How a profit-sharing agreement could be a new model for mining on Indigenous land

In 2020, when Brian Mason began his first mandate as president of the Shoshone-Paiute tribes of the Duck Valley reserve, the gold minors called. A few years earlier, Integra Resources, a Canadian reduced company, had acquired a golden and silver mine abandoned on the landscapes of the tribe in the southwest Idaho, but before the start of the work, they had an unusual request: the tribe and the company could establish a partnership which would benefit both?

“There are a lot of things that were different when we started working with Integra,” said Mason. The first efforts included invitations to tribal members of the mine while impact studies were carried out as well as investigations on the initial site.

Historically, the mining was ecologically expensive and even fatal for indigenous peoples around the world. The industry is also known to ignore a significant consultation with indigenous communities and ignore human rights squarely. Even in the United States, mining companies have often operated with carte blanche in the Indian country.

Last month, for example, the Percé nose tribe, located north of Duck Valley in Idaho, continued the forest service for having approved an open gold mine which, according to the tribe, will present cultural and ecological risks for their country of origin. In Arizona, a copper mine offered on Oak Flat, a sacred site, has been in and out of court since 2014 and the resistance in progress led President Donald Trump to call tribal members who are against the “anti-American” mine.

For Duck Valley, the question was: how do you develop an agreement that benefits the tribe with an industry that prospered on theft and dispossession? The answer was surprisingly simple: include the nation as a development partners in a framework that recognizes tribal sovereignty and self -determination.

Mining operations, and especially projects related to transitional minerals, become more expensive when companies operate indigenous territories without working with indigenous peoples. In 2023, a federal judge ruled that Enel Green Power, a developer of wind turbines, has emphasized on the land of Osage Nation when she built a wind farm, creating a legal precedent which moved the way developers sail on projects and made a significant tribal consultation a measure of cost reduction for companies.

“We are not doing this as an ideological effort,” said Mark Stockton, vice-president of the sustainability of Integra, with regard to the Duck Valley agreement. “It creates resilience in our business. It creates predictability and durability. “

Last month, the Shoshone-Paiute and Integra signed a legally binding agreement to develop and supervise the gold and money extraction project, sharing profits and establishing, in the calendar of the decade of active operations of the mine, initiatives that will support economic development and revitalization of the tribe language. But what distinguishes the agreement of others is his commitment to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Aboriginal Peoples, an international standard for the rights of indigenous peoples. While other projects, such as the Solar Anahola project in Hawaii, have coordinated a partnership with Aboriginal Hawaiians in a UNDLIP style frame, Integra says that its agreement with Duck Valley is a first in the lower 48.

Maranda Compton, the founder of Lepwe, an organization that consults tribes and developers in sectors such as mining, focuses on the agreements and publication guidelines that benefit tribes in other sectors via Undrip. “My joke is always that the consultation is essentially the federal government which comes to a tribe and says: How much do you hate this project on a scale of your to you to continue us?”

Compton has co-wrote a white paper earlier this year with the Tallgrass Institute, an organization focused on the economic management of Aboriginal people, detailing the way in which industries move to respect the Undrip and continue coordination with tribal countries, a decision that includes developers engaging in income and continuous surveillance compared to projects with tribes.

President Mason says that the request for metals and minerals has a great impact on his tribe, especially in the neighboring state of Nevada, where shoshone-paiute land are also. “If Nevada was its own country, it would be the fourth gold producer in the world,” he said. But the state has also been involved in several disputes with tribal nations, including the Thacker Pass mine project, the largest known deposit of lithiumA mineral used for electric vehicles and a sacred site for tribes, including the Reno-Sparks Indian colony and Lake Summit Paiute. Beyond a significant lack of tribal consultation to exploit the Thacker pass, generating a human rights violation report by Human Rights Watch, Mason noted that there is no share sharing agreement and none has been proposed. In addition to this, the law on federal mines allows companies to claim land at a lower cost while avoiding payments on the royalties for the use of these land.

“The tribes have never been subjected to any of this income,” said Mason. “We argued with the American government on this subject, we argued with the state on this subject, trying to obtain income from the tribes in a form of mineral tax.”

But many tribes in the region, including Shoshone-Paiute, are known as “unreache” tribes: a tribal nation with an economy only supported by subsidies and federal funding. For Shoshone-Paiute, this meant that 85 to 90% of all revenues come from federal sources. But because funding depends on available funding, tribal savings that are not returned are often unstable.

Tribal countries receive federal aid following the signing of treaties with the United States. In exchange for large expanses of land, the federal government has agreed to provide support for said tribes. However, in a report published by the Government Accountability Office last year, the listeners found that it was not clear what part of the $ 32.6 billion in tribal funding and assistance was in fact going to tribes. This funding should also decrease. In a budget request in 2026 at the Congress, the Trump administration proposed reducing the funding of the Indian affairs office by $ 617 million.

According to Arnold Thomas, the vice-president of the tribe, the economy of the tribe, alongside other tribes of Nevada, has always had trouble. By generating income from mining and games, Arnold thinks that it will make the tribe “will become self -sufficient and exercises its sovereignty”.

Although the details of the agreement are confidential, the tribe says that it would not participate if the income would not have been sufficient to finance their projects. Now on the horizon: a tribal health system and language revitalization efforts to stem the loss of current speakers. “Funding will help us,” said Thomas, “improving our teaching methods, our infrastructure and our medical needs”.

“I hope people consider it not the gold stallion, but the new standard,” said Compton.