Zinke Whistleblower: Zinke took “clearly discriminatory action” against Native American staff at Department of Interior

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, October 31st, 2022

CONTACT
hadley@montanademocrats.org

Despite only making up 5-10% of DOI staff, Native Americans represented 30% of all staff that Zinke “reassigned”

Helena, MT – When Joel Clement, a whistleblower from the Dept. of Interior, came to Bozeman earlier this month to talk about Zinke's corruption and leadership at Interior, Clement painted a picture of Zinke’s discriminatory actions against Native American staffers and his politically motivated staff "reassignments".

"30% of [the employees who were reassigned] were American Indian. Only about 5-10% of the workforce at DOI is Native American so a clearly discriminatory action. Relocating people across the country at the taxpayers expense, just to get them out of his way."

Clement was asked by an audience member if he could provide any other examples of Zinke’s racism at the Department of the Interior, in addition to his discriminatory reassignments:

“I would say Bears Ears, perhaps. Frankly, I think the Bears Ears decision, where he shrunk Bears Ears by 85%-- a monument that was supported, the very idea of it, the very underpinning of it was from these five Tribes. It was done, it was a sacred place. It was known to be. When he went out there to ‘look into it,’ he met briefly with them [the Tribes] for an hour. He spent days with the constituents who wanted that monument gone. The politicians from Utah, some of the Oil and Gas folks, some of the mining folks who gave him a map of what they thought that monument should look like. And it was about 85% smaller. He simply turned his back on the Tribes.

His official portrait at the Interior is him riding a horse through Bears Ears – I mean that’s as explicit as... that’s horrifying."

“With every new detail we learn about Zinke’s “leadership” at the Department of the Interior, the clearer the picture grows: Zinke is a callous, selfish man with no respect for Tribal land or sovereignty,” says Sheila Hogan, executive director of the Montana Democratic Party. “Zinke ignored the Tribes, cut up the boundaries of sacred Tribal land at the behest of the Oil and Gas industry, and then had the gall to commission an official portrait of him conquering that very land like a tone-deaf cowboy.”

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