Pat Gonzales-Rogers : Mining and Monuments

Pat Gonzales-Rogers , Mining and Monuments

Robert Lundahl

Can you for the sake of the podcast tell us your name and your position or your interests?

Pat Gonzales-Rogers

I’m Pat Gonzales Rogers. I'm currently at the Yale School of Environment where I am a professor of practice and a lecturer. I talk about and speak about issues related to tribal sovereignty and natural resources as well as cultural and sacred sites. By and large my interests are really, they're not relegated, but they're primarily within Native and Indigenous communities.

I always clarify for people I am not Native American, I am Native or indigenous on my mom's side both Samoan as well as Tagalog, which are the indigenous Filipinos to the Philippines, and so that is where I grew up within those particular cultural kinds of precepts, and so that has really advanced most of my career. I would say probably that about 80–85 percent of the things I've done in my professional life have been related to Native issues and to a certain extent the Greater BIPOC Community.

I came to the Bears Ears as their inaugural Executive Director. They had a national search and I was kind of identified and then selected to be the Executive Director. I had been previously, right before that, the senior Native advisor at the Environmental Protection Agency, a job that is similar to other jobs I've had. I've been the Senior Native Advisor for three different federal agencies, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Health and Human Services. So I came to the Bears Ears after it was designated by President Obama but after it had been then been reduced, about exactly a year, later by President Trump by 85 percent, and so this is a really interesting time because I came on it when it had a designation but it was certainly going through a political kind of review of the Trump Administration in terms of a, what I would fairly call a profound reduction, and so I entered the picture right at when that reduction occurred.

I was hired with three kinds of major things to accomplish, one, could we restore the monument to its previous and original size? I'll say for context what people don't realize is the tribes originally wanted two million acres. President Obama then decided on an amount a little under 1.4 million acres, so that was the first thing they wanted it to be restored to. They wanted the organization to create a comprehensive Land Management Plan that was thoroughly Native and added its underpinnings traditional knowledge married with what I would call traditional science. And the third thing was to formalize that the tribes would be recognized by the Land Management Agencies i.e. the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S Forest Service, as the co-managers of the National Monument. I will say by the work of the tribes and the staff we accomplished all three of those goals, and so it was, in my eyes, in terms of the kind of deliverables and the metrics that we set for ourselves, a very successful endeavor.

Now juxtaposed against that, and I'm what I want to do is kind of really give a background on what the extraction interests were, and this can be you know looked up and researched through both the Washington Post, and Politico, and I think Roll Call. Energy Fuels Inc, a Canadian-based company had a direct interface with the Trump Administration. Records showed that they had met directly with the Interior Secretary and by all accounts, they delineated the reduction of boundaries. Now consider this, a Canadian-based company that deals in uranium went in, and Trump, and I don't know this for a fact because Trump is an ideologue, I'm not sure how nuanced he is with respect to the Bears Ears, but it is the ultimate slap in the face to a former President to say I will reduce it and I will then make the rationale because it is public lands, that this is best served that we give 85 percent of this incredibly singular rare kind of landscape, basically for extraction purposes.

Now one has to realize there is not oil and gas on that particular platform, if you will, what there is, is uranium deposits.

And just by a bit of History we all know there's a horrible history involved with this. Navajo Nation, 40, 50 years prior, when there was not a lot of regulation and oversight, but 133 of the 150 Navajo workers died because of direct kinds of either implications or the after effects of uranium mining, so there is that history and that is how the extraction industry became very, kind of, involved in the reduction of the Bears Ears, and they will say this despite saying we support the Bears Ears and then also kind of in a way, really misguiding the public.

For all of those that are educated and aware of how sovereignty goes, the expression of a Tribal Nation can only be done by elected officials. And what they did is select, selected members of a Navajo Nation of a particular Chapter, and then use them to say Navajo Nation supports extraction. And what they really did is just pick a couple of individual people that were supportive. The governance of Navajo Nation was never supportive.

It is a huge distinction to think about it in this way. It is as if a PTA member in Sacramento said the state of California says a, b and c. And it's very distinct and so while that person is certainly has a position to express, it is an individual expression, it is not an expression or an endorsement by the governance or the sovereignty of the Navajo Nation. So I want to paint a very clear picture.

Robert Lundahl

Well yeah and it's the old trick, too, you get you get one friendly Native to put his “X” on a piece of paper and all of a sudden large amounts of land are transferred. It happened all over the West since about 1850.

Pat Gonzales-Rogers

Yeah, and so this company, Energy Fuels Inc., which is one of the primary uranium extractors in the U.S,, now what people have to know also about uranium, and I I'm trying to create a factual as well as fair picture, Uranium in the U.S is of a low grade. And it's much more expensive than in the other countries where you can procure it, Australia, Canada, I think Kazakhstan is the other, as well as formerly the Ukraine.

In fact, our price point within the U.S is not competitive. it is almost 40 to 50 percent cheaper outside of the US and so there was, so people know this right? At the end of the Trump Administration there was a bailout of about a billion five to uranium for National Security interests. Which tells me a couple of things. This company couldn't stand on its two feet, and is not tethered to the free market principles. They needed a federal bailout and the thing that they did immediately was do a stock buyback of their own stocks. Now they say that it was so that they could advance forward and do more extraction. That could potentially be true. I also know this, when you do a stock purchase of your own, executives are the ones who monetarily benefit the most, so there's a lot of dealing behind the scenes and in the reality of it is only about one percent of uranium could be extracted out of the Bears Ears or even in the area now of the new National Monument by the Grand Canyon. So these are advanced as ideological ideas but the reality is when you look at the facts, it's quite diluted and watered down.

And in fact we had at the Bears Ears, we had probably one of the most preeminent environmental economists he capitates activities and then gives you what the dollar worth of it. He actually looked at the activities of extraction in the Bears Ears, his name is Bob Mendelston, he is an environmental economist and said it has very little worth. Now you have to realize the whole kind of rhetoric that was given through the Trump Administration is twofold. One, local economies will thrive because of this extraction activity and we will secure a Rare Element in terms of our energy efficiency, which might have a little bit, but the first point is incredibly fallacious.

The fact is what we know is all regional economies are really advanced through property tax. That is how the region reserves or gets her revenue, and then it supports activities well a company like Energy Fuels Inc., they're leasing lands, they pay no property tax and the jobs that there would really be derived, are only several dozen jobs actually, and because it's very specialized, the jobs that go to locals tend to be custodial they tend to be transportation, trucking things here and there, and they're not sustainable. At some point they end.

And what we do know about National Monuments and there's been a 40–50 year study of all National Monuments in the last 50 years. All of them have been increased exponentially, economically, post-National Monument status, and the jobs are not in the dozens or in the hundreds, they're in the thousands that they create in the local/regional economy. And so if you're actually going to advance that point let's really speak in fact because National Monuments in many ways, first provide a protection on cultural resources and natural resources, but they advance the economy in a fairly profound way.

There's a lot of kind of debate there going on from a political kind of spectrum.

Robert Lundahl

mm-hmm. Well it seems like we can introduce a number of other sites into the conversation because of what you said. You know there's gold mining at Oro Cruz in Arizona that Preston Arrow-weed explained from his Quechan perspective and that's a Canadian company run by Russian staff, a CEO, and then we have Thacker Pass, Northern Nevada, lithium, lithium extraction, the traditional way dig it up, dig it all up, and that's a traditional landscape and a massacre site, two massacres and a villagesite, and then we have some lithium

extraction from geothermal going on down in Imperial Valley, California so it seems like the pressure is on from mining in areas that tribes consider sacred and it seems like all the “T”s aren't crossed and the “I”s aren't dotted from the federal standpoint, in that these sites don't have permits for disposal of waste materials.

Pat Gonzales-Rogers

So that's where we come into a real dilemma, right? A couple of data points. What we do know is tribal lands which are largely west of the Mississippi really overlap and intersect against public lands so public lands are about 600 million acres if you include Alaska Native rez lands or about a hundred million acres so we're really talking about 1/6 th of all public lands are within the domain of Native community.

So that's one data point. The second data point is 85% of Native lands hold our biodiversity so you got this large swath of public lands which is a large segment, or Native, 85 percent of biodiversity and then as we go into this next iteration of a “green economy,” about 60 to 65 percent of rare elements are on Native lands and so what historically has been seen, and again, I entered the conversation talking about some former jobs but I've been you know the Native advisor for entities that are by and large engaged in the permitting process and what I've seen is we have a consultation policy. it requires input from tribes. It doesn't mean we have to do exactly what tribes say but we have to do it in good faith.

I will say this what I have seen is 95 of the time it goes pretty well. However when they want to do something whether it is a wind turbine or this next iteration of saying, “oh we need this because there's a national security interest” then all of that goes to the side because what they can claim is their National Security interests and we don't have to abide by the terms of formal consultation. And so that is when real issues of environmental justice really rise, because it then becomes the worst kind of thing, a pedantic formality. and the input of tribes which should really be digested in a somber and earnest way get be put on the wayside because we want to advance the next kind of, again, iteration of our green economy and so it is that is where we need to be really vigilant and have to speak out on behalf of these communities.

Robert Lundahl

I wonder if you've seen my film "Who Are My People?”

Pat Gonzales-Rogers

I have not but I will check it out.

Robert Lundahl

I'll send it to you. I made a movie on the Solar Development in the Mojave Desert and I was informed at that point that that there was a lot of misinformation, disinformation being uh put out there by the applicant companies and then also by the BLM, and kind of as a newbie in this area I was appalled. As a citizen I would say rather than a newbie, a citizen of the United States so I don't think that my government should be breaking laws and lying to the population in the name of extraction to benefit a few companies. So I was very surprised and I really welcome your comments there because that's how I got into this. And then I started doing interviews at Thacker Pass and I'm doing another one this week with Dorece Sam and it seems like because of the Mining Act and then what you mentioned about the National Security incentives, although I haven't heard that specifically mentioned, they seem to be proceeding that way and essentially ignoring the National Historic Preservation Act and other federal laws that would put a little bit of a brake on some of this stuff on behalf of better judgment.

Pat Gonzales-Rogers

Yeah so there are instances, and so just so there's clarification here. There are two forms of consultation. There is a consultation that is really derived from the federal Trust responsibility and it's the administrative duty to consult with tribes. The other one that you allude to is via the National Historic Preservation Act and it's called a 106 consultation. It is actually, you can litigate against it for unsatisfactory consultation, however there are entities say within the Department of Defense that can waive 106 responsibilities of a consultation um because of National Security interests so it it's not always on an equal playing field in which we interface with Indian Country on these types of issues.

And so one can see if you know there was the political willpower and you kind of frame it in the right way, you can bypass this, and I'll give you this is not Indian country but it is a prime example and the um issue on Hawaii Island there are telescopes, what they call TMT 30 meter telescopes, and there were similar telescopes on Haleakala on Maui, where the tragedy, tragedies have just occurred in the last couple of weeks, although that's on the west side of the island.

When they had to renew their license, they had to do a 106 consultation however in a very similar fact pattern the 30 meter telescopes on Hawaii Island said "oh we don't have a federal nexus thus there is no consultation." I actually wrote a memo for the organization I was with, to say I don't agree, I think there is a delineable federal nexus. They receive monies from the National Science Foundation, the overseeing entity at this, University of Hawaii who also receives federal dollars they went and back and forth about six months ago. They said they're going to go back to do a consultation after denying this for about a decade. So my point is, at times there is a overt avoidance to just do the right thing.

But here's the thing, this 106 consultation, it culminates in what's called a programmatic agreement. It is a basically a managerial management kind of plan on how we will operate and manage with the community. They could have mitigated all of this by just saying "let's do the 106 consultation." But they try to avoid it. Cost them both goodwill, public relations, probably tens of millions of dollars, and they're right back where they should have been in the first place. And so much of this, sometimes we get caught up in the political headwind that occurs from time to time behind these issues. And so some of it you just have to unpack and you find out there's this other history or there's this other kind of impetus that is really kind of instructing where they're going with this.

And so it is the common problem and I think especially you know for the tribes in Nevada the Paiutes with lithium they're going through the same thing now because it it's important to the government, right? They they see this as a very valuable kind of commodity that they need to advance their interests but like so many things they're doing it on the backs of Native people and again the US in many instances is very aligned when it's easy, but when it becomes difficult is when it takes on a different tenor a different complexion a different cadence. But these policies in my eyes mean nothing if they can't be invoked and implemented when it's really meaningful, otherwise it goes back to what I said, a pedantic formality right?

Robert Lundahl

Well, Thacker Pass is a good example because the first judge in the Ninth Circuit, whose name is Miranda Du said that, "well unfortunately because of the lack of disposal of waste and the lack of permitting for such, it's illegal but we're going to go ahead anyway."

Now down at Oak Flat in Arizona, Biden put Oak Flat copper mining on pause because of the lack of a permit for the disposal of waste, so how would they justify the contradiction in a case like that?

Pat Gonzales-Rogers

Yeah, and that's when you know it becomes problematic, and the problem too is if you look at what's been said through courts, the way that Native people advance their spiritual interests you have to realize is that the Bears Ears is important right because from a western construct what you want to do is in very surgical ways, find the smallest area and say this area is sacred but in a holistic Native way.

Think about it this way, if you are outside a synagogue, right, and you were in the parking lot you wouldn't throw a bunch of garbage in the parking lot but then say the synagogue itself is pristine. It is the totality of experience from the parking lot to the stairway, to the inner chambers of that synagogue that make it sacred, and so in the same way it is the totality of landscape that really allows Native people to worship. But we want to pick this really micro dot and say, well just tell me where the area that's sacred, when the reality is it's the largeness of the landscape that creates the sacredness, and that's why things like the Bears Ears and the Grand Canyon are what I call a force multiplier, right? You protect large swaths of land, you allow traditional knowledge to be the managerial practice, you allow Native people to have cultural and traditional ceremonies, and you at the same time practice the highest level of environmental justice. Just in that one minute I checked off like four or five huge boxes and that's why we should work with Native communities. By doing this you give the land back, and then you get this incredible additive for everyone,and so for me it becomes fairly simple when you think about it in such ways and terms.

Robert Lundahl

Well I mentioned contradictions. There's a couple of other ones I should probably bring up like Sand Creek in Colorado is a monument and it's a massacre site, and so it has protections, and it's understood to be a total landscape, and Thacker Pass apparently wasn't considered for such a thing, and then also if you look at Gettysburg you know the part that's sacred isn't just where the soldier fell, they didn't just outline the body you know like you'd expect on a street with a police murder. You have the entire experience like people go there and visit and they want to know where Robert E. Lee sat on his horse and surveyed the action, and they want to know where the troops came from, what route, and where people fled to or retreated to if that was the case.

So with Gettysburg we look at the Total Landscape. So what's in the way? I mean do we just call it racism, and say well you know that's the way we are as a country?

Pat Gonzales-Rogers

Well it's certainly they're following an orthodoxy, right, and it's and it's very similar. There are entities that fund sacred sites but in their minds it is a Protestant Chapel in Western Massachusetts it is not the landscape or a kind of Hopi altar in the Bears Ears. In fact they don't even have monies for it. And so we've allowed ourselves not to be bamboozled but to be very myopic in the things that we call sacred because the spirituality has a western construct to it. And so some of that is allowing a much more kind of, I don't want to say liberal, but expansive view of what these things mean. So you know, one of the things I talked about recently is I'm not against per se uranium. I think we as a nation need to explore all things, but at one of the seventh wonders of the world? Where we're less than about one percent of uranium extraction can be found.

You want to put that in jeopardy for such a marginal kind of benefit? Come on now. I mean you know that doesn't even make any sense at all. But if you were to listen to those people from the uranium companies, they're like, "oh this is incredibly important to us" and the fact is they still have an outfit that is right out on the boundary of the new monument, that they're still going to do. Is it going to resolve anything? Hardly. I mean if you look, and some of the things that a conservative outlet… they said that Russia has a monopoly and we're allowing Russia to really run our energy policies. Russia has less than five percent of all uranium stockpiles in the world. Come on now. Let's, you know, I mean anyone can like look up this information and see what the reality is.

My thing is to always try to operate from a factual basis and then put things on the table and then have a kind of a healthy discourse about them but like lets not bamboozle ?ourselves with false numbers or inflammatory statements that are incredibly false and flaccid.

Robert Lundahl

Yeah well these are real people with families and dreams and, you know, ideas about life that they'd like to fulfill, and I'm thinking of White Mesa this was said specifically about White Mesa where there's a Uranium Mill like literally, they're just over the fence apparently, yeah they're a fence–line community and then that's been chosen as a site for international disposal from what I understand now.

Pat Gonzales-Rogers

There has been some talk that you know that can create a revenue stream of taking things from like ironically from the Ukraine and then storing and transporting them.

Robert Lundahl

So how does this get elevated to the public and how does this get changed and can the public do it if they're so informed or motivated? What would your recommendation be?

Pat Gonzales-Rogers

Like anything else, and I think this applies to many phases of life, become informed and become engaged.

You know the Bears Ears was a very political issue but you know during the public comment period for the Bears Ears in which they received over a hundred thousand comments, over 90 percent were supportive and, in fact, within the state of Utah where you think oh that's where the hoof meets the road, it was above 80 percent. And so when people are engaged and fully informed, I do think it does take on its own life. It becomes spirited.

And that for all of us, the other thing I say is, you don't have to be Native to have a Native sensibility to the land. When you think about the land as an extension of yourself then you come into an intimacy by take caring of the land–I not only take care of myself, I take care of this woman, this child, the fella behind me, and it is the legacy that we can all give to each other. And so while it certainly derives from a Native kind of conflation that this is an extension, we can all live that. And I encourage people to explore that notion that land and water and even sentient objects are an extension of you, and by taking care of that you are taking care of yourself, and by taking care of yourself you will take care of your community, and that community next to you.

Robert Lundahl

Thank you, Pat. That's a wonderful way to close. It's inspiring and motivating and it gives people a direction.

And so thank you so much and blessings to you and I'll let you get on with your day.

Pat Gonzales-Rogers

Thank you, Robert, you have a great day.

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Watch The Full Video Interview.

Bears Ears Photos: The Wilderness Society