From Resource to Relation

There is renewed interest for mining in America driven by the hunger of new technologies for specific minerals and the insecurities of geopolitical competition. Roshelle Patterson explores how certain indigenous American frameworks can help us approach extraction in ways that are more balanced and sustainable. How can we balance the pressing needs of industry with the longer-term needs of our ecosystems?

For the reader’s reference, Roshelle aims to earn her license to argue in the supplementary piece linked here.

The United States is digging again, this time in the name of national security and technological independence.

Rare earth elements (REEs) are small but powerful metals that are central to both green technology and national defense, powering electric vehicles, wind turbines, smartphones, and satellites. U.S. officials now describe securing a reliable supply of these minerals as a national security imperative given China's dominance over global processing. Investments into building a full mine to magnet supply chain at home are being encouraged, including new processing and manufacturing facilities in Texas and California.

Getting them out of the ground is one thing; mines involve blasting, crushing, and moving massive amounts of rock, but the real bottleneck, and the stage where China holds a near monopoly is the processing and refining.

This part of the chain consumes enormous amounts of water and energy, produces toxic waste, and leaves behind tailings and ponds that can persist for decades, making it one of the most environmentally damaging steps in the supply chain. While the United States is now trying to build this capacity at home, extraction is far from new in America. 

Mining has always fueled growth while leaving ecological scars and fractured communities in its wake. For many Indigenous nations, extraction has meant exclusion from decisions about their lands, and sometimes displacement, long term health harms, and disruption of cultural life.

As the United States works to expand its REE supply chain, a deeper question looms. It is not whether we will mine, that seems all but certain, nor is it not how quickly we can scale production compared to China, since U.S. output will remain smaller no matter the effort (at least for the near future). The real question is whether we can approach it differently this time, more responsibly, with attention to relationships, ecosystems, and communities. Answering this question requires more than asking how much the United States can produce or focusing on incremental reform, it requires examining what kind of system is being built through these choices. What becomes visible in the current model of U.S. mining governance is a consistent prioritization of output, speed, and strategic supply, which points to the need for a shift in its underlying logic, from optimizing production to sustaining relationships across time.

A relational approach to mining governance would begin by embedding the well being of all stakeholders, human and nonhuman, present and future, into decision making itself.

Mining Is Not Just a Technical Problem

Mining is often framed in economic terms, focused on questions like how to speed up permitting or cut costs. Yet a mine does not exist in isolation. It sits within watersheds, wildlife habitats, tribal treaty territories, regional economies, and a changing climate, and altering one piece of this system inevitably affects the rest.

Systems thinker Donella Meadows wrote that the behavior of a system cannot be understood just by listing its parts because what really matters is how those parts connect and what basic mindset holds the whole thing together.

If the underlying mindset (our current one) is predominantly thinking of land as a resource, then the system will naturally focus on the efficiency of extraction. If the mindset shifts to land as relationship, then stability, reciprocity, and long term balance start to matter more.

That shift in mindset is exactly what Indigenous scholars like Kyle Whyte and Daniel Wildcat have been calling for.

Relatives, Not Resources

Daniel Wildcat describes a way of thinking he calls indigenuity, a term that captures how Indigenous knowledge systems view innovation not as a tool for domination, but as something shaped in partnership with the living world. In a 2011 interview reflecting on environmental thinking from an Indigenous perspective, Wildcat explained that for many Native peoples the world has never been understood as a set of commodities to be used up, but as a network of relationships with beings that matter in their own right. 

As he put it, when discussing the environment and Indigenous worldviews, it is about "relatives, not resources". In this way of thinking, land, water, animals, and plants are not raw materials waiting to be optimized; they are active, vital participants in a complex web of relationships that include human communities, and whose well‑being matters for the flourishing of all.

Kyle Whyte expands this idea through what he calls collective continuance, which he defines as the ability of human and 'more-than-human' communities to flourish together over long stretches of time. This framework asks us to measure success not only in economic terms or short-term environmental gains, but in whether projects sustain the networks of relationships that allow people, rivers, forests, and wildlife to thrive together.

For example, a mine might cut emissions or create jobs, but if it drains a watershed that tribal communities depend on, or permanently alters a forest ecosystem, it would fail the test of collective continuance. 

Collective continuance also draws attention to intergenerational responsibility, meaning that decisions today must leave room for future generations to live well and maintain cultural, ecological, and social connections. In this sense, it offers a practical lens for evaluating extraction ethically, translating abstract Indigenous values into a tool for guiding real-world policy.

Together, these ideas do not demand an end to mining, but they insist that we look at it differently. Rather than being on a fixed line between ethical and unethical, extraction could be said to exist along a spectrum - one shaped by how well it supports or strains the communities, ecosystems and futures it touches.

The more extraction maintains, or even nurtures, these relationships, the more it leans towards responsibility, whereas the more it severs them, or repeats past harms, the further it drifts from it. Recognizing this complexity shifts the question of progress away from what we extract, towards how thoughtfully we can remain embedded in the world around us.

Relationality Is Not Just a Feeling

Indigenous relationality means decisions are made with accountability to the network of relationships that will be affected.

In the context of mining in America, that has direct implications for extraction governance.

Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, often shortened to FPIC, is a framework that is supposed to ensure that Indigenous nations have meaningful authority over projects affecting their lands, including, in some contexts, the right to approve or reject projects. Under FPIC, mining companies must disclose comprehensive and accessible information about a project's scope, risks, timelines, and potential impacts on land, water, and community well-being, in forms and languages that enable meaningful understanding and decision-making. Yet when consent is merely treated as a box to check during permitting, it loses flexibility and force. 

Through a relational lens, consent is not a one time signature, it's an ongoing governance relationship with shared authority, long term monitoring, and the real possibility of saying no. 

This is where systems thinking becomes useful. Meadows argued that the most powerful way to change a system is to change its underlying paradigm, the shared assumptions that shape its design. If rare earth mining is organized around speed, throughput, and geopolitical competition, it will behave one way, but if it is organized around collective continuance and relational accountability, it will behave another.

Real World Examples

Some early examples suggest that change is possible, even if imperfect. In British Columbia, Canada, agreements involving the Taku River Tlingit First Nation have created long term collaborative frameworks with mining companies that include environmental oversight and shared governance.

Rather than remaining an abstract commitment, the pursuit of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) between the Taku River Tlingit First Nation (TRTFN) and mining proponents is reshaping how mining is carried out in practice. The Hà Khustìyxh (Our Way) agreement with Canagold, for example, establishes concrete mechanisms for ongoing information-sharing, environmental monitoring, and participation in permitting, meaning that exploration at the New Polaris project is conditioned by adherence to TRTFN laws and values and involves the continuous involvement of TRTFN. 

This shift becomes even more tangible in the remediation of the Tulsequah Chief Mine, where TRTFN is helping co-develop the closure plan itself, guiding restoration according to Tlingit values and future land use priorities while influencing technical decisions such as water monitoring and waste management. Together, these cases show that FPIC is not simply a principle but a set of practices that can redistribute decision-making power and embed Indigenous priorities into the operational lifecycle of mining.

A Federal System at a Crossroads

If ideas like Indigenous relationality and Free, Prior, and Informed Consent are ever going to shape how America mines, they cannot live only in essays or academic conferences. They have to live inside federal agencies, budget lines, permitting rules, and real enforcement power.

Currently mining policy in the United States runs through a maze of offices. In 2026, much of that work was consolidated under the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, signaling that minerals are not just an environmental issue but an industrial priority.

The U.S. Geological Survey, housed within the Department of the Interior, publishes the official Critical Minerals List that guides investment and signals which materials the government sees as essential. The Environmental Protection Agency oversees pollution standards. The Army Corps of Engineers reviews certain water permits. Congress, especially the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, shapes the legal framework that holds it all together.

There is also a less discussed corner of the federal system that matters deeply here. Within the Department of the Interior, Indian Affairs has convened a Critical Minerals Working Group as recently as 2024, an effort meant to coordinate tribal engagement and ensure that tribal governments are not sidelined as mineral development accelerates. 

On paper, this is exactly the kind of institutional foothold relational governance would need. It signals recognition that tribal nations are governments, not stakeholders, and that mineral policy intersects directly with tribal lands and sovereignty. The effort points to a sincere desire within government to deepen engagement with tribal authorities, positioning Indigenous consent as a governing condition that can shape decisions from the outset.

However, over the past year, the broader orientation of federal environmental policy has shifted, even as these agencies continue to play formal regulatory roles. The Environmental Protection Agency's “endangerment finding”, the Obama era scientific determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare and therefore must be regulated, has been formally rescinded under the current administration. While the EPA and other agencies still oversee key aspects of mining, this reversal narrows the legal and political foundation for climate centered regulation and signals a shift away from ecological protection as a primary organizing principle guiding federal policy.

Administrative restructuring has consolidated critical minerals strategy under offices focused on industrial growth and supply chain security, while climate specific offices and clean energy deployment programs have faced closures, funding cuts, or absorption into broader economic portfolios. When offices are folded together or defunded, priorities shift with them.

If national security and throughput remain the dominant frame with which we view mining, then relational governance becomes harder to institutionalize, not because it is technically impossible, but because the system is being tuned to optimize something else. Yet even still, in this moment of consolidation and rollback, the scaffolding for something more relational still exists inside the federal system, waiting for different priorities to animate it. What should those priorities be?

What this moment demands is a prioritization of how mining governance is structured. A relational approach to extraction incorporates the well-being of all stakeholders, human and nonhuman, present and future, into the decision-making process. 

A more just system would treat Indigenous nations impacted by the extraction not as mere stakeholders to be consulted, but as governments with shared authority across the full lifecycle of projects, from early exploration through closure and remediation. In practice, this would mean embedding ongoing consent into federal permitting processes, requiring co-developed environmental monitoring systems, and aligning project approval not only with economic and technical benchmarks, but with whether they sustain the long-term relationships that communities depend on. However, to be clear, FPIC and Indigenous governance are not the endpoint of this ideal, but they are one of its clearest tests.

A governance structure that can meaningfully share authority with Indigenous nations may also be capable of recognizing responsibilities beyond immediate economic interests, including obligations to land, water, nonhuman life, and future generations. In that sense, Indigenous consent becomes a strong measure of whether mining policy is capable of moving from an extractive logic toward a relational one. The examples from British Columbia show that this is not hypothetical; when decision-making power is shared and accountability is continuous, the design and operation of mining projects begin to change. The question for the United States is whether it is willing to institutionalize those shifts, or whether it will continue to treat them as exceptions rather than the foundation of policy.

Conclusion

Rare earth magnets help power homes, guide missiles, and may one day push spacecraft farther into the solar system. The technology is impressive, and the geopolitical stakes are real. Yet every magnet begins as rock in the ground, somewhere, in someone's homeland, inside a living system. Indigenous scholars remind us that land is not just a backdrop to economic activity, it's part of a network of relationships that includes us.

Changing technology is difficult, but changing paradigms is even harder and as Meadows notes, the deepest leverage point in any system. If land shifts from resource to relationship, then mining policy, corporate governance, and federal law would have to reorganize around that truth. The question is not simply whether we can mine rare earths more cleanly, it's whether we are willing to rethink what extraction means in the first place.

Roshelle P. (she/her) is a game designer (UX research, narrative design) and death doula with 4 years of experience in the games industry. Her work centers advocacy through interactive storytelling (usually through afrofuturistic and solarpunk lenses) that spans themes of climate change to death justice.

Roshelle is also a Contributing Writer for Tusk & Quill.

All opinions expressed here are solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the author’s employer.