Home > News > Headlines

Print   Subscribe

Blog: Native Americans and environmental issues
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Filed Under: Opinion

"At the committee hearings on the Kerry-Boxer Bill last week, Democrats dutifully trotted out Fawn Sharp, president of the Quinault Indian Nation of Alaska, who assured us that climate change would affect Native Americans more than most others.

“Tribes in Alaska are seeing their villages literally disappear from under them,” President Sharp told the committee. “The melting permafrost threatens to undermine their buildings and all they have ever built and owned. We think it is imperative that Congress take action to prevent this looming catastrophe.”

If things are that serious, apparently the news hasn’t reached the Wampanoag Nation of Massachusetts, which recently asked the Department of the Interior to block the 170-megawatt Cape Wind project off Nantucket, claiming the Atlantic Ocean is their “traditional cultural property.”

Then there’s the case of the Goshute Native American Tribe in Utah, which for a decade has been offering to store the nation’s nuclear waste on its reservation. Environmental opponents have practically sworn to restart the Indian Wars if that one goes through.

Apparently what Native American think about environmental issues only counts when they’re on your side."

Get the Story:
William Tucker: White Man Speak with Forked Tongue (Planet Gore Blog/The National Review 11/3)

Copyright © Indianz.Com