(SeaPRwire) – By: Gavin Thorne
Native American sovereignty is being tested again, this time not by oil pipelines or mining concessions but by data centers. The ground beneath these facilities is the same ground colonizers have coveted for centuries. The tools are just newer. What makes this moment striking is not that tech companies want tribal land but that the political reckoning is happening inside the very offices that were designed to represent Native interests.
Flanagan put it bluntly during a July debate in Minnesota. She called AI an existential threat if left unchecked. Her campaign also ran attack ads tying Angie Craig to the crypto industry. Davids took a quieter route. She said no data center should raise electricity costs, waste water, or burden Kansas communities. Haaland initially told voters she lacked the power to stop Project Jupiter. Last week she pivoted to support a moratorium until guardrails exist. Searchlight New Mexico found $87,200 in campaign donations from Oracle and Clayco executives. A climate justice petition is now asking her to return the money and ban all AI data centers. Project Jupiter sits at 26% completion despite paused permits.
The Section 106 rollback is the silent engine driving this whole debate forward. More than 700 organizations including Native Nations signed a letter opposing the change. This is not new territory for developers. Secretary of the Interior Secretarial Order 3389 tried the same maneuver near the end of Trump’s first term. Biden reversed it. The current Advisory Council on Historic Preservation rewrite is picking up exactly where that order left off. Oil, transmission, and mining companies have been pushing this strategy for years. Data centers are simply the newest well-funded entrants.
Peltola says she defers to local communities. That sounds reasonable until you examine how Alaska actually works. Roughly 44 million acres of state land belong to Alaska Native corporations. These are for-profit entities created by a 1971 federal law. Their boards answer to fiduciary duty, not shareholder votes. Bering Straits Native Corporation already pursued federal contracts including ICE work despite loud shareholder objections. Boards were never obligated to listen. Local support may sound like consent in a press interview. It does not always hold up under structural scrutiny.
Sullivan is pushing data centers onto military installations. Stak Energy proposed a $500 million facility on the North Slope drawing immediate scrutiny. Santa Fe and Socorro Counties already passed moratoriums. Four Democratic state legislators floated one months ago. Haaland’s version is narrower and carefully hedged. The carveout is far from nothing when construction is underway and permits sit paused before the state Supreme Court.
The bottom line is simple. Native Nations must retain consultation rights regardless of which industry wears the latest branding. If Section 106 falls, data centers will move faster than any legislative response can match. The fight over tribal land never ended. It just changed format.
Author bio: Gavin Thorne, an investigative journalist tracking special interests and legislative affairs based in Washington, D.C., with over fifteen years covering Native sovereignty and infrastructure politics.