One of the earliest meetings Casey Sixkiller, Washington’s Ecology head, recalls in his career was about the cleanup of the Duwamish, Seattle’s only river.
Since that meeting some 25 years ago, a lot has happened.
In the final two years of the Biden administration he served as the region’s administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, overseeing major cleanups, rollout of federal funding for climate-friendly things like heat pumps and efforts with Native nations to restore habitat, reduce flood risks and other climate change impacts.
This year, he’s heading up Washington state’s Department of Ecology, tasked with enforcing and carrying out environmental policies that impact millions of people across the state.
He’s taking the helm amid a slew of directives from the Trump administration creating uncertainty for communities on the front lines of climate change and legacy pollution.
Federal workers, including those who respond to oil spills, provide data to inform fisheries and predict extreme weather events, have been fired. Trump has ordered plans for more logging on federal forests, alleged he could take Pacific Northwest water and send it elsewhere, and at times, cut off access to funding, including that intended to help safeguard Washington towns from wildfire.
Sixkiller says building rapport with communities across the state, like those along the Duwamish, has prepared him to take urgent action on environmental issues facing Washingtonians.
“When you look at so many of the challenges that communities are facing, from an environmental perspective, we don’t have another 40 years,” Sixkiller said. “We need to be action oriented, not process constrained. And frankly, climate change is going to continue to test us in that.”
Sixkiller insists that Washington, the first state in the U.S. to have an environmental regulatory agency, can continue to protect its air, water and land, and its leadership in regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
“We are still in the driver’s seat of what environmental protection and stewardship and partnership looks like here,” Sixkiller said.
Reinstilling “gadugi”
A young Sixkiller attended a community meeting about proposed cuts to open gym hours in local community centers. After he spoke, a City Council member dismissed him: “What do you know? You’re just a kid.”
“It lit a spark in me that has never gone out,” Sixkiller said, adding it motivated him to ensure those affected by these decisions have a say in their future.
An enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Sixkiller is not the first Native person to helm Ecology, but he hopes to instill in young Native people that they, too, can ascend to these leadership roles.
He helped open the Cherokee Nation’s first Washington, D.C., office. He would go on to serve as a legislative assistant for then-U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Seattle, and U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and eventually open his own political consulting firm.
Wilma Mankiller, the first woman to be elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, is among Sixkiller’s heroes.
“She was just one of those people that any barrier that was put in front of her she busted right through” he said. “She really sort of reinstilled a spirit in the Cherokee, what we call gadugi,” or how a village would come together to feed itself. In the contemporary context, he strives to apply that same concept to help people come together to solve problems.
“No matter what community I’m going in, realizing that there is more that we agree on than we disagree on,” Sixkiller said. “We may use different words, we may have different emotional attachments to it, but, if we can just focus on that, it’s amazing what you can accomplish.”
In 2022, Sixkiller met with Duwamish Valley community members at a time when the community’s relationship with the EPA was strained. The EPA had contemplated a cleanup plan that inconsistently treated parts of the river, Sixkiller said.
“It made no sense, because it’s the same body of water,” said Paulina López, executive director of the Duwamish River Community Coalition. Her group had recently launched a campaign to treat the river as one and sought support from Sixkiller, when he was at the EPA.
López credits him with grasping the community’s concerns and prioritizing their voices. His office prescribed a cleanup plan that would bring pollution down to preindustrial levels, and aspired to provide more consistent cleanup across the Superfund sites.
While businesses responsible for historical pollution are still working out who will pay for the full Lower Duwamish cleanup, the EPA shepherded an agreement among Boeing, the city of Seattle and King County to get started. Construction began this winter.
Residents near the river not only experience Superfund sites in a river rife with chemical contaminants such as PCBs and arsenic — where signs warn that resident fish are largely too toxic to eat — but also air pollution from nearby highways, shipping of goods and ongoing industrial practices.
“I’m really hoping that there can be investment, but also policy change, root causes, all those things that would be led by somebody that understands environmental justice and justice in general,” López said of Sixkiller as the new Ecology director.
On the other side of the state, an emerging crisis of drinking water polluted by chemicals from firefighting foam left many residents who rely on private wells without answers or access to expensive tests.
The EPA has no jurisdiction over private wells, but Sixkiller and his team worked with Ecology to provide testing for West Plains community members, including processing the tests at the EPA’s lab near Port Orchard. State agencies offered temporary solutions like water filters, or access to bottled water, while a longer-term plan was drawn up.
It was an effective project that put together Ecology and the EPA in a new way of working together, said John Hancock, a community advocate.
“I’m not an impatient person,” Sixkiller said, “but I am not someone who is satisfied by the status quo … If you really think about any of the challenges that we face as a country as a region, the status quo isn’t always the best at solving those things, or has led to inequitable outcomes, or contributed to inequitable outcomes.”
A rocky road ahead
Since taking power in Washington, D.C., the Trump administration began dismantling climate programs and priorities.
At times and without warning, Ecology has lost access to funds for everything from protecting salmon streams from toxic chemicals to cleaning up arsenic and lead from former orchard lands and grants for new electric school buses.
Some of these efforts have been caught up in the courts. But the temporary restraints only go so far, Sixkiller said.
Every day there seems to be a new twist: a dataset that no longer is available to Ecology, scientists that have been leading projects no longer able to talk with Ecology or other agencies, Sixkiller said.
The firings at federal agencies, including scientists, people who have dedicated their careers to protecting human health and the environment have an impact on every single community across our state.
Sixkiller says cleanup at the Hanford nuclear site, greenhouse gas emissions accounting and protections for public health are at risk.
“The governor has committed to work with the attorney general to defend decades of established federal law and regulations, and also to defend the state of Washington’s right to protect our air, land and water,” he said.
Sixkiller said Ecology is closely monitoring the situation and preparing for potential impacts on state environmental programs but, he said, “it does not yet feel like we’ve reached the crescendo.”
“Our mission remains clear,” he said of the state’s work. “I sort of feel the trajectory of my career over the last 25 years in some ways has prepared me to lead through this moment.”
