It’s rare for Native tribes to defeat extractors and polluters so quickly—if at all.
But that is exactly what happened earlier this year in South Dakota when Lakota Tribes banded together to defend Pe’ Sla, a sacred prairie located in the Black Hills, from being mined for graphite.
In today’s story for The Guardian, Counterstream Co-Founder and President Shilpi Chhotray reports on how the Tribes won.
Extraction on Indigenous lands is common. But lesser known is the threat the energy transition poses to the sites Tribes have prayed on for thousands of years.
“The clean economy keeps pulling the minerals of a green future out of the same colonized ground as coal and oil,” Chhotray reports.
“More than 75% of the country’s lithium, copper and nickel reserves lie within 35 miles (56.3km) of a reservation, and the communities in their path are among the most underinvested in the country.”
What’s more, granting companies the right to drill for these minerals hands over their lands for exploration—and extraction. “It’s to set a precedent to attack all sacred sites,” said Dr. Valeriah Big Eagle, who directs Black Hills work at NDN Collective.
That’s why these Tribes fought so hard to stop the mining from happening, and why noting what tactics worked is evermore important.
From launching a legal battle to placing their bodies on drill pads as they prayed to the ancestors, these land defenders showed what power still lies in organizing when tribes come together.
Go Deeper
The Answer is in the Hills with Robert Harold Bordeaux
Sičáŋǧu Lakota poet Robert Harold Bordeaux joined the Pe’ Sla resistance. In this exclusive interview for Peace & Riot, he and Shilpi Chhotray discuss the fight to protect Pe' Sla, and why he believes the Lakota are “infinite.”
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