Kinship Time Meets Linear Time
Recently, renewable energy projects across the country have found themselves tangled up in courts, with tribal governments and regulators over how and under what circumstances they are permitted on or near tribal lands. Many of these tribal lands are located in the American Southwest or Midwest and are excellent places for the potential development of solar and wind development. But not so fast! A federal judge in Oklahoma ordered wind turbines be removed from tribal lands, ruling the developers had violated federal law by not seeking mineral rights from the tribes affected. In Arizona, two tribes and two nonprofits sued the Bureau of Land Management, to prevent a massive transmission project from going through their tribal lands. And tribes objected to putting wind farms in the Pacific Ocean off the Oregon coast.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission recently announced a new policy, saying “We are establishing a new policy that the Commission will not issue preliminary permits for projects proposing to use Tribal lands if the Tribe on whose lands the project is to be located opposes the permit.”
George Hardeen, public relations officer for the Najajo Nation said, “Navajo Nation is in support of solar power and the Navajo utility has developed some solar sites which are operating right now, but pumped storage, we’re not quite ready for that.”
The competing goals of speedy renewable energy development versus protection of the land and the tribal communties is an age-old conflict between kinship time and linear time. Kyle White, a professor at the University of Michigan speaks of the importance of “kinship time” when addressing the climate crisis. Our western culture is ruled by linear time, so we never seem to have enough time. As the saying goes, “time is money”. So the western workplace today can feel like a frenzied and chaotic environment. Employees can feel crushed by performance goals, interpersonal conflicts and turf wars. When “time is money” the clock is always ticking and corruption will be the likely outcome because the ends begin to justify the means. Kyle White points out that those who are already disenfranchised such as indigenous peoples, people of color and poor communities are often the first to be sacrificed on the altar of progress.
Contrast this with a culture based on kinship time that nurtures interdependence, safety, trust, transparency and interpersonal respect. Daniel Coyle wrote about such cultures that prioritize safety first in his excellent book, “The Culture Code”. He found that organizations that value saftety before all other values thrive and adapt well to changing conditions. Kinship time values safety as well, and places a strong value on relationships of mutual responsibility and respect.
This is important, because we often approach the climate crisis with a sense of urgency that frames the issue as a crisis epistemology. Meeting the IPCC deadlines for reducing our carbon footprint in the next two decades to avoid a 2% celsius rise in average global temperatures is highly challenging in such a short time as 30 years. Linear time almost always generates this sense of crisis, because the clock is ticking. In a crisis epistomology we are always running out of time. So the solutions proposed often create injustices for poorer, disenfranchized communities.
What would happen if we approached the climate crisis as a coordination epistemology? We might become aware that the problem exists today because we have not taken responsibility for each others’ safety, well-being and self-determination. Kinship time is an ethic of shared moral responsibilty that focuses on how responsible relationships must first be established or restored for it to be possible to have renewable energy projects that respond to everyone’s safety and well-being.
“Tiyospaye” is a term used in the Lakota language that means extended family and is broadly inclusive of many who are not in one’s immediate blood family. They speak of it as “all my relations.” For them, kinship is an important value which brings with it a complex set of relationships of caring, mutual responsibiliy, respect and reciprocity.
So it is encouraging to see that the Biden administration seems to get this. Native American, Pueblo of Laguna member Deb Haaland, is the first Native American woman to oversee the Department of Interior, which oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as well as other agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. So it’s heartening to see the Biden administration’s sensitivity to tribal concerns, even as it pushes the most comprehensive green environmental legistation in history. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is the largest green environmental legislation in history offering all kinds of incentives to citizens, states and businesses to buildout new sources of alternative green energy.
The history of energy development and Native Americans is marked by exploitation such as the Osage murders of the 1920s, lung cancer among Navajo uranium mine workers, or construction of dams that obliterated native fishing grounds.
There are currently complex conflicts taking place in Osage County between landowners controlling both surface and mineral rights of their land and the Osage Nation Reservation which owns mineral rights on its own lands. It’s a complicated situation and time will tell how this all sorts itself out. Sometimes it just takes time to build relationships based on integrity, respect, and mutual trust.