If you look past the roofs and street signs in Miamisburg, Ohio, you might spot a grassy, green peak tapering toward the sky. That's Miamisburg Mound.
"Once you get up there, you can just sit and take in a really fantastic view of the Miami Valley," said Miamisburg Mayor Michelle Collins.
It rises 65 feet from the landscape on a 100-foot ridge to form one of the largest conical mounds in the eastern United States. Indigenous people in the area, known as the Adena culture, built it more than 2,000 years ago.
"You're talking (about) something that's a couple thousand years old, and here we are still sitting here and looking at it and admiring this. That's pretty awesome," Collins said.
While some protections for the historic property exist through a 60-year-old law, Trump appointees and a Senate permitting-reform proposal call for changes that would water it down and put site preservation at risk.
Tribal officials in Oklahoma are sounding the alarm that both proposals would limit their ability to protect historic sites in their ancestral homelands in the Midwest.
Stakeholders expect the Senate to hold a procedural vote on the Senate permitting bill on November 9.
"Think of your special place… and then imagine somebody given a contract or giving a permit to disrupt that place, destroy the beauty of that place, destroy the specialness or sacredness of that place, and never being offered public comment for the individual, for the community," Chief Ben Barnes of the Shawnee Tribe said.
Section 106: the decades-old law attacked on two fronts
Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act permits are required for development ranging from highway redesign to natural gas pipeline expansion to federally funded housing development.
Miamisburg Mound is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. That means that if anyone proposed federally funded construction there, interested parties, like historic Ohio tribes, would be notified. Tribal historic preservation officers, called THPOs, which rhymes with hippos, are often the tribe's main point of contact with agencies, commenting on proposals and redesigning projects to mitigate harm to sites.
Chief Barnes said the proposed changes would disrupt their work. The Shawnee Tribe is now headquartered in northeast Oklahoma, but its ancestral homelands spanned the northeast U.S., including states now called Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia.
"The Section 106 consultation process allows Shawnee Tribe and other tribes to make sure that sacred sites, such as the earthworks in Ohio or ancestral burial grounds or places of sacred memory, are preserved," Barnes said.
Two proposals currently threaten tribes' ability to have a seat at the table for these conversations, both of which happen to align with President Trump's push to promote energy production.
The first comes from the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, an independent federal agency. The council voted by email to change the regulations in July, after a week of consideration. The agency oversees the Section 106 process, and as NPR reports, it's also full of Trump appointees.
ACHP said the current process creates delays and confusion for the public and regulated entities.
In addition to making consultation optional, the revisions narrow what counts as damaging to a site and exclude natural features like mountains and landscapes from the definition of a historic property.
The other proposal, Senate Bill 5653, also called the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, would change the Section 106 statute altogether. While imposing many of the same changes ACHP is proposing, THPOs could also face penalties and potential federal takeover for missed deadlines and tribes' ability to seek judicial review would also be limited through this bill.
Senators rallying behind the bill say they want to speed up energy project approval "to lower utility bills and create more jobs."
Senator Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) co-sponsored the legislation, alongside Shelby Moore. Capito (R-West Virginia). Heinrich said the bill will "codify Tribal consultation in statute, maintaining key environmental protections, and forcing AI data centers to fully pay for their grid upgrades."
In a statement, Senator Heinrich said he's speaking with tribal leaders about possible compromises on the bill. ACHP declined to comment.
The National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (NATHPO), the membership organization representing tribal preservation leaders, condemned the bill, calling it a "legislative assault on tribal sovereignty."
From Ohio to Oklahoma, sacred sites span several states
Following broken treaties, federal policies and European American settlement in the 18th and 19th centuries, Indigenous people in the eastern U.S. – including what is now Ohio — were forced to leave. A handful of those tribes were eventually displaced to Oklahoma, now home to 38 federally recognized tribal nations.
Those treaties created a responsibility for the federal government to cooperate with tribes, who are recognized as sovereign nations.
"And the United States has that obligation to confer not just with the states, but also with its tribal nations," Chief Barnes said. "So abrogating those rights undermines authority, undermines the sovereignty not just of tribal nations, but when you get rid of Section 106, you're also destroying the consultation between the state and federal tribes."
Archaeology that's often required by Section 106 might identify Indigenous burial sites that could be compromised if the site were developed.
Heather Miller works for the Wyandotte Nation. In her role as Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (or NAGPRA) coordinator, she ensures ancestral remains and funerary items are properly handled if discovered during a Section 106 project.
The Wyandotte Nation was the last tribe removed from Ohio in 1843 and is now based in Oklahoma. ACHP's revisions also delete acknowledgment that historic properties on ancestral or ceded land may concern tribes, carving them out of the notification and consultation process in those instances.
She said silencing Indigenous voices on these projects is like the final step in the removal process.
"So now places that hold lots of memory for us, or places that we still have yet to study to figure out the ways that we interacted with these sites, could be at risk and we may not ever get the opportunity to do that," Miller said.
'Land is a relative,' not just for resource needs
Blake Norton works as a THPO for the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, which is originally from the Great Lakes region. He said these sites he works to safeguard are much more to his tribe than places needing development.
"We're talking about sacred sites, religious sites, places where ancestors were put away and are interred, or sites where cultural activities that are foundational for communities where they exist," Norton said in a Zoom interview.
He likens it to stripping away the humanity of his ancestors and disregarding the relationship Native Americans have to these spaces.
"And for what?" Norton said. "So a project can be completed so that capitalism can continue?"
Burgundy Fletcher is the THPO and NAGPRA Coordinator for the Peoria Nation. Because of forced removal, Fletcher said some of the tribe's ancestral land has already faced degradation.
These proposed changes put even more natural features at risk, Fletcher said.
"We're talking about very different ways of thinking about the places and spaces that we live in. For Western ideologies, the land is property instead of a relative."
One common misconception is that tribes can automatically cancel a project.
While tribes can provide feedback on historic sites through the Section 106 consultation process, ultimately the decision-making authority resides with the federal agency responsible for the undertaking.
Fletcher acknowledged that Section 106 could be improved, but she said they aren't asking the right people how to improve it.
"Whether it's Congress or ACHP, the tribes should be on these consultations about how to change it to make it better because we are the ones that are most negatively impacted," Fletcher said.
Miller found the timing of the proposed changes ironic. It's happening during America 250, a time when many are celebrating the places they've called home for decades, centuries and, for some, time immemorial.
"On one hand, we're talking about all this greatness, but then on the other hand, we're ready to slash it, to cut it, and ensure that we don't have access to it anymore, and that we can't regulate it, we can't protect it, and we can't manage it. That just seems insane to me," she said.
What happens now?
More than 100 organizations sent a letter to Congress urging them to pass the bill, while more than 1,000 other organizations submitted a letter urging them to reject it.
Barnes said people have an opportunity to act by contacting their senators.
"Tell them how they got this one wrong. We're going to need to activate, and we're going to make our voices heard that this is America the Beautiful, not the America the most overdeveloped," Barnes said.
Barnes said they also want to protect the spaces where they currently live and pray, and ensuring Native Americans still have a say in the process is key.
"We have a very large gas line that runs across Oklahoma to Springfield, Missouri, and one day that gas line is going to need to be disturbed or going to need to be enlarged or need to be repaired," Barnes said. "Without having Section 106 processes, they can do that without ever consulting the people that gather in that place to worship."
The public comment period for ACHP's changes hasn't opened yet, but it will last for 30 days.
This story was produced in partnership with KOSU Public Radio, the NPR affiliate station covering Central Oklahoma.
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