Since 2018, Portland-based developer Avangrid Renewables has been working to develop an industrial solar project on a piece of state-owned land in Eastern Washington. The parcel, known as Badger Mountain, is also an important ceremonial and first-foods site for tribal nations such as the Yakama and Colville.
An investigation from High Country News and ProPublica earlier this year revealed that Avangrid omitted more than a dozen sites of cultural and archaeological significance from its survey of the site. The company has now announced it will pause the project while it reevaluates feedback from landowners and tribal nations.
Toastie Oaster is a staff writer for High Country News. They join us with more details.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Since 2018, the Portland-based developer, Avangrid Renewables has been working to develop an industrial solar project on a state-owned site in Eastern Washington. The land known as Badger Mountain is also an important ceremonial and first-foods site for the Yakama and Colville Tribal Nations. Earlier this year, an investigation by High Country News and ProPublica revealed that a cultural survey the company submitted to the state failed to include more than a dozen areas of cultural and archaeological significance. A new article has a major update. The company told the state a few months ago that it was going to put a pause on the project while it re-evaluated feedback from landowners and tribal nations.
Toastie Oaster is a staff writer for High Country News. They join us with more details. It’s good to have you back on the show.
Toastie Oaster: Thanks for having me.
Miller: So I mentioned just there in my intro that a big factor in this pause was a really insufficient cultural survey. What’s the purpose of these surveys?
Oaster: Well, this particular kind of land survey is a cultural resources survey. It’s when they go out to actually walk around the parcel and look on the ground, and at the rock walls, and the surroundings, and see what’s actually out there in terms of first-foods, maybe archaeological resources, anything that might be of significance to tribal nations.
Miller: And then what does the state do with it?
Oaster: Basically, they compile it with the rest of their environmental impact statement, which is a huge document. This is only a small part of that document. And they submit it as part of the permitting process. So that’s how a developer gets the permits from the state that they need in order to begin construction on the project.
Miller: And then ultimately, after a lot of bureaucratic layers, the governor can say yes or no to a project.
Oaster: That’s right.
Miller: What exactly did a state archaeologist find to be wrong with the report that this energy developer Avangrid Renewables gave her?
Oaster: Well, she went out and double checked their work, which the state doesn’t always do, but she took it upon herself to do that, and that was within the course of her duties as a state lands archaeologist. And she told me that she found just one site after another that was not listed in the report. And sometimes, she said, these would fall between two sites that were listed. So it was clearly the archaeological folks that Avangrid hired were out there walking around, they saw this, they saw that, but for some reason, they omitted the thing that was right between them.
This happened again and again. Then when she went out later, that was on her first trip, when she found, I think she told me 17 different sites that they had omitted. And she found more later when she went back again.
Miller: What did you hear directly from local tribal nations – the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation – about what this land has and does mean to them?
Oaster: Well, for one thing, it’s a ceremonial site and they won’t talk about that. So I don’t really have details about what that means or what goes on there, but it’s also a food harvesting site and they did speak to me a little bit more about that. And one of the elders that I spoke to, he was talking about how in 1942, when the Grand Coulee Dam was built – that was the first of the Columbia River hydropower project – that stopped the salmon from getting back up to Colville lands. So they’ve been missing that sort of backbone of their foodway since the forties.
Their sort of secondary foodway is these root vegetables, which a lot of them grow on Badger Mountain and that’s where they go to harvest them. It’s one of the best places they tell me, where they’re organic heirloom root vegetables that haven’t been grazed over, they haven’t been sprayed, they’re still fairly abundant. And that’s all at risk if this gets turned into a solar field.
Miller: At the beginning of this year, you reported on some really tense back and forths between the company and various state officials, two of whom don’t even work in the state anymore. It seems partly because of these kinds of exchanges. In the end, what did the state’s Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council end up doing?
Oaster: Yeah, it’s kind of a mouthful, the name of that agency. But they ended up deciding that because the cultural resources survey was insufficient and it had actually been returned, they sent it back to basically have it redone and it came back insufficient again. So they determined that they would have a third party company, a different archaeologist, go out and redo the whole cultural resources survey as a replacement.
Miller: We’ve talked in the past about the lack of say that tribal nations often have in these kinds of renewable energy citing issues and conversations. And you wrote that often, despite tribal opposition to these projects, they go forward; or opposition to the results of a cultural survey, that often doesn’t make a difference. In this case, it did. What do you think was different about this case?
Oaster: It’s hard to say, and it remains to be seen if the difference really is a difference.
Miller: You mean, for example, if the pause will be a stop or just a blip in the road?
Oaster: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the system is designed to require agencies like this to consult with tribal nations, but consultation can mean a lot of different things and often it doesn’t mean much.
I think what’s maybe what’s different with this one, is that there’s just been so much tribal opposition, and state agencies also, aligning their voices with the tribal opposition. I’d heard about this from people both within the state government and tribal governments that there’s a lot of contested renewable energy development sites on sacred lands, but the Badger Mountain one in particular seemed to have such glaring flaws – was what I understood from people I spoke to.
Miller: Let’s turn to the timing here. So the company said it was going to pause project planning for two to three months. That letter that you wrote about recently, it was written, it was sent to the state in late June. So a month-and-a-half now since they wrote that. Do you know where the pause stands right now?
Oaster: We don’t know. Avangrid didn’t say much to me about that. In that letter, they did say that they were pausing to reconsider both tribal considerations and also landowner considerations.
Miller: Landowner, because this will be a project on both state land and on privately held land?
Oaster: Correct.
Miller: So what is the private land piece here? And how does that intersect, or does it intersect at all, with the Indigenous concerns and cultural heritage sites that we’ve just been talking about?
Oaster: Yeah, it does. And it’s really interesting because the project is cited on both public and private lands, the state lands archaeologists could only check the public lands. So if you take what she found on the public lands, that they missed dozens of cultural resources and extrapolate that, and imagine that that is likely the case on the private lands also, but the state doesn’t have access to check it there, then Indigenous cultural resources very likely also exist on the private parcels as well. But we can’t verify that without going to the landowners.
Now, what I understood from a source at the Department of Natural Resources is that some of those leases on the private lands have expired as of December. And some of those landowners may not be interested in renewing those leases. So although Avangrid didn’t verify this with me, it appears that there are other reasons that they may have paused and that would make the continuation of the solar project uncertain.
Miller: I want to dig deeper into the biggest issue here that we just touched on briefly when you’re talking about consultation. Because, as you’ve written in the past, the broadest issue here is the rights that tribal nations are granted from treaties to have a real say in development projects that threaten cultural resources on off-reservation lands. So what does that mean? I mean, to what extent are those treaty rights truly honored?
Oaster: It gets really nitpicky, down to the meanings of every individual word in those treaties, as you can imagine. And the rights that those treaties retain, they don’t grant them; they retain them. These are rights that were never relinquished to the United States. They relinquished some of the land but retained the right to access that land, even though it’s American land now, to do things like gather foods. And it specifically mentions hunting, fishing and food gathering in the Yakama Treaty of 1855. So the idea is that if you destroy all the foods, then is that a treaty violation because then we can’t access those foods? That’s kind of the question as it would probably play out in court.
Miller: And it could be up to a judge to cynically say, no, you still have access even if the roots aren’t there. I’m not saying you can’t walk there.
Oaster: Right. And this is an issue in places like Arizona where the Navajo Nation is trying to get their water rights. This particular issue of treaty interpretation comes up in a lot of different ways.
Miller: We’re going to talk, hopefully, more about this in the coming weeks. But what are these tribal nations doing to develop their own renewable energy projects?
Oaster: Well, the Yakama Nation has been working on their own solar initiative. It’s like a combination solar-hydro set of infrastructure that I believe involves canal coverage. I haven’t done too much reporting on that. I’ve just heard about it here and there from officials who seem pretty excited about it. And the Nez Perce also has a big program that they’re putting in to try to basically supplant the energy that comes from the Lower Snake River dams, so that they can power their communities without needing to rely on that.
And there’s a whole renewable energy plan put out by the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission, which is pretty broad. So, it’s a little bit puzzling why the state is sort of clinging to this one permitting avenue that seems designed to kind of sideline tribal interests, when there are these alternatives already happening in other places.
Miller: Toastie, thanks very much.
Oaster: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Toastie Oaster is a staff writer for High Country News. You can read their recent article about the pause that Avangrid has put on planning for the solar project, as well as the earlier article from January all about this issue. There are links on our website.
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