American Indians have risen to prominence as the new darlings of the environmental movement, but while they appreciate the help, they also are fighting to make sure they don’t become tokens of activists.
Even though there is room for collaboration, Jade Begay, spokeswoman for the Indigenous Environmental Network, representing tribes in their legal fights against President Trump’s recent pipeline approvals, said there is a bright line between what the tribes are trying to accomplish and what climate change groups and conservation activists are trying to do.
“You could say that’s tokenizing indigenous people, and that’s something we are very much trying to get away from, and we criticized the environmental and the nonprofit world for doing that,” said Begay.
The tribes align with environmentalists on specific issues involving their resources, heritage and cultural identity, she said. Environmental groups, on the other hand, are much broader in their scope.
“I think the inclusion of Native Americans by either side is kind of ridiculous,” Republican energy and environment consultant Mike McKenna wrote in an email. “The reality of it is the some tribes (and their members) make cash on things about which the Left does not approve (pipelines, powerplants, even casinos). They can try to pretend that is not the case, but it is.”
Congressional aides point out that Indian groups aren’t a monolithic bloc, as many are trying to develop money-making coal, oil and other fossil fuels on their land while others are getting involved in fights to preserve resources such as cultural and heritage sites.
In recent years, Republicans have focused on helping the tribes improve development of their energy resources.
A GOP-backed bill in the House seeks to respond to tribal complaints over not having enough control over their resources and Interior Department red tape. The Native American Energy Act aims to give the tribes greater independence over developing their own natural resources, including coal, oil and renewables, without interference from Washington.
Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, introduced the legislation this year. The bill passed the House in the last Congress but never cleared the Senate. The chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, supports the legislation, and he said a new effort to pass the bill will come this year.
“As far as the Natural Resources Committee is concerned, our focus is and has always been on tribal self-determination,” said a committee spokesperson. “When it comes to energy development, we are actively trying to reduce undue burdens to allow tribes to do what they want when it comes to economic development on their lands.”
More often than not, however, the point about economic self-determination is being overshadowed by tribes’ inclusion in big environmental campaigns to combat Trump’s decisions to push through fossil fuel projects and his rolling back of regulations created to try to slow climate change.
“Putting us on a flyer, or saying indigenous leader coming to their rally, or whatever … it’s tokenizing and using this identity to put out an idea that they’re working in collaboration” with tribes, Begay said. “Sometimes they are” genuinely trying to collaborate, “and sometimes they’re not.”
Often it appears that the activists have spawned the pushback, but “it’s environmental groups that have come after the fact,” she said.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota is a good example of that, as it managed to gain enormous momentum in its cause to block the Dakota Access Pipeline for the sole reason of protecting its water and cultural heritage sites. Soon after, climate activists and others latched onto the tribe’s initial success.
“Unfortunately for a lot of players — including some Indian nations — we’re seeing the environmental Left’s playbook is to co-opt some tribal leaders in an effort to thwart domestic energy production,” said Craig Stevens, spokesman for the Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now coalition, representing supporters of the Dakota Access Pipeline project.
“We saw this with [Dakota Access] when some tribes opposed the pipeline while others, like the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation), financially benefited from it,” Stevens said in an email.
Fast-forward to 2017 and a new administration, and a number of tribes, not to mention Indian coalitions such as Begay’s, are routinely standing side-by-side with the likes of the Sierra Club, 350.org and other activist groups in attacking Trump’s pro-fossil fuel policies.
For example, the big environmental groups lined up with tribes against the Keystone XL pipeline, issuing joint news releases with the Ponca Nation and Rosebud Sioux Tribe.
Both of the tribes have been fighting Keystone XL since former President Barack Obama’s administration and have remained active outside the environmental groups’ efforts.
Even as the big advocacy groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council were threatening to sue the Trump administration over Keystone XL, the first groups to actually do so were the Indigenous Environmental Network and the North Coast Rivers Alliance. Begay said the NRDC does not coordinate with them in taking legal action.
The tribal groups may even prove more aggressive than the greens, at least on countering oil pipeline projects. The Indigenous Environmental Network, for example, responded to news that Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, had begun shipping oil through the pipeline ahead of schedule, which it said violated the terms laid out in a prior court order. The network revealed it was providing legal expertise to defend a number of tribes not only from the Dakota Access project that Trump fast-tracked but also from pipelines being built by Energy Transfer Partners as far south as the Gulf Coast.
“We are also working with our allies in the Gulf region to resist the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, which is another project of Energy Transfer Partners,” the group said.
