Discoveries of uranium ore in the southern Black Hills were first announced to the public in 1896. The next time it was brought to public attention was in 1951, where more ore had been located in a similar vicinity. Coming just after World War Two, the discovery brought much excitement among the local populations whose residents provided much of the labour for the mining companies who moved in and began to profit from the deposits. Little concern was expressed over the fact that the mining was taking place in the vicinities of ancient Indian pictographs, petroglyphs, flint quarries and burial sites, and little was understood about the risks to health, land and water from radiation pollution.
By 1980, around 2,345 square miles of the Black Hills was under uranium mining leases. In this area, 5,748 uranium claims were held, mostly in the National Forest, and 355 square miles of leased land. The environmental effects of such activity have been disastrous. In 1962, for example, an estimated 200 tonnes of uranium mill tailings washed into a tributary of the Cheyenne River which is the primary source of surface water for Pine Ridge Reservation. The US Environmental Protection Agency began expressing concerns about the levels of pollution around the southern Hills, and a group calling itself the Black Hills Alliance (BHA) was formed, in the mid- to late 1970s.
A mixed group of Lakota and non-Lakota activists, the BHA declared the region a National Sacrifice Area and began to agitate and educate local people about the threats posed to the Hills by uranium mining. Citing figures issued from various governmental and private sources, they drew attention to a sharp increase in the rate of cancer in the county most affected by uranium mining (Fall River County); they demonstrated increased levels of radioactive pollution of aquifers that supplied the major water supplies to Pine Ridge Reservation and nearby non-Indian communities bordering the reservation; and chronicled and monitored the progress of the various multinational corporations who had uranium interests in the Hills - companies such as Union Carbide Corporation, Tennessee Valley Authority and Gulf Oil, who, with permission from the Forest Service, had been drilling for the ore in the Hills since 1975.
Pine Ridge Reservation, on the southeastern cusp of the Black Hills, was particularly hit by energy development, and, some have argued, singled out in a form of 'environmental racism': In 1979, BHA announced that Union Carbide had received funds from the US Department of Energy to explore one-fourth of the reservation for uranium. The Oglala tribal council refused to authorise any permits and the plan was quashed. In 1980, Women of All Red Nations (WARN), an alliance of female Lakota activists, released a report that showed a statistical correlation between high incidences of spontaneous abortions, cancer, and birth defects, as well as polluted and radioactive water contamination on Pine Ridge. Blame for water contamination was not only pointed at uranium mining in the Hills, but also at activities on the Badlands Gunnery Range during and after World War Two, and chemical herbicide and insecticide run-offs from off-reservation farming activities. WARN cited a report by a Rapid City biochemist who found that Pine Ridge water contained "lethal" dosages of radioactive particles: nineteen picocuries of uranium radiation per litre in surface water from subsidiaries of the White River, which flows into and through the reservation, and fifteen picocuries per litre in groundwater in the Lakota Aquifer under Red Shirt Table community - which also happened to be the closest community to the Gunnery Range. The report also highlights the high levels of nitrates in reservation water samples, and points the blame in the direction of gun blasts carried out on the bombing range. To underscore their grim findings, WARN also described how "[c]hildren swimming in subsidiaries of the Cheyenne River have frequently been admitted to the hospital with body sores" and doctors could not determine the cause.
In 1980, hundreds of Lakota and non-Lakota people congregated at an International Survival Gathering in the Black Hills, at which sacred land, environmental protection and indigenous peoples' treaties were affirmed. The Lakota activist, Madonna Gilbert Thunderhawk concluded the proceedings as thus: "The land is not dead yet. There is a struggle that will go on […]. We will go home and get back into the long, hard, tedious process of education, agitating, organizing. This is the way we will save our Mother, the Earth".
After just a few years of active pressure, which included taking companies to court, the BHA proclaimed their work complete and disbanded: to date there are no uranium activities in the Black Hills. Parts of the southern Hills, which bore the brunt of uranium mining, have undergone extensive clean-up operations.
© 2002 by Bornali HalderSite, Page and Article © Copyright 2002 by Bornali Halder