If a successful protest is any kind of bellwether,
Montana’s long tolerance of mining may be coming to an end. When a
group composed mostly of Native Americans marched 600 miles from
South Dakota to Montana to protest a gold mine last June, people
from local communities supported them every step of the way. March
leader Brock Conway, a Blackfeet-Lakota, was joined at various
times by the great-granddaughter of a homesteader, a grandmother
from the Crow tribe and a cowboy herding cattle on an ATV.
The march represents an unusual coalition of
ranchers and seven Montana tribes. Their aim is stopping
businessman Ernest Lehman from developing his mining claims on
public land in north-central Montana. The tribes want the hills
protected because they have been a source of visions and sacred
ceremonial songs; the ranchers fear that cyanide used to leach gold
will contaminate the water table (HCN, 8/9/93).
The coalition persuaded the Bureau of Land
Management to issue a new management plan this April; it prohibits
new mining claims on all 19,000 acres of public land in the Sweet
Grass Hills. Although Lehman can mine his existing claims once a
two-year mining moratorium ends in 1997, the coalition is
considering legal challenges and is working to elect a sympathetic
congressional representative this November.
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Emily Cousins
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Marching to stop a Montana mine.
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