Environmental Justice
What makes an individual indigenous is a tie to the land. Nothing is perhaps more central to the civil rights of indigenous peoples than environmental protection. Nearly every action taken in the United States by the federal government, states, and individuals has an impact on tribal land. For Native Americans, the environment is not just rich of natural resources, but cultural resources. The greater part of Native American history since European colonization can be characterized as a fight to protect the cultural resources Native Americans inherited from their ancestors.
There are numerous, ongoing struggles that define Native American environmental activism. Perhaps one of the most pressing is the repatriation and protection of ancestral remains and sacred tribal objects. Beginning in 1990, Congress enacted the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to be better assist in such protections. However, preexisting land holdings and provisions of the law that give considerable weight to non-Native interests have perpetuated the inability of Native Americans to reclaim their sacred artifacts from sites and plan developments.
Other environmental activism aims to restore balance to the land. In the Pacific Northwest, tribes are advocating for the removal of hydroelectric dams, which proliferated greatly during the 1930s under the New Deal's Public Works Act. hydroelectric dams greatly disrupt the flow of rivers and have negative impacts on aquatic life. Certain species like salmon, which are cultural resources for many tribes, have begun to disappear as a result of continue dam production. Fortunately, several
In the Southwest, tribes like the Kumeyaay of California and Tohono O'odham in Arizona have protested the continued construction of a border wall between the United States and Mexico. The artificiality of colonized borders have long separated members of these border tribes in both nations. Construction of the border wall threatens to disrupt long standing traditions of cross-border travel and cut off members of tribes from one another. Moreover, they also protest the border wall's impact on wildlife and the negative impact on other cultural resources. Today, the Kumeyaay and other tribes are protesting the wall's construction to enforce promises made by the federal government, protect ancestral graves, and preserve the environment.
In the North, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and its neighbors have come together to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). For years, the company Energy Transfer sought to construct a 570,000 barrel per day pipeline that would run through the Dakotas and Iowa to a refining station in Illinois. The Standing Rock Sioux have protested the pipeline as a violation of its treaty rights and disruption to the natural habitat. The risk for environmental harm from a spill drew the attention of environmentalists and allies, as well as counter-protestors and
While progress has been made across the country to protect cultural resources, there is still work to be done and there is a need for attorneys to assist tribes in achieving environmental sovereignty.
Selected Library Resources
- Chip Colwell, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits (2017), Available Online
- Beth Rose Middleton, Trust in the Land (2011), Available Online
AIM—the American Indian Movement—began in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the summer of 1968. It began taking form when 200 people from the Indian community turned out for a meeting called by a group of Native American community activists led by George Mitchell, Dennis Banks, and Clyde Bellecourt. Frustrated by discrimination and decades of federal Indian policy, they came together to discuss the critical issues restraining them and to take control over their own destiny. Out of that ferment and determination, the American Indian Movement was born.
AIM's leaders spoke out against high unemployment, slum housing, and racist treatment, fought for treaty rights and the reclamation of tribal land, and advocated on behalf of urban Indians whose situation bred illness and poverty. They opened the K-12 Heart of the Earth Survival School in 1971, and in 1972, mounted the Trail of Broken Treaties march on Washington, D.C., where they took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), in protest of its policies, and with demands for their reform.
The revolutionary fervor of AIM's leaders drew the attention of the FBI and the CIA, who then set out to crush the movement. Their ruthless suppression of AIM during the early 1970s sowed the seeds of the confrontation that followed in February, 1973, when AIM leader Russell Means and his followers took over the small Indian community of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in protest of its allegedly corrupt government. When FBI agents were dispatched to remove the AIM occupiers, a standoff ensued. Through the resulting siege that lasted for 71 days, two people were killed, twelve wounded, and twelve hundred arrested. Wounded Knee was a seminal event, drawing worldwide attention to the plight of American Indians. AIM leaders were later tried in a Minnesota court and, after a trial that lasted for eight months, were acquitted of wrongdoing.
What was the original goal of the American Indian Movement that was founded in 1968?
American Indian Movement | |
Leader | Dennis Banks Clyde Bellecourt Vernon Bellecourt Russell Means |
Founded | 1968 |
Ideology | Native American civil rights Anti-racism Anti-imperialism Pan-Indianism |
Colors | Black Gold White Maroon |