American Indian tribes protesting oil and gas pipelines are worried environmentalists are co-opting them in an overarching fight against climate change.
Tribes are aligning with climate activists on very specific issues such as mutual opposition to oil pipelines that cut too close to Indians’ water supply, Jade Begay, a spokeswoman for the Indigenous Environmental Network, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. But Indian tribes and environmentalists, she added, often disagree on issues like climate change and energy production.
“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,” Begay said.
Many Indian reservations, which have limited access to their own natural resources, have pushed and prodded Congress into allowing tribes to develop their own energy supply without government interference. Tribal lands hold nearly $1.5 trillion worth of natural resources, according to some estimates.
Recent reports from the Government Accountability Office show that the federal bureaucracy responsible for regulating tribal resources oftentimes suffer from terrible management and corruption. The reports have drawn outcries among some Indian groups who want control of their own lands.
Those living in the northern reaches of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), for instance, have lobbied Congress for years hoping to get the right to drill for oil in a tiny portion of the refuge.
“We have thousands and thousands of acres of land that our people in the state of Alaska, especially in ANWR, have title to and [they] cannot even use that resource to enrich themselves,” Alaska State Rep. Benjamin Nageak, a Democrat said in a 2015 video.
Republican lawmakers have heeded the calls.
A GOP-backed bill — the Native American Energy Act — aims to give tribes more control over developing their natural resources, including coal, oil and renewables. It hasn’t gained much traction in the Senate, despite a strong push from Alaskan lawmakers.
Begay, meanwhile, argues environmentalist activists complicate these issues.
“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, she said. “Sometimes they are” genuinely trying to collaborate, “and sometimes they’re not.”
Energy analysts who supported the Dakota Access Pipeline – a multi-billion oil project that was opposed by Standing Rock Sioux, a tribal group affiliated with the Great Sioux Nation – believe that environmentalists merely struck while the iron was hot.
“Unfortunately … we’re seeing the environmental Left’s playbook is to co-opt some tribal leaders in an effort to thwart domestic energy production,” Craig Stevens, spokesman for the Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now coalition, told reporters recently. Steven’s group supports the DAPL.
Climate activists have essentially monopolized the DAPL issue, Stevens added.
“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.
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