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Senator Steve Daines really loves Montana’s outdoors, and on Thursday, he let fellow lawmakers on the Senate floor know it. “Hunting, fishing, and backpacking in our state,” he said. “Thankfully I’ve had a chance to pass it on to our own four children.” The Native peoples of their homelands have not been as fortunate. In a state that has long leveraged anti-Indigenous policies to get at rich caches of coal, oil, and natural gas, Daines delayed Laguna Pueblo congresswoman Deb Haaland’s nomination to be Interior Secretary over their opposing views on the land. Such cultural clashes are decades-old in Montana. In the 1960s and 70s, Native women statewide felt they were genocidal targets for America’s coal interests when they started realizing that mothers in their communities had been sterilized at area Indian Health Service hospitals without clear and informed consent. “Do you feel that this a result of some kind of government policy?,” journalist Jim Lehrer asked Chief Judge Of The Northern Cheyenne Tribe, Marie Sanchez, in 1976. “The way the government is after our coal, our resources, our gas and oil, uranium - I really feel that this has some bearing in their attempts to control our population,” she said. (Scroll to 13:20)
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