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Daniel Herrera Carbajal
ICT
Artificial intelligence in Indigenous communities was at the forefront at North America’s largest Indigenous tech conference.
In a world of generative AI used to write better emails or generate funny photos, Indigenous Tech Conference gathered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada to discuss how AI can be used to create true impact in Indigenous communities.
“We don’t need more widgets in the world,” said Ryan St. Germaine, Metis, a founder and CEO of Indigenous Tech Conference. “Technology needs to be pointed towards the challenges of our time.”
Some of those challenges are data sovereignty and language revitalization.
According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, at least 40 percent of the 7,000 languages estimated to be spoken in the world are in danger and a language disappears every two weeks on average.
UNESCO is a UN agency that promotes global peace through international cooperation.
Michael Running Wolf, Northern Cheyenne and Lakota, is a co-founder and architect of First Nations Languages AI reality (FLAIR), an initiative that uses AI to support Indigenous communities in language revitalization and preservation efforts.
While many Indigenous languages have ongoing revitalization efforts, there are languages who have little to no speakers left, making large data collection unrealistic.
The organization’s aim is to reduce the number of data requirements required to build automatic speech recognition for various Indigenous languages.
He told ICT that AI can be used to create an immersive environment to enhance language learning
“You have this dynamic that even if there is funding, there are very few speakers in which to practice and so while every tribe is committed to revitalizing and reclaiming their languages, often there’s some practical barriers,” Running Wolf said. “For instance, you go to class or you go to the movies and camp, but what happens is you go home, watch Wheel of Fortune, watch TV or YouTube and that’s all in English. So what I can do is give you a tool where you can go home and practice saying ‘Turn your lights off’ in Lakota or Diné, and that’s where AI can be useful because it can make your language ambient to your home.”
While FLAIR works to reduce the data required to build automatic speech recognition for languages, other ASR and large language models still require vast amounts of data. Data which Running Wolf said was “unethically gathered.”
“These large language models have been built using stolen data,” he told ICT. “All our data, and the entirety of the internet has been scraped to create these large language models and now these large language model developers have a problem in that the internet is poison. It’s hard to tell if content is actually created by humans, which is the best kind of data And so now this puts a premium upon natural organic human data and what is the largest treasure trove of uninfected data and poisoned by AI? Indigenous data.”
Running Wolf equated data to land, and you wouldn’t give away your grandmother’s land for free.
“We are now in the era where our data is one of the last few reservoirs where we should obviously treat it like land,” he said. “You wouldn’t give away an acre of your grandmother’s land to someone for free. Similarly, with our data, if we treat it as a policy framework, as the equivalent of land, then we need to be very careful about it and guarded with it.”
Michael Running Wolf working remotely
In comes in the conversation of creating effective policy that protects and guarantees the sovereignty of Indigenous people’s data
“I think there needs to be more of an accurate depiction of who Indigenous people are and have our own digital sovereignty,” St. Germaine told ICT.
There are currently no federal or tribal policies that protect and guarantee the data sovereignty of Indigenous peoples.
“We don’t have strong intellectual property rights protection or data sovereignty protection currently. But what if tribes got together and created a co-op, like a data trust, a legal entity whose duty was to protect the data?” Running Wolf told ICT. “If we have strong tribal policy and strong agency over our data, and the strongest thing we can do is actually be the researchers ourselves, tribal research groups working on their own data, creating their own research.”
The post Treating data like land — data sovereignty in the AI age appeared first on ICT.
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‘Humanitarian crisis’: Sober living home scandal widens with criminal charges, lawsuits
(ictnews.org)
Mary Annette Pember
ICT
Roberta Romero struggles to speak about the death of her sons.
She talks softly, in hushed tones, pausing sometimes as she describes how her eldest son, Lionel Sandoval, died in 2022 while trying to shake his addiction in one of Arizona’s sober living homes.
Her youngest, Ty, died by suicide in 2024 in what she believes was in response, at least in part, to his brother’s mysterious death.
Grieving the loss of her only children, she is left grasping for ways to go on while still seeking justice for Lionel’s death.
“I am all alone now,” Romero, Diné, told ICT by phone from her home in Farmington, New Mexico, on the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation.
Romero believes that Sandoval was among thousands of victims of a massive, multibillion-dollar sober living fraud scheme in Arizona and beyond that targeted mostly Native Americans by making false promises of addiction treatments that were never delivered.
More than 100 people, several companies and at least one church have been charged as part of a state and federal crackdown on Medicaid fraud and unlicensed sober living homes. In May 2025, Arizona officials charged another 20 people, accusing them of stealing $60 million in a sweeping fraud scheme that siphoned money from the state’s Medicaid program.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Kris Mayes have called the scandal a “humanitarian crisis” and a “stunning failure of the government.”
Seeking justice
Romero filed a lawsuit in October against the state, the Salvation Army and the sober living home in Phoenix where Sandoval was living when he died in September 2022 at the age of 30.
The state of Arizona asked a judge to dismiss Romero’s lawsuit, claiming it fell outside the state’s six-month statute of limitations for wrongful death claims, but the Superior Court of Arizona in removedpa County denied the state’s motion in August 2025.
A billboard in Scottsdale, Arizona on June 10, 2023, sits near the health care facility of the Salt River Pima-removedpa Indian Community, which has been affected by what is believed to be a sweeping Medicaid fraud scheme involving sober living homes that promised help to Native Americans seeking to kick alcohol and other addictions. Credit: AP Photo/Anita Snow, File
Romero is represented by Jonodev Chaudhuri, a former chief justice for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, with assistance from his wife, Mary Kathryn Nagle, a well-known Cherokee attorney.
The suit accuses the state of withholding victims’ records until the statute of limitations had passed.
“It’s insane to expect these victims to file claims within six months,” Nagle told ICT. “We said that the six-month window doesn’t apply here because of fraudulent concealment.”
A class-action lawsuit was also filed in December 2024 by the BrewerWood law firm against the state of Arizona for negligence and misconduct. The lawsuit contends that fraudulent billings to Medicaid had grown to $2.8 billion by 2023, with about 7,000 people victimized.
Officials say the fraud is ongoing in Arizona and in other states, and may be contributing to the rising numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous peoples. The number of deaths are unknown, though some reports put the deaths at more than 1,000.
Many of the victims and their families, like Romero, are struggling with daily survival, according to Nagle and Chaudhuri.
“If victims managed to escape the sober living homes, how can they be expected to find an attorney and file a lawsuit within six months?” Nagle asked. “A lawsuit isn’t always at the top of peoples’ minds when they are struggling to feed themselves.”
The two attorneys have been working with families to piece events together.
“Many of the people we spoke to were horribly traumatized,” Chaudhuri said. “They couldn’t recall where the homes were located; they reported being taken off the street, denied contact with family, and even given drugs at the homes.”
Ready to get sober
Sandoval was full of energy and always liked to help people, his mother told ICT.
“He loved cooking and building stuff,” she said.
But trouble started for him during his first year at San Juan College in Farmington, where he studied building and trades. He began isolating from others and his drinking escalated.
“He said, ‘I’m so tired, Mom. I really need some help,’” Romero said.
Initially, Sandoval was excited to begin treatment in Phoenix at a facility operated by the Salvation Army. “He completed treatment and was doing good but then they moved him to a sober living home,” Romero said.
Grassroots advocate Reva Stewart walks outside the headquarters at Drumbeat Indian Arts in Phoenix on July 31, 2023, where she and others were working to find Native Americans who may have been victims of a Medicaid fraud scheme involving sober living homes. Credit: AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin
According to the lawsuit, Sandoval did not receive treatment services or support at the sober living home operated by Falcons Care and related companies. The lawsuit accuses the operators and the Salvation Army of colluding to exploit Sandoval by fraudulently gaining access to his Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System and the American Indian Health Program benefits.
“He called me in September and said, ‘Mom, I just want to come home,’” she said. “I could tell he was teary-eyed. He wouldn’t tell me what was wrong; he seemed afraid.”
Romero told her son she would drive down to Phoenix, an eight-hour drive from Farmington, in a couple of days to pick him up. But two days later, she received a call from a doctor at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix urging her to come immediately; Lionel was in a coma after experiencing seizures at the home.
Romero arrived at the hospital early the next morning. Sandoval never woke up, and died soon after she arrived.
“I saw my son unconscious underneath all these wires going everywhere,” she said.
She said she repeatedly called the sober living home seeking details about what happened, but said no one ever called her back. Finally, joined by two nephews, she went to the home in person.
“I had a lot of questions and asked for his records,” she said.
Sandoval had no history of seizures or other health problems, Romero said. A woman who appeared to run the home informed Romero she needed to request Sandoval’s records in writing from the state of Arizona.
“As soon as they heard that Lionel had died, they stopped communicating with me,” Romero said.
At the urging of her nephews, Romero reached out to Chaudhuri and Nagle. When she finally received Sandoval’s autopsy report, Romero learned that her son had methanol in his blood.
Methanol, a simple form of alcohol, is the key ingredient in antifreeze. Highly toxic, it causes blindness or death when ingested. Romero couldn’t imagine that he would knowingly drink poison, and is wondering how it got into his system.
Growing numbers
Other victims of the sober living scam report similar stories in Arizona. Several victims have reported being kidnapped off the streets on reservations and towns by sober home recruiters. There have been reports of violence, of clients being force-fed drugs to keep them compliant, and of other deaths.
The state of Arizona began investigating the homes and cracking down on fraudulent operations in 2023. In June 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into substance abuse treatment fraud against the Arizona Medicaid Program and the American Indian Health Plan. Some of the homes collected thousands of dollars a day in federal funds for bogus or shoddy services, according to officials.
Arizona State Sen. Theresa Hatathlie talks during a news conference on Friday, May 19, 2023, outlining the steps the Navajo Nation is taking to find and get care for tribal members being displaced by fraudulent sober living homes under investigation by the Arizona Attorney General’s Kris Mayes, far right. On the left is Rhonda Tuni, executive director of the Navajo Department of Health. Credit: AP Photo/Anita Snow
But the state and federal government have been too slow in taking action, according to victims and advocates such as Reva Stewart of the Navajo Nation.
In an interview with reporter Shondiin Silversmith of the AZ Mirror, Stewart said the state has known for years about the problems.
“I want them to be held accountable,” she said. “I want accountability for every single person that was affected by this.”
Stewart’s business, Drumbeat Indian Arts, is located catty-corner from the Phoenix Indian Medical Center. In 2021, she began noticing white vans picking up people off the streets and decided to investigate.
Asking around the Native community, she learned that sober living homes were recruiting people, especially among the homeless, to participate in treatment.
About the same time, she noticed that reports of missing and murdered Indigenous peoples began skyrocketing. Stewart is involved with advocacy surrounding missing and murdered Indigenous people, and has for years kept a standing bulletin board outside her business on which people place posters seeking information about MMIP.
Responding to requests from community members, she has since expanded to more than a half-dozen boards to accommodate the posters.
Stewart and other members of the community began putting the pieces together as Native people from as far away as Montana, Alaska and Minnesota began showing up on Phoenix streets.
“They told us they’d been recruited for treatment and ended up getting stranded when the sober living homes kicked them out,” she told ICT.
As advocates from throughout the country contacted her nonprofit organization, Turtle Island Women Warriors, she began advising them to find out if the missing people they were seeking might have been recruited to participate in treatment.
Indeed, Navajo police began warning tribal citizens about sober living recruiters as reports of missing persons increased.
“We’re in 2026 now and we’re still on this hamster wheel;,” Stewart said. “No one is being held accountable for it.”
She reported that she has counted nearly 2,000 deaths related to the fraud and knows that number will only go up.
Spreading across the US
The sober living homes have now expanded into other locations throughout Indian Country, according to Stewart, Nagle and Chaudhuri, with Indigenous people from New Mexico and South Dakota also believed to have been targeted in the scam.
In December 2025, the Minnesota Indian Women’s Center issued a safety alert about recruiters for sober living homes targeting the state’s Indigenous population. Several Native people reported being approached by men claiming to represent a treatment center and sober living facility in San Francisco, offering them immediate transportation, according to Ruth Buffalo, a citizen of the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation and president of the center.
The men also visited the women’s center, dropping off flyers about the California facilities. But they were evasive when workers asked for details. It’s unclear how many people may have agreed to go to California with the men.
There are many unhoused Native people in the Twin Cities, some of whom would be vulnerable to promises to get them into treatment within 24 hours.
“There’s a lot of people who want to get off the streets and out of active addiction,” Buffalo said. “When some people hear they can get immediate access to treatment, housing and food out in California, they are likely to say, ‘Sure.’”
Buffalo and the center are cautioning the public to verify any offers of treatment, especially those that include transportation.
“We have some good organizations here that offer treatment, including the Native American Community Clinic and providers from the White Earth reservation,” she said.
Seeking justice
Chaudhuri and Nagle have chosen to include the fraudulent homes in Romero’s and other clients’ lawsuits mostly as a matter of principle.
“There’s not a lot of money there, most of the homes were part of shell corporations that were set up specifically to commit fraud,” Nagle said. “The people who took the money mostly live overseas, have no assets or insurance, so naming them in the suit won’t result in any real payments for our clients.”
But they hope that naming them in the lawsuit will deter predatory action by others in the future. “We want to do everything we can to have a chilling effect on bad actors who want to take advantage of our communities,” Nagle said.
Romero, meanwhile, has been struggling with depression since the deaths of her sons.
“Sometimes I hide out in my room and just sleep, that’s my escape,” she said.
She was fired from her job in retail shortly after Lionel’s death. “I kept breaking down and walking out so they stopped working with me,” Romero said.
But she was recently hired by another retailer and spends her down time reading books about how parents survive the deaths of their children. Romero hopes her lawsuit will help stop the fraud and predation for others.
“There are so many of us out there,” she said, pausing briefly before continuing.
“All I can do is get up everyday and hope for the best.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
The post ‘Humanitarian crisis’: Sober living home scandal widens with criminal charges, lawsuits appeared first on ICT.
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Greenland is a global model for Indigenous self-governance. Trump’s demands for the island threaten that.
(grist.org)
Aqqaluk Lynge was 19 years old when an American B-52 bomber carrying four thermonuclear weapons as well as conventional bombs crashed off the northwest coast of Greenland, the island where Lynge was born and raised. That was January 1968, and the plane was headed to Thule Air Force Base, a U.S. military installation in Greenland, now known as Pituffik Space Base. When the plane hit the Arctic waters, the conventional bombs detonated but the nuclear weapons did not.
Six American military personnel parachuted from the plane before it crashed, shivering on the frozen ground before Inuit dog sled teams found them and saved their lives. One service member trapped on floating ice 6 miles from Thule survived the negative 21-degree Fahrenheit weather by wrapping himself in his parachute.
Now, aged 78, Lynge wonders if the United States remembers that Inuit dogsleds saved American lives. Or the fact that Greenlanders fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan as enlisted members of the Danish military, dying at the second-highest rate of any country besides the U.S. That U.S. Air Force base is still operational and 150 American military personnel are currently stationed there. “Why should a friend for so many years be treated like this?” Lynge said. “We need support from democratic-minded people in the United States.”
An Inuit dog team stands on frozen Baffin Bay near site of crash of a U.S. B52 nuclear bomber on January 21, 1968. Bettmann via Getty Images
American military survivors of a B52 crash in Greenland smile for a photo in 1968. Keystone-France / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
President Donald Trump has demanded that the United States acquire Greenland and said that control of the island is necessary for national and international security. He has threatened European allies with tariffs and even hinted at seizing Greenland by force. On Wednesday, Trump backtracked on both threats and said he’d reached a “framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland” without giving any details; however Trump’s behavior over the island has already undermined America’s relationship with Europe by threatening longstanding alliances.
Less publicized is how Trump’s threats have refocused attention on the United States’ relationship and history with Indigenous peoples: Greenland is 90 percent Inuit and has maintained its traditions, language, knowledge, and land despite centuries of colonial rule, and is viewed as a model of Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty.
Lynge, who is Inuit, is part of that history. He co-founded the Inuit Ataqatigiit, a democratic socialist party in Greenland that advocates for independence. He helped lead the Inuit Circumpolar Council, an organization that represents Indigenous peoples in the Arctic. And he’s a former member of the Greenlandic Parliament, as well as the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which helps advise the U.N. Economic and Social Council on issues related to Indigenous peoples.
Greenland is still part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a colonial relationship that’s existed since the 18th century, but thanks to the work of people like Lynge, the island has achieved a level of political independence that many Indigenous peoples aspire to. “The extensive self-governance of Greenland is an inspiring example of the implementation of Indigenous self-determination for many Indigenous Peoples worldwide,” said the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay, in 2023.
Aqqaluk Lynge, left, listens during a 2009 press conference on the Inuit Circumpolar Council on the effects of climate change. Casper Christoffersen / AFP via Getty Images
Yet despite the still-strong presence of Inuit peoples in Greenland, Stefan Aune, a historian and the author of the book Indian Wars Everywhere, said he’s been struck by how much Trump’s threats have been framed as conflict between the U.S. and Denmark or the U.S. and European countries, ignoring the presence of Indigenous peoples. “This really kind of evokes the way the history of North America often gets narrated, which is a kind of imperial squabble between the British, the French, and the Spanish, and then later the United States, despite the fact that there’s all these different Native nations that play a really equally important role in the war, the politics, the economics, and the diplomacy on the continent,” Aune said. “So there’s definitely a parallel there.”
Aune is among many experts who see Trump’s policies and rhetoric as echoes of historical entitlement to Native land reframed as a defensive struggle against Indigenous nations or other threats. “The iconic image of this is the surrounded wagon train, which you can see in all kinds of art, paintings, and then later movies and television and video games,” Aune said. “Settler colonialism consistently gets reframed as a defensive struggle rather than an invasion.”
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Peter Mancall, a historian and author of the book Contested Continent, said he was struck by how quickly Trump pivoted from the security reasons to capture Venezuela’s president to his plans to sell 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil. “The rapid pivot from the pretext of the invasion to the extraction of resources [in Venezuela] was quicker than anything I had seen in the early American period,” he said. “We’ve seen this before, and it has often had catastrophic consequences for Indigenous peoples as well as deleterious impacts on various environments.”
Jonathan Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, the dean of Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawaiʻi, sees parallels to the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, which he wrote about in his book Dismembering Lāhui. In the late 1800s, the U.S. was motivated to annex Hawai’i in order to cement economic control over the islands’ sugar plantations and to establish military control over Pearl Harbor.
“The fact that the president of the United States no longer feels that it’s necessary to justify imperialism in any other way except that ‘We need it’ is deeply revealing and clarifying,” Osorio said. “When you remove all of the pretext and you realize that all this has ever been about has been the acquisition of opportunities and other peoples and other peoples’ countries … it’s never been any different.”
Greenland is three times the size of Texas and home to about 56,000 people. The island has 39 of the 50 minerals that the U.S. considers to be critical for military technology and the U.S. economy, many of which are used for clean energy technology like electric vehicle batteries. Investors are hoping that melting ice caps due to climate change will make it easier for companies to mine minerals like gallium, which can be used to create computer chips.
A banner says “Decolonize Don’t Recolonize,” seen during a demonstration against the Trump administration in Copenhagen in 2025.
Kristian Tuxen Ladegaard Berg / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images
But Paul Bierman, a geoscientist who has studied ice sheets in Greenland, is skeptical. He said melting permafrost has led to cratering on U.S. Air Force runways and thinks mining infrastructure would face similar challenges. “If you’ve ever stood next to a melting glacier, you’re not putting a mine there. The ice is literally melting below your feet. It’s crumbling, it’s collapsing,” he said. “The idea that we’re going to walk in and in a year, start up mines and have minerals coming out and be rich, it’s a complete and utter fantasy. It doesn’t match the reality of being on the ground.”
That hasn’t stopped wealthy investors from yearning to profit from Greenland, from billionaire Ronald Lauder to Peter Thiel. Bierman said the greater risk to humanity is allowing climate change — which Trump has called a hoax — to continue to melt ice caps and inundate low-lying cities like Jakarta, eventually dislocating an anticipated half a billion people. “Compared to the value of strategic minerals in Greenland, it’s orders of magnitude more in damages from letting the ice melt,” said Bierman, who wrote a book on Greenland called When The Ice Is Gone.
Denmark has recognized Greenland as self-governing with a right to its own mineral resources, and Greenlanders have been extremely clear about their desire to maintain their sovereignty, as well as their affiliation with Denmark. “It is our country,” Lynge said. “No one can take it.”
Since World War II, Greenland has been a close military ally of the U.S., hosting not just Pituffik Space Base — which displaced an Inuit village — but also more than 20 American military bases that were eventually abandoned. Treaties dating back to 1941 give the U.S. enormous sway over what its military can do on the island and prevents other militaries from operating there, even though Trump has repeatedly claimed that Russia and China are doing so.
“[According to an] agreement from 1951, the United States is free to do what they want, and from 2014, they can do that by talking to us and the Danes,” said Lynge from Greenland. “The U.S. is the only military presence here in Greenland, so what’s the problem?”
Greenland residents and political leaders have publicly rejected suggestions by U.S. President Donald Trump that the Arctic island could become part of the United States. Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, has emphasized that its future will be decided by its own people, with officials stating that the island is not for sale and does not wish to become American. Lokman Vural Elibol / Anadolu via Getty Images
After two centuries of colonial rule, in the 1960s, Denmark began taking steps to limit Inuit population growth by inserting intrauterine devices in about 4,500 women, including girls as young as 12 years old. The Danish government apologized last year and agreed to compensate the women who sued, arguing the government violated their human rights. The population limitation process was extremely effective, dropping birth rates substantially among Indigenous families and causing permanent infertility among some women. Denmark also has a decades-long history of removing Inuit children from their homes against their parents’ will, with research as recent as 2022 showing that Inuit children are seven times more likely to be removed from their parents’ homes than Danish children. In 2023, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples issued a report on the status of Greenland that said Denmark needs to implement many reforms to fully respect Indigenous rights, including embracing a reconciliation process to address historical trauma.
Despite these traumas, and perhaps motivated by them, Greenland’s independence movement has gained ground in recent decades, securing several major wins. In 1979, more than 70 percent of Greenland’s mostly Inuit residents voted in favor of more independence from Denmark. The referendum made the island a “constituent country” of the Kingdom of Denmark, rather than just a colony, and gave Greenlanders control over domestic policies such as their education, environment, health, and fisheries. The law also established the Greenlandic Parliament.
Protesters wave Greenland flags during a demonstration with the slogans “hands off Greenland” and “Greenland for Greenlanders” at City Hall Square in Copenhagen, Denmark, on January 17, 2026.
Kristian Tuxen Ladegaard Berg / NurPhoto via Getty Images
In 2008, more than three-fourths of Greenlanders again voted in favor of self-governance, expanding their control over the police and courts and giving Greenland more of a say over foreign policy. The law also made Kalaallisut, an Inuit language of Greenland, the official language of the country, and restored Greenland’s control over its mineral and oil revenue, with provisions for remitting some funding to Denmark. It also established a pathway to full independence, without a specific timeline, as the move would require support from both Greenland and Denmark.
Political leaders in Greenland have continued to explore the possibility of full independence, drafting a potential constitution as recently as 2023, and last year, polls showed that most people in Greenland wanted independence from Denmark, although voters differed on how and when it should happen. The vast majority, 85 percent, oppose any type of union with the U.S.
“They serve as a model for how to practice self-governance,” said Gunn-Britt Retter, the head of the Arctic and environmental unit of the Saami Council, which represents Indigenous Saami people in Europe. The council has come out in support of Greenland against Trump’s threats, and has been a longtime ally of theirs in the fight for climate action and Indigenous rights internationally. She added that the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland from Denmark makes no sense. “You can’t buy something that is stolen.”
To Lynge, Trump’s threats are not only misinformed, but also threaten the political autonomy that he has spent his lifetime building. And he doesn’t think Greenlanders are the only people at risk.
“We are in the middle of a situation in the world where small nations like us would be crushed if we don’t do anything,” Lynge said. “If the world allows what is happening right now, it will continue and destroy the world order as we know it.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Greenland is a global model for Indigenous self-governance. Trump’s demands for the island threaten that. on Jan 22, 2026.
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The Trump EPA ended the ‘green new scam.’ A year later, communities are still paying the price.
(grist.org)
The Village of Sauget in St. Clair County, Illinois, was founded in order to be polluted. Incorporated in 1926 by a group of Monsanto Chemical Company executives (and initially named “Monsanto”) it was and is an industry town: with deliberately lax manufacturing and emissions law, it’s played host to companies like ExxonMobil, Clayton Chemical, Gavilon Fertilizer, Eastman Chemical, and Veolia North America.
The 134 residents of Sauget — and the 700,000 people in the greater East St. Louis metro area that surrounds it — have often seen their needs come second to those of their corporate neighbors. In the 1990s, according to the last longitudinal EPA study done in the area, they inhaled high levels of lead, volatile organic compounds, and sulfur dioxide, compounds which can increase the risk of cancer and respiratory illness.
“We were basically incorporated to be a sewer,” the town’s mayor, Rich Sauget, told the Wall Street Journal in 2006.
Since 1999, one well-known local polluter has been Veolia Environmental Services, a subsidiary of a French company that runs an incinerator, which stores and burns hazardous waste. The company is certified to burn toxic substances like PFAS, and people in the area have long complained of acrid or sewage-like smells near the facility.
Darnell Tingle, who leads United Congregations of Metro-East, or UCM — a group of faith communities working to address environmental and social justice issues in the area — says congregants at the half-a-dozen Illinois churches within 10 miles of Veolia often wonder if the incinerator is what’s making them sick.
“We have some of the worst air quality in the country,” Tingle said. Children in East St. Louis suffer from asthma at much higher rates than the national average. But it’s hard for the 878 people who live within a mile of Veolia’s incinerator to prove anything. So, in 2023, UCM proposed a solution: they would install air quality monitoring stations on half-a-dozen local churches, pay scientists to analyze that data, and finance the whole thing with $500,000 in Community Change Grant funding, a landmark program of Joe Biden’s EPA.
Soon, Tingle hoped, they’d have the answers they were looking for. But in early 2025, his promised grant money was abruptly withdrawn by the newly inaugurated Trump administration — along with 105 similar grants, totaling at least $1.6 billion, from Alaska to Florida. The EPA’s new administrator Lee Zeldin declared the grants “unnecessary,” and with the help of Elon Musk’s now-decommissioned DOGE, froze the money and closed the Office of Environmental Justice, amounting to losses of at least $37 billion.
Only two of the six planned air-quality monitors were installed in East St. Louis before the grants were terminated, Tingle said — and Tingle’s organization doesn’t have the money to pay scientists to analyze the data those monitors generate. In May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention completed an air quality study in Sauget, the main conclusion of which was that, because the EPA has not done adequate data collection, the CDC could not say much about the incinerator’s health impacts. In particular, the agency said, they were unable to conclude whether or not the volatile organic compound levels in the air were hurting people. So the community is still left with poor health effects and lots of suspicions about where they come from — but without concrete proof.
This Community Change Grant program was unique in the realm of federal funding, said Zealan Hoover, former senior advisor to Biden’s EPA administrator Michael Regan. “Most EPA funding flows through the states, and that is a model that works well,” Hoover said. “But at the same time, money that flows top down through states takes longer to reach communities and is not always as responsive as grants directly to the frontline communities that have a very clear, well-defined scope of what they need to do.”
Zeldin and Trump asserted that freezing these grants — which, organizers say, happened without any forewarning from the EPA, sometimes in the middle of grant disbursal and sometimes without communities seeing any money at all — was justified as a way to end the “green new scam” and “eliminate funding for the globalist climate agenda while unleashing American energy production,” according to a White House fact sheet.
A year later, many other communities beyond Sauget are also experiencing the grant terminations in starker terms. In Pocatello, Idaho, some of the town’s unsewered neighborhoods still face the unsanitary hardships of nitrate contamination from septic systems in their drinking water source. In the South Bronx, New York, one community remains vulnerable to extreme flooding, in part because their plan to revitalizing a dilapidated waterfront park has been defunded. And in South Dakota, the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe’s plan to use $19.9 million in grant funding to (among other things) rebuild a long-unusable bridge, build resilience hubs, weatherize buildings, and install solar panels on the homes of community elders remains just a plan.
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“For many communities, they’ve been going through the stages of grief,” said Hoover. “First was disbelief, because they know the merits of these projects. They know how badly it’s needed by the community. That has evolved over time into disappointment that the agency has been unwilling to reconsider, even after seeing cases like Kipnuk, Alaska, where EPA terminated a grant for flood prevention and then the town was washed away in a flood.”
The communities and organizations around the country who lost funding have responded in a variety of ways. Some, like United Congregations of Metro-East in East St. Louis, are hopeful that other forms of funding will turn up — and are refocusing on other projects. Other municipalities and nonprofits are still involved in litigation against the EPA, hoping to recoup some of the losses they’ve sustained in money and in time.
In South Dakota, rather than making an appeal, the town of Flandreau ended up closing its application for a grant to bring solar power to the homes of some Flandreau Santee Sioux Nation members, according to Rhonda Conn, the associate director of Native Sun Community Power Development, the nonprofit which hoped to work with the town and tribe.
Native Sun has pushed on to seek funding sources for its other work. The organization secured some local and private funding, but nothing at the scale of the EPA Community Change money has materialized, Conn said. In the process, Native Sun has been forced to work on a very lean budget — no permanent office space, few workers, and few plans to expand. These days, they’re spending more time working on renewable energy workforce development with the state of Minnesota, as opposed to taking big, costly swings at new infrastructure projects.
“For us, the infrastructure stuff is not going to go away,” Conn said. “It’s just about where we’re balancing our energy right now.”
In green energy and disaster resilience work, organizations are competing under higher pressure for less money. “There are still some grant and loan programs operating at lower levels across the government, there are still sources of state, local, and private funding,” Hoover said. “But there are not multi-billion dollar sources of funding commensurate with what the Trump administration terminated.”
“It’s very stressful,” Conn said. “Because everybody now is scrambling for the same pot of money, and there isn’t enough of it.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Trump EPA ended the ‘green new scam.’ A year later, communities are still paying the price. on Jan 22, 2026.
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One year ago, with one of the first strokes of his presidential Sharpie, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring a “national energy emergency,” making good on a campaign promise to “drill, baby, drill.” It was the first of many such orders, signaling that the championing of fossil fuels would be a cornerstone of the new administration: A subsequent order pledged to revitalize America’s waning coal industry, eliminate subsidies for electric vehicles approved by Congress under former president Joe Biden, and loosen regulations for domestic producers of fossil fuels. Yet another executive order withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the nearly unanimously-adopted international treaty that coordinates the global fight against climate change. He resumed liquefied natural gas permitting paused by his predecessor and reopened United States coastlines to drilling.
In the days following his inauguration, Trump killed a climate jobs training program, closed off millions of acres of federal water designated for offshore wind development, reopened U.S. coastlines to drilling, and scrubbed mentions of climate change from some federal agency websites. To many observers, it looked like the most comprehensive reorientation of the executive branch’s environmental and climate priorities in American history.
On paper, it certainly appears as though Trump has continued to make good on these early promises. He pushed Congress to pass the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which phases out an extensive set of tax credits — for wind and solar energy, electric vehicles, and other decarbonization tools — that were responsible for much of the progress the U.S. was expected to make toward its Paris Agreement commitments. (That move has already led some companies to abandon new clean energy projects.) Trump’s attacks on the nation’s offshore wind industry, which he recently called “so pathetic and so bad,” have been unrelenting, culminating in a blanket ban on offshore leases last month. A few weeks ago, he upped the ante on his earlier withdrawal from the Paris Agreement by severing ties with the United Nations framework that facilitates international cooperation on matters of climate change, environmental health, and resilience — a treaty that was ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate in 1992.
“It has been an extraordinarily destructive year,” said Rachel Cleetus, climate and energy policy director at the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists. It’s not hard to find specific moves that have already done tangible harm to the climate: The EPA, for instance, delayed a requirement that oil and gas operators reduce emissions of methane, an ultra-potent and fast-acting greenhouse gas, for a full year. The Interior Department announced a $625 million investment to “reinvigorate and expand America’s coal industry” and directed a costly Michigan coal plant on the verge of closure to stay open.
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However, while these moves have been effective in sowing panic and uncertainty, their long-term effects on the country’s climate policy framework are far from certain. Indeed, only a small fraction of the climate damage threatened by Trump is truly permanent, experts told Grist. That’s not only because many of Trump’s moves may ultimately be ruled illegal — federal judges in Rhode Island and New York, for instance, allowed offshore wind farms in those states to resume construction just last week — but also because executive actions can be reversed by a future president. And the president has not shown much interest in passing energy- or climate-related legislation, a far more durable form of policymaking than executive decree. Despite claims to the contrary, Trump has signed fewer bills than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“He is not changing law,” said Elaine Kamarck, who worked in the Clinton administration and is the founding director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Effective Public Management. “He is changing practice.”
Even something as unprecedented as the EPA’s moves to relinquish its own authority to regulate the emissions that affect human health — a responsibility that comprises a core tenet part of the agency’s mission and is therefore widely regarded as unlikely to hold up in court — could be unraveled by a future administration even if it’s ruled to be legal, though that process would take years.
“You can’t make up for the lost time, the increased emissions, and the extent that new areas are opened up for [fossil fuel] exploration,” said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. “But from a regulatory perspective, what this administration is doing to EPA and the other agencies are all executive actions that can be undone in the same way they were done.”
The major exception is the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA. If a future administration wants to restore expansive tax credits for wind and solar energy, that president will have to push Congress to pass new climate legislation. But the climate-relevant portions of OBBBA are noteworthy for being subtractive rather than additive — and are perhaps more accurately viewed as a representation of Trump’s quest to refute former President Biden’s legacy than a desire to radically alter U.S. energy law. Indeed, the new law left in place tax credits for other sources of carbon-free energy, including nuclear and geothermal — something that more moderate Republicans who do not share the president’s dismissal of climate science have been quick to note.
“We like to point out that the baseload clean energy credits were maintained,” said Luke Bolar, head of external affairs and communications at ClearPath, a think tank that develops conservative climate policies. Sean Casten, a Democratic U.S. Representative from Illinois, said that the goal of the Biden-era climate legislation — ensuring that U.S. clean energy can be built in a cost-competitive way — has largely been achieved even if specific parts of the law have been repealed.
“Every single zero-carbon power source … is still cheaper on the margin than a fuel energy source,” he said.
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The relative fragility of Trump’s assault on bedrock environmental and climate laws could be a product of the president’s prioritization of political dominance over lasting change, said Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the think tank Third Way.
For example, the administration has taken steps to shield the American coal industry from the punishing blows of competition, environmental regulation, and the rising costs of mining. Trump has signed an executive order aimed at “reinvigorating America’s beautiful clean coal industry,” granted coal-fired power plants temporary exemptions from emissions limits, and ended a federal moratorium on coal leasing. But those interventions will do little in the long run to reverse a decline driven mainly by economics: The nation’s aging coal plants are becoming increasingly expensive to run while natural gas and solar energy have only gotten cheaper. And they certainly don’t help the president’s stated goal of reducing household energy costs.
To attempt to make sense of the president’s crusade to save coal is to assume there is a larger political strategy at play — which may not be the case, Freed said.
“There’s no reason to bring back coal other than to show that the administration can bring back coal,” he said. “It’s not like there’s this huge lobbying effort or donor base that will be of significant benefit to MAGA or Republicans if they do it.”
A style of governance motivated by political dominance is a good way to make headlines, but it’s not a particularly effective way to build a lasting legacy. Trump’s efforts to buoy coal may help the industry in the short term, but experts are broadly in agreement that coal can’t be “saved” without sustained support from the federal government. And an industry that can only survive with a coal-friendly Republican in the Oval Office isn’t exactly thriving.
“When you have to get the government to step in to put its thumb on the scale in order to help your industry,” Sean Feaster, an energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told my colleagues earlier this week, “it’s a sign that you’re not particularly competitive, right?”
For decades now, the pendulum of U.S. climate policy has swung left and right, reflecting the priorities of the sitting president. Trump’s climate blitzkrieg may be the starkest example yet of the benefits and drawbacks of that model. But despite his best efforts to stand out from the pack, the president’s first year back in office fits a well-worn pattern. As a result, his victories may not last much longer than his presidency.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How permanent is Trump’s assault on climate action? on Jan 22, 2026.
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