User:Grace.jana07/Tribal sovereignty in the United States/Ericklemusss Peer Review

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 * Tribal sovereignty in the United States

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Following industrialization, the 1800s brought many challenges to tribal sovereignty over tribal members’ occupied lands in the United States. In 1831, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia established a trust relationship between the United States and tribal territories. This gave the U.S. federal government primary jurisdictional authority over tribal land use, while maintaining tribal members’ rights to reside on their land and access its resources. Similarly, in 1841, a treaty between the U.S. federal government and the Mole Lake Band of Sokaogon Chippewa resulted in the Chippewa ceding extensive lands to the U.S., but maintaining usufructuary rights to fishing, hunting, and gathering in perpetuity on all ceded land.

Wartime industry of the early 1900s introduced uranium mining and the need for weapons testing sites, for which the U.S. federal government often selected former and current tribal territories in the southwestern deserts. Uranium mines were constructed upstream of Navajo and Hopi reservations in Arizona and Nevada, measurably contaminating Native American water supply through the 1940s and 1950s with lasting impacts to this day. The Nevada desert was also a common nuclear testing site for the U.S. military through World War II and the Cold War, the closest residents being Navajo Nation members.

In 1970, President Richard Nixon established the federal government’s Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.). In 1974, the E.P.A. became the first U.S. federal agency to release an Indian Policy, which established the model of environmental federalism operational today. Under this model, the federal E.P.A. sets water, air, and waste disposal standards, but delegates enforcement authority and the opportunity to design stricter environmental regulations to each state. Enforcement authority over Native American territory, however, remains under federal E.P.A. jurisdiction, unless a given tribe applies for and is granted Treatment as State (‘T.A.S.’) status.

With the emergence of environmental justice movements in the United States through the 1990s, President Bill Clinton released executive orders 12898 (1994) and 13007 (1996). E.O. 12898 affirmed disparate impacts of climate change as stratified by socioeconomic status; E.O. 13007 ordered the protection of Native American cultural sites. Since the passage of E.O. 12898 and E.O. 13007, tribal prosecutors have litigated extensively against the federal government and industry polluters over land use and jurisdiction with varying degrees of success.

In 2007, the U.N. adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (“The Declaration”), despite the United States abstaining from the vote along with Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. In 2010, President Barack Obama revisited The Declaration and adopted it on behalf of the U.S. However, as recently as 2015, the Gold King Mine contaminated three million gallons of water in the Colorado River which serves as drinking water for the Navajo and Hopi downstream. The federal E.P.A. appropriated $156,000 in reparations for Gold King Mine, while the Flint, Michigan water crisis in 2014 received $80 million in federal funds.

As of 2021, 100 federally recognized tribal nations have been granted Treatment as State status by the U.S. E.P.A., and thus have jurisdictional authority over environmental regulation and enforcement equivalent to that of the states under environmental federalism. There are 474 federally recognized tribes which have yet to either apply for or be granted T.A.S. status, and thus remain under the federal jurisdiction of the United States government in trust.

A recent challenge faced by Native Americans regarding land and natural resource sovereignty has been posed by the modern real estate market. While Native Nations have made substantial progress in land and resource sovereignty, such authority is limited to land classified as 'Native American owned.' In the private real estate market, however, big industry polluters and hopeful miners have made a practice of buying out individual land owners in Native American residential areas, subsequently using that land to build mines or factories which increase local pollution. There is not yet regulation or legislation in place to sufficiently curve this practice at the rate necessary to preserve Native American land and natural resources.

Comments/Reasoning: I think that this entire piece is well-written! This adds another dimension to this Wikipedia page. The only comments I would have are, can you add more? Have there been more environmental justice movements within the United States, prior to the 1990s? Are there any more recent distributions of federal funds that you could speak about?