I wrote nearly every week on this blog during the four years when the Trumpzi party controlled the Executive Branch. I let things slide a bit during the Biden years. Though Biden was so much less than I wish he was, there was indeed much less to be outraged about. Now, Trump will be returning to the White House. The American people, with eyes wide open, looked past his criminal convictions, his obvious lack of character and integrity, his racism and sexism, and his manifest unfitness. He will be back, and he will be looking to finish the work his advisors tell him to do. Let’s face it: I am a woke historian. Studying history, after all, can break your heart. Working to remedy the injustices of the past, I believe, is one way to heal. And we are going to have a lot of work to do.

If you are a historian, you probably have a list of rules, formal or informal, that you share with your students. Some of them may have to do with how you like your students to write and conduct research. But I also share with them certain assumptions about how the past works. Mostly I share these with them as a way to let them know where I am coming from, how I have learned to view the past. I tell them that they should never bet against the power of white supremacy and colonialism.

During the campaign, Trump began to distance himself from Project 2025, a mammoth tome highlighting changes the extreme right would like to make as it overhauls the federal government as we know it. I read the sections about education. I read where the contributors described American historians as people who hate their country and feed distorted and partisan information to their students. I fully expect the next four years to be brutal for those of us who teach students to think about the past and the sometimes considerable gap between the way things are and they way they ought to be.

I also read the section of the book which treated the Department of the Interior and, under that heading, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Trumpzis are coming for the American Nation’s public lands. After all, Project 2025 reads, 61% of the mineral wealth in the continental United States occurs on federal land, but less than a quarter of the nation’s oil and 12% of its natural gas come from those lands. The Biden Administration, the authors assert, waged war “domestically available fossil fuels.” And by discouraging Indigenous nations from mining, fracking, and drilling, the Project 2025 plotters argued that the Biden administration unconstitutionally breached its trust responsibility to native nations (536).

So Project 2025 calls for the federal government to work toward the following two goals:

For Project 2025, it was simple: “A significant percentage of critical minerals need by the United States is on Indian lands, but the Biden Administration has actively discouraged development of critical mineral projects on Indian lands rather than assisting in their advancement”(536-537).

Drill, baby, drill.

There are Indigenous nations that have aggressively exploited their mineral wealth. The Crows, discussed in detail in Native America, are an example of a Native Nation that has seen in mining its rich coal fields a path out of poverty, and they have placed mining over the health and environmental consequences of mining. Project 2025 would have the Trumpzi Party “end the war on fossil fuels and domestically available minerals and facilitate their development on lands owned by Indians and Indian Nations.” The federal government should no longer require Indigenous Nations to adhere to federal environmental policies. The government should open tribal lands for corporate exploitation, and Project 2025 respected tribal sovereignty so far as it made it easier to extract the mineral wealth in Indian Country.

Nothing was said in Mein Trumpf about other areas where tribes have asked for additional authority over Indian country. Prosecution of federal crimes remains the business of the federal government. Nothing about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, environmental despoliation of Indigenous lands, police brutality, and the weight of continuing colonialism.

We are going to enter a period of unmitigated corporate rape of some of the most beautiful places in the United States. I find it difficult to believe that Trump’s avaricious young white guys are all ready to issue a flurry of executive orders opening reservation and federal land and reservation territories. It will unquestionably have adverse affects on the health and safety of Indigenous People who live nearby, and a general lowering of quality-of-life as health standards fall.

Keep your eyes on who Trump appoints to head the Interior Department and, even though the media will not cover it, who he places in charge of the BIA. Watch these people. Monitor their actions. See what they say. Hold them to account. We are the only guardrails left.