Back in July, a Supreme Court ruling on a complicated matter of jurisdiction gave way to a surprisingly straightforward ruling. The ruling recognized that the eastern half of Oklahoma still belonged to the Native American nations put on reservations there after their forced relocation on the Trail of Tears from their ancestral homeland in what is now Georgia, Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi. Julian Brave NoiseCat wrote in the Atlantic that it “might be one of the most important Supreme Court cases of all time” because it “acknowledges that Congress has never extinguished the reservation lands set aside for the Muscogee Creek Nation in 1866.”
The optimism was, of course, cautious, with the piece closing on a note that given the litany of broken treaties, “it would be hard for any Native person to trust the United States Supreme Court.”
And we can now see that the forces of colonization and extraction aren’t about to start respecting those that stand in the way of profit any time soon. Ti-Hua Chang reported in TYT yesterday that Trump’s EPA has decided to effectively reverse the parts of the Supreme Court decision it feels empowered to overthrow.
How can the federal government so readily ignore a judicial decision? Because in this governmental game of rock-paper-scissors, the Judicial branch beats Executive, but Legislative beats Judicial. So the Supreme Court ruling is constrained by Congress — courts enforce the laws Congress writes, after all. And back in 2005, Congress approved a midnight rider on a transportation bill. These two paragraphs paperclipped on to the 836-page SAFETEA transportation bill said that if the state of Oklahoma requested, it could seize environmental regulatory control from the tribes in the state.
So after the ruling, Oklahoma’s governor made the request to get authority back, and the EPA granted it, with basically no time for input from the tribes to whom SCOTUS had returned jurisdiction.
As a result, tribal authorities can’t use their newly-granted authority to do things like regulate fracking wastewater injections, or make sure industry isn’t dumping hazardous waste illegally, or make sure the vast amounts of fecal waste and urine from industrial livestock operations is being properly handled.
And who was it that managed to quietly slip these two paragraphs of fossil-fuel-friendly contingency planning into the massive 2005 SAFETEA bill that otherwise has zero to do with tribal sovereignty and environmental regulations?
None other than current EPA administrator’s boss of 14 years, the Senator famous for fallaciously claiming that a snowball in winter disproves climate change in a career serving his fossil fuel benefactors, one James M. Inhofe.
There were hopes that this ruling would be a turning point in how the United States treats the people who lived on this land before we called it America. While those hopes may be fading, the fight isn’t.
As Elder and Hereditary Drumkeeper of the Ponca Tribe Casey Camp-Horinek told TYT, “After over 500 years of oppression, lies, genocide, ecocide, and broken treaties, we should have expected the EPA ruling in favor of racist Governor Stitt of Oklahoma, yet it still stings. Under the Trump administration, destroying all environmental protection has been ramped up to give the fossil fuel industry life support as it takes its last dying breath. Who suffers the results? Everyone and everything! Who benefits? Trump and his cronies, climate change deniers like Governor Stitt, Senators Inhofe and Langford, who are financially supported by big oil and gas. I am convinced that we must fight back against this underhanded ruling. In the courts, on the frontlines and in the international courts, LIFE itself is at stake.”
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories: