At an August rally in Glendale, Arizona, the crowd’s rowdiness suggested a rock star was about to take the stage. Instead, a booming voice welcomed spectators with a resounding statement of support for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris: “She is the right person at the right time to become our country’s 47th president!” The voice belonged to Gila River Indian Governor Stephen Roe Lewis, a tribal leader who helped resolve long-awaited water rights issues in the state for the tribe last year. “Skoden!”

Later, after a warm-up speech from running mate Tim Walz, Vice President Harris took the stage and said she would “always honor tribal sovereignty and respect tribal self-determination” (Arizona’s 22 federally recognized tribes are making an Indigenous ballot ). bloc that proved essential to President Joe Biden’s 2020 swing state victory.) On her campaign website, she claims she will work to secure America’s industrial future by investing in clean energy — but clean energy development often negatively impacts sites at the federal level. lands sacred to indigenous peoples.

The Biden-Harris administration has been one of the most supportive of Indigenous peoples, investing millions of dollars in federal funding for climate resilience and green energy initiatives. Yet the Indigenous vote for Harris in 2024 is far from assured. While the U.S. has big goals toward a clean energy future, those plans must compete with preserving tribal lands — an issue that Harris has stumbled over in her political career, dating back to her time as California’s attorney general.

Nearly 80 miles east of the Arizona meeting, a sacred site is in danger. Oak Flat, a stretch of national forest in the high desert, has been an important spiritual site for tribes like the San Carlos Apache for centuries, used for ceremonies and gathering medicines such as sage, bear root, and greasewood. Yet the area is under threat: Rio Tinto, an international mining company, has been fighting to establish a copper mine there for more than ten years. Oak Flat is home to one of the largest undeveloped copper deposits in the world, and the metal is crucial for making the electric batteries needed for the shift to cleaner energy sources.

Oak Flat and other sacred sites have not received enough federal protection, activists say, despite intense advocacy from affected tribes. Much of the US has already been built and powered at the expense of tribal lands and peoples. To reach the goal of 80 percent renewable energy generation by 2030 and carbon-free electricity five years after that, the U.S. will need major investments and robust policy support. While Harris says she is the candidate best positioned to achieve these goals, there are concerns among indigenous communities that this will allow them to continue exploiting tribal homelands – most of the minerals needed for the energy transition are located within a 55 mile radius from tribal communities, on land originally stolen from them.

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“They’re definitely hard to do at the same time. That is the conflict,” says Dov Kroff-Korn, an attorney with Lakota People’s Law and Sacred Defense Fund, about the balance between extracting the minerals crucial to the energy transition and protecting tribal lands where many such minerals are located. He said Harris himself has few environmental policies to criticize, and that the broader Biden-Harris administration has been a mixed bag on the policy front. “There have been many positive signs that should be recognized and welcomed. But it is also a continuation of many of the same old extraction policies that have driven America for virtually its entire history.”

In an effort to protect some places from industry, President Biden has used his ability to turn sacred sites into national monuments, like the Grand Canyon National Monument’s ancestral footprints — or Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni — and to fully restore the boundaries of Utah’s Bears Ears monument after a Trump-era rollback. Biden also appointed the first-ever Native American in his Cabinet – Deb Haaland, Pueblo of Laguna – to head the Department of the Interior. In her role, Haaland has directed federal agencies to integrate traditional knowledge to better protect Indigenous sacred sites on public lands.

During her term as vice president, Harris has participated in the administration’s drive to produce more oil and gas than ever, despite promises to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Last year, the Biden administration also greenlighted the Willow project. an $8 billion drilling operation on Alaska’s North Slope that some, but not all, tribes opposed. Throughout her presidential campaign, and in contradiction to her previous position, Harris has expressed support for fracking, a controversial drilling method that extracts oil and natural gas from deep within the ground.

Crystal Cavalier-Keck, a member of the Occoneechee Band of the Saponi Nation in South Carolina, is co-founder of 7 Directions of Service, an Indigenous-led environmental justice organization. She is concerned that the Mountain Valley Pipeline, currently a 300-mile system running through West Virginia and Virginia, will permanently damage the sacred Haw River, where she has many memories with her family. Over the years, the beleaguered river has been polluted by chemicals and is now threatened by the pipeline, which opened in June.

In 2020, Cavalier-Keck campaigned for Biden in South Carolina but saw no movement on the environmental protections she wanted after he was elected. She said she will still vote for Harris in November, but she feels like her concerns aren’t being talked about. “There’s not much about her environmental policies at all,” she said. “They use the right buzzwords, like ‘clean, renewable, forward.’ But where is the meat of it?’

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She lives about a two-hour drive from where Hurricane Helene claimed more than 100 lives in North Carolina, and she fears the next major climate disaster will reach her community. Cavalier-Keck said her tribe has had trouble accessing the approximately $120 million in federal funding to help tribes build climate resilience.

During Harris’ time as California’s attorney general, she advocated against tribes placing land in trust, a process that can protect land and enable economic development such as casinos where gambling could be banned. She claimed that the situation only applies when a tribe is “under pressure.” federal jurisdiction” when the Indian Reorganization Act was passed in the 1930s. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Harris and the state, but if she had won the case, about a hundred tribes in California would not have been able to benefit from trust lands.

Still, Lael Echo Hawk, a Pawnee and tribal law expert, says Harris’ decisions as attorney general are not a reflection of what she could be capable of as president. She pointed out that as attorney general, Harris helped pass a red flag law in California to take firearms away from people considered dangerous. Additionally, she called on the U.S. Congress to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act – an issue that is important in Indigenous communities, where women are going missing and are survivors of violence at a rate higher than the national average. Echo Hawk also has tribes concerned with border issues and immigration who support Harris. “These are important issues that I believe better demonstrate her commitment to promoting and protecting tribal sovereignty,” Echo Hawk said.

But for Nick Estes, a member of the Lower Brule Sioux tribe and professor at the University of Minnesota, Harris could be a continuation of the Biden administration, which he says has abused tribal lands. As it stands, non-Natives on 1.6 million surface and subsurface acres of land within 83 reservations benefit from oil, gas and mining activities, among other extractive industries.

“You cannot simply implement an environmental policy based on vibrations. It actually has to be concrete,” says Estes. “What we have seen is merely servicing industry at the expense of indigenous lands and livelihoods.”