Project 2025: Environmental Impacts Part IV (Bureau of Indian Affairs)
Welcome to this week’s installment of environmental impacts with a focus on the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Project 2025. This is the third peek into Chapter 16, Department of the Interior, and please feel free to check out the previous posts on impacts from Project 2025 to the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. I’m going to focus on the environmental impacts specifically, but sneakily tucked into Chapter 16 is a section called “American Indians and U.S. Trust Responsibility” that hints at changes to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (which sits in the Department of the Interior) and it’s noteworthy that there are other potential impacts like changes to Bureau of Indian Education schools using language like “putting parents first” (which is usually a dog whistle for erasing trans and queer kids). There is also some nonsense about securing the border, but as someone who has actually been on our border and seen firsthand how the U.S. Border Patrol reacts, it is just silly to hint that we have some kind of open, unsecured borders.
A significant environmental impact laid out in Project 2025 on the future of Native Nations lies on page 537:
“· End the war on fossil fuels and domestically available minerals and facilitate their development on lands owned by Indians and Indian nations.
· End federal mandates and subsidies of electric vehicles.
· Restore the right of tribal governments to enforce environmental regulation on their lands.”
Basically, what Project 2025 lays out is unregulated, unstoppable corporate profiting from the extraction of fossil fuels and minerals on Native Nations land. Even mentioning the elimination of any benefits to owning electric vehicles (and I’m not a huge fan of electric cars - here’s Why I Don’t Own an Electric Car) is a hint at allowing the drilling and extracting of minerals as quickly as possible. The reality is that this is extractive capitalism at its finest and will result in a handful of people gaining lots of money while those living close to these areas will be devastated by hugely consequential impacts on the health of people and the land – and this doesn’t even include the devastating impacts to cultural resources. The reality is, it would be mostly white men (like those who wrote Project 2025) that will profit from the destruction of these lands.
Also, there is a hint at changing protections of certain lands including eliminating the 10-mile buffer around Chaco Cultural Historic National Park in New Mexico. A huge shout out to Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a 35th generation New Mexican, who created this invaluable protection for this area last year! There is so much great information already out there about the need to protect Chaco at an even greater level; a helpful place to begin learning more might be Pueblo Action Alliance’s Protect Greater Chaco page, which includes a fascinating white paper by the UCLA School of Law Tribal Legal Development Clinic For Pueblo Action Alliance called Sacred Place Protections, Limitations, and Re-Imagination for Chaco Canyon.
In researching for this week’s post, I also came across an “interesting” group called Native Americans for Sovereignty and Preservation who had this on a blog post:
“Native Americans for Sovereignty and Preservation (NASP) proudly announces a significant partnership with Project 2025, championed by The Heritage Foundation. This collaboration is a testament to NASP’s profound capabilities in navigating the intricate landscape of Indian Country and the bureaucratic challenges that often stifle progress.”
NASP claims to have lots of expertise, but provides no information or evidence as to what that expertise is or who is providing that expertise. And I can’t find out who (in terms of people) and what (in terms of money) is behind this group. I bring this up because so many things are stated as “facts” these days so it is up to each of us to really dig in and differentiate between what is really facts and what is just people’s opinions, ideas, and beliefs.
So this is a great opportunity to remind everyone about the critical importance of media literacy: our ability to have awareness and analyze the information we take in through the media. Just because something is written down does not mean it’s true, and it is up to each of us to build awareness and utilize critical thinking to better understand and use the information around us. Here are some questions I ask myself when researching information for these posts:
Who is writing this and what are their credentials and competencies?
What hidden agendas might be behind sharing this information?
Who gains to benefit, especially financially, from this information?
When it comes to sharing information like science, where is the actual science in the piece and what data is there to back up statements?
What is actually someone’s opinion or belief and am I ensuring I’m not taking that in as fact?
Back in my days of being a Climate Educator, I used chapters from The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania (distributed by the Heartland Institute, a proud partner of Project 2025) but didn’t tell people where the information came from. We would use the questions above to practice getting really clear about the information in those chapters before deciding how and if we would use it. It’s a great exercise, and I hope you’ll try out these and similar questions the next time you read something that immediately and strongly affects you. We can all benefit from being media literate, and applying critical thinking when seeing groups like Native Americans for Sovereignty and Preservation can really help put things into perspective.
Wishing you all a great week, and here’s hoping we all can keep increasing our media literacy over the coming weeks as more and more “facts” come our way!