Click the link to read the article on The Washington Post website (Maxine Joselow). Here’s an excerpt:
March 4, 2024
“This is our land,” said [Verlon] Jose, whose tribe [Tohono O’odham Nation] includes roughly 38,000 members across southern Arizona and northern Mexico. “It should all be protected.”
[…]
Jose is one of several tribal leaders nationwide who are growing frustrated with the Biden administration and its ambitious plans for clean-energy projects that could affect their ancestral lands. While the White House has worked to repair the federal government’s relationships with Indigenous peoples, that effort is conflicting with another Biden priority: expediting projects essential for the energy transition…The SunZia transmission line is one of those projects. Once complete, the power line would carry clean electricity from massive wind farms in New Mexico to more-populated areas as far away as California. The Biden administration has championed SunZia as a key pillar of its plans for fighting climate change and boosting green energy, and has defended its engagement with area tribes…
“We do not disagree with renewable energy,” Jose said. “We are for renewable energy. You know what the fix to this issue is? They could have rerouted it. But they didn’t listen.”
[…]
About 70 miles east of Phoenix, one of the tribes fighting SunZia — the San Carlos Apache — is also working to stop a proposed copper mine on land that it considers sacred. In Nevada, some tribal activists are opposing one of the world’s largest mines for lithium, a mineral crucial to the development of batteries for electric vehicles. And in Oklahoma, a federal judge recently took the rare step of ordering the removal of a wind farm on Osage Nation land.