ENVIRONMENT: Native Americans Settle Mining Disputes but Remain Wary

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 27 1996 (IPS) - Native American groups in Montana and Wisconsin have settled pollution disputes with mining companies, but they remain wary that their environmental problems are still not over.

The Chippewa from Bad River, Wisconsin, agreed this week to lift a four-week blockade of trains crossing their lands. The tribe was protesting plans to ship sulphuric acid to the White Pine copper mine, the operation of which has caused widespread environmental damage.

A month earlier, the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine indigenous people of central Montana agreed on an out-of-court settlement of 37 million dollars with Pegasus. The two groups had sued the firm in an effort to collect damages for pollution stemming from operation of the first cyanide-leach mine in the country.

The Chippewa, who call themselves the Anishinabe Ogtichida (the Original People), live in the area surrounding Lake Superior in the United States and Canada, which they called Kitchi Gami.

For 200 years, they traded fur with French, British, and, eventually, U.S. traders, who gradually took over Chippewa lands in the mid-19th century. In the 1950s, the White Pine mine was set up on the shores of Lake Superior where mine shafts were dug over a 28-square-kilometre area to extract copper.

INMET, a Canadian company which now operate the mine, was granted permission early last month to transport 42.6 billion litres of sulphuric acid by train from Texas to the mines, where is would be used to dissolve the remaining copper.

The Chippewa immediately raised strong objections to these plans, pointing out that acidic waste released during mining operations over the past 40 years has destroyed Mineral River, which flows eight kilometres from the mine and into Lake Superior.

Additionally, the Chippewa noted that nothing had been done to stem the flow of chloride-laced brine, a mining byproduct, which constantly breaches its containment facility and flows into the mine shaft. Government officials have estimated that the shaft will fill within 50 years and overflow into the river and, eventually, the lake.

“These tracks, this poison, and this acid mine are not wanted, not needed and not safe – for now and for the future,” said Walt Bressette, a Red Cliff Chippewa who represents the Lake Superior Alliance.

Bresette, chairman of a committee that advises the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on indigenous matters, resigned the post in early July to protest the fact that the government had not done an assessment of the impact of the mine on local indigenous people, as required by law.

Two weeks later, Bresette and a few dozen supporters set up tents near the railway tracks on the Bad River reservation, refusing to allow trains to pass until the company agreed to stop shipping sulphuric acid to the mine.

Last week, INMET, which owns 18 percent of a company that recently agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for environmental damages stemming from its mining operations in Papua New Guinea, said it would stop the shipments until further notice.

Bresette now plans to pressure the government into performing full environmental assessments to prevent any future efforts to dump sulphuric acid in the mine. But he remains sceptical, telling IPS, “Pitted against the politics of Washington and the economic might of Wall Street, environmental racism has always prevailed.”

Meanwhile, thousands of kilometres to the west, in Montana’s Little Rocky Mountains, the Gros Ventre and Assinibione peoples, are quietly celebrating a 37-million-dollar settlement for cyanide pollution that contaminated water ways critical to their survival.

Some 3,000 members of the two tribes share the Fort Belknap reservation, where they were placed after ceding rights to their traditional lands, which straddle the border of Canada and the United States, in return for food to stave off almost certain starvation in the mid-1800s.

In 1979, the Zortman-Landusky gold mine started operation upstream from the reservation. It was the first U.S. mine to use cyanide-heap leach technology, in which gold is extracted by spraying cyanide on piles of ore.

The mine, which has since shut down, was run by Pegasus Gold of Spokane, Washington, whose exploration for gold has led it to set up operations in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, and Guyana.

Just four years after the Montana mine was set up, sheep died from cyanide poisoning after straying into an unfenced area of the mine. Thousands of litres of mining waste were also discharged into the Milk and Missouri rivers which are used by the indigenous peoples.

In the settlement reached in July, the company agreed to give 1 million dollars each to the tribe, the state government and the federal government and pay 1.7 million dollars for environmental assessments. The company also agreed to post a 32-million-dollar bond to cover any clean-up costs.

Tracy King, the president of the Fort Belknap reservation, said he accepts the settlement, but he maintains it is insufficient. “Although this is the largest penalty amount ever imposed against a mining operation, it is small compared to the damage that it has done to the Little Rocky Mountains,” he said.

Lawyers in Montana who specialise in mining matters told IPS that Pegasus agreed to the settlement because it needed a clean environmental record in order to apply for new mining permits.

Their argument was supported by a statement from Werner Nennecker, the company’s chief executive officer, who said, “(This) clears the way for the federal and state agencies to issue the permits for the Zortman extension and allows us to get on with business.”