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The Northern Cheyenne Reservation, in southeastern Montana, is home to some five thousand Indians who are mostly the descendants of Dull Knife's and Little Wolf's people, who "broke out" of their forced exile in Oklahoma in 1878, and who battled their way on foot back to their traditional lands where they were finally granted a reservation in 1884 (expanded in 1900). The struggle between the United States and the Northern Cheyenne did not end with the establishment of the reservation. The contested issues today, sovereignty and land, are the same as they were at the end of the nineteenth century, though the context has changed: today, the Northern Cheyenne are fighting battles over coal, water and the soul of their nation, all of which is tied intimately to the land.
The reservation lies on top of the Fort Union coal formation, which stretches from Canada into northern Colorado. The reservation itself, which is not currently being mined, has estimated recoverable coal reserves of 5 billion tons, worth about $400 billion. Meanwhile, coal development in the surrounding area is extensive. Directly north of the reservation is the town of Colstrip, site of three mining operations and four mine-mouth electrical generating facilities. To the south near the Wyoming border are three more mine sites (the Decker and Spring Creek mines). Across the border within Wyoming is the famed Powder River Basin, with numerous mining sites. Fort Union coal has a low sulfur content, which means that it can be used by older generating facilities, mostly in the eastern United States, that lack the technology to meet the strict standards of the Clean Air Act of 1990. This allows the owners of outdated power plants to extend their life-span without investing in expensive smoke-stack scrubbers; consequently, demand for western coal has increased dramatically in recent years.
Many of the Northern Cheyenne are poor. The unemployment rate on the reservation is at least 50 percent. Thus, the Indians find themselves in a situation analogous to developing Third World nations, which, in order to survive, exploit their natural resources for export, providing cheap energy and other raw materials for the insatiable consumption of developed countries. Pressure to open the reservation coal resources for extraction is great, but equally great is the risk of degrading or destroying the land base.
The Fort Union coal would be removed by strip-mining, a process which permanently transforms the surface character of the land, even when reclamation is practiced. Traditional indigenous peoples view land differently from energy corporations; land is the basis of culture and identity, rather than a fungible commodity. Specific topographical features of the land, as well as burial grounds and sacred springs and religious sites, constitute fragile elements of culture destroyed by strip-mining. Consequently, destruction of the land surface threatens the continued viability of the Northern Cheyenne culture. National legislation, like the Clean Air Act, which intended to clean up air pollution and improve life for the dominant American society, represents a serious though indirect threat to the Northern Cheyenne.
The Northern Cheyenne Tribe has been involved in three major court and legislative battles to protect the land from coal development within the last 30 years. The first battle was in the late 1960s and early '70s, a time when some 40 coal-fired power plants were envisioned on or near the reservation, within the scope of a federal energy development plan. Private sector energy companies had leased nearly half of the reservation lands, for royalty rates ranging from 15 cents to $1 per ton of coal (compared to a price of $80 per ton delivered to the generating site). The Tribe sued the Department of Interior (DOI) over the royalty inequities; the DOI responded by suspending the leases in 1979. In 1980, federal legislation canceled the leases entirely, allowing the Tribe to maintain at least nominal control of its land and coal resources.
The second legal-political battle was over construction of two generating plants in Colstrip, Montana, immediately north of the reservation. Montana Power, which already operated two plants in Colstrip, applied for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) permits to build two more. Concerned over the impact to air quality on the reservation, the Tribe applied for and was granted Class I air quality designation by the EPA in 1976. The Tribe used this strict designation, which allows virtually no degradation of air quality, in litigation against Montana Power. As a result of the suit, the Tribe gained funds for impact mitigation, additional funds and training for air quality monitoring, and also preferential hiring agreements. The power plants were approved.
The third major battle was in 1982, when the DOI held the largest sale of federal coal leases to that date, for tracts of public lands to the east and south of the reservation, an area known as "Powder River I." The Powder River I proposal also called for construction of a rail line to move the coal; the Tongue River Railroad would be built along the eastern boundary of the reservation. The Tribe challenged the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for Powder River I in 1982, on the grounds that the EIS ignored the Tribe as a separate cultural entity. After nine years of litigation, the DOI was ordered to prepare a revised EIS that considered impacts on the Tribe and possible mitigation measures. The revised EIS stated that no mitigation measures would be sufficient to prevent coal mining from having a disproportionately negative impact on the Tribe. The findings of the revised EIS, combined with a drop in coal prices, led to cancellation of most of the leases. The Tongue River Railroad was approved, but its construction was put on hold until the coal mining issue could be finally resolved. (Currently, 197 coal-mining companies and other parties with interests in coal development are promoting the railroad construction.)
Thus, between 1970 and the mid-80s, the Northern Cheyenne successfully met three serious challenges to their land and their culture. They accomplished three significant coal-related victories: cancellation of the early lease agreements on the reservation lands, revision by the DOI of the Powder River I EIS to consider the Tribe as a separate cultural entity (rather than classifying the Northern Cheyenne with the non-Indian population), and designation of the reservation as a Class I air quality status region. However, the underlying structural conflicts that gave rise to these threats still remain: there are limited development prospects for Indians besides coal mining, while unemployment and poverty are widespread, and pressure from the United States to extract the coal increases every day.
Fourth World Bulletin • February 1993
Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
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