A breath of fresh air

CHEYENNE VIGILANCE: Gail Small leads Native Action, a Northern Cheyenne activist group that helps protect the reservation from impacts of the 2,000-megawatt Colstrip power plant and five huge coal strip mines, which nearly surround the reservation
GENTLE COUNTRY: The Tongue River, used by the Northern Cheyenne for irrigation and sacred ceremonies, flows along the reservation’s eastern border; the river, creeks and springs on the reservation are threatened by runoff from coalbed-methane development
STRONG TRADITIONS: When the federal government relocated the Northern Cheyenne tribe to Oklahoma in the 1870s, chiefs Little Wolf and Dull Knife (seated) led several hundred men, women and children in an attempt to walk back to Montana in 1878
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DIGGING THE LAND: The Big Sky Mine, run by the world’s largest coal company, Peabody Energy, stripped about 2.5 million tons of coal in 2001 a few miles north of the reservation, and shipped it by rail to the Minnesota Power company
Danny Sioux, who has served on the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Council, thinks the tribe should try coal mining to help develop the tribal capital, Lame Deer (in the background), and alleviate poverty on the reservation

BADGER PEAK, Mont. — Stand on a rocky outcrop on this modest, pine-clad mountain, the highest point on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, and gaze northward, and you can see the four smokestacks of Montana’s largest power plant, Colstrip, clustered on the horizon, 16 miles away. The stacks puff like giant cigarettes. And today, from near the stacks, a separate black plume of smoke rises.

The plume drifts southwest on the prevailing winds, toward Badger Peak and tribal air space.

Jay Littlewolf, an air-quality technician for the Northern Cheyenne, says the smoke comes from the huge strip mine that feeds coal to the furnaces of the power plant. “Must be blasting to loosen the coal beds,” he says.

Other than the smokestacks and the black plume, there is no trace of industry in sight. Red rocky ridges roll out to brown-grass plains under high wispy clouds and blue sky.

Littlewolf steps into the tribe’s air-quality monitoring station on the peak. It’s little more than a stuffy shack, with a dozen mousetraps on the floor. But the sensitive equipment housed here measures traces of air pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide, and weather conditions, such as wind speed and direction. A new digital camera takes twice-a-day photos of the skies over the Colstrip stacks and mine.

“A few years ago, we would have heard rumors about a plume like that,” Littlewolf says. “But with (the camera), we’ll have visuals to go along with the rest of our data.”

This is one of three mountaintop air-monitoring stations the tribe has deployed along the reservation border closest to Colstrip, making sure the drifting smoke doesn’t violate the tribe’s air-quality standards, which are some of the toughest in the U.S. It’s a line of defense held by one of the most determined environmental programs anywhere.

In southeast Montana, the Northern Cheyenne Reservation is an island. The tribe has been nearly surrounded by no less than five huge strip mines, as well as the Colstrip power plant, haulage railroads and transmission lines. Montana’s only active coalbed methane field sucks gas and groundwater from several hundred wells near the reservation’s southern border, and there are proposals for thousands more methane wells. And a few miles east of the reservation, in the only direction still undeveloped, the Montana state government has allied with industry seeking to create a new strip mine, and possibly build another power plant and railroad.

Yet for 30 years, the Northern Cheyenne — a relatively small and isolated tribe — have fought powerful corporations that want to develop the coalbeds that underlie almost every inch of the reservation. They have done what many other tribes have been unable to do: protected their land and culture, and repeatedly reached beyond their borders to battle development off the reservation.

But economic paralysis is testing the tribe’s resolve. Some Northern Cheyenne are starting to see coal and gas royalties as a solution to the reservation’s crushing poverty, crime, alcoholism and drug abuse.

“People are hungry here, they’re dying, they suffer day by day. They fight over a $15 food voucher,” says Danny Sioux, who just finished a term on the tribal council. “I went to 47 funerals (last) year, mostly young people. We have tremendous social problems.”

He is among those who want to take up mining and drilling to generate jobs and an economy. “That’s the only option we have. We have spent the last 30 years in litigation (against coal companies), we’ve blackmailed the socks off these corporations, and how has it helped our situation?”

Will the Northern Cheyenne hold out, or give in to industrial development? Is there a third way — to avoid invasion by corporations, but still gain from small-scale development? These questions hold implications for Indians and non-Indians alike, as a new wave of energy development sweeps into the West.

A hard-won homeland

The Northern Cheyenne environmental stand continues a long tribal tradition. The tribe’s resistance to white settlers, prospectors and the U.S. Cavalry is legendary: They helped the Sioux tribe wipe out Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s men in the Battle of the Little Bighorn (just west of the reservation’s present boundary) in 1876.

The Northern Cheyenne endured broken treaties and massacres, but even when the tribe was eventually relocated to Oklahoma with the Southern Cheyenne (who lived on the Central Plains), the resistance continued. In 1878, led by chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf, some 300 Northern Cheyenne men, women and children tried to walk from Oklahoma back to Montana, trudging through snowstorms and dodging an estimated 13,000 soldiers and vigilantes.

More than 60 Northern Cheyenne were killed on that walk, memorialized in the semi-accurate Hollywood movie, “Cheyenne Autumn.” But some made it to Montana, and the tribe was granted a reservation here in the Tongue River country in 1884.

The Northern Cheyenne Indian reservation is not large. Over the years, its boundaries have been adjusted, and now it encompasses about 707 square miles of rugged, semi-arid country, rising up to Badger Peak’s 4,422-foot elevation. Ponderosa pines dot the long red ridges, and sagebrush, skunkweed and prairie grasses fill the narrow valleys. The Tongue River meanders along the eastern border.

“We had to fight for it, with our spirit (and) our determination to continue and survive as a people on our land,” says Joe Little Coyote, the tribe’s economic development planner.

During community meetings, old men still rise to expound on the lessons learned at Little Bighorn and lesser-known confrontations, such as the Battle of the Rosebud on June 17, 1876, in which a woman warrior, whose name has been translated as Buffalo Calf Road Woman, fought bravely and saved her brother’s life.

The struggles didn’t end once the Northern Cheyenne won their reservation. Generations since have faced tough times, trying to survive on small-scale ranching, logging and federal assistance, far from any city, airport or interstate highway.

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Yet under the reservation’s surface lie arguably the biggest coal reserves held by any tribe — an estimated 20 to 50 billion tons, part of a coal belt that stretches from southeast Montana into Wyoming. The coal tends to be low-sulfur, relatively clean-burning and desirable as a fuel for power plants. Large-scale strip mining began on land near the reservation in 1968, and when the Arab oil embargo sparked an energy crisis in the early 1970s, the coal companies ramped up production.

At first, the tribe saw this as an opportunity. From 1966 to 1971, the tribal council signed coal leases with a half-dozen corporations and speculators, including Peabody Coal, Consolidated Coal, and Amax Coal.

The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs acted as trustee for the tribe, theoretically watching out for the tribe’s interests. But the BIA didn’t even complete an environmental impact statement, and the leases covered more than half the reservation. The agency sold the exploration rights for about $9 per acre, and the tribe would have received royalties of no more than 17.5 cents a ton for any coal mined.

“The BIA had sold our coal for less than gravel,” says Gail Small, the outspoken leader of Native Action, a Northern Cheyenne activist group.

“The federal and tribal representatives were clearly overmatched” in those lease negotiations, says Jason Whiteman Jr., a Northern Cheyenne who has worked in the tribe’s environmental program since the 1970s. “We had no idea what the impacts would be,” he says, and the terms of the deal were “unconscionable.”

The Northern Cheyenne began to understand the implications as the corporations drilled thousands of exploration holes and announced plans to build power plants on the reservation. Such development would threaten more than the tribe’s cattle ranches and crops. It would strike at the underlying tribal culture. “I remember seeing blueprints for boomtowns of 30,000 people on the reservation — we would’ve been a minority here,” says Whiteman.

So the tribe set out to regain control of the reservation. Charismatic tribal chairman Allen Rowland — a former truck driver and janitor who carried Japanese shrapnel in his flesh, a souvenir of his service in World War II — led the fight in the 1970s. The tribe hired a series of lawyers, including an Osage Indian named George Crossland, and a white lawyer from Seattle, Steve Chestnut. Some of the pioneering white environmentalists in Montana also came to the reservation to help organize.

“The first leaflet had (a headline summing up the threat of development): ‘The termination of the Northern Cheyenne,’ ” recalls Bill Bryan, who ran the Northern Rockies Action Group back then.

Claiming the BIA had violated laws and neglected its role as trustee, the Northern Cheyenne presented a 600-page petition to then-Secretary of Interior Rogers C.B. Morton. It was a bold move. Working the highest levels of federal government, within a few years the tribe got all those coal leases canceled, forced the corporations to pay about $10 million in damages, and gained control of another 7,000 acres one corporation had bought for mining.

Victory upon victory

Throughout the 1970s, Tribal Chairman Rowland helped foster a younger generation of budding activists and leaders, who were so inspired and empowered by early victories that they have retained a sense of mission and optimism ever since. This core has made all the difference.

Among the innovative steps taken by Rowland in those days was a youth program in which local kids traveled by bus to visit coal mines in Wyoming and on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona. Gail Small recalls sitting for a photograph with about 20 fellow students in a huge mechanical shovel near Gillette, Wyo., and feeling awed by the immense power of the mining operation.

“We were sent out as scouts, and on the way home we talked about it. We got fired up. We knew that, given the chance, we would be exploited,” says Small, who earned a law degree at the University of Oregon and worked with California tribes, then came home to work with her people.

Rowland also began the Northern Cheyenne Research Project, which tapped federal money to attract scientists from across the nation to the reservation to brainstorm ways to tackle environmental issues. Tribal members like Jason Whiteman apprenticed in the Research Project and began running the tribe’s environmental program.

With that momentum, the Northern Cheyenne took the offensive. When a consortium of utilities sought to expand the Colstrip power plant, the tribe found leverage through the federal Clean Air Act. It became the first government of any kind to voluntarily raise its air-quality standard to the highest level, a Class I Airshed — the same as national parks and wilderness areas.

“We got our Class I designation on August 5, 1977,” says Jay Littlewolf, who knows the date by heart, “two days before the first parks and wilderness areas got it.”

The Northern Cheyenne forced the utilities to spend $500 million to equip the Colstrip stacks with the best air-pollution scrubbers, Littlewolf says. Those corporations also agreed to fund the tribe’s air-monitoring program, as well as provide college scholarships and job preferences for tribal members.

As industry pressures increased, the Northern Cheyenne continued to stand tough in courts and gain concessions from corporations in savvy negotiations. The tribe voided industry-friendly coal leases made on three sides of the reservation by the Reagan administration’s secretary of Interior, James Watt, in 1982, and canceled the permit for the Montco mine just east of the reservation in 1997. The Northern Cheyenne also cancelled the allotment of much of the reservation’s subsurface mineral rights to individual tribal members and heirs — something coal speculators had hoped to take advantage of. Now the tribe effectively retains ownership of all the subsurface rights on the reservation.

Northern Cheyenne leaders have also worked with Native Action and the Northern Plains Resource Council, a Billings-based environmental group whose members include white ranchers, to block the development of a new railroad along the Tongue River, which has been pushed by coal speculators for several decades.

Now the tribe is working on a tough water-quality program, building its enforcement power on the federal Clean Water Act. “We’re developing our own water-quality standards,” says Joe Walksalong Jr., a tribal water-quality technician, “equal to or better than the federal and state standards.”

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Reservation economy languishes

The Northern Cheyenne have done a remarkable job of looking out for their land and air, but they have had a more difficult time caring for their people.

These days, 4,200 Northern Cheyenne live on the reservation, and at least 65 percent are unemployed, with fully 87 percent living in poverty, according to the tribe’s own economic analysis in 2001. Average annual income that year was $4,479.

In many places on the reservation, basic services like drinking water are not reliable. Housing is shoddy and hard to find. Up to eight families crowd into a single dwelling, while 700 families sit on a waiting list for housing. Infant mortality ranks among the worst in the U.S., and average life expectancy is only 60 years, compared to 77 for the nation as a whole. There are high rates of substance abuse, diabetes, violence and crime.

A few families run B&Bs and other small businesses that cater to the scarce tourists who come here. But the tribal sawmill has shut down. Most grazing land is in the hands of a few extended families. Eighty-five percent of the cultivatable farmland is not being farmed, and most of that is infested with weeds.

The reservation’s land, fought for by some, is neglected by others. Roads are lined with dirty diapers, aluminum cans and other litter, and right on the main highway, there’s an open dump.

Things are so difficult, about 3,200 Northern Cheyenne live off the reservation. “Almost 50 percent of the population has moved away, because there is no opportunity here,” says Danny Sioux, who served on the tribal council from 1986 to 1988 and from 1998 through last November, when he lost a bid for re-election.

If the tribe developed its own coal, he says, it would go a long way toward solving economic problems. Even at the low royalties of the leases that were canceled in the 1970s, the tribe’s coal is worth at least $3 billion.

In fact, despite the tribe’s reputation for environmental protection at all costs, many Northern Cheyenne have pushed for some kind of natural-resource development.

A proposal for conventional oil and gas drilling on the reservation was put to a vote in 1980, and won overwhelming approval. The tribe struck a $6 million deal with ARCO for exploration rights, but ARCO drilled a few holes and decided the project wasn’t feasible. Tribal chairman Edwin Dahle, who generally took an environmental stance while in office, supported a proposal to open a mine just east of the reservation in 1990. But that proposal stalled out.

Steve Chestnut, the Seattle lawyer who has represented the Northern Cheyenne in many environmental battles, says he’s advised the tribe to do limited commercial coal mining on the reservation. “The Cheyenne have a fabulous coal reserve, and they can’t bring themselves to develop even a small piece of it,” Chestnut says, adding that while he respects that position, “they are paying a price for preservation.”

Danny Sioux has worked in the mines and trained other miners; he has also worked for the power plant, at times in the control room, running a turbine. He’s had tribal jobs as well, and now ekes out a living by repairing fences, leasing out his small piece of grazing land and doing odd jobs. He points out that industrial jobs pay far better than other local jobs, and that some Northern Cheyenne have had careers in the industry. “It would be a blessing for this tribe,” he says, if the latest possibility of starting a mine just east of the reservation pans out.

The tribe should become “a shareholder” in that project, he says, and also develop the reservation’s coal. He also believes that the tribe should try limited methane development, with small, 20-megawatt modular power plants linked to a few wells.

“The tribe could be in control of development. We could try to do it right,” Sioux says. “Economically, that would generate a tremendous income to the tribe. We could set up a training program” and a facility where tribal members could be employed in a range of enterprises.

But when he lost the election last fall, Danny Sioux was cast as “Coalbed-methane Danny” by some opponents. Collective opinion is hard to measure now, but most Northern Cheyenne still apparently don’t like the idea of strip mining and coalbed-methane development on the reservation.

Development comes with a price

That kind of development, on the reservation or nearby, would add to the environmental impacts already being felt from the current mining, power-plant furnaces and methane drilling.

The mammoth Colstrip plant, with 2,000-megawatt capacity, burns about 10 million tons of coal each year. Even with the scrubbers on the smokestacks, the plant emitted about 19,000 tons of sulfur dioxide in 2001, and 35,000 tons of nitrogen oxide, 3,700 tons of particulates, 2,400 tons of carbon monoxide, and 343 tons of volatile organic compounds. The five strip mines altogether throw about 4,000 tons of pollution into the air each year, mostly dust from blasting and trucks on haul roads.

As the air pollution spreads over the vast open spaces, it has caused no noteworthy air-quality violations on the reservation in recent years. The power-plant operators, originally Montana Power Co. and now PPL Montana, report good relations with the tribe. But the emissions likely contribute to an occasional haze on the horizon, a haze also fed by more distant power plants, cars in Billings, Mont., and other sources of smoke.

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The mines take bites out of the landscape, digging as much as 200 feet deep and a mile long. Jim Mockler, director of the Montana Coal Council, cites the success of some mine reclamation in the area. “We have shown we can mine the coal and do it right, return the (surface of the) land to good condition.” But even good reclamation doesn’t entirely restore native vegetation. The mines also consume sandstone cliffs that hold petroglyphs and pictographs, and affect groundwater, seeps and springs.

Coalbed-methane development, which requires moving huge volumes of often salty groundwater, takes over entire landscapes and impacts water below and on the surface (HCN, 9/2/02: Backlash). The Tongue River is already receiving salty runoff from methane wells upriver, Joe Walksalong says, and the runoff in the river and in Rosebud Creek will likely increase with expanded methane development. There are plans for up to 16,000 new methane wells near the reservation.

The threats to water are particularly troubling to the Northern Cheyenne. Surface water is used for irrigating crops and pasture, but the meaning of water reaches deeper than its uses. Many springs and the river figure in Cheyenne sacred ceremonies that date back generations. “Cheyenne live all along the river,” says Gail Small. “They bathe in the river, a ceremonial for healing, when the roots of a certain plant in the headwaters are at highest strength.”

As much as he wants economic development, Joe Little Coyote agrees: “We don’t want to do anything that might impact our water, no matter how good it looks.” So he doesn’t want mining on the reservation, and has instead put together 111 pages of analysis, calling for the tribe to establish a commerce department, seed local businesses, and develop energy projects tapping renewable resources such as wind and solar. Gail Small’s group, Native Action, is pressuring a regional bank to open a branch in Lame Deer, so that loans will be easier to acquire. And other efforts to jump-start an economy are afoot.

Tribal President Geri Small — Gail Small’s sister, who was elected in 2000 — says, “I’ve been told that if we mined our coal, we’d be millionaires.” But she is against mining and methane: “We want to keep our homeland, keep it intact.”

Resurgence of the culture

In many tales of Indian sovereignty, tribes have given up control of their land and resources. Just to the west, on the neighboring Crow Reservation, for example, that tribe leased some of its coal for a mine that has been digging for 30 years. And the Crow recently struck a deal with a Denver corporation to develop coalbed methane on their reservation.

But there are no good examples of tribes developing their natural resources so far, says A. David Lester, director of the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, based in Denver. Tribes that have tried coal mining, like the Crow and Navajo, don’t have appreciably better living conditions and economies on their reservations, he says, because they let outsiders — corporations and the federal government — set low royalties and dictate the other terms.

“It’s hard to say that natural-resource economic development, with the model that’s been used, produces any real benefits for any tribe, or any sustainable economic activity,” Lester says. A tribe is wiser not to make any deals until it can retain control of how development is done, so “it fits in your values and culture.”

That’s what the Northern Cheyenne are doing: Preserving the tribe’s land and culture from an onslaught of outsiders, as well as defending the reservation against environmental threats.

The dismal statistics on economic and social problems don’t show the strengths of the Northern Cheyenne culture. “It’s a communal way of life,” says Gail Small. “A lot of people who have never been part of a tribe have a hard time understanding it.”

She and other Northern Cheyenne leaders cite a resurgence in the Northern Cheyenne language, and the revival of the sweat lodge and other sacred ceremonies, especially the Sun Dance — three days of fasting and dancing that purify individuals and the tribe.

“More young people are getting into the role of spiritual leader,” says Zane Spang, who works at the tribe’s Dull Knife College, where about 100 students pursue two-year degrees in fields such as business and computers. “I think it’s a sense of pride. It identifies the individual as a member of the culture.”

“Families pool their resources and give away (piles of) gifts at powwows and funerals,” reports Duane Champagne of the University of California-Los Angeles, a sociologist who has studied the tribe. “Cheyenne values emphasize cooperation, sharing, generosity, religious spirituality and tribal welfare, all of which conflict with Western notions of competition, materialism, self-interest and individual achievement.”

“The cultural infrastructure here has no room for individualists,” agrees Joe Little Coyote. So far, that makes capitalism the odd man out. But if the tribal culture is going to endure, the Northern Cheyenne must address their economic and social problems somehow. If they continue to stand firm on protecting the environment, they will have to find new ways to meet those challenges.

Jay Littlewolf drives his pickup truck from Badger Peak on teeth-clacking dirt roads, past holy springs marked by cloth tied to bushes and trees. At the tribe’s Natural Resources office, the rear half of a Quonset hut at the edge of Lame Deer, he meets Jason Whiteman and several more coworkers, who wear gloves and carry shovels and rakes. Everyone’s talking about a cleanup that’s under way today, of an unofficial dump near Lame Deer Creek.

Shortly, Whiteman and a technician head off toward the reservation’s southern boundary, scouting for a site where one of six water-monitoring wells will be established to check for impacts from current and future coal and methane development.

“The companies will never leave us alone,” says Whiteman. “They will always be knocking at the door.”

Bob Struckman lived in Montana for more than 20 years, and now writes from Boulder, Colorado. Ray Ring is HCN’s editor in the field, based in Bozeman, Montana.

The following sidebar articles accompany this feature story:

– Tribes gain power through federal environmental laws

– A mine falls, and a tribe may get the shaft

You can contact …

• Northern Cheyenne tribal office, in Lame Deer, Mont., 406/477-6284 or www.ncheyenne.net;

• Gail Small, Native Action, in Lame Deer, 406/477-6390;

• Council of Energy Resource Tribes, director A. David Lester, in Denver, Colo., 303/282-7576 or www.certredearth.com.

This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A breath of fresh air.