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The artificial intelligence industry’s data center boom is the latest chapter in a long history of environmental racism and resource exploitation in vulnerable Native communities, says Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne activist Krystal Two Bulls, the executive director of Honor the Earth, an Indigenous-led environmental justice organization that is tracking over 100 proposed data center projects on tribal and rural lands. We speak to Two Bulls about the myriad impacts of what she calls a “modern-day iteration” of “settler colonialism,” including noise pollution, cancers and respiratory illnesses, water depletion, energy grid overload and even “ecological collapse.” As tech companies set their sights on Indigenous lands, Two Bulls says, “We’re always the one that ends up having to sacrifice our relationship to land, air, water, our communities and our nonhuman relatives.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

On this Earth Day, we go now from Memphis to Montana, where we’re joined by Krystal Two Bulls, a longtime Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne activist. She’s the executive director of the group Honor the Earth, which has launched the No Data Center Coalition. Honor the Earth has been closely monitoring the construction of data centers in or near Indigenous lands. She’s joining us from the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeastern Montana.

Krystal Two Bulls, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you give us an overview? You’ve made a crowdsource map of data centers and their relation to Indigenous lands across the United States. Talk about how you see this issue of data centers.

Want to Resist a Data Center? These Organizers Share How They Did It.

KRYSTAL TWO BULLS: Yeah. Good morning, Amy. Thank you for having me.

I think, you know, similar to what we just heard, we’re seeing the targeting of Native lands. But for us, when we talk about hyperscale data centers, we typically talk about the entire AI infrastructure, because that’s the driving demand for the hyperscale data centers themselves. And so we’re looking at the physical impacts of the data centers. We’re also looking at the critical minerals in the mining that’s going to be needed to power and create things like GPUs and servers and the chips, even the air conditioners for these hyperscale data centers, which often, and especially with this push for that mining to happen domestically now, we’re going to be looking at that mining happening on Indigenous lands.

We’re also looking at the uranium just now being added to the list of critical minerals. And so, that’s also going to be happening to power nuclear for fuel. And so, we have to also look at these hyperscale data centers that are creating — using massive amounts of electricity, and where is that energy going to come from. Now they’re shifting towards nuclear. They’re looking at revitalizing coal, the coal industry, and expanding fracked gas, until they can get nuclear online. And so, we try to connect all of those dots across the board, knowing that all of those industries right there are going to target Indigenous lands, as they have in the past and as we’ve already experienced.

The other thing that we’re seeing is that they’re targeting Indigenous lands because we have large — many of our large land-based tribes, we have access to that. We have access to water. There’s tax incentives that come along with it. We have a lack of legal infrastructure oftentimes to hold these accountable, these companies accountable. Also, the promised economic development that these corporations come with, when you are dealing with communities that often live in extreme poverty, the promise of these jobs is something that appeals to them, right? And then we also have the jurisdictional issues that........

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