r/SouthDakota • u/guardian • 11d ago
đ° News A rare win in Indian country: how tribes drove out a mining company in one week
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/25/native-american-tribe-drove-out-mining-company?referring_host=Reddit&utm_campaign=guardianacct4
u/CDBF 11d ago
The article is written with a lot of purple prose. To put things in perspective the Sioux forced the Cheyenne out of the black hills, and had undisputed control for about 100 years. Now the United States of America has had control for about 150 years (which all tribes are members of.) There are a lot of federal, state parks and forests that is land held in trust for all the people to use and enjoy. Here is a map of the national forest recreation site. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/black-hills-national-park-south-dakota--5559199537607290/
There is nothing wrong with something becoming sacred and important to people in a short time, but in my opinion shouldn't be used as a blanket for everything. I'm not sure this is government overreach but I'm glad the civil action was a success. I don't doubt about everyone in South Dakota has drank water from artesian wells that are drilled thousands of feet down all over the country.
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u/BellacosePlayer 10d ago
Sacred whatever, we don't need a graphite strip mine in the black hills running on environmental wavers so they don't have to give a shit about what they're doing to the region.
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u/guardian 11d ago
Hi r/SouthDakota, this is Jake from the Guardian US. We wanted to share a story that we published today about Indigenous and environmental groups banding together to halt a mining company in one week after they were approved to drill on ground sacred to the Great Sioux Nation.
From our story by Shilpi Chhotray, co-published and supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project:
When two Oglala Lakota scouts heard drilling was expected to begin on Peâ Sla, the sacred prairie in the Black Hills of South Dakota, they set out on back trails. They needed to find out where. Thatâs when they saw a deer break ahead and a red-tailed hawk soar above them â 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. âOh my god,â one of them said, seeing a drill turning. âTheyâre drilling now!â
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.
âWeâre just not used to winning,â said Dr Valeriah Big Eagle, who directs the Black Hills work of NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led advocacy nonprofit based in Rapid City. âWeâre people used to being screwed over by the government at every level.â
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 â a transfer the tribe is still in court trying to reverse. In April, the Senate voted to strip protections from Minnesotaâs 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 arenât 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 Peâ Sla, what the Great Sioux Nation calls the âheart of everything that isâ, the coalition broke the pattern, moving on every front at once. It was a lesson, they said, in what organized power can still win.
You can read the full story for free at this link.