Indigenous concerns surface as Trump calls for seabed mining in Alaskan waters

President Donald Trump is considering allowing companies to lease more than 113 million acres of waters off Alaska for seabed mining. Alaska is the latest of several places Trump has sought to open to the fledging industry over the past year, including waters around American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Like those Pacific islands, Alaska is home to Indigenous peoples with ancestral ties to the ocean, and the proposal is raising cultural and environmental concerns.

Deep-sea mining, the practice of scraping minerals off the ocean floor for commercial products like electric vehicle batteries and military technology, is not yet a commercial industry. It’s been slowed by the lack of regulations governing permits in international waters and by concerns about the environmental impact of extracting minerals that formed over millions of years. Scientists have warned the practice could damage fisheries and fragile ecosystems that could take millennia to recover. Indigenous peoples have also pushed back, citing violations of their rights to consent to projects in their territories.

Trump, however, has voiced strong support for the industry as part of his effort to make the United States a leader in critical mineral production. He has also pushed for U.S. companies to mine in international waters, bypassing ongoing global negotiations over international mining regulations. 

Kate Finn, a citizen of the Osage Nation and executive director of the Tallgrass Institute Center for Indigenous Economic Stewardship in Colorado, said she worries the seabed mining industry will repeat the mistakes of land-based mining.

“The terrestrial mining industry has not gotten it right with regards to Indigenous peoples,” Finn said. “Indigenous peoples have the right to give and to withdraw consent. Mining companies themselves need to design their operations around that right.”

It’s not yet clear which companies, if any, are interested in mining off Alaska. A spokesperson for The Metals Company, one of the leading publicly traded firms in the industry, said it has no plans to expand to Alaska. Oliver Gunasekara, chief executive officer of the startup Impossible Metals — which has asked Trump to allow mining around American Samoa despite Samoan opposition — said his company has no plans either. 

“We do not have current plans in Alaska, as we do not know what resources are in the ocean,” he said. “If there are good nodule resources, we would be very interested.” 

The potential lease area under consideration is larger than the state of California. Cooper Freeman, director of Alaska operations for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, said the scope is so broad that it includes ecologically important waters already closed to bottom trawling, a fishing method that drags heavy nets across the seafloor. 

“A lot of these areas, particularly in the Aleutians, have been put off limits for bottom trawling because there are nurseries for commercially important fish and ecologically important species and habitat, ” Freeman said. 

In its announcement, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, or BOEM, the agency responsible for regulating deep-sea mining, said the proposed area included depths more than 4 miles deep near the Aleutian Trench and the abyssal plains of the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska, at depths as low as 3.5 miles. “BOEM is particularly interested in areas that have been identified by [the U.S. Geological Survey] as prospective for critical minerals as well as heavy minerals sands along the Seward Peninsula and Bering Sea coast.”

The waters are off the coast of a state that is home to more than 200 Alaska Native nations. Jasmine Monroe, who is Inupiaq, Yupik, and Cherokee, grew up in the village of Elim in Alaska’s Bering Strait region. She said she became concerned about what the proposal could mean for the seafood her community relies on after learning the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management opened up a 30-day public comment period last week on potential leases.

“We eat beluga meat, we eat walrus, we eat seal, we eat whale,” she said. “Whatever happens in the ocean, it really does affect our way of life.” 

“It just feels like we don’t have any say on whether it happens or not,” she said. “It just feels like the system is set up for failure for us.” 

The Alaska Federation of Natives, an organization representing Indigenous peoples of Alaska, did not respond to requests for comment.

Monroe, who works on water quality issues at the nonprofit Alaska Community Action on Toxics, said she feels disempowered by what she described as a top-down approach and short timelines for public input. 

Kate Finn from the Tallgrass Institute said Indigenous peoples have the right under international law to consent to activities in their territories and warned that U.S. federal regulations alone may not be sufficient for companies to meet international legal standards, particularly amid deregulation. 

“Companies will miss that if they’re only relying on the U.S. federal government for consultation,” she said. 

Finn added that Indigenous nations have their own economic and cultural priorities and that some have chosen to work with mining companies under specific conditions. 

“There are Indigenous peoples who work well with companies and invite mining into their territories, and there is a track record there as well,” she said. 

Monroe said she recognizes that seabed mining could supply minerals used in technologies like electric vehicle batteries, similar to other mining proposals she’s opposed in Alaska including a graphite mine that could pollute waters. But she doesn’t see electric vehicles in her community, and said the environmental and cultural cost is too high.

“It really feels like another false solution,” she said. 

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