At Annual NCAI Tribal Nations Policy Summit, Heinrich Says Tribes Should Play Integral Role In Managing Public Lands
WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) delivered remarks at the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) Tribal Nations Policy Summit. NCAI’s annual summit brings together tribal leaders and Members of Congress to discuss Indian Country’s most important issues.
Senator Heinrich called for reimagining and reforming the ways we manage America’s public lands to better reflect the values we hold today.
“Many of the major laws governing our public lands date back more than 100 years,” said Heinrich. “It no longer makes sense to measure the success of our shared lands solely by how many board-feet of timber they produce, the number of cattle they can support, or how many tons of ore can be extracted from them. The most valuable assets produced by our forests and grasslands today are not timber or copper. Rather, the most valuable products of these landscapes include clean water, healthy populations of native wildlife, and the protection of sacred sites."
During his remarks, Senator Heinrich said that tribal consultation is not enough, the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service need to work alongside tribes to manage cultural landscapes.
"Perhaps most importantly, our public lands are home to the living histories and the living cultural landscapes that tell us who we are as Americans. That's why when I think about what we need to fundamentally improve the way we manage our public lands, I know the answer lies in including the perspectives of the people who have far too often been ignored. Tribes across Indian Country have ancestral sites, historical ecological knowledge, and ongoing cultural practices on our federal public lands," said Heinrich. "I know from my experience in New Mexico, we've been able to accomplish so many victories on our public lands in the last decade because of the leadership and engagement of tribal leaders who have a deep connection with these landscapes. And that is because tribes should be playing an integral role in the management of these lands."
Senator Heinrich’s remarks as prepared for delivery are below:
Good morning.
Thank you to all the tribal leaders gathered here today and to the National Congress of American Indians for inviting me to address your Annual Winter Session.
I’d like to give a special welcome to those of you attending from my home state of New Mexico.
I take great pride in working closely with tribal leaders and sovereign governments.
I first started forming meaningful relationships with our tribal communities in New Mexico when I was guiding outdoor education trips for children in western New Mexico as the director of the Cottonwood Gulch Foundation.
Our trips brought together children who had never been to the Southwest and children from local tribal communities.
In addition to hands-on learning in these landscapes, our students visited local tribal communities and learned about the cultural context of the places we explored.
This cultural exchange and the friendships we formed gave me a real appreciation for tribal communities’ unique insights and incredible connection to place.
My two sons have grown up going on those same Cottonwood Gulch trips and learning about the deep sense of place we are so privileged to have in New Mexico.
When I began advocating for land conservation in New Mexico, one of my first mentors was Peter Pino the former governor of the Pueblo of Zia.
Watching him work to protect the Ojito Wilderness and reclaim lands from the Bureau of Land Management that contained cultural sites taught me how critical it is for tribes to have a real seat at the table in conservation and land management decisions.
I took that with me when I was first elected to Congress a decade ago. After hearing directly from tribal leaders about challenges they had leasing their own trust lands, I worked with them to write and pass the HEARTH Act into law.
Under the HEARTH Act, tribes are able to approve their own long-term leases of tribal trust land rather than relying on the BIA.
This has opened important pathways to housing projects and economic development in tribal communities across Indian Country.
Empowering tribes to make the best decisions about their own land is what tribal sovereignty is all about.
More recently, when Acoma Pueblo discovered their sacred ceremonial shield had been stolen and was up for auction in Paris, I immediately went to work drafting the STOP Act to prevent similar theft of items of cultural and religious significance.
This bipartisan bill, the STOP Act, prohibits the exportation of sacred items, increases the penalties for stealing these items, and helps recover them to their rightful owners.
With your help and support, I believe we can pass the STOP Act into law this year.
I also worked with another of my mentors, former Santo Domingo Governor Everett Chavez, to craft legislation to make sure tribes can access existing federal funding, like the FCC’s grant programs, to improve broadband internet access in rural and tribal areas.
I’ve fought alongside tribal leaders to protect resources including opioid treatment services, tribal housing grants, and tribal law enforcement funding.
And I’ve called on Republicans in the Senate to stop jeopardizing critical funding to end domestic violence and sexual abuse.
We should not wait one more day to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act!
There’s obviously a broad range of issues I could discuss with you today.
However, I would like to focus the bulk of my remarks on another major issue that I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to.
And that is how we reimagine and reform the ways we manage America’s public lands to better reflect the values we hold today.
Many of the major laws governing our public lands date back more than 100 years.
One example of this is the 1872 Mining Act, which allows companies to extract mineral resources without paying a penny in tax royalties and without any real plan for how to clean up the thousands of abandoned mines littering our mountains and forests.
Even the more progressive public lands laws like the Antiquities Act, the Organic Act, that created the National Park Service, and the Forest Reserve Act, that established the U.S. Forest Service, are in great need of re-evaluation and re-examination.
It no longer makes sense to measure the success of our shared lands solely by how many board-feet of timber they produce, the number of cattle they can support, or how many tons of ore can be extracted from them.
The most valuable assets produced by our forests and grasslands today are not timber or copper.
Rather, the most valuable products of these landscapes include clean water, healthy populations of native wildlife, and the protection of sacred sites.
Perhaps most importantly, our public lands are home to the living histories and the living cultural landscapes that tell us who we are as Americans.
That’s why when I think about what we need to fundamentally improve the way we manage our public lands, I know the answer lies in including the perspectives of the people who have far too often been ignored.
Tribes across Indian Country have ancestral sites, historical ecological knowledge, and ongoing cultural practices on our federal public lands.
I know from my experience in New Mexico, we’ve been able to accomplish so many victories on our public lands in the last decade because of the leadership and engagement of tribal leaders who have a deep connection with these landscapes.
And that is because tribes should be playing an integral role in the management of these lands.
I’m not talking about federal land management agencies simply meeting with tribal leaders to check a box they call tribal consultation.
Tribal consultation is not enough.
Tribes need to have a real seat at the table.
We must empower tribes to play an active and central role in managing their living cultural landscapes.
We need to jumpstart real conversations across the Department of the Interior and at the Forest Service about working alongside tribes to manage these cultural landscapes.
We need to think through how to make official designations of places with deep significance to tribes as “cultural landscapes.”
And we need to establish permanent governing bodies with real representation from tribes that help make management decisions for these cultural landscapes.
We saw this concept in the Obama administration’s designation of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.
The lands protected by Bears Ears National Monument include thousands of historic and cultural sites with deep meaning to numerous tribes including the Navajo Nation, The Hopi, New Mexico’s Pueblos, the Ute Mountain Ute, and Northern Ute Tribes.
For years, tribal leaders raised their voices about how closely tied the Bears Ears region is to their people and told the stories of the legacy left in the canyons and on the mesas by their ancestors.
In President Obama’s proclamation establishing Bears Ears National Monument, he recognized the “importance of tribal participation to the care and management” of the cultural resources in the new monument.
President Obama called for the establishment of a Bears Ears Commission with representatives from the tribes affiliated with the cultural landscapes in the monument.
The Commission was meant to partner with the federal agencies managing the monument and to inform management decisions.
For the first time ever, tribes would have real, meaningful, and ongoing engagement in the management of one of their cultural landscapes on our federal public lands.
But as we have seen, that all depended on the goodwill and good faith of whoever occupies the White House.
Among the many problems with the Trump administration’s new management plans for a drastically shrunken Bears Ears is the complete and total omission of the Bears Ears Commission.
President Trump’s appalling action on Bears Ears is the poster child for what it looks like to make major land decisions while excluding the people who have the deepest connections to the land.
As we all continue to fight back against President Trump’s dismantling of Bears Ears, we must also recognize that we can no longer assume that similar landscapes are immune to similar abuses of presidential power.
We shouldn’t keep counting on well-intentioned and even well-executed efforts in individual National Forests or National Parks to engage with tribes.
We can’t keep tinkering around the edges of laws based on a much different time and priorities that are either outdated or were never well-intentioned in the first place with respect to tribal communities.
As my good friend Peter Pino would tell me:
“Unresolved mistakes are wounds that are taken into the future.”
We need to start treating these lands as the sacred, cultural landscapes they are and formalize the roles that tribes play in managing cultural sites and resources.
I strongly believe the next evolution in our public land management must be to make meaningful tribal engagement and co-management of cultural landscapes the law of the land.
That’s why my legislation to establish New Mexico’s Bandelier National Monument as a national park includes a tribal commission.
This commission, composed of representatives from affiliated tribes, would provide guidance for park management that reflects traditional and historical knowledge and values.
In a historic precedent for a national park, traditional knowledge will be required by statute to be integrated into land management planning.
This is the type of model we need to enact for sacred lands across America.
This is how we can ensure long-term protection of sacred sites and living cultural landscapes like Bears Ears, Chaco Canyon, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the Badger-Two Medicine.
What I am suggesting will not be easy.
There are those within the administration and within public lands agencies that do not want tribes to have a real seat at the table.
They may not say it publically, but they will work behind closed doors to undermine any effort to bring tribes to the table in a more meaningful way.
You are going to have to make your voices heard to make this vision a reality. And we need to elevate the voices of the next generation of tribal leaders.
As with so many of the challenges we face, I’ve found that the most effective voices for change come from our young people.
That’s why we need to take our children outdoors from an early age so they can get their hands dirty, learn traditional knowledge, and see the natural beauty all around them.
In my experience, the best way to teach new generations to fall in love with our land and water is through hands-on conservation work.
As an AmeriCorps alum myself, I’m proud to support initiatives like the Southwest Conservation Corps’ Ancestral Lands program and the Rocky Mountain Youth Corps’s partnership with Taos Pueblo.
These national service programs give Native youth opportunities to work directly on historical preservation, traditional agriculture, and landscape restoration projects on tribal and shared public lands.
When you meet with these crews of young people, you see lifelong connections to the land and water forming before your very eyes.
You can see their excitement and enthusiasm as they learn what it means that this is their land, their water, their home.
It is this new generation, and the generations to come, who will continue to pass on their tribes’ deep connection to place.
That’s who we are fighting for when we fight for our public and tribal lands. I hope you will all continue to think of me as a partner in that fight.
Thank you.
