Lithium's Colonial Echo: How the Clean Energy Rush Is Repeating Old Wounds in Lakota Territory

Trina Lone Hill wasn't surprised when mining companies showed up looking for lithium beneath South Dakota's Black Hills. Gold had drawn prospectors there before. Uranium too. Each time, the Lakota Sioux watched outsiders arrive with equipment and ambition, extract what they wanted from land the tribe considers sacred, and leave behind something diminished. Lithium, the soft silver metal now central to electric vehicle batteries and grid storage systems, is simply the latest chapter in a story the Lakota have been living for over a century.

This pattern, reported in a collaboration between Inside Climate News and Columbia Journalism Investigations, cuts to the heart of one of the most uncomfortable tensions in the clean energy transition: the minerals required to decarbonize the global economy are disproportionately located beneath or near Indigenous lands, and the urgency of the climate crisis is being used, consciously or not, as a new justification for old extraction logic.

The Black Hills, known to the Lakota as Paha Sapa, were guaranteed to the tribe under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. The United States violated that treaty when gold was discovered in 1874, and the Supreme Court acknowledged as much in 1980, ruling the land had been taken illegally and awarding $105 million in compensation. The Lakota refused the money. They want the land back. That unresolved legal and moral wound has never healed, and now lithium exploration is probing it again.

The global demand for lithium has surged dramatically as automakers and governments race to electrify transportation. According to the International Energy Agency, lithium demand could increase by as much as 40 times by 2040 under aggressive clean energy scenarios. That pressure has sent prospectors into corners of the American West that were previously considered marginal, including the granite formations of the Black Hills, where lithium-bearing pegmatite deposits have attracted renewed commercial interest.

What makes this moment particularly fraught is the rhetorical cover that climate urgency provides. When a mining company can frame its project as essential to fighting climate change, the political and social calculus shifts. Opposition becomes harder to sustain publicly. Tribal objections get reframed as obstacles to progress rather than legitimate assertions of sovereignty. The green transition, in this reading, inherits the same extractive logic that powered the fossil fuel economy, just with better branding.

This is not a hypothetical concern. Across the American West, lithium and cobalt projects are moving forward on or near Indigenous lands with limited consultation. The Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada, for example, faced fierce opposition from the Paiute and Shoshone tribes who consider the site sacred and a burial ground. A federal court allowed the project to proceed. The pattern is consistent enough that scholars of environmental justice have begun describing it as "green colonialism," a term that captures how the infrastructure of a cleaner future is being built on the same foundations of dispossession that defined the industrial past.

The systems-level consequences here extend well beyond any single mine. When Indigenous communities are excluded from or overridden in decisions about resource extraction on ancestral lands, it erodes the trust that would be necessary for a genuinely just transition. That erosion has feedback effects. Tribal nations that might otherwise be partners in renewable energy development, given that Indigenous lands hold enormous solar and wind potential, become adversaries instead. The legal battles that follow slow projects down, raise costs, and generate political backlash that mining and energy companies then use to argue for weaker environmental review processes. The very resistance that extraction provokes becomes the justification for removing the protections that made resistance possible.

There is also a deeper irony embedded in the lithium story specifically. The clean energy transition is, at its core, a response to the long-term consequences of treating the natural world as an infinite resource to be consumed without accounting for systemic costs. Lithium mining, done carelessly, risks replicating exactly that logic, depleting water in arid regions, disturbing ecosystems, and displacing communities, in service of a technology meant to correct the consequences of the last round of unchecked extraction.

Trina Lone Hill and the Lakota people of the Black Hills are not simply historical footnotes in an otherwise forward-looking story. They are, in a very precise sense, the leading indicator of what the green transition will actually mean for the communities least responsible for the climate crisis and most vulnerable to the industries claiming to solve it. Whether the United States can build a clean energy economy without repeating its colonial patterns is not yet settled. But the Black Hills suggest the answer will not come from the mining companies.