Deb Haaland Becomes First Native American Cabinet Secretary
The Senate confirmed Ms. Haaland to lead the Interior Department. She’ll be charged with essentially reversing the agency’s course over the past four years.
WASHINGTON — Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico made history on Monday when the Senate confirmed her as President Biden’s secretary of the Interior, making her the first Native American to lead a cabinet agency.
Ms. Haaland in 2018 became one of the first two Native American women elected to the House. But her new position is particularly redolent of history because the department she now leads has spent much of its history abusing or neglecting America’s Indigenous people.
Beyond the Interior Department’s responsibility for the well-being of the nation’s 1.9 million Native people, it oversees about 500 million acres of public land, federal waters off the United States coastline, a huge system of dams and reservoirs across the Western United States and the protection of thousands of endangered species.
“A voice like mine has never been a Cabinet secretary or at the head of the Department of Interior,” she wrote on Twitter before the vote. “Growing up in my mother’s Pueblo household made me fierce. I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.”
Republican opposition to her confirmation centered on Ms. Haaland’s history of fighting against oil and gas exploration, and the deliberations around her nomination highlighted her emerging role in the public debates on climate change, energy policy and racial equity. She was confirmed on a 51-40 vote. Only four Republican senators — Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — voted for Ms. Haaland’s confirmation.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said supporting her confirmation “would be voting to raise gas prices for families who are already struggling, to raise fuel and heating bills for seniors on a fixed income, to take the tough times we’ve been going through and make them even tougher.”
The new interior secretary will be charged with essentially reversing the agency’s mission over the past four years. The Interior Department, led by David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist, played a central role in the Trump administration’s systematic rollback of environmental regulations and the opening up of the nation’s lands and waters to drilling and mining.
Ms. Haaland is expected to quickly halt new drilling, reinstate wildlife conservation rules, rapidly expand wind and solar power on public lands and waters, and place the Interior Department at the center of Mr. Biden’s climate agenda.
At the same time, Ms. Haaland will quite likely assume a central role in realizing Mr. Biden’s promise to make racial equity a theme in his administration. Ms. Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo who identifies herself as a 35th-generation New Mexican, will assume control of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education, where she can address the needs of a population that has suffered from abuse and dislocation at the hands of the United States government for generations, and that has been disproportionately devastated by the coronavirus.
“You’ve heard the Earth referred to as Mother Earth,” Ms. Haaland said at her Senate confirmation hearing. “It’s difficult to not feel obligated to protect this land. And I feel every Indigenous person in the country understands that.”
Lynn Scarlett, who served as deputy interior secretary under George W. Bush and is now a senior official at the Nature Conservancy, warned, “It’s an enormous job, an enormously complex job.”
“The Interior Department has a footprint in all 50 states,” she said. “Its policies touch each and every American.”
As the agency takes on a newly muscular role in addressing climate change, she added, the department “will have to deal with new strategies for managing more intense wildfires on public land and chronic drought in the West. It’s hard to overstate the challenges with water.”
Among the first and most contentious items on Ms. Haaland’s to-do list will be enacting Mr. Biden’s campaign pledge to ban new permits for oil and gas projects on public lands.
Already, the White House has placed a short-term halt on issuing new oil and gas leases on public lands, which has drawn fierce attacks from Republicans and the oil and gas industry.
Ms. Haaland’s ability to implement that ban successfully could have major consequences both for the climate and for the Biden administration. According to one study by Interior Department scientists, the emissions associated with fossil fuel drilling on public lands account for about a quarter of the nation’s greenhouse gases. But the policy will most likely be enacted at a time when gasoline prices are projected to soar — spurring almost-certain political blowback from Republicans ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
For the drilling ban to survive legal challenges, experts say, Ms. Haaland will have to move with care.
“They may attempt a total ban, but that would be more vulnerable to a court challenge,” said Marcella Burke, an energy policy lawyer and former Interior Department official. “Or there’s the ‘death by a thousand cuts’ approach.”
That approach would make oil drilling less feasible by creating such stringent regulations and cleanup rules that exploration would not be worth the cost.
“Each step will be challenged in the courts, but it’s like diversifying your portfolio,” Ms. Burke said. “It lowers the risk that one single ban will be thrown out in courts.”
Complicating Ms. Haaland’s efforts to formulate new land management policies will be a logistical hurdle: the planned relocation of the Bureau of Land Management, an agency within the Interior Department that oversees oil and gas drilling policies. The bureau is expected to move back to Washington from Grand Junction, Colo., where it was moved by the Trump administration.
“You need to move that back to D.C. and build it back,” said Joel Clement, a former Interior Department expert in climate change policy who resigned from the agency in protest of the Trump administration policies. “The staff, the budget — all these people who were supposed to work with Congress on these policies were pushed out West, or they left,” he said. “They are hugely demoralized.”
Ms. Haaland is also expected to revisit the Trump administration’s rollback of habitat protections under the Endangered Species Act. Under the Trump rules, it became easier to remove a species from the endangered list, and for the first time, regulators were allowed to conduct economic assessments — for instance, estimating lost revenue from a prohibition on logging in a critical habitat — when deciding whether a species warrants protection.
Such rules led to an exodus of staff, particularly from the Fish and Wildlife Service, Mr. Clement said.
“There’s a rebuilding that needs to happen there,” he said.
The Interior Department also must submit a detailed new plan by June 2022 that lays out how the federal government will manage the vast outer continental shelf off the American coastline, an area rich in marine wilderness and undersea oil and gas resources.
Given Mr. Biden’s pledge to ban new drilling, the new offshore management plan will quite likely reimpose Obama-era policies that barred oil exploration on the entire East and West Coasts of the United States — while possibly going further, by limiting drilling off the coasts of Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico. But writing the legal, economic and scientific justifications will be difficult.
“They have to get started and really get cracking,” said Jacqueline Savitz, a vice president of Oceana, an environmental group.
As the department moves against offshore drilling, it is expected to help ramp up offshore wind farms. Last week, the agency took a major step toward approving the nation’s first large-scale offshore wind farm, near Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., a project that had been in the works for years.
“This administration is in a position to make large-scale offshore wind a reality for the first time,” Ms. Savitz said. “But the transition in the ocean from offshore fossil fuels to wind farms needs to happen in the next four years, so it’s in place before the next administration.”
Indigenous peoples call on Nornickel’s global partners to demand environmental action
Nornickel does not invite us to meetings, so now we urge international shareholders and buyers of their metals to take action, says Pavel Sulyandziga, President of the Batani Foundation, an exile group working for the rights of indigenous peoples in the Russian north.
Nornickel’s multibillion-dollar worth mining- and metallurgical plants on the Siberian tundra are key to deliver metals for the electromobility industry. The company produces one third of the global supply of nickel and has some of the largest factories in the world for copper and cobalt.
All three metals are in growing demand as Europe, Asia and North America try to catch up in global battery race.
In Russia, however, the scramble for metals come with a cost. Pollution from the factories in Norilsk has for decades ranked top in global air pollution and a recent oil spill caused anger all the way to President Putin’s office.
Nornickel claims it has environment as a top priority, with comprehensive plans to further reduce air pollution.
That priority is questioned by indigenous peoples who feel they are taking to a wall.
“No, Nornickel does not invite to meetings and conferences,” said Pavel Sulyandziga when asked by the Barents Observer about his indigenous group’s dialog with the metallurgical giant.
“They are used to dictate conditions to everyone in Russia. In Taimyr, Nornickel is the Tsar and the God at the same time,” he said.
Sulyandziga is President of Batani Foundation, an international fund created to support indigenous peoples in the Russian north. The group’s help to communities protesting mineral extraction and industrial pollution on indigenous land has always been a thorn in the eye of authorities. The Russian government declared Batani Foundation as a foreign agent in 2015 and two years later, the organization was liquidated by the Moscow city court after a demand from the Ministry of Justice.
Since then, the group has worked in exile, with staff members asking asylum in the United States, Norway and Sweden.
Critical questions excluded
Sulyandziga claims Nornickel brings in only those indigenous peoples who can paint a “beautiful picture” of the company’s activities.
“Those who ask inconvenient questions, about various violations and problems, are simply excluded.”
Together with 35 other organizations and entities working with indigenous peoples rights and environment, the Batani Foundation has sent an urgent call to both international banking and credit institutions and buyers of metals from Nornickel.
One of the receivers of the letter is BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer and a leading producer of material to electric vehicle’s battery production.
“Given the increasing level of ethical and environmental scrutiny that is being brought to bear on supply chains for battery nickel, it is imperative that BASF does not fall foul of investor sentiment. For BASF’s Group Position and Supplier Code of Conduct to have credibility, BASF must take action to address Nornickel’s violations,” the letter reads and lists numerous examples of environmental misconduct by Nornickel in the Russian Arctic region.
Pavel Sulyandziga hopes external pressure from global customers will help.
“Nornickel only understands money. If BASF makes it clear to Nornickel that it is necessary to change its policies and attitudes, this will encourage Nornickel to actually pursue a policy of respect for the rights of indigenous peoples in accordance with international standards,” Sulyandziga said.
He adds: “We want to see this change in reality, not in presentations.”
“Sustainability matters”
Christine Haupt, spokesperson for BASF, assures to the Barents Observer that the company expect all suppliers “to fully comply with applicable laws and to follow internationally recognized environmental, social and corporate governance standards.”
She said BASF is in regular contact with Nornickel on sustainability matters and other aspects relevant to cooperation.
It was in 2018, BASF and Nornickel established a strategic cooperation to meet the growing needs for battery materials in electric vehicles. The cooperation includes construction of a new plant for battery material production serving the European automotive market in adjacent to the nickel and cobalt refinery owned by Nornickel in Harjavalta in Finland.
“What counts in our view, based on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, are the willingness and actins of a company to work towards sustainability,” said Christine Haupt.
She said BASF is co-founder of the Global Battery Alliance, which brings together business, government and civil society to develop standards and tolls to create a social responsible, ecological and economically sustainable, and innovative value chain for batteries.
BASF, though, is only one of many scrambling for battery metals.
Tesla’s Elon Must last year called on miners to produce more nickel. “Tesla will give you a giant contract for a long period of time if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmental sensitive way.”
Other carmakers, like Hyundai, GM, Ford and Nissan, are all rushing to secure raw materials for battery cars believed to count for tens of millions of new vehicles annually within the next few years.
Support program
Well aware of the critical voices, Nornickel this week announced a grant support program to the indigenous peoples of Taimyr where the company’s largest metallurgical factories are located in Norilsk.
“Most of the applications are aimed at preserving long-term traditions and practices, historical memory and cultural code of the peoples of Taimyr. We hope that the World of Taimyr competition will become a real support for local communities, help not only preserve, but also develop the rich cultural heritage of the region, ”said Larisa Zelkova, senior vice president of Nornickel.
Pavel Sulyandziga said this is just an example of Nornickel buying influence.
“Why would they negotiate with those they cannot influence when they can simply buy the loyalty of others,” he said.
“This is the Russian reality,” Sulyandziga added.
Financial institutions
The Batani Foundation, the Aborigine Forum and the Society for Threatened Peoples questions in a joint letter to UBS Switzerland this week why the multinational investment bank continuously finances Nornickel, “despite its widely known failure in environmental and human rights issues.
The Union Bank of Switzerland is, according to the organizations, holding shares and bonds in the value of $34 million and for underwriting activities in the value of $63 millions.
Another Swiss banking company, Credit Suisse, is in a similar letter asked about what they are doing to ensure their investments with Nornickel does not violate the rights of the indigenous peoples in the Russian north and what is done to prevent further environmental damage.
Credit Suisse acquired shares in the amount of $184 million in 2019 and provided loans to Nornickel, according to the indigenous peoples’ NGOs.
The letter to Credit Suisse details how the indigenous peoples of the Arctic who have occupied the land for generations, like the Sámi, Nenets, Nganasan, Enets, Dolgan and Evenk communities, suffer as a result of Nornickel’s negative impacts on their herding, hunting, fishing, and overall economic and subsistence activities, as well as their physical health and well-being.
In 2009, the Norwegian Pension Fund, one of the world’s largest investors, blacklisted Nornickel due to “severe environmental damage”. Later, other financial institutions like Actiam and Skandia followed.
Senate Committee Votes To Confirm Haaland. Here’s Who Voted For and Against Her and What Happens Next.
With two key Republican women in the Senate now pledging to support Deb Haaland for Interior Secretary, her nomination is almost certain when it reaches the full Senate.
Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski will cross party lines and buck powerful energy industry interests to support Haaland.
Susan Collins, a Republican Senator from Maine, will also vote for Haaland in the full Senate.
The last hurdle before that Senate vote was approval by the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The committee held two days of hearings last week but adjourned without action.
This morning, Senators reconvened to debate and vote.
All eyes were on West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from a coal industry state, and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, a Republican who had been heavily lobbied by energy interests to oppose Haaland.
As chairman, Manchin went first.
Then came Republicans. Predictably, Sen. Barrasso sided with energy interests against her. But Murkowski, representing a state with a high Native American population, seemed swayed by the historic nature of the nomination of the country’s first Native American cabinet official.
New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich got the last word:
By a vote of 11-9, Senators voted “favorably” on the confirmation of Haaland, sending her nomination to the full Senate for a vote sometime soon.
Who Voted for Haaland?
All 10 Senate Energy Committee Democrats, plus Republican Lisa Murkowski. Yes votes include Senator Martin Heinrich and Senators Manchin, Wyden, Cantwell, Sanders, Hirono, King, Cortez Masto, Kelly and Hickenlooper.
Who Voted Against Haaland?
9 Republicans. Senators Barrasso, Risch, Lee, Daines, Hoeven, Lankford, Cassidy, Hyde-Smith and Marshall.
What Happens Next?
Haaland’s confirmation heads to the full Senate where it will be scheduled for a vote. But don’t look for this to happen quickly.
Haaland, still a sitting member of the U.S. House of Representatives, is an important Democratic vote for Biden’s agenda and Speaker Pelosi is working to pass a long list of Democratic priorities for in Biden’s first 100 days. In other words, look for Haaland’s final vote to be scheduled sometime next month.
Indigenous Peoples’ Human Rights as a Minimum Standard for Corporate Practice
By building strategic alliances with investors and shareholders, Indigenous Peoples are proactively protecting their rights by urging corporate respect of those rights in routine operations.
When the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, it was the first time Indigenous Peoples’ rights were widely affirmed on a global scale. The Declaration contemplated not only the inextricable connection between Indigenous Peoples’ livelihoods, culture, and land, but also their collective rights to decision-making and self-determination. Countries have integrated those rights into their domestic policies and laws at different levels, but the Declaration provides a minimum standard under which Indigenous Peoples’ rights can be considered. Moreover, Indigenous Peoples worldwide view the Declaration as the authoritative enumeration of their rights that guides their interactions with government or with business.
In general, corporate consideration of Indigenous Peoples and their human rights is often peripheral to business operations and, when considered, are generally relegated to an environmental compliance process. This means that the impacts of development on Indigenous communities are often only addressed during project implementation, or only after a violation of their rights has occurred. Such an approach detrimentally narrows the focus to remedy of harms already done rather than preventing violations at the outset. Further, when tribes and Native people have used the courts to realize their rights under the Declaration, the relief is too often reactive to damages or human rights violations that have already occurred. When sacred lands or objects have already been destroyed, for example, there is no remedy even if a court case is ultimately won.
Since transnational corporations affect the human rights of peoples around the world in their ordinary course of business, in 2011 the United Nations set forth the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights as a three-part framework to address human rights impacts. The framework includes: 1) States’ responsibility to protect human rights, 2) the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, and 3) access to remedy for affected communities. Businesses have a responsibility to assess where their operations intersect with international human rights standards, and to do so with an eye towards prevention of human rights abuses. The Guiding Principles point to the significant overlap between a corporate director’s fiduciary duty to shareholders to manage the business with due care, and the director’s role to adequately assess the risks of corporate operations along a number of criteria such as financial risk, environmental risk, social risk, and human rights risk. This framework runs parallel to the decade-long shift in the corporate sector towards the adoption of broader environmental, social, and governance criteria (ESG), as well as the adoption of policies to respect human and environmental rights as a matter of business.
Building Alliances
As part of the growing ESG movement, Indigenous Peoples have realized the cumulative power of building strategic alliances with concerned investors as an effective means to proactively protect their rights, as well as to integrate respect for their rights into corporate practice. These investors reach other impact-oriented investors to build coalitions that can elevate Indigenous leaders in strategies such as letter writing, speaking at industry events, direct dialogue with banks and corporations, and filing shareholder proposals. Together, these coalitions of investors and Indigenous Peoples bring their shared interest into focus by leveraging assets under management to influence corporate decision-making.
Indigenous Peoples have pioneered the use of shareholder advocacy as a strong tool to integrate respect for human rights into corporate practice, successfully eradicating racist branding and addressing cultural appropriation. For example, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility organized 800 investors to call on Liz Claiborne to retire the “Crazy Horse” brand; in 2007, the label was discontinued. Similarly, after long engagement around the Washington NFL team’s racist logo and mascot, in June 2020 investors—representing more than $620 billion in assets—sent a letter to corporate sponsors Nike, PepsiCo, and FedEx urging them to make good on their commitments to eradicate racism by pressuring the team to change its name. A letter with nearly 1,500 signatories of Native organizations and leaders was sent to show the wide consensus for change in Indian Country. By July 13, the team had retired the name and logo.
These successes are compounding, and shareholder advocacy is becoming an increasingly important strategy to protect Indigenous lands, territories, and resources from extractive development. Core to this engagement to build preventative frameworks is advocating for Indigenous Peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) over the development of their lands, territories, and resources. FPIC is of paramount importance because it is a critical safeguard of other rights, as true implementation of FPIC allows Indigenous leadership the opportunity to meaningfully choose what type of development may occur in their communities. Because the right to set self-determined development priorities needs to be recognized prior to project finance or project implementation, Indigenous Peoples are now leveraging early opportunities for shareholder advocacy and corporate engagement to influence business behavior towards optimal operationalization of FPIC.
Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Dakota Access Pipeline
Although Indigenous Peoples and investors have come together frequently over the last decade, few examples are as visible and powerful as what occurred during the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s opposition to construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) on their treaty territory. The Tribe had expressed their desire to reroute the pipeline away from their lands as early as 2014, filed a legal case in 2016 directly opposing the route as planned, and expressed to the media their position that the pipeline violated their treaty rights. When DAPL’s parent company—Energy Transfer Partners—continued construction, decimating objects with cultural and spiritual value to tribes across the Great Plains, the clear disregard for the Tribes’ resources and concerns led to significant social unrest. Indigenous Peoples and allies from around the world gathered on the banks of the Cannonball River to physically protest construction of the pipeline. In fact, the #NoDAPL movement swelled to 15,000 people at its apex and resulted in conflict, arrests and further human rights violations.
In parallel to legal and international advocacy measures, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe activated a shareholder advocacy campaign targeted towards financial institutions funding pipeline construction. The Tribe, supported by a significant coalition of investors, sent a letter representing over $685 billion assets under management—the total market value managed on behalf of the investors’ clients—that elevated to those institutions the real-time impacts of corporate actors’ failure to consider human rights during construction. After meeting with multiple institutions over the course of the campaign, several European banks pulled their commitments from the pipeline.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s corporate engagement campaign put the rights of Indigenous Peoples on the radar as a material consideration for financial institutions. In 2018, First Peoples Worldwide used publicly available data to study whether the social and human rights risks attendant to DAPL manifested in financial losses. The study found that, though initially estimated to cost $3.8 billion, the pipeline cost more than $12 billion by the time it was operational in June 2017, losses accumulated from the long delays in construction due to social unrest and legal filings. Energy Transfer Partners’ stock price significantly underperformed relative to market expectations during the event study period, and it experienced a long-term decline in value that persisted after the project was completed. In fact, from August 2016 to September 2018—while the S&P 500 increased by nearly 35 percent—ETP’s stock declined by almost 20 percent.
While the case study does not attribute this underperformance exclusively to social pressure, the early failure to respect the human rights of the affected Indigenous Peoples led to social protests and pressure, which led to the delays that ultimately cost the company and associated financial institutions billions of dollars. Given these financial losses, this case study demonstrates the need for corporate directors and shareholders to understand, review, and incorporate respect for Indigenous Peoples into their business operations as a matter of fiduciary duty, if not as a matter of sustainable finance.
Implementing Shareholder Advocacy in the Arctic
More recently, the Gwich’in Steering Committee has leveraged shareholder advocacy to create new momentum to protect the Coastal Plain of the Arctic Refuge, which is currently under direct threat of development by oil and gas companies. The Coastal Plain is sacred for the Gwich’in and other Alaskan Natives – the Gwich’in call it “Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit” (The Sacred Place Where Life Begins). In 1988, Gwich’in Elders and Chiefs gathered for the first time in over 150 years and formed the Gwich’in Steering Committee (GSC) to act as the unified voice to protect their ancestral lands. Since then, the Gwich’in people have used every mechanism possible to protect the Coastal Plain from oil and gas development and recently have engaged with corporate and financial institutions in those efforts. In 2019, the GSC met with multiple financial institutions to urge them to ban financing for oil and gas development in the Arctic Refuge. At the meetings, representatives from the banks recalled meeting with Standing Rock Sioux tribal leaders in 2016 and indicated that those meetings continue to influence their policies.
To date, more than 30 international financial institutions have adopted policies that exclude project-level financing for oil and gas development in the Arctic. Significantly, since the meetings in 2019, all six major US banks and all major Canadian banks released updates to their policies banning project-level financing for fossil fuel development in the Refuge, and lease sales performed dramatically below expectations, with no major energy companies participating.
This strategy is increasingly important as incursions continue unabated around the world affecting Indigenous communities in Russia, the Amazon, Australia, and Africa, and, in the US, in Minnesota, Arizona, and southern Alaska, among so many more.
Forward-Looking Accountability
Engaging with investors and shareholders to elevate the importance of Indigenous Peoples’ rights is an increasingly critical avenue for advocacy and change, especially as companies and investors seek additional means to activate their own values aligning with social, environmental, and racial justice. Shareholder advocacy creates accountability not only between a boardroom and the impacts of business in Indigenous communities but between a corporation’s own policies and actions. Through understanding and incorporating these rights at every stage of decision-making—especially the initial stages—businesses can pave the way for a more integrated respect of Indigenous Peoples’ rights, one that is forward-looking instead of reactionary. In this way, centering the rights of Indigenous Peoples is an imperative for companies who are seeking the best means not only to prevent human right violations but to activate greater respect for Indigenous Peoples by aligning their operations with Indigenous self-determination and well-being.
‘It’s cultural genocide’: inside the fight to stop a pipeline on tribal lands
Dressed in a ribbon skirt and mask, Tara Houska gazed down at the trickling waters of the Mississippi near its headwaters. The great American river that eventually flows into the Gulf of Mexico is just a stream in these parts of northern Minnesota.
A pipeline will soon burrow underneath this part of the Mississippi and its surrounding wetlands. It is one of hundreds of water crossings, including wild rice fields, that lie in the path of a new stretch of Line 3, a pipeline bringing nearly 1m barrels of tar sands a day from Alberta, Canada, to Superior, Wisconsin.
But opposition to the pipeline is considerable, andis supported by environmental organizations and activists resisting pipelines such as the Dakota Access pipeline, and Keystone XL – a project that Joe Biden cancelled on his first day in the White House.
The on-the-ground activists are called “water protectors”, who are against the pipeline because of its impact on the climate crisis, oil spills and infringement on Native treaty rights.
There are numerous sites in Minnesota, along the new Line 3 route, where water protectors have set up camp. Much of the route goes through tribal lands, as well as Minnesota’s iron range and areas popular for recreation, including hunting, fishing and people enjoying the outdoors.
It is a lush, wooded part of the state, thick with birch and pine trees, pristine lakes, rolling creeks and lakes filled with wild rice, an agricultural product that is historically significant to the Ojibwe.
Tall grasses poked out of the snow at the spot near the Mississippi headwaters in northern Minnesota, where Houska spoke. “It’s really hard to be in a situation in which we’re looking at this beautiful place and thinking about the fact that our governor has chosen to support or at least tacitly allow a tar sands project, one of the biggest tar sands infrastructure projects in North America,” Houska said. “It’s a perpetuation of cultural genocide.”
A ‘replacement line’ or expansion?
Line 3 is a proposed reroute of a 52-year-old pipeline operated by Enbridge, a Canadian energy corporation based in Alberta. In 2014, after two major oil spills for which Enbridge was responsible, including the largest inland oil spill in US history, the Department of Justice under the Obama administration ordered the replacement line, due to its structural issues. The “replacement” pipeline runs mostly on a completely new route through Minnesota, barreling through hundreds of lakes, rivers, aqueducts and wetlands. It also traverses land that Native American opponents say is protected by US treaties with Ojibwe nations.
For the past three years, Houska, an attorney, has set up camp here with the resistance group Giniw Collective, which she founded. Last week Houska met with the congresswoman Ilhan Omar at the bridge overlooking the river, along with a group of other Native female leaders.
“We need Biden to revoke the water-crossing permit,” Omar told the Guardian. “That is one of the greatest opportunities that can be given to this community.”
Omar sent a letter to Biden calling on him to cancel the permits allowing the pipeline to cross under the river.
Among the objections are that the line will bring an expansion of tar sands, which have higher emissions than other types of crude oil. In addition, opponents say the line is a violation of indigenous territory, as it causes pollution in lands and waters that the Ojibwe were promised to be able to use for ever.
Enbridge calls its $3bn endeavour the Line 3 Replacement Project, claiming the new pipes simply replace existing infrastructure that dates back to the 1960s. But opponents say that it is an expansion not a replacement project, as the majority of the new pipeline in Minnesota takes a different course than the original.
“What I want to say loud and clear is that this is not a replacement line,” said Dawn Goodwin, an Ojibwe advocate from the White Earth reservation, and one of the women who met with Omar at the river. “It’s actually relocation, a whole new project, a whole new corridor.”
The fight against Line 3 evokes a series of treaties signed between the US government and the Ojibwe people, including the treaty of 1837, which explicitly grants the Ojibwe the right to hunt, fish and gather in the lands they gave up, and the 1855 treaty, which in 1999, the supreme court ruled also retains those rights.
More than 100 people have been arrested as they protested against the line in the last month, since construction of the project began, Houska said, but battles are still raging in the courts and between government agencies. In one case, the Minnesota department of commerce claims the utilities regulator should not have sanctioned the project without first evaluating the long-term demand for oil.
Meanwhile, pressure mounts on Biden to halt Line 3 as indigenous activists and environmentalists argue that building new fossil fuel infrastructure will jeopardize his ambitious climate plans.
But not everyone is against Line 3.
‘Preserve our land’
Tim Halberg owns the land on both sides of the river where the pipeline crosses underneath. A research scientist and the proprietor of a land management company, Halberg uses the land to hunt, trap, fish and swim with his family. He grew up four miles north of the crossing, the descendant of Swedish immigrants.
Halberg was approached by Enbridge four or five years ago for permission to use his land for the right of way. He doesn’t see a problem with the pipelines being underground. “The grassland doesn’t get impeded by a pipe in the ground,” he said. “Oil spills are bad, but remember what oil does with water – oil floats. It’s easier to recover.”
Oil pipeline spills are known to happen, like the Kalamazoo oil spill in 2010, in which 1m US gallons of oil flowing through Enbridge’s Line 6B burst into the Kalamazoo River.
Michael Barnes, a spokesperson for Enbridge, said according to the project’s environmental impact statement, Line 3 is unlikely to have much impact on greenhouse gas emissions. “Restored capacity on the replacement line displaces crude oil being delivered today by truck or train, which are more carbon intensive modes of transport,” Barnes said in an email to the Guardian.
Barnes also said that Enbridge has demonstrated “ongoing respect for tribal sovereignty”, pointing to support from the project by both the Leech Lake and the Fond du Lac.
Nancy Beaulieu, an organizer for the environmental group MN350 and a member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe who met with Omar at the headwaters, is unhappy with how some tribal leaders have accepted the project without consulting their members. This includes the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe – an umbrella organization of the Ojibwe tribes with the exception of Red Lake.
“Being stakeholders of the Minnesota Chippewa tribe, we should have prior informed consent, but we have not,” Beaulieu told the Guardian. “Our Minnesota Chippewa tribe constitution has a preamble to conserve and preserve our resources and our land for the wellbeing of our people and our descendants. Line 3 violates our preamble.”
Others including White Earth, Red Lake and most recently Mille Lacs, have fought Enbridge in court. That fight received a blow this week when the Minnesota appeals court denied a request for a stay of construction. Joe Plummer, a tribal attorney representing Red Lake, said the fight was far from over. “This is only a decision on our emergency request to stop construction,” Plummer said. Oral arguments for the case begin in March, and the tribe has a request in the US district court that challenges the army corps of engineers’ approval.
Another place where the pipeline will cross the Mississippi is near Palisade, Minnesota, in Aikin county. Nearby, a water protector camp called the Welcome Center hosts Natives and allies who want to stand up to Enbridge.
One truth-teller at the site is Tania Aubid, an Ojibwe woman who has no time for elected tribal leaders giving away Native land. “They may have been elected into office, but they don’t know anything about the history of their own people,” she said.
Covid-19 takes the life of the last male from Brazil’s indigenous Juma tribe
The elder Aruká, who died last week in a hospital in the upper Amazon River basin, leaves behind three daughters who are now the only survivors of a group that counted on thousands of members just three centuries ago
Aruká Juma, a native Brazilian, was aged between 86 and 90 when he died from complications caused by coronavirus on Wednesday in an intensive care unit (ICU) in a hospital in Porto Velho, a city located in the upper Amazon River basin, and 120 kilometers by road and two hours by boat from his village.
His death, just like the 1,150 other Covid-19 fatalities registered that day across Brazil, was a tragedy for his next of kin. But Aruká was also the last male from the Juma people, a living memory of ancestral wisdom and a survivor of an attempt to wipe out his kind. The three daughters he leaves behind are now the only ones left from a people who counted on between 12,000 and 15,000 members in the 18th century.
Aruká was the last Juma man who had knowledge of the ways of hunting, the artisan ways of his people
ANTHROPOLOGIST EDMUNDO PEGGION
Acute respiratory failure combined with an infection meant that the senior did not survive the illness, according to digital daily Amazonia Real. As a youngster, he and six other Jumas survived a massacre that was ordered by traders interested in the rubber and chestnuts from his land, according to the detailed information from the Social-Environmental Institute about every one of the hundreds of ethnic groups in Brazil. Hunted down as if they were wild animals, around 60 of the indigenous peoples were killed. It was the last mass-extermination attempt that was suffered by the tribe, which was described by chroniclers as cannibals, perverse and ferocious.
Aruká’s case illustrates how the coronavirus pandemic has affected the indigenous peoples who live in the villages of Brazil, which is the second-worst country in terms of the global impact of the pandemic. Three figures sum up the national drama: 242,000 dead, nearly 10 million infections and a 14% unemployment rate. Among the indigenous peoples who live in villages – a small minority that is particularly vulnerable in this vast territory – Covid-19 has killed 567 people. The life of this Juma offers, what’s more, a look at the history behind these communities that have been decimated since Portuguese colonization and that are essential for the conservation of the Amazon, the biggest tropical jungle in the world. The tribes are key, as such, in the fight to slow down climate change.
Anthropologist Edmundo Peggion came to know the last Juma in the 1990s. “Aruká was the last Juma man who had knowledge of the ways of hunting, the artisan ways of his people,” explains the professor from the Paulista State University (Unesp) via telephone. “There is a consensus in the region, among the Kagwahiva indigenous people, of their importance for the collective memory.” Kagwahiva is the linguistic group to which the Juma belong. “He was recognized as an amóe, a title of respect,” Peggion explains, in reference to a word meaning “grandfather.”
As well as the long-term threats facing Brazil’s indigenous peoples, such as gold miners and illegal loggers, they have also been facing the coronavirus pandemic and Jair Bolsonaro’s handling of the health crisis – the Brazilian president is anti-vaccine, has played down the severity of Covid-19 and has also trampled on the rights of indigenous peoples.
The main associations protecting Brazilian natives have directly blamed the government for Aruká‘s death. “Once again, the Brazilian government has acted with a degree of criminal negligence and incompetence,” they charged in a statement. “The government murdered him.”
The epidemic is spreading fast via the rivers of the Amazon, and the invaders of lands are a source of infection. While vaccines are arriving in remote indigenous villages, there is mistrust of health workers. And the lack of vaccine supply is threatening the campaign in all of Brazil – the program had to be suspended in Rio de Janeiro last week.
Aruká had to be taken to hospital in January and intubated. He became one of the Brazilians to be given what the country’s Health Ministry describes as early treatment, using drugs such as chloroquine – a medication whose efficiency against Covid-19 has not been scientifically proven, and whose usage has been turned into government policy by Bolsonaro.
The death of the indigenous senior “is a devastating loss,” says Edson Carvalho, from the NGO Kanindé. “The history of his life was and will continue to be a symbol of the tremendous fight waged by the Juma people,” he adds, speaking via telephone from Porto Velho, the city where Aruká died.
He will be buried in his village, which is where he was when he noticed the first coronavirus symptoms in January. It’s a place far from any city, a 38,000-hectare indigenous reserve that was created after a long and tough battle that involved years of administrative procedures. The Brazilian authorities were unconvinced as to whether this territory, and its handful of residents, was worthy of the legal protection needed to impede the exploitation of its resources.After another battle with the authorities, Aruká managed to return to the lands where he grew up and where his ancestors lived for centuries
Before this was achieved, at the end of the 1990s the last Juma peoples were removed from their land by the authorities. Aruká, his three daughters, a brother-in-law and his wife were moved against their will to the domain of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau, explains Peggion, who had close contact with both groups at the time. There the daughters married men from the other tribe, with whom the Juma had a common language. Abandoning their habitat “had a huge impact in the life of all of the Juma,” the anthropologist explains, adding that the older couple died shortly after the relocation. “In those years, outside of his territory, Aruká was very depressed, he really missed his territory,” the researcher explains.
After another battle with the authorities, Aruká managed to return to the lands where he grew up and where his ancestors lived for centuries. He was accompanied by his daughters (Jumas), their husbands (Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau) and the children of the three couples. The Kanindé NGO claims that the daughters are the last of the line, given that it is the father who passes down the ethnicity. The firstborn, Borehá, is the new chief of the decimated group.
Faithful to his campaign promise, Bolsonaro has failed to give legal protection to a single extra square inch of indigenous land during the two years he has held the presidency. The cases that are being processed have been frozen while the number of Amazon inspectors – the bodies that work to take care of the environment and the indigenous peoples that have protected it for countless generations – is being reduced.
More Native Americans Named to Key Posts in Biden Administration
In a slow rollout of appointments since taking office last month, President Joe Biden has added an additional three Native American members to various department and task force positions in February, making good on “the Biden-Harris commitment to diversity.”
Department of the Interior
On Feb. 3, former attorney at the Native American Rights Fund in Alaska and a tribal member of the Chickasaw Nation, Natalie Landreth, was appointed to serve in the Department of the Interior as deputy solicitor for land.
Landreth will serve under the first Native American cabinet member, Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo, once the congresswoman is confirmed by the Senate to the secretary of the Interior.
During her 17-year tenure at the Native American Rights Fund, which represents tribes in legal battles over sovereignty, treaty rights and environmental law, Landreth was involved in lawsuits to stop the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline which Native groups say could pollute sacred lands and waters in Indian Country. Last year, Landreth also successfully challenged Montana’s requirement that mail-in ballots have witness signatures, thereby correcting the most common reason such ballots hadn’t been counted.
Department of Transportation
Navajo Nation’s former Department of Transportation head, Arizona State Rep. Arlando Teller, was appointed last week to serve under department secretary Pete Butigeg as deputy assistant secretary of tribal affairs in the Department of Transportation. Teller is the first openly gay person to be confirmed to a Cabinet post.
He resigned from his legislative seat Jan. 31.
He is the second Navajo person to join the Biden-Harris administration, after Wahleah Johns was selected to serve as Director of the Office of Indian Energy in the Energy Department last month.
President of the Navajo Nation, Jonathan Nez, tweeted that, “Words cannot express how proud we are of these two young Navajo professionals, who have dedicated themselves to serving our Navajo people and are now moving on to the federal level to help empower all tribal nations.”
COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force
On Feb. 10, the White House named 12 members to a COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force.
President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris created the group “to help ensure an equitable response to the pandemic, the President signed an executive order on January 21 creating a task force to address COVID-19 related health and social inequities,” according to a press release.
Among the 12 member group of diverse backgrounds, Victor Joseph of the Native Village of Tanana in Alaska was selected to serve as a non-federal task force member.
Joseph was elected to Tanana Chiefs Conference Chairman in March of 2014, and served until last October. Prior to that role, he served in various tribal positions, and as Alaska Representative on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Tribal Advisory Committee and the Indian Health Services Budget Formulation Committee.
Indigenous community wins recognition of its land rights in Panama
- A ruling by Panama’s Supreme Court of Justice in November 2020 led to the official creation of a comarca, or protected Indigenous territory, for the Naso Tjër Di people in northern Panama.
- The 1,600-square-kilometer (620-square-mile) comarca is the result of a decades-long effort to secure the Naso’s land rights.
- Panama’s former president had vetoed legislation creating the comarca in 2018, which he said was unconstitutional because it overlapped with two established protected areas.
- Other Indigenous groups in Panama with longstanding comarcas still struggle to hold back outside incursions for projects such as dams and power transmission lines.
The Naso Tjër Di people of Panama now have a protected territory of their own. The creation of the 1,600-square-kilometer (620-square-mile) comarca, as it’s called in Panama, came as a result of a recent decision by the country’s Supreme Court recognizing the Indigenous nation’s land rights.
The court’s decision rested in part on evidence of the role that Indigenous groups play in protecting the environment in Panama, as has been shown elsewhere on the planet, according to an analysis by the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).
Leaders in the Naso community have been working toward the goal of a comarca for decades, seeing it as a bulwark against potentially destructive outside incursions.
“Having that official recognition of their land is so fundamental to their well-being and survival as a group,” Sarah Dorman, a staff attorney with CIEL, told Mongabay.
The Naso nation comprises around 4,000 people living in the rainforests of northern Panama along the Teribe River, territory they have lived in for generations. But even as other Indigenous groups in Panama have been able to secure their own comarcas, the Naso’s claim to the land remained unrecognized by the government.
Change appeared to be coming in 2018, when Panama’s National Assembly passed a law to establish the Naso Tjër Di Comarca. Shortly after the vote on the legislation, though, then-President Juan Carlos Varela vetoed it. He said the comarca would overlap with two protected areas designated in the mid-2000s: La Amistad International Park and Palo Seco Protected Forest, both UNESCO World Heritage Sites. As a result, he argued, the legislation creating the comarca was “inconvenient,” “unenforceable” and unconstitutional.
In response, the legislature overrode Varela’s veto, triggering a review of the matter by the Panamanian Supreme Court. The court rejected Varela’s arguments on Nov. 12, 2020, ruling that the Constitution required that the government secure continued collective access for Panama’s Indigenous people to their ancestral lands.
The ruling notes that “the Indigenous population has preserved the environment in the places where they have settled, because they are bearers of ancient knowledge about biodiversity, plants, animals, water, and climate that allows for the sustainable use of the resources available to them,” according to a translation from CIEL.
In another “key reference,” according to Dorman, the court’s members also wrote that Indigenous “laws, customs, and traditional practices reflect both an attachment to the land and the responsibility to conserve it for the use of future generations.”
In a statement following the ruling, the NGO Rainforest Foundation US said its analysis found that less deforestation had occurred on Naso lands than in the Palo Seco Protected Forest.
“As the court says itself, Indigenous peoples are among the best protectors of the environment,” CIEL’s Dorman said.
The court’s decision extended the thrust of a legal memo issued by the Panamanian Ministry of Environment in 2019, saying that protected areas weren’t an impediment to Indigenous land titling.
The Naso Tjër Di Comarca became official on Dec. 4, 2020, when Panama’s current president, Laurentino Cortizo Cohen, went to the town of Sieyik, where the Naso’s king resides, to sign the legislation. In a speech, Cortizo Cohen said the overlap between the comarca and the protected areas would ensure that the forests in the area would be doubly protected, according to a government statement.
Dorman said the recognition of the Naso’s territory is “huge” from a legal perspective. But she also said that more remained to be done to secure their forests.
CIEL works closely with the Ngäbe and Buglé Indigenous peoples in Panama, and these groups achieved a joint comarca in 1997. Dorman said that once a comarca is formed, the law requires demarcating the boundaries between a comarca and adjacent areas within two years.
“That has not been finished to this day,” she said.
In the years since, Ngäbe and Buglé community leaders say they’ve been sidelined for development projects, most recently the construction of a power transmission line through their territory that they worry will force them from their homes.
The Naso have faced their own spate of development projects affecting their lands and fissuring their community. After years of construction on a tributary of the Teribe River, the Bonyik hydroelectric dam came online in 2014, and its social impacts reportedly rippled through Naso communities, according to a World Bank investigation as well as a 2014 report by James Anaya, then the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The dam also lies within the boundaries of the Palo Seco Protected Forest. In fact, human rights groups and Indigenous communities have expressed concern that such protected areas may in fact be a tool to dispossess Indigenous groups like the Naso of their lands to pave the way for lucrative development projects.
Today, the Naso have recognition of their land rights, predicated on their ancestral claims and backed by evidence that shows the group’s superlative environmental stewardship. But until the borders are established, they are still vulnerable from a legal standpoint, Dorman said.
“If your land is not delineated completely,” she said, “it’s just so much harder to legally defend against these outside encroachments.”
Philippines: Drop murder charge against indigenous rights defender, UN experts urge
GENEVA (28 January 2021) – UN human rights experts today called on Philippine authorities to drop a reportedly unwarranted murder charge against an indigenous rights defender who submitted himself to police after a “shoot to kill” order had been issued if he resisted arrest, and to ensure his safety and well-being while in custody.
“From information we have received, Mr Windel Bolinget has been falsely accused of being implicated in a murder of an indigenous leader in a province he has never even been to,” said Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders. “It is believed to be a fabricated charge aimed at silencing him and other indigenous rights defenders and the charge should be dropped.”
The experts said they were seriously concerned for Bolinget’s well-being. “We implore the authorities to ensure he is afforded his right to a fair trial and due process and is not subjected to any harm while in custody,” the experts said, adding that all human rights defenders in the country must be allowed to safely carry out legitimate human rights work without fear of retaliation.
“The practice of levying unfounded charges and accusations against human rights defenders for their peaceful and legitimate work is not only incredibly damaging to these individuals and their families, but also to other human rights defenders and civil society actors in the Philippines,” the experts said.
Bolinget, held in the custody of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) since 21 January, is an indigenous rights defender and the Chairperson of the Cordillera People’s Alliance (CPA), an alliance of indigenous peoples’ organisations working in the Cordillera region.
A case filed in August 2020 against him and nine others for alleged involvement in the murder of an indigenous leader in 2018 in Davao del Norte province was followed by an arrest warrant for Bolinget in late December. Fearing for his safety, he went into hiding and on 19 January the Cordillera police issued a “shoot to kill” order if he was deemed to resist arrest. Two days later, Bolinget submitted himself to the NBI to ensure his safety and to seek legal assistance to challenge the charges.
The experts said sources close to the victim do not believe that Bolinget or the other accused were responsible for the murder, but rather a paramilitary group that had threatened the victim before his killing.
“The targeting of Mr Bolinget for his work as an indigenous rights defender comes merely weeks after nine Tumandok indigenous leaders were killed and 16 members of the community were arrested in Panay, reportedly in response to their advocacy against the construction of two mega dams and defence of their traditional lands, territories and resources,” said José Francisco Calí Tzay, Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples.
The Special Rapporteurs also expressed concern regarding the recent red-tagging of human rights defenders and staff members of civil society organisations by state officials, including the Commissioner for the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines (CHRP), Karen Gomez Dumpit, and staff members of the environmental advocacy groups Kalikasan PNE and the Center for Environmental Concerns (CEC). There is a concerning pattern, the experts said, of incidents of red-tagging preceding the killing of a human rights defender.
“Human rights defenders in the Philippines continue to be red-tagged, labelled as ‘terrorists’ and ultimately killed in attempts to silence them and delegitimise their human rights work. This must end.”
The experts are in contact with the authorities on this matter.
Indigenous Lawyer to Lead USDA’s Tribal Relations Office
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced Monday that it has appointed Heather Dawn Thompson, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, as Director of the Office of Tribal Relations (OTR), which reports directly to the Secretary of Agriculture.
Thompson is a graduate of Harvard law school and “an expert in American Indian law, tribal sovereignty, and rural tribal economic development,” the USDA said in a statement.
Thompson has years of experience working with a number of legal organizations and in public service, including as a member of the American Indian Law Practice Group at Greenberg Traurig, where she focused on federal Indian law and tribal agriculture; a presidential management fellow at the Department of Justice; a law clerk with the Attorney General’s Office for the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe; as Counsel and Policy Advisor to the U.S. Senate’s Democratic Policy Committee; and as assistant U.S. Attorney for the South Dakota’s Indian Country Section, where she worked on cases involving violence against women and children.
She was also a partner at Dentons, where she was one of the few Native American partners at an “AmLaw 100” law firm, the statement said. Additionally, Thompson has served as the director of government affairs for the National Congress of American Indians, president of the South Dakota Indian Country Bar Association, and president of the National Native American Bar Association.
Thompson has a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School, a masters degree in public policy from the University of Florida, and a bachelor’s degree in International Studies from Carnegie Mellon University.
“Heather’s appointment to lead the Office of Tribal Relations is a step toward restoring the office and the position of Director so that USDA can effectively maintain nation-to-nation relationships in recognition of tribal sovereignty and to ensure that meaningful tribal consultation is standard practice across the Department. It’s also important to have a Director who can serve as a lead voice on tribal issues, relations and economic development within the Office of the Secretary because the needs and priorities of tribal nations and Indigenous communities are cross cutting and must be kept front and center,” said Katharine Ferguson, Chief of Staff, Office of the Secretary, in the statement.
“It is an honor and a challenge to serve during these difficult times,” Thompson told the Rapid City Journal. “Here in South Dakota we know better than most that rural Americans have felt frustrated, left out and left behind. And America’s first Americans are often thought of last.”
“We need real systemic economic improvements in Indian Country and in all of rural South Dakota so our children can make a living, so our families can thrive,” she said. “Empowering tribal nations is one of the answers. In other states where rural tribal nations have developed thriving businesses, they are often the largest employers for Natives and non-Natives in their entire region.”
The OTR works on tribal agricultural and economic development, Thompson told the Journal. Under the Trump administration, the OTR was made part of the Office of Partnerships and Public Engagement, but Biden has moved it back to its own office, Thompson said.
According to the USDA, the Office of Tribal Relations “serves as a single point of contact for Tribal issues and works to ensure that relevant programs and policies are efficient, easy to understand, accessible, and developed in consultation with the American Indians and Alaska Native constituents they impact.”
The USDA website says it provides leadership on food, nutrition, agriculture, natural resources, and rural development, as well as public policy surrounding those issues.
“With Thompson in place, USDA will return OTR directly under the Secretary, restoring the office’s important government-to-government role,” the USDA release said.