This country’s history of stealing, silencing, and suppressing Indigenous peoples’ cultural heritage and connections to their ancestral homelands is an injustice that can never be fully remedied. But we can’t resign ourselves to complacency.
That’s why, together with my colleague Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM), I’ve introduced the Advancing Tribal Parity on Public Land Act and the Tribal Cultural Areas Protection Act, which are crucial steps toward recognizing the sovereign right of Tribal Nations to safeguard their homelands and reinforce their role in land management.
Current laws fail to adequately protect Tribal government interests on federal land. For example, public land containing a cultural sacred site or where a Tribal Nation has a treaty right may currently be sold to private developers — without any regard for a Tribe’s interest in the land. Numerous federal laws require federal land managers to consult with
state and local governments, but many of these requirements ignore Tribal Nations.
This is the case in the sacred ancestral Native lands at Oak Flat in my home state of Arizona where the federal government is considering handing more than 2,000 acres of sacred land to a foreign mining corporation.
San Carlos Apache Tribe Chairman Terry Rambler said that “obliterating Oak Flat for a copper mine will be a grave human rights violation against Indigenous people and an environmental catastrophe.”
He’s right and we can keep it from happening.
I want to thank the many Tribal Nations that have long advocated for these fixes and Senator Heinrich for his partnership in transforming that advocacy into legislation.
Peace,
Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ)
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