It seems apparent that the Trump administration war on Civil Rights is stranding thousands who have filed complaints about mistreatment or bias.

We can only guess that Donald Trump’s culture war stances against “wokeness” leave him at ease with rules, government procedures, business and policing practices that leave those who find themselves on the short end of the stick for circumstances they do not control.

His administration took big swipes last week to drop civil rights law enforcement at the Department of Education, the Social Security Administration, the Justice Department and several agencies overseen by Homeland Security. At the same time, he took a swipe at museums, criticizing exhibits he said were based on incorrect perceptions of race and identity in America. And he ordered national review of state voter rolls to clear out non-citizens by some magic Elon Musk technical review.

It is interesting that Trump, who like other politicians of all stripes, likes to single out individual stories in the American quilt that match his partisan point of view, is silent about the effects of all this on ordinary citizens in a pluralistic country. Instead, he repeats his general pitch about radical leftists using diversity, equity and inclusion as an activist agenda to unfairly hire, promote or even recognize achievement by anyone not white, male, and straight.

The BBC managed to find a Cleveland mom now in limbo with unresolved complaints about educational services for her 13-year-old adopted son who is not receiving school services for his fetal alcohol syndrome, ADHD and other mental health problems, Eliminating the civil rights staff at the Department of Education’s Cleveland office (and six others)  leaves the family with an unfinished mediation and no one to call.

Nor can they call the Social Security Administration, which has dismissed — under court challenge — 200 enforcement officers who follow on complaints about the disabled.

And at the General Services Administration (GAO), which manages federal property and contracts, the Trump administration has removed a rule that prohibited federal contractors from allowing segregated facilities. The GAO memo applies to all civilian federal agencies, said the prohibition was not in line with Trump’s views on diversity.

Justice and Homeland Security

The Justice Department’s freeze on civil rights litigation and formal decision to pursue policing reform agreements has created a series of live legal cases abandoned.

A simple internet search shows a long list of dropped cases involving Alabama and Virginia purging voter rolls and Texas adopting challenged election maps, state immigration enforcement challenges, police and fire discriminatory hiring cases, lawsuits involving a shelter provider sexually molesting migrant kids, a North Carolina case challenging the state ban on transition treatments for minors and a Utah suit about prison placement for trans prisoners, among others.

The dismissal of most employees in the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and two separate DHS ombudsman offices seem intended to eliminate legal roadblocks to its immigration crackdown efforts. Interestingly, the legal streamlining effort comes just as issues surrounding deportations are running into court challenges. Separations will take 60 days.

As The Hill.com reports, the layoffs at DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and two ombudsman staff who hear complaints, were in response to Justice Department belief that these offices “have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission. Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.”

The eliminated Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman provides a platform for those to bring concerns about the immigration process, while the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman is a route for the public to flag issues about the problems facing those held in immigration detention.

Homeland’s statement was that “These reductions ensure taxpayer dollars support the Department’s core mission: border security and immigration enforcement. “These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission. Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.”

Redefining Civil Rights

The fallout from the Homeland decisions will affect specific individual complaints, of course, but also the politics of Trump’s mass deportation politics.

Rep. Bernie Thompson, D-Miss, noted that Homeland is silencing those who provide a critical review of its policies, a bid overall to end oversight of Homeland Security operations. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus added that civil rights oversight is “not a bureaucratic hurdle if you don’t break the law, geniuses.”

The Trump administration and the courts are warring over whether immigration policies are being based on legal and constitutional footing, on the procedural aspects of roundups and deportations, and on whether the administration is actively ducking court orders on administrative law. Claiming the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as justification for forgoing due process before immediate deportation to El Salvadorean prison camps, for example, crosses all those lines.

From a broader perspective, the Trump Justice Department wants to prosecute or otherwise investigate cases that the Biden administration would have sought to protect, including transgender treatment cases or racially discriminatory policies followed by policing agencies.

Through its actions, the Trump administration is redefining what civil rights means by target and by whether there is anyone to take up the complaint of discrimination.

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It is one of the tragic truths of military life that oftentimes a soldier has to die before anyone notices where the soldiers are and what they’re doing there. This was the case last week in Lithuania when four soldiers from the First Armored Brigade of the Third Infantry Division went missing after their M88 armored recovery vehicle disappeared in what is described as a peat bog during a training exercise near the border with Belarus, a close ally of Russia.

The bodies of three of the four soldiers were recovered Monday after a week-long effort to pull the M88 from the swampy bog. Their names have not been announced by the army, and efforts continue to find the body of the fourth soldier who remains missing.

President Trump was asked during a press availability at the White House last week if he had been briefed on the disappearance of the soldiers in Lithuania. He replied that he had not, and the questioning from reporters moved on to other topics.

This is sadly typical of what happens when soldiers are lost in training accidents, which happen all the time. When soldiers aren't at war, they are training, and much of what they do is dangerous. The M88 is what amounts to a 140,000-pound armored tow truck, equipped to pull other armored vehicles such as M1A1 tanks and Bradley armored personnel carriers that have either broken down or somehow gotten stuck in mud or snow or in a ditch. The army hasn't announced what the mission was that the soldiers were on, other than to say they had been sent out to recover another vehicle that had broken down. It isn't clear yet what happened to send the M88 into the peat bog, but it is suspected that the vehicle was moving down a road and somehow slipped into the swampy waters of the bog. I were to guess, I'd say the M88 was probably lost at night when visibility was poor, and the road through a dense forest was unmarked.

The thing about armored vehicles is that, protected by their thick armor, you feel safe until something goes wrong. Then, as apparently happened with the incident in Lithuania, when the vehicle gets trapped and sinks into the bog, the crew is unable to escape.

Here is what may have happened. The M88 and its crew were being held in reserve and were sent out on the recovery mission when news came in over the radio that another vehicle was in trouble. Using a powerful winch, the M88 recovery vehicle can pull something that weighs up to 140,000 pounds out of trouble or lift a vehicle weighing up to 35,000 pounds using its crane-like boom. The M88 typically has a crew of three: a vehicle commander, a driver and a third soldier to assist in extractions. The three bodies that were recovered were found inside the vehicle. It is not known what happened to the fourth body, but he was probably the vehicle commander and was standing in the commander’s cupola at the time the M88 slipped off the road into the bog and was able to jump free, only to get sucked into the bog along with the M88.

I don't know how long the Third Infantry Division has been in Lithuania, but I do know what they're doing over there. They are deterring Vladimir Putin from any thought he has that he and his puppet president of Belarus might decide to roll over the Baltic states and Poland when Russia gets through with Ukraine, as unlikely as any of that might seem at this point in the three-year war Ukraine has fought for its survival.

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Salon. To read the rest of the column, go here:

Out of sight, out of mind

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♀️HANDS OFF, CREEPS!♀️

When I deleted my Twitter account several months ago, one of the few things I regretted about it was that I wouldn’t be able to keep tabs on the continuing rapid descent of the right into a swamp of racism and misogyny. It’s not that I particularly enjoy wading through the cesspool of the right but you have to know what kind of fucking imbecile bullshit you’re dealing with before you can, you know, deal with it.

Fortunately, several accounts I used to follow on Twitter1 made the move to Bluesky. Lovely, wonderful Bluesky which will pass 34 million users sometime in the next 4-5 days. Small compared to Twitter? Sure, but the legacy press cried an awful lot of big sobby tears over a little tiny social media platform. One wonders why…

Anyway! One of the people that made the move is @AskAubry.com. She has made it her life’s work to expose toxic masculinity and the general depravity of the right. As you can imagine, she has a lot of material to choose from so her Blussky feed is an endless stream of shitty men being shitty with the occasional tradwife selling out other women. Aubry is awesome. Tradwives, less so.

This particular post of hers caught my attention because it neatly captures just about everything wrong with how the right views masculinity, women, and life in general. It’s…a lot.

She’s way nicer than I am. I wouldn’t block out the name or the face. But I have a pathological disregard for the feelings of assholes.

Anywho! Let’s look at Mr. Manly here:

If you’re leading with “unvaxxed,” you’re announcing to the world you’re an imbecile but, sure, let’s go with that.

People who anoint themselves “controversial” are, by default, people who are desperate for attention. If this schmuck was actually “controversial,” he wouldn’t be a litany of right-wing talking points. “Controversial” people think for themselves and Mr. Chicken here does not appear to have ever had a single original thought in his life other than maybe, “Which arm should I hold the chicken in?”

Homeschooler? Come on, buddy. You already told us you were an anti-vaxxer. We don’t need a reminder that you’re stupid. This is redundant.

“Ambitious, mature, calm, established, old-world values.” LOL. This is a 40-year-old man demanding a submissive virgin. Nothing about him suggests calm, mature, ambitious, or particularly bright. One imagines his “old-world values” include slapping his property wife around. Like a real man. 🙄🙄🙄

Oh, it gets worse:

So…he wants a wife and a big family but…also “ethical non-monogamy?” And, look!, he’s soooo edgy! He defies convention and the status quo! What a rebel!

My favorite part is that he’s an “experienced husband and breeder.”

If that sounds weird to you, allow me to translate: “I am a divorced middle-aged father who does not see his children. I am trying to make up for my previous failures as a husband and father by embracing manly manliness I saw on YouTube.”

Fucking loser. Hopefully, his ex-wife got full custody and she moved to another state to get the kids away from this scumbag.

Here’s the rest:

Ugh! The bloodline stuff is just straight-up eugenics white nationalism crap. I’ll bet you a nickel he’s obsessed with his “Viking” heritage after finding out he’s 2% Norweigian or some shit like that. Probably throws axes in his backyard to prove how masculine he is.

Please note that Mr. “ethical non-monogamy” is also “possessive and jealous.” I guess that means non-monogamy is just for him aka “I can fuck anyone I want but you are my property.” Because he’s mature and calm and has “old-world values.” Like adultery.

It’s pretty much the total package of everything wrong with how right-wing men view the world. They are lords of all creation. Their every whim and desire must be catered to. Dissent will not be tolerated. Submission is sexy. Women exist to produce babies because their manly bloodline is all that matters.

Women who have sex outside of marriage are whores but they, as a man, can have sex with anyone they want. Their wife must be pure and virtuous but they can fuck anything with a pulse. After all, they are men and their sexual gratification is paramount.

This, not coincidentally, is the exact mindset, deeply encouraged by the right, that leads to rape. Men are sexual beasts that MUST have sex. They crave it. They DESERVE it. And women won’t give it to them, it’s their god-given right to take it. It should be noted that this does not apply to gay men who have no right to take the sex they want from other men. That’s wrong even though they are also men. You see, women are sexual objects. But JUST women.

This whole Tinder profile is like reading the fanfic of a 13-year-old who has been watching rape fantasy porn since he was 9 and has never talked to a girl in his life. Except this is an adult male who was supposed to have grown up at some point. But he didn’t.

That’s the part that stuck out for me the most and is, ironically, the least openly offensive. Not offensive, per se, although I’m sure most of the women reading it saw it as the red flag it was, even among all the other red flags: “… encouraging your man. Be my peace and comfort.”

For a very VERY long time, women were (and still are) expected to be “mommy” to grown-ass men. Do the dishes. Clean the bathroom. Cook dinner. Raise the kids. Now, if she’s a stay-at-home mom, sure, I get it. Her job is mom and homemaker. That’s MY job and I usually cook dinner and vacuum and keep things clean. Debbie has not scrubbed a toilet in almost two decades now.

But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Not entirely. While I’m sure this cockbite expects his submissive virgin wife to be his domestic slave, he also expects her to be his security blanket. Her emotional labor is his to drain at will with no reciprocation.

“I had a hard day at work fucking chickens, honey. Make me feel better.”

“I had a hard day raising our six children all by myself. Can we talk about my feelings?”

“No, you fucking harpy! Why does it always have to be about you?!”

You know exactly what I’m talking about. And I know this jackass’s ex-wife does, too. Hence, the “ex.”

This, more than anything else, is what is fueling the epidemic of male loneliness. Women stopped settling and instead of stepping up, men were told to become bitter. Even as the right tells men to better themselves physically, which, OK, that’s not the worst thing, it tells them to close themselves off emotionally more than ever.

Why? Because men who feel emotions other than anger and hate are men who look at the right with disgust. Empathy, compassion, and vulnerability are antithetical to fascism and theocracy. You cannot oppress those you see as human. You can exterminate or subjugate those you see as subhuman. And toxic masculinity teaches nothing if it doesn’t teach that women and those who disagree with you are less than.

But it’s all a trap. A manipulation. The more “manly” they become, the less they appeal to women and the less able they are to find a companion. Thus, men trapped in this lie become aggrieved and resentful, told to blame the women they’ve driven away for their loneliness. That rage is then harnessed by the right and turned to other groups, like immigrants and Jews because hate is fungible. That’s the game.

The legacy press plays its part but putting the blame for male loneliness on…women who refuse to sacrifice themselves on the altar of toxic masculinity. More than one article has insisted women need to rescue men by lowering their standards. Are men ever told they need to stop being whiny little babies who need coddling from mommy? Of course not. We never hold men, especially white men, accountable for their behavior.

I do not know the way out. There is an endless supply of money to promote the Joe Rogans and Jordan Petersons and Andrew Tates. There will always be an endless conga line of toxic men preaching hate and rage to young men who will grow up alone and bitter and isolated because they listened to people who do not care about them, only how to use them.

I do know that the way to begin is for our country to stop pretending that this is not happening and that men are not responsible for their actions. Every child has to grow up sooner or later and we are long overdue to stop tolerating childish bullshit like Mr. Chicken Fucker here as normal.

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The Speech Some Democratic or Progressive Leader Could Make and Start the Change

What would be in such a speech? First, they should skip the long list of what’s wrong and the horrible things happening. Go directly to stating what they would do if they had enough voters. Things like:

• Implement automatic industry-wide collective bargaining, as it is in Germany and still in a few U.S. industries, giving employees the leverage to get what their work is really worth.
• Minimum hours guarantee. If the employer later finds they don’t need you for as many hours as they said, that’s on them. You still get paid for the hours you agreed to work.
• Fixed schedule. If you’re hired for the day shift, you can’t be switched to the evening shift, or not without compensation.
• A very aggressive prosecution program against wage theft.
• Automation compensation. To whatever extent a company gets richer because automation reduces work, the employees get to share in that increase. As far as possible, rather than laying off workers, keep the same workers but for fewer hours but for the same pay.

Note that the items above are not social programs. Government help is needed and will be needed on some issues, like child care, but the core push is to have the rules of the economic game refocused on giving people what they should be getting in the first place, but aren’t. Social-program help is good where appropriate, but enforcing that people get what their work is already worth is much more solid and much more powerful.

Note also that these items are not just goals, like, “Young people should not go broke or in debt because they want to go to college or a trade school.” (Senator Bernie Sanders at the recent Fight Oligarchy tour.) A noble goal, but just a wish, dependent on budgets and other factors. The items listed above are more in the realm of real steps that could be done in short order, and are about people getting their proper share of the wealth they are already creating.

Another item a leader can declare is about messaging. It’s something they could push from within a progressive White House, from the bully pulpit: A call on media outlets to give an alternative to the daily stock market report that comes with almost every newscast. Yes, people are somewhat affected by the stock market if they have a retirement account, but the subtext is, this economy is not about you. It’s about the big investors. But imagine a few seconds every day on some people-news as well. There are lots of people-centered numbers that could be reported too. Such as, has the level of employee confidence in being able to find better jobs changed? Has the employee share of national income changed, how the pie is sliced? How are we doing on the percentage of people with some preparation for retirement? What’s an initial estimate on the amount of wealth the work of all workers has added to the nation today?

Can a president influence media this way? Well, we’re learning a president can intimidate law firms and colleges and make wealthy donors kiss the ring. I’d bet an ethical, but bold, leader could get lots of media to add this little piece to their reporting.

All of these steps and a hundred similar ones need to be pushed with an emphasis on functioning within the constitution, and on being fiercely inclusive of all. Yes such steps fall short of some social goals, such as DEI. But you get these kind of leaders in power, and the people themselves in turn more empowered, and people feeling more economically secure, and you have a country in a condition much more open to dealing with the many other issues it needs to.

These steps are radical, because radical change is needed and wanted, but they’re also centerist. They apply to everyone. Democrats who feel the need is to be more progressive, and ones who want to be more centerist, should both be able to get behind these.

Finally that leader needs to say, “I don’t have the votes for this. We leaders don’t have the votes for this. But this is about doing things. Here’s your part, what you can do. Let your commitment to vote for these leaders and these changes be know. Get everyone you can to join you. The popular vote was lost by less than 2%. For now we’ll resist in every way we can until, in a year and a half at the Congressional elections, we start the big changes. Then complete that by your votes regaining the next White House and a new wave of daily news of big changes will start flowing. A very different kind of big changes. Ones that are for you.”

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It’s been five years since Donald Trump and his first regime of soulless monsters deliberately allowed Covid to spread and killed half a million Americans. But what are we talking about today? That Republicans won the messaging. And the left? Well, the left made “mistakes.”

The recent fifth anniversary of the onset of the coronavirus pandemic put the difference between the contemporary right and left on stark display. Liberals have engaged in searching self-reflection—on school closings, the lab-leak hypothesis, the political aftereffects, and other unanticipated lessons. Conservatives have used the occasion to engage in a round of self-congratulations and taunting of the libs.

Chait tries to be even-handed about this but, what the actual fuck? LIBERALS made mistakes? As if school closings were only carried out in liberal states. As if the immediate politicization of masks and later, vaccines, were not completely and utterly the fault of a party of sociopaths, incapable of considering the human cost of their actions.

The legacy press was, as always, complicit. This is an actual headline from Politico:

By the time this article came out, Florida had had 2 million cases and over 32,000 dead, making it one of the worst-hit areas of the country. By that summer, just 4 months later, the Delta variant was killing over 240 a day in the state that “won the pandemic.” Mobile morgues had to help keep the bodies from rotting in the streets thanks to Republican policies.

I know most of us are still trying really hard to forget Covid and the nightmare of those years but the Republican efforts to politicize did not slowly ramp up. They started immediately:

Patrick was not concerned about the economy for the sake of ‘Murika. He was concerned about Trump’s chances of winning reelection. So of course, grandma and grandpa could die. Trump was worried, too, so he politicized the shit out of a pandemic, egging people on to atrocious behavior to prove their loyalty to him.

By May, just two months after the Great Panic, people were already getting violent about other people wearing masks. My son Jordan, who was 12 at the time, was out for a walk with his mother. He was harassed for wearing a mask by two teens while their father watched and said nothing.1

Were mistakes made “by the left?” Sure. It was a brand-new disease killing hundreds of thousands of people across the globe. We didn’t know how easily it spread. We didn’t know how long it would take to develop a vaccine. It was mutating faster than we could keep up with and that was scarier than anything else. It wasn’t killing kids, who are generally more vulnerable to respiratory infections, but what if it started to?

According to the legacy press, being overly cautious was “too much.” Cool. I wonder how many journalists had school-age kids they were willing to risk at the time. I feel like the majority of the scolds did not.

Regardless, if we’re going to talk about mistakes and who should be scolded for how they handled Covid, it’s weird how we always have an incomplete picture. Yes, Republicans said a lot of stupid shit during the pandemic:

And far from admitting their failures, or even quietly edging away from them, conservatives have elevated the figures on the right who held the wrongest and nuttiest positions. Donald Trump, who insisted that COVID would “disappear” on its own without massive harm and who publicly contemplated injecting disinfectant to fight the virus, has not exactly faded into obscurity. Elon Musk, who five years ago was predicting that there would be no new COVID cases by the end of April 2020, is now influencing large swaths of domestic policy, including public health.

But where is the discussion about the deliberate steps the Trump regime took? The steps that directly led to half a million dead for no reason? Does it count as a “mistake” if it was on purpose? I rather think it does because the thinking behind these moves, if you can call it “thinking,” was as flawed as Donald Trump’s Oompa Loompa makeup routine.

Here’s the thing that the legacy press hardly ever discusses and Chait certainly does not in his article. Trump knew how serious Covid was from the beginning.

So Trump and everyone around him knew how dangerous and deadly Covid was but because he wanted to win an election, he lied to the public. That’s a hell of a “mistake.” If only the legacy press held Republicans as accountable for that as they did Joe Biden for his age.

But the gravest sin of all, committed by Trump and his imbecile son-in-law Jared Kushner, was not just doing nothing to stop the spread of Covd, but actively encouraging it because it would harm “blue states.” This, more than anything else, is something the legacy press will not speak of. Once it was reported, there was a quiet furor and then it went away, never to be mentioned again by the same legacy press that couldn’t stop talking for YEARS about Hillary’s fucking emails or Joe Biden going home on the weekends, a short helicopter ride from DC.2

I want to be really clear here. The White House, at first, thought about actually doing its job and leading a national response. Had they done so, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved and Trump probably would have won in November, finally showing that he could, in fact, be a real president when the nation needed it most. But Trump couldn’t be that president and none of the people around him were capable of putting the well-being of others ahead of their own ambition:

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.

Yeah…they let Covid run rampant because they thought it would only really hurt blue states and blue cities. And then the virus did what viruses do. It completely ignored boundaries and ideology and went on a mass killing spree.

You’d think that would be the main story of Covid. The ONLY story of covid. The federal government under the ahahahahaha “leadership” of Donald Trump and his collection of imbeciles and sociopaths, did everything possible to make the pandemic worse. Half a million people, that we know of, died.

But we don’t talk about that. The legacy press chose to look the other way because accurately placing the blame on Trump and his party would be “biased.” Instead, we look back five years later at the left’s “mistakes.” We say the right “won” Covid while looking over mountains of dead bodies and lost futures and shattered families.

And that is why we are where we are as a country. The legacy press is manifestly incapable of holding the right accountable. Even when they acknowledge the right did something wrong, no matter how egregious, cruel, evil, and illegal, the left is always just as wrong or the left’s mistakes are more newsworthy.

When this is over, and it will be over and we will win, the legacy press has to go away to be replaced by institutions willing to do the job. More importantly, we as a people have to stop being afraid to hold racist white men, even rich and powerful racist white men, accountable for their actions. Everyone else has to pay for their mistakes and the crimes they commit. It’s time the coddled white men of the right did as well.3

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Tribal Nations Lead the Way in Environmental Stewardship Amid Federal Rollbacks

Long before the large-scale Earth Day protests on April 22, 1970 – often credited with spurring significant environmental protection legislation – Native Americans stewarded the environment. As sovereign nations, Native Americans have been able to protect land, water and air, including well beyond their own boundaries.

Their actions laid the groundwork for modern federal law and policy, including national legislation aimed at reducing pollution. Now the Trump administration is seeking to weaken some of those limits and eliminate programs aimed at improving the environments in which marginalized people live and work.

As an environmental historian, I study how Native Americans have shaped environmental management. Tribal nations are the longest stewards of the lands today known as the United States. My work indicates not only that tribal nations contributed to the origins and evolution of modern environmental management on tribal and nontribal lands, but also that they are well poised to continue environmental management and scientific research regardless of U.S. government actions.

Environmental Sovereignty

Native peoples stewarded and studied their environments for millennia before European colonization. Today, Native nations continue to use science, technology and Indigenous knowledge to benefit their own people and the broader population.

Their stewardship continues despite repeated and ongoing efforts to dispossess Native peoples. In 1953, Congress reversed centuries of federally recognizing tribal authority, passing a law that terminated tribal nations’ legal and political status and federal obligations under treaties and legal precedents, including requirements to provide education and health care.

This termination policy subjected tribal nations and reservation lands to state jurisdiction and relocated at least 200,000 Native people from tribal lands to urban centers.

A groundswell of Native American resistance captured national attention, including protests and tactics such as “fish-ins,” which involved fishing at traditional grounds guaranteed by treaties but not honored by land use at the time. Their efforts led federal courts to affirm the very rights termination had sought to expunge.

Native nations regained federally recognized rights and political power at the same time as the national environmental awakening. In fact, tribal nations exercised environmental sovereignty in ways that restored federal recognition and influenced broader U.S. environmental law and policy.

Air Quality

In the 1960s, air pollution in America posed a serious health threat, with smog killing Americans on occasion and harming their long-term health. Under the 1970 Clean Air Act amendments, the federal government set national standards for air quality and penalties for polluters.

As early as 1974, the Northern Cheyenne Tribe in southeastern Montana began monitoring its own air quality. Finding that its air was substantially cleaner than other areas of the country, the tribe used a new approach to push the Environmental Protection Agency to approve enhanced protections beyond the minimum federal standards. The Northern Cheyenne wanted to prevent polluting industries from moving into locations with cleaner air that could be polluted without exceeding the federal limits. That protection was codified in the 1977 Clean Air Act amendments, which established legal protections and a process for communities to claim greater pollution protections nationwide.

In 1978, the Northern Cheyenne used their higher standards to limit pollution sources on private land upwind of tribal lands, temporarily blocking the construction of two additional coal-fired power plants.

Within a decade, the Assiniboine and Sioux nations at Fort Peck and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes also claimed enhanced air protection and developed air quality monitoring programs even before most state governments did. Dozens of tribal nations have taken control of their air quality in the years since.

Waterways

Native nations also exercise sovereignty over waterways. In the Pacific Northwest, people whose ancestors have lived in the area for at least 16,000 years have moved to protect themselves and their lands from the effects of massive hydropower projects.

The Columbia River Basin hydropower project, which began in the 1930s, now includes over 250 dams that together generate nearly half of the United States’ hydropower. Its dams and associated development stretch from the Canadian Rockies to Southern California, with effects crossing dozens of Native nations as well as international and state boundaries. The construction of the dams inundated multiple tribal nations’ lands and displaced thousands of Native people.

When four dams were built on the lower Snake River in Idaho in the 1960s, they inundated ancestral lands and fishing grounds of Columbia River Native Americans, including the Nez Perce Tribe. The dams decimated fish populations many tribes have long relied upon for both sustenance and cultural practices and destroyed ancient and culturally significant fishing sites, including Celilo Falls near The Dalles, Oregon, which had been fished for at least 10,000 years.

Nez Perce scientists and environmental managers, working alongside other Northwest tribes, have documented the near extinction of numerous species of salmon and steelhead fish, despite federal, state and tribal agencies investing billions of dollars in hatchery programs to boost fish populations. The Nez Perce Department of Fisheries Resources Management protects and restores aquatic ecosystems. In collaboration with nearby communities, the tribe also restores significant areas of habitat on nontribal lands. That includes decommissioning many miles of logging roads, removing mine tailings and sowing tens of thousands of native plants.

The Nez Perce and other tribes advocate for the removal of those four dams to restore salmon populations. They cite, among other evidence, a 2002 Army Corps of Engineers study that found removal was the most effective way to meet the Endangered Species Act’s requirements to restore decimated fish populations.

Taking a Long View

Native Americans and tribal nations see environmental sovereignty as essential to their past, present and future.

In 2015, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes became the first Native nation to take over a federal dam when they purchased the Selis Ksanka Qlispe dam, operating on the Flathead River in Montana. Managed by a tribal corporation, the dam produces enough hydropower to supply 100,000 homes, bringing millions of dollars to tribal coffers rather than enriching a corporation in Pennsylvania.

Over the decades, Native nations have partnered with federal agencies and used federal laws and funds to manage their environments. They have also built connections between tribes and nations across the continent.

For instance, the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission coordinates and assists Columbia Basin tribes with environmental management and fishing rights. In northern New Mexico, the Indigenous women of Tewa Women United work against the legacy and ongoing effects of nuclear research affecting their homelands and communities from Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Across the U.S., the Indian Land Tenure Foundation works with Native peoples to secure control of their homelands through land return and legal reforms, while Honor the Earth organizes Indigenous peoples in North America and globally to advance social change rooted in Indigenous sovereignty through treaty organizing and advocacy.

Tribal governments have been hit hard by the shifts in federal priorities, including Trump administration funding cuts that have slowed scientific research, such as environmental monitoring and management on tribal lands.

Tribal governance takes a long view based in Native peoples’ deep history with these lands. And their legal and political status as sovereign nations – backed by the U.S. Constitution, treaties, more than 120 Supreme Court rulings and the plain text of federal laws – puts Native nations in a strong position to continue their efforts, no matter which ways the federal winds blow.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article HERE.

Photo at top: Ted S. Warren via AP

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