In 2019, the California public utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) announced that once its Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant closed, they would sell the land it sits on—12,000 acres of Central Coast hills rolling with chaparral and oak called the Pecho Coast. That same year, the California Public Utilities Commission adopted a Tribal Lands Transfer Policy mandating that public utilities disposing of lands give tribes the first right of offer to negotiate a land agreement prior to a public sale. When PG&E offered the lands (at market value) to the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe, or ytt Tribe, they jumped to acquire the lands—or re-acquire them, since they were part of their ancestral homeland. By March 2021, the tribe, along with key partners, had a memorandum of understanding to acquire the entire site.

For the first time since the 1700s, ytt Tribe could reclaim rightful ownership and stewardship of their Pecho Coast homelands. This is one of multiple instances around the United States in which tribes have recognized that large landholdings associated with nuclear power plants, unusually unfragmented and ecologically intact sites, make them strong candidates for restored tribal stewardship. But now, a confluence of murky state policies and settler-colonial values centered around the idea of conservation is complicating the transfer process.

Chumash peoples have lived in what is now California, between Malibu and Ragged Point, since time immemorial. Though often confused for a single tribe, they are not a monolith: There are eight distinct yet related Chumash communities, each with their own material cultures, language dialects, and place-based relationships. ytt Tribe have remained active stewards of their homelands in San Luis Obispo County since the 1700s, even as they endured Spanish missionization, Mexican occupation, and United States settler colonialism—a type of colonial occupation that relies on the theft of Indigenous lands and the belief that Native peoples need to be eliminated and replaced. Their stories and genealogy, relationships, and language, called tiłhini, all bear their continued kinship ties and obligations to these lands.

Built in 1968 in a region dominated by the oil industry, Diablo Canyon generated tense environmental and political debates, leading to protests from organizations such as the Sierra Club, Mothers for Peace, and the Abalone Alliance. For many, nuclear energy posed danger to coastal ecologies and raised alarms about developing power plants on geologic fault lines. For ytt Tribe, nuclear power was just a new wave of the energy colonialism that has and continues to privatize and destroy Indigenous lands.

Over time, however, the nuclear power sites came to be seen as uniquely protected areas. Unlike dams that destructively terraform riverine ecosystems, or oil infrastructure that degrades lands and oceans with leaks and spills, nuclear plants require swaths of undeveloped and therefore somewhat conserved lands around them, creating unlikely possibilities for ytt Tribe to imagine cultivating relationships with these lands for generations to come.

Indigenous leaders see stewarding nuclear sites as their responsibility, even when faced with the realities of nuclear contamination. For example, at the Hanford Site—a decommissioned nuclear production complex in eastern Washington state that is also a Superfund site—the Wanapum tribe, a federally unrecognized tribe like ytt Tribe, maintains that although the site is heavily contaminated, the land remains their kin. Wanapum tribal leader Rex Buck Jr. claims the nuclear realities of Hanford as an unlikely “blessing in disguise,” and has been quoted describing it as a sacred place that invited the nuclear project in order to protect the land from the further invasion and development of the settlers. He adds that Hanford “will heal itself, and the Wanapum will be part of this healing process as caretakers of the land.”

For Indigenous leaders such as Buck, stewarding nuclear sites into the future is an expression of their land-based sovereignty. ytt Tribe shares this kind of vision for the future of the Pecho Coast.

But lately, things have been getting complicated, as the governor’s 30×30 initiative has created complications with the California Public Utilities Commission’s Tribal Land Transfer Policy and endangered ytt Tribe’s reclamation of their homelands. In April 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom proposed to extend Diablo Canyon’s life in order to meet California’s clean energy goals. After the announcement, PG&E put land proposal discussions with ytt Tribe on hold. Five months later, the California State legislature passed Senate Bill 846, permitting Diablo Canyon to operate for an additional five years.

SB 846 included state funds for a Land Conservation and Economic Development Plan for after the plant closed, to be overseen by the California Natural Resources Agency (CNRA). This plan was designed to support “environmental enhancements and access of Diablo Canyon powerplant lands” precisely because of their “pristine” state.

The bill conflicted with the California Public Utility Commission’s policy of giving tribes first right of offer and added new bureaucratic layers to the site’s future. By moving the question of what happens to Diablo Canyon out of the utility commission’s jurisdiction and into the state legislature’s, the bill allowed the legislature to bypass the tribe’s priority access to those lands, creating a loophole to redirect the land back into settler state hands. Instead of Indigenous sovereignty, a rubric of “conservation” and “economic development” (contemporary synonyms of settler colonialism) were now the guiding ideas.

While the tribe experienced this shift in planning as a challenge, they pivoted to operate within the bill’s new rubric. In collaboration with the Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo, California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, and the local economic development group Regional Economic Action Coalition, the tribe created a conservation and economic development plan that aligned with SB 846’s requirements. Members of the CNRA visited San Luis Obispo in March 2023 to hear a presentation of the plan and to hold a public listening session. During this public comment period, returning land to ytt stewardship emerged as the public’s number one priority for the site.

But when the California legislature approved its budget in June 2023, it accepted a plan for SB 846 that did not specify ytt tribal partnership. Though it earmarked funds for collaboration with tribes to develop a conservation plan, it only gestured to a general partnership with “California Native American tribe or tribes.”

Why the sudden erasure of ytt Tribe?

Some community members and tribal representatives have suggested that the state is backpedaling out of caution about naming the “right” tribal partner. Though at the time of PG&E’s initial land offering only ytt Tribe stepped forward to purchase Diablo Canyon, since then numerous other tribes have made claims to the site.

To determine tribal land claims, the state relies on the California Native American Heritage Commission’s “Most Likely Descendants” list, which uses genealogy and documents to provide hypotheses regarding tribes’ ancestral lands. Though numerous tribes could make claims to the Pecho Coast based on some requirements of the list, ytt Tribe are the only tribe that can document a presence in the region prior to Spanish colonization—a claim that has been investigated and affirmed through genealogy records both by scholars and by PG&E.

Omitting ytt Tribe from this iteration of Diablo Canyon’s future illustrates what academics mean when we talk about settler colonialism as an ongoing structure rather than a one-time event: Native Californians didn’t have their land stolen just once; decision after decision in settler society undermines Indigenous sovereignty.

On the Pecho Coast, California has an opportunity not only to advance its state sustainability initiatives, but to finally honor its commitment to repairing relations with California tribes. As plans for Diablo Canyon unfold, many of us are watching with hope and anticipation to see if California can give meaning to “land back.”

The post Will California’s Quest for Clean Energy Get in the Way of Land Back? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Being in mining was never part of my plan. As a young boy, I dreamed of becoming a priest with a pilot’s license, living and working in remote Australian communities. I got an advertising degree, joined the foreign service, and spent five years working for the government, including three years as a junior diplomat in Samoa. But I never really fit in. I resigned from the foreign service in January 1999, when I was 27, and returned to my hometown, the remote and dusty mining town of Mount Isa in outback Australia.

There, instead of attending cocktail parties and rubbing shoulders with prime ministers and ambassadors, I mowed lawns, raked leaves, and did landscape work. About 10 months into my career break, my older sister Cassie handed me a newspaper advertisement for a “Senior Advisor, Indigenous Affairs” position at Mount Isa Mines, one of Australia’s oldest and most profitable copper, lead, zinc, and silver mines. MIM, as it’s known, wanted to hire an Indigenous Australian who grew up in the local community and understood its issues and challenges—someone like me. I didn’t expect to get the job, but I did.

Today, more than 20 years later, I am one of just a few Indigenous senior leaders working in the Australian mining industry. As the Chief Advisor for Indigenous Affairs for Australia at the Anglo-Australian metals and mining corporation Rio Tinto, I help our executive leadership team and board of directors improve our relationships with, and outcomes for, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, employees, and communities.

People like me are go-betweens, walking in two worlds. We are translators for companies and communities. We help them understand each other to achieve mutual benefits.

There are many complexities and challenges. Mining, a symbol of industrial progress and wealth creation, has unfortunately also left a legacy of exclusion, displacement, and exploitation of Indigenous peoples worldwide. In Australia, where the main exports are iron ore, coal, gas, and gold, the industry has spent decades disregarding and excluding the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who are Indigenous to the nation’s lands and waters.

Back when I took my first industry job, at MIM, many in my community thought I was either brave or naïve. But I believe Indigenous peoples must sit at the decision-making tables within corporations, not as passive stakeholders but as active influencers. We can actively secure redress for past misdeeds and lead an approach within the industry that will respect cultural heritage, drive economic benefit, and achieve environmental integrity.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands and possessed the land under our own laws and customs. Science suggests that we’ve been here for at least 65,000 years; the British colonized Australia less than 250 years ago. Over time they took our lands from us, and wrote laws that made it hard for us to fight back.

Indigenous people were powerless observers. In the 1950s to 1970s, mining companies discovered iron, coal, uranium, and industrial minerals such as bauxite, copper, lead and zinc in many places. Indigenous people rarely had any say, or ability to intervene, when commonwealth, state, and territory governments granted companies mining leases. Outsiders oversaw the destruction of our sacred sites, without recompense.

That includes near Mount Isa, my hometown. When I stepped into my role at MIM in 2000, the Kalkadoon Traditional Owners of the region had no stake in, and received no economic benefit from, mining operations. Open-pit mines had left large, gaping craters in their ancestral land. The Traditional Owners had no formal engagement with the mine, no dedicated Indigenous employment programs, and no social investment initiatives. They were organizing a native title claim aimed at legally recognizing and securing the Kalkadoon people’s historical rights to their ancestral lands and seeking a more inclusive approach to land and resource management for the future.

Leadership at MIM recognized that it was time to develop a better relationship. That’s where I came in.

Understandably, people expressed a lot of frustration in the initial meetings between the company and the Indigenous community. I felt about as welcome as a roast turkey at a vegetarian dinner party. I was verbally abused, physically intimidated, and called all sorts of names (nicer ones included “company man” and “sell-out”)—by people who were almost like family to me.

Over time, I built connections and trust. Soon after I started at MIM, I went to my boss, the mine site’s executive general manager, and convinced him to provide office space for the Traditional Owners to organize their title claim and conduct meetings. It was a small thing, but it signalled goodwill. Kalkadoon leaders still use the space today, as the registered office for their Native Title corporation.

This was an important lesson: A simple gesture of respect goes a long way—often much further than years of legal negotiations or purely transactional interactions. In September 2001, the Kalkadoon people, the Queensland Government, and MIM, among other mining companies, negotiated an Indigenous Land Use Agreement that paved the way for roughly 90 exploration licenses in the vicinity of Mount Isa. And that was only the start of what has become an enduring relationship between MIM and the Kalkadoon people.

I believe we are entering a new era of recognition for Indigenous people’s rights. The looming fight against climate change compels companies to listen to us. It’s often stated that Indigenous peoples represent about 5% of the world population but hold 80% of the remaining natural resources and biodiversity, including critical minerals. What will be the role of Indigenous people in the “just transition” to a low-carbon future—and is a green future that depends on more mining even possible?

Indigenous people still struggle. Our life expectancy is about 20 years less than non-Indigenous Australians, and I have seen many family and community members die early from preventable diseases. Proportionately, we are the most incarcerated people on earth. Our languages are disappearing, and colonization has eroded our cultural practices.

Still, I’d like to think we’re in a better place overall than when I started in this industry. Indigenous communities have more equal say, and greater control, than ever before—and the fact that more Indigenous people are coming up through the ranks and taking our rightful place in seats at corporate tables across the country has a lot to do with it. My hope is that the economic and social position of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia, too, will rise.

The post I’m Indigenous Australian, and I Work for a Mining Company appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.