FORT BERTHOLD, NORTH DAKOTA—The haze from the wildfires burning in Washington and Montana followed me as I left the Otter Creek Valley and headed northeast toward North Dakota. The land was open grasslands with few trees. The late August sun was unrelenting, temperatures climbing into the upper 90s. I reluctantly left the back roads for Interstate 94, hoping to finish the 400-mile drive to Fort Berthold before dark.
As the day progressed, the soot and smog from methane flares and, I assumed, fracking by-products deepened the haze and added an odor of hydrocarbons. The flares were my first signal that I was coming into Bakken oil country. Then well pumps began to appear in farm fields, like giant grasshoppers bowing again and again in front of bright orange methane flares. The flaring of natural gas is so widespread it can be seen at night from space, competing with the nation’s major cities for brightness in satellite images.
This is boom country. The number of wells in use in North Dakota nearly quadrupled to more than 12,000 from 2004 to 2014;1 oil extraction increased twelvefold; the state now pumps more than a million barrels a day and is contributing to the massive increase in domestic oil extraction of the last decade.
I headed to the Fort Berthold Reservation, where half of the 14,000 members of the three affiliated tribes of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations make their home.2 The MHA Nation is located at the heart of this fracking boom.
I had called Cedar Gillette before I began my trip to learn how this extraction boom was affecting the people she works with. Gillette is part Turtle Mountain Chippewa, but she is a member of the MHA Nation and had worked as a domestic violence advocate in Fort Berthold. She told me about the massive influx of oil workers with money to spend. The so-called “man camps”—the large, temporary housing sites where the drilling workers (and almost all of them are men) reside—were creating unsafe conditions, both for local women and for the wives and girlfriends from out of town who accompanied the newcomers.
View west over Lake Sakakawea, formed when the Missouri River was dammed. The haze from wildfires and gas flaring is visible in the distance.
Sex trafficking and sexual assaults are widespread, according to Gillette. And drugs are abundant: heroin, methamphetamine, and others. Organized crime is rampant. “People are fearful,” she told me.
And for good reason. Violent crime rates rose 121 percent from 2005 to 2011, according to FBI figures. “These dramatic increases have overwhelmed state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies,” according to the federal National Drug Control Strategy.3
The tribes’ environmental oversight is likewise overwhelmed. Contaminated material, including radioactive byproducts of fracking, have been found dumped on the reservation. The MHA Nation lacks the resources to oversee the many drilling sites and waste facilities.
These costs, along with other expenses of the boom—from damaged roads to social services for the flood of new workers and their families—have eaten up the cash windfall that was supposed to support the tribes for years. Now, with oil prices in a slump, meeting those needs is even more out of reach, according to a report by the Property and Environmental Research Center.4
I got lost when I arrived in the pitch dark in Fort Berthold. I had called ahead to see about staying in the RV campground behind the tribal casino. No one is there after six, I was told. Just camp tonight and register in the morning.
The casino was easy to find, right on the main highway and well lit. But I drove around in the dark through construction yards and newly excavated dirt roads for a long time before I finally found the dozens of RVs parked way behind the casino. The electrical outlet at my site didn’t work, and the bathroom was nowhere to be found. I went to sleep that night uneasily, recalling stories of murder and kidnapping.
In the morning, I crossed the artificial lake created by the Garrison Dam on my way to New Town, North Dakota. The name New Town came about when the Native people living in the villages along the Missouri River were forced to relocate to make way for a dam that would flood their homes. After trying for many years to prevent the dam construction, they finally were left with no choice but to move. Someone stuck a sign in the ground at the place they would resettle; the sign read, “new town,” I was told, and no one ever bothered to come up with a different name.
I had come to see Prairie Rose Seminole, a member of the Arikara Tribe, to learn about the impacts of fracking on the tribal community. But when we met at the Boys and Girls Club where she works, she wanted to talk about food, health, and healing.
Seminole is tall, thoughtful, and talkative. She wore a jeans jacket over a lacy white skirt. She grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, she told me, one of six kids. Her father had a huge garden, and he passed along his gardening skills to Prairie Rose and her sisters, in violation of the Arikara tradition, which calls on skills to be passed down to daughters from mothers, not fathers.
“We’d go out and forage and get stone fruits and berries and roots, turnips and stuff, and preserve those for the year. Some of the good memories I have of being a kid were foraging and fishing.”
After she was diagnosed with a chronic disease, her interest in healthy food increased. Today she teaches young tribal members about how to find food and medicine in the wild.
Prairie Rose Seminole at one of her favorite foraging spots on the Fort Berthold Reservation.
“We’ve always had a spiritual connection to the food, and to the earth that grows that food, and to the water that feeds that food, and to the air that the food grows into,” she said. “There’s a balance, and we fit into that as caretakers. I don’t want to romanticize who we are, but we’ve gotten so far away from that.”
She took me to one of her favorite foraging sites just outside of New Town and showed me where she gathers chokecherries, plums, and a variety of medicinal plants. But she worries that the food is contaminated by oil and gas emissions and fracking chemicals. She had the soil at one site tested, and it came up clean for the listed contaminants. Still, she has questions.
“Oil development has jeopardized our sacred sources of food,” she said. “If the water is contaminated, no one is telling the chokecherry bush not to drink that water, no one is telling the deer not to eat those chokecherries. You have no idea if you’re eating a deer that’s contaminated.
“We’re a population that deals with a high number of chronic illnesses that could be prevented through our diet. If our traditional diet and food systems are contaminated, then we’re not doing ourselves any good.
“We’re losing our foods and medicines because of the oil impact, and that’s a huge cultural loss—that’s just as devastating to me as losing language.”
Food is only one reason Prairie Rose regrets the oil and gas boom.
Drugs and crime have taken their toll; the millions of dollars that have flooded the community have made some tribal members extremely wealthy, while most continue to struggle. Elected members of the tribal council are swayed by big payoffs, she believes. And she sees little evidence that the cash that flowed through the tribe is compensating for the crime, overcrowding, and pollution. Nor does she think it is developing the long-term economic foundation that could sustain them now as the boom ends.
“When you drive through Turtle Mountain, it’s beautiful, green lands—they’re now the medicine chest of the Dakotas, where we once were,” she said wistfully.
The Turtle Mountain Reservation, where fracking is banned, was to be my next stop.
