Eco-Roundup: Last Time Trump Was Elected, Tribal Nations Lost a Whole Town
Every month, I assemble a round-up of stories I’m following and issues I’m covering, with palate cleansers at the end. Please consider a paid subscription so I can keep this up in 2025!
Happy New Years folks. I hope you’re all off email this week and are reading this on January 6th. It’s been a tough year, and this one isn’t looking any easier. Given the Biden administration’s unwaivering support of Israel’s genocidal activities in Gaza, and its shortcomings on so many other issues, I don’t see a strong argument for mourning the incumbent's departure. However it’s also clear that the Trump administration is likely to increase immensely the scale of suffering and destruction that the most vulnerable among us will experience.
The climate crisis and mass deportations are at the top of my concerns, but I’m also thinking about all the other possibilities, big and small, that already slammed shut with the election, whether we know it yet or not. I stumbled across this example from Trump’s last administration that I wanted to share. The incident demonstrates the power that the executive branch holds still today over Native people’s sovereignty over their land, and how a change in presidential administration can alter the fate of entire communities.
Some of you might have heard of the 2020 McGirt v. Oklahoma case, where the Supreme Court affirmed that roughly half of Oklahoma is reservation land, held by nine Native nations. (If not, check out journalist Rebecca Nagle’s podcast This Land.) Well it shouldn’t surprise you to hear that it’s far from the only case where tribes are fighting for the return of land they were promised in legally enforceable agreements, as this recent piece by Maria Parazo Rose makes clear. The town of Riverton, on the Wind River reservation in Wyoming, is another one of these disputed places.
The backstory is that in the early 1900s, Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone people were confronting dire economic straits on the Wind River Reservation, where they had recently been confined. Under pressure from U.S. officials, leaders agreed to allow the federal government to sell tracts within the reservation to white settlers. This was part of a wider government policy at the time. Using threats of violence or starvation, the feds would steal, coerce, or buy land from Native nations, then dole it out to newly established states, or corporations, or homesteaders. (Tristan Ahtone’s Misplaced Trust and Land Grab Universities series are really valuable for understanding how this happened.) Some of the land that was offered up was on reservations. So, thanks to various laws, not least the General Allotment Act, all-white towns were established in the middle of many reservations.
A 1905 Act passed by Congress opened up 1.4 million acres of Wind River Reservation land for settlement by non-Indians. The language of the law was vague on whether or not the land that was sold would remain part of the reservation, in part perhaps because U.S. officials at the time aimed for the reservation system and Indigenous control over land to fade away over time. Really, they aimed for Indigenous people to eventually cease to exist.
White people bought some of that land and established the community of Riverton on the interior of the reservation. However there was no big rush to buy the rest of the land, and fewer than 10 percent of the tracts ever sold. Ultimately the federal government stopped offering them up. The tribal nations say they never agreed to reduce the size of the reservation with the land sales. The unsold tracts were officially affirmed as still part of the reservation, however the state of Wyoming started claiming that the town of Riverton was not.
In 2008, the nations submitted an application to the Environmental Protection Agency to manage air quality programs on the reservation, including in Riverton. Approval meant that the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone governments would have access to more grants via the Clean Air Act and would generally be better equipped to monitor the impacts of the oil and gas fields, such as the Jonah Field, that surround their population. The EPA asked the Interior Department to weigh in, and agency leaders agreed with the tribes: Riverton was a part of the reservation.
The state of Wyoming was not into it and went to court to assert that Riverton should fall under the state’s control, not the tribe’s. Among other things, if Riverton were a part of Wind River, then the tribal justice system and federal courts would have jurisdiction over criminal cases in the town, and the state would be pushed out. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the state, and said Riverton wasn’t on the reservation, but this wasn’t the end of it. These kinds of cases tend to weave through all kinds of appeals processes. The tribes planned to ask for a re-hearing.
In the middle of all of this Trump was elected, and everything the tribe had been working toward ground to a halt. The Environmental Protection Agency, now run by Trump’s appointee Scott Pruitt, abandoned the tribes and refused to be involved in the case any longer. The U.S. Justice Department had also supported the tribes up until this point. But when they attempted to take the case to the Supreme Court, Trump’s new solicitor general, Noel Francisco, took the side of Wyoming, also in effect abandoning the tribes. As I understand it, the solicitor general, acts as the executive branch’s representative to the Supreme Court and has enormous influence over which cases the justices agree to consider. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case, and Riverton remains an island of white control in the middle of one of the largest reservations in the U.S.
This wasn’t the first time that the Supreme Court was asked to weigh in on the status of Riverton. In 2011, the court also declined to review the murder conviction of a guy named Andrew John Yellowbear Jr., who argued that Wyoming courts didn’t have the jurisdiction to convict him. Whether the Supreme Court will have another opportunity to weigh in — and how successful a case might be given the court’s rightwing majority — is unclear.
To me this case is a window into all the under-the-radar injustices that are ahead of us. I hope at the very least that news outlets are taking Indigenous affairs stories more seriously, so something like this doesn’t have to unfold outside the spotlight of national news.
Other stories I’m following:
I was surprised to find so many stories of infiltrators and snitch-jacketing in mainstream pop culture this month. It’s a topic I think about a lot in my work. (If you’ve never heard of snitch-jacketing, it’s when someone is framed as a law enforcement informant. Sometimes law enforcement does it to people in social movements, to seed divisions, and sometimes it happens within movements that are under immense pressure from law enforcement, often in a context where there’s widespread infiltration of that movement.) A couple nights ago, I watched the first episode of the TV show Say Nothing, which is streaming on Hulu, and begins with the 1972 disappearance and murder of Jean McConville, a mother of 10, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. She was believed by the IRA to be an informant. I’d be curious to know what experts on the IRA think about Say Nothing.
Hulu also has a docu-series out about Anna Mae Aquash, an American Indian Movement member, who was assassinated in 1975 in the Badlands of South Dakota after rumors spread that she was an FBI informant. The FBI was at the very least complicit in her killing. It was remarkable to see Aquash’s story brought to life with her photos, her voice, and archival footage of the AIM movement. However, if you decide to watch this, or if you have already, please also listen to this interview from Black Liberation Media with historian Nick Estes, who lays out a lot of key things that were left out of the series and some other serious criticisms.
I’m also midway through Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, a novel about a woman who infiltrates an environmental movement in France. It’s juicy, and I’m into it. But my criticism so far is that it creates an image of the professional infiltrator as a sexy, coldhearted mastermind. This how some of them consider themselves, for sure, and the book is written in the first person. It’s also fair to say that the author is playing with an archetype. But ultimately it’s important to remember that real-life infiltrators are much more bumbling and flawed than what this novel is presenting. Check out the podcast Alphabet Boys for an example of what I mean, or my own piece on a Standing Rock infiltrator, from a few years ago.
“That first day I stepped into that residential school. My childhood was gone.”
I’ve been listening this month to Season 2 of the podcast Stolen, which won the Pulitzer prize in 2023. Journalist Connie Walker chases the story of the Canadian residential school her father attended and a priest who abused him. Walker uses the structure of a true crime story to reveal the truth behind both her own relationship with her father and the foundational crimes of the Canadian state.
Also out this month, the Washington Post documented 3,104 deaths of children in U.S. boarding schools between 1828 and 1970 — three times as many deaths as Interior Department found in its own, apparently sub-par, investigation into boarding schools. More than 800 never made it home and are buried at the schools they attended. Biden made a formal apology about boarding schools this fall, but there has been no major federal restitution nor the creation of a truth and reconciliation commission, like in Canada. One researcher has estimated the true toll at around 40,000.
In a new paper from the University of Bristol, researchers attempt to identify patterns internationally in the criminalization of climate and environmental activists. They identify four types of criminalization and repression: anti-protest laws, prosecution and courts, policing, and killings and disappearances. They also tracked 22 pieces of new legislation meant to limit people’s ability to protest, introduced in the 14 countries they investigated. I think this four-type rubric they came up with is interesting but ignores some of the softer forms of repression, such as propaganda, and what I’d loosely call political and community organizing — efforts to build astroturf groups, or support certain political candidates, or empower industry-friendly individuals, or donate to community projects — that are so key to corporate efforts to crush movements. The report also falls a bit short in its definitions — it distinguishes between climate and environmental defenders, but doesn’t center Indigenous people’s defense of land, which is often advanced on the grounds of a combination of concerns over the environment, sovereignty, and land-based spirituality. So while the study identifies an increase in climate protest, it doesn’t capture, for example, the growth of the Indigenous land-back movement that has been central to the U.S. environmental movement for at least the past decade.
The family of Manuel Paez Terán, known as Tortuguita, filed a lawsuit against law enforcement officers they say are responsible for Terán’s death. The 26-year-old was shot to death by police during an occupation of a forest slated to be destroyed to make way for the $115 million Atlanta police training Center known as Cop City. The same day that the suit was filed, community members, media and public officials toured the training center. It’s scheduled to open in the first months of 2025.
“It’s just really important that we don’t let this intimidation stop us from doing what’s right.”
Iowa opponents of Summit’s carbon sequestration pipeline have been receiving letters from the company threatening defamation lawsuits for their criticism of the project. This is part of a wider trend of fossil fuel companies attempting to stifle criticism using defamation suits.
“Our dreams have become that we would not hear the sound of bombing.”
Al Jazeera posted a tribute to the 217 journalists and media workers killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023. They’ve got portraits of all of those killed along with the final messages of a few of them. The Committee to Protect Journalists says Israel’s war on Gaza has killed more journalists in a year than any other conflict they’ve tracked. It only continues. On the day after Christmas, an Israeli air strike killed five journalists in and around a news van outside a hospital.
Palate Cleansers
I cover topics that are heavy and distressing to take in, so I'm ending these posts with things that make me feel grounded: food, nature, community.
Something Delicious: Accidental Cookies
We had a happy accident this Christmas, while making cookies with my parents, sisters, and niece. Though all peanut butter balls had already been completed, there was an excess of melted chocolate. My mother and master of all sweet treats suggested we smear peanut butter between Club crackers and dip that in the chocolate. The sweet, salty, crispy combo made it the best cookie on the platter and also the simplest. I highly recommend.
Garden Update: A Near-Death Experience
I can’t get into the details, because it could reveal information that my enemies could use against me, but the garden was nearly taken from us forever last week. I don’t mind living in a relatively small space, but I dream of home ownership only to avoid the precarity of a life where at any moment you can be stripped of the home and land you’ve loved and cultivated. For now, the garden lives another day.
Community: Support Media Co-ops in 2025
I remember when Trump was elected last time, non-profit news media saw a big influx in donations. If you feel compelled to pay for the news you consume in 2025 (which is the right thing to do), I’d urge you to support worker-owned news outlets like Hell Gate, and the others they list here on their site, or publications that follow other cooperative models, like The Appeal, or the newsletter Flaming Hydra. You can also support freelance journalists like me, by purchasing a paid subscription to our newsletters.
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