The Evolving Path Toward Achieving Environmental Justice for Native America

• Date: 01 September 2010

9-2010 NEWS & ANALYSIS 40 ELR 10905

The Evolving Path

Toward Achieving

Environmental

Justice for Native

America

by James M. Grijalva and

Daniel E. Gogal

James M. Grijalva is Swenson Professor of Law and Director,

Tribal Environmental Law Project, University of North Dakota.

Daniel E. Gogal is Tribal Coordinator, Oce of Environmental

Justice (OEJ), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Editors’ Summary

A lack of fully functioning regulatory programs has long

been the primary obstacle to achieving environmental

justice in Native A merica. EPA recognized that chal-

lenge some t wo decades before the environmental jus-

tice movement took hold, and has since built an Indian

program based on initial federal implementation where

feasible, with aspirations for later program assumption

by Indian tribal governments. Much work on the lat-

ter goal remains, but for tribes that have assumed pro-

gram roles, a new environmental justice issue has arisen:

ensuring the parties aected—tribal citizens, tribal

grassroots environmental organizations and others

within the jurisdiction of tribal programs—receive fair

treatment and have meaningful opportunities for inu-

encing tribes’ environmental decisionmaking processes.

Collaborative approaches for resolving tensions that

arise at times between tribal government decisionmak-

ing and community desires for greater environmental

protection may be the best means for preserving both

the environment and the legitimacy—political and cul-

tural—of tribal governments.

Like indigenous peoples throughout the world, Ameri-

can Indian tribes and Alaska Native communities

have suered, and continue to suer, serious negative

impacts caused by the dispossession of their la nds and the

lack of resources to develop in accordance with their own

aspirations, as well as pressures on their cultural, politi-

cal, spiritual, economic, and other societal considerations.

Of particular note, impacts from the imposition of energy

development and the consumptive natural resource exploi-

tation of their traditional territories have been signicant.

e extensive environmental and human health risks that

these impacts cause give rise to the call for environmental

justice for indigenous communities. In addition, and equally

important, the degradation of environmental quality directly

aects not only the public health of indigenous communities

but, quite often, their very identity and survival as distinct

peoples and cultures. e long legal and political relations

between tribes and the United States, which recognize that

tribes possess inherent governmental sovereignty, require

considerate solutions to these concerns. is Article analyzes

the evolution of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s

(EPA’s) Indian Program and Environmental Justice Program

eorts to achieve environmental justice for Native America.

Section I of this Article briey reviews the development

of environmental justice as an organizing principle, and its

application to Indian country. Section II focuses on EPA’s

early identication of Indian country’s primary environ-

mental justice challenge—the lack of functioning, eec-

tive regulatory programs—and its commitment to lling

that gap through government-to-government relations w ith

Indian tribes. Section III explores a second, emergi ng envi-

ronmental justice issue, which is the call for greater citizen

involvement in tribal environmental decisionmaking pro-

cesses, and the use of collaborative approaches in resolvi ng

environmental disputes. Section IV concludes that futu re

progress on t hese two f ronts, and thus securing environ-

mental justice for Native America, rests on support for both

cultural and political self-determination for the nation’s

  

tribal workshops on Alternative Dispute Resolution, Environmental

   

  

   

(IWG) on Environmental Justice and co-chairs the IWG’s Native

    

 

      

tribal workshops on Alternative Dispute Resolution, Environmental

       

    





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