I drove southeast from Billings, my truck slowing as I climbed the long, grassy hills and then catching up to traffic on the downslope side. I was headed toward the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Alaina Buffalo Spirit, one of the opponents of the mine, had invited me to camp on her land and to meet her friends and extended family, and then to go together to attend the welcoming ceremony when the Lummi carvers arrived with their totem pole. When I asked her what I could bring, she suggested fruits and vegetables, which are hard to come by on the reservation.
The land in this part of Montana is open and sparsely populated. Lame Deer is home to both tribal headquarters and Chief Dull Knife Community College. I passed through the town and continued several miles to reach Buffalo Spirit’s home, a brand-new but modest house, with a brightly painted teepee in the front yard and fields in all directions. Beyond the fields lay a couple of other houses, and then hillsides covered in stands of pines interspersed with grasslands.
It was blazing hot and dry when I arrived, and there was no shade. I was grateful to enter the darkened, air-conditioned home and for ice water as I listened to her story.
Buffalo Spirit has long, wispy, brown hair and a ready smile. She showed me a few of her paintings—one of women on horseback who, she says, wore their finest to battle, knowing it might be their last day.
Buffalo Spirit grew up living with her parents and grandparents in a one-room log cabin and speaking the Northern Cheyenne language. “My grandfather was a farmer along the Tongue River,” she told me. “And he was a leader in the Sundance ceremony. My grandfather could heal people.”
Buffalo Spirit had six brothers and two sisters, and the family was poor but didn’t lack for food. “We learned about the edible plants along the river, like rosehips and milkweed, the wild mint tea—you can smell it as you walk along the river. We made homemade fishing poles with safety pins, and we’d catch catfish, bring it home, and fry it. And there was deer, venison; my grandmother and mother would hang it outside to dry. We pretty much lived off the land.”
Their home was surrounded by ponderosa pine trees. “It’s not desolate and desert like everyone might think; there are a lot of grasses and natural sage and plants we use for ceremonies.”
Buffalo Spirit remembers happy times with her family, although she also remembers the challenges of living in a one-room cabin, where they used a hand pump to draw water from the well for the home and garden.
“My grandfather had a team of horses. We would jump on the wagon with him and my grandmother, my mom, aunties, and cousins, and go pick wild plums. They had a portable stove, and my grandma would cook up the soup, and she used to have homemade biscuits and coffee. As children, we never had candy. So our dessert was to have a bowl of coffee, sweetened, and dip the biscuits in it. And we’d eat all the plums we could.”
Alaina Buffalo Spirit by the Tongue River on her family’s land. The proposed train line would run along the opposite side of the river.
Later, she took me down to her family’s land. at the edge of the clear, fast-running Tongue River. The quiet there was striking—the only sounds were the river running by and the wind through the cottonwood trees. The heat of the long summer day baked the ground, but in the shade it was breezy and green.
“My grandmother shared with me that this water is sacred,” she said. “That’s why I believe we need to protect our river.” The family still conducts ceremonies there, she told me. “The proposed railroad would run just a few feet from this river, just right over there on the other side. It would disturb this quiet valley and pollute it. I don’t want to see that.”
The hills above the Tongue River and the Otter Creek Valley are filled with places of spiritual significance to members of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe. Many of their ancestors are buried nearby, and the thought of their gravesites being dynamited to open the mine or to make way for the railroad spur is an anathema.
Buffalo Spirit, like most members of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, opposes construction of the railroad and mine. She worries about the huge influx of people who would arrive to work at the mine. Many in this region have heard stories of the crime, violence, and abuse of women and children that came to towns in North Dakota along with the Bakken oil boom. “I can go down to camp by the river, and no one disturbs me,” she told me. “And I would like that for my grandkids and for their kids as well.” Plus, as a cancer survivor, she doesn’t want to be exposed to coal dust, diesel, and other pollutants.
“I’m a grandmother, and I’m going to be a great-grandma soon. What would I tell my grandkids if they said, ‘Grandma, what did you do to stop this? What did you do to help save our water and our land and our air?’ They might ask me that, and I’ll be able to say, ‘Here are the records and the articles. Here—I spoke up for you.’ ”
That night Buffalo Spirit’s extended family came by, and the women bustled in the kitchen preparing a meal as the men told stories and jokes. The conversation went on well into the night, around the fire pit next to the teepee, with the sparks flying up to join the bright Montana stars.
I woke up in the morning to the sound of thunder and wind, and the camper shuddering in the gusts. Dark marbled clouds covered the sky, and a warm breeze followed a brief but brilliant sunrise. Buffalo Spirit and other visitors who had come to witness the ceremony were still asleep in the house and the teepee.
Later, we piled into cars and drove to the site where the ceremony was to take place. The totem pole was already there, lashed to the back of a yellow flatbed truck. Smoke from distant forest fires had turned the intense late August sunlight gray-blue. The wind blew steadily, rustling the cottonwood trees and sage. In all directions were rocky hillsides and buttes, with the river cutting its way among the outcroppings and greening the shrubs along the banks. The area has been used by tribes going back 10,000 years, the tribe’s archaeologists told the crowd.
The crowd was a mix of people from the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and nearby ranches, a smattering of environmentalists from Billings and elsewhere, and visitors from the Lummi Tribe.
The bluffs across the river would be dynamited to create the right grade for the new railroad spur, rancher Hank Coffin told me as we waited for the ceremony to begin. He and his wife, Kitty Coffin, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, would see their land broken into two parts if the rail construction went through.
“It is strange to think that a railroad would want to knock that high hill down so they could go right through the middle of it, but that’s what they’re after,” he said. The Coffins, like the other ranch and tribal families here, aren’t giving in. “We are we the people of the great state of Montana.”
On this day, there was still time to stop the dynamite, the giant excavating machines, the strip mining, and the new coal trains. That fact added a seriousness of purpose to the scene. On this day, instead of dynamite explosions, there were only the sounds of the wind, the children playing, and the adults hauling in food for a shared meal and setting up chairs in rows facing tables for the speakers.
The ceremony began with a prayer and continued with speeches, songs, and more prayers. The carver of the pole, Jewell Praying Wolf James, along with Freddy Lane and others from the Lummi Tribe, talked about the pole they had carved and then transported from their home near Bellingham, Washington. As they made their way to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, they visited various communities, churches, reservations, and a synagogue to explain the battle to stop the Gateway Pacific coal terminal in Washington State and the Otter Creek mine in Montana. All spoke of their determination to protect the human and natural communities that make their homes in these threatened places.
“We’re standing on sacred ground,” one of the ranchers, Roger Sprague, told me during a break in the ceremony.
Jewell Praying Wolf James from the House of Tears carving studio, with the totem pole he and his team carved.
Sprague is tall, heavy-set but fit, and sported a broad-rimmed cowboy hat and a bushy, graying mustache. His family came to this valley in 1881, he said, and they raised cattle and traded with the Cheyenne people. Sprague has spent his whole life in this valley, and one of his two sons works with him on the ranch. Sprague told me he hopes his grandchildren will take over the ranch someday.
“When I ride horseback through this country, we find arrowheads, teepee rings, places where indigenous people lived. We respect that, and we want to protect it. Just like my family history, we want to protect that, too.”
James and his team of carvers consulted with members of the Northern Cheyenne before carving the pole, to ensure they included appropriate symbols. The pole contains badgers, who protect the ground; an iconic buffalo; and an eagle clutching a rabbit, which represents the processes of the ecosystems, Jewell explained. And the Cheyenne medicine wheel has a blue outer circle to represent the water of life.
“Part of our prayer and our belief is that water is the blood of Mother Earth,” Jewell James said when we spoke after the ceremony. “We don’t have the right to destroy her. If we don’t stand up and unite, we may find out we’re just a cancer that killed her.”
The people gathered on this knoll came from very different backgrounds, but they had much more in common than their opposition to a mine and a railroad addition. They are each, in their own way, rejecting the ethos of extraction.
“We’re a commodity colony,” Alexis Bonogofsky told me. Bonogofsky, who has been working on coal issues for many years, is from a ranching family in southeast Montana and also is on the staff of the National Wildlife Federation. “We’re told all we’re worth is under our feet.”
“This coal is to make big corporations a lot of money,” Sprague told me. “And they’ll do it on the backs of us small ranchers.”
“We already have global warming, and the ocean and the rivers are warming up,” Jewell James said. “We’re all in the same battle; we’re all looking at a holocaust if we don’t stand up.”
James takes some solace in the idea that prominent non-Natives are speaking up for the environment. “The pope said, ‘God did give you dominion over the Earth, but you’re also to respect it because it’s God’s creation. Keep it holy. Everything on the Earth is your brother and sister.’ In the 400 to 500 years of contact, that’s what we always hoped would finally be understood on the other side.”
That shift, from an economy of extraction to one of reciprocity with the Earth and with one another, is foundational.
The ranchers recognize that the Native people lived in this region many generations before their families. Still, they share with their Northern Cheyenne neighbors the responsibility that goes with inheriting the area from their ancestors, and the duty to pass it along in good condition to their descendants. That responsibility has meant a struggle against extraction industries that has gone on for years. The ranchers’ and the Northern Cheyenne’s shared attachment to their place, and to the human and natural communities that comprise it, is a source of real power.
“People care about this land and have an attachment to it and will put up a fight,” Brad Sauer said. Sauer ranches north of the ceremonial site, near where the Colstrip mines were located. “We’ll stay up late at night to read documents and write letters, and go places to testify. It all starts with a deep attachment to the land.”
At the end of the ceremony, members of both tribes—one coastal, one plains—ranchers, and activists from the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation circled around, each shaking the hands of the speakers, carvers, visitors, and singers. Then the food was brought out, people chatted and sang and drummed, and the restless children were finally allowed to play on the totem pole.
On my last day in Montana, I drove to Otter Creek to see the valley that would become a strip mine if Arch Coal has its way.
The Otter Creek Valley is made up of ranches and open fields, forest stands, and a creek nestled between the rocky outcroppings and ponderosa pines of the Custer National Forest. I pulled over by the side of the narrow road that follows the creek up the valley. It was so quiet there that a footfall in the grass sounds loud, and you hear, not traffic or airplanes, but the rustle of birds in the dry brush and the rush of water. I tried to imagine the excavations, coal trains, and deep pit that would overtake this valley if Arch Coal’s plans were approved.
This question matters beyond the Otter Creek Valley and the Tongue River, and beyond the Northern Cheyenne Reservation and the ranches that border it. The implications extend beyond the towns and valleys bisected by the rail lines, and the giant new coal terminal that could be forced on the Lummi Tribe, and even beyond Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and other Chinese cities where millions are sickened by breathing coal-polluted air.
If scientists are correct that more than three quarters of the carbon now in the ground needs to stay there to avert catastrophic climate disruption, then the fate of this coal is not just the problem of those millions. It’s a problem for all of humanity—and for almost all other species.
For every ton of coal burned, 2.86 tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.1. The Otter Creek mine alone would produce 1.2 billion tons of coal. The coal from this one project, not including the climate consequences of excavation and transport, would contribute more than 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide to an already saturated atmosphere. That is the equivalent of putting 600 million additional cars on the road for a year.2.
Here in southeast Montana, this small but powerful collaboration of Native people, ranchers, and environmentalists was helping to avert not only a local disaster but a global one.
As I was completing work on this book, Arch Coal announced that it had withdrawn its application to mine for coal at Otter Creek. The company cited low coal prices and uncertainty about permits—uncertainty that was at least in part a result of the activism of the tribes, the ranchers, and the environmentalists.
Not long after, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that, in light of the Lummi Tribe’s treaty fishing rights, it would not grant a permit to build the Gateway Pacific terminal.