EBCI talks environmental justice, data center moratorium at town hall
The EBCI town hall addressed the cultural impacts of data centers.
File photo
An April 25 Qualla Boundary town hall about data centers, featuring three speakers instrumental in the fight against hyperscale expansion on Indigenous land, both generated support for a tabled tribal council moratorium and explained the myriad ways these facilities can harm environments and cultures alike.
Eastern Cherokee Organization Communications Organizer Louwana Montelongo coordinated the event alongside her mother, Mary Crowe. Montelongo said the mother-daughter pair was able to implement this programing through Crowe’s role as just transition organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network — and her own position with ECO — as data centers became an increasingly relevant issue.
“There were so many surrounding counties that were having town hall meetings, so we wanted to have one and get our community educated and involved,” explained Montelongo. But the three-hour April 25 event wasn’t just any town hall. From the start, it centered Cherokee culture, tradition and values. An hour-long no-cost community meal headed off the program, inviting attendees to get to know their neighbors while enjoying traditional, locally sourced Cherokee food. Through their collective, Bigwitch Indian Wisdom Initiative, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians enrolled member Tyson Sampson had catered an assortment of regional Indigenous dishes such as taters and ramps, poke and eggs and bean bread.
The subsequent presentation was framed as a momentum-generator for the moratorium, submitted by council members Shennelle Feather (Yellowhill), Lavita Hill (Big Cove), Shannon Swimmer (Painttown) and Venita Wolfe (Big Cove).
Wolfe, the only co-sponsor present, said she would’ve been joined by Feather, Hill and Swimmer, each of whom had prior obligations. On May 7, she said, the moratorium would be deliberated by tribal council as an ordinance.
The legislation seeks an indefinite ban on the construction of data centers, defined as “a large-scale facility, campus of facilities, or array of interconnected facilities which house working servers and that are developed to cool, secure and connect data associated with applications and services.”
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The ‘large-scale’ categorization was contextualized by IEN Policy Analyst and Muscogee (Creek) Nation citizen Jordan Harmon.
Data centers have existed since the 1940s, but recent hyperscale buildouts — like Core Scientific’s facility in Marble, with a total power capacity of 117 megawatts and a campus footprint of 70 acres— are unprecedently dangerous, Harmon said.
“Large data centers can use up to 5 million gallons per day, or 1.8 billion [gallons] annually,” she said.
Two-phase immersion cooling, a popular alternative to water, can have significant health-related impacts due to its usage of PFAS “forever chemicals.” Migrating birds and bugs, she added, are impacted by facility-produced light pollution. As a security measure, some data centers employ a sonic weapon called long-range acoustic deterrence . LRAD is potent, capable of causing physical pain within a 20-meter radius.
LRAD notwithstanding, the noise from these facilities is a nuisance at best, and harmful at worst, she noted. For example, Harmon and a co-presenter took a slight detour during their road trip to the Qualla Boundary, but not for sightseeing. They were headed to the predominately Black south Memphis, home to the massive campus of “xAI,” owned by Elon Musk. The facility — the product of a non-disclosure agreement — is operating non-permitted methane gas turbines that generate smog and emit formaldehyde, Harmon said.
“In about five minutes of being [at xAI], we had a headache, and we felt nauseous, and we felt very sick, almost immediately from being close to that data center. We had to get out of there,” she recounted.
“And there’s neighborhoods there — it’s a community.”
She then posed a rhetorical question to the audience: “Why are data centers coming to North Carolina?”
Municipalities, Harmon said, are courted by big tech “for pretty much the same thing” nationwide.
“Number one: the availability of power, coal, gas plants or what they’re calling renewable energy, like nuclear,” she explained.
Tribal land has long been exploited through nuclear testing and waste dumping, and the health outcomes are devastating. The Navajo Nation’s drinking water has been poisoned by over 500 abandoned uranium mines. Western Shoshone territory once endured nearly 40 years of nuclear testing. The last remaining U.S. uranium mill continues to pollute the ancestral homelands of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.
Harmon was quick to highlight the imperfections of alternative green sources. For example, solar and wind power require lithium mining, a process that has created environmental “sacrifice zones” within South American Indigenous communities.
“There is no such thing as power generation — whether it’s hydro, solar, wind — that is totally sustainable with zero impact and zero emissions. That is a fairy tale. It doesn’t exist. The only way to reduce the impact is to reduce the demand,” she said.
And right now, demand is skyrocketing — because of hyperscale data centers, not “regular people” she noted.
The United States leads the rest of the world in domestic data center construction, and it’s not even close. According to Statista, the U.S. had 4,184 data centers in April 2026. With 515 centers, the United Kingdom took a distant second.
But why is this country so keen on hyperscale expansion?
Fellow presenter and Keetoowah Band of Cherokees enrolled member and Cheyanna Morgan attributed it to “the possibility of artificial super-intelligence.”
While ASI is a relevant, if controversial, topic, it’s not been reported as the key reason behind massive data center growth. Instead, research shows that AI demand is primarily driven by circular corporate financing — like Nvidia’s $100 billion investment in OpenAI for data centers filled with Nvidia’s chips — enterprise workflow integration at major companies and firms, search engine embeddedness, training needs, social media optimization, chatbot generation and weapons systems.
Regarding the latter, said Morgan, “Palestine really became a testing ground.”
For example, a targeting system called The Gospel, one of many AI products developed for Israeli military usage. Military technology experts have criticized the system for intensifying Gaza’s devastation, and a detailed report claimed the Gospel manufactures targets to punish Palestinian civilians.
As for AI demand drivers that impact the everyday American, some have been advertised as enhancing or streamlining user and consumer experience. But most have been released — think AI search engine overview, e-mail and text summaries, Flock cameras and facial recognition — without request or permission. That’s why, Morgan explained, a hyperscale facility has no place within the Indigenous “anti-extractive” data sovereignty movement. “Data sovereignty is based on the autonomy of personhood for native peoples. Data sovereignty requires consent and collective agreements,” she said, adding that consent must be given by the population, not just its government.
Final speaker Kenzie Roberts, a grassroots organizer and Muscogee Nation citizen, shared an anecdote illustrating this notion.
The Muscogee Nation had purchased 5,000 acres of land in a trust sustain a food sovereignty initiative. Food deserts are common within the reservation; where Roberts lives, it’s an 11-mile journey to get to the supermarket. The original proposal would “ensure that our people can have good, healthy food, eat at an accessible in an accessible place, at an accessible way,” she told the audience.
The land was rezoned to make way for a data center park. But thanks to the tireless efforts of Roberts, Harmon and Morgan — which included staging town halls, emailing representatives and hosting a rally — the project was voted down, 9-4.
“Every tribe has their own protocols and procedures of sacred consent. You don’t take more than you need. You make sure that you leave enough for everybody to receive that abundance, and so data centers, particularly, that is directly antithetical to many of our beliefs as indigenous people,” Roberts said.
So too, she said, is the narrative of productivity and urgency that inundates today’s society. “For us as indigenous people, the work is the point. The process is the point,” she explained.
Language can encompass some of the more insidious ways generative AI is hurting tribal nations. Roberts recounted that someone in a language revitalization Facebook group had incorrectly used a Muscogee word. After this person was lovingly corrected, Roberts told the audience, she doubled down because ChatGPT — “not an elder; not a Mvhayv, a teacher” — had been a consultant.
“We give [our linguistic tradition] to ChatGPT, and suddenly the people that have been stewarding it for generations are the people that know the least,” she said.
According to EBCI enrolled member Elvia Walkingstick, the intersection of language and AI on the Qualla Boundary has also proved an issue. As a second language-learning member of the Cherokee revitalization project, she, alongside other coworkers, was instructed to program the language into an AI platform called Terentia. Though Cherokee speakers were available for consultation, the archive would be built through the limited knowledge of Walkingstick and her coworkers.
“Our tribe has already adopted [Terentia]. We’re already pushing forward. But I want you guys to be aware that students, second-language learners, did push back on it, and we were removed from the project,” she said, adding that one person was even written up for speaking out.
Wolfe shared Walkingstick’s unease about the situation.
“My concern is also our language, in keeping our language pure and alive. And we’ll have that conversation, because I think that’s going to come up next,” explained the councilwoman, before bringing the conversation back to the moratorium.
“Come in on Thursday the 7th. Come support this [ordinance],” she said. “We want our people to be involved in everything that we’re doing in that council chamber. This is for you all. It’s for all of us.”
