Construction began this week on an open-pit mine at the largest lithium deposit in the United States, even as tribes and environmental groups continue a years-long effort to block the project.
The Bureau of Land Management approved the $2.2 billion mine project in January 2021. Mining operations would cover 5,000 acres and create a pit deeper than a football field. Lithium is a key component in the batteries of electric vehicles.
Thacker Pass, known as Peehee Mu’huh to the Paiute Shoshone people, is 200 miles north of Reno and less than 40 miles north of the tribal land of the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone tribe. Tribes opposing the mine say the area has historical, cultural and religious importance and that it was the site of an 1865 massacre of at least 31 Paiute people.
“It’s an important place not only because a terrible massacre occurred, but also because it’s a place where people gather, it’s a place for ceremony, for hunting,” said Michon Eben, tribal historic preservation officer for the Reno Sparks Indian Colony, a government that includes members from the the Paiute, Shoshone and Washoe tribes. The colony is advocating for Peehee Mu’huh to be on the National Register of Historic Places. “It’s really hard to be a tribal member and see our homelands destroyed,” said Eben.
Thacker Pass also comprises thousands of acres of sagebrush and is a nesting ground for the sage grouse and a migration corridor for pronghorn antelope. Environmental groups including the Great Basin Resource Watch and Western Watersheds Project say the mine would cause irreversible ecological damage, and that the project’s impact was not adequately studied.
“It got by the environmental impact statement process in just under a year and I would expect a project of this scale and complexity to take 3 to 5 years,” said John Hadder, director of Great Basin Resource Watch. “That’s sloppy permitting on the side of the federal government.”
Tribes, environmental groups and a cattle rancher are all plaintiffs in a combined case against the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, and Lithium Nevada, a subsidiary of Lithium Americas. On February 6, a federal judge in Reno ruled that the BLM had complied with federal law in approving the mine, with the exception of one matter regarding waste disposal, which the judge ordered the BLM to revisit. The plaintiffs filed an appeal in the 9th Circuit and an emergency motion to block construction before the appeal hearing. The appeals court rejected the injunction and set the hearing date for June.
In January, General Motors announced it would invest $650 million in Lithium Americas to develop the Thacker Pass mine, and expected the deal to yield enough lithium for 1 million electric vehicles per year.
Lithium Americas did not respond to a request for comment.
If the appeal fails and the lithium mine goes into operation, Hadder said it sets a bad precedent for how projects can be rushed in the name of the green transition.
“If it’s mining for lithium and other critical minerals, it will fall under the rubric of ‘Lithium is so important that we need to relax some of our environmental standards,’” said Hadder. “That’s a dangerous path that future generations and the environment will pay a price for. I think they’ll look back and say, ‘Oh, that wasn’t a good idea.’”
This story is excerpted from The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, published by Simon & Schuster.
It was March 2021, and Sheri Neil was throwing together po’boys for the lunch crowd at her namesake Sheri’s Snack Shack, the only restaurant in the small bayou village of Pointe-aux-Chenes, Louisiana. The counter-service sandwich joint stands elevated about 12 feet off the ground, with a big red deck where people can sit as they enjoy one of Sheri’s renowned milkshakes.
At the height of the lunch hour, a woman drove into the parking lot and came running up the stairs. She was a teacher at Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary School, which served about 80 children from the village of Pointe-aux-Chenes and nearby Ile de Jean Charles, both Indigenous communities that had been eroding for decades. Earlier that morning a representative from the parish school board had shown up unannounced and informed the staff that the parish was closing the school, effective that summer. People had been leaving Pointe-aux-Chenes for decades, driven out by frequent floods and the decline of the local shrimping industry, and enrollment at Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary had fallen well below the district’s target. The village no longer merited its own school, officials said.
A fallen pole lies near Point-Au-Chenes Elementary School. Jake Bittle
There were about a dozen people at the restaurant when the teacher drove up, and each of them ran at once to tell their families and friends. By nightfall everyone in town had heard the news, and by the next morning the residents of Pointe-aux-Chenes leapt into action as only the residents of a small town could. They started a Facebook group on behalf of the school and alerted the new cub reporter for the daily newspaper in the nearby city of Houma. The leader of the local tribal organization called the tribe’s attorney and asked her to help them file a lawsuit against the parish. The town staged a small picket outside the school, with students and parents holding up handwritten signs.
This was far from the first school closure in coastal Terrebonne Parish, which had seen broad population loss over the previous two decades. The story was more or less the same in every town: the shrimp business crashed, the flooding got worse, and people moved up to dry land, leaving empty desks in every classroom. No one who lived in Pointe-aux-Chenes could deny that the bayou population was shrinking. The parish had shut down the library branch a few years earlier, warehousing the books in the school building, and the bayou had lost two grocery stores in the past decade. The only remaining general store was operating on thinner and thinner margins. You couldn’t go more than a mile without seeing a FOR SALE sign.
Storm clouds gather off the coast of Louisiana, as seen from Pointe-Aux-Chenes, on August 30, 2021.
Mark Felix / AFP via Getty images
Still, closing the school at this time felt like an unnecessary escalation, one that would push the town further toward depopulation and decay. Fifty years earlier, when Indigenous children had first attended classes there after the integration of the state school system, the school had been a hostile place, but in the decades since it had become a kind of cultural melting pot for the whole bayou community, a bridge between the white Cajun and Indigenous sides of Pointe-aux-Chenes. The school had one of the largest Indigenous populations of any school in the state, and teachers made a point of educating students about the rich history of the bayou, bringing in tribal leaders to demonstrate ceremonial dances and drum rituals. The bayou had no museum, no archive, no dedicated historian, so it was through the school that each generation of residents passed down their unique traditions to the next. If that went away, what would the town have left?
Even more painful was the fact that the decision had come just a few years after the Army Corps of Engineers had finished a new levee system that would protect the bayou, part of a massive project the agency had been working on since the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The erosion exodus that had begun two generations earlier seemed like it was finally about to slow down: The main reason so many people had left over the years was to escape the flood problem, but now the town would be protected from all but the most devastating storms. The marshland outside the levees might disappear, but the town itself would be safe for decades to come.
A water control structure in Pointe-Aux-Chenes, Louisiana on August 31, 2021.
Mark Felix / AFP via Getty Images
Residents had seen what could happen without that investment in flood protection. Like Pointe-aux-Chenes, Ile de Jean Charles, just a few miles to the west, had been losing population for decades amid storm and erosion — indeed, around 98 percent of the island’s landmass had disappeared over half a century. The federal government had excluded the island community from its protective levee network, and rather than protect the island with flood walls the state government had opted to relocate its remaining 40-odd residents to a new tract of land farther inland. The relocation was funded by the federal government through an Obama-era grant program, and it amounted to the first whole-community climate migration in the history of the continental United States. The original idea for the relocation had come from a senior leader of the island tribe, but many had grown dissatisfied with the state’s handling of the program: The new site lacked direct access to the water that had sustained the island tribe for generations, and many residents had vowed never to leave the island, but as of 2021 most remaining residents were preparing to make their final move inland.
The residents of Pointe-aux-Chenes had hoped they would avoid this fate after the completion of the Army Corps’s levee system. The most optimistic residents were saying the bayou was poised for a minor renaissance now that the state had addressed the main driver of migration. The closure of the elementary school dashed these hopes: Pointe-aux-Chenes might be better protected than Isle de Jean Charles from flooding, but in the long run it was destined to suffer the same cycle of disinvestment and depopulation. Decades of erosion had already altered life on the bayou for good. The new levees had arrived too late.
Two members of the United Houma Nation Indian tribe walk around a hurricane-damaged home along Bayou Pointe-au-Chien in May 2022. Gerald Herbert / AP Photo
The Terrebonne Parish School Board convened the next month to take a final vote on the closure. The meeting began with a public comment period during which parents and community members could address the board. The nine members sat Supreme Court–style at a long wooden desk, all arranged to face a single public podium. The residents of the bayou stood up one by one, white and Indigenous, and pleaded with the board to reconsider its decision. A few board members seemed moved by the show of support, but it wasn’t enough: The board voted six to three to shut the school down. The 80-odd students at Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary would attend Montegut Elementary five miles away the following autumn. The tribe’s lawsuit against the parish was still pending, but it didn’t seem likely to succeed, since the board had the authority to manage its school system the way it saw fit.
Among the audience members at the meeting was Mary Verdin, whose husband was Alton Verdin, a tugboat captain and lifelong resident of Pointe-aux-Chenes. Alton’s uncle had been a legendary tribal leader, known for getting in frequent fistfights with white police officers, and in keeping with the labyrinthine family trees of the bayou, Mary was Alton’s fifth cousin on both his mother’s and his father’s side.
Working on a tugboat didn’t bother Alton the way it bothered many other Pointe-aux-Chenes residents who had been forced to give up shrimping and fishing. The tugboat pay had been enough for Alton to support Mary and their seven children, not to mention Mary’s mother, who lived with them and helped them take care of the kids. The family had a one-story brick house on the upper end of the bayou town, the part that had once been off-limits to Indigenous people like them. The wide marshland on the edge of their property sometimes flooded during heavy rains, but the house itself was modern and sturdy, and the family had hunkered down there during several hurricanes. Some of Alton’s older relatives still lived farther down the bayou, in the open-water areas that previous generations of the tribe had called home, but much of Alton and Mary’s extended family had moved up to join them on the solid territory of the mainland.
The school closure hit Mary hard, driving her first to depression and then to anger. Five of her seven children had graduated from the school already, but Gabrielle, the second youngest, still had one more year to go before she graduated to middle school, and Raelynn, the youngest, was just two years old. Mary had always been involved at the school, collecting box tops and Community Coffee proofs of purchase, and they lived close enough that she and Alton could go and have lunch with their daughters when Alton was home from the tugboat. One year Alton had driven his daughter Abigail to a father-daughter dance in a stretch limousine — the drive took, in total, about 30 seconds — and had shown off his traditional Cajun dance moves in the school cafeteria during the talent show. Now all of that would vanish. Gabrielle would finish elementary school in the ancient Montegut Elementary building one town over, with its steep stairs and single set of bathrooms, and Raelynn would never set foot in the school that had witnessed so much history.
To Alton, who had lived in Pointe-aux-Chenes his whole life, it seemed like the levee had arrived too late. With the school closed, the out-migration from the town would become all but irreversible. Who would move down the bayou to start a family, to raise their children, knowing that with every passing year a new rip would appear in the town’s social fabric?
Mary and Alton Verdin
Courtesy of Mary and Alton Verdin
The closure of the school had started to make Alton and Mary doubt their future in Pointe-aux-Chenes. They needed to rip the floors out to fix long-term water damage, which would take thousands of dollars, and Alton wondered whether they should sell the house and find something inland in the nearby cities of Montegut or Houma. Their eldest daughter had just become a real estate agent and was looking for her first commission, so she was helping them scout out houses that might serve as suitable replacements. Both wanted to move, but they didn’t want to leave Pointe-aux-Chenes. Even as the school year began, they were stuck in a holding pattern, waiting for a sign about what they should do.
Gabrielle attended Montegut Elementary for less than two weeks before Hurricane Ida cut her school year short. The storm intensified to the threshold of Category 5 over the course of just three days as it pushed up the Gulf of Mexico, and made landfall a few miles south of Pointe-aux-Chenes with winds of around 150 miles per hour. The parish issued a mandatory evacuation order ahead of the storm, but many hardened bayou residents stayed behind and watched as the wind ripped telephone poles out of the ground and sheared the walls off double-wide trailers. The erosion of the bayou had eliminated the natural protection system that weakened storms as they made landfall, allowing Ida to retain its full strength for far longer than it would have decades earlier.
The devastation on the bayou was total. It took close to a week for the water to drain back out of the town, and when aid workers at last made it all the way down the length of the bayou road, they found that almost no structure had escaped the storm. It would take weeks for the parish to restore electricity and running water, and even longer to drag away the mountains of gnarled debris that lined the side of every road. The sole remaining grocery store sustained so much damage that its owner, Mary’s uncle, decided to shut it down for good. The final insult was that the storm had seemed to confirm the parish board’s decision to shut down Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary. The school in Montegut had survived the storm, but the old white building on the bayou had not. The storm had twisted the structure’s metal roof like a nautilus shell and rolled it out into the street. There were shards of white wood all down the block.
An aerial view of storm damage in the city of Pointe-Aux-Chenes, near montegut, Louisiana on August 30, 2021 after Hurricane Ida made landfall.
Mark Felix / AFP via Getty Images
Alton and Mary’s house was in better condition than many of the trailers and elevated houses around them, but it was far from livable. The roof was in tatters and water had dripped into the bedrooms and the living room. Resource-strapped FEMA wouldn’t arrive with temporary trailers for three months, and Alton’s contractor told him it would take about seven months before his house was fixed. In the meantime, Alton and his family would have to find somewhere else to stay, as would thousands of other people from Pointe-aux-Chenes and elsewhere in Terrebonne Parish.
It might sound counterintuitive, but the storm strengthened Alton and Mary’s resolve to stay on the bayou. They figured if their house had survived Ida, it could survive just about anything, and they didn’t want to abandon their ailing hometown as it began the tortuous recovery process. Unfortunately, it wasn’t up to them: There was almost no livable housing anywhere on the bayou, and certainly none that they could rent on a short-term basis. The storm had walloped the nearby city of Houma, destroying dozens of hotels and apartment complexes, which meant the closest rental they could find was all the way in Mississippi. The owner asked for $900 a month at first, but by the time Mary went to go look at the place he had jacked it up to $1,500, plus a steep deposit. She said she’d rather buy a generator and take her chances back in Pointe-aux-Chenes.
The following summer, as the residents of Pointe-aux-Chenes struggled to make it back to the bayou, the Louisiana state legislature voted unanimously to reopen Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary as a French-language magnet school. The tragedy of the hurricane had inspired lawmakers to override the parish board’s decision and offer the bayou community a new lease on life. Alton, Mary, and the kids returned to their battered house once the power and water came back on, and Gabrielle resumed school at Montegut Elementary, taking some of her classes in trailers.
This story is excerpted from Jake Bittle’s book The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, published by Simon & Schuster. Grist / Jasmine Clarke / Simon & Schuster
Despite the saving grace of the school’s reopening, the recovery has been even longer and more painful than Alton feared. Instead of seven months, it has taken 15 months for the repairs on his house to begin. He and his family are now living in a camper as contractors work on fixing up the property, and even now Alton is still fighting with a supplemental adjuster over the details of the insurance payout. Hundreds of other families on the bayou and elsewhere in Louisiana are in a similar limbo: They can’t yet come back to the homes they lost, but they have nowhere else to go. Many residents are still living with family or in temporary apartments, and haven’t yet made it back to the bayou.
To make matters worse, FEMA will stop distributing temporary housing payments to the victims of Hurricane Ida next week. The agency only dispenses post-disaster aid for 18 months after a storm or fire, and after that it shifts its resources elsewhere, but the recovery in Pointe-aux-Chenes has taken much longer than 18 months, and FEMA’s withdrawal will only stretch it out further. The long process of displacement that began decades ago and has continued through an endless succession of floods is still going on, and there is no reason to think that Alton and Mary have seen the end of it. Even once the school reopens, it will take a long time before Pointe-aux-Chenes gets back to the way it was, if it ever does.
Nevertheless, the Verdins are hunkering down, trying to hold on a little longer.
This story was reported and produced in collaboration with High Country News.
Last fall, following a 20-year campaign led by tribal organizers, the federal government ordered the removal of four dams on the Klamath River, which flows from Oregon to California. For almost a century, these dams have prevented the river’s salmon from swimming upstream to spawn.
The dams will be gone by next year, but now the salmon, including endangered coho, are facing a renewed threat from farther upstream. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which controls another set of dams on the Klamath, announced last week that it will cut flows on the river to historic lows, drying out the river and likely killing salmon farther downstream.
“The bureau’s proposal will kill salmon, and there’s no question about it,” said Amy Cordalis, general counsel for and citizen of the Yurok Tribe. “These are some of the lowest flows the Klamath River has ever seen.” Cordalis said that the last time the river faced such low flows was 2002, when the Klamath saw the largest fish kill in U.S. history. That eliminated a generation of salmon, leading to economic devastation for the West Coast fishing industry.
Instead of letting the water flow downstream, Reclamation plans to hold it back in Upper Klamath Lake, which feeds the river. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sets minimum water levels to keep endangered c’waam and koptu, or suckerfish, alive, and Reclamation said it will hold back water so it can meet those minimum levels.
In the past few years, as drought in Oregon and California lowered water levels on the Klamath, Reclamation struggled to manage the competing needs of the salmon and the suckers: If the suckers get the water, the salmon die, and if the salmon get the water, the suckers die. Reclamation’s management of the river pits salmon and the Yurok and Karuk tribes that protect them in the lower Klamath basin against suckerfish and the Klamath Tribes that protect them in the upper basin.
Not only will the flow cuts endanger the salmon in the lower basin, they may not save the suckers either.
“I think it’s too little, too late,” said Clayton Dumont, the chairman of the Klamath Tribes, whose territory extends across the upper Klamath Basin. “C’waam and koptu need a certain amount of water over them to escape predation, and we don’t believe that the bureau’s cut is sufficient.” In other words, even as Reclamation dries out the salmon’s habitat, they may also fail to protect the suckers’ habitat, barring strong rain for the remainder of the winter. Dumont said this could be the fourth year in a row that lake levels fall too low for the suckerfish to survive.
But salmon and suckerfish aren’t the only ones using the basin’s water. Some tribal leaders say Reclamation manufactured the salmon-suckerfish dilemma to obscure where the water is really going: crops, which use hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of Klamath River water annually.
“This has more to do with potatoes than it does fish,” said Karuk Tribal Council Member Troy Hockaday. “What the bureau is not saying is that the water savings will make it more likely that irrigation deliveries will be available to water users.”
The basin has more than 200,000 acres of irrigated farmland, between 10,000 and 14,000 of which are dedicated to potatoes, an Indigenous food originally engineered from a toxic wild root by Andean horticulturists. Roughly three quarters of the basin’s potato yield go to companies like Frito Lay for potato chips, and In-N-Out Burger for fries, according to the Klamath Water Users Association.
Tribes say the scale of the Klamath Basin’s agricultural project is unsustainable. “We just cannot support a 220,000-acre irrigation project anymore, and we have to find a way to downsize that project,” said Craig Tucker, natural resources policy consultant for the Karuk Tribe. “I don’t think we should kick people off their farms and destroy their livelihood. There should be a just, fair way to buy out willing sellers, compensate people at fair market value. But we cannot farm in the 21st century like we did in the 20th, because the weather is just not the same.”
Cordalis said that part of the reason for the salmon-and-suckerfish dilemma is that Reclamation released more water for agriculture last year than was necessary.
“What that did was it drove down the lake really, really far, and so we are essentially starting with an empty bathtub,” she said. “And so, then what [the bureau is] doing is saying, ‘oh, no, we don’t have enough for species…and so now we have to decide, which fish are we going to kill?’ And they’ve decided it’s the coho this year.”
“The Klamath Basin is facing the real potential for a fourth consecutive year of extraordinarily dry conditions,” said a Reclamation spokesperson. “Reclamation’s proactive measures to adaptively manage Klamath River flows are designed to create springtime conditions that mitigate risks to species and the environment, while we also work with agricultural communities.”
Diverting water from the basin and leaving tribes to scramble on behalf of the fish they’re duty-bound to protect continues the old colonial strategy of divisiveness, the Yurok Tribe’s Vice Chairman Frankie Meyers said.
“We should instead be focused on meaningful restoration of the wetlands that accommodated the needs of sucker and salmon for millennia that were sacrificed on the altar of Manifest Destiny,” he said.
Irrigators in the Klamath Basin don’t necessarily disagree. Moss Driscoll, director of water policy at the Klamath Water Users Association, said basin-wide solutions could include restoring other wetlands and reservoirs in the area, such as Tule Lake, that supplement agricultural water needs. This could free up Klamath water for endangered fish. “The farming community is working on opportunities to manage water in new and creative ways that can restore the function of the landscape, in a manner that supports wildlife, fish, the environment and farming alike,” Driscoll said.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is weighing a large restoration project on Upper Klamath Lake that would convert 18,000 acres of ranchland back into natural wetlands, expanding the safe habitat for c’waam and koptu.
As the removal of the river’s four non-irrigating dams looms, the focus is on long-term solutions for whole watershed health. To that end, the Fish and Wildlife Service, in collaboration with other stakeholders including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, and the Klamath River Renewal Corporation (which is in charge of dam removal), have outlined a strategy to identify and address the “root causes” of watershed degradation.
But to tribes, the root cause of this fish-and-chips disaster is clear. “We’re just not gonna have fish in the future if we don’t reduce irrigation demand,” said Tucker. “We’re going to have to change the way we eat, and we’re gonna have to change agriculture a little bit.”
In June, state security forces in the United Republic of Tanzania engaged in a violent eviction campaign against Indigenous Maasai, shooting them and driving them from their lands. The attack took place in Loliondo in northern Tanzania near the Kenyan border. Dozens of Maasai were injured, some fleeing to Kenya to seek medical attention, while others were arrested.
The violence was the Tanzanian government’s latest move in a years-long campaign to remove the Maasai and make way for game reserves, protected areas, and tourism. Amid months of increasing state violence and persecution, Maasai leaders have called for urgent international attention and intervention.
So when Salangat Mako, a Maasai leader, heard that the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights was going to make a monitoring visit to Tanzania, he felt like his prayers had finally been answered. Mako was chosen alongside five other community members to speak to the Commission on their planned visit to Loliondo.
Throughout the day, Mako and other community members rehearsed their statements, skipping lunch, and growing excited every time they heard a car approach. But late in the afternoon, they received news that the Commission was not coming to Loliondo. “The little hope that was ignited in the morning vanished in a second, replaced by desperation and hopelessness,” Mako said.
Angry and disappointed, Mako wanted to find another way to get his message out. Samwel Nangiria, another Maasai leader, decided to film a video of Mako.
“I have become a thief in my own land,” Mako said in the video. “A community depending on livestock, without grazing land. Where is our future? Where is our tomorrow? Where will our children be?”
Nangiria and Mako sent the video to the Commission and other activists. Some posted the video on social media, hoping that the Commission and the world would pay attention. Instead, government officials came to Loliondo the next day, and announced that they planned to arrest Mako and whoever filmed and shared the video. Mako has since fled to Kenya. Nangiria is in hiding.
Still from a video of Salangat Mako speaking in Loliondo. Mako has since fled to Kenya after being threatened with arrest for speaking out.
Samwel Nangiria
The Maasai say the violence and persecution they face are the result of domestic and international conservation policies — a years-long effort by the Tanzanian government to destroy Indigenous ways of life, and drive tens of thousands of Maasai off their land to establish game reserves, reach global conservation goals, and support tourism.
When Tanzania created Serengeti National Park in the mid-20th century, Maasai pastoralists living there were forced to relocate. Many moved to the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a mixed-use piece of land to the east that is home to about 70,000 Maasai. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the country’s largest tourist attraction, drawing over half a million visitors each year.
In 2019, the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) urged Tanzania to develop a plan to limit population growth in the park, saying it was a threat to conservation efforts and the “value” of the park. The Tanzanian government responded by cutting access to services and resources for Maasai in an attempt to force them out of the area. Although many Maasai have remained in the park, they face increasing pressure to make way for international tourists who pay thousands of dollars for safaris.
Many Maasai who were evicted from the Serengeti also relocated to Loliondo, a district north of Ngorongoro on the Kenyan border, where they have legally protected village land. But in 1992, the Tanzanian government granted a hunting block in Loliondo, the Pololeti Game Reserve, to a United Arab Emirates-based luxury safari company. Since then, the Maasai say the government has repeatedly attempted to force them from their land. In June of 2022, the violent attack by state security forces left dozens of people injured and arrested – prompting Salangat Mako and other Maasai leaders to request international observers and support.
Sources: UNEP-WCMC and IUCN (2023), Oakland Institute, Pingos Forum, OCHA HDX, Joseph Oleshangay, Just Conservation
Grist / Maria Parazo Rose
At the time, the African Commission publicly called for a halt to evictions: “The African Commission is gravely concerned that the forcibly [sic] uprooting of the affected communities entails grave danger to various rights of the members of the communities.”
The Maasai say the most recent visit from Africa’s highest human rights protection body is a government-controlled sham, and the Commission’s visit comes on the heels of a scuttled United Nations trip. In December of 2022, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay, was scheduled for a week-long visit to Tanzania. Days before Calí Tzay was scheduled to arrive, the Maasai say the visit was postponed out of fear that the government would not allow an independent investigation. The Special Rapporteur had no comment on the matter and would neither confirm nor deny the reason for the trip’s cancellation.
The Maasai are now calling for a new, independent visit by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, or any international observer for that matter, to investigate the decades-long campaign to remove the Maasai from their homelands. They’re not optimistic. “Our government can control anyone who is coming to our rescue,” Nangiria said.
Based in the Republic of The Gambia, the African Commission was established by an international human rights agreement that over 50 African countries, including Tanzania, have adopted. The Commission, however, does not have enforcement power and cannot compel countries to accept its recommendations.
In a draft communique from the Commission’s visit obtained by Grist, the Commission’s observers express concerns about the government’s relationship and treatment of Maasai people, but generally applaud the government for “providing ample access to the agro-pastoral communities,” and highlights that the Maasai enjoy more complete recognition of their rights under the Tanzanian government as opposed to previous colonial government administered by the British.
But Samwel Nangiria believes the system persecuting Maasai has not changed. “The colonial government initiated it and the independent government inherited and carried it forward,” he said.
The latest attacks on the Maasai have come in the form of cattle seizures by state security forces. Since June, the government has seized or shot over 10,000 Maasai cows and collected over $2.5 million in fines. “Every corner that the Maasai pastoralists are there, the government is seizing livestock in a manner never seen before,” said Joseph Oleshangay, a lawyer representing Maasai in several cases against the government.
Sources: UNEP-WCMC and IUCN (2023), Oakland Institute, Pingos Forum, OCHA HDX
Grist / Maria Parazo Rose
The Tanzanian government says that Maasai pastoralism is detrimental to conservation efforts inside the UNESCO site, but research shows maintaining pasture lands is good for biodiversity in Ngorongoro. Growing research, including from the IUCN, reveals that the protection of grazing land is one of the most important adaptive strategies for climate change.
“The driving force for our elimination is colonial conservation, a conservation that knows only the guns, military and money,” Nangiria said. “The colonial governments and their allies, particularly wildlife lobby groups, are still extending serious influences on how conservation is carried out in Africa.”
Mathew Bukhi Mabele, a conservation social scientist at the University of Dodoma in central Tanzania, says that if the government truly cared about conservation, they would focus on reducing invasive species and limiting tourism, both of which contribute to biodiversity issues in Ngorongoro. “The thing about revenue generation is they don’t think about the consequences of having such a large number of tourists per day,” he said.
Neither representatives from the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights nor the Tanzanian government responded to requests for comment on this story.
Maasai men and their cattle in Msomera.
AFP via Getty Images
Maasai allege that at every step, the Commission was accompanied by state security forces who intimidated Maasai people, excluded them from meetings, and threatened those who spoke up about ongoing human rights abuses.
Maasai lawyer Joseph Oleshangay says that the government prevented the Commission from visiting Maasai in Loliondo while residents of Msomera, a village many Maasai are being relocated to, also say they were prevented from participating in meetings with the Commission. Oleshangay also alleges that Commission members traveled with officials that have been accused of directing violent evictions, further preventing victims from interacting with human rights observers.
“How on earth can you ride in those vehicles?” Oleshangay said. “We feel like they are being used by the government to justify that nothing happened.”
During the visit, nine community organizations wrote multiple letters directly to the Commission. “The state party succeeded to divert the Commission from meeting indigenous peoples independently without the presence of government machinery as agreed and planned for,” reads one communication. “Hence rendering the Commission powerless to collect, analyze and consequently objectively report on human rights situation in those sites.”
In response, the Commission offered to conduct additional meetings with Maasai via Zoom, however, Oleshangay says the offer is the equivalent of being denied a consultation. “To many of the Maasai on the ground, internet is not available,” Oleshangay said.
Tanzania’s treatment of Maasai has come under increasing scrutiny from international observers. Over the last ten years, United Nations Special Rapporteurs have issued seven communications expressing concern over the treatment of Maasai, and in June, nine U.N. human rights experts called on Tanzania to immediately halt plans to relocate Maasai communities. In a letter, the experts warned that the removals “could amount to dispossession, forced eviction and arbitrary displacement prohibited under international law.”
The Oakland Institute and Survival International, two nonprofits that advocate for Indigenous rights, called on UNESCO and the IUCN to sever ties with Tanzania and remove Ngorongoro from the UNESCO World Heritage Site list. The UNESCO World Heritage Center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The African Commission’s Tanzania delegation is expected to file a final report on their visit to the full Commission and submit findings to the Tanzanian government, but based on the delegation’s initial communique, the Maasai expect shortcomings: the findings only briefly mention the Maasai’s allegations of cattle seizures, and only vaguely mentions concerns about relocations. Samwel Nangiria says that the delegation’s communique is “far from the reality.”
Mathew Bukhi Mabele at the University of Dodoma isn’t hopeful that the Commission can push back against the powerful conservation interests driving the Tanzanian government’s campaign against the Maasai. “They are very much powerless when it comes to these international forces pushing certain agendas,” he said.
Maasai wait for the African Commission in Loliondo.
Samwel Nangiria
When he heard that the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay, would not be visiting in December, Samwel Nangiria was devastated. Now, seeing what happened with the African Commission, he thinks that it was the right decision. “We are grateful that the Special Rapporteur couldn’t be manipulated,” he said.
While the Maasai have called on the Commission to return and conduct a new, fully independent visit, leaders say they have few options. Leaders like Nangiria and Salangat Mako are in hiding, United Nations observers have been sidelined, and, to victims, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights appears to be rubber-stamping the Tanzanian government’s actions.
Nangiria said he sometimes feels guilty for sharing the video considering the attention it drew from authorities and the impact it had on Mako, but Mako has no regrets. “My heart spoke that day,” he said.
Now, the rest of the world has to do their part, Mako said. Especially tourists whose presence continues to drive the campaign against the Maasai.
“We need your voice. We are losing breath,” he said. “Please come to our rescue.”
In early February, 15 First Nations and the Canadian government announced a new plan for a network of marine protected areas on Canada’s west coast. The Marine Protected Areas Network Action Plan for the Northern Shelf Bioregion provides a strategy to create protected areas that will safeguard more than two hundred species of fish, marine birds, marine mammals, and invertebrates in the region. It will also help preserve a coastline that stretches from Vancouver Island to the Canada-Alaska border.
“This is a significant achievement in Canada’s commitments,” said Joyce Murray, Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard. “Only by working together at all levels can we achieve Canada’s marine conservation targets.”
The Canadian government has committed to protecting 30 percent of its oceans by the end of the decade; one part of the international goal known as 30X30 to protect biodiversity and reverse climate change by protecting 30 percent of the planet by 2030. But a new report says to meet this goal, Canada has to make more efforts to include First Nations in its national marine conservation plans.
The report from the Assembly of First Nations, a national advocacy organization that represents First Nations governments and their citizens, also says Canada must provide more support for existing Indigenous conservation initiatives, like establishing Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas, or IPCAs – lands and water managed and conserved by First Nations and communities. Indigenous land management protects biodiversity and benefits the environment, as does the recognition of Indigenous territory and rights.
The report provides a list of recommendations to support those IPCAs, including establishing cultural objectives alongside ecological goals, and hiring more First Nations staff. The Assembly of First Nations also says more structure, investment, and support for conservation efforts are necessary to help Canada meet its human rights and climate commitments.
“A whole-of-government approach is necessary to provide more certainty for First Nations’ stewardship of their lands and waters,” the report says.
“Our Nations have a solid track record proving that Indigenous-led conservation works for nature and for people,” said Dallas Smith, Board President of Nanwakolas Council Society. “As we tackle the urgent challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change, this is the model the world needs now.”
In 2019, oil and gas companies operating on tribal and federal lands lost $63 million in revenue from venting, flaring, and leaking infrastructure. That loss, according to a report from the Environmental Defense Fund and Taxpayers for Common Sense, shows that Indigenous nations lost the most potential royalty revenue: approximately $21.8 million. Researchers say that total loss across all lands represents enough natural gas to power 2.2 million households for a year – almost every home in New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming combined. However, those numbers are likely much higher: researchers did not include emissions from Alaska, Michigan, Nebraska, Illinois, or Indiana.
Gas is wasted when it is released directly into the atmosphere through venting, or burned at the site of extraction by flaring, or when it leaks from aging or ill-fitting infrastructure. As a potent greenhouse gas with warming power 80-times that of carbon dioxide, methane is often released with additional air pollutants. Those emissions contribute heavily to climate change and poor healthcare outcomes for local communities.
Synapse Energy Economics, the consulting firm that conducted the analysis, found that 54 percent of the gas lost in 2019 was due to flaring, 46 percent to leaks, and less than 1 percent to venting. Researchers found that on federal lands, a majority of natural gas is lost to leaks while on tribal land, most loss is attributed to flaring. Overall, roughly $275 million worth of gas is lost through flaring.
Wasted methane shortchanges the royalties that tribal, state and federal governments collect for oil and gas production that often fund priorities like education, infrastructure and public services. According to the report, while tribal governments lost the most potential revenue, states lost $20.5 million and the federal government lost $21.3 million. Additional research showed that flaring rates on Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation lands atop the oil-rich Bakken formation were extremely high compared to public and tribal lands outside of North Dakota. Lost royalties from the MHA Nation totaled an estimated $19 million.
“We can’t continue to allow half a billion dollars’ worth of taxpayer-owned resources to go to waste every year,” Jon Goldstein, a senior director at the Environmental Defense Fund, said in a press release. “The Biden administration has a clear opportunity to step up with strong rules that stop waste and pollution from practices like routine flaring to protect the public interest. These resources should benefit priorities like education and infrastructure, not be released into the atmosphere to undermine our climate and health.”
The report comes in the wake of two proposed rulings from the EPA and the Bureau of Land Management aimed at reducing methane waste. Both proposals were issued last November and the EPA is accepting public comment on their proposal until February 13th.
Goldstein said that the two proposed rulings target methane emissions from different lenses. The EPA ruling operates with a “pollution-oriented focus”, while the BLM ruling, which would target only federal and tribal lands, has a “waste-oriented focus”. Together, the two strategies offer complementary solutions to reduce emissions, but Goldstein says that a crucial, missing provision is to limit how much gas can be flared in the first place.
“There should be guardrails that narrowly define conditions flares are allowed in,” Goldstein said. “[Otherwise], it just becomes the cost of doing business. Oil and gas companies just write a check and continue to flare and waste.”
It is the tradition of inaugurations in Brazil for the incoming president to ascend the ramp of the Planalto Palace, the country’s equivalent to the West Wing of the White House, and receive the presidential sash from the outgoing head of state. The gesture is meant to symbolize a peaceful transition of power. In the inauguration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which took place on January 1, things were a little different. In a final emulation of his political idol Donald Trump, the outgoing president, Jair Bolsonaro, often referred to as the “Trump of the tropics,” was absent. He had flown to Orlando, Florida, two days earlier for an extended vacation.
Instead, Lula used the moment to send a political message. He chose to walk the ramp with a small group of individuals meant to represent those his government will prioritize. Among them was the 90-year-old Indigenous leader Raoni Metukitire, of the Amazonian Kayapó people. Bolsonaro had attacked Raoni in a 2019 United Nations General Assembly speech, accusing him of being a pawn of foreign governments and NGOs that seek to undermine development in the Brazilian Amazon. Raoni’s presence at the Planalto signaled that Indigenous rights and protection of the environment will be high on Lula’s new presidential agenda.
“Our goal is to reach zero deforestation and zero greenhouse gas emissions in our electrical grid,” Lula said in his inaugural address to Congress, adding that Bolsonaro’s government had “destroyed environmental protections.”
Brazil’s new President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva stands next to Indigenous leader and environmentalist Raoni Metuktire at his inauguration on January 1.
Sergio Lima / AFP via Getty Images
The diagnosis is an accurate one. Over four years, Bolsonaro dismantled environmental regulations, much of it through executive action, and gutted federal agencies tasked with enforcing environmental laws. His actions and rhetoric emboldened illegal miners and loggers, who felt they could act with impunity. Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest spiked 60 percent during Bolsonaro’s presidency, the highest relative increase since the beginning of measurements by satellite in 1988.
The preservation of the Amazon is crucial to the climate crisis. The rainforest was once the world’s greatest carbon sink, but because of forest clearing fires and degradation caused by rising temperatures, there are large regions of the Amazon today that emit more carbon than they absorb. The situation could get substantially worse. Studies show that if 20 to 25 percent of the Amazon is deforested, the biome would no longer be able to sustain itself. This would trigger an irreversible process of dieback that could turn the forest into a savannah in a matter of decades. Currently, 15 to 17 percent of the Amazon has already vanished.
Lula served two previous terms as president between 2003 and 2011. During this time, in stark contrast to Bolsonaro’s tenure, deforestation in the Amazon fell by a historic 67 percent. Marina Silva, a well-known environmental activist and politician in Brazil, led this crackdown as Lula’s Minister of the Environment. Silva will once again hold that office, but environmentalists say this time around the government will have to rebuild Brazilian environmental policy virtually from the ground up if it is to achieve comparable results.
The first step will be to reverse many of the changes Bolsonaro enacted though executive action. This process has already begun. On his first day in office, Lula issued a series of decrees that overturned some of Bolsonaro’s most egregious changes to environmental regulations. He reinstated environmental funding programs, restructured key agencies that had been hollowed out, and reestablished the government’s anti-deforestation plan, which had been discontinued by Bolsonaro. But there is much more work to be done.
“It’s a scorched earth scenario,” said Suely Araújo, referring to the environmental regulatory apparatus that Lula inherited from his predecessor. Araújo is a senior specialist in public policy at Observatório do Clima, a coalition of climate-focused civil society organizations. She spent the last months of 2022 working with Lula’s transition team, prepping the first steps in what is expected to be a long process of recovery. “It will take longer to rebuild these institutions than it did to destroy them.”
Early in his administration, Bolsonaro tried to dissolve the Ministry of the Environment entirely, but was unable to do so due to backlash from civil society and Congress. Instead, his administration’s strategy became to weaken the country’ scientific and environmental institutions from within. Describing this process during a ruling about a slew of changes to environmental policy by Bolsonaro’s government, a Brazilian Supreme Court Justice evoked the image of a termite infestation eating away at environmental protection agencies from the inside out.
Environmentalist and former Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva speaks at a conference in 2019, where she called deforestation under the Bolsonaro administration “out of control.” Silva is stepping back into the role of minister under President Lula.
Juan Barreto/AFP via Getty Image
Shortly after Bolsonaro took office in 2019, Natalie Unterstell, of the watchdog group Política por Inteiro, began monitoring executive actions that had an impact on deforestation and climate change. “They were pressing buttons that sent shocks through the entire system,” she said.
Unterstell began this monitoring effort alone, keeping an updated spreadsheet, but the process soon became overwhelming due to sheer quantity. She enlisted the help of data scientists and developed an algorithm that would scrape the daily government bulletin, pinpointing the decrees that merited closer attention. In four years, Política Por Inteiro identified 2,189 executive acts that are “relevant to climate and socio-environmental policy.”
2,189
The number of executive actions taken by Jair Bolsonaro and his administration to unravel Brazil’s “climate and socio-environmental policy.”
Many of the early decrees involved institutional reform. Offices and task forces within the executive branch that had climate change or deforestation in the name were simply eliminated. Regulatory agencies were transferred wholesale from the Ministry of the Environment and put under the purview of sectors they were supposed to regulate. The Forestry Service for example, which manages nature reserves, became an agency of the Ministry of Agriculture. The National Water Agency, which regulates water resources and use, was transferred to the Ministry of Regional Development.
Bolsonaro also named loyalists friendly to logging, mining, and agribusiness interests to head key environmental agencies like the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable and Natural Resources, also known as IBAMA, the main agency involved in monitoring and enforcing laws against deforestation.
Three months into his presidency, Bolsonaro issued a decree that froze the Amazon Fund. The fund, which is bankrolled by foreign governments, aims to support Brazil’s efforts to preserve its forest and is a crucial source of financing for IBAMA. The move possibly deprived Brazil of $20 billion in funding for environmental conservation projects, according to a report from the government’s own comptroller.
A critical element of the government’s strategy was to remove civil society and the scientific community from the environmental regulatory process. In 2019, Ricardo Salles, Bolsonaro’s Minister of the Environment, issued orders that restructured the National Environment Council, or CONAMA, a body that makes key decisions relating to environmental policy in Brazil. CONAMA was traditionally composed of a diverse group of stakeholders, including business interests, scientists, NGOs, Indigenous groups, and federal, state, and local representatives. Salles downsized the council and in doing so cut seats belonging to non-business civil society organizations from 11 to 4, giving them less proportional representation.
“They would bring four or five decisions up for a vote at once, and the councils were weakened so they had the opportunity approve whatever they wanted,” said Unterstell.
The system of environmental fines, which was already inefficient before Bolsonaro took office, suffered significant changes. Operations to curb deforestation began to be executed primarily by the military instead of IBAMA, an agency with decades of expertise in combating environmental crimes and the power to fine illegal deforesters. Even though the military reportedly spent $110 million to monitor roads and rivers in the Amazon region — roughly 10 times the yearly budget for IBAMA — deforestation rates skyrocketed. An investigation by the Climate Policy Initiative and World Wildlife Fund showed environmental fines decreased by almost a third during the Bolsonaro administration when compared to 2015 levels. The government also created a convoluted appeals process which in practice ground the entire system to a halt, resulting in fines being paid at an even lower rate than before. From 2019 through 2021, 98 percent of IBAMA fines went unpaid.
“The message was that if you commit environmental crimes you don’t need to worry because the chances that you will be held accountable are minimal,” said Unterstell.
During the pandemic the pace of deregulation accelerated. In a leaked video of a cabinet meeting in 2020, Salles, the country’s then-environment minister, urged his colleagues to use the global crisis as an opportunity. “We need to make an effort while we are in this calm moment in terms of press coverage, because they are only talking about COVID, and push through and change all the rules and simplify the norms,” he was heard saying in the video.
Aerial view shows a deforested area of Amazon rainforest in Labrea, Amazonas state, Brazil, in 2021.
Mauro Pimentel/AFP via Getty Images
Among other significant changes to environmental norms was a directive from IBAMA, then-led by pro-industry Bolsonaro supporters, that loosened proof of origin documentation requirements for exported wood (later struck down by the Supreme Federal Court), and a presidential decree that encouraged mining in Indigenous territory. The government was changing regulations as late as December 2022, weeks after Bolsonaro’s loss in the polls, when IBAMA issued a measure that allowed for logging on Indigenous lands as well.
Lula might have gotten started on Day 1 in reversing many of these environmentally harmful policies, but scientists and environmentalists warn that results will take time. It is one thing to commit changes to paper and another to implement them on the ground.
“There are major trends of illegality that need to be reversed and a whole rebuilding process that has to happen. We won’t be seeing 2012 levels of deforestation in six months or a year,” Araújo told Grist, referring to the year with the lowest deforestation rate since records began in 1988. “The government will face a resistance that was not as strong back in 2003.”
Today’s Amazon is a very different place than the one Lula encountered when he began his first term as president. Brazil as a whole is significantly more polarized and much of the Amazon region is led by governors and mayors who align themselves with Bolsonaro. When Lula won the election in October 2022, Bolsonaro supporters blocked roads and highways to protest what they understood, without evidence, to be a stolen election. Many of these protests occurred in the Amazon’s frontiers of deforestation, such as the town of Novo Progresso in the state of Pará. “Bolsonaro created a bellicosity in the population,” Araújo said.
This tension came to high pitch on January 8, when Bolsonaro supporters, bused into the capital Brasília from all over the country, stormed and vandalized Congress, the Supreme Federal Court, and the presidential offices. Speaking after the events of that day, Lula speculated: “Many who were in Brasília today could have been illegal miners or illegal loggers.”
The Amazon has also become a more violent and lawless place. While homicides in Brazil overall have been declining since 2018, they have been on the rise in the Amazon. If the Brazilian Amazon were a country, it would have the fourth highest homicide rate in the world. Some of this can be attributed to the increasing presence of organized crime groups in the region, who have become involved in illegal mining, logging, and fishing operations and use the region’s waterways as drug trafficking routes. This trend became international news last year with the murders of Guardian journalist Dom Phillips and the Indigenous activist Bruno Pereira.
In addition to these challenges, Lula will face fierce opposition in Congress from politicians friendly to agribusiness and mining interests. Having been elected by a thin margin, he has limited political capital to spend. Some are wary that the administration’s commitment to protecting the Amazon will waver over time. Although the rise in deforestation was much more pronounced during the Bolsonaro years, it began under the administration of Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s handpicked successor after he left office in 2010.
Still, it is widely expected that deforestation rates will be declining by the end of Lula’s now third term as President of Brazil. “We can be sure of that,” said Araújo. “All it takes is for environmental protection agencies to be allowed to do their job.”
If you want to see some examples of actual Indigenous futuristic filmmaking, may I suggest you look somewhere besides James Cameron?
There’s the Cree-Metis’ filmmaker Danis Goulet’s recent Night Raiders or the late Mi’kmaw filmmaker Jeff Barnaby’s extremely timely last film, Blood Quantum, released for streaming near the beginning of the COVID pandemic.
Both of those films look at and reframe Indigenous history through an Indigenous perspective: boarding school trauma in the case of Night Raiders and the unique relationship Indigenous people have with foreign disease (think smallpox) in the case of Blood Quantum. Both films speak to issues that affect and have affected Indian Country.
If you want to see a white man’s version of an Indigenous futurism film, however, then the local multiplex showing Avatar: The Way of Water is the way to go.
That said, the plot of what some call Avatar 2 is simple enough: the earth is dying, humans need resources, and this requires a complete takeover of the planet Pandora, which also requires the “taming” of the Indigenous inhabitants, the Na’vi.
Former Avatar and now transformed into a full Na’vi, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and family are driven out of their homelands by Sully’s former military colleague Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who’s also gone full Na’vi and is set on revenge. Sully is intent on protecting his family from further danger. Why is he running? Is it white guilt? He claims it’s to protect his Indigenous clan, yet his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) wants to fight.
The Sully family fly far out to sea where they meet Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), the chief of the Māori-inspired Metkayina clan. The Metkayina are slow to accept them in their territories (the Sullys can’t swim well and their tails are too small) yet eventually take the Sullys in as one of their own and in time will join together in the fight against the approaching earth intruders, the Sky People.
Cameron’s latest is a curious mixture of surface Indigeneity signified from a white man’s perspective: long braids and dreadlocks attached to foreign bodies, the bodies laden with “exotic” ta moko-style tattoos. Ten-feet-tall men and women with large eyes and elfin ears are set in exotic alien locales that bring to mind fantasy artist Frank Frazetta or certain Lakota friends I’ve met. On top of all this is the connection these beings, the Na’vi, have with respect to the land and its inhabitants. It’s fantasy Indigeneity.
It’s hard not to be skeptical of Cameron’s grasp of the Indigenous material he’s appropriating here. Sure, you can make up anything you want in a fantastical tale and even have your left-leaning cake too. There are no rules to filmmaking or art in general, and if you have the funding, the world is your oyster. One can create a world where we can see white men’s myopia in regard to the environment; a story of materialism and colonialism where the consequences of a hunger and thirst for money and resources are displayed from beginning to end. Where’s the fault in that?
The fault is that James Cameron can travel the world, do the “research,” hire Indigenous film legends like Wes Studi (Cherokee) in the first Avatar movie and Cliff Curtis (Maori) and Jermaine Clement (Maori) in Avatar 2, but he can’t escape who he is: a filmmaker who told the Guardian in 2010 that his inspiration in making the first Avatar film was based on the Lakota Sioux.
“I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future … and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation … because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society — which is what is happening now — they would have fought a lot harder.”
Cameron’s comments are tone-deaf, condescending, and not the kind of ally I want or need to help tell Indigenous stories. It’s one thing to read and research about a culture; it’s quite another to be of it. Perhaps that’s why there’s a boycott of the film currently underway by many Indigenous groups, one of which is led by Asdzáá Tłʼéé honaaʼéí, a Navajo artist and co-chair of Indigenous Pride Los Angeles.
The arresting animation includes this creature in Avatar: The Way of Water.
20th Century Studios
The animation in Avatar: The Way of Water is visually stunning. The animals in particular — I’ll call them sea beasts and air beasts — are very lifelike, with shadows and texture, and many have souls and thoughts of their own and communicate these with the Na’vi. The concept (much like the film) walks a fine line between being corny and magical, and you just have to go with the concept, should you buy into it. One thinks if you paid the ticket to be in the theater, you’re ready to take the ride. I viewed the film as a ride, once in a 3D IMAX theater and once in a regular theater. As someone with glasses, I have to say that I think I enjoyed the film better without the 3D accouterment (also there’s less danger of smearing popcorn butter on your clunky 3D glasses).
The thesis of the film, in the midst of the various subplots, exotic character names, and Pandora versions of whales and sharks and fascinating technology, seems to be: family first. In this case it’s the Sully family fighting against the elements and their enemies to persevere on the frontier.
Sully (a Marine in his former human life) and his sons communicate to each other in military speak and it’s a bit cringey; his sons reply with “yes sir” to their father not as a sign of respect but because that’s just the way they relate to each other; they are sons in their father’s army. It’s a Sully family quirk. Is this wrong? Not necessarily, but it’s certainly jarring to hear in a family supposedly influenced by Indigenous culture.
And while not totally off topic, the poor white kid the Sully family has adopted, Spider (kind of a mix of the feral kid in Mad Max and gas station-era Justin Bieber), is often forgotten or left low on the priority list of the family. The mother practically despises him and he knows it. The lack of respect the Sully clan have for their human adoptee becomes comical as the movie progresses.
At 3 hours and 10 minutes, the film needs a more aggressive editor. Though the time in Metkayina territories provides a nice backstory, we probably don’t need to spend as much time exploring this new Na’vi version of Maoriland. I was intrigued by the updated western movie influences: trains are derailed by Comanche, er, I mean Na’vi, and pillaged for modern weaponry, the Sky people view the Na’vi as hindrances to “progress,” the Sully family is seen as dirty “half-breeds,” half sky people, half Na’vi.
A film like this takes a lot of money to make, and as such is a technological marvel. Still, I’m left wondering, what if a producer just gave a Maori-inspired project like this to an actual Indigenous filmmaker, perhaps an actual Māori filmmaker like Taika Waititi, and we had an actual Indigenous filmmaker tell the story instead of a story told through the lens of a white guy updating colonial western movie tropes? What would that look like? And why are we watching an Indigenous story again through a white man’s (3D) lens? Well, the obvious answer is James Cameron has the money to make it. But when do Indigenous people get to make something like this?
Or maybe the better question is: Is this the type of thing Indigenous people would even want to make?
There are plenty of real-life issues that affect Indigenous people in 2022. The upcoming Supreme Court ICWA decision regarding whether Indigenous adoptees get to stay with Indigenous families or not comes to mind. We have water issues (which this film ironically has nothing to do with), of course colonialism is ever-present and the fight for resources is always in play, but do we need a white guy to dress these issues up in the world of fantasy where 10-foot-tall aliens fight “hard enough” to save the day to prove that we aren’t after all a “dead-end society”? Perhaps Indigenous futurism should be left in the hands of actual Indigenous filmmakers who know and can tell these stories?
When the first Avatar came out in 2009, I actually enjoyed it. The technology was shiny and new, there were less Indigenous stories on film, perhaps I even asked less of the type of Indigeneity I saw on the screen; times have changed. In 2022 we had three Indigenous-led TV shows in the United States: Rutherford Falls, Reservation Dogs, and Dark Winds. Reservation Dogs alone had at least half a dozen Indigenous directors in its ranks. The time has come for Indigenous directors to re-make these westerns and continue making our own Indigenous futurism films in our own image, to flip the script, tease the tropes, put Indian before Cowboy. We have enough proven talent at this point and don’t need out-of-touch, privileged directors like James Cameron to appropriate Indigenous culture for his stories. We can tell our own stories. We tell them better.
Jason Asenap is a Comanche and Muscogee Creek writer, critic, and filmmaker based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Nearly 200 nations reached a milestone agreement early Monday morning to protect biodiversity, pledging action on more than 20 targets spanning from land conservation to invasive species to pesticide use in an effort to stem the rapid deterioration of nature world-wide.
The global accord, brokered at the latest United Nations’ biodiversity conference in Montreal, Canada, comes at a critical time: A recent U.N. report found that plants, animals, and ecosystems are declining at an “unprecedented” rate due to human activity, and that around 1 million species could go extinct within decades.
The convention’s headline goal — to protect 30 percent of the planet’s land and waters by the year 2030 — received the most floor time over the meeting’s two-week run. The target comes from famed biologist E.O. Wilson, who argued that to reverse the extinction crisis, half of the planet must be set aside “for nature.” Some countries, like Colombia and the United States (the only country besides the Vatican that is not an official member of the international Convention on Biological Diversity), had already begun implementing a scaled-down version of the goal, dubbed “30×30,” within their own borders. Now, however, countries have a new global pact, known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, for protecting land and sea that some have compared to the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
“It’s a landmark moment to have nearly every country on earth agree to halt and reverse biodiversity loss,” Craig Hanson, managing director for programs at the World Resources Institute, said in a press statement. “Yet the agreement is only as strong as countries’ political will to implement it, and countries now face the urgent task of turning these commitments into action.”
Leading up to the international gathering, Indigenous groups had expressed alarm over 30×30 and its potential to remove land and resources from tribal control in the name of conservation. “The prevailing concept of protected areas is ‘fortress conservation,’ exclusionary spaces based on the view of wilderness without people,” said Jennifer Corpuz, a member of the Kankanaey Igorot people from the Northern Philippines and a lead negotiator for the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity, a group of activists, scholars, and representatives from Indigenous governments and NGOs that organize around international environmental meetings. Time and again, studies have shown that Indigenous peoples are the best stewards of biodiversity, yet they are often hampered by protected area expansion and its attendant evictions and livelihood restrictions.
“We saw the negotiation of a new framework as an opportunity to address those problems,” said Corpuz. The final language of the agreement calls for “systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, recognizing indigenous [sic] and traditional territories,” and Indigenous rights are also mentioned with strong language at numerous points throughout the pact, according to Corpuz. While Indigenous groups had called for their territories to be recognized as a distinct pathway to protect biodiversity, Corpuz said “we feel that the language is ambiguous enough to accept.”
The biggest sticking point in the biodiversity negotiations, or the Conference of the Parties or COP15, was over who would fund conservation action in the most species-rich parts of the world, mostly in the Global South. Developing nations called for a $100 billion fund from wealthy nations, similar to the fund established through the U.N.’ s convention on climate change for climate mitigation and adaptation. Last week, delegates staged a walkout over the issue. The final agreement requires wealthy countries to provide $30 billion a year to small island nations and developing countries by 2030, although research has shown that closer to $700 billion per year is necessary to reduce species decline. Objections on Monday morning from the Democratic Republic of Congo and other African nations over insufficient funding were overridden when Huang Runqiu, the president of COP15 and China’s minister of ecology and environment, brought down the gavel to end the conference.
In total, the final agreement contains 23 targets, including commitments to halve risks from pesticides and toxic chemical use in agriculture, halve invasive species introduction rates, and reform government subsidies linked to biodiversity destruction.
Language requiring that companies disclose their impacts on the natural world and their financial risks associated with species extinction was watered down in the final version of the text. Developing nations and Indigenous peoples had also asked that when countries extract genetic resources from their biodiversity-rich ecosystems, like rainforests and peatlands, to make drugs and other products, that the origin countries receive an equitable share of the benefits of the research. While a mechanism was not established, language in the final text sets forth a two-year process to create a way to fund the communities and countries from which biodata is taken; Indigenous communities are calling to be the main beneficiaries.
Countries now have eight years to meet their new targets, which some observers have criticized for prioritizing economic interests and lacking any enforcement mechanism. As it stands, the 30 percent goal is global, not specific to individual countries, and commitments will be voluntary, similar to the Paris Agreement. At the 2002 biodiversity conference in the Netherlands, parties agreed to reduce the rate of species loss by 2010 and failed. The last major wave of biodiversity goal-setting happened in Aichi, Japan, in 2010, and not a single one of the meeting’s targets was met by the 2020 deadline. Given the track record, it remains to be seen if countries will make good on their ambitious new commitments.
The sun is setting in Glacier County, Montana. Souta Calling Last guns her diesel-powered white GMC pickup truck east on Highway 2. The car following her can barely keep up as she hurtles across the dimming prairie, one hand resting lightly on the steering wheel, her eyes scanning the side of the highway. Calling Last, a researcher and an enrolled member of the Blood Tribe — one of the four nations that make up the Blackfoot Confederacy — grew up on the Blackfeet reservation. She knows this landscape by heart.
“There it is,” she says and yanks the steering wheel to the right, sending a plume of dust into the air as she brakes hard on the gravel shoulder. The Two Medicine River, sacred to the Amskapi Pikuni, the Blackfeet, rushes nearby. A couple of minutes later, a gray Toyota slowly pulls in behind the GMC and rolls to a stop. The words “Working Dogs for Conservation” are printed on its side in block letters. A volley of excited yips and whines rings out from the truck bed.
Calling Last has brought Working Dogs for Conservation, or WD4C, a nonprofit that trains dogs to hunt down invasive species and poachers, to the Blackfeet reservation to help her solve a mystery. In recent decades, unusual cancers and thyroid issues have bloomed in clusters across the Nation. Some Blackfeet stopped harvesting wild plants and animals — like mint, huckleberries, and elk — suspecting that traditional sources of sustenance for countless generations had become contaminated and diseased. But so far, there’s been limited empirical research linking the tribe’s public health woes to its environment. Calling Last aims to change that by conducting a comprehensive scientific survey of environmental contaminants in Blackfeet territory. If it works, her experiment will give the community peace of mind and the freedom to harvest wild edibles safely.
Her success relies on two restless dogs waiting in crates in the back of the gray truck.
Sully is a black-haired border collie and retriever mutt. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Frost is a rust-and-cream-colored Springer spaniel-pit mix. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Frost is a rust-and-cream-colored Springer spaniel-pit mix, Sully is a black-haired border collie and retriever mutt. Sully, who was trained to track down human remains before he came to WD4C, was part of an unplanned litter. Frost was surrendered by his former owners for being too excitable, too energetic, and too obsessed with balls — traits that made him a perfect candidate for professional service.
Freed from the back of the truck, Frost and Sully zigzag from bank to bank, their tails wagging furiously. They’ve been trained to pinpoint mink and otter droppings, or scat, which can contain toxins because of processes called bioaccumulation and biomagnification, when substances move through the food chain and get concentrated in organisms. Insects like mayflies and dragonflies pick up toxins from their environment and accumulate them in their exoskeletons, then they’re consumed in vast numbers by trout and other fish, which in turn get eaten by mink and otters. The mammals leave their scat, infused with whatever toxins were originally in the insects, on the sides of the Two Medicine and other water bodies on the reservation.
All of a sudden, Frost stops running and starts sniffing around a beaver dam. Michele Vasquez, a canine field specialist who is leading the Blackfeet project for WD4C, isn’t sure whether the dog is excited about scat or if he’s trying to rouse an animal hiding in the dam, but she hangs back a few feet to let him work. Seconds later, Frost sits and makes eye contact with Vasquez. “Yeah? You think you’ve got something?” she asks him, and leans forward for a closer look.
Sure enough, a small, jet black dropping is perched precariously on a twig a few inches inside the beaver dam: mink scat. “What a guy!” Vasquez exclaims. She pulls Frost’s reward, a yellow ball on a rope, out of her fanny pack and chucks it into the river. Frost dives after it, ecstatic. Vasquez’s colleague, forensic field specialist Ngaio Richards, walks over and dons a plastic glove before reaching her hand into the dam to collect the sample and put it in a paper bag. Vasquez marks the place where Frost found the scat on her GPS. They’ll send the scat, and all the other samples they collect on this trip, to a lab for testing. When the results come back, Calling Last will share the data with her community. Clean scat means it’s safe to harvest wild edibles from this part of the river; toxic scat means it’s better to harvest somewhere else.
Calling Last has heard stories about contaminants buried on the reservation her whole life: whispers about a web of toxic hotspots, the legacy of decades of illegal dumping of trash, electronics, and other hazards. Rumors that a company paid the tribe a paltry sum to bury a cache of nuclear waste somewhere on the Nation’s rolling plains in the 1960s. Snatches of information about the chemicals companies used for fracking in the Bakken shale formation, which runs beneath part of the reservation and contains billions of barrels of oil and natural gas. The threat of oil extraction still looms today. The tribe is currently fighting to stop an oil company, Solenex, that wants to drill near the Badger and Two Medicine Rivers, which hold some of the tribe’s most sacred and culturally significant sites.
These scattered reports have contributed to a sense of unease among the Nation. “I feel like there’s a lot of fear on the reservation,” Celina Gray, a Little Shell and Blackfeet mother of four and a graduate student at the University of Montana studying wildlife biology, said. She wants to take her kids out hunting and foraging with her, but she doesn’t want to expose them to the environmental health hazards she suspects are lurking in the soil.
Celina Gray is a Little Shell and Blackfeet mother of four and a graduate student at the University of Montana studying wildlife biology. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Rates of cancer are higher on the Blackfeet Nation than elsewhere in Montana. Six in 1,000 Blackfeet were diagnosed with some type of cancer, on average, every year between 2005 and 2014, compared to 5 in 1,000 Montanans per year over the same period. An assessment of health risks among Blackfeet shows cancer was the leading cause of death on the reservation between 2014 and 2015 — 16 percent of overall deaths during that time period. But the tribe lacks the data it needs to get a fuller sense of how the disease is impacting Blackfeet and what could be causing these higher rates.
Calling Last says it’s not just the higher rate of cancer that concerns her, but the way the disease and its warning signs appear, in clusters, that makes her think people may be exposed to unknown health risks from the environment.
Kim Paul, the founder of a public health nonprofit called the Piikani Health Lodge Institute, tried to track down the source of the cancer when she was a graduate student at the University of Montana in the 2010s. Because she’s a member of the community, she knew about a 10-mile-long portion of the reservation, 40 miles north of the Blackfeet headquarters in the town of Browning, where every family but one had developed multiple forms of cancer. She remembered her grandmother’s warnings, when Paul was just a little girl, not to collect bear grass or flowers from that part of the reservation. “There was a lot of death in that stretch of road,” Paul said. At the University of Montana, she started collecting samples from the area to conduct a study, but quickly ran out of money and was forced to abandon the project.
Now, Calling Last is picking up the mantle. She was awarded a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to devise a project that will establish a database of environmental stressors at sites across the reservation that are both important harvesting spots and hold cultural significance to the Nation. Calling Last expects to find trace amounts of uranium and other nuclear energy byproducts, heavy metals that leached from illegal and legal dumpsites, pharmaceutical residue flushed or tossed by members of the tribe, and flame retardants and other pollutants carried into waterways by urban runoff. Then, she’ll add that data to a virtual map she’s making for her community.
A lone pumpjack sits on the plains south of the Blackfeet reservation in northwestern Montana.
AP Photo / Matt Volz
When it’s complete, her map will have more than 30 layers — sites of cultural importance, traditional names for rivers and valleys, toxic dumps, areas where it is dangerous to harvest plants and animals, and more. Each layer will serve a different role in achieving an overarching goal: to help the Blackfeet protect their health, preserve their traditional ways of life, and strengthen their hold on cultural identity and knowledge.
But first, Calling Last needs to find mink and otter scat. Or rather, the dogs do.
Frost and Sully get food and love from their trainers. They affectionately call Frost “melon butt,” because of the dense bunches of muscles at the top of his stocky legs. And in return, WD4C gets access to the dogs’ secret weapons: their noses.
Humans can see well and we have big brains, but we don’t have very many scent receptors in our nostrils — at least, not compared to dogs. All of the scent receptors from a human’s nose, laid side by side, would fit on the surface of a postage stamp. All the scent receptors from a dog’s snout would fill a handkerchief. “Let’s say you walk into a house and you smell spaghetti dinner being cooked,” Hugh Murray, a K-9 handler for the Quapaw Nation of Oklahoma. “You smell the product. They smell the individual ingredients, the flour, the sugar, the tomato. They break things down individually.”
Ngaio Richards collects a scat sample. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Brown paper bags hold mink and otter scat samples located by the working dogs. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
A dog can also pinpoint a single ingredient in a forest of other smells, a “single drop of perfume in an Olympic size pool,” Amanda Ott, a dog trainer for Working Dogs for Conservation, said, which is what makes them so good at working in the field.
Dogs have been trained to sniff out cancer, bed bugs, COVID-19, even stress. But canine fieldwork has drawbacks, and each working dog has its own idiosyncrasies. Ott, who owns and trains the black lab mix Sully, recently lost him for an afternoon when the pup took off after a moose.
And switching dogs from one project to another can confuse them as well. Frost, who had just come back to Montana after three weeks in Wyoming hunting down invasive plant species, would occasionally get sidetracked by a plant that looked like a target from his previous adventure while looking for scat along the Two Medicine River. With gentle coaxing from Vasquez, though, he was able to refocus.
Michele Vasquez points Frost toward an area she wants him to search. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Over the course of nine days of surveying, the two dogs found more than 70 scat samples. On their last day of work on the reservation, a member of the community told Calling Last that someone had illegally dumped barrels of used motor oil into the water upriver from one of her testing sites. Vasquez said the silver lining is that now the researchers will have data from before and after the incident. “So lies the crux of this work,” she said.
Eight years ago, Calling Last would never have imagined designing research around the vagaries of dogs. She was working as a water training facilitator, teaching Indigenous and non-Indigenous water operators how to manage their systems. She infused her trainings with presentations on the cultural importance of water and the original names for rivers and streams. “I tried to implant in them that they are our communities’ modern day water warriors, because they’re cleaning the water,” she said.
But the work wasn’t fulfilling. She quit her job and set about starting her own organization. After a year, she had cashed in her 401(k) and savings accounts, maxed out her credit cards, and succeeded in forming the group she still runs as a one-woman show today: Indigenous Vision. She holds cultural sensitivity trainings for Native and non-Native groups, runs educational programs for Blackfeet youth, and has spent the past several years building out the multi-layered map.
Calling Last laid out the stakes for me as she drove between surveying spots, pausing once in a while to take swigs of an energy drink and sing along to the mid-2000s hits thumping from a playlist on her phone. The license plates on her truck read “MTNBRBI” — “mountain Barbie” — a tribute to the place where she was raised, and where much of her family and many of her friends live. She grew up picking mint, sage, and sweetgrass on the reservation’s prairies. Her relatives hunt for buffalo, deer, and elk in its mountains and plains.
Souta Calling Last, a researcher and an enrolled member of the Blood Tribe, grew up on the Blackfeet reservation. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Hunting and foraging are not only crucial aspects of Blackfeet spiritual and cultural identity, she said, they’re a means of survival for a community that lacks critical resources. Some 36 percent of people on the reservation live below the poverty line, compared to 12.5 percent statewide. More than two-thirds of all Blackfeet are food insecure, meaning they don’t have reliable access to nutritious food. Wild animals and plants are cheaper, healthier, and fresher than the meat and produce available at the grocery store, Celina Gray, the graduate student, said. “The meat we ate all winter long was elk burger,” she said, “I don’t buy hamburger at Costco.”
But Blackfeet will only continue turning to those traditional methods of harvesting as long as they can trust them. Calling Last has watched as, over the years, her friends, family, and wider community developed unusual health problems — and she hasn’t been spared, either.
“Me, a bunch of other people, my mom, all the women in my family, have thyroid issues,” she said. To her, the source of the sickness is clear: “It’s gotta be something from our environment.”
A survey site on the reservation. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
That’s why Calling Last, who has a degree in water management from the University of Montana, has dedicated her life to building this map. “As a scientist, I can read Excel sheets and see data trends just by looking at the numbers,” she said. “But my community can’t. My community doesn’t even know what good or bad exposure limits are to all of these contaminants.”
And there’s a new threat on the horizon, one that further imperils the tribe’s reliance on the environment. The dogs have been brought out to the reservation this year to track down environmental contamination, but next summer, they’ll hunt for traces of an even worse-understood health hazard: chronic wasting disease.
In the winter of 2020, a Blackfeet hunter named Charley Wolf Tail shot and killed a white-tailed deer on his property and, because he had heard warnings about a strange illness percolating in deer in Montana, sent the animal’s lymph nodes to the Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks department for testing. The nodes turned up positive for chronic wasting disease, or CWD, an illness caused not by a virus or a bacteria, but by a baffling phenomenon in the natural world: a misfolded protein, or a “prion.”
One prion can infect the proteins in healthy cells by forcing them to fold, too, creating a chain reaction that produces a series of tiny holes in the brains of the hoofed ruminants that are unlucky enough to come across it. The prions create a mushy, spongy texture in the organ. Outwardly, the animals waste away for no discernable reason. Chronic wasting disease is often referred to as “zombie deer disease” because the creatures afflicted with it end up dazed and haggard, walking in aimless circles until they die. CWD could lead to mass die-offs in deer, elk, and bison populations on the reservation — whose meat Blackfeet depend on for survival. And experts still don’t know if the illness can spread to humans.
The federal government has detected CWD in 30 states. The deer shot by Wolf Tail is the first documented case of CWD on the reservation. If it spreads, it could further upend the Blackfeet way of life. “Because we live so close to the land and because we’re subsistence hunters,” Calling Last said, “if there is a human impact from CWD, it’s going to be to the tribal people.”
U.S. Geological Survey
Once CWD establishes itself in a given area, it’s nearly impossible to eradicate. A bacteria or a virus, like the coronavirus, can survive on a surface for a limited amount of time before it dies. A prion can exist, in theory, forever. “Once it’s in the environment, it’s there sort of indefinitely,” Cory Anderson, a CWD expert at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told Grist.
Some studies show that grasses and other plants can absorb prions from animal saliva and feces and, in turn, impart the disease to other animals that eat the plants. “We use plants for our ceremonies, our sweat lodges, our food, and our tea,” Calling Last said. “If those plants have prions in them, what does that mean for us?”
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have determined that dogs can detect CWD prions in deer feces in the lab. But experts have never attempted putting working hounds on the hunt for CWD in the field. Next summer, WD4C plans to conduct an in-the-field canine search for the prions, right here on the Blackfeet reservation.
It’s a new day in Glacier County and the sun is high in the sky as Calling Last turns right on a long, winding dirt road that leads to a ranch-style house in the middle of a large field. She’s taking the Working Dogs for Conservation crew to one last site on the reservation before this year’s research trip is over — a place she calls “ground zero.”
The women clamber out of their trucks and put on shoes they’ve been saving for this site, their “dirty” shoes. So little is known about the misfolded proteins that cause chronic wasting disease, and Calling Last and the Working Dogs team aren’t taking any chances. When they’re done surveying here, they’ll rinse their shoes with bleach and clean the dogs’ paws with disinfecting wipes in order to prevent rogue prions from hitching a ride back to Missoula with them.
Wolf Tail, the hunter who shot the deer, steps out of his house and walks toward the parked cars. He knows why the researchers are here. He’s just as worried about CWD as they are and is glad to help them prepare for next year’s prion surveys. “Hunting is my way of life,” he said, standing in the driveway and holding his dog, a terrier-pug mix named Uno. Herds of deer amble past Wolf Tail’s front porch every day. He scans them religiously now, looking for sick animals. “It’s something that’s definitely been in the back of my mind now, since the testing,” he said.
Charley Wolf Tail holds his dog, Uno. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
There’s no way Calling Last can search the entire reservation for prions. There are too many acres and not enough money or dogs. But she has figured out a way around those obstacles by making an educated guess. The way chronic wasting disease works is still shrouded in mystery; some ruminants get the disease after encountering prions, while others are exposed and walk away unscathed. Calling Last thinks the determining factor is immune system function — how healthy an animal is at the time of exposure. She’ll test that theory by having the dogs search for CWD in the same areas where they hunted for environmental contaminants this year.
“The main point of the project is to see whether there is a correlation between these contamination sites and CWD. Like, do animals have lower immune systems because of contamination, and are these animals more likely to get sick?” Vasquez said. In short, there may be an overlap between environmental contamination and CWD, which would mean that protecting the community from one threat also protects it from the other.
Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Charley Wolf Tail’s house. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Grist / Zoya Teirstein
A dead bird floats in the river behind Wolf Tail’s house. Grist / Zoya Teirstein
Grist / Zoya Teirstein
The otter and mink scat that the dogs find today, at ground zero, will help Calling Last test her hypothesis. Vasquez, a GPS tracking device hanging from a lanyard around her neck and a long leash in her hand, walks to the back of her truck and opens the tailgate. The two rescues peer out at her from their crates.
“Let’s bring Frost out for this one,” Ott says, glancing at the Springer spaniel. Frost lets out a frantic bark at the sound of his name.
“OK,” Vasquez says, opening the door to his crate, “You’re up, bud.”
Vasquez puts a collar and a red vest on Frost, who is standing on the truck bed trembling with excitement. “Free,” she says when he’s suited up, and Frost jumps down from the truck. Vasquez walks around the back of Wolf Tail’s house and down to the stream, Frost bounding a few feet ahead of her. A bright, midday sun is shining. Calling Last, Vasquez, Richards, Ott, and the others who have been running alongside the dogs for three days straight are drained and quiet, slightly diminished by the significance of ground zero. The prions could be lurking anywhere, in the tall grass rippling across Wolf Tail’s backyard or the dark mud that lines the river bank. Frost is unfazed. There’s mink and otter scat to be found, and a squeaky reward to receive.
Vasquez makes him heel and sit before she gives him the command that transforms the excited pup into a laser-focused hunting machine: “Go find,” she says.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Reservation Dogs on Dec 14, 2022.
A deadline is looming for the Senate to take action to stop new uranium mines adjacent to the Grand Canyon, conservation experts and Indigenous tribal leaders warned this week. An existing mine just south of the canyon, though dormant for 30 years,already poses a threat to nearby ecosystems and communities and is expected to resume operations in early 2023.
The Senate has until January 3 to vote on the Grand Canyon Protection Act, a bill that would make a 20-year moratorium on new uranium mines near the Grand Canyon permanent, saving more than 1 million acres of public lands from development. The act has already been passed twice by the House of Representatives.
After the January 3 deadline, the legislative slate is wiped clean ahead of the start of the 118th Congress, with no promise of the Grand Canyon Protection Act being reintroduced to the Senate agenda next year.
The operations of the existing Pinyon Plain Mine near the Grand Canyon would nonetheless not be impacted by the bill. While a 20-year moratorium on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon was implemented in 2012, Pinyon Plain was exempt due to an earlier agreement.
The Grand Canyon forms part of the Colorado River Basin, a vast watershed with critical tributaries and reservoirs which provide water to over 40 million people in Southwest states and California. The territories of Indigenous tribes such as the Navajo Nation are also located there. But for decades, the region has been under intense economic and environmental pressure from uranium mining operations. Countless members of the Navajo Nation have suffered from higher rates of cancer and respiratory illnesses due to the nuclear waste left over from Cold War era uranium extraction.
Other Native communities in the area are also under threat from mining interests. Since the 1980s, the Havasupai Tribe, whose territory lies within the Grand Canyon, has fought against the ongoing operation of the nearby Pinyon Plain Mine. The controversial mine has been responsible for rupturing important groundwater resources during the drilling process, effectively depleting an essential natural resource.
“It is time to permanently ban uranium mining — not only to preserve the Havasupai Tribe’s cultural identity and our existence as the Havasupai People, but to protect the Grand Canyon for generations to come,” said the tribe’s chairman Thomas Siyuja, Sr.
“From an environmental standpoint, water resource standpoint and a cultural standpoint, it’s just the wrong place to do it,” said Amber Reimondo, the energy director at the Grand Canyon Trust, a local conservation and environmental justice organization. Reimondo explained that the Colorado River Basin is so complex and extensive that any contamination of its waters could have profound consequences for communities hundreds of miles away.
Hundreds of active uranium mining claims have been made near Grand Canyon National Park. These claims could develop into full-fledged operations if the Grand Canyon Protection Act doesn’t pass a Senate vote.
Uranium is a radioactive element that nonetheless occurs naturally in the earth’s soil, rock, and groundwater. The element is so ubiquitous in the environment that it is a major contributor to normal “background radiation.” When condensed in rock formations, uranium is far less radioactive than when it is extracted during mining operations.
Mining of uranium is essential for nuclear power generation. But to extract uranium, mining operations often use a mix of chemicals to dissolve the element from underground rock formations and into groundwater. The exposed uranium extraction – now far more radioactive – is then pumped to the surface through mine shafts and placed in surface-level evaporation ponds. The waste from the entire process can cause food, water, and air contamination.
Uranium mining in the Grand Canyon region has unsurprisingly been opposed by major environmental organizations. But mining has also faced pushback from local business owners who depend on a steady stream of tourists from around the world who expect to visit a pristine and beautiful natural environment. Arizona voters are also overwhelmingly supportive of the Grand Canyon Protection Act. The threat that uranium mining poses to healthy water resources is of particular concern in the Southwest, which is facing historic drought in the Colorado River Basin – which provides water to over 40 million Americans – and alarmingly low water levels in its reservoirs.
But banning new uranium mines on the federal lands that make up the Grand Canyon would only address part of the problem. The Pinyon Plain Mine would still pose a threat to natural resources that tribal nations depend on and visitors cherish. In addition, tribal leaders and environmental advocates are still struggling to get the federal government to clean up the radioactive waste from hundreds of abandoned mines.
In the rush to take advantage of nuclear power’s purported green energy benefits, Reimondo, of Grand Canyon Trust, says, the same mistakes of the fossil fuel era are being made in the clean energy era.
“Indigenous communities from around the world have known for hundreds of years that uranium is something you don’t touch,” she said. “Because once you expose it, it’s like a Pandora’s Box, and you can’t close it again.”
Correction, December 12, 2022:This story has been corrected to reflect more accurately the potential consequences of uranium mining on the Colorado River Basin; the future of the Pinyon Plain Mine; and the legislative hurdles to pass the Grand Canyon Protection Act.
The Bureau of Land Management proposed a new rule Monday that aims to reduce wasted natural gas on federal and Tribal lands which will help tamp down methane releases. By preventing billions of cubic feet of natural gas emissions that come from unintentional equipment leaks or deliberate venting and flaring, the federal government hopes to curb the potent greenhouse gas which is responsible for 30 percent of global warming.
The proposed rule, said Secretary Deb Haaland in a press release, “will bring our regulations in line with technological advances that industry has made in the decades since the BLM’s rules were first put in place, while providing a fair return to taxpayers.”
The rules would require operators to submit a waste minimization plan with any permit application to drill oil wells. If a plan doesn’t adequately show how the operator will avoid wasting gas, the BLM can delay approval until the concerns are addressed to the agency’s satisfaction.
There would also be monthly limits on flaring, mandatory technology upgrades, and enforced leak and detection programs. The proposed rule would apply solely to oil and gas facilities that the BLM oversees on federal and Tribal land.
“No one likes to waste natural resources from our public lands,” said BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning in a press release. “This draft rule is a common-sense, environmentally responsible solution as we address the damage that wasted natural gas causes.”
The proposal builds on goals the Biden administration announced at 27th United Nations climate change conference, or COP27, as well as in November 2021 after COP26 where the U.S. became one of more than 100 countries to sign the Global Methane Pledge – a non-binding agreement to collectively reduce global methane emissions at least 30 percent from 2020 levels by 2030. According to a recent Global Carbon Project study, half of methane emissions are caused by humans – and fossil fuels represent nearly 18 percent of that total budget. Of that, roughly 63 percent is derived from oil and gas production and pipelines.
But federal proposals to curb methane emissions have been met with limited success. Environmentalists celebrated ambitious regulations the EPA introduced last year, but in 2016, a BLM attempt to reduce natural gas waste – an earlier version of this proposal – was quashed by industry and state groups, arguing that the EPA overstepped its authority.
All together, the federal government estimates that implementing the new rule would cost companies roughly $122 million per year to meet requirements but would benefit from $55 million worth of recovered gas per year. The BLM claims individuals living in the U.S. would benefit $427 million per year from avoiding climate damages with reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
In an email, BLM press secretary Brian Hires said “the proposed rule would ensure that, when federal or Tribal gas is wasted through excessive venting or flaring, the public and Tribal mineral owners are compensated through royalty payments.”
In early November, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case brought by the Navajo Nation that could have far-reaching impacts on tribal water rights in the Colorado River Basin. In its suit, the Navajo Nation argues that the Department of Interior has a responsibility, grounded in treaty law, to protect future access to water from the Colorado River. Several states and water districts have filed petitions opposing the tribe, stating that the river is “already fully allocated.”
The case highlights a growing tension in the region: As water levels fall and states face cuts amid a two-decade-long megadrought, tribes are working to ensure their water rights are fully recognized and accessible.
On average, 15 million acre-feet of water used to flow through the Colorado River every year. For scale, one acre-foot of water could supply one to three households annually. A century ago, states reached an agreement to divide that water among themselves. But in recent decades, the river has supplied closer to 12 million acre-feet. Scientists say water managers in the basin need to plan for closer to 9 million acre-feet per year, a 40 percent decrease in a water source that supports 40 million people, due to climate change and aridification.
No states have made plans to accommodate this drop. Meanwhile, tribal nations are legally entitled to between 3.2 and 3.8 million acre-feet of ground and surface water from the Colorado River system.
There are 30 federally recognized tribes in the river’s basin, and 12 of them, including Navajo Nation, still have at least some “unresolved” rights, meaning the extent of their rightful claims to water have yet to be agreed upon.
Grist / Jessie Blaeser / Amelia Bates
Ultimately, Indigenous nations in the Colorado River Basin could be serious power brokers in crucial water negotiations to come — but they face historical, legal and practical obstacles. The Navajo Nation, for example, has rights to almost 700,000 acre-feet of water annually across New Mexico and Utah, along with unresolved claims in Arizona. But, because of a lack of infrastructure, up to 40 percent of Navajo households don’t have running water. For the Navajo Nation and other tribes with allocations in the basin, building and improving infrastructure means providing citizens with access to a fundamental human right: water.
But tribal water use is taken out of state allocations, meaning the more water tribes use, the less states have. It also means that states have less incentive to work with tribal leaders or recognize pending water rights claims. This conflict is not new. It has been built into a century of policies that have excluded and divested from Indigenous nations.
Tribes often hold senior water rights, meaning their allocations are the last to be cut in a shortage, and states in the basin are beginning to reckon with this fact. A fundamental shift in how the river is governed — to a system that acknowledges tribes’ sovereignty and gives them greater say — will be key to sustainably and equitably distributing water in the years to come.
Tribes “need to be included in every one of those conversations and considered just like a state or the federal government,” Southern Ute Tribal Council Member Lorelei Cloud said at the annual Colorado River District Seminar in September. “You cannot discount us.”
Grist / Jessie Blaeser / Amelia Bates
One barrier to equitable distribution is a glaring information gap: There is no definitive source of data on water usage among tribes in the Colorado River Basin. Historically, federal surveys have ignored tribal water use, and though tribal-led studies have begun to fill these gaps, the lack of data makes planning for a future river with shrinking flows impossible.
“If you know how much water everyone has or is allocated, then you can come up with a comprehensive solution — not just management of the river but responses to climate change,” Heather Tanana (Diné), a professor of law at the University of Utah, said in an interview.
In Arizona, for example, nearly 70 percent of the state’s water allocation belongs to tribes, and nearly all the tribal nations with unresolved water rights in the basin have at least some territory in the state. According to a joint study by tribal nations and the federal government, 10 tribes in the basin, which hold the bulk of the recognized tribal water rights, are diverting just over half of what they’re entitled to — most of which is used for agriculture. It’s unclear what water availability would look like if these tribes had basic infrastructure to get water to their citizens, or if all tribes with unresolved rights settled their cases.
Grist / Amelia Bates / Jessie Blaeser / Joseph Lee / Anna Smith
“My experience of negotiating water rights settlements in Arizona is that the state of Arizona very much approaches them as a zero-sum game,” said Jay Weiner, water counsel for the Quechan Indian Tribe and the Tonto Apache Tribe, which has been in settlement negotiations since at least 2014. That combative approach, he said, has persisted regardless of governor or political party. “It is something that seems to be deeply embedded in the fabric of Arizona and how it approaches Indian water rights settlements.”
In February, the federal government announced $1.7 billion for tribes to use for water settlements. That means more tribal citizens and communities could have access to water. It also means that states will have to work with tribes to plan for the future and adapt to climate change.
In some places, tribes and communities have already been moving in that direction, working together to find place-based solutions that use the resources and infrastructure at hand. The Pascua Yaqui Tribe and the city of Tucson, Arizona, have an intergovernmental agreement for Tucson to store and deliver potable water for the tribe, which doesn’t have the infrastructure to do so on its own. Such partnerships will only become more essential as drought and aridification continue to stress the region.
“If folks work together and partner together, the opportunity to solve the problem, I think, is enhanced,” said Robyn Interpreter, an attorney who represents the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and the Yavapai-Apache Nation in their water rights claims.
Grist / Jessie Blaeser / Amelia Bates
The federal Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project, which is building $123 million in infrastructure, is another promising example. The goal of the project is to construct water plants and a system of pipes and pumps that will deliver water to the Navajo Nation, the Jicarilla Apache Nation, and the city of Gallup, New Mexico. Crystal Tulley-Cordova, a principal hydrologist for the water management branch of the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources, said in an interview there is a new willingness to collaborate, owing to both the severity of the situation and non-tribal water users’ realization that they must work with tribes. “Now there’s a greater desire to be able to work together. So I’m encouraged by that,” she said.
Meanwhile, tribal nations are also making progress in securing their access to water. In May, the Navajo Utah Water Rights Settlement Act was finalized, granting the Navajo Nation 81,500 acre-feet of water in Utah and authorized $220 million in federal funds for water infrastructure projects. “Our families celebrate this moment in history after decades of fighting for the Navajo Utah Water Rights Settlement,” Navajo Nation Council Delegate Charlaine Tso said in a statement at the time. “It is clear drought conditions are affecting water levels across the country. Many of our elders haul drinking water from miles away while we work to get proper water infrastructure projects completed. This settlement allows us to begin connecting our water lines to the most rural areas.”
However, tribes still have no direct means of governance over the river, and, as seen in the Navajo water rights case headed to the Supreme Court, states continue to fight tribal communities seeking access to water.
Last fall, more than 20 tribes signed a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in which they pressed for direct, sustained involvement in re-negotiating the guidelines that manage the river, which are set to expire in 2026. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, last March, Haaland and Bureau of Reclamation leadership met with tribal leaders and “committed to transparency and inclusivity for the Tribes when work begins on the post-2026 operational rules,” according to a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior.
“It’s the job of political imagination to see what’s possible,” Andrew Curley (Diné), an assistant professor of geography at University of Arizona, said in an interview. “That’s something that we collectively, not just Native nations but led by Native nations, can start to articulate. What is a different vision of the river than what has been put into law and these congressional acts and Supreme Court decisions over the years?”
To reach net-zero carbon goals with their current plans, countries around the world will need 1.2 billion hectares of land, an area larger than the United States and equivalent to the world’s total cropland, for carbon removal projects. More than half of that land would need to be transformed into new forests. According to a new study, countries are over reliant on massive tree planting projects, and other land-based carbon removal schemes, to meet climate targets and avoid more effective measures like cutting fossil fuel use or conserving primary forests.
The “Land Gap” report, compiled by 20 researchers around the world and released this week by Melbourne Climate Futures, is the first to calculate the massive gap between governments’ reliance on land for carbon mitigation and the role that land can realistically play given availability and competing needs. The report also highlights that using land for carbon removal via tree planting programs will have negative impacts on ecosystems, Indigenous communities, food security, and human rights.
“There are assumptions that land can save you somehow from having to do deeper cuts in terms of fossil fuel production and use,” said Anne Larson, one of the authors of the report. “It’s distracting and it’s not going to work.”
For years Indigenous groups have warned about the dangers of depending on forests to remove carbon from the atmosphere without clear guarantees of Indigenous rights. The report shows global climate pledges have the potential to put communities at higher risk of danger. Repurposing land for plantations and other tree planting-based carbon removal could push Indigenous peoples from their land ultimately weakening the environment.
“We will lose everything,” said Levi Sucre, Bribri from Costa Rica and the Coordinator of the Mesoamerican Alliance of Peoples and Forests. “We have to figure out an alternative way to sustain our lands, our communities.”
Tree planting has been shown to be a tenuous strategy to mitigate climate change, and part of the problem is the accounting system used to track carbon emissions. Cutting fossil fuel use is a guaranteed way to reduce atmospheric carbon while trees are unreliable: they take a long time to grow, need land that often isn’t available, can be harvested, or can even burn down. However, countries treat cutting fossil fuels and planting trees as the same. That means countries can make ambitious pledges based on future land use changes instead of jeopardizing short term economic interests by cutting fossil fuels. The report recommends countries make deep cuts in emissions from industrial agriculture, deforestation and fossil fuels instead of relying on unavailable land for carbon offsets. “We should really be seeing reductions and removals as two different things,” said Kate Dooley, one of the report’s authors.
As well, researchers found that if land-based strategies are to work as a complement to emission cuts, they’ll need to be oriented away from simply planting trees in order to be just and effective. To that end, the study emphasized safeguarding the rights of Indigenous peoples in order to protect forests. Research has shown that the world’s healthiest forests are on protected Indigenous lands, and securing Indigenous land tenure rights, as well as political status, would protect communities and the lands they call home.
“We are under constant threat due to land disputes. We need to have a clear demarcation of indigenous lands. We need effective land protection policy, and also protection of those of us who live in these areas,” said Sonia Guajajara, the first Indigenous person to be elected federal deputy in São Paulo. “That is urgent. That is fundamental.”
Tree planting and reforestation projects typically prioritize monocultures of fast growing commercial trees over biodiversity. Offering limited ecosystem integrity, they are extremely susceptible to fires and droughts, emit carbon when they are harvested, and, even in the best case scenarios, they don’t provide immediate, critical carbon storage payoffs because trees need time to grow. Instead, the report emphasizes protecting standing forests from extractive industries like logging, mining, and agriculture as the first priority. Most critical are primary forests, which store the most carbon and are the most stable and resilient to climate change.
The report encourages restoring degraded natural ecosystems instead of planting new forests, or creating monoculture plantations. The U.N.’s Global Land Outlook report estimates 5 billion hectares of land is suitable for restoration, but at the moment, countries’ pledges examined in the study only account for restoring 551 million hectares of degraded ecosystems leaving room for world leaders to focus on ecological restoration, natural regeneration, and agroforestry. However, only twenty countries mention agroforestry in their climate plans.
Countries that signed the Paris Climate Accords are supposed to update their commitments every five years at least, and in 2021, the U.S. set a goal of reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent below 2005 levels in the next eight years. The authors of the report hope that as world leaders head to the COP27 climate summit to discuss their climate pledges and make new, more ambitious commitments, they will reconsider the impact of carbon removal and refocus on ecosystem restoration, primary forests, and protecting Indigenous rights.
“It isn’t too late for countries to rethink the way they use land to achieve their climate goals,” said Brendan Mackey, a report co-author.
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.
Grist
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.
