This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On Thursday, Republicans in the House failed to override President Donald Trump’s first two vetoes in office: a pipeline project that would bring safe drinking water to rural Colorado, and another that would return land to the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians in Florida. Their inability to block the president’s move signals their commitment to the White House over their prior support for the measures.  The Miccosukee have always considered the Florida Everglades their home. So when Republicans in Congress voted to expand the tribe’s land base under the Miccosukee Reserved Area Act—legislation that would transfer 30 acres of land in the Everglades to tribal control—the Miccosukee were thrilled. After years of work, the move would have allowed the tribe to begin environmental restoration activities in the area and better protect it from climate change impacts as extreme flooding and tropical storms threaten the land. “The measure reflected years of bipartisan work and was intended to clarify land status and support basic protections for tribal members who have lived in this area for generations,” wrote Chairman Cypress in a statement last week, “before the roads and canals were built, and before Everglades National Park was created.” The act was passed on December 11, but on December 30, President Donald Trump vetoed it; one of only two vetoes made by the administration since he took office. In a statement, Trump explained that the tribe “actively sought to obstruct reasonable immigration policies that the American people decisively voted for when I was elected,” after the tribe’s July lawsuit challenging the construction of “Alligator Alcatraz,” an immigration detention center in the Everglades.  “It is rare for an administration to veto a bill for reasons wholly unrelated to the merits of the bill,” said Kevin Washburn, a law professor at University of California Berkeley Law and former assistant secretary of Indian affairs for the Department of the Interior. Washburn added that while denying land return to a tribe is a political act, Trump’s move is “highly unusual.” When a tribe regains land, the process can be long and costly. The process, known as “land into trust” transfers a land title from a tribe to the United States, where the land is then held for the benefit of the tribe and establishes tribal jurisdiction over the land in question. When tribal nations signed treaties in the 19th century ceding land, any lands reserved for tribes—generally, reservations—were held by the federal government “in trust” for the benefit of tribes, meaning that tribal nations don’t own these lands despite their sovereign status.  > Trump’s veto “makes absolutely no sense other than the interest in vengeance.” Almost all land-into-trust requests are facilitated at an administrative level by the Department of Interior. The Miccosukee, however, generally must follow a different process. Recognized as a tribal nation by the federal government in 1962, the Miccosukee navigate a unique structure for acquiring tribal land where these requests are made through Congress via legislation instead of by the Interior Department. “It’s ironic, right?” said Matthew Fletcher, a law professor at the University of Michigan. “You’re acquiring land that your colonizer probably took from you a long time ago and then gave it away to or sold it to someone else, and then years later, you’re buying that land back that was taken from you illegally, at a great expense.” While land-into-trust applications related to tribal gaming operations often meet opposition, Fletcher says applications like the Miccosukee’s are usually frictionless. And in cases like the Miccosukee Reserved Area Act, which received bipartisan support at the state and federal levels, in-trust applications are all but guaranteed. On the House floor on Thursday before the vote, Florida’s Democratic Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz said, “This bill is so narrowly focused that [the veto] makes absolutely no sense other than the interest in vengeance that seems to have emanated in this result.” The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.), did not respond to requests for comment. In July last year, Gimenez referred to the Miccosukee Tribe as stewards of the Everglades, sponsoring the bill as a way to manage water flow and advance an elevation project, under protection from the Department of the Interior, for the village to avert “catastrophic flooding.” “What you’re asking is for people in the same political party of the guy who just vetoed this thing to affirmatively reject the political decision of the president,” Fletcher said. The tribe is unlikely to see its village project materialize under Trump’s second term unless the outcome of this year’s midterms results in a Democratic-controlled House and Senate. Studies show that the return of land to tribes provides the best outcomes for the climate.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Early last year, the hydropower company Nature and People First set its sights on Black Mesa, a mountainous region on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona. The mesa’s steep drop offered ideal terrain for gravity-based energy storage, and the company was interested in building pumped-storage projects that leveraged the elevation difference. Environmental groups and tribal community organizations, however, largely opposed the plan. Pumped-storage operations involve moving water in and out of reservoirs, which could affect the habitats of endangered fish and require massive groundwater withdrawals from an already-depleted aquifer.  The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has authority over non-federal hydropower projects on the Colorado River and its tributaries, ultimately denied the project’s permit. The decision was among the first under a new policy: FERC would not approve projects on tribal land without the support of the affected tribe. Since the project was on Navajo land and the Navajo Nation opposed the project, FERC denied the permits. The Commission also denied similar permit requests from Rye Development, a Florida-based company, that also proposed pumped-water projects. Now, Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright wants to reverse this policy. In October, Wright wrote to FERC, requesting that the commission return to its previous policy and that giving tribes veto power was hindering the development of hydropower projects. The commission’s policy has created an “untenable regime,” he noted, and “For America to continue dominating global energy markets, we must remove unnecessary burdens to the development of critical infrastructure, including hydropower projects.”  Wright also invoked a rarely used authority under the Federal Powers Act to request that the commission make a final decision no later than December 18. And instead of the 30 to 60 days generally reserved for proposed rule changes, the FERC comment period was open for only two weeks last month. If his effort proves successful, hydropower projects like the ones proposed by Nature and People First could make a return to the Navajo Nation regardless of tribal support.  More than 20 tribes and tribal associations largely in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest, environmental groups, and elected officials, including Representative Frank Pallone, a Democrat from New Jersey, sent letters urging FERC to continue its current policy. > “He wasn’t understanding that our region has a history of extraction, and that > is coal mining and its impact on our groundwater.” “Tribes are stewards of the land and associated resources, and understand best how to manage and preserve those resources, as they have done for centuries,” wrote Chairman William Iyall of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe in Washington in a letter submitted to the commission.  Tó Nizhóní Ání, or TNA, a Diné-led water rights organization based in Black Mesa on the Navajo Nation, also submitted comments opposing the proposed hydropower project. In the 1960s, after Peabody Coal broke up sections of the resource-rich region between the Hopi and Navajo tribes for mining, the company was accused of misrepresenting the conditions of its operations and the status of mineral rights to local communities. Environmental problems soon followed, as the company’s groundwater pumping exceeded legal limits, compromising the aquifer and access to drinking water. According to Nicole Horseherder, Diné, and TNA’s executive director, this led residents of Black Mesa to use community wells. “They were now starting to have to haul all their water needs in this way,” she said. “That really changed the lifestyle of the people on Black Mesa.”  After the coal mines closed 20 years later, Black Mesa communities have focused on protecting their water resources while building a sustainable economy. But when Nature and People First’s founder Denis Payre presented the company’s plans, he seemed unaware of the tribes’ history in the region. During these presentations, Payre also made promises that if the company’s hydropower project went forward, it would benefit residents. The project would generate 1,000 jobs during construction and 100 jobs permanently, he claimed, and would help locals readily access portable drinking water. “He wasn’t understanding that our region has a history of extraction, and that is coal mining and its impact on our groundwater,” said Adrian Herder, Diné, TNA’s media organizer. “It seemed like this individual was tugging at people’s heartstrings, [saying] things that people wanted to hear.” If the commission decides to retract tribes’ ability to veto hydropower projects, it will mark a shift in the relationship between Indigenous nations and the federal government. Horseherder described such a move as the “first step in eroding whatever’s left between [these] relationships.” She is pessimistic about the commission’s decision and expects it will retract the current policy.  “The only thing I’m optimistic about is that Indigenous people know that they need to continue to fight,” she said. “I don’t see this administration waking up to their own mistakes at all.” 

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Ruby Williams’s pink kayak pierced the fog shrouding the mouth of the Klamath River, and she paddled harder. She was flanked on both sides by fellow Indigenous youth from across the basin, and their line of brightly colored boats would make history when they reached the Pacific Ocean on the other side of the sandy dunes—they were going to do it together. The final of four hydroelectric dams was removed last year from the Klamath River, in the largest project of its kind in US history. The following July, 28 teenage tribal representatives completed a 30-day journey that spanned roughly 310 miles from the headwaters in the Cascades to the Pacific. They were the very first to kayak the entirety of the mighty river in more than a century. It marked a new beginning for the once-imperiled river and its sprawling basin that straddles the California-Oregon border, an important biodiversity hotspot and a region that has been at the heart of local Indigenous culture for millennia. It also served as a bridge, bringing together river advocates from around the world eager to replicate the restoration happening on the Klamath. > “The river seemed to come alive right after dam removal.” It’s been only a year without the dams and the reservoirs created by them, and already there are successes to share. Just days after the dams were demolished, threatened coho salmon made it farther upriver than they had in the previous 60 years. Shortly after the one-year mark, Chinook salmon were spotted in headwaters for the first time in more than a century. Native seeds strewn across the riverbanks and their adjoining hillsides began to bloom. Scores of birds and animals—from bald eagles, to beavers, to bears—returned to the waterway. Insects, algae, and microscopic features of the flourishing systems that feed this ecosystem were sprouting. “These kids will be the first generation who get to grow up alongside a clean Klamath River,” said Ren Brownell, the former spokesperson for the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, a nonprofit created to oversee and implement the removal. “They can now carry this momentum to other watersheds.” That sentiment fueled the idea to have tribal youth be the first to navigate the river. The “Paddle Tribal Waters” program is part of Ríos to Rivers, an advocacy organization that fosters environmental stewardship by connecting thousands of Indigenous students across seven countries. For the finish, people traveled from China and the Bolivian Amazon. There were Māori people from New Zealand there and members of the Mapuche-Pehuenche tribe who live along the Biobío river in Chile. Representatives from the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and the Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) Tribe in the Snake River Basin in the western US also joined. While the Klamath youth cultivated a deeper connection to their wild river being reborn, they also inspired Indigenous-led movements working to protect or restore other rivers around the world. “It is a great David-and-Goliath story,” Brownell added. “It turns out that you can win.” A project of this scale had never been attempted before Klamath’s dams came down, and even with an abundance of hope and extensive modeling, there was uncertainty about how the river would rebound. Even with years of work left to do, the speed of recovery has surprised everyone. Without the large reservoirs that kept waters stagnant and warm during the summers, toxic markers that used to consistently spike outside healthy ranges have stayed at safe levels through the seasons. Water temperatures too have returned to their natural regimes, providing the coolness fish need to migrate. “The river seemed to come alive right after dam removal,” said Damon Goodman, the Mount Shasta-Klamath regional director for CalTrout during a meeting on the one-year anniversary. “There’s just fish jumping all over the place, bald eagles, all sorts of wildlife.” > “The river needed those kids—they are part of the solution.” The unprecedented project required an equally unprecedented fish-monitoring effort that relied on a range of tools, including sonar, boat surveys, netting and tagging, and video—to observe adaptation, migration, spawning and habitat. “The data is coming out so fast it is hard to keep up with the findings,” Goodman said. Barry McCovey Jr. is the senior fisheries biologist for the Yurok Tribe and has warned local communities and the public about the challenges that still lie ahead. Two dams remain on the river and it will take decades to heal “the massive scars” left by the dams that were removed, McCovey Jr. said, adding that what might seem like a happy ending is just the beginning. Ríos to Rivers is an advocacy organization that fosters environmental stewardship by connecting thousands of Indigenous students across seven countries.Erik Boomer/River Roots Productions That doesn’t mean he isn’t celebrating. “We called them footballs, they were so robust and healthy,” he said, referring to the fish now completing long journeys they haven’t been able to for more than a hundred years. One year in, “the big-picture update is the river is continuing to heal,” McCovey Jr. said. “It has a different feel to it now—and it is only going to get better.” For McCovey Jr., the wins go beyond the fish getting a renewed chance to thrive, along with the ecosystems that support them. After working to restore this basin for most of his life, his son, who completed the first descent, is now connecting with the river as it rebounds. “The river needed those kids—they are part of the solution,” he said. They will play an important role to lead restoration work needed into the future. But they are also helping to spread an important message. “It’s always been part of the goal to show people around the world that something like this is possible,” McCovey Jr. said. “You just have to look to the Klamath to see that crazy things can happen.” The removal of the four dams was still an abstract idea when Williams first began training for the adventure of a lifetime. She was one of about a dozen in the Klamath inaugural class, launched in 2022, when she was a sophomore in high school. Williams mastered the kayaking skills required to traverse challenging and unknown rapids that would emerge from under the reservoirs—including the harrowing and awe-inspiring K’íka·c’é·ki Canyon run, more than 2.5 miles of class IV rapids that winds through an ancient and steep basalt chasm, held sacred to the Shasta Indian Nation. It’s a run that sparked fear even among the most experienced guides. She turned 18 early on in the journey, her birthday falling on a grueling day spent battling strong headwinds and sharp sunlight that left her eyes and skin burning. But the memories of exhaustion are outweighed by those of camaraderie. Williams said she still talks to the friends she made during the program nearly every day. Weston Boyles, founder and director of Ríos to Rivers, said the program forged links among youth from across the Klamath basin: “Everyone within a basin is connected to that river. Through the love of a common sport like kayaking, you can connect communities.” Boyles and others on his team hatched the plan to help Indigenous youth lead the first descent in 2021 along with Rush Sturges, a professional kayaker and film-maker who cut his teeth on a Klamath tributary, the Salmon River. The curriculum they designed not only gave kids the skills needed to paddle the river but also helped them engage with what they were studying. Kayakers on the Klamath.Erik Boomer/River Roots Productions Students, including Williams, were also taken on trips around the world to meet other youth dedicated to fighting for their rivers. Among them were youth from the Bolivian Amazon, where dams being proposed would displace more than 5,000 Indigenous people and flood a portion of biodiverse Madidi national park. “Our work in these rivers is allowing [people] to jump in a time machine and go to the future to see what could happen—what their basins would look like if the dams were built,” Boyles said. “We have all the information and we know all the answers here. There are actually solutions that are obtainable.” A group of the students are heading to Cop30 in Brazil, petitioning the United Nations to stop recognizing dams as clean energy eligible to receive carbon offset funding. They were also the first to sign the so-called Klamath River Accord, an agreement made to protect rivers around the world that “recognizes that the removal of these dams should serve as a model for future climate resilience efforts and a testament to the power of collective action.” For Williams, who is a Quartz Valley tribal member and a Karuk person, paddling the entirety of this river was a protest in itself. She recalled the tears that filled her eyes as she reached the ocean and pulled her boat on to the shore, taking in the sound of beating drums and the generations of Native people smiling as they reached the sand on that cool July morning. “For a split second we stood there, like what do we do now?” she said. “And then all at the same moment we looked at each other and sprinted up this hill as fast as we could and full-on jumped into the ocean.” Williams, who started college this year majoring in environmental conservation and land management, is eager to lead the charge. Along with lifelong friendships she found on the Klamath’s first descent, she’s gained a calling to fight for her river, and others around the world. “All rivers should be free,” she said.

In May 2021, ground-penetrating radar detected more than 200 unmarked graves of Indian children near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada. The discovery prompted US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to announce the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, an investigative review of the legacy of Indian boarding schools in the United States.  While both countries attempted to grapple with this era in their histories, Indigenous families continued grieving the loved ones, culture, and tradition lost to Indian residential schools. In We Survived the Night, the writer and filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat grapples, in part, with this legacy and its impact in his own family and community. NoiseCat previously explored this territory in Sugarcane, the 2024 Oscar-nominated documentary, which follows the Williams Lake First Nation’s investigation into the abuse at St Joseph’s Mission and the resulting intergenerational trauma.  We Survived the Night begins with the story of NoiseCat’s father, Ed, who was found hours after birth in the trash incinerator at St. Joseph’s Mission, an Indian residential school in British Columbia, Canada, perhaps moments from death. Ed grew up on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve and was part of the first generation there not sent to residential schools. But growing up on the reserve was hard, and NoiseCat writes that his father is “an Indian who barely knows how to live in this world. Just how to survive.”   This book started as a way for NoiseCat to understand and reconnect with his father, who he writes was always “coming and going” from his life. But the memoir also goes beyond his family story, weaving in reporting about Indigenous communities through North America with mythology and oral histories through the story of Coyote, a trickster whose antics are legendary among the Salish people. These Coyote stories were told for generations among NoiseCat’s people, but were largely lost to colonization.  In his reporting, NoiseCat told me he wanted to tell stories about Native people and communities that have been overlooked, but also that say something about the different roles of Indigenous people across North America. He travels to visit the Tlingit in southeast Alaska as they navigate a conflict over herring eggs in the Sitka Sound; to the Lumbee in southeastern North Carolina, who are seeking federal recognition despite pushback from other Native nations; and to a Diné medicine man in Arizona who endured through the Covid-19 pandemic. “Looking out at that big, diverse Indian world is one of my ways of looking within—just as looking within is a way for me to look out,” NoiseCat writes.  I talked with NoiseCat recently about writing We Survived the Night, which he describes as a book dealing with questions of life, death, and survival. “I do believe that there are spiritual dimensions to asking those sorts of questions,” he said. To write it, he told me that he took on more ceremonial commitments in his community.  This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Can you start by talking about what motivated you to write We Survived the Night?  I’m the son of a noted Native artist and an Irish Jewish New Yorker. My dad left when I was pretty young, and I had a really Indian name—Julian Brave NoiseCat is about as Indian a name as you can have—and I looked the way I looked, yet the father who connected me to my family, my community, and my culture was gone. I was always trying to understand him and why he left, and what it was to be Native, and even more specifically, what it was to be a Native man—a Secwépemc man, a St’at’imc man—and I think that reading and writing was kind of always one of the core ways that I was trying to sort that out—devouring the work of Sherman Alexie and other Native writers: Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday, Louis Erdrich.  One of the things that I found most striking about this book is how much grace you give so many different people in your life. You don’t really vilify anyone, when you certainly could.  I definitely feel some pain about my experience in relationship to my father and other figures in the book. I also think about what my grandfather did—having all those kids and womanizing in the way that he did—and I can see the way that that still hurts my grandmother. Yet I also see the beautiful ways that those men helped make my complicated world and I can’t separate them out. Some of the same reasons my dad didn’t know how to be a dad and wasn’t present were the same reasons that he’s a survivor and he’s still here. Some of the same reasons he struggles to be a present, empathic father is that he had to look out for himself. That also has led him to be hyperfixated on his art as his way to survive.  I wanted to capture that truth and the way that I see it as honestly as I can. I don’t think that I could spend a lot of time writing about people who I didn’t love. To me, to tell a story about someone is to say, “I have spent so much time with this person or thinking about this person and their story and their life and this is a story that only I could tell you about them.” I see myself in that tradition. Something that you write about is this idea of feeling like you have to earn the right to your indigeneity. Tell me about this idea of what it means to be Indigenous and how working on this book challenged or changed the way you understand it.  Almost every single Native person I know doesn’t feel, in some particular way, Native enough. We all wish that we spoke our language a little bit better, or were better about spending time in our family or community, or that we were more present in our ceremonial or cultural life. Maybe we wish we had better hair or darker skin—the list goes on.  There’s something about being Native wherein we all feel like we’re not necessarily Indian enough and that’s because the history of being Native—which is a term that only makes sense in the context of colonization—is one of just immense, immeasurable, unfathomable loss. Two continents were stolen from us. We’re having this conversation in a language that was imposed upon us by colonizers and that makes so much of our life as Native people often an act of reclamation and recovery.  In the writing of the book—and especially while I was working on Sugarcane—I was thinking very purposefully about what traditions as a storyteller I had a responsibility to try to recover and bring back to life. This is what ultimately led me to the Coyote stories, which are these trickster narratives from my people’s culture. As I was reading them, I just kept seeing so much of the stories in my own life, in the Native world, and in the world.  Broadly, it’s hard for me not to look out at the world right now and the news cycle and just be like, this is a world that is deeply shaped by tricksters and their tricks. > I hope that more broadly, people recognize that Indigenous peoples are core to > the story of this land, and always have been.  I’m glad you mentioned Coyote. I love him as this character and as a guide through the narrative. Can you talk about how you wove him into these stories? I moved in with my dad for two years while I made Sugarcane and wrote, We Survived the Night. After not living with the guy for 22 years, suddenly we were across the hallway from each other, hanging out every evening, and I would turn on my recorder and ask him to tell me different stories. We’d laugh, hang out, smoke a little weed, and play board games and stuff. During the day, I’d be working on my writing while he’d be out in the studio carving. I was reading all these oral histories about Coyote and I was just really struck by the parallels between him and Coyote and the stories that I was reporting. Then it just sort of clicked: What if I took that notion—that the Coyote stories are nonfiction—seriously? I was also honoring what is, to the Salish peoples, probably our most celebrated art form: weaving. My great grandmother and my great-great grandmother were basket weavers. We don’t have any weavers in our family really anymore, but their work is still considered our most prized possessions. So, it also felt kind of appropriate to be telling a story that was itself kind of a woven story and an acknowledgement of the fact that to my people, weaving is the highest art form.  What do you most hope readers take away from We Survived the Night? I take seriously the notion that a book is also supposed to make you feel things and entertain you, so I hope that the universal aspects of the story—our relationship to our parents, our relationship to tradition, questions of life and death, spirituality, and survival—do that.  You could argue that the system that I’m describing—one that takes away Native kids from their parents and deprives an entire race of people from the right to parent—is an authoritarian system, which is obviously relevant in the present moment. But at its core, the extent to which it is still possible to be a serious intellectual, a serious commentator, a serious historian of North America—someone who supposedly knows this land and its people—and to not know anything really about Indigenous people really irks me. I hope that more broadly, people recognize that Indigenous peoples are core to the story of this land, and always have been. Because we are the first people of it, by understanding us and our stories, you can actually understand this place and this society and this world and what it is to be human, in deeper ways. I do really believe that, and I hope that people get some sense for that. 

In 2017, David Leavitt drove to the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana to adopt a baby girl. A few years later, during an interview with a documentary filmmaker, Leavitt, a wealthy Utah politician, told a startling story about how he went about getting physical custody of that child.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. He describes going to the tribe’s president and offering to use his connections to broker an international sale of the tribe’s buffalo. At the same time, he was asking the president for his blessing to adopt the child. That video eventually leaked to a local TV station, and the adoption became the subject of a federal investigation into bribery. To others, the adoption story seemed to run afoul of a federal law meant to protect Native children from being removed from their tribes’ care in favor of non-Native families.   This week on Reveal, reporters Andrew Becker and Bernice Yeung dig into the story of this complicated and controversial adoption, how it circumvented the mission of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and why some of the baby’s Native family and tribe were left feeling that a child was taken from them.  This episode was produced in collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. This is an update of an episode that originally aired in August 2024.

Almost two centuries ago, Native American tribe members sought the protection of Florida’s Everglades during the Seminole wars as they hid from government forces seeking to banish them to Indian territories that later became Oklahoma. Now, as the Trump administration continues its wholesale slashing of federal funding from conservation projects, the Miccosukee Tribe is stepping up to fulfill what it sees as a “moral obligation” to return the favor. The tribe is looking to buy and protect environmentally significant lands, including some that once provided refuge, in a groundbreaking partnership agreement with the Florida Wildlife Corridor Foundation. The corridor is an ambitious project to connect 18 million acres (7.3 million hectares) of state and privately owned wilderness into a contiguous, safe habitat for scores of imperiled and roaming species, including black bears, Key deer, and Florida panthers. Tribal officials say they will work with the foundation and other partners to “explore the acquisition and stewardship” of land within the corridor considered important to the tribe and its community. “We have a constitutional duty to conserve our traditional homelands, the lands, and waters which protected and fed our tribe since time immemorial,” said Talbert Cypress, chair of the Miccosukee Tribe headquartered on a 130-square-mile reservation west of Miami. “[But] we’ve seen some sort of hesitancy a lot of times to commit to projects because of the erratic nature of how the government is deciding to spend their money or allocate money.” > “We have a constitutional duty to conserve our traditional homelands, the > lands, and waters which protected and fed our tribe since time immemorial.” The agreement, announced at a summit of corridor stakeholders in Orlando last week, comes as a study by the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society (NAFWS) found that 60 percent of federally recognized tribes have lost grants or other federal funds, totaling more than $56 million since Donald Trump took office in January. “These services are part of what we receive in lieu of all of the years of what we gave up, our land, our resources, and sometimes, unfortunately, our culture and language,” Julie Thorstenson, executive director of the NAFWS, told the Wildlife Society last month. With government funding drying up, and the future of existing federal land stewardship agreements uncertain because of Trump’s sustained onslaught on the National Parks Service, Cypress said tribe leaders had re-evaluated its work with other partners. “For good reason, my predecessors had more of a standoffish approach. They went through a lot of the areas where they did deal with conservation groups, federal agencies, state agencies, pretty much not including them in conversations, or going back on their word. They just had a very different approach to this sort of thing,” he said. “My administration has taken more of a collaborative approach. We’re engaging with different organizations not just to build relationships, but fix relationships that may have gone sour in the past, or were just non-existent.” Cypress said the tribe, which already has collaborative or direct stewardship of almost 3 million acres in the Everglades and Biscayne national parks, and Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, was working to identify and prioritize land within the corridor of historical significance and to “get those conversations going”. He said: > Financially, the tribe will invest some money, but we’ll also be instrumental > in finding investors, partners interested in the same thing, which is to > conserve as much of our natural habitat as possible while making room for > growth and development. > > > We’ve shown we can do it in a sustainable way, and our voice can help in > shaping the future of Florida as far as development goes because once a lot of > the land gets developed we’re not going to get it back. > > > We need to do it in a way where we benefit not just ourselves in the present, > but for generations in the future as well. The Florida Wildlife Corridor was established in 2021 by lawmakers who approved an initial $400 million for acquisition against a multi-year $2 billion budget for land conservation. About 10 million acres have been preserved, with another 8m considered “opportunity areas” in need of protection, and environmental groups warning large areas could still be lost to development. The legislature, which is weighing cuts to corridor funding as it attempts to balance state spending, has encouraged commercial investment and partnerships. At last week’s summit, the Disney Conservation Fund announced a $1 million grant for training conservation teams and expanding public access to trails and natural areas.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Bill Cross pulled his truck to the side of a dusty mountain road and jumped out to scan a stretch of rapids rippling through the hillsides below. As an expert and a guide, Cross had spent more than 40 years boating the Klamath River, etching its turns, drops, and eddies into his memory. But this run was brand new. On a warm day in mid-May, he would be one of the very first to raft it with high spring flows. Last year, the final of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River were removed in the largest project of its kind in US history. Forged through the footprint of reservoirs that kept parts of the Klamath submerged for more than a century, the river that straddles the California-Oregon border has since been reborn. The dam removal marked the end of a decades-long campaign led by the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath tribes, along with a wide range of environmental NGOs and fishing advocacy groups, to convince owner PacifiCorp to let go of the aging infrastructure. The immense undertaking also required buy-in from regulatory agencies, state and local governments, businesses, and the communities that used to live along the shores of the bygone lakes. As the flows were released and the river found its way back to itself, a new chapter of recovery—complete with new challenges—emerged. Among the questions still being answered: How best to facilitate recreation and public connection with the Klamath while recovery continues. There are hopes for hiking trails, campgrounds, and picnic spots. A wide range of stakeholders are still busy ironing out the specifics and how best to define the lines between private and public spaces. It’s a delicate process. Not just the ecology is being restored; the Indigenous people whose ancestors relied on the river for both sustenance and ritual across thousands of years are also renewing their relationships with the land. More than 2,800 acres, some of which emerged from under the drained reservoirs after the dams came down, will be returned to Shasta Indian Nation, a tribe that was decimated when construction on the dams started in the early 1910s. Ready to be stewards, they are also now navigating their role as landowners in a recreation region. On May 15, the first opening day for new access sites on the Klamath, visitors got the first real glimpse of the extensive restoration efforts since demolition began in 2023. It also served as an early trial for how the public and an eager commercial rafting community might engage with the river and the landscapes that surround it. As the sun broke through a week of cloudy weather that morning, rafters readied their gear near an access now bearing the traditional name in the Shasta language, K’účasčas (pronounced Ku-chas-chas). > “If we were here a little over a year ago, we would be standing on the edge of > a reservoir.” “If we were here a little over a year ago, we would be standing on the edge of a reservoir,” said Thomas O’Keefe, the director of policy and science for American Whitewater, as he helped Cross and Michael Parker, a conservation biologist, ready their boat for a stretch of river above where the Iron Gate dam once stood. The Guardian joined them to try the section on opening day. O’Keefe has played a pivotal role in bridging recreation and restoration on the river. He hopes connecting people to the landscapes will encourage future care for them. “The vast majority of people want to do the right thing,” O’Keefe said, describing the extreme care taken towards ecologically and culturally sensitive areas. “We want to make sure we can define where that can happen.” There is still a lot of work left to do. Rustic roads that lead to the river’s edge are minimally paved and laden with potholes. It’s not immediately clear where visitors should park. Finishing touches are still being added on signs and infrastructure – from put-ins to picnic tables – with the completion of five new public recreation sites planned for August 1. And for rafters, of course, the river itself must be relearned. Roughly 45 continuous miles were unleashed between the Keno and Iron Gate dams. Rapids, long-dependent on artificial surges from the hydropower operations, are at last being fueled by natural conditions. “We are kind of writing the book on it,” said Bart Baldwin, the owner of Noah’s River Adventures, a commercial outfit out of Ashland, Oregon, who has taken guests downriver for decades. While he admits the releases from the dams made for “world-class” rapids, he says the loss has created new opportunities. “The scenery is stunning and I think it’s going to be special.” The waters of the Klamath have burst back to life in recent weeks, spurred by melt-off from strong winter storms. The Iron Gate Run bumps and sways through a mix of class II and class III rapids, enough for a fun ride that’s manageable for most experience levels. Upriver, the exciting and challenging K’íka·c’é·ki Canyon run winds through more than 2.5 miles of class IV rapids, beckoning those with more expertise. As he called out paddling orders to navigate his boat’s small crew through splashy sections, Cross was relieved. In the years before the dams came out, he’d worked to outline the new river and its whitewater potential, armed with historical topographic maps, old photos, and bathymetric data that showed depth and underwater terrain. Rooted in science, it requires a bit of guesswork. The volcanic geology here often comes with surprises. “I spent the first six months sweating bullets watching the water recede and the channel scour and wondering if there was going to be a waterfall I didn’t predict,” he said. Even with strong flows, there was space to breathe between more challenging sections. There were spots to beach boats for a picnic lunch and places to quietly float through the vibrant scenery. Vestiges of the recent past are still visible. Gradients of green shroud a scar left by the high-water mark of the reservoir. Columns of dried mud, remnants of the 15m cubic yards of sediment held behind the dams, are clumped along the river’s edge. But there are also signs of nature’s resilience. Swaying willows stand stalwart from the banks. Behind them, rolling hills splashed with orange and yellow wildflowers and ancient basalt pillars stretch to the horizon. Far from the hum of the highway and roads, the silence here is broken only by the purr of the river as it rolls over rocks, accented with eagle calls or chattering sparrows who have already claimed sites along the water for their nests. Years before the dams were demolished, as teams of scientists, tribal members, and landscape renovation experts tried to envision how recovery should unfold, there wasn’t a guidebook to go by. There weren’t records for how the heavily degraded ecosystems should look or function. “Creating the mosaic we are currently seeing out there has been a work of educated estimation,” said Dave Coffman, a director for Resource Environmental Solutions (RES), the ecological recovery company working on the Klamath’s restoration. “There’s nothing in that watershed that hasn’t been touched by some sort of detrimental activity.” In less than a year’s time a dramatic reversal has taken place. Some spots have bounced back beautifully. Others had to be carefully cultivated to mimic what could have been if the dams never disrupted them. Native seeds were cast across the slopes, some by hand and others from helicopters. Heavy equipment trucked away mounds of earth. Invasive plants were plucked from around the reservoir footprint before they could spread across the barren ground. > “We are giving nature the kickstart to heal itself.” “We are giving nature the kickstart to heal itself,” said Barry McCovey Jr, the fisheries department director for the Yurok tribe. What he calls “massive scars” left by the dams “aren’t going to heal overnight or in a year or in 10 years”, he added. Giving the large-scale process, time will be important – but a little help can go a long way. In late November last year, threatened coho salmon were seen in the upper Klamath River basin for the first time in more than 60 years. Other animals are benefiting, too, including north-western pond turtles, freshwater mussels, beavers, and river otters. It took mere months for insects, algae, and microscopic features of a flourishing food web to return and sprout. “It’s amazing to see river bugs in a river,” he said. They are good indicators of water quality and ecosystem health. It might seem like a happy ending. McCovey Jr said it’s just the beginning. “We are going to have ups and downs and it will take a long time to get to where we want to be,” he said. Ongoing Yurok projects will focus on making more areas “fish-friendly” and closely monitoring aquatic invertebrates in coordination with the other tribes, researchers, and advocacy organizations, and the Klamath River Renewal Corporation that was created to oversee the project. There are also far-flung parts of the watershed they are still working to restore. Close to 47,000 acres of ancestral Yurok homelands in the lower Klamath basin will be returned to the tribe this year after being owned and operated for more than a century by the industrial timber industry. Considered the largest land-back conservation deal in California history, the work there will complement and benefit from what’s being done upriver. Even as recovery on the river remains perhaps at its most fragile, most people who have been part of this enormous undertaking are looking forward to welcoming the public. “I think one of the biggest fears of this project is that it wouldn’t work,” Coffman said. “I am excited for more folks to get out here and see what we are capable of.” The work goes beyond the water line. The lands that hug this river have had their own transformation, along with the people who once called them home. “People are really focused on dam removal and fish and recreation—and those are all great things—but it is a very personal story for us,” said Sami Jo Difuntorum, cultural preservation officer for the Shasta Indian Nation. As the tribe returns to their ancestral lands, they are envisioning ways to introduce themselves to a largely unfamiliar public. Their story is laced with tragedy, but also resilience. Shasta Indian Nation is not federally recognized, largely because they were massacred in the mid-19th century when gold-seeking settlers poured into the region. Their villages and sacred lands were drowned in the damming of the river. But the people tied to these lands have largely remained close by; many still reside in the county. As the waters of the reservoirs receded, it revealed a place held at the heart of their culture for thousands of years. > “The return of our land is the most important thing to happen for our people > in my lifetime.” “The return of our land is the most important thing to happen for our people in my lifetime, for the generation before and the generation ahead,” Difuntorum said, standing on a quiet overlook watching the river course through the sacred K’íka·c’é·ki Canyon. This steep basalt chasm was left dewatered while the river was rerouted to the hydroelectric plant. “There are so many things we are learning, like how to coexist as future landowners with the whitewater community, the local community, the fishermen—and then all the tribes,” she added. “It’s a lot—but it’s all good stuff. It’s huge for our people.” Looking ahead, plans are being made both for public use and for tribal reconnection. There will be access trails across their lands and efforts to plant traditional medicinal and ceremonial plants. Old buildings that provided electricity from the plant will be converted into an interpretive center. Places have been picked for sweat lodges, an official tribal office, and the area where the first salmon ceremony will be held in more than century. Difuntorum’s grandsons— ages nine and six—will be dancing in that ceremony this year. For the tribe, reconnecting to the river has provided an opportunity to reconnect to their culture and history. Part of reconnecting comes through reintroducing their language. James Sarmento, a linguist and tribal member, is helping Shasta people learn and use pronunciations for recovered places as they were once known along with the stories of creation tied to them. The public will learn them, too. “It’s about making a relationship and having conversations with the land,” Sarmento said. “These are landscapes that we are not only working to protect—we are working to speak their names out loud.” The darker moments in the tribe’s history live on. Remnants of the now-inoperable hydroelectric plant still sit solemnly on the embankment: coils of metal, enormous pipes, nests of wires that connect to nothing. A cave, tucked into the steep slopes among ancient lava fields where 50 or so Shasta people sought refuge in the mid-1800s, still bears the violent marks of a miners’ raid that left five people, including women and children dead. Difuntorum said it used to be hard for her to see it all. “I don’t feel that now,” she said. “Of all the places I have been in the world, this is where I feel the most me— out here at the water.” Cross, O’Keefe, and Parker pulled up their paddles to ease into the final float of the run, gliding through the channel that once propped up the Iron Gate dam. Overhead, an osprey settled into its nest with a large fish as a throng of small birds scattered into the cloudless sky. There are sure to be challenges ahead. The climate crisis has deepened droughts and fueled a rise in catastrophic fire as this region grows hotter. Habitat loss and water wars will continue as city sprawl, agriculture, and nature increasingly come into conflict. For now, though, the river’s recovery is a hopeful sign that a wide range of interests can align to make a positive change, even in a warming world. “I never thought I would see the run under reservoirs be revealed,” Cross said, smiling as he packed up his boat. As a new chapter begins, the Klamath has already become a story of what’s possible, fulfilling the hopes that the project could inspire others. And, after decades of advocacy and years of work, “we have salmon and beaver and poppies,” he said. “This river will go on forever.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. For the fewer than a hundred people that make up the entire population of Port Heiden, Alaska, fishing provides both a paycheck and a full dinner plate. Every summer, residents of the Alutiiq village set out on commercial boats to catch salmon swimming upstream in the nearby rivers of Bristol Bay.  John Christensen, Port Heiden’s tribal president, is currently making preparations for the annual trek. In a week’s time, he and his 17-year-old son will charter Queen Ann, the family’s 32-foot boat, eight hours north to brave some of the planet’s highest tides, extreme weather risks, and other treacherous conditions. The two will keep at it until August, hauling in thousands of pounds of fish each day that they later sell to seafood processing companies. It’s grueling work that burns a considerable amount of costly fossil fuel energy, and there are scarcely any other options. Because of their location, diesel costs almost four times the national average—the Alaska Native community spent $900,000 on fuel in 2024 alone. Even Port Heiden’s diesel storage tanks are posing challenges. Coastal erosion has created a growing threat of leaks in the structures, which are damaging to the environment and expensive to repair, and forced the tribe to relocate them further inland. On top of it all, of course, diesel generators contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and are notoriously noisy.  > “We live on the edge of the world. And it’s just tough.” “Everything costs more. Electricity goes up, diesel goes up, every year. And wages don’t,” Christensen said. “We live on the edge of the world. And it’s just tough.” In 2015, the community built a fish processing plant that the tribe collectively owns; they envisioned a scenario in which tribal members would not need to share revenue with processing companies, would bring home considerably more money, and wouldn’t have to spend months at a time away from their families. But the building has remained nonoperational for an entire decade because they simply can’t afford to power it.  Enormous amounts of diesel are needed, says Christensen, to run the filleting and gutting machines, separators and grinders, washing and scaling equipment, and even to store the sheer amount of fish the village catches every summer in freezers and refrigerators. They can already barely scrape together the budget needed to pay for the diesel that powers their boats, institutions, homes, and airport.  The onslaught of energy challenges that Port Heiden is facing, Christensen says, is linked to a corresponding population decline. Their fight for energy independence is a byproduct of colonial policies that have limited the resources and recourse that Alaska Native tribes like theirs have. “Power is 90 percent of the problem,” said Christensen. “Lack of people is the rest. But cheaper power would bring in more people.”  In 2023, Climate United, a national investment fund and coalition, submitted a proposal to participate in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or GGRF—a $27 billion investment from the Inflation Reduction Act administered by the Environmental Protection Agency to “mobilize financing and private capital to address the climate crisis.” Last April, the EPA announced it had chosen three organizations to disseminate the program’s funding; $6.97 billion was designated to go to Climate United.  Then, in the course of President Donald Trump’s sweeping federal disinvestment campaign, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund was singled out as a poster child for what Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claimed was “criminal.” “The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” Zeldin said in February. He then endeavored on a crusade to get the money back. As the financial manager for GGRF, Citibank, the country’s third-largest financial institution, got caught in the middle.  > “The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist > groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over.” The New York Times reported that investigations into Biden officials’ actions in creating the program and disbursing the funds had not found any “meaningful evidence” of criminal wrongdoing. On March 4, Zeldin announced that the GGRF funding intended to go to Climate United and seven other organizations had been frozen. The following week, Climate United filed a joint lawsuit against the EPA, which they followed with a motion for a temporary restraining order against Zeldin, the EPA, and Citibank from taking actions to implement the termination of the grants. On March 11, the EPA sent Climate United a letter of funding termination. In April, a federal DC district judge ruled that the EPA had terminated the grants unlawfully and blocked the EPA from clawing them back. The Trump administration then appealed the decision.  Climate United is still awaiting the outcome of that appeal. While they do, the $6.97 billion remains inaccessible.  Climate United’s money was intended to support a range of projects from Hawai’i to the East Coast, everything from utility-scale solar to energy-efficient community centers—and a renewable energy initiative in Port Heiden. The coalition had earmarked $6 million for the first round of a pre-development grant program aimed at nearly two dozen Native communities looking to adopt or expand renewable energy power sources.  “We made investments in those communities, and we don’t have the capital to support those projects,” said Climate United’s Chief Community Officer Krystal Langholz. In response to an inquiry from Grist, an EPA spokesperson noted that “Unlike the Biden-Haris administration, this EPA is committed to being an exceptional steward of taxpayer dollars.” The spokesperson said that Zeldin had terminated $20 billion in grant agreements because of “substantial concerns regarding the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program integrity, the award process, and programmatic waste and abuse, which collectively undermine the fundamental goals and statutory objectives of the award.”  A representative of Citibank declined to comment. The Bureau of the Fiscal Service did not respond to requests for comment.  Long before most others recognized climate change as an urgent existential crisis, the Alutiiq peoples of what is now known as Port Heiden, but was once called Meshik, were forced to relocate because of rising seawater. With its pumice-rich volcanic soils and exposed location on the peninsula that divides Bristol Bay from the Gulf of Alaska, the area is unusually vulnerable to tidal forces that erode land rapidly during storms. Beginning in 1981, disappearing sea ice engulfed buildings and homes. The community eventually moved their village about a 10-minute drive further inland. No one lives at the old site anymore, but important structures still remain, including a safe harbor for fishing boats. > In a region that’s warming faster than just about any other place on the > planet, much of the land is on the precipice of being swallowed by water. The seas, of course, are still rising, creeping up to steal the land from right below the community’s feet. In a region that’s warming faster than just about any other place on the planet, much of the land is on the precipice of being swallowed by water. From 2017 to 2018, the old site lost between 35 and 65 feet of shoreline, as reported by the Bristol Bay Times. Even the local school situated on the newer site is affected by the shrinking shoreline—the institution and surrounding Alutiiq village increasingly threatened by the encroaching sea.  Before the Trump administration moved to terminate their funding, Christensen’s dream of transitioning the Port Heiden community to renewable sources of energy, consequential for both maintaining its traditional lifestyle and ensuring its future, had briefly seemed within reach. He also saw it as a way to contribute to global solutions to the climate crisis.  “I don’t think [we are] the biggest contributor to global pollution, but if we could do our part and not pollute, maybe we won’t erode as fast,” he said. “I know we’re not very many people, but to us, that’s our community.” The tribe planned to use a $300,000 grant from Climate United to pay for the topographic and waterway studies needed to design two run-of-the-river hydropower plants. In theory, the systems, which divert a portion of flowing water through turbines, would generate enough clean energy to power the entirety of Port Heiden, including the idle fish-processing facility. The community also envisioned channeling hydropower to run a local greenhouse, where they could expand what crops they raise and the growing season, further boosting local food access and sovereignty. In even that short period of whiplash—from being awarded the grant to watching it vanish—the village’s needs have become increasingly urgent. Meeting the skyrocketing cost of diesel, according to Christensen, is no longer feasible. The community’s energy crisis and ensuing cost of living struggle have already started prompting an exodus, with the population declining at a rate of little over 3 percent every year—a noticeable loss when the town’s number rarely exceeds a hundred residents to begin with.  “It’s really expensive to live out here. And I don’t plan on moving anytime soon. And my kids, they don’t want to go either. So I have to make it better, make it easier to live here,” Christensen said. Janine Bloomfield, grants specialist at 10Power, the organization that Port Heiden partnered with to help write their grant application, said they are currently waiting for a decision to be made in the lawsuit “that may lead to the money being unfrozen.” In the interim, she said, recipients have been asked to work with Climate United on paperwork “to be able to react quickly in the event that the funds are released.”  For its part, Climate United is also now exploring other funding strategies. The coalition is rehauling the structure of the money going to Port Heiden and other Native communities. Rather than awarding it as a grant, where recipients would have to pay the costs upfront and be reimbursed later, Climate United will now issue loans to the communities originally selected for the pre-development grants that don’t require upfront costs and will be forgiven upon completion of the agreed-upon deliverables. Their reason for the transition, according to Langholz, was “to increase security, decrease administrative burden on our partners, and create credit-building opportunities while still providing strong programmatic oversight.”    Still, there are downsides to consider with any loan, including being stuck with debt. In many cases, said Chéri Smith, a Mi’Kmaq descendant who founded and leads the nonprofit Alliance for Tribal Clean Energy, replacing a federal grant with a loan, even a forgivable one, “adds complexity and risk for Tribal governments.”  Forgivable loans “become a better option” in later stages of development or for income-generating infrastructure, said Smith, who is on the advisory board of Climate United, but are “rarely suitable for common pre-development needs.” That’s because pre-feasibility work, such as Port Heiden’s hydropower project, “is inherently speculative, and Tribes should not be expected to risk even conditional debt to validate whether their own resources can be developed.” This is especially true in Alaska, she added, where costs and logistical challenges are exponentially higher for the 229 federally recognized tribes than in the lower 48, and outcomes much less predictable.  Raina Thiele, Dena’ina Athabascan and Yup’ik, who formerly served in the Biden administration as senior adviser for Alaska affairs to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and former tribal liaison to President Obama, said the lending situation is particularly unique when it comes to Alaska Native communities, because of how Congress historically wrote legislation relating to a land claim settlement which saw tribes deprived of control over resources and land. Because of that, it’s been incredibly difficult for communities to build capacity, she noted, making even a forgivable loan “a bit of a high-risk endeavor.” The question of trust also shows up—the promise of loan forgiveness, in particular, is understandably difficult for communities who have long faced exploitation and discrimination in public and privatized lending programs. “Grant programs are a lot more familiar,” she said.  Even so, the loan from Climate United would only be possible if the court rules in its favor and compels the EPA to release the money. If the court rules against Climate United, Langholz told Grist, the organization could pursue damage claims in another court and may seek philanthropic fundraising to help Port Heiden come up with the $300,000, in addition to the rest of the $6 million promised to the nearly two dozen Native communities originally selected for the grant program.  > “These cuts can be a matter of life or death for many of these communities > being able to heat their homes.” “These cuts can be a matter of life or death for many of these communities being able to heat their homes, essentially,” said Thiele. While many different stakeholders wait to see how the federal funding crisis will play out, Christensen doesn’t know what to make of the proposed grant-to-loan shift for Port Heiden’s hydropower project. The landscape has changed so quickly and drastically, it has, however, prompted him to lose what little faith he had left in federal funding. He has already begun to brainstorm other ways to ditch diesel. “We’ll figure it out,” he said. “I’ll find the money if I have to. I’ll win the lottery, and spend the money on cheaper power.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In June 1942, Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian islands in Alaska prompted the US military to activate the Alaska territorial guard, an Army reserve made up of volunteers who wanted to help protect the US. So many of the volunteers were from Alaska’s Indigenous peoples—Aleut, Inupiak, Yupik, Tlingit, and many others—that the guard was nicknamed the “Eskimo Scouts.”  When World War II ended and the reserve force ceased operations in 1947, the US approached the Indigenous Yupik people of Alaska with another ask: Could the Air Force set up “listening posts” on the island of Sivuqaq, also known as St. Lawrence Island, to help with the intelligence gathering needed to win the Cold War?   Viola Waghiyi, who is Yupik from Sivuqaq, said the answer was a resounding yes.  “Our grandfathers and fathers volunteered for the Alaska territorial guard,” she said. “We were very patriotic.”  But that trust was abused, Waghiyi said. The US military eventually abandoned its Air Force and Army bases, leaving the land polluted with toxic chemicals such as fuel, mercury, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which are known as “forever chemicals” because they persist so long in the environment. The contamination was largely due to spilled and leaking fuel from storage tanks and pipes, both above ground and below ground. More chemical waste came from electrical transformers, abandoned metals, and 55-gallon drums.  Now, Waghiyi is the environmental health and justice program director at the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, an organization dedicated to limiting the effects of toxic substances on Alaska’s residents and environment. Last week, the organization filed a complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, in partnership with the University of California-Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic.  Their complaint calls for the United Nations to investigate how military waste on Sivuqaq continues to violate the rights of the people who live there, such as the right to a clean and healthy environment and Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land.  “By exposing the Yupik people of Sivuqaq to polluted drinking water sources, air, and soil, and by contaminating local native foods; by causing pervasive human exposure to hazardous chemicals through multiple routes; by toxifying the broader ecosystem; and by not cleaning up contamination sufficiently to protect human health and the environment, the US Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers violated human rights long recognized in international law,” the complaint says.  > “We wanted our lands to be turned back in the same condition when they turned > over.”  This submission from Alaska is part of a larger, global effort to raise awareness of military toxic waste by the United Nations. The UN special rapporteur on toxics and human rights is collecting public input on military activities and toxic waste until April 1. The information collected will be used in a report presented to the UN General Assembly in October.  The two shuttered bases in Sivuqaq, Alaska, are now classified as “formerly used defense,” or FUD, sites, overseen by the US Army Corps of Engineers, and more than $130 million has been spent to remove the contamination. John Budnick, a spokesman for the US Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska, said the cleanup is considered complete but that the agency is reviewing the site every five years “to ensure the selected remedies continue to be protective of human health and the environment.”  “We have completed the work at Northeast Cape, but additional follow-up actions may result from the monitoring phase of the Formerly Used Defense Sites Program,” he said. The last site visit occurred last July and an updated review report is expected to be released this summer. The federal Environmental Protection Agency similarly concluded in 2013 that an additional EPA cleanup wouldn’t significantly differ from what the Army Corps of Engineers is doing and declined to place the sites on the EPA’s list of hazardous waste cleanup priorities. A 2022 study found that so far, federal cleanup efforts have been inadequate. “High levels of persistent organic pollutants and toxic metals continue to leach from the Northeast Cape FUD site despite large-scale remediation that occurred in the early 2000s,” the authors concluded.  The persisting pollution has garnered the attention of Alaska’s state Department of Environmental Conservation, which oversees the cleanup of contaminated sites. Stephanie Buss, contaminated sites program manager at the agency, said her office has asked the Army Corps of Engineers to do additional cleanup at Northeast Cape. “These active contaminated sites have not met closure requirements,” she said. The second former base, Gambell, was classified as completed but still lacks land use controls, she noted.  “DEC takes community health concerns seriously and will continue to provide oversight of the conditions at its active sites in accordance with the state’s regulatory framework to ensure an appropriate response that protects human health and welfare,” Buss said. That same 2022 study found that 89 percent of the fish around the Northeast Cape base contained mercury exceeding the levels the EPA deemed appropriate for people who rely on subsistence fishing. “All fish sampled near the FUD site exceeded the EPA’s PCB guidelines for cancer risk for unrestricted human consumption,” the researchers further found. Waghiyi said the contamination displaced 130 people, and has left her friends and family with a lasting legacy of illness.  “It’s not a matter of if we’ll get cancer, but when,” Waghiyi said. Her father died of cancer. Her mother had a stillborn child. Waghiyi herself is a cancer survivor and has had three miscarriages.  “We feel that they have turned their back on us,” Waghiyi said of the U.S. military. “We wanted our lands to be turned back in the same condition when they turned over.”  The US military has a long history of contaminating lands and waters through training and battles sites, including on Indigenous lands. Citizens of the Navajo Nation in Arizona and  Yakama Nation in Washington continue to raise concerns about the ongoing effects of military nuclear testing on their lands and health. In the Marshall Islands, fishing around certain atolls is discouraged due to high rates of toxicity due to nuclear testing and other military training. On Guam, chemicals from an active Air Force base have contaminated parts of the islandʻs sole-source aquifer that serves 70 percent of the population. Last year, a federal report found that climate change threatens to unearth even more US military nuclear waste in both the Marshall Islands and Greenland.  In 2021, the Navy in Hawaiʻi poisoned 90,000 people when jet fuel leached from aging, massive underground storage tanks into the drinking water supply after the Navy ignored years of warning to upgrade the tanks or remove the fuel. The federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to remove unexploded ordnance from the island of Kahoʻolawe, a former bombing range in Hawaiʻi, but the island is still considered dangerous to walk on because of the risk of more ordnance unearthing due to extensive erosion.  The complaint filed last week by the Alaska Community Action on Toxics calls for the United Nations to write to federal and state agencies and call upon them to honor a 1951 agreement between the government and the Sivuqaq Yupik people that prohibited polluting the land.  The agreement said that the Sivuqaq Tribes would allow the Air Force to construct surveillance sites to spy on the Soviet Union, but they had four conditions, including allowing Indigenous peoples to continue to hunt, fish and trap where desired and preventing outsiders from killing their game. Finally, the agreement said that “any refuse or garbage will not be dumped in streams or near the beach within the proposed area.”  “The import of the agreement was clear: The military must not despoil the island; must protect the resources critical to Indigenous Yupik inhabitants’ sustenance; and must leave the island in the condition they found it, which ensured their health and well-being,” the Alaska Community Action on Toxics wrote in their complaint.  “This is a burden we didn’t create,” Waghiyi said.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The verdict against the environmental group Greenpeace finding it liable for huge damages to a pipeline company over protests has been described by advocacy groups as a “weaponization of the legal system” and an “assault” on free speech and protest rights. A North Dakota jury decided on Wednesday that Greenpeace will have to pay at least $660 million to the pipeline company Energy Transfer, and is liable for defamation and other claims over protests in 2016 and 2017. Rebecca Brown, the president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law issued a statement highlighting the threat the decision poses to free speech and the right to protest. She says the verdict is “a calculated attack on the sovereign rights of the Standing Rock Sioux and all indigenous peoples defending their land and water. This case is a textbook example of corporate weaponization of the legal system to silence protest and intimidate communities.” ClientEarth, a nonprofit and partner to Greenpeace, said that the verdict highlighted the growing trend of big polluters using the legal system to intimidate and silence critics and that corporations want to send the message that “no organization that challenges the polluting industries is safe” in a statement on social media. > “This ruling is a blatant attempt to silence dissent and crush the power of > grassroots activism.” Energy Transfer was “frivolously alleging defamation and seeking money damages, designed to shut down all voice supporting Standing Rock,” Janet Alkire, the tribal chair for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, said in a statement. “The case is an attempt to silence our Tribe about the truth of what happened at Standing Rock, and the threat posed by DAPL to our land, our water and our people. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe will not be silenced,” the statement said. Energy Transfer counsel during the case, Trey Cox, said that the verdict showed that Greenpeace’s actions had been unlawful. “It is also a day of celebration for the constitution, the state of North Dakota and Energy Transfer,” he said following the decision. Kevin Cramer, a Republican senator for North Dakota, also celebrated the verdict on social media, writing in a post on X: “Today, justice has been done with Greenpeace and its radical environmentalist buddies who encouraged this destructive behavior during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests with their defamatory and false claims about the pipeline.” But experts and nonprofit groups expressed alarm over the verdict and what it means for constitutional rights in the US. EarthRights, another non-governmental, nonprofit group, says that the Dakota Access pipeline protests were “overwhelmingly peaceful” and that the organization “proudly joins Greenpeace USA in speaking up against brazen legal attacks and ensuring that the environmental movement only continues to grow stronger, despite the appalling result in North Dakota.” The case is being described by legal experts as a classic example of a SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation)—a form of civil litigation increasingly deployed by corporations, politicians, and wealthy individuals to deliberately wear down and silence critics including journalists, activists, and watchdog groups. These cases often result in significant legal costs for the defendants, which is viewed as “a win” for the suing entity even if they don’t win the lawsuit. The international environmental organization 350.org called the verdict against Greenpeace a “devastating legal ruling.” “This ruling is a blatant attempt to silence dissent and crush the power of grassroots activism,” the group said in a statement. “It sends a dangerous message: that fossil fuel giants can weaponize the courts to silence those who challenge the destruction of our planet.” They also warn that the fossil fuel industry is increasingly turning to “lawfare”—the use of courts and legal action as weapons of intimidation. Brice Böhmer, the climate and environment lead at Transparency International, said: “In the face of a climate emergency, it is unconscionable that organizations committed to protecting our planet from the devastating consequences of fossil fuel extraction should be prosecuted in this manner. “As the world struggles under the weight of an existential climate crisis, it cannot be right that environmental defenders are being silenced by a weaponized legal system.” Greenpeace says it plans to appeal the verdict, and some legal experts say it has a good case to do so. The appeal would go straight to the state supreme court, as North Dakota does not have an appellate level court. Kelcy Warren, Energy Transfer’s billionaire founder, is a major donor to Donald Trump.