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| Building Bridges: Robert Tohe’s work to bring renewable energy to Navajo and Hopi lands is just one example of efforts to work with new allies. |
While studying engineering at the University of New Mexico in 1970, Tohe joined the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island and was awed by the convergence of the anti-war, civil rights, and Native American rights movements. “It changed me forever,” he says. “I’ve been a civil rights activist ever since.”
Tohe is one of three Sierra Club staffers dedicated to building bridges with Native American communities. Through its Environmental Justice and Partnership programs, the Club is keenly aware that it can be more effective when it teams up with groups directly affected by corporate irresponsibility, including non-traditional allies like communities of color, labor groups, faith communities, and hunters and anglers.
Working with Tohe in Flagstaff is Andy Bessler, a Sierra Club Partnerships Program organizer (and non-Native American) who five years ago was instrumental in the shutdown of a pumice mine in the San Francisco Peaks, a mountain range sacred to 13 tribes.
Bessler and Tohe are working with Native American and environmental grassroots groups to usher in a “just transition” of Hopi and Navajo lands from producing coal to providing space for renewable-energy resources like solar and wind. They’re meeting with tribal communities, negotiating with government agencies, and demanding accountability from Peabody Energy, which owns the lease for the Black Mesa coal mine on tribal property.
Meanwhile, the Partnership Program’s Chas Jewett, a Lakota Tribe member, is protecting sacred lands in South Dakota. She works to keep logging in check in the Black Hills National Forest, promote wilderness proposals, and halt a campground near sacred Bear Butte. That facility, to be called “Sacred Grounds Campground,” would feature a 40-foot statue of an Indian.
In all cases their work is slow and steady. It can be tricky to get groups to agree, and a sensitive approach is key.
Bessler, for instance, has run traditional Hopi footraces, planted beans, harvested corn, prayed in sweat lodges, and danced at pow wows—all in an effort to understand the culture he works with, meet community members, build trust, and keep the lines of communication open. This comes easier for Tohe and Jewett, but they must also build a rapport. Says Tohe, “The Sierra Club as a whole follows closely behind me once I set up a trust relationship.”
His efforts at the moment—the transition of tribal lands from producing coal to supporting sustainable energy options—involves preparing a shareholder resolution for Peabody Energy’s annual meeting this spring and finding corporate funding to support sustainable energy development.
Tohe relishes these innovative approaches. “You have to understand how a community works in order to be successful,” he says. “I know there are going to be challenges every day, and I look forward to that.”
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