Once again, many Native Americans find themselves facing the loss of land and home. In 1889, President Grover Cleveland issued an executive order that set the stage for an almost impossible situation facing a Native American community in Washington State today. President Cleveland’s order confined the Quileute Nation to one-square mile of land on the tip of the Olympic Peninsula. The Quileute traditionally used this portion of their land as a fishing community for part of the year due to its tendency to flood. Confined to this tiny patch of land, the Quileute community faced frequent flooding. Today, due to rising sea levels and intensifying storms caused by climate change, the Tribe increasingly experiences power outages, flooding, and storm damage, which prevent them from using the one road that connects the community with the rest of the world. Nations like the Quileute face a difficult choice: remain on their home land and suffer from the effects of climate change, or leave their ancestral land to find refuge further inland. Unfortunately, the Quileute Nation is not the only Native Nation in this position.
In an October 2021 article in the journal Science, a team of researchers examined the forced relocation of hundreds of Native American Tribes in the United States by European and American settlers and the continuing impacts of their relocation on the Tribes’ environmental and economic conditions today. More than two-fifths of the 380 Tribes that were forcibly relocated have no federal or state-recognized land base, while Tribes with land bases saw their land size reduced by up to 99 percent after relocation. Furthermore, relocated tribes often were moved to land with less hospitable climates that now expose these Tribes to higher climate change risks, increasingly severe environmental hazards, and disadvantageous economic conditions. These results further confirm the deep interconnection between environmental justice, racial justice, and economic justice.
The increasing frequency and severity of environmental disasters has also amplified economic inequality for Native Nations. According to Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research, approximately one in three Native Americans live in poverty, with a median income of approximately $23,000. The Institute also points out that, even though more Native Americans are receiving a high school and college degree than ever, wage gaps are increasing and employment levels are dropping when compared to white populations in the same areas. The effects of climate change are exacerbating this economic inequality by prompting many to leave their Tribes for cities with more economic opportunities, which means Tribes often face a shrinking tax base. For example, the Yupik of Newtok, Alaska, have been forced to relocate to nearby Mertarvik due to sea level rise, increased flooding from the Ninglick River, and the erosion and shifting buildings caused by melting permafrost. Likewise, two Tribes on Isle de Jean Charles in southern Louisiana, the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw and the United Houma Nation, are considered the United States’ first climate refugees as of 2016 when they were awarded a $48 million federal grant to relocate their communities. Isle de Jean Charles is sinking, with flooding becoming more frequent, and nine-tenths of the island’s land mass lost to rising sea levels since 1955.
Centuries of systemic racism and widespread inaction on climate mitigation have left Native Nations vulnerable to the increasingly severe effects of climate change. The existing challenges facing Native Nations have been amplified by the effects of climate change, such as rising sea levels and intensifying storms. The past is rarely ever left in the past; it continues to shape our present world and inform our future.
