Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[3]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[9]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[3]

EntryDate

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1		-2016-10-02 17:38:06.912
	1	+2016-10-02 17:38:06.0

Caselist.CitesClass[9]

Cites

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	1	+Congress should give indigenous control over nuclear energy on their land . Segal, JD, 12
	2	+(Alice, URANIUM MINING AND THE NAVAJO NATION - LEGAL INJUSTICE Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice 21 S. Cal. Rev. L. and Social Justice 355)
	3	+Additionally, the U.S. government has made it easier for corporations to harm the Navajo people. Specifically, it does not sufficiently regulate mining organizations because it fears that doing so would stunt corporate growth. Thus, to promote economic prosperity, it has allowed organizations to poison tribal land. As a result, the government has indirectly given many Navajos cancer. Legal action needs to be taken to enable the Navajo Nation to protect its people. The Indian Child Welfare Act implies that Congress may be willing to expand the authority of Navajo courts. According to the Act, Congress has "assumed the responsibility for the protection and preservation of Indian Tribes and their resources." n277 To compensate for past misdeeds, the tribes were given "exclusive jurisdiction" over Native American child custody proceedings and Native American parents were given the right to intervene in foster care proceedings to enable them to preserve their own *391 culture and prevent external influence. n278 Congress gave Native American governments the power to preserve their culture and granted the expansion of power because "an alarmingly high percentage of Indian families were broken up by the removal, often unwarranted, of their children from them by non-tribal ... agencies and that an alarmingly high percentage of such children are placed in non-Indian foster and adoptive homes and institutions." n279 Congress should pass another act, which grants Navajo courts the authority to control their land for the same reasons it passed the Indian Child Welfare Act. As the history of Navajo authority and uranium mining has shown, the limitation of the rights of the Navajo has not just been with the legitimized theft of their children under the pretense of child health concerns. Therefore, similar to the special treatment provided in the Indian Child Welfare Act, Congress should enable the Navajo Nation to get special authority to manage tribal land with similar authority granted to states for controlling the cleanup, compensation, and regulation of uranium mining that will affect Navajo people. Currently, state and federal agencies both pressure and limit Navajo authority over their own and surrounding land. Legislatively expanding Navajo authority would enable the Navajo to better control the limited land that they have been allotted in the past and enable the Navajo government to prevent the continued exposure that is currently being forced upon them.
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	5	+Competes: a) net benefits and b) allows tribes to decide if nuclear power continues to get produced, so it’s not a prohibition.
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	7	+Solves dumping – hardly any tribes want it. Johnson 12
	8	+Johnson, Charles K. "A Sovereignty of Convenience: Native American Sovereignty and the United States Government's Plan for Radioactive Waste on Indian Land." Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development 9.2 (2012): 22.TF
	9	+Given the financial state of much of Indian Country, it is significant¶ that only seventeen tribal governments, out of nearly 560¶ federally recognized tribes, decided to apply for the money. Also¶ significant was the fact that the tribes accepting these grants had¶ virtually no experience dealing with radiation. Soon, their leaders¶ were under siege from angry tribal members.¶ In January 1992, Grace Thorpe was enjoying a comfortable retirement,¶ volunteering for her tribe, the Sac and Fox Nation of¶ Oklahoma, as a Health Commissioner and part-time tribal judge.¶ She was retired, that is, until she discovered that her tribe was¶ one of the seventeen applying for funding through the United¶ States government's MRS nuclear waste program. She¶ researched the issue, discovered that her initial reaction to oppose¶ the program was warranted, and set about successfully challenging¶ the grant at a special meeting of the Sac and Fox Tribe. Tribal¶ members voted by a margin of seventy to five to return their¶ $100,000 grant.¶ Suddenly, she found herself swept up into a new unpaid "career,"¶ speaking throughout the country against the United States¶ government's MRS scheme. Thorpe, a daughter of legendary athlete,¶ Jim Thorpe, was not unfamiliar with political action. She¶ participated in the occupation of Alcatraz during the 1970's. As an aide to former Senator James Abourezk, she helped shepherd¶ legislation through Congress that allows Indian Nations a first¶ chance at surplus federal lands-an extremely important provision¶ that has allowed tribes to increase their land bases.¶ In her travels, she discovered that Native American activists¶ throughout the country had awakened to this plan for nuclear¶ waste storage. They too, were able to reverse their tribal governments¶ position on accepting radioactive waste. Together with¶ other Native American environmental activists, Thorpe formed¶ the National Environmental Coalition of Native Americans¶ ("NECONA") in March of 1993. As of today, through efforts of¶ NECONA, only four tribal councils are still considering taking an¶ MRS radioactive waste dump.¶ In June of 1993, NECONA, under Grace Thorpe's leadership,¶ made an alliance with Nuclear-Free America to promote the declaration¶ of Nuclear Free Zones ("NFZs") on Native American lands.¶ The Nuclear Free Indian Lands Project, through letter and personal¶ contact, has succeeded in encouraging the formation of six¶ new NFZs since that time. 19 The newly declared Nuclear Free Nations¶ joined the Flathead Nation of Salish and Kootenai, which¶ has been an NFZ since 1984.
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	12	+And cp best addresses historical injustice. Segal, JD, 12
	13	+(Alice, URANIUM MINING AND THE NAVAJO NATION - LEGAL INJUSTICE Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice 21 S. Cal. Rev. L. and Social Justice 355)
	14	+Only a direct mandate from Congress would sufficiently enable Navajo sovereignty. This kind of congressional authority is exemplified by the Delaney Mandate, which required food manufacturers to eliminate all carcinogens from their products. Although the court believed that a complete elimination was not necessary, it had to follow the mandate because Congress clearly expressed its intent. n280 In contrast, by interpreting vague statutes against the Navajo people, courts have significantly reduced the rights of tribal governments. Thus, only a direct and clearly worded congressional mandate would sufficiently expand the authority of Navajo courts and tribal government. This new authority should allow the Navajo government to regulate and try non-Native *392 Americans that damage the Navajo environment, just as any state could do. Corrective justice theories, as applied by Congress in the Indian Child Welfare Act, justify expanding the authority of Navajo courts. Specifically, the new law should allow the Navajo government to regulate and try non-Native Americans that damage tribal land. Even the very existence of the tribes was affected by the whims of Congress throughout history. As a result of this one-way relationship, courts were able to strip away Navajo children from their families. This injustice was not corrected until Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act, which provided the Navajo with greater authority. n281 To compensate for historical injustices such as this, as well as to allow them to define for themselves their own people groups, the Navajo Nation should be granted greater authority over its land as a sovereign tribe. However, Congress has resisted efforts to increase Navajo authority because this would reduce the federal government's power. An optimal solution that would satisfy the interests of both Congress and the Navajo Nation would be to give the Navajo authority over uranium mining. Under the NRC's lax oversight, federal agencies have proven inept at regulating uranium mining and cleanup. Courts have deferred to the agencies' poor decisions, perpetuating inefficient and reckless mining. On the other hand, the Navajo government has both the interest and organizational capacity to regulate uranium mining because the Nation has a personal stake in protecting its people from further exposure to radioactive material. The interests of the Navajo suggest that, with congressional help, the Navajo government would work to resolve the unfair treatment of its people through careful management of uranium mining.
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	17	+Net Benefit
	18	+Net Benefit is Tribal Sovereignty
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	20	+Deciding whether nuclear power is right or wrong is the wrong question – resolving encroachments on indigenous lands requires included them in the decision first. Making the decision for them perpetuates colonialism. Ishiyama, 03
	21	+Ishiyama, Noriko. "Environmental justice and American Indian tribal sovereignty: Case study of a land–use conflict in Skull Valley, Utah." Antipode 35.1 (2003): 119-139. TF
	22	+Within the contexts of colonialism and the politics of tribal sovereignty, it is not possible to conclude that actually siting the PFS facility on the Skull Valley reservation means that justice will have been achieved for the tribe, simply because the tribe made the decision in its sovereignty capacity. Instead, the following question needs to be answered: In what context has the tribe made the decision to accept high-level radioactive waste?¶ The inevitable answer is that a prolonged process of historical colonialism over people and land has produced a landscape of injustice in which the tribe’s choices have been severely structurally limited. Even if the tribe makes an informed decision to host the PFS facility, working from consensus among tribal leaders reached through a democratic process, they never participated in the decision-making process leading to production of nuclear waste or to the absence of alternate means of economic survival in the desert landscape. Lack of economic autonomy, due largely to the protracted environmental degradation of Skull Valley, has prevented the tribe from pursuing robust political-economic sovereignty as an indigenous nation. Whether the tribe ends up hosting high-level radioactive waste on the reservation or not, therefore, this land-use conflict represents procedural environmental injustice conditioned by Skull Valley’s historical geography.¶ The Skull Valley land-use debate reveals theoretical defects in the predominant discourses of environmental racism and distributive environmental justice, raising significant conceptual questions. As indicated in this case, it is not necessarily useful to prove racist in- tention on the part of electric utilities and the federal government to site nuclear waste on the tribal reservation. The disenfranchisement of the tribe through institutional exclusion from and isolation in the environmental decision-making processes indicates the structural aspects of racism embedded in hegemonic ideologies. Rather than seeking equity in the distribution of hazards or eliminating intentional racist actions, therefore, environmental justice requires the participation of communities in various decision-making processes that are conditioned by and intertwined with the political-economic processes and social relations at different geographical scales. In the context of Indian country, environmental justice depends on tribes’ sovereign capacity to pursue politically, economically, and ecologically sound options for sustainable development. Accordingly, reinforce- ment of both political and economic sovereignty of tribes will lead to the long-term accomplishment of environmental justice.¶ No easy answer exists to resolve the Skull Valley conflict concerning the siting of high-level radioactive waste. Making a simple judgment regarding environmental justice solely in the context of the present siting of the PFS facility leads us nowhere. This paper does not provide specific suggestions to resolve the immediate conflict, which is com- plicated by a variety of difficult historical, social, and political- economic questions. Instead, environmental-justice scholars are encouraged to reframe their research questions to articulate the truly complex practices of political economy and historical colonialism over communities’ struggles for self-determination. The landscape and the peoples who play active roles in the Skull Valley conflict would not then be subject to the influence of the simplistic analyses of environmental justice that have restricted the terms of this debate thus far
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	24	+Merely saying nuclear power is bad ignores the way that some tribes use deals with power companies to reclaim control and political influence. Ishiyama 03
	25	+Ishiyama, Noriko. "Environmental justice and American Indian tribal sovereignty: Case study of a land–use conflict in Skull Valley, Utah." Antipode 35.1 (2003): 119-139. TF
	26	+The Goshutes live modest lives, isolated in the arid desert and forgotten by mainstream society after the initial period of colon-ization. They used to hunt and gather the limited resources available in their homeland, efficiently adjusting to the ecology of the desert and relocating themselves as seasons rotated (Defa 1979). The Euro-American settlement transformed the ecological system of the desert, introducing horses and mules, which overgrazed the grasses and thus lessened the prevalence of seeds that the tribe gathered. Finding hungry Goshutes digging roots from the ground, settlers called them “diggers.” Other Indian tribes did not acknowledge the Goshutes as equals, either—Utes used to call them poor people (Papanikolas1995:12). Despised, feared, and neglected, Goshutes have demanded little from the outside society, living quietly for a long time. The reservation community has been struggling to survive, suffering the legacies of colonialism. Only 24 of the 124 members currently live on the reservation; many Goshutes have left, seeking opportunities and jobs elsewhere. The reservation has not attracted major business or industry, except for a small Pony Express convenience store and the tribe’s leasing contract with a rocket-engine testing facility on the site. The tribal leaders argue that the PFS project may enable the tribe to pursue sustainable development as a united community. In the 1990s, therefore, the Skull Valley Band of Goshutes became significantly more visible, due largely to the leaders’ declaration to welcome a temporary storage facility for high-level radioactive waste into their reservation. Suddenly, the invisible tribe isolated in adesolate desert presented a political and ecological threat to Utah politicians and the public. The decision to sign a contract with PFS appeared out of the blue for Utah politicians, but for the Skull Valley Goshute tribe, the project was completely consistent with the environmental history of Tooele County, Utah.
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	29	+Blanket policies deny tribal sovereignty, which takes away their only tool to fight colonialism. Ishiyama ‘03
	30	+Ishiyama, Noriko. "Environmental justice and American Indian tribal sovereignty: Case study of a land–use conflict in Skull Valley, Utah." Antipode 35.1 (2003): 119-139. TF
	31	+The concept of tribal sovereignty has essentially defined the politics regarding struggles for self-determination among actors involved with the Skull Valley environmental management as well as the siting of environmental hazards in tribal nations in the United States. Sovereignty recognized by treaties and the US constitution does not represent something given to the tribe; rather, it is what tribes have retained throughout the tragic history of colonialism. As Vine Deloria and Clifford Lytle (1998:15) state, self-government of tribes has been “a product of the historical process” required for tribal political survival. Retention of sovereignty, therefore, means the survival of tribes, which hold unique legal and political status as independent nations within the United States.¶ American Indian activists engaged in the environmental-justice movement have explicitly addressed the importance of sovereignty (Pulido 1996b). They participated in the process of drafting the “Principles of Environmental Justice” during the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. Principle 11 (Newton 1996:156–158) makes a clear statement: “Environmental justice must recognize a special legal and natural relationship of Native People to the US government through treaties, agreements, compacts, and covenants affirming sovereignty and self-determination.” This principle emphasizes the significance of sovereignty, which makes American Indian tribes distinctive from other ethnic minorities fighting against environmental injustice in terms of their political strategy for activism.¶ Environmental-justice activists have demanded that tribes get appropriate federal assistance in order to establish infrastructure equivalent to that of state governments so that they can develop sound environmental programs to protest outside industry’s attempt to damage the ecology of tribal land. The director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, Tom Goldtooth (1995), points out that the Environmental Protection Agency failed to acknowledge the sovereign status of tribal governments entitled to receive funds to develop environmental management of their own until 1984. Conse- quently, he (1995:147) clarifies, most tribes were severely behind state governments in environmental infrastructure development. Grass- roots activists hold a strong mandate to protect tribal sovereignty, struggling to develop the political-economic and legislative infra- structure for participatory democracy.¶ At the same time, American Indian activism for social and environmental justice faces a challenging question over who has the legitimate right to realize tribal sovereignty. Grassroots environmental activists tend to question the legitimacy of tribal representatives when they do not share the same ecological philosophies. Goldtooth reveals an ideological and political disagreement over tribal sovereignty among indigenous communities:¶ We as indigenous grassroots are the most protective of our sovereignty and do not hide behind it or use it as a cloak or shield like some of our Tribal governmental leaders. Some of our Tribal leaders use sovereignty to protect them from criticism or legal attack on tribal developments that are environmentally unsound (personal communication, 27 September 1996). Grace Thorpe (1996:720), another key American Indian figure in the environmental-justice movement, criticizes tribal leaders who support nuclear waste sites in Indian nations for “selling our sovereignty.” Thus, while recognizing the significance of protecting tribal sovereignty from various outside threats, tribal and grassroots leaders hardly share a consensus on the strategic process to fortify it.¶ Some indigenous grassroots activists have adopted the romanticized ethnic identity of American Indians as stewards of the environment for the purpose of justifying their right to self-determination in environmental management. They have utilized what Pulido (1998) calls “ecological legitimacy” rooted in cultural essentialism to empower and establish solidarity in the movement. Goldtooth asserts:¶ There are ideological differences with the mentality of our Indian “relatives” who have decided to follow the “American dream.” The American dream is about money and power. It is about owning the land ... Indigenous Peoples don’t think this way. We are only caretakers of this great sacred land. (Personal communication, 27 September 1996)¶ Cultural essentialism in the formation of American-Indian identities has played a significant role in developing the environmental-justice movement. Nevertheless, it has promoted the problematic general- ization of a culturally diverse population according to the stereotype and has dismissed the voices of those who do not share the same ecological views. This tension concerning tribal sovereignty inter- twined with the definition of American-Indian ethnic identities establishes the context of intensified political battles concerning the Skull Valley land-use debate.

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-10-02 17:38:10.438

Judge

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	1	+Sarah Garris

Opponent

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	1	+Christopher Columbus AT

ParentRound

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	1	+3

Round

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	1	+5

Team

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	1	+Harvard Westlake Paul Neg

Title

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	1	+SeptOct - CP Indigenous

Tournament

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	1	+Holy Cross