Glacier National Park was one park where National Park Service Director Chuck Sams said native cultures could help co-manage natural and cultural resources/NPS file

A congressional hearing Tuesday into how best federal land-management agencies could tap Native American expertise for natural resource issues opened the door for Republicans to push for more oil and gas drilling and development of a national energy policy in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

U.S. Rep. Garrett Graves, R-Louisiana, slammed U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva, chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, for holding the hearing at a time when oil and gasoline prices were soaring, inflation was undercutting Americans' buying power for energy costs, and the Biden administration was calling for a ban on Russian oil imports.

"We have a crisis going on right now, we have a crisis going on in Urkraine and Russia, we have a crisis going on right here in the United States," he said. "This committee has jurisdiction over our energy resources. We have the highest gasoline prices, the highest energy prices in American history. Right now. Mr. Chairman, I've offered amendments in this committee asking that we not carry out policies that have a disproportionate impact on Native American communities, on communities of color, on communities of low economic activity.

"Mr. Chairman, these are the people that are harmed most by what is happening. And what's worse about all of this. All of this is preventable," Graves said in a full-throated delivery of his grievances with the committee's agenda as well as the Biden administration's decision to open talks with Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Venezuela as possible sources for oil to replace Russian imports.

For the past three years, Graves went on, he and other Republicans have offered amendments "to ensure America's energy security" and to ban Russian oil imports only to have Democrats controlling the committee work ignore them.

"And now all of a sudden, everybody's on board with a Russian ban?" the congressman said. "Now we do a Russian ban, [but] we don't have a way to backfill the energy. So what's going to happen? You think prices are high now, just wait. We're getting ready to further penalize Americans, further penalize the U.S. economy, because energy has an impact on everything. It transcends everything. This is the committee that can actually design an energy solution."

While President Biden has announced plans to release 30 millon more barrels of oil from the country's strategic oil reserves in an effort to slow the rise in gasoline prices, Graves said there are 38 billion barrels of proven reserves in the United States that should be tapped.

Near the end of his five-minute limit, the Republican asked National Park Service Director Chuck Sams, who was testifying on how tribes could help co-manage federal lands, what input the Park Service was offering on energy development proposals on lands adjoining national parks. Grijalva moved the hearing on before Sams could respond.

Graves' vocal outburst was not entirely duplicated by other GOP members of the committee, though several raised the issue of energy independence for the United States and used the Russian invasion of Ukraine to drive that point home.

"There's a subject that's being ignored, that is far more important that we should all be discussing. We should be having hearings on this until we get to a resolution, and that is the unprecedented energy crisis that our country and the world is facing right now," said Rep. Bruce Westerman, an Arkansas Republican who is the ranking member on the Natural Resources Committee. "This committee has jurisdiction over many of the resources that could be used to solve this energy crisis, and I would consider it a dereliction of duty to have a hearing to not to bring this up."

While Grijalva tried to deflect those questions, Westerman returned to them when he asked Melvin J. Baker, the chairman of the Southern Ute Tribe, whether the nation should be working to develop the tribe's energy resources or work to "get more oil and gas from hostile nations like Iran or Venezuela?"

"If the tribes have it within their reservation homelands, it's definitely an opportunity," replied Baker. "We are very advanced in oil and gas, but of course we do cater to Mother Nature, the land. We have to do things respectfully. Some of our rules and regulations surpass even the federal government's rules and regulations. We always have other native tribes that come and visit with us for a one-on-one and 'How do you do this?' With new technology like horizontal drilling, it really changes the footprint. You don't see lands that are totally destroyed. It's all underground, horizontal drilling. There's a lot of new technology. But we do support domestic production in Indian Country. I mean, if we have the resources, we should, and I think it can really benefit some of the tribes that are not doing that."

Rep. Jared Huffman, D-California, tried to portray the Republicans' line of questioning as "false choices" that overlook the promise of clean energy.

"The false choice choices are flying from our Republican colleagues this morning. Do we respond to (Russian President) Putin by cutting dirty oil deals with Iran and Venezuela, or do we develop oil and gas on tribal lands?" he said. "There is a third way. We'll keep saying it, and I hope maybe it gets through, but it's called clean energy. It changes the whole paradigm. And in a decarbonized world, you don't have to pick the prettiest source of the glue factory, you can actually have clean energy, which makes thugs like Vladimir Putin powerless and poor, and pretty soon it'll make Russia look for a new leader."

To that suggestion Rep. Cliff Bentz, an Oregon Republican, would later in the hearing point out that "this is trading one dependency for another because clean energy, of course, requires aluminum, graphite, copper, lead, and a quick glance at the source of those minerals reveals that China and Russia are supplying something over 60 percent of each of those necessary elements of clean energy. ...So in the short run, we need the oil and gas that's available, whether it's on tribal lands or on federal lands, and we need it now."

Throughout the hearing, which ran more than two hours with committee members joining from their respective offices in a virtual setting, Democrats tried to focus on the help Native cultures could bring to managing natural resources with approaches they've honed over millennia, while Republican members for the most part sought opportunities to develop the country's energy reserves.

But in his opening statement, Carleton Bowekaty, the lieutenant governor of the Zuni Tribe and co-chair of the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition, pointed to the knowledge native cultures can bring to land management, and talked of how the country once was bent on "the most enduring policies of Indian removal, bounties for Indian scalps and the painful legacies of boarding schools and criminalization of our language and culture," but now "remarkably, Presidents and members of Congress, like you, are acknowledging that our millennia-long experience living and perpetuating the environmental around us, what some people call 'Traditional Ecological Knowledge,' is an important resource, no longer something to erase or subjugate, in the combined effort to take care of our shared home."

Sams in his prepared remarks told the committee that there were a number of examples where the Park Service was already working with native peoples.

Grand Portage National Monument in Minnesota is co-managed by the Grand Portage of Chippewa Indians, he said, while the Nisqually Tribe is collaborating with Mount Rainier National Park staff on a report concerning Plants, Tribal Traditions, and the Mountain Practices and Effects of the Nisqually Tribal Plant Gathering at Mount Rainier National Park. In Acadia National Park the Wabanaki Nations of Maine has been allowed to gather sweetgrass in that park, while the Yurok Tribe has worked with Redwood National And State Parks to repair hiking trails, as well as provide resource stewardship education. At Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona, the monument's enabling legislation "preserves some land and mineral rights of the Navajo as well as the preferential right to provide visitor services," noted Sams.

Rep. Don Young of Alaska pressed Sams on how the Park Service could develop better relationships with Indigenous peoples in his state, saying it has failed to do so in the past. 

"We are in deep discussions with a number of the Alaskan natives, we have a new regional director in Alaska now, and we're wanting to put a lot more effort in that," said the Park Service director. "As I said, we've worked with the Tlingit in the past regarding the harvesting of eggs [in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve]. But we recognize there's much more opportunities to be working in Glacier Bay on interpretation, and so we are reinvigorating our consultation and government-to-government [talks] throughout Alaska."

Young said one place the Park Service would be better served by working with native peoples is at Sitka National Historical Park.

"All it is is a totem park. And it should be, I think, should be totally managed by the local tribe," the Republican said. "That's their culture, they know more about it than anybody else, and yet they can't get any headway in the presentation and what happens there culturally, and that's not right."

There were no requests that tribes regain lands in the National Park System where they have cultural and historic ties, but rather statements that the Park Service and other federal land managers could benefit from working with tribes in pertinent areas in terms of not just natural resource management but in better understanding those cultural ties and reverence for the land.

"There are a number of parks," Sams said in response to a question about what parks could serve as pilot projects when it comes to co-management with native cultures. "Many of the lands that the National Park Service has, particularly out West, are lands that were ceded to the United States government through a treaty. Whether that was treaties of war, or peace. But many times the tribes were able to preserve their rights to hunt fish and gather in those spaces. And they already to a lot of co-management, along with the states and the federal government on flora and fauna.

"And so I think expanding some of those opportunities. There's great opportunities at Yosemite. There's great opportunities at Glacier, great opportunities at Yellowstone," said the director. "And of course, as we talked about, in Acadia, where they're doing [traditional gathering of] sweet grass. There's a great opportunity here to be able to bring not only that traditional ecological knowledge, but the reciprocity that tribes demonstrate when they're doing restoration and management of these different flora and fauna. Because ultimately, it is for the entire American people. Our ideas to bring these species back not to just a survival rate, but to a thriving rate so that all people will be able to enjoy them for future generations."