The Keep It In The Ground team has been working at a relentless pace to build momentum across multiple fronts. We hosted a webinar featuring Joey Peltier of Mukqua and Leanna Goose of Rise and Repair, aimed at educating our online audience about the specific dangers posed by this Magellan pipeline and the particular threat it poses to the sacred grounds of the Pipestone National Monument.
At the same time, we’ve been conducting a full-scale media blitz, making appearances on KILI radio out of Porcupine, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, appearing twice on KLND radio out of Fort Yates, North Dakota, on Standing Rock, and joining Robert Pilot’s show twice here on Native Roots Radio in the Twin Cities.
Beyond the airwaves, we also co-hosted a joint public meeting on June 22nd at the Minneapolis American Indian Center alongside the Indigenous Protector Movement, the Braveheart Society, and the Red Nation, where the conversation centered specifically on the ecology of the pipeline routes and gave community members the chance to fill out public comments expressing both their support for sacred sites and their opposition to the pipeline itself within the PUC docket 23-109.
What’s becoming increasingly clear is that concern is spreading, and tribal nations are beginning to weigh in with growing force. White Earth, in particular, came forward very strongly, condemning the pipeline and the process surrounding it while urging the PUC to engage in free and prior informed consent and to honor the nation-to-nation relationships and treaty rights that are rightfully due to the tribes.
The big news is that we have a 60-day extension to the public comment period, and hundreds and hundreds of comments are pouring in opposing the pipeline!
As this process moves forward there will be two more opportunities to comment. Stay tuned to our socials and messages in your email.
This month we attended “Uniting West Wisconsin: A Regional Response to Data Centers”, headlined by viral comedian Charlie Bearns. The event was hosted by Great Lakes Neighbors United (GLNU), a Wisconsin-based grassroots organization working to educate, empower, and connect residents and local leaders responding to large-scale development issues affecting their communities. This event was attended by nearly a thousand people, Democrats, Republicans, union workers, farmers, ranchers, local activists, and environmentalists. The anti-data center movement is broad and deep.
On June 26th, I spoke at the rally in front of the Minnesota Capitol, where Mukwa presented the Mother Earth Vs Big Tech Petition. This petition advocates for a two-year moratorium on the construction of hyperscale data centers, and our goal is to deliver this message directly to the office of the Governor of Minnesota.
Speakers from Mukwa, Indigenous Protector Movement, Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development, Rise and Repair Coalition, and the Stop the Pine Island Data Center.
I spoke on the connection between data centers and a new nuclear power rush fueling new uranium mines on native land. Natives die in every step of the nuclear supply chain. We die when our relatives fall prey to industrial accidents in the mines; we are harmed by the radioactive dust left when mines are abandoned; we die in the transportation spills across our lands, and die next to the toxic waste storage and nuclear power plants on our reservations. In Minnesota, the highest rates of thyroid cancer are found in the Prairie Island Indian Community, where the Exel nuclear power plant has sat for over 40 years.
