I Voted, Now I Watch Project 2025 Videos Endlessly
What will happen to us all if Trump wins? What will happen to Tribal Sovereignty?
Last week, I had the privilege of attending the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. As the largest and oldest representative body of American Indian tribes in the United States, NCAI holds a significant place in our history. My father's Dakota family has deep ties to this organization, and its legacy is further enriched by the contributions of my grandmother's cousin, Vine Deloria, Jr., who served as its executive director during the Civil Rights and Red Power movements and chronicled his experiences in his influential 1969 book, Custer Died For Your Sins.
During a session titled 'Expanding Political Power in Indian Country: A Post-Election Blueprint session,' a tribal delegate posed a question that resonates with a sense of urgency in our current political climate:
“My concern here is with what Mr. Trump had said that he wanted to get rid of the Department of the Interior. I know he was looking toward the environmental part, possibly, but it, there's no clarity and no specificity on that. So if you're talking about the Department of the Interior as a whole, that would mean where would we go as Indian Country?
Where would that put us? Because of the treaties would that put us under Congress? And what would Congress do with us? So I know that the states have a big idea that they want our land, our resources. And with the Supreme Court in their pockets, any official act that a president does, it can't be undone.
So even if they eliminated the Department of the Interior and got rid of us, put us under Congress, Congress puts us under the states and they go after our lands, our water, all of our resources.”
This question was asked after a speaker in this session from the Native Organizers Alliance, Robert Chanata (Kiowa), had spoken of not going "backwards" at the DOI after four years of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland of the Laguna Pueblo Tribe. He had hoped to keep a Native American in that key position and secure more cabinet-level representation of Native Americans.
To most Americans, Native American leadership at the Department of the Interior was merely an interesting headline when President Biden nominated Haaland for the position and then confirmed in 2021. Along with Rep. Sharice Davids, she was one of two of the first Native women elected to Congress in 2019. After stepping into the Secretary of the Interior role, she became the first Native American to hold a cabinet position and possibly (we don't know much of pre-Columbian history) the first Native woman to have authority over a large portion of the North American continent.
There has been a lot of reporting and TikToks reviewing the impact of Project 2025, the 920-page conservative policy mandate/fever dream assembled by the Heritage Foundation since it was published in April 2023. Also known as the ‘2025 Presidential Transition Project,' its main focus is establishing a "unitary executive theory" that will replace the independence of federal agencies, and even the judiciary, with absolute loyalty to the executive branch, namely President Trump.
While mainstream news outlets have not extensively covered the implications of Project 2025 on Native American tribes, High Country News, an independent news magazine based in Colorado, has delved into this critical issue in their article, 'What Project 2025 has to say about Native communities,' published on October 29. The potential impact of this project on our tribes cannot be overstated.
The main focus of the mandate in Indian Country is increasing fossil fuel resource extraction from Native lands and sacred sites through increased leases and reinstituting National Environmental Policy Act Trump reforms. The Heritage Foundation's goals are to expand coal, oil, and gas drilling (drill baby drill, as a VP candidate once said) and reduce tribes' right to have a say about what happens on their own lands. This is further exacerbated by the establishment of a 'unitary executive theory ', which could potentially undermine tribal sovereignty and self-governance by concentrating power in the executive branch.
In 2017, one of Trump's first acts as President of the United States was authorizing the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. He did this after several thousand had stood with Standing Rock Sioux Tribal "water protectors" in opposing the pipeline delivering crude oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, which, if it leaks, could cause catastrophic harm to their drinking water. After nearly 6 months of protests, President Obama finally issued an executive order to stop both pipeline projects. I was in the bitter winter snow of North Dakota when that news broke. The whole camp celebrated, but Trump undid that victory.
I wrote about it in my book STANDOFF: Standing Rock, the Bundy Movement, and the American Story of Sacred Lands. President Obama rejected the Keystone XL Pipeline after a seven-year review.
Then, towards the end of his first year in office, Trump traveled to Utah to sign a proclamation reducing Bears Ears National Monument by 80 percent. Bears Ears in San Juan County, Utah, in the state's southeastern corner, is sacred to several tribes in the region. It has thousands of years old artifacts and documents the development of tribes as diverse as the Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo (my mother's people). In December 2016, just over three weeks before he left office, Obama designated Bears Ears (along with the Gold Butte Monument in Nevada) using powers granted to the president by the Antiquities Act of 1906. The Act was passed during Theodore Roosevelt's administration and has been used to create national parks like the Grand Canyon National Monument in 1920.
The 2017 anthology I edited, Edge of Morning: Native Voices Speak for the Bears Ears, covers the collaborative effort by five Native nations to get Obama to declare the national park in some detail. I also wrote articles about the reduction of Bears Ears and the Utah state legislature's claims during the comment period that the monument endangered their uranium mining development. I was happy when Samantha Bee featured my High Country News article on her show Full Frontal but appalled when I heard the CEO of Energy Fuels put up a letter on the company's website denouncing me. Energy Fuels runs the White Mesa uranium mill adjacent to Bears Ears, which local Ute Mountain Ute community members say is poisoning them.
As you can tell from the subtitle of my book Standoff, I also wrote about the Bundy family and their standoffs with the Bureau of Land Management in Bunkerville, Nevada, in 2014 and at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016.
So, it caught my eye in the High Country News Project 2025 article when I saw a lawyer with the 'sagebrush rebellion,' a movement that advocates for local control of federal lands. The lawyer was the lead writer of the Project 2024 section about the Department of the Interior. The Mountain States Legal Foundation, which is associated with this movement, has a history of challenging federal land management policies, which often intersect with Native American land rights and environmental issues.
“The section regarding the Department of Interior, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was written by Trump’s former acting head of the Bureau of Land Management, William Perry Pendley (former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in Indian Affairs under Trump, John Tahsuda (Kiowa) is credited with assisting him). Pendley, a controversial attorney who spent many years as president of Mountain States Legal Foundation, regularly opposed tribes’ efforts to protect their cultural sites and, according to The Intercept, has openly shared racist views on blood quantum. For example, he has previously warned about “an increasingly important issue in the West, that is, the willingness of federal land managers to close public land because it is sacred to American Indians.” More recently, he represented the energy company Solenex LLC in a long-running conflict over oil and gas leasing in the Badger-Two Medicine, a culturally important place to the Blackfeet Nation that is now permanently protected after litigation.”
Bundy patriarch Cliven had been represented by another lawyer from that foundation, Karen Budd-Falen. She was appointed as the deputy Interior solicitor for wildlife and parks during the Trump administration. Budd-Falen had been considered to run the Bureau of Land Management, an agency she had sued, alleging agency staff were engaged in racketeering to enforce government regulations.
She is also credited with being the author of the 'County Supremacy' ideology, which asserts that sheriffs are the supreme law within the county, superseding any federal official or body, even Congress and the Supreme Court of the United States and POTUS. This ideology, which has no basis in constitutional law, has been used to challenge federal authority in matters such as land use and environmental regulations, directly impacting Native American rights and environmental issues.
So, as I write this and read the New York Times’ headline, “Trump clinches Pennsylvania, putting him on the brink of the presidency,” I wonder what the next four years hold for all of us and my own Native people. And if all my writing and research on the intersection of right-wing extremism and tribal sovereignty has helped or not?
I wonder as well and am looking forward to writings from like minded people to keep adverse consequences at bay.