As in previous tight election years, Native voters will have an important role in the outcome of the 2024 election, especially in key swing states where the margins are slim. The political initiative known as “Project 2025” — and its vision for the future of tribal nations and Indigenous communities — could play a part in that.
Last year, the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation introduced Project 2025, which includes a Mandate for Leadership, meant to be a road map of conservative policies and legislation for former President Donald Trump to implement should he win the November 2024 election. Trump hasn’t put forward any policy regarding tribes or Native communities, while the Republican Party’s platform is absent of the same. The Mandate, however, gives a look into what far-right conservatives want their leadership to prioritize. The project, which calls for a return of Trump-era policies, increases the power of the executive branch and presents an extreme vision for the future of the U.S. With regard to tribes and Indigenous communities, it focuses on increasing oil and gas and mineral extraction on tribal and public lands and seeks to reverse the Biden administration’s work on climate change and the protection of culturally significant places.
“At this point, our main obstacle to practicing our belief systems is climate change, is energy extraction and is the selling off of public lands,” all of which would be made worse by the plans laid out in Project 2025, said Judith LeBlanc (Caddo Nation), executive director of the Native Organizers Alliance and the NOA Action Fund, which in October endorsed the Harris-Walz campaign. “Under Project 2025, and a Trump administration, we will go backwards.”
According to a survey published last year by the Native Organizers Alliance and partners, the top priorities for Native voters are climate change, racism and healthcare. Project 2025’s vision does not address them or the way they affect Native communities. Other issues critical to Indigenous communities are omitted: There’s nothing about addressing the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, for example, or sustaining and improving on tribal co-stewardship of public lands and the protection of cultural sites, extending investigations into boarding schools or details on improving the Indian Health Service.
“At this point, our main obstacle to practicing our belief systems is climate change, is energy extraction and is the selling off of public lands.”
Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but the authors of the 922-page Mandate for Leadership include at least 140 former Trump administration officials, according to a review by CNN. The section regarding the Department of Interior, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was written by Trump’s former acting head of the Bureau of Land Management, William Perry Pendley (former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in Indian Affairs under Trump, John Tahsuda (Kiowa) is credited with assisting him). Pendley, a controversial attorney who spent many years as president of Mountain States Legal Foundation, regularly opposed tribes’ efforts to protect their cultural sites and, according to The Intercept, has openly shared racist views on blood quantum. For example, he has previously warned about “an increasingly important issue in the West, that is, the willingness of federal land managers to close public land because it is sacred to American Indians.” More recently, he represented the energy company Solenex LLC in a long-running conflict over oil and gas leasing in the Badger-Two Medicine, a culturally important place to the Blackfeet Nation that is now permanently protected after litigation.
Resource development on tribal and public lands
The section in the mandate on the Bureau of Indian Affairs has one overarching focus: more coal, oil and gas and mineral extraction. It echoes other sections on the Department of Interior that suggest restarting leases in areas that many tribes have fought long and hard to protect from energy development. That, combined with the suggestion to bring back Trump-era reforms of the National Environmental Policy Act, could be troubling for some tribal nations, said Gussie Lord, managing attorney of the tribal partnerships program at Earthjustice and citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, since that’s a key way for Indigenous communities and tribal governments to have a say on whether or how a project that might impact tribal resources should proceed — if at all. “Project 2025 shows a preference for extractive practices, as opposed to the preference that I hear from my clients, which is more of a stewardship angle,” said Lord. It’s “a preference for ensuring that these resources, and the cultural practices that depend on these resources, are around for the long term.”
The Trump administration put tighter limits on the length and timeline of NEPA documents and public and tribal consultation. Tribes are already somewhat limited in what they can do to protect places off-reservation, and a limited NEPA process could further infringe on their ability to protect sacred sites.
Putting a stop to national monuments
Pendley recommends a full repeal of the 1906 Antiquities Act — the law by which a president can create national monuments. Such land designations have become a significant way for tribes to obtain landscape-level protection for places that are located off-reservation. During President Joe Biden’s term, at least two campaigns led by or involving tribes have successfully pushed for national monument protections in Arizona and Nevada. While Republicans have made a show of opposing many new monuments — particularly Bears Ears National Monument — there have been exceptions: In California, for example, a Senate resolution with bipartisan support called on President Joe Biden to designate three more monuments in California that are championed by tribes.
What else?
Outside the section on the Interior Department, substantive policy on Indian Country is slim. The section on the Department of Justice makes no mention of the long-standing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples, despite “renewing” a “focus on violent crime,” instead highlighting things like drug cartels and protections for protesters at abortion clinics. The section including the Indian Health Service acknowledges that “reforms are needed,” but lacks any detail concerning those reforms or information on how the federal government will fulfill its responsibility to provide tribes health care. Given the overall attempt by Project 2025 to reverse the Biden administration’s focus on climate, it’s all but certain that tribes would not receive continued support for climate resilience efforts under the Project’s vision.
The Mandate for Leadership repeatedly suggests siloing tribal interests by moving programs for tribes to the Bureau of Indian Education or the Department of Interior. In the section on the Environmental Protection Agency, a similar suggestion would create a separate office within the agency specifically for tribes. But the whole agency needs to understand tribal sovereignty and its responsibility to tribes, Lord said. “You can’t just shunt it over to one place and say, ‘Indian stuff over here,’” Lord said. “That’s a mistake in any agency; it needs to be incorporated throughout.”
LeBlanc warns that Project 2025’s failure to address Indigenous interests is a miscalculation that clearly shows how the people behind it underestimate Indigenous sovereignty, tribes’ legal rights and political power, of which voting is just one piece. The grassroots-level organizing will continue no matter who wins in the election, though the election will determine the issues and conditions LeBlanc’s organization and others like it will be working under. “Project 2025 is so out of step with reality,” LeBlanc said, “the reality in Indian Country and the political reality in this country.”
