Tribes, tree huggers, fishers united in stopping another foreign miner

The Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming are hardly the only public lands plundered by foreign companies under cover of the General Mining Law of 1872 that was enacted to settle Civil War debt and rob Indigenous peoples of their homes and human rights.

Until it closed in 1939 the Tererro Mine in the headwaters of the Pecos River took gold, lead and other metals then left piles of toxic waste rock in their place. After major flooding in 1991 when sulfuric acid, aluminum and zinc swept into the river miner Freeport-McMoRan was held responsible for the deaths of some 100,000 Rio Grande cutthroat trout and for the subsequent decades of acid mine drainage. 

Today, thanks to the Trump Organization the United States is in debt to the tune of $31 TRILLION so the US encourages mining companies from outside the country to drill more holes in the Earth looking for gold and silver. Repeal or even reform of the 1872 statute has been thwarted repeatedly and the US Forest Service is often powerless to stop the extractive industry from permanently altering sensitive watersheds because of the 1872 law.

The archaic legislation enables Australian miners like Jervois Global to gouge ore containing cobalt from the homelands of the Nimíipuu or Nez Perce at a Superfund site near the Frank Church Wilderness in Idaho. At Harshaw, Arizona, South32 Ltd. is ripping into Sobaipuri O’odham and Hohokam ancestral lands at the old Hermosa Mine for manganese and nickel. A Canadian miner paid a settlement to mitigate and remediate portions of Colorado's San Juan County where the 2015 Gold King Mine spill polluted the motherlands of the Ute people. 

In southeastern Arizona operations owned by Freeport-McMoRan Inc, Morenci and Miami are ravaging water supplies and reducing entire mountain ranges to piles of waste rock in Tonto Apache lands. Apsáalooke and Lakota ground near Silver City in my home state of South Dakota is under assault from Canadian miners, too. Much to the frustration of locals, the US Environmental Protection Agency moved most of the contaminated soil from the home of the Blackfeet above Rimini, Montana to a mine in upper Basin Creek where it was encapsulated so EPA has allocated more resources to clean up sites in that state. 

In 2019, despite opposition from Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and Senator Martin Heinrich, an American subsidiary of Australian company New World Cobalt, was granted twenty federal permits to drill test holes into the Sangre de Cristo mountain range on the Santa Fe National Forest in the Jones Hill area north of Pecos, New Mexico.

The 1872 Mining Act is a formidable foe, but the Stop Tererro Mine coalition has alighted on a strategy to fight it, according to Lela McFerrin, vice president of the Upper Pecos Watershed Association. Numerous tribes — from the Jemez, Tesuque and Santa Clara Pueblos to the Hopi and the Comanche — registered disapproval or called for government-to-government consultations to stop the project. Along with local community organizations, they demanded a full environmental assessment, which significantly slowed the permitting process. Until then, it’s painful to watch distant companies like New World Resources be given the benefit of the 1872 Mining Act, coalition members lamented. Many felt as if the Australian company had more say on the future of their lands and water than they did. [Can a mine near the Pecos River be stopped?]