Native American tribes competing for the first federal grants for relocation due to climate change damage to land

Shoalwater Bay, Tokeland, Wash.  (NYT Photo by Tailyr Irvine)     

Native American tribes have long felt the squeeze of having to survive on lands with fringe value.  In many coastal areas, climate change has altered Native lands, taking them from marginal to unlivable. As climate change evolves, tribes will not be the only people to need relocation, but they may be the first.

"The federal government has been quietly trying to shift its approach away from endlessly rebuilding after disasters and toward helping the most exposed communities retreat from vulnerable areas. But moving is expensive, and as disasters intensify, demand from communities to relocate will only increase, straining the government’s ability to pay for it," reports Christopher Flavelle of The New York Times.

New York Times map

Favelle shares the story of the Shoalwater Bay Tribe: Their lands along the Pacific coast in Washington state are eroding. Tribal leaders want to relocate to the remote hilltop; however, relocating the tribe by moving them up a mountain will cost millions of dollars the tribe does not have. 

"In response, the Biden administration has created what appears to be the first program in American history specifically designed to help relocate communities threatened by climate change. The Department of the Interior is now deciding which tribes will win funding this year — and which will have to keep waiting as their land falls farther into the sea," Flavelle reports. "That decision, expected soon, is likely to reverberate far beyond Indigenous Americans, by establishing a model for other agencies to follow."

This is a new program, and the biggest decisions for Interior and its Bureau of Indian Affairs are who gets the money and in what order. In sum, who gets to go first? "That makes the new program both test case and precedent for perhaps the most challenging dilemma facing the United States as it adapts to climate change," Flavelle writes.

The money will be awarded through competitive grants of up to $3 million a year. The bureau will spend $25.8 million on community relocation this year. Tribes like Shoalwater Bay are applying a grant in hopes of getting started with relocation. "Through a public-records request, The New York Times obtained a list of at least 11 tribes that have applied for relocation grants," Flavelle reports. "Five of those tribes are clustered within about 100 miles of each other around Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula, making it the site of one of the most important experiments in U.S. climate adaptation policy."