The Trump-appointed coalition's proposal lands in a blizzard of louder and broader environmental tensions on Indian reservations, swirling around all of the protests against a petroleum pipeline by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and their supporters in North Dakota. As most OEN readers know, recently the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit for the Dakota Access Pipeline project, citing a need to explore alternate routes. The Trump transition team has expressed support for the pipeline, however, and his administration will reverse the Corp's decision in January.
Most of the rhetoric that follows smacks of having been produced in corporate board rooms by the many specialists in double speak and oil company public relations press releases:
Tribes and their members would see wealth from tapping resources beneath reservations. The Council of Energy Resource Tribes, a tribal energy consortium, estimated in 2009 that Indian energy resources are worth about $1.5 trillion. In 2008, the BIA testified before Congress that reservations contained about 20% of untapped oil and gas reserves in the U.S. And what do you know but all of this deregulation could also benefit private oil drillers including Devon Energy, Occidental Petroleum, BP, and others that have sought to develop leases on reservations through deals with tribal governments.
Trump's transition team asked the 27-member Native American Affairs Coalition to draw up a list of proposals to guide his Indian policy on issues ranging from energy to health care and education.
The backgrounds of the coalition's leadership clarigy its pro-drilling bent. Three of four chair-level members have links to the oil industry. Mullin received about 8% of his campaign funding over the years from energy companies, while co-chair Sharon Clahchischilliage--a Republican New Mexico State Representative and Navajo tribe member--received about 15% from energy firms, according to campaign finance disclosures examined by Reuters.
Swimmer is a partner at a Native American-focused investment fund that has invested heavily in oil and gas companies, including Energy Transfer Partners--the owner of the pipeline being protested in North Dakota. The fourth co-chair, Eddie Tullis, a former chairman of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians in Alabama, is involved in casino gaming, a major industry on reservations. Clahchischilliage and Tullis would not respond to requests for comment.
Bureaucratic Layers
The Crow Nation in Montana and the Southern Ute in Colorado, have entered into mining and drilling deals that generate revenue for tribe members and finance health, education and infrastructure projects on their reservations. However, federal permits are required to lease, mortgage, mine, or drill--bureaucracies that critics blame for resulting in increased poverty on reservations. Tribes has struggled to profit off of oil and gas drilling in the past ten years.
"The time it takes to go from lease to production is three times longer on trust lands than on private land," said Mark Fox, chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes in Forth Berthold, North Dakota, which produces about 160,000 barrels of oil per day. If privatizing has some kind of a meaning that rights are given to private entities over tribal land, then that is worrying, but if it has to do with undoing federal burdens that can occur, there might be some justification."
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There is a long history of abuse in this department, and Native Americans who fear tribal-land privatization cite precedents of lost sovereignty and culture.
The 1887 Dawes Act gave Indians private lots in exchange for becoming U.S. citizens--resulting in more than 90 million acres passing out of Indian hands between the 1880s and 1930s, said Kevin Washburn, who served as Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs at the Department of the Interior from 2012 until he resigned in December 2015. "Privatization of Indian lands during the 1880s is widely viewed as one of the greatest mistakes in federal Indian policy," said Washburn, a citizen of Oklahoma's Chickasaw Nation.
Congress later created the "termination" policy in 1953 to "assimilate" Native populations into U.S. society. By 1963, 2.5 million acres of land were removed from tribal control, and 12,000 Native Americans lost their tribal affiliation. Mullin and Swimmer are mouthing sweet nothings when they state that the coalition won't repeat mistakes and will work to preserve tribal control of reservations. They said they also will aim to retain federal support to tribes, which amounts to nearly $20 billion a year, according to a Department of Interior report in 2013, and Mullin believes this proposal would result in Congressional legislation as early as next year.
Washburn said he doubted such a bill could pass, but Gabe Galanda, a Seattle-based lawyer specializing in Indian law, said it could be possible with Republican control of the White House and the U.S. House and Senate.
Legal challenges to such a law would also face less favorable treatment from a U.S. Supreme Court with a conservative majority, he said. Trump will soon have the chance to nominate a Supreme Court justice to replace Antonin Scalia, a conservative member who died earlier this year.
"With this alignment in the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court," he said, "we should be concerned about erosion of self determination, if not a return to termination."
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