{"id":610307,"date":"2026-08-31T16:06:45","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T16:06:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/610307\/"},"modified":"2026-08-31T16:06:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T16:06:45","slug":"a-rare-win-in-indian-country-how-tribes-drove-out-a-mining-company-in-one-week-south-dakota","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/610307\/","title":{"rendered":"A rare win in Indian country: how tribes drove out a mining company in one week | South Dakota"},"content":{"rendered":"

When two Oglala Lakota scouts heard drilling was expected to begin on Pe\u2019 Sla, the sacred prairie in the Black Hills of South Dakota<\/a>, they set out on back trails. They needed to find out where. That\u2019s when they saw a deer break ahead and a red-tailed hawk soar above them \u2013 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. \u201cOh my god,\u201d one of them said, seeing a drill turning. \u201cThey\u2019re drilling now!\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re just not used to winning,\u201d said Dr Valeriah Big Eagle, who directs the Black Hills work of NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led advocacy nonprofit based in Rapid City. \u201cWe\u2019re people used to being screwed over by the government at every level.\u201d<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, an Apache holy site in Arizona, to a copper company to gouge out one of the largest mines in North America \u2013 a transfer the tribe is still in court trying to reverse. In April, the Senate voted to strip<\/a> protections from Minnesota\u2019s Boundary Waters, a watershed in Ojibwe treaty territory where the bands still hunt, fish and gather; the battle has since moved to the statehouse<\/a>. The consequences of losing aren\u2019t abstract: poisoned water<\/a>, sacred ground turned to open pit<\/a>, and the lasting health toll<\/a> extraction leaves on Native land while the profits flow elsewhere.<\/p>\n

But at Pe\u2019 Sla, what the Great Sioux Nation calls the \u201cheart of everything that is\u201d, the coalition broke the pattern, moving on every front at once. It was a lesson, they said, in what organized power can still win.<\/p>\n

The threat arrived the way these things usually do: as paperwork. On 27 February, the US Forest Service quietly approved exploratory drilling<\/a> by Pete Lien & Sons, a local mining and construction-materials company. They could drill 18 boreholes on national forest land, at least 10 of them inside a two-mile buffer around the central meadow that the tribes and the agency had agreed to protect. It was waved through with a \u201ccategorical exclusion\u201d that skipped environmental review on land prayed over for thousands of years.<\/p>\n

Pe\u2019 Sla holds a sacred place in the world of the Great Sioux Nation. Wizipan Little Elk Garriott \u2013 the president of NDN Collective and a former Interior department official \u2013 describes it beginning with the sky. It is where Fallen Star came to Earth, and where, in a world scoured by fire and water, the people went inside to survive and later emerged. It\u2019s also where traditionally foraged plants like the timpsula, the prairie turnip with its short spike of purple flowers, grow, and its root, high in calcium, is the real gift. Pe\u2019 Sla is a church, a pantry and a pharmacy at once \u2013 the ceremony, the food and the medicine all right there in the ground. The ground that was almost drilled open.<\/p>\n

What the company was drilling for only sharpened the insult. Graphite is a \u201ccritical mineral\u201d of the energy transition, the stuff in electric-car batteries. Which means the drills boring into the birthplace of a people were there to help save the planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s to set a precedent to attack all sacred sites,\u201d Big Eagle said. \u201cThis isn\u2019t happening just here \u2013 it\u2019s happening all over the country.\u201d For the organizers, the graphite is almost beside the point: once a company has the right to drill, it can look for whatever else is down there.<\/p>\n

The clean economy keeps pulling the minerals of a green future<\/a> out of the same colonized ground as coal and oil. More than 75% of the country\u2019s lithium, copper and nickel reserves lie within 35 miles (56.3km) of a reservation<\/a>, and the communities in their path are among the most underinvested in the country. Oglala Lakota county<\/a>, home to the Pine Ridge reservation, has a poverty rate above 50%.<\/p>\n

Even though the permit drew broad opposition<\/a> \u2013 from tribes, local officials and the public \u2013 the Forest Service granted it anyway. So the coalition of tribal nations, the NDN Collective and two environmental groups escalated.<\/p>\n

Organizers speaking with federal officials at Pe\u2019 Sla after they locked down drilling equipment on site on 30 April. Photograph: Angel White Eyes<\/p>\n

The legal front moved first: in early April, NDN Collective, the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance and Earthworks sued the Forest Service<\/a>, and nearly every tribe in the Dakotas filed a second suit of their own<\/a>. But the courts were slow and the company was quick. When Pete Lien & Sons learned a restraining order had been filed, it went to round-the-clock drilling, boring as many holes as it could before a judge ruled.<\/p>\n

The organizers couldn\u2019t wait for the courts. That\u2019s when the two Oglala Lakota scouts went out to find where the drilling had gone.<\/p>\n

Before dawn on 30 April, organizers sent up a drone and found the company had moved overnight, its crews now on two lit pads across the highway. The convoy had already set out \u2013 a caravan of about a dozen vehicles strung along the highway under a high, bright moon. With the ground still frozen, they climbed the Forest Service roads. At the only road in, 40 of them blocked the way behind them and put their bodies on the drill pads so no rig could run.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was supposed to be one day, to make a statement,\u201d Robert Bordeaux, a Si\u010d\u00e1\u014b\u01e7u Lak\u0307ot\u0304a poet who joined the occupation, told me for Peace & Riot<\/a>. \u201cIt went so well we decided to stay.\u201d<\/p>\n

For seven days, they lived on those pads \u2013 intergenerational by design: a youth council out front and elders anchoring the camp. They held it through helicopters overhead, three lines of police and private security, and a night that fell to 10 degrees with no fires because the hills were experiencing a drought. They stayed warm with hand warmers and each other. Even then, the scouts said, the camp felt strangely calm \u2013 held, protected \u2013 as if the relatives they\u2019d prayed to were with them.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe only weapons we had were our prayers,\u201d Big Eagle said \u2013 steady and warm, the big sister of the camp.<\/p>\n

Ceremony wasn\u2019t a pause from the strategy. It was the strategy. There were altars on both drill pads. And when the local news called them \u201carmed and dangerous\u201d, they livestreamed their own version of events. They knew it was bad optics to drag an Indigenous prayer camp off a mountain on camera.<\/p>\n

On 4 May, a federal judge halted the drilling<\/a>, finding the plaintiffs were likely to prove that the Forest Service had unlawfully waved through a supposedly under-a-year project whose permit required three years of work. Still, the organizers didn\u2019t leave \u2013 they didn\u2019t trust a company that could pay a fine to stop.<\/p>\n

Days later, Pete Lien & Sons wrote to the Forest Service withdrawing its plan<\/a>, and said it would not file another. The company never said why, but organizers believe the company would lose this round in court and starting over could take years. For a family limestone-and-concrete business, an unproven graphite prospect likely wasn\u2019t worth the fight. (Pete Lien & Sons did not respond to the Guardian\u2019s requests for comment.)<\/p>\n

A youth organizer locks himself to equipment to stop drilling at Pe\u2019 Sla on 30 April. Photograph: Angel White Eyes<\/p>\n

For the next community staring down a similar drill permit, the lesson isn\u2019t any single tactic \u2013 it\u2019s the stacking of them, organizers said. A lawsuit alone is slow; an occupation alone is easy to clear; a good story alone changes nothing without leverage behind it. Pe\u2019 Sla worked because the pieces protected each other.<\/p>\n

That coordination reached into the law: the coalition treated Indigenous sovereignty not as symbolism but as a legal instrument \u2013 nine nations in federal court is a force no advocacy group can supply. The rest is homework: somewhere in the government\u2019s own paperwork, on almost every rushed permit, is the shortcut it took to get there. At Pe\u2019 Sla, it was a one-year exemption stretched over a three-year project.<\/p>\n

\u201cNone of this moves forward without all of us working collectively,\u201d said Anissa Martin, who leads NDN\u2019s Black Hills Land Back campaign. \u201cEverybody had a role, and we understood that.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is just one of many fights the Great Sioux Nation has waged for generations, from mining claims to oil pipelines<\/a>. The aim is a full mineral withdrawal and the Sacred \u021ee S\u00e1pa Restoration Act<\/a>, endorsed by all nine of South Dakota\u2019s tribes, to return the region\u2019s public lands.<\/p>\n

Ask Martin what winning finally looks like, and she thinks bigger than any bill. \u201cMaybe NDN won\u2019t even exist anymore,\u201d she said softly, \u201cbecause our people will be liberated. The land will be liberated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Months later, on the reclaimed ground where the grass is coming back, her words didn\u2019t sound like a slogan. They sounded like a plan. And they had just, against every odd, worked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When two Oglala Lakota scouts heard drilling was expected to begin on Pe\u2019 Sla, the sacred prairie in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":610308,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[246,61,60,82],"class_list":["post-610307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/610308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}