FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 15, 2024
MEDIA CONTACT
Radim Dragomaca, [email protected]
Whistleblower Exposes Systematic Destruction of Sacred Native American Sites by the U.S. Forest Service – including within the Trail of Tears Corridor
Whistleblower Aid calls on the Forest Service and the U.S. Government to conduct a full and impartial investigation
Washington, D.C., November 15, 2024 – Alarming new evidence from a U.S. Forest Service employee shows that the agency has spent years facilitating the destruction of Native American heritage sites, including some from the Trail of Tears Corridor. Instead of conducting an investigation, the Forest Service has instead run a campaign of retaliation and harassment for his efforts to expose it.
Scott Ashcraft, a 31-year career Forest Archeologist blew the whistle on the illegal conduct, and is speaking out publicly for the first time in a letter to state and federal officials. Whistleblower Aid represents Mr. Ashcraft alongside the Federal Practice Group.
Mr. Ashcraft has disclosed that North Carolina Forest Service leadership has suppressed and ignored vital data and approved massive developments on sloped Native American sites across Western North Carolina, including Old Fort Trails Project, the Lickstone Project and the Seniard Creek Project.
He is also ringing the alarm that sacred sites may be destroyed throughout the country based on an obsolete and fundamentally flawed national Forest Service statistical model, which predicts how likely a plot of land is to contain Native American heritage sites. The Forest Service uses that model in deciding how to investigate the land ahead of approving development projects, controlled forest burns and other public or commercial activities. Internal research over the last decade has proven that this model systematically and dramatically undercounts Native American sites on sloped terrain, such as hills and mountains.
The agency has obscured this data and its implications from the affected Tribes, in contravention of U.S. law.
“Our nation’s most precious and irreplaceable Native American heritage sites deserve to be fiercely protected by the agency charged with that duty. Instead, the Forest Service has not only failed to keep those lands safe, it maliciously and repeatedly retaliated against a public servant – the whistleblower – whose career has been dedicated to that very mission,” said Libby Liu, CEO of Whistleblower Aid.
“This brave whistleblower’s revelations expose a decades-long failure to protect Native American sites around the country. It’s unfathomable that the Forest Service continues to choose to build new projects over protecting cultural heritage sites and then has the audacity to illegally hide these practices from the Tribes and the public. It is past time for officials in Washington and Raleigh to urgently remedy this institutionalized, lawless destruction and hold Forest Service leadership accountable.”
A report from the Associated Press was published earlier today.
###
Whistleblower Aid provides pro bono legal, advocacy, and communications support to government and private sector whistleblowers acting in the public interest. The organization’s lawyers have represented some of the most consequential national security and Big Tech whistleblowers in history, including the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, the anonymous intelligence community whistleblower whose disclosures led to the first impeachment of President Trump, and others.
Whistleblower Aid is a 501(c)(3) organization.
