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Gail Small: The Coal Wars
Northern Cheyenne Reservation,
Lame Deer, Montana

"I've always known that this is the place I was meant to be. This is my source of strength here."

This land that I live on today with my four kids, it's my mother's family's land. And her family, they're buried right behind us here in the hills.

The Cheyenne themselves are about eight thousand tribal members and we live on about 500,000 acres of land here in Southeastern Montana. The land is tied to the culture, to the language, to the view point. There's a tremendous spiritual connection to our homeland that is the core of the fight here.

All my life my people have been fighting to keep strip mining off our reservation. Right now, our tribal lands are surrounded by Montana's largest power plant, five massive strip mines and the largest coal-fired generating complex in the country.

When the Bush administration came into office in 2000, Vice President Dick Cheney held a series of closed-door meetings to shape this nation's energy policy. This country will never know exactly what went on in those meetings with energy lobbyists. But what happened to us was this: the Tongue River Valley, where we live, was opened up to massive development.

They're basically coming in and sizing up what's left in the United States, and it's like whatever they can take, they're trying to take. They're streamlining, gutting, whatever laws are out there. It's kind of like the Gold Rush days. There's a rush to get Indian energy resources.

What they want right now is not so much coal, as natural gas. Really it's methane. It's coal bed methane gas in our area of the Powder River Basin. But natural gas makes it sounds like it's so nice.

Coal bed methane gas is the primary constituent of natural gas that you burn in your homes or in your business. They drill down into the coal seam, which is where both the coal bed methane water and coal bed methane gas resides. And then another smaller pipe with an electric pump on it pumps a combination of gas and water to the surface.

The production, particularly in the Powder River Basin, is associated with lots and lots of saline water. Those wells will produce something like six billion barrels of water. The easiest and cheapest thing to do with that produced water is to dump it. And the impacts associated with discharging huge volumes of produced coal bed methane water are just staggering.

TOM SCHNEIDER, PETROLEUM GEOLOGIST

The primary component of your household cleaners is sodium, and the reason why it works is because it causes the soil particles to essentially come apart. Water that's high in sodium causes that same thing to happen. It causes soil particles to essentially come apart. Once that happens, the soil can no longer take water in. You lose the ability to use it for agricultural production.

JIM BAUDER, SOIL AND WATER QUALITY SPECIALIST

The technology exists today to re-inject the salty water back into the methane wells, but it would cost the companies money.

The money is there to do this thing right and it needs to be done right so that everyone else is not damaged for the benefit of the producers.

TOM SCHNEIDER

It's outrageous that these energy companies would be allowed to dump the wastewater - the salty water. And they're dumping it. As we speak.

The plan now is to surround our reservation with seventy-five thousand methane gas wells. These wells that would drain our ground water and turn our homeland into a desert.

I think the water's alive, it's moving. With water here, we can live forever. And as long as the river flows, the grass grows, you always have a homeland. But once it's destroyed, I don't know what's going to become of us.

COWBOY FISHER, NORTHERN CHEYENNE

This is our land, we were born and raised here. And we are part of this land, part of this earth. We would go with my grandmother to pick cherries and buffalo berries. And when we approach the trees, my grandmother, she would stand there and talk -- actually talk to the trees and say we're going to pick you, we're not here to abuse you. We are very closely connected with this earth and we have to respect it and treat it like it's our very own mother.

FREDA STANDING ELK, NORTHERN CHEYENNE

This isn't the first time we've been up against the energy giants. The Cheyenne reservation, carved from land once considered too barren for farming or ranching, ironically turns out to sit atop one of the largest deposits of clean-burning coal in the world. Deposits estimated to be worth over $200 billion.

I remember when I was starting high school, the big companies came in here wanting to get their hands on our coal. That's thirty years ago: the coal wars.

At the time, we had a Tribal Council that had a very limited understanding of the English language. They really didn't comprehend that the coal companies were going to come in and develop the coal. What was always told them is that they were going to come in and explore and find out how much energy resources we had. This was all pushed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the BIA came in with specialists and told the tribe this is a real good deal.

It was economic blackmail. Our tribe was so poor we didn't even have running water in our houses. Even today the average income here is only around $10,000.

So the companies were going to come in, and we had a stand off with them where we wouldn't allow them to cross into our homeland. The Tribal Council decided that they were going to have to sue the companies to break the contract, otherwise there would probably be violence and our young people here would get hurt. What began was a very long fight. It went through all my high school years.

The coal wars were very personal. Cheyenne kids were bussed 25 miles off the reservation to Colstrip to the same school as kids whose parents worked for the coal companies.

They would call us prairie niggers. That we were anti-everything. We were anti-progress, our tribe. So I quit school when I was a junior. I just couldn't endure the harassment that we were getting from the non-Indians because of our tribe's stand against mining and protecting our land. A lot of us quit high school.

When a lot of us left for college it was even harder. Very few of us got through, I think in my class only about three Indian students got through. Then we came home. The coal wars were still getting hotter and more heated.

At 21, I was the youngest member of the tribal negotiating committee working to get the coal leases cancelled. I was also the only one with a college degree. It was a long hard road. It took 15 years, but we finally won. In the 1980s, the courts ruled in our favor and all the leases on our lands were cancelled.

That gave us sustenance internally to keep going, that maybe there was some hope in the American court system.

It also gave me hope, that this was the best way I could help my people. I went to law school and I returned to the reservation in 1984 to form a non-profit organization — Native Action.

It's a very small, flexible organization. Reluctantly we get involved in some litigation. But our main focus is to create the information for the people to be able to grasp and for them to speak their own voice.

The people here could all be millionaires if they would sign on the dotted-line and go into a major energy contract. But they vote and they've chosen to say no. For thirty some years, they voted and said no. Now that to me is almost like a miracle. I mean, you look at any other people in the world who have been given this abundance of wealth, and for over thirty some years have said no. It's really a story that I find no analogy to.

Our values come from our ancestors. They give us the strength to fight for this last, small island of land that we live on today.

In the summer of 1876, the Cheyenne joined with the Sioux and the Arapaho for one last stab at freedom in what would become known at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

After the Custer battle, we were marched to Oklahoma as prisoners of war. Hundreds of our people died of disease and starvation. The Cheyenne decided they would rather die fighting. They told the military that they were returning to their beloved North Country. They asked that they get a little ways north before they made the ground bloody. They were relentlessly pursued as they made the brutal trek to the Powder River Basin, hundreds of miles on foot. Only 300 Cheyenne people survived. But finally, we were granted a small reservation here along the Tongue River.

It almost makes you cry what our people went through, endured for me to be living here today. For me to be raising my kids here. It's a very heroic tale of the strength and the courage of the Cheyenne people.

It's very powerful to have that kind of history. And it's not something you just sign away on a piece of paper and say, make me a millionaire tomorrow and I'll give up all this land and this history. It's not the Cheyenne way to do that.

I'm very grateful to have both my parents here, my mother and my dad. They support our work and give us a lot of direction. My youngest son, Joaquin, I'm grateful that he supports a lot of our work, too.

Recently the Bureau of Land Management started approving coal bed methane leases right on the borders of our reservation, without even consulting our tribe. So we filed a lawsuit against them.

The federal government is supposed to assist Indian tribes in protecting our interests so that we have a homeland in perpetuity, that's what a federal trustee is supposed to do. Instead we've been forced to sue them. You know, what limited money we have is spent suing them, our trustee.

The coal wars go on, but one victory we all celebrate is that we now have a high school on our reservation. The kids were tired of being call prairie niggers, just like I was, when I was a kid.

I go to the games, and then that's when I feel like real proud that I had a little part in getting this high school.

We are proud that we are Cheyenne and that we still live in our indigenous land, and that sustains us, it'll sustain our children and their children.

Genocide is the destruction of a people and their culture. And unless we face up to the fact that destruction of these tribes is at a point where, they may not be able to survive much longer. We are at that point here. You put in 75,000 methane gas wells around our reservation, you take our ground water, pollute our air, destroy our rivers, the Cheyenne here will probably not be able to survive. We'll have a wasteland here. That's what's at stake here. Where will the Cheyenne go?

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Current Developments

• Northern Cheyenne Tribe had a partial victory on February 25, 2005 when a federal judge in Billings, Montana ruled that a statewide environmental study by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) of coalbed methane development in Montana was inadequate. This ruling comes from lawsuits filed in 2003 against BLM and the Department of Interior Secretary Gale Norton by the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and the Northern Plains Resource Council.
• In 2002, the state of Montana sold leases to Fidelity Exploration & Production Co. for natural gas development. These leases are along the Tongue River, which borders the Northern Cheyenne reservation. Fidelity lawyers noted that the 1900 federal order giving the tribe at least half the width of the riverbed. To solve this issue, Fidelity filed a lawsuit in July 2004 asking who owns the riverbed. The state argued they owned the riverbed because Montana has a "prior and superior ownership claim" as a state government since 1889. However, on February 7, 2005, the state decided not to intervene in the case, instead preferring to resolve related issues, such as the establishment of "environmentally sound" water quality regulations for the river.
• In 2002, Northern Cheyenne petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to protect the water of the Tongue River. Nearly a year later, the agency office in Denver gave a preliminary okay. The petition stated that salt content in the water from coalbed methane projects must be cut by a third. However, at EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., the Cheyenne petition stalled. Protests by the states of Montana and Wyoming, as well as pressure from methane producers are part of the reason for the delay. When pressed for the reason behind the delay, the EPA declared that the tribe's legal argument was "novel" and "insufficient"-never mind that it was the EPA's Denver office that had suggested using the Clean Water Act and the state compact as justification for regulating the river.