Chronic federal underfunding of tribal environmental programs is deliberate, not accidental

Evidence

Goldtooth, who had come of age in an era of Indian activism and had been involved with IEN since 1991, was at the time the environmental director of the Red Lakes Band of Chippewa. Through his work he had come to the realization that the chronic underfunding of Indian environmental programs by the federal government occurred not by accident but by design. “I started to look at this as another colonial action of the government,” he explains. “I’ve always had this feeling that the government is in cahoots with corporations, and that it’s the corporations that want to take advantage of our resources. Surely, corporations don’t want tribes to have strong environmental protection infrastructures; they don’t want tribes to be exercising full sovereignty to implement their own enforcement laws, because if the tribes did do that, it may limit or fully restrict the ability of these corporations to continue to tap the tender resources, the water resources, the mineral resources.” — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 629

Categorization

• XREF: Fuses directly into the litigation-failure thread of ch15 and the sovereignty stakes for the legal course. — connects to: Chronic federal underfunding of Indian environmental programs is deliberate colonial design; An EPA rule flagged tribal benefit rather than tribal harm as its injustice concern — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 608
• SEED: Angle: underfunding tribal enforcement as a quiet mechanism of environmental racism, distinct from overt siting.

Broader Connections

• An EPA rule flagged tribal benefit rather than tribal harm as its injustice concern #contradicts (0.75) — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 608