The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has delivered on the federal government's promise to uphold the fishing rights of the Lummi Nation. In May, the agency denied Pacific International Terminals a permit to build a coal export terminal at Cherry Point in Washington State. The facility would have been North America's largest coal export terminal, shipping up to 48 million metric tons of coal from Montana's Powder River Basin overseas each year.

The project's construction would have disrupted the Salish Sea ecosystem and damaged Washington's fishing industry, which accounts for more than $4.5 billion of the state's annual economic activity. "The Lummi people have always fished the Salish Sea, [and] the terminal poses a threat to the sacred site of Cherry Point and our very way of life," explains Lummi Nation tribal chairman Tim Ballew II.

"This is certainly a win for the fight to transition to a clean energy economy . . . [and] for everyone who is impacted by the life cycle of coal," says Cesia Kearns, deputy regional director for the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign. "But it is first and foremost a tremendous victory, from a justice standpoint, that the U.S. government stood by its [treaty] obligations."