Every day, Bryant Celestine opens his email to find around 80 messages that require immediate responses. Most of those emails come from the Tower Construction Notification System (TCNS) that alerts the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas of a new proposal to build a 5G cell tower on ancestral territories. As the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO) for the nation, Celestine is charged with upholding tribal and federal preservation laws created to protect tribal resources, including the repatriation of remains and sacred items, and the protection of culturally or historically important land.
“Our territory goes from Brownsville all the way up to Texarkana and all the way across to Tennessee down into the panhandle of Florida,” Celestine says. “So, it’s a major workload.” He says he regularly fields calls from the “Tennessee Valley Authority, the United States Forest Service, Texas Department of Transportation, and a lot of different industries.”
Promised to be a faster, more reliable cell network, 5G requires the construction of thousands upon thousands of small cell towers just a few blocks apart. 5G waves are smaller and don’t travel far or well, which means some 650,000 new towers need to be built nationwide to support the network.
