Gail Small is tall, lanky, and statuesque. She is quite a beautiful woman. She is also so direct and quick-tongued, she can make a federal official wince at the sight of her. She does have a big heart, and she has a hard line. For two decades I have watched her out of the corner of my eye, leading a small, reservation-based nonprofit on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana, and I have admired her strength. Her path is different from mine, but she is always there, a keeper of the fire on Northern Cheyenne.
Gail is the kind of woman you’d want to watch your back at a meeting with dubious characters. She will watch it, and she’ll guard your flank as well. And, when she is ready, she will send the opposition reeling. No matter how limited her weaponry, she is able to muster it. She is a trained sociologist, an attorney, and a 1997 appointee to the Federal Reserve Board’s Consumer Advisory Panel.
Gail Small is one of ten children and the mother of four. She was a 1995 Ms. Woman of the Year and is a recognized leader in the Native environmental movement and the environmental justice movement, as well as in a host of organizing circles. Small’s sophistication moves her deftly through courtrooms, the Federal Reserve Board, the picket line, and back to her herd of horses on the reservation. And, with a committed staff of six and many more volunteers, she directs Native Action, a grassroots organization that illustrates a unique, multifaceted strategy for reservation survival.
Native Action is one of the largest independent, reservation-based nonprofits in the country and has been around for over 15 years. That is an immense accomplishment in itself, given the tough nature of reservation politics and the whims of national foundations on which they rely. Gail and the staff of Native Action are survivors, in pretty much every sense of the word. They also highlight a Native politic directed from the grassroots, not from a posh national office in an urban area. That is their strength. Native Action does not represent grassroots Native America, it is.
“We understand our community’s problems from the inside,” Gail explains. “Our work directly reflects the history, experience, culture, and wishes of the unique people and community that it serves. We are concerned first and foremost with the continuation and well-being of our tribe and our community.”2 And, within that context, Gail Small, Native Action, and the Northern Cheyenne find themselves in an ongoing set of battles to defend their community. They do so with dignity.
The Northern Cheyenne are in a tough spot, a hundred years or so of a tough spot. And the assaults on them and their land do not seem to relent. That is what makes your heart ache for them: that they must continue this struggle through each subsequent generation.
What is the value of your homeland? What is the value of land, traded and sold like so much dust and dirt? Companies, governments, and entrepreneurs sell grazing rights, mineral rights, and water rights and the land itself in a heartbeat.
These questions of value are unanswerable, unquantifiable. Yet all the same, the intensity of the Cheyenne relationship to the land is felt and realized each day, in each generation.
The Northern Cheyenne are Tsetsestah, the Beautiful People. (According to Northern Cheyenne historian Eric Spotted Elk, the word Cheyenne is likely an anglicized version of the Lakota word Shyhela, which is what the Lakota named them.) The most western of the Algonkin-speaking peoples, the Tsetsestah have been led by great prophets and leaders, including Maheo’o and Sweet Medicine. Sweet Medicine helped the Cheyenne organize themselves and develop a code by which to live, Spotted Elk continues. He gave them their first sacred items, the four sacred arrows. It was then that their hunting territory extended from the Platte River to what is now eastern Montana and the Cheyenne became a powerful force to reckon with. A southern group that had hunting grounds around the Arkansas River and another group known as the Sohtaio joined them.
Of all the prophetic teachings given by Sweet Medicine, his foretelling of the coming of the white man (veho, as one of Native Action’s staff explains it to me, meaning “a spider in its cocoon”) awakens the most fear among Northern Cheyennes today. As Spotted Elk explains,
Before he died, he foretold of things to come. His people did not understand what he was telling them. He told them that they would meet the white people. They would have long hair on their faces. The white people would give them new things like sugar in return for things they want. They will try and teach the Cheyenne their way of living. The new way of life will take over. Sweet Medicine told them, when this happens, you will become crazy, and will forget all that I am now teaching you.3
The Northern Cheyenne did not forget their teachings. They have tried to keep them and their land. The Cheyenne reservation of 500,000 acres stands on their homeland of ponderosa pine, deep valleys, beautiful rivers, and rolling plains, and is a testimony to their tenacity and sacrifice.
The Indian Wars: Land and Gold
We all fully realize that it is hard for any people to leave their homes and graves of their ancestors, but, unfortunately for you, gold has been discovered in your country, and a crowd of white people have gone there to live, and a great many of these people are the worst enemies of the Indians—men who do not care for their interests, and who would not stop at any crime to enrich themselves. These men are now in your country—in all parts of it—and there is no portion where you can live and maintain yourselves but what you will come in contact with them. The consequences of this state of things are that you are in constant danger of being imposed upon, and you have to resort to arms in self defense. Under the circumstances, there is, in the opinion of the commission, no part of the former country large enough where you can live in peace.
—John Steele, to the Southern Cheyennes4
In 1851, the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Sioux, Crow, and other tribes met at Fort Laramie with representatives of the United States to treaty on lands, passage, and mining. All present swore to maintain good faith and friendship in all their mutual intercourse and to make an effective and lasting peace. The treaty they negotiated at that time defined the territory of the Cheyenne nation as “commencing at the Red Butte and the place where the road leaves the north fork of the Platte River, thence along the main reign of the Rocky Mountains to the headwaters of the Arkansas River, thence down the Arkansas River to the crossing of the Santa Fe Road, thence in a northwestern direction to the place of the beginning.”5 The Cheyennes were divided into two main bands known to the white people as the Northern and the Southern Cheyenne.
Within a decade of this first Fort Laramie Treaty, the non-Indians, the veho, had driven a wedge into the heart of this territory, along the valley of the Platte River. Trains were followed by a chain of forts to protect the trains; then came the stagecoaches, pony express riders, and subsequently the telegraph riders. Settlers would follow and with them, the apologists from the federal government, explaining, once again, and wringing their hands about the bad white men. Then would come the cavalry. The first miners built mining shanties in the Rockies near present-day Colorado. The Pike’s Peak gold run of 1858 brought thousands more miners. In 1859, they built a town called Denver City, and in blatant disregard for the treaty with the Cheyennes of less than a decade before, the United States created Colorado Territory from Cheyenne homelands. It was on these lands in November of 1864 that Colonel Chivington and the Colorado volunteers ruthlessly massacred over 100 Southern Cheyenne in what is known as the Sand Creek Massacre. There, some 105 women and children and 28 men perished while they stood under a white flag of peace. Chivington killed, in that massacre, virtually every one of the Southern Cheyenne chiefs who talked of peace with the white men. The Northern Cheyenne knew this story; it was their story as well.
Determined to defend their lands, the Cheyenne joined forces with others. The three allied nations (Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho Tribes) came together for war and religious ceremonies. It was these three tribes that were celebrating summer ceremonies along the Bighorn River in southeastern Montana when George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh Calvary attacked in 1876. The three allied nations defeated Custer on that hot summer afternoon, and the story goes that when the American flag went down on the battlefield, the tribes picked it up and counted coup (victory) on the United States.
“I remember hearing the old people tell this story often when I was growing up in Lame Deer,” Gail continues the story. “And it always ended with the moral that war does not bring peace.” That seems always to be the case. The war stories of the Indian people’s fight for their survival are retold on the reservations across the country as if they occurred yesterday. In a way, it is as if the Northern Cheyenne are caught in a time warp, in which they must keep fighting the Seventh Cavalry and its descendants for the rest of their history.
The story of Dull Knife’s band is, in the end, the story itself.
It was a year after the great battle victory of the Northern Cheyennes and Lakota at the Little Bighorn. General Custer was long dead, as were many of the buffalo. Many of the bands had been pushed or forced on the reservations, and the military still held strongholds on the prairies. Both the Cheyenne and Lakotas were now on the verge of starvation. In the Spring of 1877, Crazy Horse shepherded his band of Oglala Lakotas into surrender at Fort Robinson, and several bands of Northern Cheyenne followed. The Cheyenne expected to live, as promised in the treaty of 1868, on a reservation with the Lakota. The Indian agents from Washington, D.C., however, ordered the Northern Cheyennes to march south to Oklahoma Indian territory and the camps of Southern Cheyennes already located there. There were 972 Cheyennes who started from Fort Robinson on the long trek to Fort Reno, in 1877. Some 937 of them reached Indian Territory. There they would find little: poor rations, starving and sick relations, and broken promises. Lieutenant Lawton wrote to Washington,
They are not getting supplies enough to prevent starvation. Many of their women and children are sick from want of food. A few articles I saw given to them they would not use themselves, but said they would take them to their children who were crying for food. The beef I saw given them was of very poor quality, and would not have been considered merchantable for any use.6
The Northern Cheyenne chiefs, Dull Knife and Little Wolf, entreated Washington to let the Cheyenne return to their home in the mountains. But their pleas fell on deaf ears.
So it was that on the night of September 9, 1877, the Cheyenne stole out and headed northward across the sand hills: 297 men, women, and children, a third of them warriors. Ten thousand soldiers and 3,000 white vigilantes, who sought to chase them to their death, followed them.
After six weeks of running, the two chiefs split. Little Wolf was determined to return with his people to the Tongue River and live like Cheyennes again, and the next morning he led 53 men, 43 women, and 38 children north to their homeland. Those who were tired of running followed Dull Knife to turn themselves in at Fort Robinson, where they had been promised safekeeping. But within a few months after arriving at Fort Robinson, Washington ordered them back to the death camp in Oklahoma: Fort Reno. Dull Knife and his people again tried to flee. This time they did not make it. In the first hour of fighting, more than half the warriors died, and then the soldiers began overtaking scattered bands of women and children, killing many of them before they could surrender.
From the days when the Cheyennes numbered in the thousands, and they had more horses than any of the plains tribes, by the late 1800s, they were closer to obliteration than the buffalo.7
Some of Dull Knife’s band would finally make it home 114 years later. On September 21, 1993, the National Park Service would issue a notice with regard to an “Inventory of Native American Human Remains.” According to museum records the collection of remains was retrieved from a sinkhole in the vicinity of Fort Robinson, Nebraska, in 1879, about one year after Dull Knife’s band was attacked while leaving the fort. Five skulls and one femur, along with “associated funerary objects” such as a leather knife sheath, a fragment of cloth, and some buttons, were deposited at Harvard University. According to the National Park Service, “The location and date of collection...and the evidence of violent death exhibited by the human remains support the identification of these human remains and associated funerary objects as being culturally affiliated with the Northern Cheyenne Tribe.”8 These ancestors have finally been allowed to go home to the Tongue River, home to their relatives.
Coming Home to the Coal Fields
In 1884, President Chester Arthur established a small, checkerboarded reservation along Rosebud Creek, which was expanded to the Tongue River and consolidated into one reservation in 1900. From there, Little Wolf’s band of Cheyennes and their descendants slowly nursed their people back to health, all the while keeping those sacred bundles, their medicine items, and their traditional ways.
The Northern Cheyenne reservation lies in the middle of the Powder River coal basin, which extends across parts of southeastern Montana and northern Wyoming. The coal beds that lie within and around the reservation are some of the richest, highest quality, and most easily mined, from an economic stand-point. That coal has become the bane of their existence.
In the 1920s, a coal mine opened at the prophetically named town of Colstrip, just north of the reservation. That mine provided coal for the railroads and closed in the 1950s. Aside from this brief and relatively small-scale mine, the vast Powder River basin’s coal reserves remained largely untouched and unnoticed until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, activities half a world away brought some of the largest transnational corporations in the world to the northern Cheyenne reservation.
In June 1887, German, English, and American entrepreneurs formed a metals corporation called AMCO. Within a year, the British interest sold its shares to the Germans and the Americans. During World War I, the German interests in the company were seized, and the company was consolidated in American hands. In 1916, they acquired a controlling interest in various mining claims on Bartlett Mountain, and in the late 1920s AMCO joined interests with another big international mining company, Newmont Mining, to expand in Africa. After World War II, these two companies acquired mines in Namibia at a “bargain price after its appropriation from its defeated German owners.”9 The companies’ subsequent expansion in Africa was extremely lucrative and allowed for the company to again expand—into coal—in the 1960s.
By 1974, AMCO, now renamed AMAX Coal Company, was the fourth-largest producer of coal in the United States.10 Several factors combined with AMAX’s expansion strategy to bring it to Northern Cheyenne lands: new legislation on air quality standards, the development of the national and international power grids, and the pressures of Third World nationalism. The passage of the 1973 Clean Air Act made the low-sulfur, high-quality coal of the West more attractive. Coal that could be mined on site and either moved by rail or burned in the rural area and then sent by high-voltage power line to consumers far away became increasingly plausible. Out of sight, out of mind.
While technology and domestic laws made the move to Northern Cheyenne (and with it a “domestic” energy supply) viable, Third World nationalism made it essential. As Richard Nafziger, an economist and former research director of Americans for Indian Opportunity, describes:
Until recent years, British and American resource corporations, with the full backing of their home governments, roamed the world...plundering the raw materials of the people of Africa, Asia and America. Raw materials were extracted with little or no compensation to the people or governments in those areas. To secure control of these raw materials, a series of institutions were imposed on the people to foster dependency on the transnational corporations and their home governments. The raw materials became particularly important to the exploiting corporations and governments because of the high profits earned due to cheap labor and minimal royalties and taxes. In a sense, these resources fueled the industrial growth of the United States and Western Europe.11
This situation, history teaches us, was not without opposition. Third World nationalist governments challenged U.S. corporate dominance in their economies and were in many cases successful. Both the anti–Vietnam War movement domestically and the Cold War internationally made it difficult for the U.S. government to aggressively defend U.S. corporate interests abroad.
Finally, many resource corporations were interested in diversifying their resource base and expanding into coal and nuclear energy. All of these factors combined to bring the corporations to the reservation, to Native America, a place where, indeed, many of them had started initially.12 So it was that the federal government began to eye the West and was pleased with what it found. In 1971, the Department of Interior reported that the low-sulfur strippable reserves in the West were ten times more abundant than those in the eastern part of the nation.13 By the mid-1960s, the federal government had determined that one-third of all strippable coal resources and one-half of the country’s uranium was on reservation lands. That reality ultimately put Native communities, without infrastructure, attorneys, negotiators, environmental policy coordinators—without most of the strategic assets necessary to sit across the table from a multinational mining or oil company—face to face with the big companies and their own destinies.
The Northern Cheyenne and AMAX
“Before the mid-1960s, we were a small, isolated Indian tribe living on a small piece of land in one of the last and least settled regions of the continental U.S.—land for which our ancestors fought and died,” Gail explains. “Our ancestors left that land to later generations in sacred trust. By the 1960s, we had just begun to recover somewhat from the awful destructive reservation policies that characterized the period from the late nineteenth century through the termination policy of the mid-twentieth century. Around 1950, our population halted a long downward spiral and began to recover.” Then came the next wave.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) is the trustee of the Indian estate. This relationship is a colonial holdover from when responsibility for Indian peoples, lands, territories, and political rights was moved from the Department of War to the Department of Interior. The BIA has always suffered from a little conflict of interest problem, in that it cozied up to the Interior Department’s Bureau of Mines, Bureau of Reclamation, and other bureaus managing natural resources. The BIA has always been a stepchild of the Department of Interior and has stumbled through its existence with the mandate of taking care of something the U.S. government pretty much doesn’t want—Indians.
Not surprisingly, the BIA found itself wooed by some big corporations into giving away the North Cheyenne reservation to AMAX. Actually, the BIA found it couldn’t help itself and during a short period gave away much of Indian country to a few corporations, signing leases on tribes’ behalf and pretty much squandering most of the assets of tribal peoples. “The average Indian lease covers 23,523 acres, or nearly 37 square miles and is 15 times larger than the average public land lease.”14 This is in spite of the fact that the BIA was only allowed to approve leases for tracts larger than 2,560 acres if more land was needed to construct thermal electric power plants or other facilities near the reservation. In fact, it might be argued that the BIA leasing policy facilitated the development of the mega-structures near the reservation.15
Nor were the terms equitable, as even the federal government itself acknowledges. According to the 1976 American Indian Policy Review Commission Report, “Measured by international standards, the leases negotiated on behalf of Indians are among the poorest agreements ever made.”16 According to the commission, the royalties were too low and fixed, ignoring the increase in the value of production. Hence, many leases were signed for between 15 and 35 cents a ton for coal, which had a market value between $4.67 (1968) and $18.75 (1975). Another problem was the fact that most lease provisions allowed for the continuation of mining “as long thereafter as minerals are produced in paying quantities.”17
According to Ken Peres, a former economic planner for the Northern Cheyenne, “In the 1970s, the BIA and the energy corporations brought a money economy to the reservation lands. They also brought unemployment and poverty. The corporations wanted the coal under the people’s land, so they signed leases with the BIA that gave them the right to mine. Of all the acreage on the reservation, 64 percent was leased to such corporations as Chevron, AMAX, Consolidated Coal, and ARCO in the early 1970s. Most of these leases were set up to give the Cheyenne Nation a 17.5 cent royalty on the coal removed.”18
When AMAX ambled onto Northern Cheyenne in 1973, they had three billion tons of coal reserves; they bought purchasing permits for 1.9 billion more tons of coal on the Northern Cheyenne reservation. Although previously the company’s strongest coal holdings were in the Midwest, that coal had a high sulfur content, and most of AMAX’s mines had a short life span—around 11 years. The company saw the writing on the wall of Third World anti-colonialism against its properties abroad and expanded its investments into its coal subsidiary, investing some $212 million in a few short years and projecting that annual production of coal would reach 50 million tons by 1978.19
Coal strip-mining is about as destructive as it gets. There is a term used in the strip-mining business for everything that is on top of the coal, or, perhaps, whatever else it is you want to get from under the ground. That term is “overburden.” That term, in itself, encapsulates the divergence between industrial development and Native society. Coal strip-mining, whether in Appalachia or on Northern Cheyenne and Crow territory, is destructive, but in the government’s own research, the more arid the land, the more damage strip-mining wreaks. According to a 1973 National Academy of Sciences report that sent shivers up the backs of Native people in coal-rich reservations,
No issue associated with the current energy debate is more in the center of this conflict between demand and conservation than is the surface mining of coal. Our most abundant domestic fossil fuel is coal, and much of it occurs at depths where it can be mined by surface methods. Surface mining destroys the existing natural communities completely and dramatically. Indeed, restoration of a landscape disturbed by surface mining, in the sense of recreating the former conditions, is not possible.20
The problem was so dire, according to the academy, that in those areas receiving little rainfall (i.e., less than seven inches or so), the academy recommended that reclamation not even be attempted. They noted that
The coal lands of the western United States are quite different from others in the nation.... The ecological process of vegetative succession, or the orderly process of community change, is extremely slow under such arid conditions. Where natural revegetation of a disturbed site may develop in five to twenty years on a high rainfall eastern U.S. site, it may take decades or even centuries for natural vegetation to develop in a desert. The precarious nature of these dryland ecosystems should suggest caution by prudent men in any deliberate disturbance of an arid site.
The academy suggested that if such lands were mined, it was more feasible to deem the land “National Sacrifice Areas.”21 That same year, the government itself issued an urgent warning to arid, coal-rich areas of the West, recommending that reclamation not be attempted.
These conclusions, however, were not initially presented in the negotiations, not by the federal government, which had contributed to the study, nor by the companies. Nor would the impact of the coal development be exclusively on the environment. The mining would affect a nation of people, with some 3,000 residents on their pristine reservation. The influx of workers, machinery, and infrastructure all would impact the community socially, politically, and culturally. Sociologists refer to the ramifications of such development as the “boom town syndrome.” It is not considered to be a healthy environment for the host population and is exacerbated when the local host community is a different color, race, and culture from the newcomers. These cultural, political, social, and environmental impacts all were concerns to the Northern Cheyenne. But while they fought coal development on their reservation, they found that their neighbors, the Crow, were also faced with coal development, and the areas adjoining the Crow and Cheyenne reservation lands were, too. Hence, while the Northern Cheyenne could potentially fend off development on the reservation, they might still find themselves in the midst of coal exploitation and coal culture, just the same. Over the next decade, four large power plants, Colstrip 1-4, and the Rosebud power plant, were built in Colstrip, all adjacent to the reservation.
“We were in high school,” Gail explains. “While the Tribal Council was looking at these leases and horrified at the agreements, we had to deal with it face to face. We were bussed off-reservation into the border town, and all of a sudden, there were all these new kids there—miners’ kids. Those kids didn’t like Indians at all. I never experienced so much racism before and never heard some of those words before. Never got called those names until that time.” Gail pauses, the memory still painful. “They called us prairie niggers. That’s what they called us. Prairie niggers. I had never heard anything like it.”
“I feel like I have lived a lifetime fighting coal strip-mining, and I long for a better life for my tribe,” says Gail. The fact is that Gail’s entire adult life has been spent fighting coal strip-mining, all by virtue of the fact that she was born a Northern Cheyenne.
Since I was in high school, I have been involved in my tribe’s fight to protect our reservation and the environment of southeastern Montana. It was during this time, the early 1970s, that the Cheyenne people learned the horrifying news that our federal trustee, the BIA, had leased over one-half of our reservation to the coal companies for strip-mining. Cheyenne coal was sold for 11 cents a ton, and no environmental safeguards were on the coal leases. The fight was on, and every resource our small tribe had was committed to this battle. I was with a group of young Cheyenne whom the tribe sent to the Navajo coal mines and then on to the coal fields of Wyoming. The enormity of our situation frightened and angered us. After college, I served on the tribal negotiating committee charged with voiding these coal leases. I was 21 years old, the youngest on my committee, and the only one with a college degree. We were fortunate to find a very capable young attorney with a passion for Indians and for justice because we were suing our federal trustee and the coal companies, both formidable opponents.
They were also facing utilities as far west as San Francisco, which through the regional power grids could contract for power from Cheyenne coal. The odds were not good.
What the Northern Cheyenne did stunned the federal government and the mining companies. It was in 1973 that Gail and the rest of the Northern Cheyenne sparked off a virtual revolt against the substandard mineral leases concluded by the federal government on their behalf. Their legal research revealed numerous violations—at least 36—of federal leasing procedures in the execution of mineral permits and leases. The Secretary of the Interior was forced to suspend the leases pending tribal and corporate negotiations with the Northern Cheyenne.22 Congress voided the leases and paid compensation to the leaseholders, in the form of federal bidding rights for Montana coal in the future. (Some of these compensation agreements would come back to haunt the Northern Cheyenne years later in the form of what would later become Montco, an entity created by Billings coal mining speculator Mike Gustafson.)
According to Richard Nafziger,
The Northern Cheyenne action put in motion a domino effect and set a precedent for other tribes to take on the big companies and the government. Their neighbors, the Crow Tribe, also found numerous irregularities in their leases. They invalidated a lease with Westmoreland Resources and then signed another one raising royalty rates from 17.5 cents to 40 cents per ton. On the basis of the violations, the Crows filed suit in the Ninth Circuit Court to cancel two other leases with Shell and AMAX. The court ruled in favor of the Tribe. Both companies returned to the bargaining table, but their tactics differed considerably. Shell tried to push through a new lease by offering a $200 to $400 gift to the Tribal members just before Crow Fair, an annual celebration that is one of the largest powwows in the nation. The Crow Tribe protested such divisive tactics. A tentative agreement was finally reached reducing Shell’s leased acreage from 33,000 acres to 7680 acres and increasing the royalty rate to 12.5 cents per ton.23
Then the Northern Cheyenne went a step further. In 1978, the Cheyennes took advantage of that year’s amendments to the Federal Clean Air Act, which allowed them to redesignate their entire reservation to class-one air quality. The amendments are referred to as Prevention of Significant Deterioration Regulations, or PSD and would apply to all government agencies (i.e., National Parks, refuges, etc.) The Northern Cheyenne were the first entity in the United States to redesignate, Gail explains. That redesignation required that the government fund and enforce an air quality program. However, the EPA never gave the Northern Cheyennes enough money to manage their air quality program. Funding to tribes represents less than 1 percent of the EPA’s budget, even though Native people bear a disproportionate share of the burden of environmental devastation between Superfund sites, strip-mines, and abandoned uranium mines. “We were eventually forced to settle with the coal companies in a lawsuit over Colstrip,” Gail explains, “just to get the equipment for our air quality monitoring program on the reservation.” Some Native activists argue that tribal governments are considered sovereign by the federal government only if they want to put in a dump or open a casino, not if they want to protect their air quality. Regardless, by designating their air of high quality, they forced nearby Colstrip to modify its modus operandi and likely curtailed some development.
It took almost 15 years before the Cheyenne Tribe convinced Congress to void all the present coal leases and compensate speculators with other potential sites or money. “Fifteen years of anxiety and sacrifices by the people,” Gail explains, and sighs. “It has been an immense struggle and sacrifice, and one which seems to go on and on. I wish I could tell you that we have a happy ending; unfortunately the battle is still waging because the Cheyenne coal is now even more valuable and sought after.” And the Cheyenne face powerful adversaries. “The political and economic power of the coal and utility companies is so great,” Small explains, that “they basically rule the state of Montana.”
The Native community’s battles with the big energy companies led to the creation of the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, CERT, in the early 1970s. CERT was a collective effort of several influential tribal chairmen (i.e., Floyd Correo [Laguna Pueblo] and Peter MacDonald [Navajo]) and Native leaders like LaDonna Harris (wife of former Oklahoma senator Fred Harris), funded by federal and corporate grants. CERT was intended to level the playing field for tribes who went face to face with the big corporations interested in their resources. CERT has played an historic and important role in the leasing process by securing better prices for Native resources, but since its inception has been mired in controversy and criticism. Many Native people question whether CERT was engaged in the process of brokering of Native resources, when in fact many tribes have actually opposed development. Subsequent federal funding to CERT and other national organizations in various roles in this energy-and-environment equation has brought criticism from Gail and others. “Rarely is there money in the federal bureaucracy for cultural and environmental needs of tribes,” she points out. “I find it ironic, however, that federal monies always miraculously appear to study and develop coal strip mines, uranium mines, and nuclear waste dumps on reservations.” Most of CERT’s resources have been focused on fossil fuel and nuclear power development, despite the immense environmental impacts of these technologies and the vast potential for alternative energy development.
America is the single largest energy market in the world, and consumption is not, at present, dwindling. Some people call Montana the “boiler state of the West.” Actually, it is one of a few. Coal exports from Montana are lower than those from Wyoming, but thanks to those big power grids Montana power can keep the lights on in Los Angeles and Seattle. The Colstrip 1-4 power plants, adjacent to the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations, are owned by various interests with Montana Power Company, including Pacific Corporation, Puget Sound Power and Light, Pacific Gas and Electric, Western Washington Power, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Although these utilities may perceive that they have externalized their environmental problems far away, it may be argued that they are culpable for the environmental problems in Montana and the struggles of the Northern Cheyenne.24
The national power grid looks like a big veho spider web, and it links the Northern Cheyenne to the rest of the country through high-voltage transmission lines. The western portion of the National Electric Reliability Council’s electric grid system includes Montana and hooks it up to Washington State and the rest of the West, in a rather uneven interdependence in which Montana produces power and Portland receives it. That’s perhaps one of the reasons why Native Action and the Northern Cheyenne find it frustrating that many presumed allies like environmentalists and foundations are so sporadic and fickle with their support. Everyone seems to benefit from the Northern Cheyenne, but few want to change their relationship with them. “Americans would rather fight for the rain-forest than deal with their own backyards,” Gail says. “Because of the teachings of one of my past elders, a tribal chairman, since deceased, I’ve learned to strategize based on the premise that we have few allies.” That is a political tragedy in its own right, but it is also a pragmatic reality.
The broader environmental movement often misses the depth of the Native environmental struggle. Although it has been romanticized historically and is often considered in some New Age context, the ongoing relationship between Indigenous culture and the land is central to most Native environmental struggles. Gail concurs:
Environment, culture, religion, and life are very much interrelated in the tribal way of life. Indeed they are often one and the same. Water, for example, is the lifeblood of the people. I recall taking a draft tribal water code for public input into the five villages on my reservation when I was a tribal sociologist. Protection of the water spirits was a major concern throughout the reservation. And the water spirits varied depending on the water source being a river, lake, or spring. I reported back to the attorneys, and they laughed at my findings. However, it was no laughing matter a few years later, when an elderly Cheyenne man held off the drilling team of ARCO from crossing his water spring with his rifle. “Today is a good day to die,” he said as he held his own hunting rifle before him.
I defended him in tribal court the next morning, and I cried with him when he told me how the water spirits sometimes came out and danced at his spring. Indeed, there is a profound spiritual dimension to our natural environment, and without it, the war would not be worth fighting.25
Native Action’s strategies to fight the coal development and to ensure the survival of the Northern Cheyenne community have been diverse and sophisticated. As an attorney, Gail Small, on behalf of Native Action and a number of individual plaintiffs, has been through the courts and administrative processes, down virtually every avenue open to her community.
To some, though, because there is coal in the ground, it should be mined. Mike Gustafson, a minerals speculator from Billings who had been compensated in the 1973 congressional lease cancellation, had new plans that would affect the Northern Cheyenne and in particular those homelands on the Tongue River. His proposal came in the form of Montco, and he had over time become, according to Gail, one of the last great railroad and coal-mining barons in the country, “amassing” both political and economic wealth that Gail equated to a “little dynasty.” “Even though we got our reservation’s mineral sites cleared, we ended up with a formidable opponent in the form of Montco.” For almost 20 years, Gustafson and Montco have sought to open a rail spur along the Northern Cheyenne reservation, ostensibly to haul coal from Wyoming coal fields to Montana markets, but also to service new mines in the Northern Cheyenne homeland. Thus far, all have been averted.
In a seemingly relentless onslaught of battles spanning almost two decades, Native Action has organized and coordinated hearings on the reservation and played a central role in litigation related to the proposals for the Tongue River Railroad and Montco Mine. Their work resulted in the state of Montana denying a request by the company for an extension of their mine permit. The significance of this case lies in part in the fact that the land that the companies wanted to mine is the land on which Little Wolf’s band originally settled upon their return from the death camps of Indian territory. It is an extremely important historic site to the Northern Cheyenne, not a suitable location for yet another strip mine.
Each year, it seems, the Cheyenne face a new development project that will tear away at the social and cultural fabric of the community. As I was completing the interviews and research on Native Action, I had to call and clarify the status of three different mining projects the grassroots organization was currently fighting. In a related action in Fall 1997, President Clinton issued a line-item veto of the transfer of federal coal lands to the state of Montana as a tradeoff for Montana not devastating Yellowstone National Park with a new gold mine. The Great White Father helped out his Northern Cheyenne children. For once.
“That there are not more mines in Montana is in part due to Gail’s work,” explains Jeff Barber of the Northern Plains Resource Council, a non-Indian advocacy group composed primarily of ranchers and farmers. The group ends up working with Native Action on a number of issues every year. As Barber explains, “about 25 percent of the nation’s coal is out here, and there are only five major mines in Montana, producing an average of 30-40 million tons of coal annually. That compares to the 300 million tons annually produced in Wyoming, a steady increase since the 1980s. That is, in part, because of Gail. Otherwise, we would have the same kind of rape and run that they have in Wyoming. That is no small feat.”26
Economic Justice and Ethnostress
Agnes Williams, a Seneca social worker, came up with a term in her practice on the Cattaraugus reservation: “ethnostress.” That’s what you feel when you wake up in the morning and you are still Indian, and you still have to deal with stuff about being Indian—poverty, racism, death, the government, and strip-mining. You can’t just hit the tennis courts, have lunch, and forget about it. You will still have to go home. That reality of ethnostress pretty much sums up life on the reservation, perhaps more so at Northern Cheyenne.
Ethnostress comes from the structural issues that affect every reservation, Northern Cheyenne included. Most statistics place reservations in the Third World economically, something that the energy and mining corporations understood when they negotiated leases on Native lands. Land- and natural resource-rich, the Northern Cheyenne continue to live in immense material poverty. As Gail describes it, “The current profile of our reservation is characterized by a 60 percent unemployment rate, alcoholism, drug abuse, suicide, violence, a 57 percent dropout rate, apathy, and a sense of powerlessness.” All of this is especially disturbing considered along with the fact that the tribe’s population is young: 42 percent of the total population are less than 21 years of age. Alarmingly, approximately 250 Cheyenne youth, or 57 percent, had in 1995 already dropped out of non-Indian-controlled high schools. These statistics indicate a deep and chronic cycle of underdevelopment, as well as the structural racism of the region.
The Northern Cheyenne realized that unless there was some long-term work done to address these symptoms, each time the coal companies came back to the reservation, the community would be prey. In response, Native Action took on two strategies—economic justice and education. Since the tribe had been aggressively fighting the coal mines and the companies, the local pro-development townspeople and businesses were hostile towards tribe members. As Gail explains it, non-Indians in the bordering towns rarely hire Cheyennes. There is no bank on the reservation, and very few Indian-owned businesses. Very little money generated from the reservation stays on the reservation, with most going to the off-reservation coal towns. The Cheyenne also found that there were virtually no loans going to the reservation, although a good portion of tribal members operated ranches. Native Action took on the bank.
The Northern Cheyenne do not want to live in poverty, nor should they be forced to trade their ecosystem for some economic justice. They decided they needed some alternatives. Native Action opposed an interstate bank merger on the grounds that the banks were in violation of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). This act requires that banks loan to the communities in which they do business, but as it turned out there had been less than a half-million dollars’ worth of loans to Northern Cheyennes over the previous decade. In December 1991, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors shocked the banking industry by denying the merger application of the First Interstate Bank System based solely on Native Action’s CRA appeal. Three years later, the bank and Native Action settled the appeal and entered into a CRA agreement.
In the 20 months that followed, over $3.8 million was loaned to residents of the Northern Cheyenne reservation. Almost $2 million was loaned to young people working to re-establish ranches and farms on the reservation. In early 1997, Gail Small was appointed to serve on the Federal Reserve Board’s Consumer Advisory Council, the only Native person ever to have served on one of the federal bank’s committees. To others, another important benchmark occurred when an automated bank machine was installed in 1997 at Lame Deer. That meant to Gail that they were coming of age.
In the last few years, Gail has gone back to that border-town high school that caused her so much anguish. For decades, the majority of Northern Cheyenne students were bussed to the border-town high schools, meaning that the Cheyenne lost control over their children’s educations. Not surprisingly, most Native students dropped out. The local school districts adjacent to reservations get around $6,000 per student to teach enrolled Native students, according to Gail. That is money the school districts don’t want to lose, so they fought the Northern Cheyenne community’s initiatives to start their own school district. But in 1993, after almost 30 years of fighting, the state superintendent of public instruction granted the Northern Cheyenne’s petition for a high school because of the hard work of Native Action and the community at large. In 1997, the Northern Cheyenne broke ground for the Morning Star High School.
Gail Small sits in an office overlooking her town of Lame Deer, Montana. During the course of her life, she has pretty much done everything in her ability to ensure some quality of life in the town, on the reservation, and in the region. She would like to take a breather. One day, she might. Maybe. In the meantime, the largest coal strip mine in the United States looms like a great shadow over her. The Northern Cheyenne beat the latest proposal to mine their territory, but there will be another. There will most likely always be another proposal. She takes another breath and thinks about her four young children. She wants them to be happy to be Cheyenne. It is not so much to ask.
This America
has been a burden
of steel and mad
death,
but, look now,
there are flowers
and new grass
and a spring wind
rising from Sand Creek.27