Protect Indigenous lands

Earthjustice clients take on this fight every day to protect their sacred sites and ancestral homelands from destructive mining and fossil fuel projects. In Michigan and Wisconsin, the Bay Mills Indian Community and the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa are fighting to prevent the dangerous Line 5 oil pipeline from destroying their sacred waters, their economic livelihoods, and their treaty-protected rights to hunt, fish, and harvest wild rice. In Arizona, the Hualapai Tribe is facing rampant mineral extraction that could permanently damage their sacred hot spring. Further south, the Tohono O’odham Nation, Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and Hopi Tribe continue to fend off the open-pit Copper World Complex mine that would destroy their ancestral lands.

We must protect the most sacred places where Indigenous peoples pray, gather traditional foods and medicines, get drinking water, and visit to remind themselves of the ways their ancestors lived. 

We are in an environmental, climate, and racial justice crisis. Indigenous peoples care for and protect 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity — environmental advocacy cannot succeed without Indigenous rights and leadership.

We call on the Biden administration to build on his 2022 memorandum on consultation by issuing an executive order directing all federal agencies to require the engagement and the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent of affected Tribal Nations early in the planning process and before a project is approved. 

Tribal Nations must be part of the decision-making process. No more oil pipelines threatening water supplies without the consent of tribes. No more oil and gas drilling in ancient burial sites without tribal permission. No more large-scale mining projects without tribes’ participation in planning and consent.

The U.S. must uphold the rights of Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, as set forth by the United Nations.