The history of the United States’ treatment of its indigenous peoples is more notorious than it is honorable, littered with controversial policies including tribal relocation and forced assimilation. From the earliest days of American colonies to the 20th century, the United States and Native American nations negotiated some 500 treaties, nearly all of which were broken by the United States. After stripping most tribes of their ancestral land, congressionally sanctioned policies created Indian boarding schools in the 20th century with the explicit objective of erasing Indian culture in younger generations.
Today, American policy and indigenous interests continue to struggle for peaceable and respectful coexistence in a so-called government-to-government relationship. In 1972, indigenous peoples protested in the Trail of Broken Treaties, a march on Washington which culminated in an occupation of Bureau of Indian Affairs offices at the Department of Interior. More recently, the Standing Rock Sioux vehemently protested the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline for infringing on tribal sacred land, guaranteed by an 1868 treaty, amid larger environmental concerns.
The DAPL controversy was a direct standoff between indigenous land rights and American big oil, but many other indigenous communities — especially coastal ones — currently face land issues against a less tangible and more formidable nemesis, one that requires unprecedented support from the American government: the rapidly changing global climate.
The Rising Tide
For those who live along America’s numerous coasts, the prospect of their communities confronting rising sea levels in the future comes as little surprise nowadays. As the HPR has reported, low-lying places like Louisiana face a dangerous combination of severe weather, rising seas, sinking land, and messy politics that threaten to swallow towns whole. Scientists project that the sea level in New York City will rise between 18 to 50 inches by 2100 in addition to the foot it has already risen since 1900.
But for some communities in the Arctic, the threat of rising waters is not a concern of the distant future; it belongs to the present day. In January 2017, the 450-person Alaskan Native village named Newtok made an unprecedented petition to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to declare a state of disaster for their village, in an effort to secure federal funding for their relocation. In recent years, the permafrost undergirding Newtok has melted away, and some 70 feet of its coastline has eroded into the ocean.
Joel Clement, former director of the Department of Interior’s Policy Office and now senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Arctic Initiative, told the HPR that Newtok is far from alone in facing an uncertain future. Newtok is one of four Arctic communities along the Alaskan coast, in addition to Shishmaref, Shaktoolik, and Kivalina, that the Obama administration identified as particularly “vulnerable [and] imperiled,” a fraction of another thirty-some that face literal rising tides from climate change in the near future.
Other indigenous coastal communities, like the Quinault Indian Nation in Washington state, are relocating not only to escape the effects of climate change, but also due to the existing geographical difficulties of the reservation assigned to them generations ago. Once, the glaciers of nearby Olympic National Park had furnished cool freshwater that supported abundant blueback salmon, which the Quinault had fished for both sustenance and employment. But today, the glaciers have melted; consequently, the Quinault “can’t fish for [the blueback salmon] this year because the numbers have just been decimated,” Kelsey Moldenke, senior planner for the Quinault relocation process, told the HPR.
Furthermore, the Quinault reservation lies along the Cascadian subduction zone, a major geological fault line that is due for significant and potentially devastating seismic activity. “Everybody likes to talk to us about climate change and the effects of [it],” but the “real clear and present danger that could knock out the entire lower village is the Cascadia subduction zone tsunami and earthquakes,” said Moldenke. The Washington Department of Natural Resources has predicted such a disaster could put the village under 50 feet of water — devastating for a village whose tallest buildings, according to Moldenke, are 25 feet high. “Even if someone is a skeptic of climate change … this move is still necessary,” Moldenke said.
Where’s the Money?
Relocation for these relatively small villages is far from simple — Newtok’s relocation process has been decades in the making — moreover, they are far from inexpensive, and the promise of funding can be fickle. Moldenke estimates that the first neighborhood they plan to build in the so-called “upper village,” a mile and a half inland from the current village, will cost between $11 and $15 million. Much of that will be community infrastructure: a “generations” building that will serve as part daycare, part senior center; a biomass facility to serve as an electricity plant for the new village; and an administrative building. This past March, Newtok received a comparable sum, $15 million, from the federal government, but still merely a fraction of the total expected $130 million price tag of relocation.
Part of the difficulty in securing funding for relocation efforts arises from the lack of governmental infrastructure to handle what Clement calls slow-moving disasters. FEMA, under the Stafford Act, responds to and funds recovery from acute catastrophes, like the immediate aftermath of hurricanes and earthquakes, but slow-moving disasters like rising sea levels and coastal erosion do not necessarily fall under its purview. Moreover, it is not immediately clear to whom communities should turn to support their relocation; Clement’s previous role at the Interior was partly to help communities find and apply to federal grants for which they might be eligible. “There’s no one agency [to which] we could point to take on the responsibility of getting it done,” said Clement.
Even when the communities and projects might be eligible to receive funding, money can be earmarked for only the early stages of relocation, a problem that the Quinault have encountered as they move into the construction and execution stages. “A lot of [nonprofit] foundations, we’ve learned, don’t really fund brick and mortar building; they fund capacity building, which is great for making plans,” but less helpful for the “really expensive stuff like actually building the buildings,” said Moldenke. Capacity building, which happens in the initial stages of planning relocations, is related to Clement’s work on resilience and focuses on strengthening a community’s capacity to adapt to changing conditions sustainably.
The very nature of being a small community can hinder the process of acquiring funds as well. For the Quinault and other towns along the Cascadia subduction zone, a lot of funding is intended to get the most “bang for the buck,” as Moldenke put it, and subsequently focuses on densely-populated metropolitan areas like San Francisco. Many resilience grants are intended for towns of at least 50,000 — for perspective, Taholah, the relocating village in Quinault, has a population of 825. “Just looking [along] the Cascadia subduction zone … there are no cities over 50,000 people,” said Moldenke. “Hundreds of miles of coastline are ineligible [for these grants].”
A New Frontier
The difficulties of securing adequate support for relocation projects are put into perspective by the tremendous importance and implications of these projects. There is a moral dimension to supporting indigenous efforts to relocate, rooted in America’s historical treatment of indigenous peoples and the aftermath of this treatment. “[The United States has] a very dark history of relocating Arctic folks against their will,” a policy that had devastating effects on their culture, said Clement. One is reminded of the notorious Trail of Tears of the early 19th century, when an estimated 100,000 American Indians were forcibly removed to the Oklahoma Territory; an estimated 15,000 died along the way.
Due to the fraught past of indigenous relocation, today’s efforts — which Moldenke and Clement heavily emphasize are community-driven — are particularly compelled to preserve remaining traditions in the move. In Taholah, this manifests itself literally: among the endangered establishments threatened in the lower village is the Quinault museum. If lost to the waters, said Moldenke, “that whole cultural history is gone.”
To Jim Gamble, senior Arctic program officer at Pacific Environment and formerly director of the Aleut International Association, the effects of climate change that Arctic natives particularly face is a tragedy in which the natives are entirely blameless. “The fact is, many of these communities are not located where they are located because the tribes or indigenous peoples chose them, they were chosen by a government,” Gamble told the HPR. Nor are they responsible for the shipping-induced air pollution or global warming-induced coastal erosion that afflicts their communities and is impelling their relocation.
Relocation is of heightened significance for many of these communities because their culture often relies on their land; take for example the Quinault’s reliance on blueback salmon. The Quinault were at the forefront of the Fish Wars during the 1960s and ’70s, which resulted in the landmark Supreme Court Boldt decision guaranteeing Indian fishing rights. Consequently, unlike people who live off-reservation but within the threatened zones, simply picking up and moving away is not a solution for Quinault members: “The reservations are their home; this is their homeland,” said Moldenke. If they moved away, “they wouldn’t be living on the land.”
These relocation efforts, even more paradoxically, are imperative as harbingers of times looming ahead as climate change continues practically unabated. Indigenous peoples, in living closely with the land, are crucial for opening the discussion on the growing need for relocations in the first place. “The tribal nations pay attention more than a lot of the cities along the coast as to what might happen,” said Moldenke. “It’s the native tribes that are having to take the lead.” Clement agrees that the way in which these efforts are undertaken is of vital importance: “This will foreshadow how we will handle [climate change] as it arises everywhere in the country and on the coast,” particularly as it begins to impact more metropolitan, populous areas.
Plans for the Future
The United States’ ever-changing, even contradictory, stances on climate change and policy are of unsurprisingly little help, especially as they intersect with indigenous rights to representation and sovereignty.
In early 2017, shortly after President Trump took office, Clement and 50 of his Department of Interior colleagues were reassigned overnight from their climate policy work. Clement was reassigned to the office that collects royalty payments from oil and mining companies: “They were clearly trying to get me to quit,” and “if I were to keep my voice, I knew I’d have to go.” He perceives the danger of this tactic to be far greater than his employment prospects. “That was the end of our response to this slow-moving disaster plan,” which places Alaskan natives like those in Newtok at risk. Before resigning, Clement filed a whistleblower complaint, which is still being investigated. He is doubtful that these processes will be eased or amended without a concerted effort from the administration and Congress, particularly because the current administration has “shown an ongoing disdain for tribal sovereignty and tribal rights, and, of course, for climate change.”
Gamble has also noted a decline in indigenous inclusion under the current administration coupled with total reversals on climate policy. There was “quite a bit of forward thinking on climate change” under the previous administration, but today at international assemblies like the Arctic Council, U.S. representatives avoid language mentioning renewable energy, the Paris agreement, or even the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Gamble is concerned that mass reassignments in critical departments like Clement’s will mean that, even if a new administration were more disposed towards environmental policy, there will be no one left to implement it.
Despite shifts in outward federal climate policy, Gamble, a self-described optimist, also noted that most of the agencies overseeing these projects on the ground have managed to retain their “approach to [compassionate] consultation and appreciation of culture.” The Department of the Interior, Clement’s previous department, is a notable exception. Moldenke is inclined to agree: He said that he had not noticed that the Quinault relocation had been particularly affected by the new domestic climate policy. In fact, the Quinault recently secured government funding for the solar energy component of the new village.
What is most critical in these efforts, according to Moldenke, Clement, and Gamble alike, is the deliberate engagement of indigenous peoples’ expertise. “These are the folks that are generally left out, because money talks,” said Clement. However, “the tribes and Alaskan Natives [are] absolutely the responsibility of the federal government.” According to Gamble, it is incumbent on the government to take the time to identify “how to work with, and within, the communities.”
Correction 10/31: A previous version of this article incorrectly said that Joel Clement was “reassigned [by the Department of the Interior] to distribute loyalty checks to oil and mining companies.” The sentence has been revised to say that “Clement was reassigned to the office that collects royalty payments from oil and mining companies.”
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/United States Coast Guard