The Puyallup Tribe of Indians is making sure juvenile spring chinook will still find their way to the upper White River each year.
The tribe is raising 250,000 spring chinook at their hatchery so they can stock acclimation ponds in the upper White. Legislative budget cuts forced the state Department of Fish and Wildlife to cease their White River spring chinook program.
“We used to get these fish from the state, but now the Muckleshoot Tribe is allowing us to have some of their excess spring chinook,” said Blake Smith, enhancement manager for the Puyallup Tribe. The Muckleshoot Tribe also raises White River springers at one of their hatchery.
Before picking up the state’s effort completely this year, the Puyallup Tribe has chipped in with the cost of clipping the spring chinook.
The state’s White River spring chinook program had been one of the oldest salmon recovery projects in the state. The effort began almost 40 years ago when the state began capturing fish for broodstock from the weak early run. “Probably the only reason we have White River springers to protect is because of the state’s early action,” said Russ Ladley, resource protection manager for the tribe.
In 1986 only six spring chinook returned to the White River, putting the viability of the run in question. “At the time, there was a chance that so few fish would return that the run would blink out,” Ladley said.
When the Muckleshoot Tribe opened their hatchery on the White River, fisheries managers began releasing the spring chinook back to the river to supplement the run. Because of diligent hatchery management, the spring chinook population on the White River has slowly increased since, with returns now normally in the thousands.
After being transported to the acclimation ponds, the juvenile spring chinook will be fed by the tribe for eight weeks. Once they are imprinted on the upper watershed creeks, they’ll be released to begin their journey to the ocean.
The acclimation pond program has played a large role in the recovery of the spring stock. “More and more springers are coming back each year to the upper tributaries,” Smith said. “Some creeks went from zero spawners to dozens in the last decade.”
Narbeck Wetland Sanctuary has had problems with parking and vandalism. It is currently closed for work.
By Michelle Dunlop, HeraldNet.com
EVERETT — A cherished local wetland is getting a face lift and possibly a new caretaker after nearly two years of misuse.
The past few weeks, the gates have been closed to the Narbeck Wetland Sanctuary near Paine Field. Snohomish County workers have been giving the wetlands, and its parking lot, some extra care as spring draws near. A change in management is also on tap.
The Snohomish County Council will hold a public hearing at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday over a plan to fund the salary for a park ranger, who would oversee Narbeck. The three-quarter-time position would cost $57,641.
The request is due to a “lack of public parking access, increased vandalism and nuisance issues at the Narbeck Wetland Sanctuary,” according to county documents. The issues have meant “a loss of use of Narbeck by the public.”
The wetlands is in the 6900 block Seaway Boulevard, across the street from the Boeing Co.’s engineering complex and Fluke Corp. Over the past couple of years, Narbeck’s parking lot has been taken over by local workers. Some leave their cars all day. Others would drive over from nearby businesses like Boeing for a smoking break. Boeing prohibits smoking on its premises.
The result: People wanting to visit Narbeck — to walk the trails or watch the wildlife that live there — couldn’t find parking in the wetlands’ lot. Regular Narbeck visitors Joan Douglas and Debbie Schols told The Herald last November that they began noticing the overabundance of cars in the parking lot more than a year ago.
“We thought we’d see lots of people on the trail but we didn’t,” Schols said.
Instead, the two women said, they saw people park their cars, gather their briefcases and walk up the road to Boeing. The company has been boosting jet production and, therefore, employment, since 2010 and transferred 900 engineers to Everett from Renton that year.
Schols and others complained about the parking and smoking to officials at Paine Field, which owns Narbeck. The airport established Narbeck in the late 1990s to mitigate damage when an addition was made to Paine Field.
On Friday, Paine Field Director Dave Waggoner said the airport and county parks department will work together on Narbeck. They’re seeking county approval for a park ranger, who will have police authority, to keep an eye on the parking and smoking problems that have plagued the wetlands. The airport and parks department are working with the County Council to develop a no-smoking policy for Narbeck, Waggoner said.
For its part, Boeing has opened parking to employees at its activity center, about a mile and a half up Seaway Boulevard, said Elizabeth Fischtziur, company spokeswoman. A shuttle transports workers to and from the lot. Over the course of 2013, Boeing also will consider reconfiguring or expanding existing parking lots as well as its van pool options, she said.
Over the past several weeks, the county has been giving Narbeck a bit of a makeover. Crews have re-striped the parking lot, cleaned up the park shelter and restored some of the interpretive signs.
“It really looks a lot nicer,” Waggoner said.
Waggoner wasn’t sure how soon Narbeck will re-open. That decision will be made after the public hearing this week.
This Clayton Lindemood photo won third place in the 2010 Beargrease Marathon Photo Contest.
March 10, the 29th Running of the John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon kicked off in Duluth, Minnesota. The race up in Alaska may be getting most of the headlines right now, but the John Beargrease dog sled race is truly an American Indian special: John Beargrease was an Ojibwe man and the inspiration for this annual 390-mile competition.You can follow all the action at the official race site, Beargrease.com.Meanwhile, we present an article on the man and the history behind the grueling test of man and dog that ICTMN.com originally published in February 2011, after the conclusion of the 27th annual marathon.
By Konnie LeMay, February 09, 2011, Indian Country Today Media Network
When one of the longest and most-respected dogsled races in the lower 48 was run January 30 through February 2, it included a tribute to the Ojibwe man for whom it is named. The 390-mile John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon honors the mail-carrier who braved appalling weather and questionable trails to deliver mail at the turn of the 20th century, traveling by dog team or by boat the 90 miles between Two Harbors and Grand Marais along the sometimes treacherous shoreline of Lake Superior. More than 100 years after his death, John Beargrease seems an unlikely candidate for celebrity status, but he has been the inspiration for this race, a children’s picture book and at least two biographies, one of them (as yet) unpublished. He is also one of the Minnesota Historical Society’s 150 people, places and things that make Minnesota great. Beargrease now inspires a new generation of mushers, including a young woman who is a distant relation—Billie Diver, a musher and member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. Diver, a nursing student at the University of North Dakota, became interested in mushing when she was just 3, after her mother took her to visit a friend’s dog team. She was smitten with the dogs and the idea of riding behind a team, and when she was 7, she began working with teams. Diver first participated in the mid-distance portion of the John Beargrease race when she was 15. “It was really cool,” she said. “It meant a lot more to me [because of Beargrease’s name].”
While it took John Beargrease two to three days to travel one way with four dogs from Two Harbors, northeast of Duluth, to Grand Marais, it takes mushers about two days to make the complete circuit with teams of eight dogs. John Beargrease was born in Beaver Bay, Minnesota, in 1858. His father, Moquabimetem, also called John Beargrease, had recently moved there with several Ojibwe families to work at a sawmill founded by German immigrants. John and his two older brothers were taught to hunt, trap and fish by their father and they became very familiar with the trail that runs along the shore of Lake Superior that was blazed by the Ojibwe people and later used in the fur trade and commercial fishing. When he was about 19, he married Louise Wishcob of another well-known Ojibwe family in the area, and they had 11 or 12 children. As was true for many men in the Ojibwe and European immigrant families who lived in this rugged place that still didn’t have roads in the late 1800s, John Beargrease acquired a broad range of skills. He provided for his family by fishing and hunting, but he also worked in the sawmill, joined the crews of freight and passenger ships on the big lake, did commercial fishing, served as a guide and worked the ore docks in Two Harbors. He is most remembered, though, for his nearly 20 years of delivering the U.S. mail along the Minnesota shore of the lake, often using that old Ojibwe trail.
Beargrease Biography, Holy Cow Press, 2008 He was a sinewy man just under six feet tall whose mail delivery in the small towns was heralded by his frequent singing and the bells attached to his dog harnesses. Until Lake Superior got too icy each winter, Beargrease and other mail carriers used a rowboat with sails. He once made the 90-mile trip from Two Harbors and Grand Marais along Minnesota’s North Shore in just 20 hours by boat—28 hours was his fastest time by dog team. “It was the North Shore version of the Pony Express,” said Daniel Lancaster, whose book John Beargrease, Legend of Minnesota’s North Shore was published in 2008 by Holy Cow Press. While researching for that book, Lancaster was struck by the friendly interactions between the Ojibwe and European immigrant families in Beaver Bay from its beginnings in 1856, shortly after the La Pointe Treaty of 1854 opened the North Shore to white settlement. “It’s a great story because it’s very much a symbiotic codependency that formed between those two communities,” he said. “What I enjoyed… was to see how the one culture influenced the other culture. And it seemed to be a really positive relationship on both sides.” Last year Bob Abrahamson, a registered nurse and photographer in Superior, Wisconsin, found an unpublished biography of Beargrease among his great uncle William Scott’s papers. Scott was a probate judge in Two Harbors who became involved with the Lake County Historical Society. In the late 1950s he collaborated on a series of books about the North Shore that was to include the Beargrease biography. Scott interviewed several octogenarians who had known Beargrease. A Two Harbors resident, Madeline James Fillinger, told him: “The Post Office, when John Beargrease carried the mail, was right across the street from where my father then had his drugstore.… Invariably, when John Beargrease arrived with the mail, he left it over at the Post Office and then came over to our store to get warm. The trip from Grand Marais probably took him two or three days, and after such a long time in the cold air, he would quickly become drowsy and would doze off in the armchair.” For John Beargrease and the other mail carriers on Lake Superior, delivery could be dangerous. Story has it that Beargrease got his job after a mail carrier fell through the ice with horses and a sleigh. That man made it out alive but immediately quit. Beargrease knew his environment well enough that he and his four-dog team, and later his two-horse team, rarely encountered such disasters, though they were occasionally stranded by blizzards. His death in 1910 may have been caused by Lake Superior’s icy waters. There are two versions of the story. In one, Beargrease jumped in the lake to rescue a mail carrier floundering in the water near the shore after leaving his rowboat during a storm. The other story, which biographer Lancaster favors, has Beargrease in the floundering boat and jumping into the water to help the other carrier, who was trying to steady their boat. Both accounts say that Beargrease died of pneumonia caught from the chill of the freezing waters. The official record, however, indicates that the cause of death was tuberculosis. Last week, as mushers gathered to run a race that traces his well-worn trail, it was a pleasing turn of history to have a legend made of a humble man who did what needed to be done to provide for his family and his community. As Scott concluded in his unpublished biography of John Beargrease: “[His] fame came not by doing some specific heroic act, but rather, when he had work to do or a job to perform, however humble or big, he did so dependably, cooperatively and conscientiously. He did his best. Can anything be more praiseworthy than that?
INCREDIBLE NEWS: On Thursday, February 28th, 2013, the House of Representatives finally decided that Native women, LGBTQ women, and immigrant women were worthy of protections from rape, stalking and sexual assaults via Reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. This was a huge deal for Tribes, ironically as it was a substantial step toward the end of “tribes” and the beginning of “nations” for Native people—being able to regulate all people within their territories. President Obama stood strong for tribal sovereignty in this very important matter for Native people.
Big deal, definitely. All those people and organizations—all federally recognized Indian tribes, NCAI, Deborah Parker, Sarah Deer, Center for American Progress and many many more that helped to organize—you should be very proud.
HORRIBLE NEWS: On Friday, March 1, 2013, the Obama Administration decided that Native sacred sites were not worthy of protections from the rape and pillage via the Keystone XL pipeline. Despite pretty much every reputable scientist who is not on an oil company’s payroll saying the opposite, the State Department somehow concludes that the Keystone XL pipeline “is unlikely to have a substantial impact” on the rate of Canada’s oil sands. “The analyses of potential impacts associated with construction and normal operation of the proposed project suggest that there would be no significant impacts to most resources along the proposed project route.”
If President Obama approves the Keystone XL pipeline, make no mistake, he and his Democratic Party placed themselves diametrically opposed to the interests of Native people.
Let’s be clear: President Obama has been great on many issues for Native people. He’s best on those things that will most quickly speed Native people’s assimilation into western society, e.g. criminal jurisdiction that mimics the western system (that’s what the hold up was on VAWA—due process), economic development further ingratiating Native dependence on the western economic system. Those things are important—Natives must compete in those realms, so that’s fair.
But on those things that are distinctively Native—Obama has been absolutely terrible. Shameful. He’s done nothing on sacred sites—in fact, he’s done the opposite. Keystone XL will run through many sacred sites (some “official” sacred sites according to white man law, and some that are just sacred because we value them) and the damage will trickle into many more. He’s done nothing for Native languages. Zero.
Radio silence.
Look, all the economic development and jurisdiction in the world doesn’t matter if the Earth is, as Winona LaDuke says, “scorched.” After all, what is the point of exercising criminal jurisdiction over lands that are uninhabitable?? Tribes are cognizant of that—land and language is what makes Native people “Native.” Not casinos, not police forces, and definitely not simply repeating the word “sovereignty” over and over. Land–presumably with clean water and clean air—is at the center of our religious ceremonies and our creation stories. And while we’re rightfully celebrating the amazing victory of VAWA, we should also understand that this guy has shown that he’s got many of the same destructive tendencies as his predecessor.
As much as we like this guy, Obama, and we dig that he sings Al Green and seems to like having a few Natives hanging around and was even adopted by Native people like Johnny Depp, we must hold him and his party accountable also just like we did with his predecessor. If the President and Democrats keep trying to cook the earth just like the Republicans, well then we have to get them out of office just like we did them.
The President’s legacy with Native people will ultimately be determined by how he deals with the environment, climate change and Keystone XL. Why? We’re the stewards of this land—we cannot “go back to where we came from.” We come from right here. Some, that do not understand Native people’s relationship to the land, will argue “there are no federally protected sacred sites affected!” Those folks just don’t get it—it’s not just the few places that the government determines are “sacred” that we’re concerned about. No, all of this land is sacred and is not supposed to be ripped apart for a few coins. Soon, after the euphoria of winning the VAWA war wears off, we’ll realize that the Obama’s Administration snuck a fast one past us—the day after VAWA passed!
I hope I’m wrong. Still, the Administration hasn’t given us any reason to think that I am. Idle No More—we’re not going to take this lying down.
By Shondiin Silversmith Navajo Times
WINDOW ROCK, March 7, 2013
A process that usually takes three to four years was swept through as a Native American T-shirt company got its product on the shelves of America’s largest retailer in less than one year.
Native Threads President Randy Bardwell, Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians, said his company basically “busted the door down at Walmart” because a process he was told that takes years took Native Threads only six months.
“We did it really fast, and the reason it happened so fast is because we were able to put good information together for Walmart,” he said.
Native Threads’ first shipment officially hit the Walmart floor the weekend before Black Friday in 2012 with three original designs.
Bardwell said they had to drive five hours to get to the closest Walmart retailer that sold their product…across the state line in Arizona.
“It’s surreal,” said Bardwell. “The work that we put in to get it there makes it all worth it. It’s really a big sense of accomplishment.
“Not only are they the largest retailer in the world, but also they have so many stores that fit into our population demographic,” Bardwell said, noting that they took a lot of things into consideration before proceeding with the process.
“It wasn’t a decision that we took lightly. We had to consider what we had built without Walmart, and how we may alienate or affect our core shops – the people that really got us to where we are today,” Bardwell said. “We don’t want to put them in the same basket as Walmart.”
Bardwell said the way they did this was to create new designs specifically for Walmart, and they wouldn’t sell those designs through their core shops. It’s not only designs that changed, but the weight of the T-shirts as well.
Bardwell said the usual heavyweight T-shirts sold through the website and shops is not what is being sold at Walmart, because Walmart requires a lighter weight shirt, but the print quality is the same for both.
Mens Tee, Native Threads
“Choosing Walmart as a partner was the right thing to do, not only from a sales standpoint,” Bardwell said, but because through Walmart they are able to sell their products at prices fit for everyone. “Walmart serves our population, and they can buy the quantities that can drive the price range to the 10-dollar range.”
Bardwell also believes that this partnership shows everyone that Native Americans are “sophisticated – we’re big picture thinkers and we’re true Native American entrepreneurs.”
Bardwell said that Native Threads can be found in over 120 stores until their spring release in May, when it will be cut back to around 70.
According to the Native Threads Website, Native Threads is one of Indian Country’s only Native-owned and operated clothing companies since their development in 1990. Bardwell said when they were first established they sold their products directly in various ways and that is how they started branching out.
“We went from direct retail selling to wholesale selling,” he noted.
“Our designs are contemporary, yet the messages are very traditional, cultural, and conscious of the current social, political and economic trends that affect Native peoples,” states the Native Threads Web site. “By combining these elements, our clothing helps give Native people clarity about who they are in this place and time. By providing constant reminders about our past, our products help bring to the surface the pride we carry inside of us.”
In 1911 in Europe, March 8 was first celebrated as International Women’s Day. In many European nations, as well as in the United States, women’s rights was a political hot topic. Woman suffrage — winning the vote — was a priority of many women’s organizations. Women (and men) wrote books on the contributions of women to history.
But with the economic depression of the 1930s which hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and then World War II, women’s rights went out of fashion. In the 1950s and 1960s, after Betty Friedan pointed to the “problem that has no name” — the boredom and isolation of the middle-class housewife who often gave up intellectual and professional aspirations — the women’s movement began to revive. With “women’s liberation” in the 1960s, interest in women’s issues and women’s history blossomed.
By the 1970s, there was a growing sense by many women that “history” as taught in school — and especially in grade school and high school — was incomplete with attending to “her story” as well. In the United States, calls for inclusion of black Americans and Native Americans helped some women realize that women were invisible in most history courses.
And so in the 1970s many universities began to include the fields of women’s history and the broader field of women’s studies.
In 1978 in California, the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women began a “Women’s History Week” celebration. The week was chosen to coincide with International Women’s Day, March 8.
The response was positive. Schools began to host their own Women’s History Week programs. The next year, leaders from the California group shared their project at a Women’s History Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. Other participants not only determined to begin their own local Women’s History Week projects, but agreed to support an effort to have Congress declare a national Women’s History Week.
Three years later, the United States Congress passed a resolution establishing National Women’s History Week. Co-sponsors of the resolution, demonstrating bipartisan support, were Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, and Representative Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland.
This recognition encouraged even wider participation in Women’s History Week. Schools focused for that week on special projects and exhibitions honoring women in history. Organizations sponsored talks on women’s history. The National Women’s History Project began distributing materials specifically designed to support Women’s History Week, as well as materials to enhance the teaching of history through the year, to include notable women and women’s experience.
In 1987, at the request of the National Women’s History Project, Congress expanded the week to a month, and the U.S. Congress has issued a resolution every year since then, with wide support, for Women’s History Month. The U.S. President has issued each year a proclamation of Women’s History Month.
To further extend the inclusion of women’s history in the history curriculum (and in everyday consciousness of history), the President’s Commission on the Celebration of Women in History in America met through the 1990s. One result has been the effort towards establishing a National Museum of Women’s History for the Washington, DC, area, where it would join other museums such as the American History Museum.
The purpose of Women’s History Month is to increase consciousness and knowledge of women’s history: to take one month of the year to remember the contributions of notable and ordinary women, in hopes that the day will soon come when it’s impossible to teach or learn history without remembering these contributions.
You’ll want to think about going to bed early or sleeping in this weekend: Daylight Saving Time starts at 2 a.m. Sunday, March 10. That means you’ll spring ahead and move your clocks forward one hour — and, unfortunately, lose that hour of sleep.
The benefit is that we’ll get more sunlight later in the evening and it’s a pleasant sign that spring is just around the corner. Spring 2013 officially starts on Wednesday, March 20.
One drawback for Northern Virginia residents—Metro closed last year effectively one hour earlier than normal, since clocks jumped from 1:59 a.m. to 3 a.m., and 3 a.m. is Metro closing time. A few late-night partygoers in DC were caught off guard by the time change.
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority has not issued a press release regarding Daylight Saving 2013, but it is expected the same thing will happen.
Many electronic devices, like your cell phone and computer, automatically adjust when Daylight Savings Time begins or ends.
So, why do we do this at 2 a.m., and why shift our clocks at all?
According to Webhibit:
In the United States, 2 a.m. was originally chosen as the changeover time because it was practical and minimized disruption. Most people were at home and this was the time when the fewest trains were running. It is late enough to minimally affect bars and restaurants, and it prevents the day from switching to yesterday, which would be confusing. It is early enough that the entire continental U.S. switches by daybreak, and the changeover occurs before most early shift workers and early churchgoers are affected.
The larger reason for shifting our clocks, however, is energy conservation.
The first official national time shift wasn’t until 1918. Then the United States stopped the practice, started again during World War II for energy conservation reasons, stopped when the war was over and re-started with the Uniform Time Act in 1966. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 lengthened daylight saving to eight months instead of six months.
Although a U.S. Department of Transportation study in the 1970s found that daylight saving trimmed electricity usage by about 1 percent, later studies have shown that the savings is offset by air conditioners running in warmer climates.
It may not all be for naught, however. Another study, performed in 2007 by the RAND Corporation found that the increase in daylight in spring led to a roughly 10 percent drop in vehicular crashes.
Check Your Smoke Detectors!
When you change your clocks in the fall and spring because of Daylight Saving Time, it’s also a good time to change batteries in your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, and check to make sure the devices are in working order.
Arizona, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, U.S. Virgin Islands and American Samoa do not observe Daylight Saving Time.
MARYSVILLE — Unless it’s raining hard, the Highway 529 bridge into Marysville is set to close tonight and is scheduled to remain closed through the weekend.
People who drive the bridge over Ebey Slough will have to choose a different route from 8 tonight through 5 a.m. Monday. The weekend detour uses Fourth Street in Marysville and I-5. Bicyclists and pedestrians can be escorted through the closure if needed.
For the past year, demolition crews have used half of the new bridge as a staging area to rip down the old Ebey Slough bridge.
With the removal of the old bridge, drivers will finally be able to use all of the new, wider bridge after this last bit of work.
State Department of Transportation crews plan to remove the concrete barrier between drivers and the demolition staging area. Once the barrier is gone, the roadway will be striped for traffic in each direction. The bridge will reopen by Monday with four lanes for vehicle traffic and bike lanes on each side.
Transportation engineer Mark Sawyer anticipates that it will be a big change for drivers who use the bridge to commute and ease traffic during the evening commute from Everett.
When the weather improves in May, a final layer of asphalt will be applied.
The state built the new bridge to replace the 85-year-old Ebey Slough bridge.
Colville Confederated Tribes Chairman John Sirois, center (holding award plaque), and previous Watershed Hero Award recipient Mary Verner pose with tribal members at Sierra Club award dinner. Colville received the 2013 Watershed Hero Award from the Sierra Club’s Washington chapter. Photo: Jack McNeel.
By Jack McNeel, Indian Country Today Media Network
The Colville Confederated Tribes’ successful effort to hold a British Columbia smelter accountable for dumping pollutants into the Columbia River for a century has caught the attention of the Sierra Club Washington State’s Upper Columbia River Group, which bestowed its 2013 Watershed Hero Award on the tribes.
Colville won a major victory in 2012 when the company, known today as Teck Metals Ltd. (formerly Teck/Cominco), admitted in court to depositing millions of tons of toxic substances into the river, which flows into Lake Roose-velt. Pollutants included 250,000 tons of zinc and lead, as well as 132,000 tons of other hazardous substances such as more than 200 tons of mercury, cadmium and arsenic.
The tribes, having pressed their case for two decades, also made legal history when the court struck down the notion that a foreign company could not be held liable under U.S. law. The victory was marked in high style on February 23 when Sierra Club leaders, including John Osburn, co-chair for Sierra Club’s Upper Columbia River group, joined tribal members in Spokane, Washington, for the presentation of its Water-shed Heroes honor at an awards dinner.
“Watershed Heroes are people who act out of love and respect for nature,” said Mary Verner, former director of Upper Columbia United Tribes and the former mayor of Spokane, who won the award last year and presented it this year.
“We’re very grateful for all the sacrifices you have made,” Verner said in introducing Colville Tribes chairman John Sirois and recognizing others from the tribes who had played major roles in the process.
“I’m grateful you relayed the history,” Sirois said. “I’m grateful for you honoring all the work of the past councils that really put in the time and effort. We have such a great legal team. There are countless people who played a role in this. It’s really a validation of who we are as a people. All along the river, those places are named after our people and where we come from: Okanogan, Chelan, Methow, Eniat, San Poil, Lakes, that is who we are. That is where our people are buried. That is where we’re born.”
Between 1896 and 1995, Teck’s smelter dumped 400 tons of waste a day—derived from the smelting process—into the Columbia River. The smelter is about 10 miles north of the U.S. border.
“It comes as no surprise that after being dumped into the Columbia River, all this toxic material flows downstream. The company tried to deny that,” Verner said. “Some of the most ridiculous arguments one has ever heard from a corporate entity have been raised by Teck/Cominco, now known as Teck Metals Ltd. The Colvilles weren’t having it.”
In the 1990s the tribes asked Canada to tell Teck to stop polluting the river, but Teck did not comply. The U.S. made similar attempts to stop the company but met with the same lack of results. In 2003 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency identified Lake Roosevelt as a Superfund site and entered into an agreement with Teck to study the problem, making it clear that Teck would not be held responsible for the cleanup. But Teck found that unacceptable.
“In 2004 the tribes decided they could not wait any longer, and they filed a suit,” Verner said. Washington State eventually joined the tribes.
“To say the case of Pakootas v. Teck/Cominco is a landmark case would certainly be an understatement,” Verner said. “What a complex case it was! It has required navigating some incredible intricacies of the law, not even counting the science and politics.”
The tribes also got the court to overrule Teck’s argument that a company in another country cannot deliberately pollute U.S. waters and is not covered by U.S. law.
“The question is not where the polluter is located, but where the pollution is located,” Verner said. “It makes absolute sense, but the Colvilles had to fight for that outcome.”
Last April the court ruled that Teck could not escape liability. In September, Teck admitted it had knowingly and deliberately discharged 10 million tons of slag and toxic pollution into the Columbia. And in late 2012 a federal judge ruled that Teck qualifies as a polluter under the Superfund law.
“Heroes are tenacious,” Verner said of the tribes. “But it’s not over. Teck has appealed the ruling. They are trying to take this to the U.S. Supreme Court.”
As long as the bulk of the pollutants remain in the river or wash up on black beaches, the Colville Tribes will continue the battle. “Our future is about the water, all of us,” said Sirois. “We’re all in this fight together, to protect our environment, to protect our resources.”
Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/03/06/watershed-heroes-colville-confederated-tribes-win-sierra-club-award-battling-british
