pipeline protests.
Thankful for the employment, Daniel throws himself into his new assignment at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. He’s doing it for the money, to be sure, but it’s clear he’s also seeking some sort of clarity in his life – what exactly that might be, he doesn’t appear to know.
Once at Standing Rock, the plot gets pretty predictable. Daniel meets a sleazy intermediary tasked with guiding him to write that big, oil-friendly story. Somehow, Mariel Hemingway gets mixed into the narrative as a frontline activist, as does Irene Bedard, who plays a matriarchal-type activist named Mary Singing Crow. Daniel gets a crash course on how to act at the makeshift camp and becomes gradually aware of the significance of the story he’s writing and the nuance it demands. Needless to say, the story he discovers is not as oil-friendly as his employer’s funders would have him believe.
Films like On Sacred Ground mean well, and they’ve meant well for a while. I’m reminded of the well-intentioned 2017 film Neither Wolf Nor Dog, where the white protagonist spends the entire run time grimacing after learning the “real” story of how America has treated Indigenous people — a revelation that, when presented to Indigenous viewers or individuals with even a modicum of education, elicits a reaction of “duh?” Here, William Mapother’s Daniel does much of the same, standing in for white America, carrying a look of confusion and pain throughout nearly the entirety of the movie.
Characters like Daniel are designed as stand-ins for WHITE GUILT. Ostensibly, they shoulder some of the heavy weight of America’s historic and ongoing human rights abuses and responsibility for the crushing climate crisis, but that form of atonement leaves little space for nuance when the narrative favors didacticism over true representation. Many viewers may be on board with the idea that the United States has an unhealthy love for oil, but do we need another film about how white people feel guilty about it — especially one set at one of the most important Indigenous events in recent history, at a place where the images of resistance are still seared into our collective memory? Can a film about Standing Rock without Indigenous people at the forefront succeed on any level? And perhaps most importantly, can white people make films like this and not make it about themselves? Of course not.
Actual Indigenous protesters at Standing Rock demonstrate against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. ROBYN BECK / AFP via Getty Images, Michael Nigro / Pacific Press / LightRocket via Getty Images
While co-writers and directors Joshua and Rebecca Harrel Tickell have crafted a story about the price we pay for oil, it unfortunately relies on tired tropes of white guilt and white redemption, retreading that old story we’ve seen so many times before where a white guy is thrown into an “exotic” situation and with the help of ancient Indigenous teachings, goes “off the reservation,” has an epiphany, and finds his truth. In fact, at one point of the film, Frances Fisher’s character actually yells to David Arquette’s Elliot: “He’s gone off the reservation!” The line was so predictable, I was able to say it at the same time she did even on first viewing. I may or may not have howled in amusement.
In the end, the film leans back on the historical record: The Indian activists get arrested, their teepees are burned down, and a lone tear falls down an Indian’s face as they watch the destruction happen. Daniel, meanwhile, watches sadly on his laptop from the comfort of his own home, thus ending his journey. It feels condescending to see the Indians fight valiantly and get punished for it while Daniel gets to go back to his family, file a story about it, and cash a check.
I know I’d rather see other takes on the Dakota Access Pipeline and all the things that occurred there: the love, the loss, the challenges, the inspiration. But I want to see Indigenous people, the ones who took the journey there, tell these stories. I personally know plenty of people who went to Standing Rock in the fight for clean water. And unlike Daniel, once I close my laptop, I know they still exist.
On July 29, 2021, Li Boyd woke up to the smell of smoke. It was her birthday — she was turning 38 — and she had rented a boat to take her parents and aunts out on the lake near her home in central Minnesota, about 90 minutes north of the Twin Cities. But that morning, when she looked outside her window and found a thick, yellow-gray haze, she figured it was best to avoid going outside. Her older family members all had respiratory issues, and as the day went on and the smoke grew thicker, she worried about how it would affect them. They celebrated in her house, sealing the windows as tightly as they could.
Boyd is a member of the federally recognized Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. That day, her government sent out alerts through Facebook, email, and text message, warning citizens to stay indoors and close their windows. Youth programs were canceled, and public employees were told to go home. The smoke was “so intense,” Boyd said, that her aunt called the police in a panic to report that something was on fire.
It was Canada, they told her; wildfires burning in nearby Alberta had sent a column of smoke south into Minnesota, where it reached Mille Lacs and settled on the reservation like a blanket. Air quality in the United States is measured on a point scale called the air quality index, or AQI, where a score under 50 is considered “good” while one over 150 is “unhealthy.” That day, a private sensor on the Mille Lacs Reservation registered an AQI-equivalent reading of 667.2 — the highest ever recorded in the state of Minnesota.
A NASA-generated image from July 21, 2021, shows high concentrations of wildfire smoke over wide swaths of the US including Minnesota.
Grist / Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory
Smoke had drifted over the reservation before, but that day was a wake-up call. “I didn’t need the news to tell me that that was a record event or that it was extraordinary,” Boyd recalled nearly a year later, sitting in a lawn chair in her front yard on a clear day in May. “We could tell because literally anybody you talked to was like, ‘What is happening?’”
That summer, as fires burned pest- and drought-stricken forests to the north and west, air pollution levels on the Mille Lacs Reservation were above normal nearly every day in July and August. The state issued 29 air quality alerts, triggered by an AQI of over 100, for the Mille Lacs area; in previous years, the tribe could expect to see around four. For Boyd, it became clear that climate change was here — and that it would affect the tribe in ways it hadn’t anticipated.
Li Boyd moved back to her family’s property on the Mille Lacs Reservation as an adult. One thing she missed: the sight of the lake. “It’s difficult for me to imagine living somewhere where I don’t turn the corner out of my driveway and see that,” she said. Grist / Diana Kruzman
Across the country, wildfires are becoming more frequent and intense as climate change dries out forests. Scientists and public health advocates are also increasingly recognizing the danger posed not just by the flames themselves, but the smoke that they generate. Smoke from megafires in the West has blocked out the sun as far as Washington, D.C.; asthma cases and deaths from wildfire smoke now affect more people in the Eastern U.S. than in the West.
But these impacts are not distributed equally. Communities of color and low-income residents in urban areas already shoulder disproportionate air pollution burdens from sources like truck traffic and industrial waste sites. But Indigenous communities, which tend to be located in rural areas closest to blazes and often have difficulties accessing air filters and upgrading homes to keep out the smallest particles, can be more vulnerable to the impacts of intensifying pollution from wildfires than other groups.
Last year, researchers at the University of California examined the impact of wildfires on communities around the state over the past 20 years. Their study found that areas with a higher percentage of Indigenous residents experienced more frequent and severe fires. In the most highly affected areas, the Indigenous population was about three times higher than the average census tract. Even the topography of reservations like Mille Lacs can concentrate dangerous levels of wildfire haze, threatening tribes’ rights to hunt, fish, and use their land guaranteed under treaties with the U.S. government.
A Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) image of Canadian wildfire smoke wafting over Minnesota, as seen from the NOAA-20 spacecraft on July 11, 2021.
Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory
A Columbia University study published in March found that air pollution in Native American communities is worse than in non-Native areas, despite nationwide improvements in air quality over the last 20 years. These health disparities aren’t just from exposure to wildfire smoke, but experts say it is a significant factor. In 2018, one study found that American Indian and Alaska Native people were 20 percent more likely to have asthma compared to non-Hispanic whites.
Tribes are now calling out a lack of federal funding for programs to monitor air pollution, as well as for upgrading homes and infrastructure to deal with the worsening smoke. Money supplied by the Environmental Protection Agency’s air grants program has remained stagnant for the last 20 years, even as more Indigenous nations have begun applying for it, said Chris Lee, co-director of Northern Arizona University’s Tribal Air Monitoring Support Center, which trains Indigenous environmental professionals.
“Because of that disparity in the funding, tribes are really doing what they can with the minimal support that they have,” Lee said. “It’s a really tough situation.”
In response, some have begun waging a campaign of citizen science, installing low-cost air sensors that deliver data in real time and can help residents prepare for particularly dangerous air days. With more and better data, tribal air quality specialists say, they can start preparing their communities to face increasingly hazardous air.
The Mille Lacs Band is about a third of the way toward its goal of installing 23 PurpleAir sensors around the tribe’s lands, thanks to funding from a local school district.
Grist / Diana Kruzman
“We really need to start thinking ahead and understand and anticipate these issues that we’re seeing,” Lee said. When it comes to wildfire smoke’s escalating danger to tribal communities, he added, the question “is not going to be ‘if,’ it’s going to be ‘when.’”
The Mille Lacs Reservation sits on 61,000 acres along the southern shore of Mille Lacs Lake, nestled among the thick forests and swampy bogs north of Minneapolis. When the boundaries of the reservation were established in 1855 under a treaty with the federal government, the tribe fought to remain near the lake, an essential source for staple foods like wild rice and walleye, a freshwater fish.
Living by Mille Lacs Lake, though, turned out to have unexpected consequences. At 207 square miles, the body of water is large enough to form its own microclimate; in the summers, it cools the surrounding environment enough to trap air under a warmer layer, an effect known as a temperature inversion. Nitrous oxide pollution, the main component of ozone, drifts northward from Minneapolis and settles on Mille Lacs; so does smoky air coming in from Canada or the Western U.S. That’s what happened on July 29 of last year, said Charlie Lippert, an air quality specialist for the Mille Lacs Band, and it helps explain why AQI readings were so much higher in Mille Lacs than in Minneapolis or even neighboring communities like Brainerd.
Charlie Lippert, who has worked for the Mille Lacs Band since 2002, says the tribe would normally receive about four air quality alerts every summer. Last year, it received 29. Grist / Diana Kruzman
Nearby nations, including the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, that also surround Minnesota’s famed lakes experience similar problems. Air quality sensors on the reservation near Duluth registered such high numbers during last summer’s wildfires that the state’s real-time monitoring system assumed the data was an error, said Brandy Toft, an air quality specialist for the tribe. “We kind of took offense … like, no, we can cut the air with a knife,” Toft said.
This isn’t an issue unique to the Midwest, either. Tribes around the U.S. have been dealing with increasingly smoky air in recent years, particularly in the West. In northern California, the Karuk Tribe has experienced AQI readings of nearly 1,600, driven by the same intense fires that set air quality records in Portland, Oregon, and colored the skies orange over San Francisco. In response, the Karuk and nearby Blue Lake Rancheria have established “clean air shelters” and distributed household air filters to their members.
More tribes have also begun drawing attention to the ways geography affects their susceptibility to particulate matter pollution. When New Mexico’s largest wildfire tore through the northern part of the state in April and May of this year, a thick cloud of smoke settled on the Tewa Basin, a low-lying area surrounded by mountains that concentrate pollutants. The basin, home to federally recognized tribes like the Santa Clara and San Ildefonso Pueblos, has no EPA-approved air monitors, making it difficult to assess the severity of the smoke, even as the fires threatened historic villages in the area.
Smoke billows from the 2022 Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak fire in New Mexico. William Fullerton / Getty Images
In northeastern Oregon, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation have seen bigger and bigger smoke events over the past decade, said Caleb Minthorn, a technician for the tribe’s Office of Air Quality. Part of the reason is the reservation’s location at the base of the Blue Mountains, where smoke tends to settle. As a result, during particularly hazardous air quality days people might try to escape to the higher-elevation parts of the reservation, he said, though even those parts can still get smoky during the worst wildfires.
“You really can’t get away from all of it all the time,” Minthorn said. “But that’s the world we live in now — do your best and get to somewhere where it’s easier to breathe.”
Structural deficiencies in infrastructure and residential buildings can compound these effects. Many Leech Lake residents don’t have access to air conditioning, Toft said, so they tend to keep their windows open, even when the air is smoky or hazy. “They can’t shelter in place in 90 degree weather and close up their house,” Toft said.
These disparities are tied in with the largely rural nature of reservations; air quality monitoring and mitigation resources tend to be clustered in cities, which then use this data to send out air quality alerts for nearby tribal communities, Toft added. But that kind of modeling can overlook more hazardous conditions in these areas and put residents at risk, giving them a false sense of security. “Modeling is only as good as the data you put in,” Toft said.
When the boundaries of the Mille Lacs Reservation were established in 1855 under a treaty with the federal government, the tribe fought to remain near the lake, an essential source for staple foods like wild rice and walleye, a freshwater fish.
Grist / Diana Kruzman
Some residents also don’t realize that their health conditions may be aggravated by smoke, Minthorn said. As a result, it can be difficult to track the impacts of wildfire smoke on the health of tribal citizens since they don’t report them as such, and to educate the public on the need to stay inside during smoke events.
“Young people are resilient, and they can shake off things like that,” Minthorn said. “But not children with asthma, and not elders with COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease], or any kind of pre-existing medical conditions. Those people tend to find themselves in the emergency room pretty fast.”
Boyd was born in the Twin Cities, but spent summers in her family’s home on the Mille Lacs Reservation; as an adult, she decided to move back permanently, missing the sight of the lake. “It’s difficult for me to imagine living somewhere where I don’t turn the corner out of my driveway and see that,” Boyd said. But over the years, she began noticing days where she would get inexplicable headaches; other times, she felt deeply fatigued. She couldn’t tell whether these were symptoms of fibromyalgia, a health condition that causes pain in various parts of the body, something environmental, or both. She wondered whether something in the air could be causing her chronic condition to flare up.
For a long time, it was impossible to know. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, or MPCA, maintains a network of air monitors around the state that test primarily for ozone and particulate matter pollution, or PM. But the nearest PM monitor to the Mille Lacs reservation is about 40 miles away in Brainerd, which provides a general sense of larger trends like wildfire smoke plumes, but can’t capture the specific conditions that develop on the shores of Mille Lacs Lake.
A U.S. Forest Service image shows smoke and a pyrocumulus cloud rise above Highway 1 near Murphy City, Minnesota, on August 23, 2021. The cloud was visible for miles in all directions and settled on nearby areas such as the Mille Lacs Reservation. U.S. Forest Service via AP
That gap in data is a widespread problem for tribal communities, Toft said; air quality alerts based on faraway monitors can underestimate the severity of the smoke, putting community members in danger. The Leech Lake Band has pushed the state for years to install more air monitoring equipment, which is prohibitively expensive and requires a laboratory to interpret. “We were saying, ‘We need monitors, we need to show you that we are in a data gap and you’re not getting the accurate data,’” Toft said. “And it really showed with this wildfire smoke.”
To address this gap, multiple tribes have begun installing low-cost, portable sensors on public buildings and private homes. These sensors, produced by companies such as PurpleAir, have seen an explosion of interest in recent years from researchers and communities aiming to learn more about the air around them; in some cases, they have uncovered air quality violations or hazardous conditions that haven’t been picked up by the EPA.
The agency has embraced the technology, too, funding a sensor loan program used by tribes including the Nez Perce in Idaho and the Yakima in Washington. The EPA also worked with the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Catawba Indian Nation in South Carolina, and the Seminole Tribe of Florida to host shelters where the air sensors could collect data alongside the federal regulatory-grade monitors, helping improve their accuracy.
The Mille Lacs Band is about a third of the way toward its goal of installing 23 PurpleAir sensors around the tribe’s lands thanks to funding from a local school district, aiming to place one sensor every 30 miles, Lippert said. Last year, he purchased a sensor for Boyd and helped her install it under an eave on the side of her house; all it needs to work is electricity and a Wi-Fi connection.
A PurpleAir sensor hangs outside Li Boyd’s home. Unlike expensive regulatory-grade monitors, the PurpleAir sensor only needs electricity and a Wi-Fi connection.
Grist / Diana Kruzman
The benefits are twofold: With a better handle on the conditions in their community, tribal governments can know when to issue air alerts and protect their most vulnerable citizens without waiting for air quality information from the state. And residents can view data from the sensors closest to them on a real-time map, helping them make personal decisions based on the air quality and their particular health conditions.
“You try not to let it dictate anything, but there are times when you’re like, it’s gonna be a better day today for me to keep my windows closed,” Boyd said. “If you still have to do what you have to do, at least you don’t have to wonder. That’s the biggest part, is just knowing.”
Just having more data alone, though, won’t be enough, Boyd emphasized. The tribe needs funding to equip homes with medical-grade air filters, the only ones that are able to keep out the fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, that makes wildfire smoke so dangerous. Some tribes and Indigenous advocacy organizations are already distributing these devices, called HEPA filters, to their communities; others are coming up with low-cost substitutes. In New Mexico, a mutual aid group called the Pueblo Action Alliance has developed a guide for constructing DIY filtration systems to deal with smoke from the recent fires. Known as a Corsi-Rosenthal Box, the system consists of four cheap filters taped together into a cube and reinforced with cardboard, which uses a box fan to circulate and purify air quickly.
Another organization, the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, worked with Pueblo Action Alliance to distribute 20 of those boxes to homes in the state’s northern pueblos, a dry and mountainous area where the Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire has been burning since April. They targeted families with children and elderly people, who are the most vulnerable to the effects of smoke, according to the group’s membership coordinator, Rufina Abeita. The coalition has also given out 25 air purifiers to domestic violence shelters located in pueblos around the state, Abeita said.
This kind of assistance is essential because many of these communities don’t have access to stores like Home Depot where they can purchase air filters, Abeita said, or can’t afford to pay the $75 it costs to assemble one of the DIY systems.
“It’s protecting our future generations … protecting our lungs, protecting our bodies from the smoke, the toxins,” Abeita said. “These tools are here to help us have stronger communities and healthy families.”
An air monitor hangs outside Charlie Lippert’s house on the Mille Lacs Reservation.
Filters, though, are just a “band-aid,” Boyd said. In the long run, addressing smoke will require major investments in tribal infrastructure, upgrading houses to make them more airtight and improving public facilities, from laboratories to community centers. Tackling the root causes of climate change will be crucial to preventing wildfires from growing even stronger.
And for many tribes, a necessary first step will be understanding the problem of wildfire smoke in the first place, said Minthorn of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Of the 574 federally recognized tribes, only 85 have air quality monitoring programs.
“There’s a lot of communication and a lot of work yet to be done on where we stand as Indian country in terms of air quality,” Minthorn said. “Because not all of us are at the table yet.”
A new poll of likely voters in Arizona signals strong, bipartisan support for a permanent ban on new uranium mining near the Grand Canyon – and hope for the passage of the Grand Canyon Protection Act, a bill that would permanently ban the practice.
Conducted by GQR, a polling and opinion research firm, 600 registered Arizona voters were asked specific questions about the Grand Canyon Protection Act, which passed the House last year but has yet to pass the Senate. Sixty-seven percent of those voters said they supported the act while 46 percent said they strongly supported the act. Only 15 percent opposed the ban. On protecting the state’s clean water supply, 96 percent of Arizonans say it’s a top priority, the poll indicates.
“If we want to truly protect this treasure, Arizona’s water, and the people who rely on that water to live, we need permanent protections in place to have the force of law,” said House Natural Resources Committee Chair Raúl M. Grijalva, author of the act.
Advocates say that the Grand Canyon is home to only a small fraction of the U.S.’ known uranium reserves and a permanent ban would not impact national security or the economy. Mining proponents say that U.S. uranium production is important for energy independence, a strong economy, and national defense.
In 2012, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar enacted a 20-year ban on new uranium mining on roughly one million acres of federal land around the Grand Canyon. The two-decade ban was intended to give scientists time to study the potential impact of uranium mining on the region. Since then, the mining industry, which holds hundreds of active mine claims in the area, has tried to overturn the ban in court unsuccessfully.
In 2018, nearly two-dozen members of Congress sent a letter asking President Trump to reopen the Grand Canyon to uranium mining. The letter, which was endorsed by dozens of mining and economic organizations, claimed that domestic uranium was crucial to national security, economic growth, and manufacturing. According to the letter, a uranium ban in the Grand Canyon area would cost local economies both money and jobs, in addition to adding potential burden to domestic energy production. Since the war in Ukraine began, more pro-mining groups have called for an increase in domestic uranium production.
“Anyone who claims that we need to be able to mine for uranium near the Grand Canyon in order to be independent of Russia is at best exaggerating the uranium potential of this region and possibly only seizing on a geopolitical crisis to benefit their own bottom line,” said Amber Reimondo, Grand Canyon Trust Energy Director.
According to the Grand Canyon Trust, the U.S. has enough uranium stockpiled to supply military needs until 2060, and that the region contains less-than one percent of U.S. uranium reserves, meaning production in the Grand Canyon would play a marginal role in the regional and national economy.
Outdoor recreation and tourism centered on the Grand Canyon area’s natural resources are major drivers of the regional economy, supporting over 9,000 jobs and generating over $160 million in annual state and local tax revenues. According to the Grand Canyon Trust, mining could threaten the entire industry.
“In this place, whether you think of it from the standpoint of the tribes, the standpoint of the wildlife, the standpoint of water, or the standpoint of the economy, uranium mining just doesn’t make sense,” said Scott Garlid, Executive Director of the Arizona Wildlife Federation.
Earlier this year, Energy Fuels’ Pinyon Plains mine was approved by a federal judge because it was permitted before the ban went into effect. The U.S. Forest Service estimates that the mine site has around 1.6 million tons of ore. Full mining operations have yet to begin, but Stuart Chavez, a council member of the Havasupai Tribe, says that some tribal members have stopped picking medicinal plants like sagebrush near the mine because they believe radiation has made the plants unsafe. “For us the tainting of the location has already happened.”
In an email, Curtis Moore, Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Development at Energy Fuels, said there was no credible evidence that the Pinyon Plain mine has caused, or is causing, any adverse impacts to plants, wildlife, air, or water. “If people understood how low-impact, safe, healthy and responsible modern uranium mining is, and how dependent the U.S. is on Russia and China for our uranium and critical minerals, many reasonable people might have a different view,” he said.
After fighting against uranium mining for decades, the Havasupai Tribe say they’re hopeful. “I’m very pleased to know that we finally have the voices of Arizona joining the Havasupai tribe in this fight,” said Carletta Tilousi, a Havasupai tribal leader.
For more than four years, ConocoPhillips has been working with the federal government to expand oil and gas development in the National Petroleum Reserve, a roughly 23-million-acre stretch of government-managed land on Alaska’s North Slope. If approved, the so-called Willow Project would allow for construction of up to 250 wells, two airstrips, as well as a network of gravel roads, pipelines, and a new central processing facility in a remote, ecologically sensitive corner of the Arctic.
Willow’s road to approval has been rocky. Last year a federal court ordered the Department of the Interior to redo the project’s legally-required environmental impact statement, or EIS, a new draft of which was released early last month. Now, Congressional Democrats and the Native Village of Nuiqsut, a town of just over 500 people that is closest to the development, are asking the Biden administration for more time to weigh in on the new document.
So far they’ve been met with silence. The Department of the Interior has not responded to formal requests to extend the public comment period on the draft EIS. Two letters obtained by Grist, one from the House Committee on Natural Resources and one from Nuiqsut, described the 45-day comment period — the minimum required by law — as inadequate for a project of this scope. The House committee also requested a response from the Interior Department by July 22 but still has not received an answer.
The Interior Department did not respond to Grist’s formal requests for comment, but an employee who was not authorized to speak on the record told Grist that the requests to extend the comment period are “on everybody’s radar, but no decision has been made.”
Further complicating the administration’s decision is the Democrats’ recent agreement on a reconciliation bill, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides billions in tax credits for renewable energy but also allows for considerable new oil and gas leasing on public lands and in the Gulf of Mexico. The administration may be reluctant to further delay the Willow project as the legislation moves through the narrowly divided Senate.
The project has been described by the Center for American Progress as a “disaster” for the climate that would lock in approximately 260 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions over its 30-year lifetime, undermining the Biden administration’s efforts to combat global warming. Willow would also push development closer to a special conservation area around Teshekpuk Lake, the largest body of water in Arctic Alaska and important calving grounds for the Teshekpuk lake caribou herd.
Willow was approved in the final months of the Trump administration, but last summer a federal court found that the department had failed to properly account for the project’s impact on global greenhouse gas emissions, among other issues, and ordered the agency to redo parts of the EIS. The Biden administration, which also defended the original version of project, released its draft supplemental EIS on July 8.
Willow is only about 35 miles from the Native Village of Nuiqsut, which is already surrounded by oil and gas development and has opposed the project. In a June 6 letter to the Bureau of Land Management’s Alaska office, before the draft EIS was released, Nuiqsut Mayor Rosemary Ahtuangaruak noted that a 45-day public comment period would overlap with the busy summer subsistence harvest season, as well as preparation for the fall whale hunt. Ahtuangaruak said that she, along with tribal leadership and the Native village corporation, Kuukpik, requested that the comment period and five public meetings, one of which will be held in Nuiqsut, be extended through the end of September to better accommodate North Slope residents.
Ahtuangaruak told Grist that the Interior Department has been provided with a copy of the community’s subsistence calendar, and that August is one of the busiest times of year. Caribou are beginning to migrate through the region, it is the middle of a short moose hunting season, families are gathering berries and plants, and crews are getting ready to travel to Cross Island to prepare for the whale harvest.
“Either we go out during this time to try to attempt our harvest, or we make a choice to miss out on the harvest and respond to this document,” Ahtuangaruak said. “You can’t be online when you’re out harvesting.”
A July 18 letter from the House Natural Resources Committee echoed Ahtuangaruak’s concerns and described the decision to hold a minimum 45-day comment period during the summer harvest season as “incredibly troubling.” The committee contrasted this with the perception that, under Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna who is the first Indigenous cabinet secretary in U.S. history, the department has “begun to restore the principles of transparency, public engagement, and tribal consultation that the previous administration weakened.”
“We ask that you continue to follow through on your commitments to these values as you oversee our public lands by extending the public comment period for the Willow draft [environmental impact statement] by at least 75 days to 120 total days,” the committee wrote. That would take the comment period through the middle of November, almost certainly pushing any final decision into next year.
Pressure to advance the Willow project, however, has been equally strong. During Haaland’s confirmation hearing, Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican representing Alaska, described Willow as her top priority and sought assurances that the department would do everything in its power to expedite the project. Haaland made no specific commitments but said she would consult with Murkowski on this issue and “follow the law.”
On July 18, Murkowski issued a press release urging the department to stick to the 45-day public comment period and argued that the project has already undergone extensive review. “Timely completion of this process is critical to the project’s ability to undertake any level of development activities during the rapidly-approaching 2022-2023 winter season,” she wrote.
If Interior does not grant an extension, the public comment period will end on August 29. A final record of decision will be issued sometime after that, potentially giving Conoco enough time to break ground on Willow this winter.
This story is a collaboration between Floodlight, The Narwhal and the Guardian. It is republished here with permission.
A U.S.-based libertarian coalition has spent years pressuring the Canadian government to limit how much Indigenous communities can push back on energy development on their own land, newly reviewed strategy documents reveal.
The Atlas Network partnered with an Ottawa-based think tank — the Macdonald-Laurier Institute — which enlisted pro-industry Indigenous representatives in its campaign to provide “a shield against opponents.”
Atlas, which has deep ties to conservative politicians and oil and gas producers, claimed success in reports in 2018 and 2020, arguing its partner was able to discourage the Canadian government from supporting a United Nations declaration that would ensure greater involvement by Indigenous communities.
The Canadian Parliament did eventually pass the legislation to begin implementing the declaration in 2021, but observers say the government has made little progress to move it forward.
Meanwhile, Indigenous groups linked to the Macdonald-Laurier Institutes’s campaign — including the Indian Resource Council — continue to appear at conferences, testify to federal committees, and get quoted in major media outlets to push the view that Indigenous prosperity is virtually impossible without oil and gas.
Hayden King, executive director of the Toronto-based Indigenous public policy think tank Yellowhead Institute, called the campaign “a contemporary expression of the type of imperialism that Indigenous peoples have been dealing with here for many, many years.”
The Macdonald-Laurier Institute directed questions about the reports to the Atlas Network, which did not respond to requests for comment.
The Atlas Network calls itself a “worldwide freedom movement” and has nearly 500 partners, including think tanks like the Manhattan Institute. Other powerful partners include the Cato Institute, a think tank co-founded by Charles Koch in 1977, as well as the Heritage Foundation, which hosted a keynote speech by Donald Trump in April. Their influence on U.S. politics includes leading campaigns to make Americans doubt if human-caused climate change is real.
Atlas members have helped influence the views of Republican politicians, including George W. Bush. The Arlington, Virginia-based organization — which received more than one million dollars from the oil company ExxonMobil through 2012 and $745,000 from foundations linked to the Koch brothers through 2018, according to watchdog groups — has also exerted significant influence on conservative politics in the U.K. and Latin America.
Bob Neubauer, a researcher with a Canadian oil and gas watchdog organization known as the Corporate Mapping Project, said Atlas includes “a very significant number of the most influential right-wing think tanks and advocacy organizations on the planet.”
“It should make people nervous,” he added.
Atlas and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute have for years been pushing back against attempts by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to align Canadian laws with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, or UNDRIP, a declaration Canada endorsed more than a decade ago. That could have codified Indigenous rights to reject pipelines or drilling, the Atlas Network feared, according to their strategy documents, which were shared with Floodlight by an investigative climate research organization called DeSmog.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holds a press conference in 2021. NDREJ IVANOV / AFP via Getty Images
That’s because the treaty contains clauses affirming Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty over territories they’ve lived on for thousands of years. Implementing it would potentially make it harder for extraction companies to operate on those territories. At stake, the report explains, were Canada’s “monumental reserves of natural gas, hydroelectricity, potash, uranium, oil, and other natural resources.”
In recent years the Atlas Network has deepened its connections to Canada, setting up a Center for U.S. and Canada that “works with local civil society organizations on both sides of the border to create positive perceptions of the role of free enterprise and individual liberty,” according to its website.
The Macdonald-Laurier Institute is one of roughly a dozen Atlas Network partner organizations in Canada. It’s a relatively new organization, formed only in 2010, but its board members and advisors come from some of the top lobbying, legal, and financial firms in the country.
In 2018, the Atlas Network created a 13-page “think tank impact case study” report about a campaign being led by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute called the “Aboriginal Canada and the Natural Resource Economy Project.” Atlas wanted to highlight this project at a training academy for its partners around the world.
The report is no longer accessible on the Atlas Network website but was recovered by DeSmog on an internet archive called the Wayback Machine.
“The Macdonald-Laurier Institute, its staff, and the authors affiliated with the Aboriginal Canada and the Natural Resource Economy project were the only entities that worked on that project,” institute spokesperson Brett Byers wrote in an email.
“Questions regarding the content, nature, or interpretation of a report published by the Atlas Network are better directed toward the Atlas Network,” he added. The Atlas Network didn’t respond to a detailed list of questions about its involvement.
The report claims that this project was started “at the behest of the Assembly of First Nations,” a national advocacy group for Canada’s Indigenous peoples, which “saw potential in the natural resource economy as a major driver of transformation in Indigenous opportunity.” The Assembly didn’t respond to a media request asking if this is accurate.
The Atlas report notes that a prime objective of this collaboration was removing barriers to the production of fossil fuels. It explains that as political momentum began building in 2016 for Canada to implement the U.N. declaration, this “concerned the team” at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
That was because the U.N. declaration contains a clause stating that Indigenous peoples have the right to give “Free, Prior, and Informed Consent” before governments make decisions that could have a large material impact on their traditional territories.
Some legal experts see this as a reasonable way to ensure that Indigenous communities are equal partners in decision-making. But the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and the Atlas Network appeared to interpret this to mean that those communities could effectively veto new oil pipelines, fracking operations, and other resource extraction projects.
“It is difficult to overstate the legal and economic disruptions that may have followed from such a step,” the report continued.
The Macdonald-Laurier Institute with the support of Atlas embarked on “a sophisticated communications and outreach strategy to persuade the government, businesses, and Aboriginal communities on the dangers involved with fully adopting UNDRIP,” the report says.
Early success came that November, when then-Canadian minister of justice Jody Wilson-Raybould, who is is a member of the We Wai Kai Nation, “offered her support to [the institute’s] view.” The report was referring to a 2016 speech where she said that fully implementing UNDRIP would be “unworkable,” creating doubt about the government’s commitment.
The Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s “experts are always in regular communication with MPs, ministers, and government officials,” Byers wrote. Wilson-Raybould didn’t respond to a media request.
Meanwhile, an opposition party member introduced a new bill meant to enshrine UNDRIP in law. This effort slowly gained momentum and political support, but when the bill ended up before Canada’s Senate for approval in 2019, a Macdonald-Laurier Institute scholar named Dwight Newman submitted written comments that the legislation’s inclusion of “Free, Prior and Informed Consent” could “have enormous implications for Canada.”
“The bill was ultimately defeated,” Atlas explains on its website.
“There could be some truth to that,” said King, who is Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation. “The bill died in the Senate because Conservative senators delayed and basically filibustered the legislation.” And one of the senators accused of filibustering, Don Plett, quoted at length from a Macdonald-Laurier Institute report during a Senate debate about UNDRIP.
This was seen as a major victory by Atlas, which appears to have provided funding for the campaign. “Atlas Network supported this initiative with a Poverty & Freedom grant,” notes a 2020 document on the Atlas website. That document also identified First Nations allies “working directly” on the campaign, such as the Indian Resource Council and the First Nations Major Projects Coalition.
“That is inaccurate,” wrote a spokesperson for the First Nations Major Projects Coalition, referencing 2018 testimony its vice-chair gave in support of UNDRIP.
When the Trudeau government made yet another attempt to implement the U.N. declaration in 2021, Indian Resource Council president Stephen Buffalo told a standing senate committee that there should be language in the legislation preventing “special-interest groups” from being able to “weaponize” the declaration to block new pipelines.
“Whether or not you support the oil and gas industry, it is the right of the 131 nations of the Indian Resource Council of Canada to develop their resources as they see fit,” he said. The organization didn’t respond to a media request.
The Trudeau government successfully passed a bill starting the implementation of the declaration in June 2021. But it’s been a slow process since then. “There’s very little progress,” King said. “It’s bogged down in administrative morass.”
The Atlas Network appears to be moving into a new phase of advocacy. At a conference in Guatemala earlier this year, leaders “from freedom-minded organizations, many of them Atlas Network partners,” gathered to “sharpen their plans for the coming year.”
At this invitation-only event, Macdonald-Laurier Institute “workshopped a project to improve opportunities for native populations,” according to an Atlas Network write-up of the conference.
Macdonald-Laurier Institute wanted to apply what it has learned in Canada globally. “The goal of the project would be to promote Indigenous economic development across the world,” Byers wrote.
Tucked against a bend of the Kuskokwim River in southwest Alaska sits the city of Bethel. Home to about 6,000 people, the community is connected by mostly unpaved roads that are often muddy in the summer and covered by ice and snow throughout the winter. Beyond the city limits, the vast expanse of the tundra stretches toward the horizon. Follow the Kuskokwim in either direction—southwest towards Kuskokwim Bay or northeast towards the center of the state—and you’ll find a network of small villages dotted along the banks of the river.
Sophie Swope, Yup’ik, grew up in Bethel, and usually hung out at the local bilingual Yup’ik-English radio station where her father worked. But her favorite memories are when she left town, spending weekends at fish camps, splashing through wetlands, and picking wild berries in the stunning tundra landscape just minutes outside of Bethel. Her adventures always led to some discovery—a cluster of duck eggs, ptarmigan and their fluffy chicks, a moose hanging out in a meadow, a bald eagle soaring over the 700 mile-long Kuskokwim snaking its way through Southwest Alaska before mixing with the Bering Sea.
In the winter, Swope’s family enjoyed homemade foods they had prepared throughout the year like dried fish, walrus, and muktuk. She remembers her grandmother watching and giggling, delighted that Swope loved traditional meals. “Being able to eat my Yup’ik foods is one of the greatest things,” Swope said. “Eating the food that I am biologically wired to think of and feel as soul food, because it’s been passed down for generations and generations of surviving fully on that.”
Sunrise on the Kuskokwim River
Courtesy of Sophie Swope
Throughout those generations, the Kuskokwim River has provided food, a community gathering spot, transportation between villages, and a water source to those lucky enough to call the terrain home. Now, a proposed gold mine nearly 200 miles up-river from Bethel threatens the entire region.
Known as the Donlin mine, the project would be built on a tributary of the Kuskokwim River and is owned by Barrick Gold and NovaGold Resources, two Canada-based international mining corporations. On its website, NovaGold calls Donlin “a tier one asset” and “a rare discovery.” It’s estimated that there are about 30 million ounces of gold at the proposed site, which would operate for around 30 years and be the largest open-pit gold mine on the planet.
If completed, the Donlin complex will be around 25 square miles—larger than the island of Manhattan—with a series of facilities to sustain its operations: a two-square mile pit filled with toxic water that will need to be treated after the mine closes; a 2.5 billion-ton mountain of waste rock covering four square miles and towering 1,100 feet high; a 470-foot tall dam to corral a nearly four square mile slurry pond filled with toxic chemicals like arsenic and mercury. There will also be a 300-mile liquid natural gas pipeline starting at Cook Inlet near Anchorage and cutting across rural Alaska to supply Donlin with fuel, an airstrip, a power plant, housing for workers, and two new ports to increase barge traffic on the Kuskokwim to move mining materials.
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Swope says Donlin and its associated facilities would severely disrupt the Kuskokwim ecosystem and could completely fracture Indigenous subsistence lifestyles. But what worries her most, is if any of its safety or infrastructure systems fail: If the dam breaks, or the pipeline spills, the results, she says, could be catastrophic. “We’re going to see so much lost in our culture,” Swope said. “We’re going to see so much lost in our populations.”
Swope, now 24, is the director of the Mother Kuskokwim Coalition, an organization dedicated to fighting the Donlin mine along with her tribe, the Orutsararmiut Native Council and other Alaska Native villages and environmental organizations. Since the mine was proposed, Indigenous opponents have brought three separate lawsuits against the mine’s state and federal permits. But for Swope and other Alaska Natives, the fight is even more complicated than a straight environmental battle: the mineral rights for the proposed Donlin site are owned by the Calista Corporation, an Alaska Native Corporation that represents dozens of villages and thousands of Alaska Natives in the region, including the Orutsararmiut Native Council, Swope, and members of her family.
“We’re fighting big money, we’re fighting our Native corporation,” said Beverly Hoffman, an Orutsararmiut tribal elder. “Our tribe has written resolutions, we’ve written letters, and they’re spending millions and millions and millions of dollars against their own people.”
In early June, the annual Calista Corporation shareholders’ meeting was held in Tuluksak, a small village on the Kuskokwim River. Of Calista’s 30,000 shareholders, less than a hundred attended the meeting. In the village’s school gym, under a digital scoreboard and 30-year old championship banners, Calista’s board, dressed in a mix of button down shirts and traditional kuspuk tops, held court from tables and a podium at the front of the room. The board had flown in from their headquarters in Anchorage. Swope, who scraped together money to charter a six-seat plane for the 20-minute flight from Bethel, and other shareholder attendees were scattered among folding chairs and bleachers.
Calista is one of thirteen Alaska Native Corporations created in 1971 by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANSCA). They are for-profit organizations separate from federally recognized tribal governments. When ANSCA created the corporations, it gave them around 44 million acres and $900 million in exchange for the forfeit of all land claims over Alaska. ANSCA was the compromise following years of Indigenous resistance after the U.S. seized their lands and declared Alaska a state. Those corporations were then able to select land from those 44 million acres which they would own and use for whatever purpose they like, while individual tribes retained local governing authority.
Because of this, unlike most Indigenous land in the continental U.S., Alaska Native Corporation-owned land is private. Following ANCSA, Calista selected 6.5 million acres of land in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, including land that is now the proposed Donlin mine site–chosen because of the potential for mineral extraction.
A fish camp on the Kuskokwim River. Courtesy of Sophie Swope
Alaska Natives can be both members of their federally recognized tribes, based on specific ties to individual villages, and shareholders in the Alaska Native Corporation that covers their region. Alaska Natives with at least one quarter Alaska Native blood quantum who were born before 11:59pm on December 18, 1971 received shares in their regional corporations. When Calista was created in the early 70’s, 13,000 Alaska Natives in Calista’s region were given shares in the corporation. These original shares cannot be sold or traded, but they can be gifted or passed down to descendants. In 2017, Calista created two new classes of shares and opened enrollment for descendants of original shareholders, like Sophie Swope. These new shares expire when their holder dies.
Although ANSCA places responsibility for shareholders’ wellbeing on the corporations, the corporations are still for-profit entities, rather than sovereign nations in charge of governing. While they pay dividends to shareholders and fund community projects such as scholarships, cultural development, and youth programs, Swope says Calista’s size and structure makes it difficult to have a say in Calista’s direction. “It’s near impossible for the younger population to actually use their voices and to make any changes,” she said.
Because of this complicated structure and relationship, federally recognized tribes in Alaska generally have less money and land than their counterparts in other states since ANCs control it and are expected to support villages and tribes. Those tribes also have no direct power over the corporations, and in the case of the proposed Donlin mine, dozens of tribes in the region have passed resolutions against the mine, but Calista continues to support the project. “As tribal nations we haven’t come to the point where we believe in our hearts that we have inherent sovereign powers,” Gloria Simeon, a tribal elder and member of the Orutsararmiut Native Council, said. “So while we’ve been playing catch up, corporations have been plowing ahead in the game of corporate greed and corruption.”
A protest against the Donlin mine in Bethel. Courtesy of Sophie Swope
Thom Leonard, Calista Vice President of Corporate Affairs, who describes Donlin as a “generational opportunity” that could transform the region, denies that Calista only cares about money. Leonard, describing high poverty, unemployment, and suicide rates in the 56 villages Calista represents, believes that the main reason to support the mine is the hope and opportunity it could provide for younger generations. “Being able to provide that type of hope for our youth is just phenomenal,” he said.
“I don’t feel that we’re going to get to a place where there’s going to be 100% of people on board,” Leonard added. He does believe, however, that the more information people have, the more they will support the project. “What we see at the beginning is usually people are a little bit hesitant, on the fence, or opposed,” Leonard said. “But as they learn about the project, as they learn about how it’s our land and our oversight, in addition to all these really strict regulations and laws, it shifts.”
But how widespread support is remains a question. Leonard says that Calista has made every effort to address shareholder concerns and that the corporation has conducted nearly 200 village meetings to discuss the mine, plus additional meetings in response to specific questions. Based on these meetings, Leonard says that their data indicates the majority of shareholders support the mine. As well, at the June meeting in Tuluksak, Calista board members claimed that a community poll had gone out to shareholders. In response, Beverly Hoffman, a tribal elder and former dog musher who attended with Swope, asked members in attendance to raise their hand if they had even seen the poll. No one, Swope recalls, raised their hand.
“It’s kind of beyond me that these are the people representing us and the titles to our land,” Swope said.
Aerial view of Bethel, Alaska. Mitchell Forbes / Getty Images
If completed, Donlin would be one of the largest sources of greenhouse emissions for any mine in the state. The proposed pipeline to carry fuel to the site would cross nearly 200 streams identified as fish habitat. It would also require the fill of hundreds of acres of wetlands. Salmon spawning is very sensitive to changes in water temperature and any harm to salmon populations in the Kuskokwim would represent a blow to a vital species and Indigenous subsistence. In 2018, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released its Final Environmental Impact Statement for the mine, which, among other permits, is now the subject of litigation brought by Earthjustice, a non-profit environmental law organization, on behalf of the Orutsararmiut Native Council, three additional tribes, and an environmental nonprofit. The lawsuits challenge the pipeline right of way given by the state, twelve water appropriation permits, and the federal water quality certification permit. All focus on the environmental impact of the mine, and, according to the complaints, that the permitting process did not accurately assess the mine’s potential risks.
Donlin’s own water models predict that the reduction in groundwater due to the mine will raise water temperatures to within less than 1°F of water quality standards: 55.1°F where the standard is 55.4°F. But according to Earthjustice, those numbers do not account for climate change and increasing temperatures over the next thirty years, which could easily push water temperatures over the legal threshold for spawning. “Given the fact that the model predicts compliance by the narrowest of margins, there is far too much uncertainty to support a finding that the mine will comply with temperature standards,” Earthjustice said in its June request for a hearing over a state water quality certification. “When climate change is added to the mix, there is no assurance at all.”
“Our corporation, our state government, and our federal government has failed us through the permitting process by not listening to our voices and the pleas of our people to survive,” said Gloria Simeon, of the Orutsararmiut Native Council. “If our land, our river, our air is destroyed, we have nowhere else to go.”
Despite the environmental concerns, Calista maintains that the environmental review has been comprehensive. Calista says that its first concern for any project is the environment and the subsistence lifestyles that rely on it. By working directly with Donlin, Calista says, it has helped to ensure that Indigenous interests are protected. “The environmental review and monitoring of this project is massive and it will continue with opportunities for shareholders to provide input,” said Tisha Kuhns, Calista’s Vice President of Land and Natural Resources. Kuhns adds that Donlin has reduced mine-related barge traffic on the river by 50% in response to shareholder concerns.
“The loudest voices in the room doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s how the majority of people feel,” said Leonard.
Starting this past winter, Donlin began preliminary drilling and planning, with a budget of $60 million for 2022 and no indication that it intends to stop. Barrick and NovaGold, the corporations that own Donlin, did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story, but in a statement, Donlin Gold said: “For over 25 years, Donlin Gold has supported the self determination of Alaska Natives in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region, upheld environmental and subsistence traditions, and provided economic opportunities for shareholders.”
Salmon hangs to dry at a fish camp. Rachel Rustin
In addition to Calista, the mine is also supported by The Kuskokwim Corporation, an Alaska Native village corporation that owns the surface rights to the Donlin site. In a statement, the Corporation said: “The Kuskokwim Corporation’s (TKC’s) priorities are, and always have been, supporting our Shareholders and protecting our land. We support development of our resources when it can be done in a responsible way, allowing traditional use and development to coexist.”
Sophie Swope regularly makes sure to remind herself what she is protecting. Whenever they can, Swope and a few lifelong friends head to their fish camp up the Kuskokwim river. From there, they kayak and paddleboard around before docking and hanging out on the bluff overlooking the Kuskokwim while snacking on wild rosehip berries. “It’s a small thing to do, but so grounding,” she said.
Swope has always dreamed of sharing Yup’ik food and culture with her future children, but she says the prospect of the mine is now putting that hope in doubt.
“If this mine is pursued and it affects everything that I was raised on and know and love so much, I’m not sure I’m going to actually want to have a family,” she said.
In Australia, more than 100 animal species have gone extinct or been placed on endangered lists, ecosystems are plagued by invasive species, temperatures and sea levels rise, marine heatwaves have caused coral bleaching, while devastating floods and wildfires have ravaged the country. That’s all according to Australia’s long-awaited State of the Environment report, which describes the environment as “poor and deteriorating.”
“Our waters are struggling – and so is the land,” Australia’s Minister for the Environment and Water Tanya Plibersek said in an address announcing the report. “If we continue on the trajectory we are on, the precious places, landscapes, animals and plants that we think of when we think of home, may not be here for our kids and grandkids.” Plibersek called it a “shocking” call to action.
Indigenous Australians are especially impacted by these compounding crises, facing loss of culture, health risks, and other issues. However, for the first time, the State of the Environment has an Indigenous lead author, Dr. Terri Janke, a Wuthathi/Meriam lawyer. Along with the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the Australian report is part of a growing trend of climate reports acknowledging Indigenous peoples and knowledge.
“Including an Indigenous voice has required us to change the previous approach of reporting on the environment separately from people,” the lead authors wrote in a separate article. “Instead, we’ve emphasised how Country is connected to people’s well-being, and the interconnectedness of environment and culture.”
The State of the Environment report devotes an entire chapter on the role that Indigenous people play in environmental conservation, as well as ongoing challenges to those efforts. Authors highlight the deep relationship between Indigenous people and Country, a term that includes all living things, the environment, as well as the associated knowledge, culture, and responsibility. “The poor overall state of Country and connection to Country has a negative effect on Indigenous people’s wellbeing,” the report reads. “In turn, our environment is poorer because of the lack of Indigenous leadership, knowledge and management.”
Authors found that Indigenous people were more likely to be impacted by extreme events like floods and fires, resource extraction, and other industrial development. It also found that Indigenous stewardship, including traditional fire management, is leading to positive environmental results. However, the report found that while the value of Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge and land stewardship has been widely recognized, Indigenous people have still not been given sufficient freedom and resources to apply their knowledge.
The report recommends a rights-based approach for self-determination, increased application of existing laws and regulations, as well as new actions to codify Indigenous land stewardship. As well, the Australian government will double the number of Indigenous rangers by 2030, increase funding for Indigenous Protected Areas, and provide $40 million for water projects.
“First Nations Australians have managed this country for 65,000 years. And they did it through changing seasons, shifting climates, and across radically different environments,” Plibersek said in her address. “These systems of environmental knowledge have been passed down for thousands of generations. Any modern conservation program should incorporate them.”
The report was completed and submitted to the Liberal-National Coalition government in 2021, but officials delayed its release until after the May election. The new Labor government made the document public.
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, Indian Country Today, High Country News.
The first climate agreement focusing on Indigenous perspectives continues to gain international support after the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues urged its member states to adopt the agreement in its final report which was released last month.
Known as the Escazú Agreement, the plan was a recurring topic throughout the permanent forum’s 21st session, and its side events, in April and May in New York City, in which government, tribal and community leaders discussed vital issues affecting Indigenous populations throughout the world.
“The Escazú Agreement is the first instrument that includes provisions on the protection of human rights defenders in environmental matters,” the report states.
The permanent form’s annual session is considered the world’s largest gathering of Indigenous leaders and the final report provides expert advice and recommendations on Indigenous issues to the U.N. system through the economic and social council.
In 2000, the United Nations Economic and Social Council established the permanent forum to discuss Indigenous issues relating to economic and social development, culture, the environment, education, health, and human rights.
The council is then expected to make recommendations to the U.N. General Assembly, member states and other agencies. It’s considered a vital instrument for disseminating information about Indigenous people on an international level.
The permanent forum’s newly elected Chair Darío José Mejía Montalvo, Zenú, talked about the agreement during his opening remarks on the first day of the session.
“Recall that in combating climate change, Indigenous people are mainstays,” Montalvo said. “This is not a fashion, not motivated by needs and trends on social networks, it’s our way of life. We value and respect all efforts to protect the planet.
“Our existence dates from before the existence of borders,” he said.
He went on to explain the significance of the Escazú Agreement, then urged those states that have not yet subscribed to the agreement to adopt it and for those that have to implement it faster.
According to environmental defenders like Patricia Gualinga the most effective way to protect rainforests, like the Amazon, is by protecting the rights and sovereignty of Indigenous people and the Escazú Agreement could potentially be a powerful mechanism in doing that.
Gualinga is a Kichwa leader from Sarayaku, Ecuador and a spokeswoman for Amazonian Women – a coalition of women environmental and land defenders, better known as Mujeres Amazónicas Defensoras de la Selva.
“It’s hard to describe the smell of such pure air when you’re in the rainforest,” she told Mongabay News in May. “When you go into these sacred forests, you feel so much closer to the forces of creation.” In these spaces, beyond encountering an incalculable natural wealth, one can connect to the basic principles of energy and equilibrium, she told the news outlet.
One of the Escazú Agreement’s pillars starts with ensuring the timely generation and dissemination of environmental information to impacted communities.
“Such reports shall be drafted in an easily comprehensible manner and accessible to the public in different formats and disseminated through appropriate means, taking into account cultural realities,” the agreement states. “Each Party may invite the public to make contributions to these reports.”
The Escazù Agreement entered into force in April 2021 and a year later, as outlined, the first Conference of the Parties took place. The conference established public participation during the three days of the event, which began with tense debates on the matter.
“Eliminating the participation of the public is removing the very spirit of this agreement,” said Calapucha, a member of the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin, during that first meeting.
The moment was sparked by several tense minutes during the negotiations when the Bolivian delegation presented a project that would eliminate the inclusion of the public in the board of directors, according to Mongabay News. Another topic was the creation of a task force specifically focused on monitoring the situation surrounding environmental defenders, according to the news outlet.
That first Conference of Parties of Escazú – which was in Santiago, Chile – marked the first step toward effective implementation of the agreement but during one side event, hosted by the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network, women voiced their lingering concerns.
She’s the daughter of a traditional healer who testified in front of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to protect their ancestral territory. She knows, first hand, when Indigenous people mobilize they have the power to halt extractive projects in their tracks but they risk arrest or even death.
“Without proper implementation there won’t be justice” Gualinga said about the Escazú Agreement, adding that Indigenous women can speak up and lead forward to a more sustainable future. Many voiced concerns about the threats experienced by female land defenders, saying they are not unusual and adding that there’s a “lack of political will” on national and international level to protect people.
“We need to use this lever as much as we can to protect defenders of land and women who are putting their bodies on the line to protect biodiverse areas,” said Osprey Orielle Lake, executive director of WECAN, the organization that hosted the virtual side event. Lake pointed to the entrenched colonial and patriarchal systems in place that will make it difficult for this “unique and transformative agreement” to provide a promising path forward.
Addressing environmental and human rights abuses
The permanent forum’s final report urges member states to adopt the Escazú Agreement because it’s a necessary measure to ensure rights, protections, and safety of Indigenous people.
“The Permanent Forum regrets the continuous killings, violence, and harassment targeted at Indigenous human rights defenders, including Indigenous women, in the context of resisting mining and infrastructure projects and other such developments,” according to the report. “The Permanent Forum therefore invites Member States to honour their human rights obligations.”
According to a 2021 report, the previous year had been the worst year on record for killings of environmental defenders, with more than half of the attacks taking place in only three countries: Colombia, Mexico, and Philippines.
The report was published by Global Witness, an international nonprofit organization that has been investigating environmental and human rights abuses and linking natural resource extraction with widespread attacks and killings. However, more recent data shows a dramatic increase in assassinations.
So far in 2022, 99 defenders have been killed as of July 4, according to the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace which tracks murders in Colombia. Roughly a third of those killed were Indigenous or Afro-descent.
Many Indigenous communities are attacked and displaced, forced to leave their territories due to legal and illegal extractive projects, like mining and logging, as well as narco-paramilitaries. Experts say the increased violence is spilling into neighboring rural communities.
The impacts of the agreement reach beyond Indigenous communities. It’s also gained support from multilateral banking institutions and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which recognize the importance of the agreement as a tool to generate certainty and stability in investments. Leaders are hopeful that, with support from the permanent forum, the Escazú Agreement can continue to generate support and proper implementation.
The Republic of Kenya must pay the Indigenous Ogiek people reparations for decades of illegal evictions from their ancestral land in the Mau Forest. That’s according to a ruling from the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights. The decision, which is the first time the court has called for reparations for an Indigenous community, said that the Kenyan government must pay the Ogiek for both material and moral damages. The case may set the tone for other Indigenous rights cases in Africa.
The court also said that Kenya must make efforts to give the Ogiek titles to their forest land and officially recognize them as Indigenous peoples, a protected status the Kenyan government has resisted. “This is really a big milestone, a landmark ruling,” said Daniel Kobei, Executive Director of the Ogiek Peoples Development Program. “We are all elated and very happy.”
The Ogiek people have lived in the Mau Forest area since time immemorial. Over the years, they have been subject to violent evictions by both Kenyan and colonial governments leading to Ogiek communities being divided and scattered, and losing access to language, culture, and burial sites. Recently, Kenyan authorities have claimed that the Ogiek are responsible for deforestation and ecosystem degradation, which the Ogiek strongly deny.
In 2009, in response to a fresh wave of evictions planned by the Kenya Forest Service, the Ogiek brought a case to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which then referred it to the African Court based on the severity of the allegations. In 2017, the African Court found the Kenyan government had violated the Ogiek’s rights, and was in violation of seven articles of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, including rights to life, property, and culture. The African Charter is an international human rights mechanism that has been ratified by 54 countries, including Kenya. The case was the first time the court had ruled on an Indigenous case.
Despite the decision, Ogiek leaders and international advocacy groups say that evictions and other human rights abuses have continued. According to multiple reports, thousands of Ogiek have been violently evicted since 2017. As recently as July 2020, 100 Ogiek families were removed from the forest.
According to the African Court’s ruling, Kenya must pay the Ogiek 57,850,000 Kenyan shillings ($492,000) for material damages and 100,000,000 Kenyan shillings ($850,200) for moral damages. The decision instructs Kenya to give the Ogiek community titles to their land in the Mau Forest and to consult with them on any future development projects. Kenya must also work with the Ogiek to develop land-sharing and access agreements. If a compromise cannot be reached, the Ogiek must either be given the land or compensation for it.
“The decision is monumental in many many aspects because it has set the precedent on the continent going forward on how issues of Indigenous claims to rights to their land can be dealt with,” said Samuel Ade Ndasi, Africa Union Advocacy Officer at Minority Rights Group. “What this means for the African continent is that going forward, states will be very very mindful when they want to evict Indigenous people from their land.”
The Batwa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Maasai in Tanzania, the Endorois in Kenya, and other Indigenous peoples have all brought cases to the African Commission. All center on allegations by Indigenous people that they are being violently removed from their land to create protected areas, a global practice known as fortress conservation. “This ruling is not only for the Indigenous Ogiek community, but for all Indigenous communities globally,” Kobei said.
Despite the victory, Ndasi said implementing the ruling will be a challenge: the court does not have direct enforcement power over the Kenyan government. The court mandated a report from Kenya on the implementation of its orders within 12 months, and will schedule a hearing on the implementation at that time.
“We are hoping that Kenya will respect its obligations,” Samuel Ade Ndasi said. “There is still much that needs to be done. If you have a judgment and you cannot reap the fruit of that judgment, then justice has not been done.”
The Kenya Forest Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
New Jersey is suing Ford Motor Company, one of the country’s largest automobile manufacturers, for allegedly dumping waste on the homelands of the Ramapough Lenape Nation, a Native American tribe recognized by the state.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in state court, accuses the company of disposing of thousands of tons of toxic paint sludge and other pollutants on the site of a former iron mine in northern New Jersey in the 1960s and 70s, then donating or selling the land without disclosing the contamination. As a result, tribal members say they have experienced cancer, birth defects, and other negative health effects.
“I lost my grandmother to cancer,” Ramapough Lenape Nation member Angel Stefancik said at a press conference announcing the suit. “I’m 22 years old and I suffer with a list of chronic illnesses because of what has been done to me.” At the same time, Stefancik said, leaving is not an option. “I want to be there for the rest of my life … I was born there, and I’m gonna die there.”
The lawsuit, though, doesn’t focus on these health issues specifically. Instead, it seeks damages for the destruction of natural resources, and accuses the company of “deliberate acts or omissions taken with a wanton and willful disregard for the welfare of the residents of New Jersey.” Contaminants such as lead, arsenic, benzene, and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs — likely human carcinogens, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency — have been found at the site.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has twice listed Ringwood as a Superfund site, where cleanup of toxic waste is ongoing.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency via Facebook
In a statement, Ford told Grist that it has not yet had time to review the lawsuit and fully respond to its claims. “Ford takes its environmental responsibility seriously and has shown that through our actions to address issues in Upper Ringwood,” the neighborhood where the dumping occured, the company said through a spokesperson. “We understand this has affected the community and have worked cooperatively with the Borough of Ringwood, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency while implementing the remediation plan stipulated by the EPA.”
Ford opened an auto assembly plant in the nearby town of Mahwah in 1955, and the company purchased the 500-acre Ringwood Mine site 10 years later to use as a landfill. Over the next decade, according to the EPA, it dumped toxic waste into the forests and wetlands of the site, as well as abandoned mine shafts. The area has been the home of the Lenape people since long before European colonization, and parts of the site were used as affordable housing for the Ramapough people, who trace their ancestry to the Lenape, in the 1970s. Ringwood meets the criteria for an “overburdened community” under New Jersey’s 2020 Environmental Justice Law.
“Today we hold Ford accountable for Natural Resource Damages — for knowingly polluting some of the State’s most precious environmental assets, then walking away without disclosing the toxic mess they had made or attempting to mitigate the harm,” New Jersey’s acting attorney general, Matthew Platkin, said in a press release.
Unfinished cars on the Ford assembly line in Mahwah, New Jersey, in 1976.
Brian Alpert/Keystone via Getty Images
In 1983, the EPA designated Ringwood a Superfund site, and Ford conducted cleanups throughout the 1980s and 1990s. But further waste was discovered in the following years, and Ringwood was re-listed as a Superfund site in 2006, the only time the EPA has done so; Ford eventually agreed to pay the state $2.1 million to cover the costs of the cleanup. The new lawsuit builds upon this past recourse, seeking an as-of-yet-unspecified amount in damages for the destruction of natural resources, which would fund projects to further restore the contaminated land as much as possible.
Ford has also faced a class-action lawsuit from around 600 Ramapough Lenape Nation members, who sued the company in 2006 for property damage and personal injury. The legal battle was the subject of an HBO documentary, “Mann v. Ford,” that followed the tribe’s lawsuit against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent automotive industry downturn. Fearing that Ford might go bankrupt, the Ramapough accepted an $11 million settlement with the company, according to the documentary. But waste remains at the site, and cleanup is ongoing; the EPA doesn’t expect “final remedial action” to begin until 2024.
The Ramapough Lenape Nation’s struggle against Ford is part of a global trend; around the world, Indigenous people suffer disproportionately from the impacts of pollution, according to a 2020 study from Helsinki University. Also on Thursday, the U.S. government announced it had reached a $32 million settlement with New Mexico over a 2015 spill that polluted rivers in the Navajo Nation with arsenic, lead, and other heavy metals.
On Friday, video footage emerged of Indigenous Maasai people running and scrambling for cover from gunfire in the United Republic of Tanzania. The videos reveal chaos as the Maasai try to escape state security forces, and photos released in the aftermath of the incident show bloody injuries and bullet wounds. In Loliondo, in northern Tanzania, the Maasai are being violently evicted from their land as part of an effort to create a game reserve. Maasai leaders have been arrested, dozens of community members have been shot or wounded, and hundreds have fled to Kenya for safety and medical attention. Others are determined to remain in their homeland. “I won’t go until the last point of our life,” said a Maasai leader who asked for anonymity because they fear retaliation. “I can’t run out of home my grandparents’ lands [sic].”
According to a new report from Project Expedite Justice, a non-profit focused on international human rights, the forced removal of the Maasai in Tanzania is part of a growing, global trend known as fortress conservation which often includes violently clearing Indigenous peoples from their homelands in order to create “protected areas”—lands dedicated to conserving nature. The report focuses on Tanzania, Nepal, India, Uganda, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Republic of Congo and identifies human rights abuses carried out in the name of conservation.
“Policies that conservation organizations are using are not considering the fact that Indigenous peoples were the first people to actually practice conservation,” said Trésor Nzila Kendet, the director of Development Actions Center who works on Indigenous People’s rights in the Republic of Congo and contributor to the report.
The report identifies a pattern of abuses with three distinct parts in all ten countries: Indigenous people are removed from their land, face gross human rights violations like murder and rape, and experience what the authors call “indirect human rights violations” that include loss of culture and lack of access to important sites.
According to the report, national governments, nonprofits, and international organizations are all involved in fortress conservation models. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), for example, is named in eight of the report’s ten case studies. The WWF was the subject of a 2019 BuzzFeed investigation that documented their funding for guards who killed Indigenous people. A recent report on Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo revealed that park guards, supported by a range of foreign governments and organizations including the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), carried out murders, torture, and group rape of the Indigenous Batwa in an apparent effort to enact fortress conservation policies. In 2020, the U.S. halted its funding to WWF and WCS based on reports of widespread abuses.
“It’s important to show the pattern in different parks to show how important the present situation is and to make the perpetrators of those situations understand that this is a reality and it has to stop,” said Nzila Kendet.
The report calls for a change to the global conservation model, warning that the violence highlighted in the report could be a preview of more threats to Indigenous people and land. “There is a model that is problematic,” said Nicolás Süssmann-Herrán, the report’s lead author. “If you keep implementing it you’re going to arrive at the same results. So what needs to change is the model.”
In Tanzania, ongoing efforts to dispossess the Maasai of their land in Loliondo have been widely condemned, including by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which released a statement calling on Tanzania to halt the evictions, reinstate the Maasai to their homes, and reopen the conservation plan for discussion.
“What we’re seeing with the Maasai at the moment is the demonstration of fortress conservation,” said Süssmann-Herrán.
As Tropical Storm Olivia bore down on the island of Maui in September 2018, Kaliko and her family grabbed their most important belongings and fled. The storm inundated the island with more than a foot of rain, and the floodwater lifted Kaliko’s home from its foundation and washed part of it away. Now, 11-year-old Kaliko is one of 14 youth suing the State of Hawaii for failing to adequately reduce greenhouse gas emissions to protect them from the worsening dangers of climate change.
In a lawsuit filed yesterday, the young plaintiffs allege that the director of Hawaii’s Department of Transportation, Jade Butay, the department itself, Governor David Ige, and the State of Hawaii are violating their constitutional rights by failing to reduce emissions from the transportation sector. In Hawaii, the state constitution has guaranteed each person since 1978 “the right to a clean and healthful environment.” Climate change threatens that right. But when it comes to decarbonizing the state’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions — transportation — the plaintiffs say state leadership has been asleep at the wheel.
“What we want is for the Transportation Department to start doing the things it’s already supposed to be doing to help mitigate climate change,” said Leināʻala Ley, an attorney with Earthjustice and a co-counsel for the case.
The Department of Transportation did not respond to a request for comment, and Governor Ige’s office declined to comment on the pending litigation.
The State of Hawaii recognizes that climate change is an existential threat. Last year, it became the first state in the U.S. to declare a climate emergency. Three years before that, Governor Ige signed a law committing the state to becoming carbon neutral by 2045. In many ways, Hawaii has been a climate leader — but not when it comes to the transportation sector. If the state continues on its current trajectory, by 2030 the emissions will have increased by 41 percent from 2020 levels, according to the state’s most recent emissions report.
Earthjustice and Our Children’s Trust — the two organizations representing the 14 plaintiffs — chose to focus on the Department of Transportation because there is much more it could and should be doing, Ley said. There are statutes that require the agency to take steps to cut emissions, like reducing vehicle miles traveled and improving pedestrian and bike pathways, “but the state Department of Transportation isn’t meeting any of these goals and mandates that are already on the books,” Ley said.
Leināʻala Ley, an attorney for Earthjustice, stands in front of the Supreme Court of Hawaii the morning the lawsuit was filed.
Marti Townsend / Courtesy of Earthjustice
“We have the tools in our hands to fix the climate crisis, we just have to have the political will to do that,” she added. “This lawsuit can help push the government in the right direction.”
Today’s youth have the most to lose if we don’t act quickly to address climate change. The personal stories of the youth plaintiffs, who are between 9 and 18 years old and come from across the Hawaiian Islands, illustrate how climate change is already affecting the region. Fourteen-year-old Navahine and her family maintain a fishpond, but polluted runoff from unusually heavy downpours and rising sea levels threaten the Native Hawaiian practice. “If urgent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are not made, these lands will most likely be underwater within my lifetime. And if that happens, our legacy and our future on this island will be lost,” she told Grist.
Ka‘ōnohi, 15, is a diver and spearfisher, but ocean acidification and rising temperatures have caused wide-scale bleaching and die-offs of Hawaii’s once-vibrant reefs. Others have had their homes threatened by intensifying storms, their roads washed away by flash floods, and their food and water security torn away by the changing climate.
In previous cases, youth have sued the federal government and other state governments over climate inaction. In 2015, 21 young people filed a lawsuit against the federal government in a case called Juliana v. United States, or Youth v. Gov. Five years later, a federal appeals court dismissed the lawsuit, writing that the issue should be addressed by the executive and legislative branches, rather than the courts, but now the plaintiffs have filed an amended complaint.
Recently, activists have been trying a different tactic, filing lawsuits in places like Hawaii, where the state constitution guarantees the right to a clean and healthful environment. Similar cases are also pending in Utah and Montana, but the outcomes are still uncertain.
As kids, it can be frustrating “to constantly feel like our voice isn’t heard in these big conversations about our future,” said Navahine, the lead plaintiff. “These decisions that are made regarding climate change are going to impact my generation and the generations after us the most.” She sees this lawsuit as a way for her and her peers to make their voices heard.
Though it feels a bit overwhelming, she said, “I do know that it’s the right thing to do. And I really hope that it makes an impact.”
Located in the United Republic of Tanzania, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site famous for its beautiful landscape and “Big 5” game — elephants, lions, leopards, buffalo, and rhinoceros. Every year, the area’s attractions draw hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world. The park is also home to roughly 80,000 Indigenous Maasai people who have called the region home for millenia, living on the rich and fertile landscape. But since its creation in 1959, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA), the Maasai population in the park has steadily increased. Now, the government is trying to evict the Maasai, a move officials say is necessary to protect the park’s environment, but that the Maasai say is an attempt to sacrifice their way of life for tourism and profit.
According to a new report from the Oakland Institute, a California-based think tank, Tanzania’s proposed resettlement sites have “serious issues” for the Maasai and are critically flawed. “While denying plans for mass evictions in the NCA, the government’s strategy to deprive residents of basic services and the ability to graze livestock, leaves the Maasai with few options for survival in the land they have stewarded for generations,” said Anuradha Mittal, Oakland Institute’s Executive Director.
Around the world, Indigenous people are being evicted and even murdered by governments and international NGOs in the name of conservation, despite strong evidence that Indigenous land stewardship is actively helping biodiversity. Both the Maasai and international advocacy groups have strongly resisted what they are calling an illegal eviction. The Maasai and international groups have called on the Tanzanian government to respect their rights before making any decisions regarding the land and Maasai stewardship of it. In April, eight U.N. Special Rapporteurs also raised concern about the evictions, and this month, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues called on Tanzania to immediately stop the eviction plans.
According to the report, the Tanzanian government has failed to live up to the promises it made in its resettlement plan. Based on field research at three proposed resettlement locations, the report identifies several areas where the actual sites lack adequate water, sufficient grazing land, and other infrastructure promised by the government. The sites are also not equipped to provide healthcare, education, and other social services that were supposed to be a part of the plan.
Local, non-Maasai residents also say they were never consulted about receiving the resettled Maasai population and the report identifies an increased risk of conflict because of the plan, pointing to one resettlement that has already seen conflict over limited water and grazing resources. The report alleges that the influx of Maasai from NCA would only add to the chance of conflict.
The Oakland Institute is calling on the Tanzanian government to stop the eviction plans and to give the Maasai more decision making power. It also calls on UNESCO to use its leverage to help the Maasai. Tanzania’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism and UNESCO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“It is imperative that Indigenous residents of the NCA are not just consulted but given real authority over any resettlement schemes or changes to land use regulations,” Anuradha Mittal said.
Northeastern Minnesota’s Iron Range has been a major mining hub since the 1860s. Nestled among thick forests and many of the state’s famed “10,000 lakes,” open-pit mines there produce low-grade iron ore that’s shipped to steel mills around the country. But for the last few decades, as the U.S. steel industry has waned and demand for different minerals has grown, multiple companies have proposed something new: hard rock mining, which involves extracting valuable metals from sulfide ores and produces large amounts of acidic waste. One of these, the PolyMet Mining Corporation, has been locked in a battle to open Minnesota’s first copper-sulfide mine near the tiny town of Babbitt for over 17 years. The $1 billion project has been mired in legal challenges almost since its inception.
Now, environmentalists and nearby tribal nations hope that recent court victories will shut it down for good. Earlier this month, the Army Corps of Engineers held a hearing to decide whether to reissue a permit for PolyMet to dump waste rock on more than 900 acres of wetlands, a possibility that the downstream Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa vehemently opposes. The Environmental Protection Agency came out in support of the tribe, telling the Corps that allowing the mine to go ahead with its plans would risk contaminating the already-polluted St. Louis River with dangerous levels of mercury.
As opponents highlight the mine’s environmental impact, PolyMet is touting its potential for producing valuable metals needed to build transmission lines and electric vehicle batteries — making it the latest dispute over how to responsibly mine the materials needed for the renewable energy transition. In Nevada, a lithium mine is facing stark opposition from tribes who say it would damage a culturally, historically, and spiritually significant area. Cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo have reportedly been subjected to exploitative working conditions, including by the company that owns PolyMet. At the same time, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing for an increase in domestic mining in response to supply chain issues and increased demand.
Activists say these conflicts are increasingly testing the idea of a “just transition” — one that doesn’t repeat the mistakes of the past, such as prioritizing extraction over the needs of Indigenous people and the environment, in shifting to new forms of energy.
“The Band is not opposed to mining,” Band Chairman Kevin Dupuis Sr. said in a press release on the first day of the Army Corps hearing. “But if mining is to occur, we must ensure that our waters are protected, not just for the Band, but for all Minnesotans.”
This former iron ore processing plant near Hoyt Lakes, Minn. would become part of a proposed PolyMet copper-nickel mine. Jim Mone/Associated Press
PolyMet, which is majority owned by the Swiss mining conglomerate Glencore, first unveiled plans for its Northern Minnesota mine, the NorthMet project, in 2005. Since then, it’s faced legal challenges to multiple other permits it needs to move forward, including water pollution, air pollution, and mining permits that are either tied up in litigation or have been sent back to state agencies for further study and adjustment. And it’s not the only disputed mine in Minnesota; in January, the Biden administration canceled two federal leases for the Twin Metals mine, which would have extracted copper, nickel, and precious metals near the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness.
In the last few years, PolyMet has leaned into its role as a supplier of elements needed to build electric car batteries and other renewable energy infrastructure. The company has said that the area of the NorthMet project contains significant reserves of copper, nickel, and palladium — “metals vital to global carbon reduction efforts” — and that it would become one of the country’s top suppliers once the mine becomes operational, although it can’t guarantee how much of its eventual output would go toward green energy.
“These metals that we’re producing are really crucial to not only modern society,” PolyMet spokesperson Bruce Richardson told MinnPost, but also “for clean energy and climate change and our own security.”
JT Haines, the northeastern Minnesota program director for the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, called this view “problematic.” The industry is using the demand for new metals for green energy as a “safe harbor talking point,” he said, to justify destructive mining activities without addressing the core issue of consumption and extraction. Instead, Haines argued, the focus should be on how to recycle and reuse the metals that already exist while reducing consumption and energy use in the first place.
“It’s clear that we can’t mine or drive our way out of the climate crisis,” Haines said.
The contested permit at the center of the recent Army Corps hearing was issued in 2019 – despite years of opposition from the Fond du Lac Band, which as a sovereign nation has the right to set its own water quality standards and the legal status of a downstream state. Last year, following a lawsuit from the tribe, the EPA determined that the NorthMet project “may affect” water in the Fond du Lac Band’s territory as well as the state of Wisconsin, and asked the Army Corps to suspend the permit.
Protesters gather on Lake Superior to express opposition to PolyMet’s plans to open Minnesota’s first copper-sulfide mine. Duluth for Clean Water
At the hearing on May 3, the EPA said PolyMet’s plan to dredge and fill the wetlands with mining waste could contaminate multiple waterways that drain into the St. Louis River, which flows through the tribe’s reservation near Duluth. The biggest concern is mercury, a potent neurotoxin that can be a byproduct of mining. The NorthMet project would also release sulfate, which helps convert mercury into methylmercury — the metal’s most toxic form, which accumulates in fish and other wildlife and can eventually be toxic to humans that consume it.
The St. Louis River is already one of Minnesota’s most mercury polluted waterways, and the Fond du Lac Band relies on both the river and its upstream tributaries for hunting, fishing, and gathering foods such as wild rice. While PolyMet said it would capture and treat the mine runoff to prevent mercury and sulfate pollution, the Fond du Lac Band’s scientists testified that the discharge would exceed the tribe’s water quality standards, which are more stringent than Minnesota’s.
The Army Corps is now accepting public comments through June 6, after which it will decide whether to reinstate, permanently revoke, or modify PolyMet’s permit. PolyMet did not respond to a request for comment from Grist.
Although this is the first time that a tribal nation has used its authority as a “downstream state” to challenge a federal permit that could impair its lands and water, a win in the PolyMet case could set a precedent for other tribes to do the same, said the Fond du Lac Band’s attorney, Vanessa Ray-Hodge.
“It’s an important mechanism for tribes to be able to use and to have available to them to protect their reservation waters from development, just like other states can do all the time,” Ray-Hodge said.
European supermarket chains like Aldi and Sainsbury’s, European pet food producers, and Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in the U.K, profit from human rights abuses and Indigenous land theft in Brazil. That’s according to a new report that details human rights abuses in a chicken supply chain from Brazil to Europe. The report comes amid violence against Indigenous communities in Brazil, and specifically in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where rampant deforestation and violent attacks against the Guarani Kaiowá continue to escalate.
The report, released by Earthsight, a UK-based non-profit, and De Olho nos Ruralistas, a Brazilian agribusiness watch group, traces major international companies’ chicken production back to Brasilia do Sul, a 23,000-acre soy farm in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, built on Guarani Kaiowá land. Evicted from their territory in the 1950’s, the land was deforested over the years while the Guarani Kaiowá fought unsuccessfully in Brazil’s courts to regain title to their land. In 2003, a Guarani Kaiowá leader, Marcos Veron, was beaten to death by Brasilia do Sul workers and hired gunmen after leading an effort to reclaim a portion of the territory.
“When we’re not struck by gunmen we’re struck by the courts.” said Valdelice Veron, a Guarani Kaiowá leader and Marcos’ daughter. “The aim of Brazil’s rulers is the extermination of our people. My message to you watching our situation in Mato Grosso do Sul and in Brazil is that you rise up with us.”
According to the report, the supply chain works like this: Lar Cooperativa Agroindustrial, Brazil’s fourth largest chicken slaughtering company, is a significant buyer of Brasília do Sul soy, which it uses to feed chickens that it sells internationally. Westbridge Foods, a British poultry supplier, buys thousands of tons of chicken from Lar Cooperativa to supply supermarkets like Sainsburys and Aldi, as well as restaurants like Kentucky Fried Chicken. Also buying from Lar Cooperativa is German firm Paulsen Food, which owns pet food companies and uses the chicken in dog and cat food.
“Businesses in Britain have failed to cut ties with Brazilian producers linked to the violence, making us consumers unwitting participants in tragic stories like that of the Guarani Kaiowá,” said Rubens Carvalho, Earthsight’s head of deforestation research.
Westbridge and Kentucky Fried Chicken did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Other companies, including Sainsbury’s, denied receiving any chicken from Lar Cooperativa and did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the report.
The report called on the European Union and the United Kingdom to make reforms to chicken and soy supply chain regulations, and Earthsight’s Ruben Carvalho said that the findings demonstrate the need for stronger legislation that includes “the protection of indigenous land rights, and to cover key commodities, including soy and soy-fed chicken.”
The Guarani Kaiowá’s fight is part of a larger, global effort to protect land and the environment as research shows that Indigenous land stewardship is crucial to preserving biodiversity and combating climate change. “Our aim is to restore the health of the land to allow us to reconnect with this divinity and give meaning to our lives,” Eliel Benites, a Guarani Kaiowá leader and academic, said in the report.
Across Brazil, Indigenous people are being killed by illegal mining and advancing agribusiness activities. Since 2003, over 500 Indigenous people have been killed in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul—more than any other region and a third of all Indigenous killings in Brazil during that time and primarily due to expanding agribusiness. “Many massacres have happened for us to be here today,” said Valdelice Veron, the Guarani Kaiowá leader, in the report. “We’re here because this is our sacred land, it’s where we have our history and our memory. It’s our Tekohá [sacred village] and we don’t forget it.”
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, Indian Country Today, High Country News. Native News Online also contributed to this article.
The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, or UNPFII, concluded its 21st session on Friday, calling on governments, courts, and U.N. agencies to implement mechanisms to support and protect Indigenous peoples’ lands and lives. It also recommended that Indigenous peoples be given more opportunities to participate in the U.N.’s General Assembly process through “enhanced participation” – a move that could elevate the forum to a level on-par with member states.
The forum is one of the few official venues where Indigenous voices are reliably heard at the U.N., but its role is constricted by a structure that only allows UNPFII members to make recommendations to other U.N. bodies, like the the Economic and Social Council or UNESCO. Indigenous nations, communities, and peoples are classed as non-governmental organizations, and cannot vote or speak to U.N. bodies without an invitation, including the General Assembly.
“A basic, first step for enhanced participation would be the United Nations recognizing that tribes have a right to be here and have a right to be able to attend,” said Geoffrey Roth, a Standing Rock Sioux descendent and UNPFII member. With enhanced participation, Roth says, Indigenous peoples could engage directly, and equally, with member states to ensure rights are protected and concerns are heard.
“We need the support of the absolute leadership of the United Nations to address Indigenous human rights,” said Hannah McGlade, a Noongar woman and member of UNPFII from Australia. “We mustn’t lose sight of the changes that can come through our engagement, our advocacy, and our work with member states.”
In a draft report put forth by UNPFII leaders Friday, members urged countries to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, including calling on the United States and Canada to develop national action plans to implement the agreement. Both countries have signed onto support UNDRIP after years of opposition, but have not generally moved to codify those international rights into their legal systems.
Under the forum’s proposals, relevant UN agencies, like the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and UNESCO would initiate studies on the implementation of FPIC, the impacts of industrial fishing on Indigenous communities, and develop and align internal policies to protect human rights with regards to intellectual property rights and traditional knowledge. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the forum also recommended that the World Health Organization incorporate Indigenous cultures into the social determinants of health policy.
“This is really a very challenging moment for the Permanent Forum, that continues to be a subsidiary body,” said Darío José Mejía Montalvo, the chair of the forum, in an interview. “We still don’t have enough of a voice in those bodies where the decisions are made at the United Nations and the states.”
Despite the challenges and limitations of UNPFII, Mejía Montalvo believes that it can help elevate the concerns of Indigenous peoples around the world and empower them to push for change in their countries. A sentiment echoed by Geoffrey Roth who hopes to put pressure on international bodies like the World Bank to start making change. Roth says that pressure could be stipulating that the World Bank has a process in place to ensure member states that receive funding have a strong FPIC policy. If they don’t, he says, the World Bank could refuse to work there. “The money is where the power is – and the World Bank is the pocket book,” he said.
Leaders say next year’s session will focus on global health and climate change.
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, Indian Country Today, and High Country News.
When Cielo Magdalena Gómez López, Maya Tseltal, first arrived in the U.S. from Mexico in 2005, she was surprised at how many other Mayan people she met in her new home of Tampa, Florida. Trained to teach English as a second language, Gómez López quickly became the de facto interpreter, translator, and advocate for the Indigenous Mexican community in Tampa, many of who spoke Tsotsil and Tseltal but no English or Spanish. “It was like taking care of my little brothers and sisters,” she said. “We were all going through the same struggles.”
Now, Gómez López works at the Mexican Consulate in Orlando, where she provides translation and interpretation services in an official capacity, but she says much more support for Indigenous migrants is needed.
From the moment Indigenous migrants and refugees arrive in the U.S. they face obstacles. Border crossings rarely have Indigenous language interpretation available, leaving migrants vulnerable and often unaware of the options and services available to them. Once they make it to a new home, language challenges continue.
In an intervention delivered at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Rosalba Sotz, Maya Tseltal and a representative from Red de Indígenas Migrantes, called on the Mexican government to employ more Indigenous leaders at their consulates in the U.S. to help with translation, interpretation, legal advocacy, and other services. Many Indigenous people in Mexico and Central America are farmers and are particularly sensitive to climate disasters, changes in weather patterns, and drought. And as those populations continue to bear the brunt of climate change and seek refuge outside of their homelands, Sotz says the U.N. must pay greater attention to the unique challenges facing Indigenous migrants.
“Climate change is pushing people to leave their territory,” she said. “We are going to see more migration and more displacement.”
Geoffrey Roth, a Standing Rock Sioux descendant and member of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, says that the forum can make recommendations to member states to adopt recommendations like Sotz’s. He added that Indigenous migrant populations are uniquely vulnerable. “We need to address these issues on climate change and the environment the best we can so we can allow people to stay in their homeland if possible,” he said. “If not, we need to be able to provide services and support to Indigenous peoples wherever they are.”
For Indigenous people, displacement from their land and people can be particularly difficult. “Our way of life is related to the community and being isolated is a very traumatic experience,” Sotz said.
Thousands of Indigenous people from Mexico, Central America, Africa, and other parts of the world call the U.S. home, but the exact number isn’t known because they are often counted among other immigrants, rather than as Indigenous people. That means that the unique challenges facing Indigenous immigrants are often overlooked. “Language is a huge issue,” said Roth. “It’s been an issue on the borders, but it’s also an issue beyond the borders.”
Gómez López says that empowering and employing Indigenous people will help their communities access and understand services, become more comfortable in their new homes, and contribute to the community both in the U.S. and Mexico. She also hopes that her work can serve as an example for other consulates serving Indigenous populations.
After living undocumented in the U.S. for fifteen years, Gómez López secured a diplomatic visa through her work at the Consulate. Next year, however, the visa is set to expire, meaning she may have to return to Mexico, where she hasn’t lived in nearly 20 years. Sotz says that Gómez López’s situation illustrates the need for institutionalized Indigenous consulate employees. If Gómez López leaves, not only will her life be uprooted, but the Indigenous community in Florida will lose her years of knowledge and expertise.
“In our own country we have been discriminated against and excluded,” Sotz said. “That situation is exponentially worse when you migrate.”
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, Indian Country Today, and High Country News.
In the 1970’s, the Kenyan government evicted hundreds of Indigenous Endorois families from their homelands to create the Lake Bogoria National Reserve. The park is known for its hot springs, beautiful Rift Valley landscape, and large flamingo population. The Endorois were devastated. Disconnected from their homelands and traditions, the Endorois faced poverty, language loss, separation from cultural landmarks, and other threats. “It took away our sense of belonging,” said Carson Kiburo, Endorois and Executive Director of the Jamii Asilia Centre. “We have lost our culture.”
The Endorois challenged the eviction in court, eventually taking their case to the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights. In 2010, the Commission ruled that Kenya had violated the Endorois’ human rights and provided seven recommendations for restitution and compensation, including the return of land, providing access for animal grazing and ceremony, and financial damages. The Commission established a three month timeline for the Kenyan government to provide a progress report, but 12 years later, the Endorois say that Kenya has failed to follow through on the Commission’s core recommendations.
This week, Kiburo is demanding Kenya adopt the Commission’s other recommendations and using the United Nations’ Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues to call for stronger international action to support the Endorois in defending their rights.
“We want to retain our sense of belonging, our culture, our food sovereignty, our spirituality, and contribute to humankind,” Kiburo said. “That’s all we’re asking.”
Neither Kenya’s Wildlife Service or National Commission on Human Rights immediately responded to a request for comment.
“What happened to my people is about to be repeated.” he said “It doesn’t make sense.”
Jennifer Corpuz, Kankanaey Igorot from Northern Philippines and Senior Global Policy & Advocacy Lead for Nia Tero, said that harmful conservation practices are a widespread issue. Pointing to examples from Thailand, the Democratic Republic in the Congo, and other countries, Corpus says that evicting Indigenous people in the name of conservation is not only a violation of human rights, but also a threat to biodiversity. “This cannot be allowed to continue because when you displace the traditional authorities, it becomes difficult to protect it,” she said, adding that Indigenous land represents “islands of biodiversity in a sea of degradation.”
Joan Carling, Global Executive Director of Indigenous Peoples Rights International, says that both national reforms and international enforcement mechanisms are needed to ensure Indigenous peoples’ right to live on and defend their land is upheld. “We must make sure that there are laws that recognize our land rights and the way we manage our resources,” she said. “They cannot penalize us when we do our traditional occupations or livelihoods in our area.”
Kiburo, who is also a student at Kabarak Law School in Kenya, says that the Endorois have to pay to access the land where their ancestors are buried and are not permitted to perform their ceremonies or prayers on the land. Restoring that access is one of the Endorois’ primary demands, however, Kiburo says the Kenyan government is the main obstacle. “Those economic and social rights are very much enshrined in the constitution of Kenya,” he said. “[The government is] just not committed.”
Editor’s note: Nia Tero is a funding partner with Grist. Funding partners have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
Bounded by the Bitterroot Mountains to the west and the Sapphire Mountains to the east, Montana’s Bitterroot Valley is home to renowned fly fishing streams and soaring vistas. Its forests, however, are facing the greatest wildfire risk in the entire state, with towns like Florence, Victor, and Darby all in the nation’s 98th-plus percentile for risk. Yet houses continue to be built at a rapid clip, many of them in hazardous areas.
Theoretically, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a $1.2 trillion bill that funds improvements in transportation, water, energy, broadband, and climate resilience projects, should be able to help. The legislation, signed into law by President Joe Biden in November 2021, includes money to make forests more resilient to fire and defend at-risk communities. But according to a recent analysis by the Montana-based research group Headwaters Economics, over half of the communities in the West might not be able to access those funds.
Researchers examined 10 factors that influenced how well-equipped communities were to apply for grant funding, and then used those factors to calculate each county and community’s “rural capacity” score. For instance, Missoula County, Montana, home to the state’s second-largest city and flagship university campus, scored 94 out of 100, while Carter County, Montana, where there is no county head of planning and just 20 percent of adult residents have attended college, scored just 45, the lowest in the state.
Within the West, Montana stands out: More than three-quarters of its communities have index scores below the national median. The state’s low capacity exemplifies the challenges rural communities across the West face, including a reliance on boom-and-bust industries that create financial instability, and a lack of grant writers, land-use planners, and emergency planners that would be helpful in applying for federal funds. “You go to a rural community, and typically the mayor is almost always part-time,” said Don Albrecht, director of the Western Rural Development Center at Utah State University. “They don’t have the resources or the experience or the expertise to even write grants to get the money in the first place.”
More than half the communities in Wyoming, New Mexico, and Idaho rank below the national median on Headwaters’ rural capacity index scoring system. Clark County, Idaho; Esmeralda County, Nevada; and Jackson County, Colorado, like Carter County in Montana, also received capacity scores in the 40s. At the same time, Headwaters also found that many of the rural communities rated as having low capacity also face the highest climate threats.
When overlaid with data about flood and wildfire risk, Headwaters’ analysis reveals areas with stark capacity barriers, often exacerbated by historical injustices, as well as high vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. In Montana and elsewhere, many of these communities are on or near Native American reservations. In the town of Hays on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, for example, capacity is among the lowest 5 percent in the country, while both wildfire and flood risk are higher than in 90 percent of the country.
In theory, the $47 billion the infrastructure bill designates for climate resilience can help communities prepare for floods, fires, storms, and droughts. But Headwaters’ analysis suggests that areas with low capacity might not submit requests in the first place. “The point of this was to shed light on major barriers that exist for communities trying to plan and finance climate adaptation projects,” said Patty Hernandez, the executive director of Headwaters Economics. “For our team, it was really striking how widespread the problem is.”
Over the next few weeks, the Biden team is taking a cross-country tour to discuss the legislation ahead of the midterm elections in November, with a particular focus on rural areas. According to Mitch Landrieu, Biden’s infrastructure czar, officials will stop in a handful of Western states, including Colorado, Alaska, Arizona, Washington, and Nevada. Behind the scenes, federal agencies in charge of divvying up infrastructure funding are defining grant guidelines and making spending plans. “These decisions are being made right now that will impact the ability of rural communities to access the dollars that are coming online,” Hernandez said.
Officials say that access for rural communities is their top priority, pointing to their “rural playbook,” which details money set aside for urgent rural issues like broadband internet access and upgrading electricity and wastewater systems. Last Wednesday, the Biden administration launched a pilot program called the Rural Partners Network, designed to address capacity issues by putting staff on the ground in rural communities to “provide local leaders with the expertise to navigate federal programs,” according to a fact sheet from the USDA.
It’s essential for state and federal officials to work directly with communities in order to make sure that the money gets where it’s most needed, Albrecht said. Otherwise, those with more resources will “lap” it all up. According to The Washington Post, municipalities from Florida to California are already hiring lobbyists to influence where infrastructure money goes.
There are also policies the Biden administration could enact to give communities a fair shot at funds, Headwaters’ analysis suggests. The administration could eliminate requirements for communities to match contributions from federal grants, which can be difficult in sparsely populated areas with a limited tax base. Granting agencies could even directly identify places with high need and award them money without requiring applications. Hernandez said that new approaches are necessary to give rural towns across Montana, and the West, a chance. “I can’t imagine a scenario,” she said, “where a one-size-fits-all rubric for scoring proposals is ever going to work out for rural communities.”
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, Indian Country Today, and High Country News.
In 2017, Hurricane Maria hit the Caribbean, destroying homes, killing thousands, and driving many from the region. Indigenous Taíno people in Puerto Rico were on the front lines of the disaster, which has since been compounded by environmental violence in the form of toxic military waste, luxury development on cultural sites, and other threats. But the Taíno struggle to get those concerns acknowledged by the U.S. and other governments. Now representatives are at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) in New York to call attention to their situation.
“If we’re not getting visibility or any kind of recognition at the national level, we have no choice but to take it outside and try to build that visibility for our people,” said R. Múkaro Agüeibaná Borrero, President of the United Confederation of Taíno People.
The Taíno people are Indigenous to the Caribbean and live in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and more. When Christopher Columbus made landfall in 1492, the Taíno were the first people he met. Today, Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the United States, which means that it is neither an independent country nor an official state. Puerto Rico has a non-voting member of Congress and does not have electoral college votes in presidential elections. Because of this colonial relationship, the Taíno have few platforms to make their concerns heard.
International forums like the UNPFII are a rare opportunity to directly engage with officials from the United States and other countries — providing space for the Taíno to advocate for policies that will help their communities. “There is a narrative that Taíno people were wiped out,” Borrero said. “So we have to make statements at the international level, to say ‘wait a minute, we are here.’”
Andrea Carmen, Yaqui Nation and Executive Director of the International Indian Treaty Council, says that for the Taíno, Puerto Rico’s political status presents challenges for the Taíno. “What makes them unique is they are still residents of a colony,” she said. Carmen added that, like the Taíno, most Indigenous peoples around the world also lack state recognition, which makes the UNPFII and other international venues even more important in their fight for rights.
In a statement to the forum, Tai Pelli, another representative from the United Confederation of Taíno People, highlighted the environmental and climate crises facing Indigenous peoples in Puerto Rico. Increasingly powerful storms have destroyed homes and driven many from the island while illegal toxic waste dumping and military waste contamination are also serious issues. On the island municipalities of Vieques and Culebra, the U.S. military conducted weapons testing for over 60 years, leaving unexploded ordinance and dangerous chemicals behind. “Increasing cancer rates and other non-contagious diseases are a direct result of the environmental injustices our people confront every day,” Pelli said.
Pointing to luxury hotels and other development projects on culturally significant sites like the Dry Forest and the Kaguana Ceremonial Center, Pelli called on the UN to confront the issue with UNESCO, which oversees some of the sites, and demanded a review of UNESCO’s protected areas mandate and greater transparency. “The wrath of greed and uncontrolled development are beginning to seem as dangerous as the hurricanes, earthquakes and pandemic that we are still trying to survive,” she said.
The United Confederation of Taíno People also called attention to Taíno language revitalization efforts, which will lead to the publication of the first Classic Taíno Dictionary and Grammar Guide later this year. Borrero noted, however, that the International Decade of Indigenous Languages must not overlook Indigenous Caribbean languages and called on the Permanent Forum to give special attention to insular Caribbean Indigenous Peoples, including those in both self-governing and non self-governing territories.
“We’re not only raising the visibility of who we are within the U.S.,” he said. “We’re also raising the visibility of our people for other Indigenous peoples so that we could build that solidarity regionally and internationally.”
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, Indian Country Today, and High Country News.
At the world’s largest gathering of Indigenous leaders, women are talking about how to hold financial institutions accountable for fueling climate catastrophe through investments in the extractive industry.
Michelle Cook, Navajo, was among those who offered testimonies focused on the women at the frontlines of extractive projects, the boardrooms of financial institutions, and the halls of governments. Speaking at a side event hosted by Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network at the 21st session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York, Cook described the work as being part of a sacred obligation.
“That’s what we’re doing, fulfilling a prayer for the world – for nature – with love, compassion, and with courage. No other weapon than that, the truth,” Cook, the founder of Divest Invest Protect, said. “For some, that is so terrifying. Indigenous women will not give up … We will not be intimidated, shamed or be afraid just for being who we are.”
The international forum side events offer participants the opportunity to continue thematic dialogues outside of the forum’s schedule, which is more limited than previous years due to the pandemic and is operating on a hybrid format this year. Summer Blaze Aubrey, Cherokee and Blackfeet, is a staff attorney for the International Indian Treaty Council and also spoke on the panel. She noted that racism and genocide are at the center of human rights violations around the world. Atrocities are ongoing and fueled by the extractive industry, she added, even with “green energy” initiatives moving forward. She pointed to the White House’s Russian rhetoric and the Defense Production Act, which was enacted to jump start new mines or expand existing ones.
“Engaging in the extractive industry isn’t moving forward, it’s not going to help in the long run. It’s part of capitalism,” Aubrey said. “It is not helpful…We see throughout the extractive industry on Turtle Island it’s linked to violence against women. It’s so nuanced and interconnected that you cannot speak on one without speaking on the other.”
Women on the panel maintained that due diligence must occur continuously through development projects, not just during the initial phases. But ultimately, they say, society needs to divest from the extractive industry altogether.
“Indigenous people are providing the answers,” Aubrey said, referencing traditional knowledge and science. “We understand how to live symbiotically with the environment, How to feed people. We already have systems in place that will protect us and the world.”
She added that corporations and financiers need to recognize that and be engaged in those principles and strategies.The panel called out BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, saying the investment company has an insatiable appetite for feeding its bottom line. BlackRock presently does not have an Indigenous rights policy, a shortcoming that Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network founder Osprey Orielle Lake said should change immediately.
Like countless others during the first week of the Permanent Forum, the panel consistently returned to the matter of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). FPIC specifies that developers must engage with impacted Indigenous communities to ensure their participation and consultation. However, despite the international human rights principle being widely adopted by U.N. member states via the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, many experts and leaders have identified that the articles are not being recognized or applied effectively, leaving the land and people vulnerable to exploitation. Among the other solutions highlighted, included investing in climate justice frameworks that center traditional ecological knowledge.
For women like Maria Violet Medina Quiscue, from Pueblo Nasa in Colombia, it takes courage to speak out on these issues – especially on a global scale – because land and human rights defenders are being murdered, meaning that publicly criticizing the institutions, corporations and nations behind them places her life on the line. Quiscue described the deeply entrenched racism against Indigenous people in Colombia, which has been on full display as of late.
For the last seven months, roughly 2,000 Indigenous people have been living at an encampment at Bogota National Park after being displaced by extractive industries and paramilitary groups. Anti-Indigenous rhetoric from Colombian politicians has created a hostile environment for Indigenous people, with grocers and store owners refusing to serve Indigenous people. Quiscue says racism in Bogota ramped up after Mayor Claudia Lopez Hernandez unleashed a slew of attacks against Indigenous people at the encampment.
Quiscue says the discrimination they are currently facing is rooted in colonization. Maria and the other panelists made it clear that Indigenous people maintain both the legal right to say “no” to extraction as well as a sacred obligation to stand up against current and future developments. At an event featuring numerous policy solutions and calls to action, this was the line that the women seeking to hold financial institutions accountable consistently returned to: you cannot be a climate leader when you expand extraction.
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, Indian Country Today, and High Country News.
The Global Indigenous Youth Caucus on Thursday demanded that the United Nations send investigators to Hawaii to probe the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility, a series of World War II-era reserve tanks which have leaked at least 14,000 gallons of fuel-laced water into Honolulu’s groundwater aquifer. The Caucus also urged the U.N. to re-inscribe Hawaii on the list of non-self governing territories – a move that would classify Hawaii as a colonized territory alongside Guam, the Falkland Islands, Western Sahara and 14 others.
“We are supposed to have access to water for our ceremony, for clean drinking water,” said Makanalani Malia Gomes, a Pacific representative of the Caucus. “When we ensure Indigenous peoples rights, we ensure the rights of all people of Hawaii, it’s a human right.”
The remarks come as Native Hawaiians demand the U.S. Navy take action at Red Hill after the discovery of the fuel leak last November forced the closure of water wells which serve nearly half-a-million residents on the island. Coupled with ongoing drought, Hawaii’s Board of Water has asked residents to reduce water use by 10 percent.
In December 2021, the Hawaii Department of Health ordered the U.S. Navy to drain the facility, but the Navy filed legal appeals to fight the order. Last month, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that the facility would be closed, but to date, no timeline for the closure has been offered. Earlier this month, the Navy dropped its lawsuit against the Department of Health.
The Navy was unable to provide a timeline or comment at publication.
Geoffrey Roth, Standing Rock Sioux descendant and a member of the Permanent Forum, says UNPFII leaders will evaluate the Youth Caucus’ request for a final report to be presented to the United Nations main body for action. “We work to form the actual recommendations that go into the report,” he said. “I’d like to look at it more and maybe sit down and talk to them as well.”
According to the United Nations, at its founding, nearly a third of the world’s population lived in colonized territories. In 1990, the UN proclaimed the International Decade of the Eradication of Colonialism. Beginning in 2021, the General assembly declared 2021-2030 the Fourth International Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism. “Inscribe us back on the list so that we can become self-determining,” said Gomes.
In January 1893, U.S. troops invaded the Kingdom of Hawaii, deposing Queen Lili’uokalani. Prior to invasion, the Kingdom had established diplomatic agreements with the United States and maintained nearly 100 consulates and legations around the world. In December 1893, U.S. President Grover Cleveland acknowledged that Marines had illegally invaded the Kingdom, but did not withdraw troops. In 1959, both Hawaii and Alaska were removed from the UN’s list of non-self governing territories when they were granted statehood. While UNPFII leaders continue their dialogue with the Youth Caucus to finalize a report for the U.N.’s main body, Gomes offered a clear-eyed vision for their desired outcome.
“The United States’ military needs to be out of all of the Pacific,” said Gomes. “Hawaii and the entire Pacific should be demilitarized immediately.”
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, Indian Country Today, and High Country News.
In 2020, construction of Fosen Vind, an onshore wind energy complex, was completed on Norway’s central coast. The 151 turbines make up one of Europe’s largest onshore wind complexes, but Indigenous Sami peoples in the area say that the wind farm is encroaching on their lands, endangering their reindeer herds, and threatening their way of life. Silje Karine Muotka, President of the Sami Parliament of Norway, says that the situation is an example of how Indigenous rights are being violated in favor of renewable energy projects. “The so-called green shift can take the form of green colonization,” she said.
Indigenous leaders say that Norway and other countries need stricter enforcement and application of free, prior, and informed consent, or FPIC. FPIC is a right that is recognized by international standards like the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the International Labor Organization Convention, and applies to relocation, culture, legislation, land use, and the environment. Under international law, countries have an obligation to obtain the free, prior, and informed consent of impacted Indigenous communities in all of these areas. FPIC is recognized as the gold standard for respecting Indigenous rights, as it is designed to create a comprehensive and culturally appropriate consultation process for any activities that affect Indigenous peoples. But while over one hundred countries have adopted UNDRIP, including the United States, Indigenous leaders say that FPIC is not being adequately enforced or applied.
“Although the rights of Indigenous peoples to self determination, land, territory resources and free, prior and informed consent are guaranteed under international law including in business contexts,” said Darío José Mejía Montalvo, Zenú from Colombia and the new chair of the Permanent Forum, “rights are not recognized or applied effectively in many countries.”
Although many provisions of UNDRIP also face a serious lack of enforcement around the world, FPIC is an essential right that Indigenous leaders want the international community to focus on. This week, Indigenous leaders at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples will push for stronger international frameworks to support the application of FPIC.
Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, a forum vice-chair and Indigenous Mbororo woman from Chad, says that in the midst of the global climate crisis, FPIC is more important than ever. Pointing to examples like the wind farm in Norway, she says that governments and corporations are continuing to violate Indigenous rights to build their energy projects. “They think that it is a solution for climate, but those are false solutions,” she said.
Throughout the session, Ibrahim said that she hopes that the forum can develop strong recommendations for other U.N. bodies and member states, as well as mechanisms to monitor member states’ national policies and programs. According to Ibrahim, some countries just mention FPIC without actually applying it. “FPIC is not only a principle,” she said. “For Indigenous peoples it is a right.”
Darío José Mejía Montalvo, Chair of UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous issues and Leader of the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia, (right) speaks from New York. Left, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations RoseAnne Archibald.
Grist / Tristan Ahtone
The World Bank, hypothetically, could institute a policy whereby it only funds projects in countries maintaining clear FPIC regulations. In addition to national level recommendations, these are the kinds of policies that Ibrahim hopes the forum will develop during this session.
Majo Andrade Cerda, a Kichwa member of the Global Indigenous Youth Caucus from Ecuador, said that her peoples’ territory is threatened by gold mining projects. The country, she observed, needs a significantly stronger application of FPIC to defend Indigenous land and rights. “When you have FPIC programs and you respect that right, you are respecting our autonomy and how we decide to live,” she said.
Developing those programs will be a challenge that requires direct input from Indigenous communities. “We have to reinforce the idea that FPIC has to be done with intercultural points of view,” she said.
Cerda also stressed the difference between consultation and consent — consultation only requires nations to notify Indigenous communities of their actions; consent requires their active approval. Her hope is that Ecuador and other countries will look to the standard set by the UNPFII and other U.N. bodies to develop their own strong FPIC laws, rather than writing weaker versions that only require consultation.
Fawn Sharp, President of the National Congress of American Indians and Vice President of the Quinault Indian Nation, believes that broad policies like the RESPECT Act are important because they hold governments to a high standard in interactions with all tribes. However, she also said that there need to be provisions within these laws that give Indigenous communities options to dictate those consultations based on their needs and traditions. “It should be a general process that will work and that’s enforceable, but then flexible enough to ensure that each sovereign nation and its protocols are respected,” she said.
Sharp also said that a meaningful application of FPIC will require the United States to treat tribal nations as equals. “If we’re going to have meaningful consultation, we have to have political equity, which means there’s an equal bargaining position,” Sharp said. “The United States can’t just consult, check the box, then proceed with unilateral action.”
Another key part of the process is a mechanism that Indigenous groups can turn to when a project proceeds without their consent. Sharp believes UNPFII is an opportunity to learn from international examples of what that dispute resolution mechanism might look like.
Jose Proaño, co-director of Land is Life, is working directly with Indigenous communities in South America to develop the type of frameworks Cerda and Sharp describe. Proaño says that Indigenous communities already have their own established practices for decision making. FPIC is merely a way of providing a procedure to help the government engage with them. “The protocol is just a framework of what has been happening in this territory for thousands of generations,” he said.
Those procedures also help to guide governments on how to respectfully and appropriately communicate with Indigenous groups. In the past, he says, corporations and governments have done insufficient and disrespectful consultation processes. “It’s not consultation,” he said. “It’s just like a check mark.”
Silje Karine Muotka says that as the world moves towards greener energy sources, it needs to listen to Indigenous peoples, rather than continue to violate their rights and land. “You can’t camouflage the policies that we have endured for so long with global warming and lack of biological diversity,” she said. “If you are going to solve the main problem, then you must take another direction.”
This story is published as part of the Global Indigenous Affairs Desk, an Indigenous-led collaboration between Grist, Indian Country Today, and High Country News.
Indigenous communities around the world face an alarming quartet: state violence, human rights abuses, harmful conservation practices, and extractive industries. All these issues and more will be addressed at the 21st session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), which convenes today at U.N. headquarters in New York.
The forum is a rare opportunity for the international Indigenous community to set a high standard for respecting Indigenous land, rights, and culture and create clear recommendations for the U.N. and its member states. Geoffrey Roth, a Standing Rock Sioux descendant and forum member, says that it is an opportunity to advocate for Indigenous issues and people on a global scale, specifically projects that require the consent of communities.
“We can really be an example to the world’s leaders in how to preserve the environment,” Roth said.
The forum also serves as an important platform for young Indigenous leaders. Victor A. Lopez-Carmen, Yaqui, and enrolled with the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, is a student at Harvard Medical School and Co-Chair of the U.N. Global Indigenous Youth Caucus. He says that the forum is especially important because of the way it allows Indigenous people from around the world to compare experiences and unite on shared issues.
“Our values are going to push us towards more innovation,” he said. “There aren’t many organizations that can deliver a global statement.”
Indigenous and human rights leaders participate in the 15th session of the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Monday May 16, 2016 at U.N. headquarters.
AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
Established in 2000, UNPFII is an advisory agency to the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council with representation from seven regions: Africa; Asia; Central and South America and the Caribbean; the Arctic; Central and Eastern Europe, Russian Federation, Central Asia and Transcaucasia; North America; and the Pacific.
Climate migration and conflict will be a key issue throughout the session. Impacts from climate change—including floods, crop failures, and increased temperatures—have forced many Indigenous people to move from their homelands. According to a report from forum members, Indigenous communities in the Sahel and the Congo Basin have been acutely impacted, leading to migration and conflicts over water access and land claims. Competition over resources like Lake Chad, which lost 90 percent of its surface area and water volume over the last 60 years, is leading to conflict between communities in the area.
Ongoing violence against Indigenous people will be another major topic with twin crises present across the globe: missing and murdered Indigenous people and violence against Indigenous land defenders. Reem Alsalem, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, will present on the subject. Alsalem is working on a report on violence against Indigenous women and girls, which will be presented at the U.N. Human Rights Council this summer. “Eliminating violence against women is a human rights obligation of states,” she told The New Humanitarian. Indigenous people have also been the victims of violent and illegal conservation efforts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Brazil, and other places. With the support of foreign governments and international organizations, Indigenous people have been murdered, abused, and driven from their lands in the name of protecting the environment.
In the middle of an international effort to transition to greener energy, Indigenous people continue to bear the brunt of harmful resource extraction. According to a member report, the transition to cleaner energy needs to happen quickly, but in a way that respects and consults with Indigenous communities. According to the report, Indigenous peoples are not an obstacle to development, but may have a different idea of what development should look like. Calling for a new global covenant with Indigenous people, the report says that, “Transferring responsibility and sacrifice to groups of people who are the most vulnerable and are excluded from energy policies is not the right way to address the crisis caused by increased climate variability.”
Benki Piyano (C), Shaman of the Ashaninka of the Amazon, speaks at an event of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, highlighting new and emerging efforts to protect the planet’s rainforests and their defenders, on April 23, 2019 in New York City.
JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images
Recently, Indigenous knowledge and culture has received wider recognition and appreciation from non-Indigenous people. While this is a positive step, a member report argues that the international community needs to create stronger protections for Indigenous intellectual property. The report says that “The knowledge, wisdom, tools and methods used by indigenous peoples to solve their problems have been passed on, and should continue to be passed on, as a legacy, not only to future generations, but to the whole of humankind.” Indigenous knowledge and expertise with biodiversity, for example, will be a key part of conserving and protecting the environment. Indigenous people need to lead these efforts however, or they risk exploiting or stealing their intellectual property. According to the report, this would amount to a human rights violation.
Around the world, Indigenous languages have been under threat for generations. International experts estimate that as much as 95 percent of today’s spoken languages—many of which are Indigenous—could be extinct or seriously endangered by 2100. To draw attention to the issue, the U.N. declared 2019 as the Year of Indigenous languages, which led to over 800 activities, including technology development and youth education. To make language protection and revitalization more sustainable, the U.N. launched the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, which starts this year. Members and invited experts, like Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskins Jr., will talk about ways to increase Indigenous language access and education around the world.
UNPFII serves as a mechanism for Indigenous issues to be integrated more broadly within the United Nations system, but is also key to advocating for the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), a non-binding resolution that affirms the rights of Indigenous people around the world. Passed in 2007, UNDRIP was initially opposed by the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand but has since been adopted in those countries as well as over a hundred others around the world. However, while the resolution has been met with support, most of its key provisions have yet to be codified into the legal systems of member states.
Over the course of its 10 days, UNPFII will be tasked with providing advice and recommendations to the U.N. on ensuring that Indigenous peoples’ rights are protected. Last year’s final report recommended the adoption of legal mechanisms to create stronger human rights protections as well as highlighting global inequalities exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The report also raised concerns that efforts to achieve sustainable development goals did not include Indigenous communities and drew attention to various Indigenous rights abuses around the world. Those concerns, and their handling by the international community, will be revisited and evaluated in this year’s session.
“Our hammer,” said Geoffrey Roth, “is this final report, which gives recommendations to the U.N. agencies on how to interact and correct things in these nation states and Indigenous communities.”
About two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, a metal that plays a key role in batteries for electric vehicles, or EVs, was thrust suddenly into the spotlight. On March 8, the price of nickel doubled within hours on the London Metal Exchange, prompting the world’s leading metals market to shut down trading for the material. The price spike occurred amidst fears that nickel from Russia, the world’s third-largest producer of the metal, would soon become “untouchable due to sanctions risk,” as one group of analysts put it.
More than a month later, the hypothetical sanctions that helped fuel metals market chaos have yet to materialize. And an emerging supply chain that connects Russian nickel with the European EV market — most notably through a partnership between mining giant Nornickel and German chemical company BASF — remains intact for now. But the war in Ukraine, and Russia’s totalitarian crackdown on dissenting voices, have major implications for that supply chain as well as an Indigenous-led movement for environmental justice that targets Nornickel’s polluting practices.
For the European EV industry, the situation raises difficult ethical questions and highlights the competing demands of geopolitical, social, and environmental responsibility in a time of war. In recent weeks, Germany has come under growing pressure to sever more of its economic ties with Russia in order to punish Putin for his brutal war in Ukraine. But if the nation were to ban imports on Russian nickel, an industry that is essential to Europe meeting its climate goals, it would have to scramble to secure new sources of a critical raw material. At the same time, Russian Indigenous activists fear they would lose one of the few levers they have for holding Nornickel accountable: its relationships with Western companies.
“We’re in a situation of contradictory demands,” said Tilman Massa, a member of the Association of Ethical Shareholders Germany, an NGO that campaigns for environmental protection and human rights due diligence at German corporations. On the one hand, Massa says, companies are facing intense public pressure to cut ties to Russian business. “On the other hand, we now have leverage to increase the pressure on Nornickel to improve the situation on the ground.”
A defunct smelter owned by the Russian mining giant Nornickel in the town of Nikel, Russia. KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP via Getty Images
Nornickel, the world’s largest producer of the high-grade nickel needed for EVs, isn’t a huge player in Europe’s battery supply chain today. But it is expected to become one in the future thanks to a strategic partnership with BASF that the companies announced in 2018. Through that partnership, Nornickel will supply both high-grade nickel and cobalt from its metal refinery in Harjavalta, Finland, to BASF’s nearby battery materials plant, which is scheduled to come online this year. According to Caspar Rawles, an analyst at the battery market research firm Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, BASF is expected to represent nearly 20 percent of Europe’s battery cathode production capacity by 2025, with raw materials supplied by Nornickel.
The EV industry needs nickel and cobalt to create the long-lasting, high-performance batteries Western consumers increasingly demand. Nickel, in particular, is essential for boosting the energy storage capacity of batteries, extending an EV’s range. As a result, the world’s appetite for the metal is expected to skyrocket in the coming decades: According to the International Energy Agency, producing enough batteries for EVs and energy storage to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius could cause global nickel demand to rise 21-fold by 2040.
But Europe, a leading consumer of these batteries, doesn’t have many local nickel suppliers.
“The dilemma that European battery and EV makers face is: do they want to use the Nornickel-BASF nickel supply chain, or to rely for the bulk of nickel imports from Indonesia and China,” Benchmark CEO Simon Moores wrote in an email to Grist. The latter options, Moores notes, raise serious environmental and social concerns for the EV industry: nickel mining in Indonesia has been tied to severe deforestation, while China is currently under intense scrutiny for alleged human rights violations in its renewable energy supply chains.
BASF acknowledged this dilemma in a statement to Grist. “If we were to end our collaboration with Nornickel on nickel supply, an important value chain for the European production of batteries for electric vehicles would be interrupted,” BASF told Grist in an emailed statement. “[T]here are currently no alternatives for locally sourced nickel in Europe.”
But nickel mining in Russia isn’t free of environmental or human rights concerns. Nornickel’s production sites and refineries in the Russian Arctic are a major source of regional air pollution; a 2017 NASA article described a “man-made volcano” of sulfur dioxide lingering over the industrial city of Norilsk, where company facilities are located. Indigenous people living in the shadow of Nornickel say that the mining giant’s activities have poisoned their land and water, making it impossible for them to fish and hunt reindeer in their traditional territories.
After a major oil spill from a tank owned by Nornickel contaminated waterways around Norilsk in 2020, Indigenous activists stepped up their efforts to raise awareness of the mining giant’s impacts. In late 2020 and early 2021, a coalition of activists from Russia and allied international organizations sent letters to BASF airing their grievances about Nornickel and asking the German company to hold it accountable. BASF, activists say, listened to the coalition’s concerns, beginning an “intense and productive dialog” that continued up until the war, according to Pavel Sulyandziga, the president of the Batani Foundation, one of the Russian Indigenous groups in the coalition.
As this activist pressure was mounting, Nornickel reached out to the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, or IRMA, expressing interest in becoming a member. A multi-stakeholder organization that develops environmental and social standards for the mining sector, IRMA offers membership to companies after they conduct a self-assessment of their practices followed by a third-party audit of at least one of their mines within a year.
Indigenous activists were encouraged by these developments — but now they fear Russia’s war is eroding any progress they had made. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Sulyandziga says the coalition has had no contact with BASF or Nornickel. Meanwhile, Russian media reports and decrees indicate the government is working to relax environmental regulations, including postponing new requirements around emissions monitoring and emissions quotas for polluters, and declaring that negative environmental reviews cannot halt projects.
In March, IRMA formally paused its plans to audit Nornickel this spring. IRMA executive director Aimee Boulanger told Grist that decision was based on the organization’s desire to stay aligned with the message the world was sending about doing business in Russia, as well as concern that people living around Nornickel’s mine sites would be unable to speak with auditors safely.
There are valid reasons for IRMA’s concern. Speaking out about polluting industries in Russia was a risky proposition before the war; in wake of Russia’s recent crackdown on dissent, it has become even more dangerous. Sulyandziga told Grist that criminal cases have recently been filed in Russia “against the very Indigenous communities and representatives who have been in opposition to Nornickel all along” and that police have begun cracking down on those communities by confiscating reindeer meat they sell in order to support themselves.
Reached for comment, Nornickel spokesperson Andrey Kuzmin said that the company “never paused and always remains open for dialogue” with Indigenous communities. Nornickel, Kuzmin added, regularly holds meetings of a council of Indigenous representatives the company set up last year to discuss economic development, educational projects, and more. Critics like Sulyandziga, however, say that this council represents a cynical attempt by Nornickel to buy loyalty by providing support to communities who agree not to speak out against it.
Andrei Danilov, the director of the Sámi Heritage and Development Fund, which represents Sámi people of the Russian Arctic and is a member of the activist coalition, told Grist he hopes that BASF can convince Nornickel to “restart the dialog” with its critics. BASF told Grist that while the company is engaged with Nornickel it plans to remain in touch with Indigenous activists in addition to “encouraging Nornickel to directly engage.” While BASF has stopped pursuing new partnerships with Russian businesses, it will continue to fulfill its contracts with Nornickel “in line with applicable laws, regulations and international rules,” according to the company.
But that could change should Germany or other European countries impose sanctions targeting nickel or metals from Russia.
“It could be any day that Nornickel is on the sanctions list,” said Massa of the Association of Ethical Shareholders Germany. In early April, Nornickel’s billionaire president, Vladimir Potanin, was hit with Western sanctions for the first time.
Vladimir Potanin, the billionaire president of Nornickel, in London in 2017. Mikhail Svetlov / Getty Images
The conflicting pressures BASF and the European EV industry face with respect to Russian nickel are a microcosm of a challenge the entire world faces as the clean energy transition ramps up: how to balance securing the metals and minerals needed for that transition with the environmental and social harms caused by mining. It’s a difficult enough balancing act in times of peace; as Russia’s war shows, global conflict has the potential to further tip the balance of power away from frontline communities.
That’s why some climate justice advocates are now calling for an entirely new approach that situates mining not as a centerpiece of the energy transition, but a single approach within a broader suite of solutions including increased battery recycling and expanding mass transit to reduce demand for EVs. Where mining does occur, these advocates stress that it needs to be done responsibly and with full buy-in from affected communities.
“I don’t think we know where this [war] is going right now and what that means for the world,” IRMA’s Boulanger told Grist. “But in a time of violence and political crisis, we need environmental and social justice all the more.”
