Native American Rights Fund Exposes Bias of National Resource Council Committee, Urges Withdrawal of Interim Report on Klamath Basin
Source: Native American Rights Fund
Boulder, Colo. – The president of the National Academy of Sciences has affirmed his support for Academy actions that are "blatantly discriminatory against Native American people," it was revealed today by Native American Rights Fund (NARF) executive director John Echohawk.
n a recent letter to Dr. Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and chairman of the National Research Council (NRC), Echohawk called for the withdrawal of the NRC committee’s initial findings on water issues in the Klamath River Basin, citing socioeconomic bias and sloppy science.
It is with great regret that I am making public our correspondence to Dr. Alberts and his reply," Echohawk said. "The Native American Rights Fund had hoped that when presented with incontrovertible evidence that one of the Academy’s National Research Council panels had knowingly and deliberately subjugated the rights of a Native American tribe and demeaned the value of the tribe’s resources, president and chairman Alberts would take steps to restore the Academy’s social responsibility and scientific integrity." "Instead," Echohawk continued, "he simply denies that racially biased and scientifically unsound statements, or that the focus on the importance of farm economics to the exclusion of the economic concerns of native Americans, by his panel’s leadership played any role in the NRC interim report recommending that the Klamath Tribes’ endangered fish be deprived of their natural water supply."
In his letter to Alberts, Echohawk asserts that the interim report and statements by committee chair William Lewis Jr. clearly indicate that the committee has applied standards inconsistent with the NRC’s extensive guidance on species protection under the Endangered Species Act.
Specifically, the committee considered the "economic stakes" involved in the agency decisions, even though the NRC has instructed that such decisions must be based only on scientific aspects of species protection. Moreover, as Echohawk’s letter pointed out, the "economic stakes" considered by the panel were only those of non-Indians, and equivalent Indian interests were ignored.
"Dr. Alberts does not deny that his panel chair made remarks that are clearly biased against Native American people, that discount the value of Native American resources, and that violate the National Academy of Sciences' own standards for evaluating the science of protecting endangered species," said Echohawk. "Rather, Dr. Alberts asks us to believe that this intemperate and unsound thinking had nothing at all to do with his panel’s conclusion that non-Indian farmers should have gotten water that the Interior Secretary, on the advice of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientists, had allowed to stay in Upper Klamath Lake to protect tribal fisheries."
Many in the scientific community also have identified inherent problems with the NRC committee’s interim report that prompted the Bureau of Reclamation to release water for irrigation in the Klamath Basin in 2002. Recent articles in Science and Fisheries magazines reported that the hastily organized NRC Committee on Endangered and Threatened Fishes in the Klamath River Basin employed flawed logic in its evaluation and preparation of the report.
Contact:Don Wharton, Native American Rights Fund, 303-447-8760
Bud Ullman, 541-783-3081
Joe Browder, Washington D.C., 202-546-3720
Monica Shovlin, The Ulum Group, 541-434-7028