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“It comes down to the stealing of everything that is and the taking of everything that is,” says Joseph White Eyes. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes talks with Native organizers Joseph White Eyes and Krystal Two Bulls about the struggle against data centers in Native communities. The conversation explores how the AI boom is advancing a new era of colonial extraction, and how Native communities are resisting land grabs and exploitative technologies.

Music: Son Monarcas and Sarah the Illstrumentalist

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer, and organizer Kelly Hayes.

The AI boom is being built through the seizure and exploitation of land, water, minerals, human creativity, and data. In the book Empire of AI, Karen Hao writes, “Over the years, I’ve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are: empires.”

The AI Boom Is a Corporate Project. It Can Be Disrupted

Today, I’ll be talking with Krystal Two Bulls and Joseph White Eyes of Honor the Earth about the AI boom as a colonial project and the growing fight against data centers in Native communities. As ravenous tech companies race to build the infrastructure AI requires, and the Trump administration strips away environmental protections to help them do it, Indigenous lands and communities are being targeted — and organizers are fighting back.

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Kelly Hayes: Joseph White Eyes and Krystal Two Bulls, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Krystal Two Bulls: Yeah, thank you for having us. I’m really excited to have this conversation.

Joseph White Eyes: Yeah, definitely appreciate being here as well.

Kelly Hayes: How are you all doing?

Krystal Two Bulls: I am doing great. I am in the middle of strategic planning, visioning some of the work that we have for our future, specifically around this conversation, but also enjoying the beautiful views here in Montana.

Joseph White Eyes: Yeah, I’m doing great too. Spending a lot of time getting ready for ceremony here back in the Homelands. So excited for that, but also looking forward to that as well.

Kelly Hayes: Can you introduce yourselves and share a bit about the work you do?

Krystal Two Bulls: Yeah, so my name’s Krystal Two Bulls. I’m Oglala Lakota, Northern Cheyenne. I reside in Northern Cheyenne territory in Southeastern Montana. Just basically a grassroots organizer who ended up in an executive director position. I’ve organized around just different Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and just really excited to be here right now.

Joseph White Eyes: Yeah, my name is Joseph White Eyes. I’m a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe located in Central South Dakota. I also come from the Siha Sapa and O’Hanupa, bands of the Lakota people. And yeah, I’ve been organizing against the fossil fuel industry for a number of years. And then with my work for Honor the Earth, it’s been more towards critical minerals and now the current data center fight. So it’s been a big learning curve in understanding the different, I guess, contexts behind everything. And yeah, it’s been great so far.

Kelly Hayes: Well, I’m really glad to be talking with you about this work. You’ve both spent years organizing against fossil fuel extraction and in defense of Indigenous lands and waters. How did that work lead you into the current fight over data centers, and what connections began to emerge as you learned more about the industry?

Krystal Two Bulls: Yeah, I mean, I can share a little bit generally of what brought us to this point and then Joseph can jump in. But I’ve been organizing around the fossil-driven industry as well for a long time, Indigenous rights, just broadly across many different areas that intersect with Indigenous rights as well and climate justice, environmental justice. But for this in particular, it was probably about just over a year ago, there was a small modular nuclear reactor that was proposed for the community that I live in. So I reside 15 minutes north of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. It’s a coal mining community. They have two coal-fired power plants, a coal mine, and now have been kind of targeted as a place for a nuclear power plant. And so, I basically went to the meetings, listened to the meetings, and basically they said that this is a site where there’s absolutely no deterrents whatsoever for having nuclear.

Also, what happened during that same timeframe was the Montana State Legislature passed legislation that allowed for uranium enrichment and for nuclear waste storage in the state of Montana. And so those two things triggered some research on our end. And so our team started to dive in, and we quickly found out that the reason why that they were pushing for a small modular reactor in Colstrip was because they needed the nuclear power to power the hyperscale data centers that were planned for the state of Montana. So right now, the state of Montana has a 4,000-acre data center proposed for Broadview, Montana, which is maybe about an hour and a half, two hours from that community that I live in. And so, once we found out that that was proposed and that 4,000 acres would, if it goes through, it’ll be the largest hyperscale data center in the state or in the United States actually, not just the state of Montana.

And so once we realized that, all of a sudden, we started getting just slammed with data centers all over in our communities targeting tribal lands, rural communities were getting targeted. And so we just started doing research and trying to figure out what the impacts of these things were. And so, we just started to quickly organize research and anything that we researched or that we found out, turned around and put it out to communities. But I think what we’ve seen, or at least what I’ve been able to see, is that this community was targeted because it’s a fossil fuel-impacted community. And so, the coal mining that was happening there, as we know, coal is a dying industry.

And so there’s a lot of fear in these communities that they will no longer have jobs, there’s no livelihood for them there, things like that. And so, this other corporation comes in and basically targets them and plays into that fear and says, “Well, we can offer you this. There’ll be jobs for you. It’s going to benefit the community,” all of these things. But what our research has actually shown us is that the jobs that exist with these hyperscale data centers and these nuclear power plants don’t actually go to the local communities that are already impacted. And so, what we started to see is that actually fossil fuel-impacted communities, rural communities, and Native lands are all targets because of our access to large land bases, because we have access to water, also because there’s jurisdictional issues. And also, it’s easy to deem us as sacrifice zones for critical infrastructure.

And so, I think a lot of that intersects with a lot of the work that Joseph and I have done in the past around pipelines, coal mining, and then even with the just transition around critical minerals mining, because there’s going to be a large demand for critical minerals mining to get these minerals to create the GPUs [graphics processing units], the servers, the air conditioners, all of these things for the actual hyperscale data centers themselves. And so, I think there’s a lot of intersection right now. And so, a lot of the networks that we’ve built with some of the previous fights have proven to be helpful in this fight as well. And they are also being targeted. And so, it’s just a natural fit that we transition from, not away from fossil fuel, but build from those campaigns into this data center fight that we’re carrying right now. So yeah.

Joseph White Eyes: One of the biggest things that I always talk about when having conversations with our elders, our leaders, and our spiritual people is that if we can quantify our data, then they can sell our data. And so, a lot of times in relationships to these data centers, that’s really what it comes down to. It’s not just the environmental factors of our waters, our lands, nuclear energy phasing out of fossil fuels, but it also comes down to our specific data of who we are as tribal people, as tribal nations. And the moment we engage with things such as large language models or generative AI, that information no longer belongs to us. And when we try to use those same tools that they developed out to try to build what we want to call data sovereignty, if we use their tools to try to build that out for our tribal nations, what we’re seeing is that these multi-billion dollar companies now have access to that information because we use their tools and there’s lack of oversight.

There’s no meaningful policy on guiding principles on what that would look like as far as tribal nations maintaining and really securing what they want to, I guess, reach as data sovereignty. So we’re seeing problems like intellectual property rights. We’re seeing things like our language and culture being taken and bastardized. And so, that’s been one of the big parts of our work here too, has really been education for our tribal communities and helping them to understand that it’s more than just a data center that’s coming to take our land. It’s more than just our water disappearing, but it’s also about us as individuals and our data and what we strive to, I guess, preserve for the well over 500 different tribal nations here on Turtle Island. And that’s one of, like I said, the big conversation that I try to have with our traditional folks, our spiritual leaders and everything related to that.

Kelly Hayes: Can you say more about how Honor the Earth is approaching this fight? How are you helping people understand the larger infrastructure behind data centers, and how are you supporting Native communities that want to organize against them?

Krystal Two Bulls: Yeah, I mean, there’s so much right now, but I think generally right now what it looks like for us is there’s a couple of different ways we’re approaching this. One is on the narrative front and really connecting all of the dots. And so, when we are talking about hyperscale data centers, we’re not just talking about the physical or the material manifestation. What we try to do on the narrative front is really connect it all the way back to the demand for generative AI right now. And the demand for generative AI is directly linked to militarism so that way we can have autonomous AI in warfare. And so that’s what we try to really focus on. And then from there to have generative AI though and to advance it in the way that the United States is, basically they have to build out the physical infrastructure, which is the hyperscale data center.

The cloud is not this invisible place. They are physical buildings that create heat islands, that can cause cancer, that are connected to rare cancers, that are connected to killing off bees. There’s so many negative impacts. And so there’s the hyperscale data center, which houses the data itself. From there, you actually have to have critical minerals. Like I mentioned earlier, you’re going to have to have the critical minerals to create the GPUs, the servers, all of those. And so we know that there’s the exploitation of our relatives in the Congo, in Kenya, in the Philippines, in these different areas currently for their critical minerals. But in this current administration, they’re pushing for everything to be done domestically now. And so what we’re going to start seeing is that the demand for these critical minerals are going to shift towards Indian Country because we have access to that.

Many of our nations live on top of these critical minerals, critical mineral deposits. And so there’s already a long legacy of that. We already know that there has been a rollback of protections, a rollback of any kind of restrictions, and then a fast tracking of this mining. And so we’re going to start seeing those impacts to get these minerals specifically for data centers. And then from there, you have to power these data centers. You have to have energy. Many of these hyperscale data centers require more energy than the cities that they’re next to. So you’re going to start seeing places like Lake Tahoe who actually were notified that they are going to have to find a whole different way to power their community because their utilities company is actually going to be going and pulling all of their energy to these individual homes and providing electricity and energy for a hyperscale data center moving forward beyond 2026.

And so we’re going to start seeing that. And I think recently we just heard that seven states are starting to experience blackouts where the grid is going down, there’s no electricity specifically because they’re powering hyperscale data centers over homes and the grid cannot handle the amount of electricity that needs to be pumped through. So we’re already seeing that. And so you’re seeing the demand for energy, but that means that you’re going to see revitalizing the coal industry. You’re going to see an uptick in the frack gas world. You’re also going to see the advancement in the fast-tracking of nuclear. We’re also seeing Native communities being targeted for that as well. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the conversation around uranium mining, around uranium milling, uranium enrichment to create the fuel that’s needed.

But then also the broader conversation of the nuclear waste that comes from these nuclear power plants, because there is no long-term nuclear waste facility in existence in the world. And so you’re going to see this nuclear waste staying in the communities where these power plants exist. And also, you’re going to see them going to Native lands or other Indigenous lands globally to actually house this nuclear waste. And so that’s coming. And then all of this connected to empowering surveillance, the very surveillance that we’re seeing with the Flock cameras that we’re seeing connected to ICE, that we’re seeing surveil our communities and our tribal nations that are on the borders, the false borders. And so we’re already seeing the impacts of all of that play out across the country, and then all of that towards militarism. And so we’re seeing a lot of direct connections obviously of using generative AI within the military.

I think it was released in an article a couple of weeks ago where the first account of generative AI making the autonomous decision to kill. But before that, we also have generative AI making the decisions about targets, about what is an acceptable human life loss to getting the target. And so this is already happening. It’s already playing out. And so for us, it’s really important that every time we speak about hyperscale data centers, that we speak about the entire infrastructure, which we call the AI death cycle. It’s important to know that this is not just about the physical manifestation of the hyperscale data center, but it’s about the entirety of it in the way that this current administration is fast-tracking and rolling back protections right now for everything. And so that’s one way that we’re fighting is the narrative front. The other way is by organizing. And so we have a national coalition that’s comprised of 36 different Native nations, 14 different states, and they’re all Native Indigenous folks who are organizing actively in their communities.

Honor the Earth has committed to providing toolkits for them. We provide templates, we provide fact sheets, we provide presentations that they can change and modify to fit their own community. We’ve launched a data center tracker across Indian Country specifically, so that way we know which one of our lands and tribal nations are being targeted and we can support them, and that’s growing every day. And then, we also are able and are just now starting to work on tribal resolutions for tribes to protect themselves around things like intellectual property, property rights, generative AI practices and policies, and also just creating moratoriums or flat out bans for hyperscale data centers themselves on Native lands. And so we’ve been doing a lot of that. And so not only are we supporting these coalitions and providing that for them in addition to the research, but we also have people and organizers directly on the ground in communities, specifically in South Dakota, Montana, and Oklahoma. We’ve had a lot of progress in Oklahoma and a lot of victories. Some of the largest Native nations in the country have passed moratoriums.

And I think just recently we got a full-blown ban coming out of Oklahoma as well. And so we’ve been doing that work in Montana. We’ve kind of gone the strategic litigation route of pushing back on them. And in South........

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