If We Can Change Racist Mascots, We Change Racist Energy Policy: Thoughts on the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day

Earlier this month, the University of North Dakota (UND) dropped its vilified mascot, The Fighting Sioux. After decades of protests, litigation and sanctions against the school for the racially offensive logo, the North Dakota Board of Education finally retired the mascot. A $50 million UND stadium with 1,200 Fighting Sioux branded arena seats will now have to undergo some changes.

Some strong parallels can be drawn between the UND mascot decision and environmental change in this country. For my entire adult life, I have worked on environmental issues, from fighting uranium mining and nuclear power to opposing mega dam projects, coal strip mining and coal fired power plants. I am now looking at the huge shadow of Tar Sands oil development, an ever expanding web of mines, pipelines and refineries that links American consumers to the destruction of the Canadian boreal forest and the devastation of Indigenous peoples and territories. It is forty years since the first Earth Day, and we still see the same racist logos on the playing field dominated by nuclear power, coal and oil.

While President Obama has done more than any other US President to acknowledge the sovereignty of Native Nations, his energy policies continue to leave Indigenous peoples as no more than mascots for American consumption. Fossil and nuclear fuel development disproportionately impact Indigenous peoples, but this fact is completely absent in the current debate on America’s energy future. If we are going to truly tackle the climate crisis, we need to ensure human dignity and human rights are central to discussions of energy policy. A sustainable future cannot be based on continuing a paradigm of conquest.

The Obama Administration’s energy plan gives more money to those that already have it so they can continue on a mission of conquest that exploits land, water, air and peoples. The administration is giving $18 billion in tax-payer loan guarantees to the nuclear industry to jump start construction of two new nuclear power plants – the first to be built in this country in thirty years. Another $54 billion in guarantees is proposed to subsidize Small Modular Reactors that can be transported and set up in any community.

Along with tens of billions for neighborhood nukes, there is the recent Congressional give away of $154 million to a Texas company to come up with a plan to sequester carbon underground and pursue the industrial fantasy of ‘clean’ coal. And, on top of that, the president has called for opening our coastal waters to offshore oil drilling.
This plan is pretty much a genetically modified version of the past fifty years of bad policy. It is a plan that threatens the survival of all peoples, and hits Indigenous peoples particularly hard.

What’s missing from current pro-nuclear posturing is the issue of uranium mining and the Indigenous peoples who have been and continue to be victimized by the extraction of this radioactive ore. Seventy percent of the world’s uranium underlies Indigenous lands. With no public attention on uranium mining, an absolute necessity of the recommitment to nuclear power, our communities, still reeling from vast cancers, birth defects and other health impacts from last century’s booms in atomic energy, are meeting tremendous challenges in resisting new mining. For example, a federal appeals court recently moved to allow uranium mining operations in the Navajo community of Churchrock, New Mexico, despite the fact that the Navajo Nation outlawed uranium mining in 2005.  This case has received little public scrutiny. Perhaps even less well know is the fact that new uranium mining is proposed for one of the seven wonders of the world -- the Grand Canyon – near Havasupai land. The Havasupai, like Navajo and Pueblo communities, have been fighting uranium mining for decades, only to find themselves thwarted by renewed corporate and government greenwashing of this lethal technology.

The human rights footprint of offshore oil drilling and coal development is similarly massive. Obama’s recent decision to open up 130 million acres of the pristine Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off the coast of Alaska to oil exploitation comes at the expense of Inuit communities already ravaged by the impacts of climate change. Entire Arctic villages are falling into the ocean due to warming seas, and the Inuit peoples’ subsistence, from seal to caribou, are teetering on the edge of extinction along with their ways of life. 

The oxymoron of ‘clean’ coal reminds me of the 25 year battle of the Northern Cheyenne to keep their precious homeland intact, a homeland that sits on one of the largest remaining coal deposits in the country.  Dire poverty coupled with monetary offers for the coal on their land is convincing some Northern Cheyenne to reconsider their decades-long resistance to mining. This brave community should not be forced to trade their homeland for an economy.

We must ask not only where our energy comes from, but also who it comes from. The reality is that America’s seemingly unquestionable right to over-consume energy is predicated on the invasion and destruction of other peoples’ territories. How about we retire those old mascots of an energy system? UND made a decisive and healing move away from an unjust past, and by raising our voices, we can pressure this administration to do the same. We can build a just, clean energy economy. It is doable.

Honor the Earth is working with Native communities to support the creation of this next energy economy. Along with vast coal, oil and uranium reserves, our reservations have some of the richest solar and wind regimes in the world. We are working to build energy justice in Native America through renewable energy pilot projects, trainings, education, outreach and coalition building combined with financial support to Native groups through our grant making program. Along with safe energy, we are supporting a host of local food restoration projects, as addressing the fossil fuel addiction of industrial agriculture and the absence of food economies in our communities goes hand in hand with developing safe energy and resilience.

Native communities across the country are making strides in creating a resilient, energy sovereign future. For example, in the southwest, grassroots Navajo organizations have successfully pushed forward an innovative proposal to replace power from the closed Mohave coal generating station with wind and solar and they organized for the passage of Navajo green jobs legislation. And tribal communities in the Great Plains, the Saudi Arabia of wind, are working to plan significant renewable installations to bring clean energy to market and a strong economy to their people.

It’s been forty years since the first Earth Day. It was eighty years of a bad mascot at UND, but things have changed. America’s centralized energy economy can and will change, too. In the end, moving away from racist mascots and a racist energy system are about building just relationships with each other and the Earth. That’s what the future looks like.