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Bone-chilling cold and Arctic winds gripped the northeastern U.S. over the past few weeks, straining electricity systems and raising power prices as people cranked up their heat. Now, as the region finally starts to thaw, early data shows how America’s offshore wind farms helped keep electricity flowing during the extreme-weather stretch.
The results demonstrate the bitter irony of the Trump administration’s ongoing — and potentially unlawful — battle against U.S. offshore wind development. Federal officials are calling for additional fossil fuel power to prevent future winter blackouts, all while trying to block the build-out of offshore wind, one of the most valuable resources for cold-climate coastal states.
“Performance data is showing in real time that offshore wind delivers reliable power when the grid needs it the most … at the scale this region and our country need,” said Liz Burdock, president and CEO of Oceantic Network, which advocates for marine renewable energy sectors.
Burdock was speaking on Tuesday in New York City at the group’s annual International Partnering Forum, where hundreds of offshore wind developers, policy experts, and labor leaders gathered to regroup following President Donald Trump’s yearlong attacks on five in-progress offshore wind farms.
For years, independent energy experts have forecast that offshore wind could deliver substantial amounts of power to densely-populated, land-constrained communities along America’s east coast — particularly during winter cold spells, when demand for fossil gas exceeds supply. And grid operators in the region have been banking on offshore wind capacity to come online to meet the rising electricity needs of data centers and electrified homes and vehicles.
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The data from January shows that the nation’s two operating utility-scale offshore wind farms — South Fork Wind and Vineyard Wind — performed as well as gas-fired power plants and better than coal-fired facilities, including during last month’s Winter Storm Fern, experts said at the event.
The 132-megawatt South Fork Wind farm, which delivers power to Long Island, New York, had a “capacity factor” of 52 percent last month. The metric reflects how much electricity the project actually generated compared with the maximum amount it could generate in a given period. That puts South Fork Wind on par with New York state’s most efficient gas plants.
“The wind capacity in the Northeast is absolutely amazing, particularly over the winter,” said Mikkel Mæhlisen, vice president of the Americas Generation division for Ørsted, which jointly owns South Fork Wind with Skyborn Renewables.
The 12-turbine project became America’s first utility-scale offshore wind farm in 2024, when it started providing power to some 70,000 homes. Last winter, it was also a beacon of reliability, notching a 54 percent capacity factor between December 2024 and March 2025.
Vineyard Wind, meanwhile, can already produce as much as 600 MW of clean electricity off the coast of Massachusetts. The project, which is 95 percent complete, is one of the five offshore wind farms that were forced to halt construction late last year in response to Trump’s stop-work orders, which cited ambiguous “national security” concerns. Federal judges have allowed all five projects to proceed as the developers’ complaints move through the legal system.
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However, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum says the Trump administration plans to appeal those court rulings, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
During Winter Storm Fern, Vineyard Wind had a 75 percent capacity factor, Burdock said. Once fully operational, the project will deliver power at a price of $84.23 per megawatt-hour to the New England grid. That’s markedly less than spot wholesale prices during the storm, which spiked to over $870 per MWh on January 25.
Soaring gas prices and limited supplies pushed utilities in New England to fire up oil-burning power plants in order to avert blackouts, assets that are typically too expensive to justify running. The result will be even higher bills for the region’s residents, who have historically faced some of the highest energy costs in the nation — in part because New England lacks recoverable resources like oil and gas, said Katie Dykes, commissioner of Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
Having a more diverse energy mix would help states reduce the reliance on firm, dispatchable, but also costly and dirty power plants during such challenging periods.
“Variable resources like wind and solar, when they’re operating during these cold weather periods, they’re actually helping to keep a lid on prices,” Dykes said during a panel. “It means we can reduce the runtimes of those more expensive oil units. It also means that we can preserve the runtime of those [fossil] resources that are relying on stored fuel.”
Proponents of America’s nascent offshore wind industry said they’re hopeful the five in-progress projects will be completed as planned. In New York, Ørsted’s Sunrise Wind and Equinor’s Empire Wind would together provide 1.7 gigawatts of new capacity — enough to meet more than 10 percent of the electricity needs in New York City and Long Island.
“The last few weeks have been extremely stressful,” Gary Stephenson, a senior vice president for the Long Island Power Authority, said about the region’s cold snap. The municipal utility, which serves 1.2 million customers, purchases power from South Fork Wind and will connect its grid to Sunrise Wind, which is expected to start operating in 2027.
“I really wish we had that Sunrise facility online. That would have taken so much pressure off the natural gas system,” Stephenson said at the event. “So we’re looking forward to that [coming online] towards the end of next year.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Offshore wind showed up big during the East Coast’s brutal cold on Feb 14, 2026.
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This story was originally published by Grist.
Tristan Ahtone
Grist
When Billie Eilish told Grammy audiences that “no one is illegal on stolen land,” she ignited a small firestorm that went beyond celebrity discourse, revealing deep fault lines in how America confronts its own history.
Critics accused her of hypocrisy, pointing out that her multimillion-dollar Los Angeles home sits on Tongva land. Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas invoked her line in a Senate hearing, calling the entertainment world “deeply corrupt.” Meanwhile, pundits and commentators spawned online backlash and memes. And The Washington Post published an op-ed defending property law and dismissing land restitution.
“No, Billie Eilish, Americans are not thieves on stolen land,” op-ed authors Richard Epstein and Max Raskin wrote on Thursday. Only days before, Eilish responded to ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and killings by pointing to America’s history of violent colonialism and genocide directed at Indigenous peoples. The Washington Post authors argue “it’s time to put Eilish’s theory of property out to pasture,” arguing, “it is easy to call land stolen, but what about the innocent purchasers who acquired in good faith in the interim? Are they thieves?”
This language, these arguments, are reasonably predictable. They appear when Indigenous dispossession is pushed into the public eye.
But there are countless examples throughout history of Indigenous peoples being forced to cede land under threat of violence, take for example, what is currently Washington State. Between 1854 and 1855, territorial governor Isaac Stevens pressured tribes in the region into ceding much of the West Coast to the United States. His warning to Yakama Chief Kamiakin was explicit: “if you do not accept the offer … you will walk in blood knee-deep.” The threat was not rhetorical — less than a decade earlier, the California gold rush brought settlers west and culminated in what California Governor Gavin Newsom would later call genocide. “No other way to describe it,” Newsom said in 2019. “That’s the way it needs to be described in the history books.”
The U.S. frequently combined economic pressure, unequal bargaining power, and the threat of military force in treaty negotiations, and establishing Minnesota was no different. The federal government withheld rations promised to tribes after previous land cessions, and allowed settlers to violate previous treaties — which are federal law — in order to hunt and claim land in agreed-upon Indian territory. With the treaties of 1851, signed at Mendota and Traverse des Sioux, the Dakota Nation was forced to cede 35 million acres — nearly the entire bottom half of what later became Minnesota. Tensions eventually led to the Dakota War, a five-week conflict that forced the removal of nearly all Indigenous peoples from the state. Those actions, that war, have also been called genocide by Holocaust and Genocide scholars, as well as the act’s direct beneficiaries: the Minneapolis and St. Paul City Councils.
In The Washington Post, Epstein and Raskin refer to the land acknowledgements that spring from these histories as “accepting generational guilt,” adding that statements of apology, like those by the state of California, “thankfully” don’t transfer title backward to the original owners, “for if they did, civilization would collapse.”
Scholars of settler colonialism have long documented how the U.S. has framed whiteness as synonymous with “civilization,” while casting Indigenous peoples as obstacles to progress — a racist framework where owning property becomes the key marker to civilization. Epstein and Raskin’s argument operates squarely within this tradition. By treating property titles as the foundation of civilization, it obscures the history that made them possible: war, forced removal, forced assimilation of children, and policies that historians and government officials have described as genocide.
Take for instance the Morrill Act of 1862, which used land taken from tribal nations to fund the land-grant university system: nearly 11 million acres taken from more than 250 tribes to establish 52 universities.
Then there are state Enabling Acts, laws passed by Congress that authorized the formation of a state government and allowed for admission to the Union. As Indigenous homelands became territories and territories became states, newly-formed state governments carved land out of their newly acquired “public domain” through their enabling acts to fund state institutions, services, and public works. Those lands are now known as state trust lands.
The primary purpose of state trust lands was education and has remained so to this day. Land-grant colleges, for instance, opened their doors with the help of the Morrill Act, then states stepped in with more income from state trust lands. Grist investigations have since identified 14 land-grant universities still benefiting from more than 8 million acres of land taken from 123 Indigenous nations through 150 Indigenous land cessions. This land generated approximately $6.6 billion in profit between 2018 and 2022.
Nearly 25 percent of state trust lands that benefit land-universities are designated for mining or fossil fuel production. In Montana, oil and gas extraction, timber, grazing, and other activities on state trust lands generated $62 million for public institutions, with a majority of that cash going to K-12 schools. Ten states use nearly 2 million acres of state trust lands to fund state prison systems. In 2024, those lands disbursed an estimated $33 million in funding to carceral facilities. At least 79 reservations in 15 states have state trust lands within their boundaries, an estimated 2 million acres, that provide revenue to support public institutions and reduce the financial burden on taxpayers. “Every dollar earned by the Land Office,” said New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard in 2019, “is a dollar taxpayers do not have to pay to support public institutions.”
In at least four states, tribal nations pay states for access to those lands despite being within their own territorial boundaries — an estimated 11,000 acres. The Ute Tribe paid the State of Utah more than $25,000 to graze on those trust lands in 2023 alone. While critics have been quick to point out that institutions like K-12 schools benefit everybody, it’s important to remember that many tribal members don’t attend state-run schools at all, they enroll in Bureau of Indian Education schools that receive funding from the federal government.
But return of those lands remains mired in bureaucracy. In 2024, Grist reported that more than 90,000 state trust lands inside the Yakama reservation — the reservation created under threat of walking knee deep in blood — were mistakenly carved from the Yakama Nation due to a federal filing error. The tribe has fought for its land to be returned for nearly seven decades, but Washington has refused to let them go: American property law says the state’s ownership over those lands is legal because the state holds the deed.
But Washington acknowledges that this is an injustice, and that that land should be returned to the tribe. However, then-Commissioner of Public Lands Hilary Franz, argued that righting that wrong would take revenue away from beneficiaries like K-12 schools. The state, therefore, would need to be compensated for their loss of revenue, even though those lands were wrongfully taken in the first place. Between 2021 and 2023, those state trust lands generated about $573,000for state beneficiaries — less than 1 percent of all revenue from all trust lands across Washington state.
In The Washington Post op-ed, the writers say that “the effort to undo the past would involve trillions of dollars in transfer payments and coerced title shifts that would unsettle every home mortgage, every mining and oil lease.” They are correct. To return land to tribal nations would be to unsettle — pun intended — the very foundations that drive climate change and threaten life on the planet. A fact echoed by more than 600 scientific and conservation studies over the past 20 years that say Indigenous land return offers significant environmental returns with serious implications for tackling climate change.
Ultimately, the controversy surrounding Eilish’s remark reveals less about celebrity or even property than the limits of America’s moral imagination, including at influential media outlets. Democracy may die in darkness, but America was built in daylight, and in America, oppression and injustice don’t need shadows to thrive — they need champions.
The post Billie Eilish, stolen land, and the climate cost of America’s dispossession appeared first on ICT.
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Daniel Herrera CarbajalICT
PHOENIX — Tribes want more of a seat at the table for Colorado River water usage talks.
As the seven Colorado River Basin states seem unlikely to reach a water usage agreement by Feb. 14, tribes want more input in the new operating guidelines.
The deadline was set by Interior Secretary Doug Bergum after the basin states failed to reach an agreement by the original date in November 2025.
Historically tribes have been excluded from Colorado River management.
“When these laws were made regarding the river, we weren’t part of that,” Colorado River Indian Tribes Chairwoman Amelia Flores, told ICT. “We continue to tell them to correct that with these guidelines that are coming out for the future.”
Boats move along Lake Powell along the Upper Colorado River Basin Wednesday, June 9, 2021, in Wahweap, Ariz. Included in the infrastructure deal that became law last month is $2.5 billion for Native American water rights settlements, which quantify individual tribes’ claims to water and identify infrastructure projects to help deliver it to residents. On the Navajo Nation, the largest reservation in the U.S., the money could fund a settlement reached in 2020 over water in the upper Colorado River basin. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
In the original 1922 Colorado River compact the only parties at the negotiating table were the seven basin states and the United States. None of the 30 Tribal nations who have claims to the river and its tributaries were present in negotiations.
Thirty tribal nations have varying degrees of recognized water rights, with 22 Tribal Nations holding rights to use approximately 3.2 million acre-feet of Colorado river water annually. This equals approximately 25 percent of the basin’s annual water.
There are currently 12 tribal nations with unresolved water right’s claims which once adjudicated or settled, would increase the total volume of water that must serve tribal nations.
One of those tribes is the Pueblo of Zuni.
“The Colorado River and Grand Canyon is homeland to the Zuni people,” Zuni Councilman Edward Wemytewa told ICT.” “And we do not have readily available access to the river. We have to organize with other Tribes. . . Zuni needs to be more involved with the river.”
While many tribe’s water rights are senior, dating back before the 1922 compact, they often do not use them due to funding and infrastructure barriers.
“The Colorado River Indian Irrigation Project is probably the oldest in the BIA system and it is operated and maintained by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. And quite frankly, they have not done a very good job of maintaining and keeping the irrigation project in prime working order. And as a result the project is highly inefficient and it makes it difficult for the tribes and its members to be able to fully access its water because the system is the only way we can access our water in Arizona and it is just incredibly inefficient,” Bezedek told ICT.
This undated photo shows an irrigation canal on farmland in Mohave Valley, Arizona. An arm of the Central Arizona Project wants to buy farmland in the Mohave Valley Irrigation and Drainage District, pay farmers to fallow portions of it and send the water savings to central and southern Arizona. (DK McDonald/Mohave Valley Daily News via AP)
Recently, governors of six of the seven basin states met in Washington D.C. in an attempt to reach an agreement in Colorado River negotiations.
If the states can’t reach an agreement before the current operating guidelines expire in October, the federal government will implement one of its alternative usage plans.
The current interim operating guidelines for lower basin shortages specify how and when deliveries are made to California, Arizona and Nevada, and are triggered by reservoir levels in Lake Mead.
New operational guidelines for Lake Mead and Lake Powell are actively underway led by the Bureau of Reclamation in consultation with states and tribes as well as other stakeholders.
In January a draft Environmental Impact Statement was released which analyzes five main alternatives:
- No Action Alternative
- Basic Coordination Alternative (Federal Authorities Alternative)
- Enhanced Coordination Alternative (Federal Authorities Hybrid Alternative)
- Maximum Operational Flexibility Alternative (Cooperative Conservation Alternative)
- Supply Driven Alternative
Colorado River Indian Tribes is currently reviewing the proposed alternatives according to lead water attorney John Bezdek.
CRIT has the most senior water rights of any entity with water usage rights to the Colorado River.
“CRIT first and foremost wants to see its water rights protected and the ability for CRIT to fully put its water to use,” Bezdek told ICT. “We would also like to see barriers for our water use taken down and the opportunity for CRIT, as well as other tribes to be fully engaged in finding solutions here in the Colorado River Basin.”
The Colorado River is split into two basins outlined in the 1922 Colorado River Compact. The lower basin consists of Arizona, California and Nevada. The upper basin consists of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico and a small portion of Arizona.
Tribal nations rely on the Colorado River for agricultural, domestic and commercial uses as well as spiritual activities and practices.
“We want to be part of the solution and we’ll continue to voice that. We’ll continue to push for being part of the solution,” Flores told ICT.
“Given the importance of a consensus-based approach to operations for the stability of the system, Reclamation has not yet identified a preferred alternative,” Bureau of Reclamation Acting Commissioner Scott Cameron said. “However, Reclamation anticipates that when an agreement is reached, it will incorporate elements or variations of these five alternatives and will be fully analyzed in the Final EIS enabling the sustainable and effective management of the Colorado River.”
Following a public comment period and feedback, a final EIS and record of decision are expected before Oct. 1, the start of the 2027 water year.
“Our water rights go back to the creation of our reservation, but even back further, it goes to our creator,” Flores told ICT. “We continue to fight for consultation. I want to say we’re 100 percent there, but we’re not.”
The post Colorado River: Tribes seek to be part of solution appeared first on ICT.
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Trigger warning: This story contains graphic descriptions and testimony of sexual assault, violence, and suicidal ideations. If you or someone you know is in need of support, the following are national and regional resources. The 988 Lifelineis a national suicide and crisis lifeline, and can be reached by dialing 988. Indigenous residents in Washington state can press 4 and be connected with an Indigenous counselor. The Strong Hearts Native Helplineis a national hotline that provides resources for Native Americans and Alaska Natives who have experienced sexual and domestic violence, and can be reached at 1-844-7NATIVE (762-8483).
Luna Reyna
Underscore Native News + ICT
SEATTLE — In the small beige King County courtroom, Native women in colorful ribbon skirts with Coast Salish embroidery holding traditional medicine filled the first four rows of public seating at Redwolf Pope’s sentencing on Jan. 7. Survivors of Pope’s crimes, other Native women, friends and family were also present to support one another.
Pope sat in an orange jumpsuit just a few feet in front of the first row where he represented himself as he had for the duration of the trial.
Pope, a 49-year-old man who posed as a Native American for decades, was sentenced to more than 46 years in prison. A jury convicted him of five counts of second-degree rape and four counts of first-degree voyeurism in Washington state courts in September.
In 2018, Pope was arrested in Phoenix, Arizona, on the New Mexico warrant accusing Pope of videotaping himself sexually assaulting multiple unconscious women and secretly recording a guest in a bathroom. He was extradited to face the charges. A Santa Fe jury found Pope guilty of second-degree rape and voyeurism in 2020. He was sentenced to four years in prison in New Mexico, serving just two years after receiving credit for the almost two years already served while awaiting trial. He was extradited to Washington state in 2022 to face additional rape charges, for which he was recently sentenced to over 46 years.
Survivors of Pope’s violence requested in statements to Judge Tanya Thorpe of King County Superior Court that Pope should receive the harshest sentence possible to keep others in the community safe from ever being harmed by him again.
Survivors walked their statements up to the judge by going behind the first row of people and around the prosecuting attorneys desk on the right side of the room to not have to face Pope directly or be near him. Each had their back to Pope as many detailed sexual and physical violence they endured.
Pope’s case raised questions about identity in Indian Country. Survivors also questioned why community leadership and local authorities couldn’t act when women alerted them about Pope more than two decades ago. It took several other survivors and video evidence to see some form of justice.
For the survivors, the sentence and trial coming to a close are a relief and the bond created between them all has formed a sisterhood that has inspired advocacy for victims rights in the courtroom.
Survivors speak at sentencing
During the first few hours of sentencing, survivors of Pope’s crimes were given the opportunity to speak to the judge recounting the violence in detail.
“You stalked me, you drugged me, you raped me, you threatened me…” a survivor who asked to remain anonymous said in her statement while facing the judge with her back to Pope.
ICT and Underscore News typically does not identify victims of sexual abuse except in cases where they publicly identify themselves or share their stories openly.
She went on to explain that when she saw that Pope was being prosecuted and convicted in New Mexico for the exact same crimes he had committed against her, she began to understand her delicate mental and emotional state.
“Even though my case was one of many, they were unable to prosecute. I’m still one of your victims, perhaps more so as I stand with hundreds of other women you raped that will never see justice for themselves, perhaps still wondering what happened to them, why they don’t remember and why they’re afraid,” the anonymous survivor said.
City Hall Park & King County Courthouse, Seattle, Washington, USA. Photo by Joe Mabel.
She recounted an incident of physical abuse in September 2012 being so bad that she thought she had a concussion. She was too afraid to report the physical and verbal abuse so she fled Washington state after she graduated from law school, leaving her family and everything she has ever known. She said his actions impacted her career, relationships, and peace of mind, but she’s stronger now.
“I’ll be here watching ready to ensure you never have the chance to try again,” the anonymous survivor said. “You thought you cast aside your victims, forgetting each of us as you move on to the next instead, you made an army, one victim at a time. We’ll always be watching. We’ll always be ready, and now we’re going to make sure that you will never be free.”
Survivors took this opportunity to read statements they had prepared as a way to take back their power and to urge the judge to hold Pope accountable for his actions by giving Pope the harshest sentence possible. Most read their statements with their backs to him while looking at the judge. Others addressed him directly while standing near the judge’s podium.
Erica Elan urged Judge Thorpe to protect future women from Pope, by giving him the harshest sentence possible.
“I firmly believe that the only option for collective safety is a life sentence,” Elan said.
Elan and Lehi Sanchez found the cameras throughout Pope’s living spaces in his condo in the Capital Hill neighborhood of Seattle. They shared their findings with one of the survivors who was subletting the condo. She went to the Seattle police. Elan and Sanchez went to the Santa Fe police which led to the cameras in Pope’s Santa Fe apartment being discovered as well.
“His brazen violence, as we’ve unfortunately all witnessed, his targeting of the Native community, his clear pattern of abuse, his selfie style videos of himself spliced together while violating women who I love and respect are forever seared in my mind,” Elan said. “A person who can do this over and over does not have a place in any free society.”
One survivor, who asked to remain anonymous, told the judge that at 35 weeks pregnant she should be preparing for her baby, “ … but again, I am here face to face with my rapist.”
“He is and should be considered by this court to be a serial rapist, a serial sex offender and predator, one that our community needs indefinite protection from,” she said. “He did not find his victims off the street, nor were they random strangers. He picked his victims carefully, calculatedly, and made his victims believe that he was their friend.”
No witnesses came to speak on Pope’s behalf.
When the Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney, Jocelyn Cooney, addressed the court she also commented that judgment in this case is long overdue.
“The jury in this courtroom for eight weeks, witnessed the defendant’s acts, caught on film,” Cooney, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma citizen, said. “Him grinning at the camera as he violently raped his unconscious friends. Footage of his friends unknowingly being filmed in the most intimate of places, the bathroom. And after hearing the testimony of the brave survivors, the countless law enforcement officers and seeing the evidence for themselves, they found the defendant guilty on nine separate felony sex offenses, and today, the judgment of the court must reflect who he truly is at his core, a serial rapist and a serial voyeur, as he deserves no lenience from this court.”
Cooney also pointed out that Pope doesn’t just deny he did anything wrong, he continues to attempt to villainize the very people who uncovered his crimes. It shows that he is a “continued risk” to society, Cooney said.
Pope received a law degree from Seattle University and represented himself in court. However, he is not a licensed lawyer, confirmed the Washington State Bar Association. His LinkedIn page lists him as an attorney who has worked for the Tulalip Tribal Court for over a decade, but the Tulalip Tribes said he never worked as an attorney there.
During his closing arguments he attempted to paint himself as a victim and addressed survivors instead of defending his case. Judge Thorpe interjected and told him this isn’t an opportunity to disparage witnesses but to defend his case.
Pope’s sentence came swiftly, within minutes after closing statements. Because of the trust built between Pope and his victims, Judge Thorp’s ruling was for the harshest sentence possible under Washington state law: a total of 560 months or over 46 years.
Trust through identity
Trust was built due to Pope’s claims of Western Shoshone and Tlingit heritage, according to accounts from survivors and Pope himself during sentencing. Survivors recounted meeting Pope at demonstrations against the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock and outside the White House in Lafayette Square in 2017 for the Native Nations Rise March on DC.
This led to him being asked to give a TEDxSeattle talk about his activism called “Lessons of Courage from Standing Rock.” He also appeared on FOX’s “The O’Reilly Factor” giving his perspective on Thanksgiving.
King County Courthouse stairs. Photos by Susan Dennis.
But the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska say he is not an enrolled citizen. During the trial Pope changed his story and claimed that he learned his mom isn’t Tlingit but comes from up north. Through the years, Pope has claimed to be a member of the Western Shoshone Tribe. There are several Shoshone tribes in America’s west. Shoshone members also have said they’ve found no record of Pope’s enrollment. Though it’s unclear whether he has claimed citizenship to any particular tribe or lineage or familial connection to those tribes. Pope shared during his Jan. 7 sentencing in Seattle that he was disenrolled.
“He certainly built his reputation as somebody who was an activist. I don’t think there’s a strong likelihood he would not have had access to at least a few of our survivors if not for that,” Cooney said. “It’s also a big reason why we did go to that aggravator, that abuse of trust, that he was only able to perpetrate his offenses because of the position of trust that he built with everybody.”
Cooney explained that the exceptional sentence was necessary because violence committed against those who trusted him. Cooney said he stripped his friends of an ability to trust those around them, and took away any sense of safety they are entitled to feel.
Another survivor who asked to remain anonymous shared with Underscore + ICT, “This is someone who was born into [the] thievery of Native culture[s]. This is why cultural appropriation is so dangerous and violent.”
For Patricia Allen, nickname Chookenshaa, which means Glacier Bear Woman in Tlingit, Pope’s false claims of Tlingit identity has caused her to question who in her community are actually Tlingit citizens. She is concerned about who can be trusted, especially men who called Pope “brother” that have been completely silent throughout the trial.
Allen met Pope about 14 years ago when she was around 21. She’s now 35.
She said he was interwoven in her social scene, and involved in the academic, nonprofit, social justice and intertribal spaces. He claimed he was Tlingit. He also said he was from an Eagle Brown Bear Clan from the village of Yakutat. Allen is from an Eagle Black Bear Clan and in Tlingit culture if you’re both from an Eagle clan, you’re considered like siblings so she addressed him as an eagle brother.
“It makes me wonder just who’s either complicit or who’s been supporting [Pope],” Allen said.
She believes that Pope harmed more people.
Allen and many others that she knows have stayed over at Pope’s residence in Seattle many times, thinking it was a safe place because Pope said he was sober, or on the Red Road.
“It’s gonna take a long time for us as a community to really even scratch the surface of just how deeply this impacts us, even just people who went there to use the bathroom,” Allen said.
Allen doesn’t believe that the sentencing is enough.
She has served as an elected delegate for the Tlingit & Haida Tribes of Southeast Alaska from April 2018 to March 2024, led the National Coalition to End Urban Indigenous Homelessness, and served as a community advocate with Chief Seattle Club in Seattle from September 2019 to December 2022.
As a delegate she brought Pope’s crimes up on the annual tribal assembly floor in 2019 asking leadership to make a public statement, and every year after that until 2024. She believes that Tlingit leadership should be more vocal, with statements advocating for the victims who should have been a priority during the trial process, considering many of the survivors of Pope’s crimes were Tlingit citizens.
Justice
Justice in this case looks different for everyone.
The prosecuting attorney said Pope’s sentence was just and fair based on the evidence presented and the crimes Pope perpetrated against the survivors.
“I think it was a display of what justice can look like in the system to hold somebody accountable, but also to give survivors a platform to be able to speak about what this individual did to them,” Cooney, the prosecuting attorney, said.
Moreno found relief in the sentencing.
“I’m glad that I don’t have to look over my shoulder anymore. I don’t have to worry about him being released on bond, or someone believing him, and this getting overturned,” Moreno said.
But true justice to her needs to go a step further, past the court systems and into the community of people who didn’t believe her.
“There’s still the anger that none of this needed to escalate in this manner like people have spoken up about him for a very long time,” Moreno said. “I think for me, justice would have looked like being believed in the first place and justice would have been not having to stay in class with him after I got a protection order against him… justice for me would also look like the people who publicly shamed me for being a victim. It would look like public apologies.”
She also said justice is Pope not being able to harm another woman.
“This is one step towards real justice, and that step has been our collective truth, the truth of our collective experience has resulted in a very bad, evil person being banished from our society where he belongs, incapable of doing any more harm,” she told Underscore + ICT.
City Hall Park, King County Courthouse, and King County Administration Building, Seattle, Washington, U.S. Photo by Joe Mabel.
Elan is grateful that after eight years the case is over, but she doesn’t believe that justice was served.
“In no world should any type of pursuit for justice from a predator take nearly eight years to get to some type of result,” Elan said. “And really, in no world should that predator be able to hold his victims hostage on the stand for days at a time and really use forms of psychological torture and brutalize them further. It’s egregious that that can happen.”
She went on to explain that the systems that are meant to maintain justice leave a lot to be desired.
“Justice doesn’t feel like the right thing. The last eight years I’ve been so grateful to get to know many of the people who he deeply harmed, and so many of them, myself included, have and are still dealing with the effects of what he’s done,” Elan said. “So I don’t think there’s really justice, but I do think there are things that we are all working to transform out of this and maybe prevent something, or at least a piece of this in the future.”
Victim bill of rights
In cases where defendants choose to defend themselves, they have the right to cross examine witnesses which includes survivors. Pope chose to defend himself and was able to cross examine each survivor throughout the four yearslong trial processes.
Elan and other survivors are working to update Washington’s victim bill of rights so that in the future abusers are less likely to be able to cross examine their victims in court. The updates to the victims bill of rights would give a judge the discretion to appoint somebody else to ask the questions of the victims. This creates a barrier between an individual who’s committed these acts and the survivor in cases where defendants want to represent themselves.
“Every survivor that came forward in this, during this trial, every named victim, and even some that didn’t, but every witness had to be cross examined by their rapist or assault abuser,” a survivor who asked to remain anonymous told Underscore + ICT.
This survivor went on to explain the psychological trauma of being cross examined by Pope.
“It’s like we got raped all over again,” she said.
This caused multiple survivors to mentally “spiral into really bad places” to the point of needing to seek out additional mental, emotional, and spiritual support.
“More needs to be done to protect survivors and rights can be upheld for people who choose to defend themselves, but we need to change the law so that there are protections for survivors who are brave enough to take the stand,” the anonymous survivor said.
“What this sick man did was try to convince his victims that it was consensual,” she told Underscore + ICT. “He tried to vie for people’s approval again.”
“It was enraging,” the survivor continued. “I went dark. I’m on medical leave.”
“That’s such a terrible position for anybody to be in where the individual who perpetrated these harms against you, especially sexual violence, now has the opportunity to question you again,” Cooney said. “And what we saw was there were multiple survivors that he kept on the stand for multiple days, and it was not commensurate with how long I kept them on.”
According to Cooney, the longest direct examination of a survivor she did was close to two hours. Pope then questioned that survivor for two days.
“Hopefully that’s something that will actually pass, and it will be added into the victims rights bill,” Cooney said. “[The survivors] are working really hard to make that happen. It has kind of turned this pretty awful situation for the survivors into something that could benefit other survivors in the future.”
In January, an amendment to the Crime Victim Bill of Rights was introduced to the legislature. This amendment was shaped directly by survivors and Native community members. The amendment is currently in committee. The deadline to sign up to testify for or against the amendment was on January 27.
The Seattle Indian Health Board is advocating for support of the amendment and has provided links for written testimony, graphics to share on social media in support of the amendment and more.
This story is co-published byUnderscore Native NewsandICT, a news partnership that covers Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest.
The post Redwolf Pope survivors reclaim power in courtroom appeared first on ICT.
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