Tribal lands now at risk to foreign miners for 'green metals'

America ships millions of tons of salvage material to India and Asia to be recycled tearing up our own ground mining for virgin minerals while steel, copper and rare earth metals are still being buried in landfills. 

But, the General Mining Law of 1872 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.

Supply chain security, however, is far from complete: The cobalt concentrate pulled from the ground at the Jervois mine, complicated by the presence of arsenic, will be processed in Brazil due to a lack of U.S. facilities. Cobalt is often then shipped to China, where it is put into lithium-ion batteries. Mining companies are targeting the West especially because of its wide swaths of public land and history of mining. [Idaho cobalt mine is a harbinger of what’s to come]

Ores containing lithium are hideously carbon intensive to mine and the 1872 law allows foreign companies to exploit public lands instead of sharing the pecuniary rewards with Indigenous former landowners.

In my home state of South Dakota, British Columbia-based United Lithium has staked some 500 claims, some on Bureau of Land Management ground near Pringle, where lithium bearing pegmatites are already being quarried for potassium feldspars and micas. 

In 1951 after uranium was discovered south of Pringle more than 150 uranium mines were gouged into the Earth where the Oglala Lakota once made their winter camp. Since then, radioactive tailings from those mines have been detected in Angostura Reservoir after a dam on the Cheyenne River broke in 1962.

In 2017 Rare Element Resources said its mine in the Wyoming Black Hills just upstream of the South Dakota border on ancestral Apsáalooke and Lakota lands at the headwaters of the Redwater River, a tributary of the Belle Fourche/Cheyenne, announced financial backing from General Atomics and applied for enough water for the mineral separation process despite widespread contamination in Crook County wells. But some decommissioned coal fired power plants in the Cowboy State are being remediated in part by harvesting needed minerals from coal waste.

ip image: an adobe ruin crumbles at the Harshaw, Arizona ghost town.