William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review
Abstract
Climate-driven displacement is no longer a speculative concern for Indian Country. Across our country, from Alaska, to the Gulf Coast, and the Pacific Northwest, Tribal communities confront accelerating erosion, sea-level rise, permafrost thaw, and chronic flooding that threaten not just individual structures, but the territorial foundations of Tribal sovereignty itself. Schools, clinics, water systems, housing, and transportation networks are increasingly exposed to conditions that render continued habitation unsafe or impossible. These impacts do not present as isolated disasters; they manifest as cumulative, slow-onset processes that erode the capacity of Tribal governments to govern in place.
This Symposium Essay advances the doctrinal thesis that under existing principles of federal Indian law, sustained federal inaction in the face of foreseeable, well-documented, climate-driven threats to Tribal lands and governmental continuity violates the fiduciary standards the Supreme Court has repeatedly articulated as defining the federal trust responsibility. Climate relocation is not an extraordinary policy request. It is the contemporary expression of the federal government’s oldest and most enduring legal obligation in Indian affairs, and one that becomes most demanding precisely when the costs of performance become politically inconvenient.
The litigation strategy sketched here is intentionally disciplined. The core objective is not a judicially designed resettlement plan or a court-managed construction project. It is a forward-looking administrative law remedy: an injunction compelling an agency to exercise existing statutory discretion rationally, transparently, and in a manner consistent with the trust relationship. Where contracting is the instrument chosen to implement that duty (most likely through self-determination mechanisms), the aim is to compel negotiation and performance, not to ask courts to pick the line items of a capital budget.
This Essay proceeds in six parts. Part I reframes the trust responsibility as arising from federal constraint rather than environmental risk. Part II situates that argument in the doctrinal development of the trust responsibility. Part III addresses the relationship between Tribal self-determination and enforceable fiduciary accountability. Part IV identifies administrative-law and statutory pathways for judicially manageable review. Part V addresses land-status and sovereignty bottlenecks in relocation. Part VI explains why forward-looking APA relief is the most operationally useful remedy.
Repository Citation
Samuel Kohn, The Federal Trust Responsibility in an Era of Coastal Retreat: Climate Relocation, Fiduciary Governance, and the Future of Tribal Self-Determination, 50 Wm. & Mary Env’t L. & Pol'y Rev. 635 (2026), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmelpr/vol50/iss3/9Included in
Administrative Law Commons, Environmental Law Commons, Indigenous, Indian, and Aboriginal Law Commons