Life in the City of Dirty Water by Clayton Thomas-Muller

Author:Clayton Thomas-Muller [Thomas-Muller, Clayton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2021-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

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At that time I began to organize a lot of delegations to Washington, DC—or as we call it, Washington Deceit —to lobby Congress on Indian energy policy. President George H. W. Bush and Dick Cheney, those leaders of the free world, were trying to pass an energy bill that included Title V, legislation that would kick open the back door to Indian Country to big fossil fuel interests. Title V was designed to give American Indian nations the right to approve and regulate their own energy projects. Of course it was a setup, because there are only a couple of tribes with the legal and scientific capacity (including their own environmental protection departments) to actually preside over big energy projects. This legislation would essentially result in energy projects being built without any federal oversight, because the tribes don’t have any oversight capacity and the government wasn’t giving any money to them to provide oversight. The bill would have continued to build upon the legacy of subsidizing and giving corporate welfare to the richest, most powerful corporate entities that ever graced the Earth.

I created alliances with grassroots groups in Alaska Native nations and with a lot of people in about thirty nations in the Lower 48. We began to go to Washington to talk to congressional leaders. Through direct actions, lobby trips, and slick media campaigns, we were able to defeat that first energy bill. It was a big victory, and it was the direct result of our people working together and lobbying not only congressional leaders but also our own leaders.

We got the National Congress of American Indians—the US equivalent of the Assembly of First Nations—and many other institutions to target our champions in Congress, leaders like Senator Daniel Akaka from Hawaii. Akaka, at the request of the National Congress of American Indians and all the tribal nations that we were working with through our campaign, killed the energy bill in the Senate. It was one of the biggest victories in my young professional career. I got to smack out President Bush and Dick Cheney in their own yard. Of course, when their second term came around, they slammed that energy bill right through. But that’s the ebb and flow of things—in this work as a campaigner, it is always a “one step forward, two steps back” scenario. But every victory in the Indigenous rights and climate justice movement leads to thousands more joining our ranks as we build the largest social movement ever in the history of our people.

During Bush and Cheney’s second administration, there was a massive push to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the North Slope of Alaska and to expand energy development in Indian Country right across the board. My job became increasingly tense because it was often me who would be in direct contact with community members, and I was working with many communities. Our organization wasn’t leading the campaigns—we were supporting those who were leading the campaigns. But the campaigns became very real life-and-death situations.

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