Indigenous Environmental Justice Issues Enter the Global Ring

By Talli Nauman

Development of an Indigenous Environmental Agenda
Citizens Take Action
Birth of the Indigenous Environmental Network
Road Widens Ahead
Resources

If anybody has reason to be wary of promises made in today’s free trade agreements, it’s the Native American population in the United States. The historic 1972 Trail of Broken Treaties protest march to Washington, DC, demanded fulfillment of a legacy of unkept commitments made in treaties between the U.S. government and tribes. By then the failure of the pacts had brought on a whole century of economic, social, and environmental havoc in Indian country. Now, after three more decades of often-fruitless insistence on treaty guarantees, Indian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have taken their demands beyond the realm of the U.S. civil rights and environmental movements.

Indigenous leaders have joined the front guard in the global justice arena. In this larger ring, Native American environmentalists are generating mutual support and solidarity to prevent further degradation of natural resources. They stress indigenous and gender equity in proposals for fair trade, sustainable development, and local democratic process. They offer traditional knowledge and practices as viable ways to create alternatives to the destruction fostered by prevailing models of globalization and international fossil-fuel dependency.

Charmaine White Face summed up U.S. indigenous activists’ distinctive role in environmental policymaking at the most recent annual conference of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), held in the Black Hills of South Dakota. White Face, a spokeswoman for Defenders of the Black Hills who introduced herself as a grandmother, mother, and retired teacher, said, “Our ancestors lived sustainably for thousands and thousands of years. We have to teach ourselves again to live sustainably. The American system, the Western European system, is not going to survive long.”

She and other activists are clearing through a long history of discrimination and injustices to come out at the leading edge of the environmental movement. They are promoting renewable solar and wind energy systems. They conduct commercial harvesting of wild rice, wild salmon, buffalo, and timber from certified woodlands. They teach backyard gardening to propagate heirloom seeds. They build hemp-bale model housing. Their small-scale projects aim to demonstrate the long-term viability of down-home control. In so doing, they also are dispelling the myth of the benefits of cheap energy from huge hydroelectric and as mining and logging, have had on their lands. They hold the line against radioactive and toxic dump sites. They educate their own communities and authorities at every level. They lobby for clean air and water.

They note that the consumerist, energy-intensive habits that have left deep scars in Indian country are the same ones that have created the global threat of greenhouse warming. “Those with the least power and resources are the most affected by climate change,” said Amit Srivastava of Global Resistance at the IEN conference. “Climate change is nothing more than a globalization of the abuses of the fossil fuel industry.”

On local, national, and international levels, Native American NGOs are central figures in upsetting the balance of power and re-establishing the balance of nature. Indigenous leadership has gained respect within the broader environmental justice movement, largely because it is mandated and driven by a land-based culture. It stems from the native perspective that environmental protection is the key to cultural survival, not just a special interest issue, as some non-Indians see it. The Honor the Earth Project, which spearheads U.S. indigenous environmental activism, highlights this basic tenet with its mission statement: “… protecting the earth we all share.”

This worldview dates to the pre-colonial era, before land was a commodity and natural resources were trade goods. Quite to the contrary, indigenous peoples perceived these resources as sacred entities. Protecting the air, water, and soil was elemental for subsistence. Many tribal descendants today still believe that. In accordance with wisdom handed down through the years, they see their purpose on earth as its caretakers. Not incidentally, nearly every organizing event includes some form of religious ceremony.

“We’re coming from communities that still haven’t severed their connection to the land. The rest of settler society trying to reconnect to land is a far cry from subsistence harvesters and people who relate to land as sacred and who have had sacred ceremonies in the same places for hundreds of years in continuity,” says Honor the Earth Program Director and former U.S. Green Party Vice Presidential candidate Winona LaDuke.

Through integrating political and spiritual considerations, indigenous activists make basic values a constant element in their analysis. This helps them cut through the social rhetoric of intergovernmental agencies and transnational corporate developers to unmask the raw profit motive hidden behind it. Throughout history they have been on the losing end of U.S. nation-building and as a result they see the contradictions. For example, a recent story in the Honor the Earth newsletter begins, “The U.S. is the wealthiest and most dominant country in the world, and we can’t keep the lights on in New York City nor can we provide power in ‘liberated’ Baghdad.” It ends, “We need to recover democracy, and one key element is democratizing power production.”

This philosophy lends itself perfectly to an internationalist stance. Says IEN officer Shelly Vendiola, “Traditional societies have always held at the core of their spiritual traditions the belief that all life forms and Mother Earth are equal. So the question we should ask ourselves is … ‘what can you do’—what can we all do—to maintain balance, be respectful and promote peaceful resolution. We must be proactive and together we can change the world.”

Development of an Indigenous Environmental Agenda

The unfurling of the indigenous environmental banner was a four-stage process. The first phase of the movement can be traced to the lifestyle of the tribes before Christopher Columbus’ arrival on the continent 500 years ago and subsequent colonization. Nonetheless, many tribal members surrendered their traditional values in ensuing generations, due to incessant government policies of assimilation, acculturation, relocation, mercantilism, and other isms or ills of Western culture.

In Phase 2, a resistance movement reinstated Indian pride and sparked the take-back of native languages. The American Indian Movement, born in 1968, laid the groundwork for the establishment of the International Indian Treaty Council in 1974 and its recognition as the first indigenous group to receive NGO status at the United Nations in 1977. The U.S. indigenous movement followed a similar path to others throughout the hemisphere, from the Mapuche in Chile and Argentina, to the Mayan descendents and the Rarámuri (or Tarahumara) in Mexico. In the 1970s, the U.S. Indian movement founded some of the first indigenous community colleges, helping empower Native American citizens and challenge paternalistic patterns. Indian activists, scholars, and artists emerging from this period became the guides for youngsters, as well as for elders who had lost touch with native tradition.

Then in the 1980s came the differentiation of indigenous environmental activism from general Native American rights causes. Some Indian leaders formed the Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT) as a technical and training assistance tool intended to assure indigenous management of assets on reservation lands. The organization split however, when numerous CERT members were co-opted into the idea of selling mineral rights at the expense of tribal members’ quality of life. Others recoiled at Indian uranium miners’ cancer rates, the health effects of community wells polluted by petroleum extraction, or relocation of homes to provide access to big coal companies. They organized and lobbied independently for better local control of land, water, and air.

Indigenous organizers were key to the success of the general anti-nuclear movement. As they allied with non-Indian ranchers and students, they brought attention to uranium mining and nuclear waste effects on Indian land, at the front and back ends of the atomic power cycle. The Black Hills International Survival Gathering in 1980 was a benchmark of this phase of activism. Indian activists also spearheaded resistance to the forced relocation of Navajos and Hopis in the coal-mining area where their aboriginal lands overlap in Arizona. Other groups have managed to ward off government and private companies’ proposals for supposedly lucrative contracts to dump toxic and nuclear waste on their reservations.

The activists forged networks. The Indigenous Women’s Network was founded in 1985 and the Indigenous Environmental Network in 1990. As indigenous environmental awareness flourished, many other groups began to form too. The National Tribal Environmental Council today has 108 member tribes. The Indian Law Resource Center, founded in 1978, was one of first organizations to help craft legal frameworks and litigate for precedents to strengthen indigenous self-determination. The Mni Sose Intertribal Water Rights Coalition formed in 1992 to assure tribal capacity-building in resource access and management in the Missouri River Basin.

In the current phase, indigenous activists are looking back to see that over the past decade, energy and waste policy has changed little. As developed areas become densely populated and their resources depleted, companies look to less-developed areas for new supplies and waste disposal sites. Indian reservations have caught their eye because although they were originally located on poor agricultural lands, they have now been found to be rich in natural resources.

Indigenous environmental organizing today entails a redoubling of forces. As mounting radioactive waste poses a conundrum, waste disposal companies actively seek reservation dump sites. As energy supplies dwindle, nuclear-power boosters seek to reopen decommissioned generating plants, foreshadowing the resumption of uranium mining on native lands. Meanwhile, tribes are still trying to clean up after the uranium and other mines closed a decade ago. One-fourth of the 1,100 mines on Navajo land have never been made safe. Cleanup began only recently on the largest radioactive spill in uranium mining history at Churchrock on the Navajo reservation.

In the face of more of the same, LaDuke says, “The strategies used 20 years ago were good strategies. They require educating our communities to push on the environmental movement to have a memory as to why we fought nuclear and fossil-fuel energy before.”

The contemporary indigenous environmental movement has evolved from raising awareness about the risks to local communities of uranium and coal mining, oil and gas development, nuclear and fossil-fuel power plants—although it continues to work hard on those issues. Along with the rest of the environmental movement, it has gone on to promote appropriate technology and renewable energy systems in the interest of protecting the planet from the blight of induced climate change, a global concern.

Longtime and current priorities for the movement were reflected in the agenda of the IEN’s 13th Annual Protecting Mother Earth Conference this year. Topics included water, globalization and free trade, nuclear and fossil-fuel energy, climate justice, and alternative clean energy. The workshops covered native youth organizing, the National Environmental Policy Act, the precautionary principle, using the media in organizing, the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, new generation waste incinerators, mercury contamination, and the EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC).

Among the issues raised were enforcing cleanup of International Uranium Corp.’s mine and mill tailings on sacred sites at White Mesa north of Moab, Utah; barring nuclear waste storage proposed in Western Shoshone territory at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, and on the land of the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes, in Utah; making sure the congressional federal energy bill eliminates tax loopholes and breaks for nuclear plants that would otherwise be mothballed; preventing arctic oil and gas exploitation in Gwich’in territory of Alaska; protesting 60,000 proposed coal-bed methane wells in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin; blocking expansion of Midwestern railroad lines for coal and potential hazardous waste transport; opposing proposed oil drilling in the Slim Buttes and Cave Hills in South Dakota; stopping strip mining that threatens 1,700 burial and other sacred sites on near Beulah, ND; organizing around proposed construction of the first U.S. refinery to be built since the mid-1970s on Ft. Berthold reservation in North Dakota; and an April 2006 deadline for payment of an $8 million debt to the world’s largest mining company in exchange for protection of the Sokaogon Chippewa’s Wolf River Watershed in Wisconsin.

These issues are arising from lands that only two generations ago were the scenes of battles between tribal and U.S. soldiers sparring to the death over access and control of natural resources. To meet the challenges today, Indian and non-Indian people alike have to believe they can improve life by cooperating to curb pollution and polluting habits. They have to look beyond the superficial consumer benefits to the environmental and health impacts of poisonous dioxins exuded in many processes that produce consumer goods. Making those things happen constitutes no small feat. Among other things, more commitment to land-based cultural priorities from the big international environmental organizations is necessary.

Citizens Take Action

While still struggling to reestablish use of indigenous languages, counter conventional television culture, and lower tragic levels of alcoholism, suicide, and crime on reservations, activists have nonetheless transcended crisis management to continue their advocacy for Mother Nature.

Although urban residents sometimes hardly believe it, the safety and cleanliness of the soil, air, and water supplies are linked directly to health and security in Indian country. That’s because many people still depend on wild flora and fauna for their diet and medicine. Living off the land and close to the earth demands attention to detail in environmental protection.

So, many activists are pushed into their roles, and all too frequently by ugly circumstances. For example, Lori Thomas-Luna helped form the Gila River Alliance for a Clean Environment in Arizona a year ago, after the improper storage of pesticide barrels in the mid-1980s on her family’s land resulted in leaching.

“Along with damaging our bodies, it damages our souls,” she says, adding that her email address is contaminatedinaz@yahoo.com.

In seeking to put things right, activists have repeatedly leveraged their treaty rights to control their reservations’ land and natural resource base, as well as laws such as the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act and 1975 Indian Self-Determination Act. Their arsenal for achieving change includes teach-ins, fact sheets educating local residents, pressure on federal and tribal administrative agencies, lawsuits, legislative proposals, lobbying, letter-writing and media campaigns, protests and civil disobedience actions, prayer sessions, cultural events and musical tours, appropriate technology projects, merchandising for fundraising, alliance building, and international appeals.

Through a combination of these tactics, the Black Hills Alliance—an unprecedented ad hoc organizing effort between Indians and non-Indians in South Dakota—successfully nixed plans for uranium mining in the Black Hills in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since then, the indigenous environmental movement has made its mark in hard-won struggles time and again.

In 1987, for example, the Cowboy-Indian Alliance resisted Honeywell Corp.’s attempt to destroy an encampment and place of worship that activists had established on the Cheyenne River, and successfully blocked testing of radioactive munitions in South Dakota. Activist JoAnn Tall, who went on to earn the Goldman Prize awarded to outstanding environmentalists around the world, credits her dreams for giving direction to that and other endeavors. “The spiritual base is the only way a lot of us know,” she adds. “Without that, we would not have been successful in a lot of the campaigns we have been involved in.”

Birth of the Indigenous Environmental Network

A landmark catalyst for organizing was a letter sent out by the Department of Energy 14 years ago to most of the 565 federally recognized tribal governments, encouraging them to accept radioactive waste in exchange for money and more land. Likewise, Bechtel sent the tribal governments letters proffering nuclear power plants. Activists saw these as an abuse of tribal sovereignty, since many reservation authorities were not well-versed in the dangers of such deals and wielded no laws or enforcement mechanisms for environmental protection. The letters were delivered just one year after indigenous communities from Alaska to Oklahoma began receiving inquiries from a private hazardous waste management firms looking to develop incinerator and other facilities on reservations. Notified of the inquiries, Greenpeace Southwest Toxics Campaign Director Bradley Angel put the informants in touch with one another. The outcome was the first IEN gathering in 1990 at the Dilkon rodeo grounds in Navajo country, attended by 200 people from 25 tribes.

IEN formed “to protect our sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, health of both our people and all living things, and to build economically sustainable communities.” The network accomplishes this by sustaining its yearly conferences; maintaining an informational clearinghouse; organizing campaigns, direct actions, and raising public awareness; building the capacity of communities and tribes to address environmental justice issues; and developing policy initiatives. It promotes alliances among indigenous communities, tribes, inter-tribal and indigenous organizations, people-of-color and ethnic organizations, faith-based and women’s groups, youth, labor, environmental organizations, and others.

IEN conferences update participants on issues across the map, raise awareness in the local communities that host them, and result in agenda-setting. The network is among the few environmental organizations that make sure its events are held in collaboration with tribes and in out-of-the-way localities otherwise overlooked.

IEN policy declarations challenge corporate privilege in natural resource distribution, taking into account the potential for global consensus building. For example, the 2003 annual meeting produced the Indigenous Declaration on Water that states: “We seek support and solidarity for the opposition to any free trade agreements that purport to privatize water and trade water as a commodity, including the North American Free Trade Agreement and the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas.”

IEN’s partner, the Indigenous Women’s Network (IWN) emerged from a gathering five years earlier of some 200 native women activists with the mission “to protect Mother Earth for future generations.” Its Austin, Texas headquarters, called Alma de Mujer, serves as a community center and model for sustainable development.

IEN and IWN teamed up to create Honor the Earth, now 10 years old. It describes itself as a national foundation and advocacy group that supports frontline native environmental work by building an informed native and non-native constituency able to strategically coalesce around specific environmental justice and survival issues. That constituency consists of more than 200 grassroots organizations. Honor the Earth represents a unified effort in Native America to broaden awareness of environmental struggles and to generate political and financial support for specific issues.

Its outreach is produced in six languages on the Internet. Through five concert tours featuring the Grammy Award-winning Indigo Girls and in coordination with Tides Foundation Native Communities Program, it has raised and distributed more than $800,000 to some 100 native groups. Its national media coverage and letter-writing campaigns are aimed at influencing political decisionmakers in the United States.

Its members joined five tribal councils in the Colorado River Native Nations Alliance in a successful bid to bar the federal government’s proposed Ward Valley nuclear waste repository in California’s Mojave Desert. Mexican Rarámuri and members of Canadian first nations also came to their aid. Just when resistance was at its peak in 1998, Greenpeace pulled out its support for the action and community-based anti-nuclear work in the United States. That spawned the multi-ethnic, San Francisco-based environmental justice NGO GreenAction, which has collaborated in the indigenous environmental movement since then. A 113-day prayer vigil that attracted a White House representatives’ visit finally ended the standoff at Ward Valley. As in the case of the blockage of Black Hills uranium mining, a film about the conflict was undertaken to inspire grassroots activism.

In a more recent case, Zuni Salt Lake Coalition won a 20-year campaign in 2003 to prevent coal strip mining and underground water pumping by the Salt River Project. The proposal threatened sacred Zuni Salt Lake in New Mexico until mining interests finally relinquished permits and coal leases. However, investors have expressed desires to reopen the issue, highlighting the ongoing need for stronger environmental oversight on Indian lands.

On the Hill, IEN claims a decade of inroads. One is the EPA’s General Assistance Program begun in 1993. It provides grants to tribes for handling solid waste, water and soil contamination, air quality, and other problems. Another is the creation of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) and Indigenous Peoples Subcommittee Work Group in the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice. Their formation was inspired by the Feb. 11, 1994 presidential executive order establishing environmental justice as a national priority, focusing federal attention on the environmental and human health conditions of minority and low-income populations. NEJAC has an executive council of 26 appointed members from different sectors. The subcommittee is one of eight working groups made up of council members and stakeholder organizations. With NEJAC’s participation, the Office of Environmental Justice’s Tribal Program provides internships, training, and technical and development assistance for tribal members and governments to hone their environmental skills. The program also provides support to grassroots organizations with small grants, cooperative agreements, and community internships.

Many obstacles remain to be overcome in getting federal agency support. The EPA, like the Bureau of Indian Affairs, lacks capacity and channels of communication with tribal officials and community members. Only 2% of federal agency employees are Native American, and not all are in scientific or decisionmaking positions. EPA has only been assisting tribes for 10 years, so it usually sticks to compliance assistance in the case of environmental conflicts, rather than taking enforcement actions. But its financing may be the biggest problem. Since the tribes have no tax resource base and taking state money for tribal use is politically incorrect, agency funding is dependent on authorities in Washington. Only one-quarter of 1% of Congress’ funding to EPA is currently earmarked for tribes. No funds for renewable energy and energy efficiency projects were available from the Energy Department in 2004 due to limited discretionary funds appropriated by Congress.

The same year, the IEN conference gave the EPA a venue to encourage comments in the federal public consultation on “Meaningful Involvement and Fair Treatment by Tribal Regulatory Programs.” The consultation reveals jurisdictional problems that explain why IEN finds it must play the role of intermediary between indigenous community members, tribal representatives, and federal authorities. Tribal governments are administrative bodies caught in crossfire. Economically, they are tasked with procuring outside investment for their reservations without squandering their natural resources. Some tribal governments lack capacity. Turnover in tribal posts often causes setbacks to sustainable development projects. Politically, the legitimacy of tribal councils is constantly being undermined by tribal members who refuse to respect the council form of governance that was imposed on the traditional form, as well as by state and federal officials who fail to recognize its legal standing. Honor the Earth works with all the factions in getting ecological affairs addressed.

Its participating organizations often partner with others for legislative action, as in the case of a June 2004 joint effort to oppose H.R. 4513, which would have cut out the heart of the National Environmental Policy Act, and in the case of the informal coalition to block the S. 2095 energy bill. IEN was among the groups that have helped convince federal legislators for three years in a row to shun the Defense Department’s repeated proposals for sweeping new exemptions from the Clean Air Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and so-called “Superfund” toxic clean-up act. But much remains to be done.

Similarly, fundraising with private foundations for grassroots organizing has been frustrated in the past couple of years. According to IEN Director Tom Goldtooth, this is a factor of poor stock market performance, which in turn has meant private donors are spending less on supporting the cause.

In the courtroom, one of the most recent victories in countless lawsuits was a case filed by Defenders of the Black Hills in 2003 to prevent the proposed use of federal Community Development Block Grant housing funds for a private shooting range in the vicinity of Bear Butte, a religious site for 60 tribes. While a good lawyer was necessarily responsible, opponents of the project also credit prayers for this and other successes.

Network members have also made progress in local environmental education. For example, on the Eastern Navajo reservation, organized community members are teaching others how contaminants spread, answering questions about the impacts of radioactive spills, monitoring mining, sampling water, and getting funding for long overdue environmental health studies on uranium mining. Their community action led to a letter-writing campaign that helped achieve the withdrawal of a U.S. Senate bill subsidizing uranium companies.

Meanwhile, in South Dakota, community organizing by Concerned Rosebud Area Citizens achieved the ouster of Bell Farms’ polluting factory hog farm. Slated to have 860,000 pigs in confinement, it would have been the third-largest facility of this type in the world. But it was approved without an environmental impact statement by the Rosebud tribal council. So in the 1999 council elections, tribal members voted out all councilors who favored the project and replaced them with opponents to it.

Examples of implementing renewable energy projects abound. The tribes’ first commercial wind turbine was built in the Rosebud Sioux Nation, with 750-kilowatt capacity. It is being followed up by 16 more of its kind there, as well as 30-megawatt projects planned for the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana and the Makah reservation in Washington. On a smaller scale, wind turbines are slated for the independent KILI community radio station and the White Plume Tiospaye Community Center on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Meanwhile, the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority plans to build 63 hybrid photovoltaic and wind turbine electricity-generating systems at isolated households in 2004, for a total of 103 installations.

Road Widens Ahead

IEN says its mandates from native grassroots and tribal leadership for the next 10 years are: environmental and economic justice issues, toxics, environmental health, biodiversity, mining, climate change, water, food security, sustainable development, and energy issues.

To gain more ground, the network and its partners will need to keep expanding their circle of friends, as they have in years past. In 2000, IEN held its annual conference at the U.S.-Mexico border crossing of Brownsville, Texas and Matamoras, Tamaulipas. Hosted by the border indigenous NGO Casa de Colores, the meeting focused on border justice, water, and agricultural toxics, as well as the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and privatization of indigenous lands in Mexico. In 2003, the gathering was held in the Okanagan Nation Territories overlapping British Colombia, Canada, and ended with a call for the creation of an international monitoring body to track the trade of water in relation to indigenous peoples.

The 2004 IEN conference featured a talk on traditional appropriate technology by David Bald Eagle, a chief of the eight-year-old United Native Nations organization, which has participants from 45 tribes, not only the United States, but in Greenland, Latin America, and the South Sea Islands. A glance at the topics covered in the 14 years of IEN conferences shows that international concerns have been on the table throughout the organization’s trajectory. IEN participated actively in the workshops and protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999, the Social Forum of the Americas in Quito 2004, and is one of the prime organizing contacts for the Northwest Social Forum in Seattle, WA, Oct. 15-17, 2004.

However, what many non-Indian activists know as cross-border organizing is nothing new to the indigenous environmental movement in the Americas. The present borders didn’t exist during much of the tribes’ history. Up until a century or so ago, most ancestral territory in the present-day United States was not marked by tribal, state, or national boundaries and today several tribes span national boundaries. The creation of reservations, countries, and other jurisdictions has necessarily placed the original Americans in the position of negotiation across borders. The imaginary lines drawn through land inhabited at least as far back as 1000 A.D. couldn’t help but produce internationalists.

Now, with the advent of super-national governance by the likes of the WTO and the World Bank, as well as the latter-day treaties exemplified by NAFTA, treaty-making efforts for the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, and other such instruments, a new era has awakened other population sectors to the increasing contradictions of geo-political dividing lines. Non-native and native environmental activists in different countries have become closer allies, as they realize they’re all in this together. The longstanding indigenous arguments against the privatization and monetization of land, water, and air, such as those attributed to famous 19th Century Duwamish-Suquamish Chief Seattle, take on more meaning in the context of globalization: “Every part of all this soil is sacred to my people. … We are part of the earth and the earth is part of us.”

Talli Nauman is the Interhemispheric Resource Center's editor at large and Americas Program associate. She recently attended the 2004 conference of the Indigenous Environmental Network in South Dakota, her home state.

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Resources
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U.S. Indigenous and Collaborating Non-Governmental Organizations
Federal Government Agencies
Tribal Government Agencies
Online Reading and Other Media Sources

U.S. Indigenous and Collaborating Non-Governmental Organizations

Honor the Earth
Tel: (612) 879-7529
Email: honorearth@earthlink.net
Web: http://www.honorearth.org/
Strives to “be a voice for those not heard” by using music, the arts, and the media to make public the environmental, political, and financial issues facing indigenous groups.

Indigenous Environmental Network
Tel: (218) 751-4967
Email: ien@igc.org
Web: http://www.ienearth.org/
The IEN focuses on protecting the environment and developing alternative energy and sustainable development projects on indigenous lands.

Indigenous Women’s Network
Tel: (512) 258-3880
Email: iwn@indigenouswomen.org
Web: http://www.indigenouswomen.org/
Although their focus is on indigenous women, this group supports movements in a number of different areas, promoting respect for and understanding of the problems in indigenous society today.

Association on American Indian Affairs Sacred Lands Protection Program
Tel: (240) 314-7157
Email: general@aaia.verizon.net
Web: http://www.indian-affairs.org/
Established in 1922 to protect the sovereignty and dignity of indigenous groups by safeguarding their lands and natural resources.

Black Mesa Water Coalition
Tel: (928) 226-0310
Email: blackmesawatercoalition@yahoo.com
Web: http://www.blackmesawatercoalition.org/
Builds sustainable communities and educates and empowers youth about the environmental injustices suffered by the Navajo and Hopi tribes in Arizona.

Buffalo Field Campaign
Tel: (406) 646-0070
Email: buffalo@wildrockies.org
Web: http://www.wildrockies.org/buffalo/
Works to stop the unlawful slaughtering of the wild buffalo in Wyoming.

Caribou Commons
Tel: (250) 514-8419
Email: refuge@cariboucommons.org
Web: http://www.cariboucommons.org/
An alliance of aboriginal people, artists, and conservationists locked in an effort to permanently protect the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd, located in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Citizen Alert’s Native American Project
Tel: (702) 796-5662
Email: pmj1@citizenalert.org
Web: http://www.citizenalert.org/
A group in Nevada that works with indigenous and other groups to lobby political figures for environmental causes.

Concerned Rosebud Area Citizens
PO Box 153
Whiteriver, SD 57579

Defenders of the Black Hills
Tel: (605) 343-5387
Email: cwhiteface@aol.com
Web: http://www.defendblackhills.org/defenders/
This group of South Dakotans works on a local level, aiming to save some of the most sacred lands of the Black Hills and the surrounding areas from harmful development and industry, such as mining.

Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment (Diné CARE)
Tel: (928) 309-8718
Web: http://www.dinecare.indigenousnative.org/
The Diné CARE Eastern Navajo Safe Water Project is a comprehensive community education and response campaign to gather data, improve scientific understanding, design trainings that translate and make use of key information, and build the capacity for a strong community response to the problem of ground and surface water radiation pollution in the region.

Forests and Forest Peoples Program
Environmental Defense
Tel: (212) 505-2100
Email: members@environmentaldefense.org
Web: http://www.environmentaldefense.org/
Based broadly on the protection of Earth’s oceans and ecosystems through the creation and promotion of environmentally responsible policy decisions on the public level and sustainable business practices in the private sector.

Gila River Alliance for a Clean Environment
Tel: (480) 239-8481
Email: contaminatedinaz@yahoo.com

Gitigaaning Project
Tel: (715) 682-7137
Program concerned with the health of indigenous peoples.

Green Action
Tel: (415) 248-5010
Email: greenaction@greenaction.org
Web: http://www.greenaction.org/
Activist group that promotes civil protests to sway government action on environmental and social issues.

Lakota Action Network
Tel: (605) 867-1545
Email: ntilsen@lakotamall.com
Web: http://www.lakotaaction.net/
The LAN creates campaigns to both build and defend the Lakota Nation. Strategies focus on protecting sacred sites, ecosystems, and natural resources so that future generations of Lakota may prosper.

Military Toxics Project
PO Box 558, Lewiston, ME 04243-0558
Phone: (207) 783-5091
Fax: (207) 783-5096
Email: mtp@miltoxproj.org

National Wildlife Federation Tribal Lands Program
Tel: (800) 822-9919
Web: http://www.nwf.org/
A land stewardship program with the goal of protecting the ecosystems and native species on Native American tribal lands.

Northwest Social Forum
Tel: (360) 305-9166
Email: msvendiola@comcast.net
Web: http://www.nwsocialforum.org/
The NSF brings together activists working on issues of social justice, economic justice, and environmental sustainability throughout the Northwest.

Seventh Generation Fund
Tel: (707) 825-7640
Email: of7gen@pacbell.net
Web: http://www.7genfund.org/
The Fund, founded in 1977, funds initiatives aimed at promoting and maintaining indigenous culture from Alaska to South America.

Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice
Web: http://www.sneej.org/

Western Shoshone Defense Project
Email: wsdp@igc.org
Web: http://www.wsdp.org/
The WSDP is charged with reclaiming Shoshone land, which covers much of the state of Nevada.

Wolf River Protection Fund
Tel: (715)-478-7605
Email: info@wolfriverprotectionfund.org
Web: http://www.wolfriverprotectionfund.org/
The fund was started to assist the Mole Lake Chippewa tribe in paying off an $8 million loan used to stop a mining facility from further damaging the tribe’s lands. The loan will have to be paid off by 2006.

Yucca Mountain Alerts
Tel: (775) 237-5707
Email: ecmarshall@eurekanv.org
Web: http://www.yuccamountain.org/
Yucca Mountain in Nevada may become one of the U.S.’s largest repositories for nuclear waste. Run by Eureka County, in which the site will be built, this website keeps citizens informed on the project.

Federal Government Agencies

U.S. EPA American Indian Environmental Office
Web: http://www.epa.gov/indian/programs.htm

U.S. EPA Environmental Justice Advisory Council Indigenous Peoples Subcommittee
Tel: (202) 564-2576, (800) 962-6215
Web: http://www.epa.gov/compliance/environmentaljustice/

U.S. Interior Department Bureau of Indian Affairs
Tel: (202) 208-3710
Web: http://www.doi.gov/bureau-indian-affairs.html

U.S. Interior Department Bureau of Land Management
Web: http://www.blm.gov/

U.S. Energy Department, Tribal Energy Program, National Wind Coordinating Committee
Web: http://www.eere.energy.gov/tribalenergy/; http://www.nationalwind.org/

Tribal Government Agencies

B.C. Aboriginal Fisheries Coalition
Tel: (604) 913-9060
Web: http://www.bcafc.org/

Union of B.C. Chiefs
Tel: (604) 684-0231
Web: http://www.ubcic.bc.ca/

Northwest Intertribal Fisheries Commission
Email: contact@nwifc.org
Web: http://www.nwifc.wa.gov/

Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council
Phone: (604) 775-5621
Email: info@fish.bc.ca
Web: http://www.fish.bc.ca/

Inter-Tribal Council on Utility Policy
National Tribal Environmental Council
Tel: (505) 242-2175
Email: info@ntec.org
Web: http://www.ntec.org/envgroup.html

Mni Sose Intertribal Water Rights Coalition, Inc.
Tel: (605) 343-6054
Email: mnisose@qwest.net
Web: http://mnisose.org/

Online Reading and Other Media Sources

Indigenous Peoples, Power & Politics | Winona LaDuke, Honor the Earth Publications, http://www.honorearth.org/

Photovoltaics on Indian Lands: The Solar Way | Sandia Corp., 2001, http://www.sandia.gov/pv/

“Native Americans & the ‘Environment” | Sierra Magazine November/December 1996, http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/199611/

Indian Land and Dumpsites | Native Net, September-October 1991, http://nativenet.uthscsa.edu/archive/nl/91c/0053.html

Groups that Change Communities: Slim Buttes Community Farming Project | Robin Garr, @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG, http://www.grass-roots.org/usa/slim.shtml

Interview: Tex Hall, President, National Congress of American Indians, http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov/

Defending the Sacred Ward Valley Film Project
Tel: (415) 248-5010
Email: defendingthesacred@greenaction.org

Sacred Land Film Project
Tel: (650) 747-0685
Web: http://www.sacredland.org/

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Published by the Americas Program at the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC). ©2004. All rights reserved.

Web location:
http://www.americaspolicy.org/citizen-action/series/14-ien.html

Production Information:
Writer: Talli Nauman
Editing: Laura Carlsen
Production & Layout: Tonya Cannariato