Posted on 07/24/2023 10:53:13 AM PDT by george76
The Biden administration’s war on the ability of American Indians and tribal nations to develop their energy resources is finally receiving the probing attention it deserves, resulting in an aggressive pushback from American Indians and tribal leaders.
The tipping point came last month when Biden’s Department of the Interior announced a 20-year moratorium on new oil and gas leases on 350,000 acres of federal land within 10 miles of Chaco Culture National Historic Park in northwestern New Mexico.
Navajo Nation, which earlier withdrew its support for a 5-mile park buffer due to the economic cost to tribal members, had lobbied against the closure, then condemned the decision by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of New Mexico’s Pueblo of Laguna and “the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary,” and watched as many of its members blocked access to the park where Haaland celebrated her edict.
The response is no surprise. Biden’s plan will cost Navajo allottees—whose median annual income is only $20,000, but who receive an average annual royalty revenue from oil and gas production of $28,000 — $194 million over 20 years! Meanwhile, oil and gas royalties lost to the federal treasury over the course of the withdrawal total $1.02 billion.
Navajo Nation is not alone in its ownership of vast energy resources or as the target of the Biden administration’s war on so-called fossil fuels. The Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation) on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in central North Dakota sit atop the famed and productive Bakken Formation and have been enriched by its development.
The Southern Ute tribe in Colorado, Wind River Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes in Wyoming, Jicarilla Apache tribe in New Mexico, Navajo Nation in the Southwest, Ute Indian tribe in Utah, and the Osage Nation in Oklahoma possess significant oil reserves.
In addition, Alaska Native corporations own subsurface mineral rights and prosper by providing oil support services throughout the Last Frontier.
Biden’s refusal to conduct quarterly federal oil and gas lease sales as required by federal statute and needed to complete units on some tribal lands as well as his closure of federal lands to oil and gas leasing; his Draconian regulations, especially those relating to methane gas, and his administration’s efforts to deny financing to the oil and gas operators who will develop these energy resources all harm Indian nations.
Tribes and Alaska Native corporations are denied the profits they might earn at a time of high and increasing energy prices while Indians, among the poorest Americans, are forced to choose between food and fuel.
Meanwhile, American Indians watch in bewilderment as the Biden administration spends billions subsidizing electric vehicles, which are far beyond their ability to afford; are all but useless in the wide-open spaces they call home, and are decades away from having reliable access to electric charging stations.
It is not just oil and gas. American Indians have benefited from the development of the nation’s coal resources for decades, including the Navajo and Hopi in Arizona and the Crow in Montana.
In fact, coal in the latter’s Powder River Basin is some of the highest quality and cleanest-burning coal in the world, often called “compliance coal” because it meets air quality standards.
These tribes are now suffering because of Biden’s efforts to destroy the market for their coal by eliminating coal-fired electricity in the country and to prevent the transport of their coal for sale internationally, as well as by renewal of an Obama-Biden ban on coal leasing on federal lands, which affects the Crow whose coal is valued at $27 billion.
Why Secretary Haaland would so besiege American Indian tribes and individual tribal members is a mystery given her well-known and incessantly proclaimed tribal bona fides. If there were a secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior most likely inclined to give special attention to the impacts of her decisions on American Indians, it would be Haaland.
Born in Winslow, Ariz., daughter of two members of the U.S. armed forces, including a Marine father awarded the Silver Star for valor in Vietnam, she attended 13 public schools across the country before her family settled in Albuquerque, where she graduated from high school.
After putting herself through college and law school, she led the second largest tribal gaming enterprise in New Mexico, where she pursued “earth-friendly business practices.”
In 2012, she signed on with the Obama reelection effort in New Mexico, later chaired the New Mexico Democrat Party, and in 2018 ran for and was elected U.S. Representatives from central New Mexico, largely Albuquerque.
...
There she pushed aggressively for an end to oil and gas leasing, fracking, and use of fossil fuels, pledges later adopted by former Vice President Joe Biden in his run for president.
What Secretary Haaland believes about fossil fuels and the impact of its abandonment on the country, let alone American Indians, might not matter; after all, Biden’s energy policies are being decided in the White House, including by former Obama appointees, such as once head of the White House Office of Climate Policy, Gina McCarthy, as at least one of Haaland’s more embarrassing appearances on Capitol Hill demonstrates.
That Secretary Haaland’s opposition to fossil fuel is heartfelt, however, became clear when in December, her daughter Somah Haaland, a media organizer for the Pueblo Action Alliance, a New Mexico-based cultural and environmental group, visited Washington, D.C., along with fellow climate activists demanding senators, representatives and federal officials block fossil fuel drilling near New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park.
In addition to their lobbying efforts, daughter Haaland and her colleagues screened a film she narrated “showcas[ing] the threats” posed by oil and gas leasing throughout New Mexico for several representatives and Secretary Haaland’s “agency officials.”
It was not Pueblo Action Alliance’s first controversial visit to Washington. In October 2021, several groups, in a planned protest violently stormed and attempted to breach Interior Department headquarters forcing deployment of Federal Protective Service and U.S. Park Police units and SWAT, during which several security personnel were injured and one was hospitalized.
Meanwhile, inside, Pueblo Action Alliance’s Executive Director Julia Bernal bragged of her personal meeting with “Auntie Deb” to discuss her group’s opposition to oil and gas leasing. Much about these two events remains unknown, including if daughter Haaland were in the meeting with her mother and the degree to which her daughter’s involvement presents a conflict of interest for Secretary Haaland. Not surprising therefore, two Freedom of Information Act lawsuit were filed recently.
One thing is clear: Biden, Haaland, and Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning are not listening to the voices of those American Indians harmed by the Biden administration’s radical anti-energy policies, but to activists who support those courses of action.
Although all Americans have been suffering and will continue to suffer the ill effects of President Biden’s disastrous federal lands, energy, and minerals schemes since his first hours in office, Biden’s war on the energy resources owned by American Indians and tribal nations is especially problematic.
The United States and thus Biden, Haaland, and federal officials owe them a special trust responsibility.
First enunciated by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1831 (“The condition of the Indians in relation to the United States is perhaps unlike that of any other two people in existence…. They look to our government for protection; rely upon its kindness and its power; appeal to it for relief to their wants; and address the President as their Great Father.”), the Supreme Court fleshed it out in a landmark 1942 ruling (“Under a humane and self-imposed policy which has found expression in many acts of Congress and numerous decisions of this Court, [the United States] has charged itself with moral obligations of the highest responsibility and trust [to] be judged by the most exacting fiduciary standards.”).
More recently, Justice Neil Gorsuch, the only Westerner on the court and the most knowledgeable jurist on American Indian issues, explained the special relationship between American Indians and the federal government.
“Our Constitution reserves for the tribes a place — an enduring place — in the structure of American life.” Justice Gorsuch wrote in a concurring opinion.
Later, dissenting, he acknowledged, “The Constitution’s text — and two centuries of history and precedent — establish that tribes enjoy a unique status in our law.”
It does not require a Westerner or a scholarly judge to understand the nature of that fiduciary obligation. One federal agency declared it requires “the federal government to support tribal self-government and economic prosperity,” by citing a 1977 U.S. Senate report, which affirmed that the “purpose behind the trust doctrine is and always has been to ensure the survival and welfare of Indian tribes and people.”
It is difficult to imagine how, by his actions in New Mexico, Biden has not breached his fiduciary duty to American Indians there.
Can a federal lawsuit be far away? What will Justice Gorsuch say?
Like blacks, the Native Americans are only useful to the Democrats as long as they vote for them. Sadly, for the Navajo, they are a decisive voting bloc for the Democrats in Arizona.
It boggles the mind Blacks and NA continue voting for Ds after what the party has done to them over the years.
What did you think President Retard would do?
Why did you dumb Indians vote for him?!
Maybe the libtards will strip mine the crap out of your land for lithium
“These tribes are now suffering because of Biden’s efforts to destroy the market for their coal…”
We’re all suffering as the Biden presidency has sucked money out of EVERYONES pocket.
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