At an August rally in Glendale, Arizona, the tumult of the crowd suggested a rock star was about to take the stage. Instead, a booming voice welcomed the spectators with a full-throated endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris: “She is the right person at the right time to be our nation’s 47th president!” The voice belonged to Gila River Indian Community Governor Stephen Roe Lewis, a tribal leader who last year helped resolve long-overdue water rights in the state for the tribe. “Damage!”
Later, after a warm-up speech from managing partner Tim Walz, Vice President Harris took the stage and said she would “always honor tribal sovereignty and respect tribal self-determination,” (The 22 federally recognized tribes in Arizona make up an indigenous voting block that was essential to President Joe Biden’s victory in the swing state in 2020.) On her campaign website, she keeps it up she will work to secure America’s industrial future by investing in clean energy—but clean energy development often has a negative impact on sites on federal lands sacred to indigenous peoples.
The Biden-Harris administration has been one of the most supportive of indigenous people, investing millions of dollars. federal funding for climate resilience and green energy initiatives. Yet the Indigenous vote for Harris in 2024 is far from assured. While the US has big goals on its way to a clean energy futurethose plans must compete against preserving tribal lands — an issue Harris has stumbled on in her political career, which dates back to her time as California’s attorney general.
Nearly 80 miles east of the Arizona rally, a sacred site is in danger. Oak Flat, a stretch of national forest land in the high desert, has been an important spiritual site for tribes such as the San Carlos Apache for centuries, and is used for ceremonies and the gathering of medicines such as sage, bear root and tallow. Yet the area is under threat – Rio Tinto, an international mining company, was fought for more than a decade to put a copper mine there. Oak Flat is home to one of the planet’s largest undeveloped copper reserves, and the metal is critical to making the electric batteries needed for the transition to cleaner energy sources.
Oak Flat and other sacred sites have not received enough federal protection, activists say, despite intense advocacy from the tribal lands affected. Much of the US is already built and powered at the expense of tribal lands and peoples. To reach its goal of 80 percent renewable energy generation by 2030, and carbon-free electricity five years after that, the US needs major investments and robust policy support. While Harris says she is the candidate in the best position to achieve those goals, there are concerns among indigenous communities that do will continue to exploit tribal homelands — most of the minerals needed for the energy transition are located inside 35 miles away from tribal communitieson lands originally stolen from them.
“It’s definitely hard to do at the same time. That’s the conflict,” said Dov Kroff-Korn, an attorney with the Lakota People’s Law and Sacred Defense Fund, about the balance between extracting the minerals essential to the energy transition and protecting tribal lands where many such minerals are located. He mentioned that Harris has few environmental policies of his own to criticize, and that policy-wise the broader Biden-Harris administration has been a mixed bag. “There were many positive signs that should be recognized and applauded. But it was also a continuation of many of the same old withdrawal policies that have driven America for almost its entire history.”
In an effort to protect some places from industry, President Biden expanded his ability to make national monuments out of sacred sites, such as the ancestral footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument — or Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni — as well as fully restoring the boundaries of the Bears Ears Monument in Utah from a Trump-era rollback. Biden also appointed the first Native American ever to his cabinet — Deb Haaland, Pueblo of Laguna — to head the Department of the Interior. In her role, Haaland directed federal agencies to incorporate traditional knowledge to better protect indigenous sacred sites on public lands.
During her tenure as vice president, Harris was part of the administration’s push to produce more oil and gas than ever, despite promises to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Last year, the Biden administration also gave the green light to the Willow project, an $8 billion drilling operation on Alaska’s North Slope that some but not alltribes were against. Throughout her presidential campaign, and in a reversal of her previous stance, Harris showed support for frackinga controversial drilling method that extracts oil and natural gas from deep in the ground.
Crystal Cavalier-Keck, a member of the Occoneechee Band of the Saponi Nation in South Carolina, is the co-founder of 7 Service directionsAn Indigenous-led environmental justice organization. She worries that the Mountain Valley Pipeline, currently a 303-mile system that runs through West Virginia and Virginia, will permanently damage the sacred Haw River where she has many memories with her family. Over the years the besieged river has been contaminated by chemicals and is now threatened by the pipeline, which began operating in June.
In 2020, Cavalier-Keck campaigned for Biden in South Carolina, but saw no movement on the environmental protections she wanted after he was elected. She said she would still vote for Harris in November, but felt her concerns were not being addressed. “There’s not much at all about her environmental policy,” she said. “They say the right buzzwords, like ‘clean, renewable, forward’. But where is the meat of it?”
She lives about a two-hour drive from where Hurricane Helene claimed more than 100 lives in North Carolina, and she worries that the next big climate disaster will reach her community. Cavalier-Keck said her tribe has had problems accessing the approx $120 million in federal funding to help tribes build climate resilience.
During Harris’ time as Attorney General of California, she argued against tribes placing land in trusta process that can protect land as well as allow economic development such as casinos where gambling can be prohibited, and claims the situation only applies if a tribe was “under federal jurisdiction” when the Indian Reorganization Act was passed in the 1930s. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals against Harris and the state ruledbut if she had won the case, about 100 tribes in California would not have been allowed to benefit from trust lands.
Still, Lael Echo Hawk, who is Pawnee and an expert on tribal law, says Harris’ decisions as attorney general don’t reflect what she might be capable of as president. She pointed out that Harris, as attorney general, helped pass a red flag law in California to take guns away from people deemed dangerous. In addition, she called on the US Congress to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act – an issue that is important in indigenous communities, where women go missing and are the survivors of violence at a rate higher than the national average. Echo Hawk also knows of tribes involved in border issues and immigration that Harris endorses. “These are important issues that I think better demonstrate her commitment to promoting and protecting tribal sovereignty,” Echo Hawk said.
But for Nick Estes, a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and a professor at the University of Minnesota, Harris may just be a continuation of the Biden administration, which he says has taken advantage of tribal lands. As it stands today, 1.6 million surface and underground acres of land within 83 reservations has non-natives benefiting from oil, gas and mining operations, among other extractive industries.
“You can’t just have a vibes-based environmental policy. It actually has to be concrete,” Estes said. “What we’ve seen is just service to industry at the expense of indigenous lands and livelihoods.”
