<
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/25/native-american-tribe-drove-out-mining-company>
"When two Oglala Lakota scouts heard drilling was expected to begin on Pe’ Sla,
the sacred prairie in the Black Hills of South Dakota, they set out on back
trails. They needed to find out where. That’s when they saw a deer break ahead
and a red-tailed hawk soar above them – less like a coincidence than being led,
the scouts said. Over a rise, they came upon a road freshly cut to the dirt.
They followed it, past a parked truck. “Oh my god,” one of them said, seeing a
drill turning. “They’re drilling now!”
What happened next was something that almost never happens in Indian country: a
coalition of tribes and organizers banded together and drove out a mining
company in a matter of days.
“We’re just not used to winning,” said Dr Valeriah Big Eagle, who directs the
Black Hills work of NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led advocacy nonprofit based
in Rapid City. “We’re people used to being screwed over by the government at
every level.”
The fight to protect ancestral land from mining is a common one, and the
struggles are often long, hard and lost. In March, the government handed Oak
Flat, an Apache holy site in Arizona, to a copper company to gouge out one of
the largest mines in North America – a transfer the tribe is still in court
trying to reverse. In April, the Senate voted to strip protections from
Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, a watershed in Ojibwe treaty territory where the
bands still hunt, fish and gather; the battle has since moved to the
statehouse. The consequences of losing aren’t abstract: poisoned water, sacred
ground turned to open pit, and the lasting health toll extraction leaves on
Native land while the profits flow elsewhere.
But at Pe’ Sla, what the Great Sioux Nation calls the “heart of everything that
is”, the coalition broke the pattern, moving on every front at once. It was a
lesson, they said, in what organized power can still win."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
