The Fight Against Graphite: What Tribal Opposition to a Mine in Alaska Teaches Us about the Importance and Limitations of Consultation in the Green Transition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Twelve years ago, a Canadian mining company started drilling for graphite in the Kigluaik Mountains. The Native Villages of Mary’s Igloo, Brevig Mission, and Teller were never notified of the start of exploration, despite their proximity to the proposed mine site and the significance of the Kigluaiks in their culture and creation story. Adding insult to injury, in July 2023, the Department of Defense (DoD) granted Graphite One $37.5 million dollars to expedite the feasibility study for this mine. To this day, the DoD has not consulted with the Tribes regarding the Graphite One mine. The DoD wants to expedite the project because there is currently no domestic manufacturing of graphite in North America, and graphite is an essential ingredient for both renewable energy technologies and weapons manufacturing. While local Tribes oppose the mine, many Tribal members feel that mine development is inevitable, especially given that the Graphite One mine is on State land (and thus subject to fewer environmental and Tribal consultation requirements) and the project has the federal government’s blessing. This Comment pushes back against that feeling of inevitability by identifying existing tools within federal environmental and federal Indian law that Tribes affected by mining projects can wield to mandate consultation and participation in mine-related decision-making. Using Tribal opposition to the Graphite One mine as an example, this Comment explores actions Tribes have already taken and further steps Tribes could take to protect their homelands and subsistence resources from mining projects. As the Green Transition intensifies the need for minerals used in renewable energy technologies, Tribal consultation and participation in mine-related decision-making grows increasingly important. Without meaningful consultation with Tribes, the Green Transition will inevitably follow in the footsteps of the fossil fuel past it seeks to replace: extracting resources from Indigenous lands and threatening subsistence lifestyles. This Comment imagines a just transition where Indigenous ways of life are honored and uplifted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.064 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".