US Rare Earth Revival: Decolonizing Supply Chains from Colonial Extraction to Just Transition
Original framing: “Can America Break China’s Grip on Rare Earths?” — Bloomberg
The Mountain Pass mine’s history is one of **violent dispossession**: the Agua Caliente Band’s 1952 land seizure by the US government, justified under the **1906 Mineral Leasing Act**, which explicitly excluded Indigenous nations from compensation. Today, the **Native American Rights Fund (NARF)** has documented how rare earth mining on tribal lands repeats patterns of **environmental racism**, with Indigenous workers facing higher exposure to toxic waste while corporate profits flow to non-Native shareholders. The **Dine’ (Navajo) resistance to uranium mining** offers a counter-model: their **1979 Nuclear Freeze Resolution** and ongoing legal battles demonstrate how Indigenous sovereignty can redefine resource governance. Yet US policy frames 'domestic production' as apolitical, erasing these precedents.
The US’s rare earth revival is not a story of **geopolitical competition** but of **repeating colonial patterns**—from land theft to labor exploitation—under a new guise of 'national security'.
The **historical amnesia** around Mountain Pass’s Indigenous dispossession and the **scientific neglect** of rare earth toxicity reveal how **capitalist accumulation** depends on **erasing ecological and social costs**. Cross-cultural models—like **Bhutan’s sovereignty-over-resources approach** or **Japan’s Indigenous partnerships**—demonstrate that **alternatives exist**, but they require **disrupting the trickster logic** of US exceptionalism, which frames extraction as **inevitable progress** rather than a **choice**. The real solution lies in **Indigenous-led stewardship hubs**, **global worker cartels**, and **precautionary legislation**—not in **corporate-led 'reshoring'** that replicates the same harms. The synthesis is clear: **rare earths are not a Chinese monopoly but a global crisis of justice**, and the US’s rush to 'compete' risks **deepening the very dependencies it claims to escape**.