Oglala Oyate considering uranium litigation

Pants Butte south of Edgemont, South Dakota

Nearly all of the 300 mile long Cheyenne River flows through Indian Country. Powertech USA, part of Canadian firm Azarga Uranium, wants to mine near a tributary of the river even though tailings from uranium mining near Edgemont have been detected for years in Angostura Reservoir on the Cheyenne River in the southern Black Hills.

The Oglala Sioux Tribe is considering whether to appeal a decision by a panel of judges that a proposed uranium mine site in southwest South Dakota doesn’t have to be surveyed for Native American burials or artifacts. The tribe has until Jan. 6 to file an appeal. [KDLT teevee]

South of Edgemont at Crow Butte near the headwaters of the White River above Crawford, Nebraska Canada-based Cameco, Inc. has obtained rights to use 9,000 gallons of water per minute to extract raw uranium ore through 8,000 holes bored into the Ogallala and Arikaree Aquifers. The foreign miners have already pumped over half a billion gallons of radioactive waste water into disposal wells and have rights to bury more. In 2014 Cameco, the world’s largest uranium producer, paid a million dollar fine for environmental damage in Wyoming. The White River also flows through much of Indian Country in South Dakota. Earlier this year workers at Cameco's Key Lake uranium mill in Canada reported 50,000 litres of radon-contaminated water had leaked through the concrete floor into the ground. It has yet to be remediated.

At least 23 prehistoric sites near Devils Tower National Monument in the Wyoming Black Hills, some of which are archaeological treasures eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, are also at risk to an 8000-acre expansion of Australia’s largest US aquifer uranium mining operation.

In northwestern South Dakota radioactive waste in the Cave Hills area went for decades without remediation because the Board of Minerals and Environment is an arm of the Republican Party that ceded regulatory authority to the US Environmental Protection Agency for uranium mining after the legislature realized there is no competent oversight from state agencies.

SMRI loses Sturgis trademark crusade

The Chair of the South Dakota Republican Party is Jewish but as a bail bondsman he always cuts a fat hog on crimes committed in Sturgis anyway.

Judge Jeffrey Viken has ruled the Sturgis mark is invalid. The court ruling is consistent with an 8th Circuit Court ruling earlier this year. Since 1996, words associated with the rally, specifically "Sturgis", have been trademarked. The phrases "Sturgis Rally and Races" and "Sturgis Motorcycle Rally" were not trademarked but Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, Inc., claimed ownership of them. SMRI still has the trademark for several words, such as “Sturgis Bike Week,” “The Legend Lives On,” and “Take the Ride to Sturgis.” [KBHB Radio]

The City of Sturgis was not a party in the case.

Appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009 Jeff Viken is the chief judge for the District of South Dakota.

A South Dakota school board voted unanimously to cancel homecoming activities that would have featured a football game between the Sturgis Scoopers and the Pine Ridge Thorpes after a car bearing hate speech and a symbol painted on it that some said resembled a swastika was smashed by Sturgis students. Sturgis routinely ranks as one of the worst towns in South Dakota but the reasoning is hardly mysterious. It's all about the money prostitution, the Sturgis Rally, policing for profit and sex trafficking bring to the SDGOP destroying lives, depleting watersheds and smothering habitat under single-party rule.

Oglala Lakota Nation hopes to drive South Dakota into the 21st Century

In 2019, the average cost of a household photovoltaic system is about $3/watt or around $12,810 when tax credits are factored in. Using those numbers a $100,000,000 investment would electrify about 7,700 homes. South Dakota is dead last in electrical power generated from the sun and only .02% of the state's electricity comes from solar sources.

The solar park would be within the Pine Ridge Reservation on the western edge of Oglala Lakota County, about 20 miles east of Buffalo Gap. Eleven miles of proposed underground transmission line would carry electricity from the park to a proposed substation in Custer County. [$100 million solar project slated for reservation moves ahead]

No corporate taxes, a compliant regulator, a dearth of environmental protection and cheap labor make South Dakota the perfect dumping ground for earth killers like coal and eyesores like wind farms. But according to Republican Public Utilities Cartel Commissioner Chris Nelson the amount of wind power generation may have reached its plateau. In an interview with WNAX Radio Nelson said he believes there will be rapid development of solar power production facilities.

The Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe is investing in a $750,000 solar power project to provide energy for partial needs at several buildings. [Moody County Enterprise]

Utilities are not your friends. Ice storms routinely knock out electric power on American Indian reservations often resulting in lost lives and the inevitable cyber attacks on the US will take down the grid for days, even months causing food shortages and mayhem. Microgrid technologies are destined to enhance tribal sovereignty, free communities from electric monopolies and net-metering only gives control back to utilities enabled by moral hazard.

Leaving the grid has never been easier so anyone who can afford to it should do it now and with Trump still in the White House destroying solar power it's never been more urgent.

LawCo admits area is ripe for weaponized wildfire

Photo shot of 2002 Grizzly Gulch Fire from '59 burn: spot fire on Pillar Peak, at least a mile downwind of main fire

Much of the 2002 Grizzly Gulch Fire outside Deadwood occurred on ground owned by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the 60th anniversary of the 1959 Deadwood Hill Fire was just recently commemorated but because of Senator John Thune (NAZI-SD) costs of conducting prescribed burns are now thousands of dollars per acre instead of hundreds.

It’s been nearly a decade since the county updated its Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP)/Firewise in 2012 and much has changed since that time, prompting county officials to make redevelopment of the document a priority for 2020. Rob Mattox, wildland interface specialist, and Paul Thomson Lawrence County emergency management director, spoke about the proposed update with the county commission, beginning with a funding update on the BLM-funded Community Assistance Program (CAP). As part of the CWPP, roads are also buffered. For example, there are areas, such as Galena, that are simply too steep to reach for fuels treatments. Municipalities, Terry Valley and Deer Mountain subdivisions were high on the list. “The areas with more density was higher on the list for prioritization,” Mattox said, adding that the structure layer would be used to update the CPWW for the different buffers and reprioritization, taking new developments into account. [County to update wildfire protection plan]

Keystone, Hot Springs, Custer, Pringle, Argyle, Hill City, Hisega, Rochford, Nemo, Galena, Silver City, Hanna, Cheyenne Crossing, Savoy, Deadwood, Lead, Whitewood, Newcastle, Alva, Aladdin, Hulett even parts of Sundance, Rapid City, Piedmont, Sturgis and Spearditch are at extreme risk from the tactical use of wildfire. Just six strategically-placed improvised fuel air explosives (FAEs) deployed during red-flag conditions have the potential to create a firestorm that would be virtually unstoppable.

Recall the 2016 Crow Peak Fire affected mostly Republican landowners who built in the wildland-urban interface and begged the feds to protect their properties.

Most of the vegetation on some 274,000 surface acres in the South Dakota BLM Field Office is prairie grassland or juniper woodlands but the trees at the Fort Meade Recreation Area are mostly ponderosa pine and bur oak. Around Lead and Deadwood pine and oak are mixed with spruce, birch, and quaking aspen.

A group of retired top officials from the Bureau of Land Management is in Washington, D.C., this week criticizing the agency’s planned relocation out West. In a statement, the BLM says they are moving ahead with the relocation and have cooperated with Congress at all points. [Wyoming Public Radio]

When the Custer Expedition came through the Black Hills in 1874 bringing invasive cheatgrass for their horses stands of ponderosa pine were sparsely scattered but a century and a half of poor ranching and land management practices have created an unnatural overstory best controlled by the mountain pine beetle, prescribed fires and periodic wildfires. The bug is hard at work clearing centuries of overgrowth throughout the Rocky Mountain Complex, so is the western spruce budworm. But leaving dead and dying conifers on the forest produces methane, an even more dangerous greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is.

If you live in the wildland-urban interface government can't always protect you from your own stupidity. Volunteer fire departments are irreplaceable as first responders to unexpected blazes and if the Federal Emergency Management Agency survives a Trump presidency it should convince Congress to make sure the resources are there to sustain rural firefighters.

Longleaf pine is fire-dependent. #goodfire https://t.co/xs9wEZKEQS

— interested party (@larry_kurtz) December 10, 2019

Annual Yellowstone bison 'cull' furthers genocide

Slippery Ann Creek

In 2010, habitat preservation and rewilding advocate George Wuerthner backed the Tony Dean Cheyenne River Valley Conservation Act, part of Senator Tim Johnson's proposal to add 48,000 acres as wilderness in the Indian Creek, Red Shirt and Chalk Hills areas of the Buffalo Gap National Grassland on the borders of Badlands National Park.

It is particularly disturbing that the tribes are participating in this annual carnage. In a sense, they are doing to bison what the American manifest destiny did to them — using bullets as a fence, they are confining bison to a wildlife “reservation.” Rather than continuously remove bison from Yellowstone by hunting, this rare genetic stock should be transplanted to other suitable habitats like the Missouri Breaks National Monument/Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, the Green River/ Red Desert of Wyoming, North Park of Colorado, the INL/Craters of the Moon/Snake River Plain in Idaho, among other suitable sites. [column, George Wuerthner, Billings (Montana) Gazette]

Outside Yellowstone National Park the Hayden Valley memorializes Ferdinand V. Hayden who advocated for “extermination” of tribal people and Mount Doane is named for Lieutenant Gustavus Doane who led a massacre of the Piikani, part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. One reason Republicans don't like Common Core history standards is that the curriculum long-ignored by textbooks includes genocide and near-extermination of American Indians by European colonialism.

In 2011 an odd goddess and an interested party counted a hundred wapiti in a CM Russell National Wildlife Refuge meadow while another hundred browsed and bugled concealed by the cottonwood and willow stands on the riverbanks. The waxing gibbous moon extended our viewing time well beyond twilight and long after the line of humans in cars and trucks on the road below us had dispersed. Then, coyotes harmonized in a chorus that continued until dawn. Spring flooding sustained stands of grass that still hid elk calves and cows while they lazed about. The name has been bastardized from Cyprian to Siparyann to Slippery Ann Creek. It has become a safe refuge where elk gather as they leave summer grazing in the upper Missouri River Basin and migrate downstream to escape the winter. Managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the area is at the extreme west beginning of the Fort Peck Reservoir in eastern Montana.

Restoring and rewilding American ecosystems are parts of the Green New Deal.

The Anthropocene is now and time to rewild some of the American West eventually becoming part of a Greater Missouri Basin National Wildlife Refuge connecting the CM Russell in Montana along the Missouri River through North Dakota to Oacoma, South Dakota combined with corridors from Yellowstone National Park to the Yukon in the north and south to the Pecos River through eastern Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, western Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

Clear the second growth conifers and restore aspen habitat, prescribe burns, begin extensive Pleistocene rewilding using bison and cervids, empower tribes, lease private land for wildlife corridors, turn feral horses from Bureau of Land Management pastures onto other public land to control exotic grasses and buy out the welfare ranchers Tony Dean warned us about.