A Chilean appeals court ruled against the world’s largest gold mining company on Monday, favoring Chilean Indians who accuse Barrick Gold Corp. of contaminating their water downstream and creating more doubts about the future of the world’s highest gold mine.
The judges in the northern city of Copiapo unanimously ruled that Barrick must keep all its environmental promises before moving forward with construction of the Pascua-Lama mine at the very top of Chile’s mountainous border with Argentina. They also said Barrick must monitor the condition of three glaciers next to the mine project.
Chile’s environmental watchdog agency already ordered construction stopped until Barrick builds systems to keep the mine from contaminating the watershed below, and Barrick executives have publicly committed the company to fulfilling the requirements of its environmental permit.
But Monday’s ruling goes beyond that by demanding repairs to damage in the watershed below, by calling for increased monitoring of the impact on surrounding glaciers, and by opening up the project’s environmental license for review. The judges found no evidence of contamination due to mine construction, but said the watershed could face “imminent danger” without more environmental protections.Attorney Lorenzo Soto, who represents about 550 Diaguita Indians in the case, said this review might even kill the $8.5 billion mine, which has been under development for more than seven years. “The project’s conditions aren’t the same as they were in 2006. New conditions could be established, and we don’t discard any scenario, including the closing of the project,” Soto said.Scarce river water is vital to life in Chile’s Atacama Desert, and the Diaguitas fear that the Pascua-Lama mine above them is ruining their resource.Barrick acknowledged the ruling in a statement late Monday that did not say whether or not the company would appeal.
The company said it “is committed to diligently working to complete all of the projects the regulatory requirements” and is working with Chile’s environmental regulator to construct a water management system by 2014, after which time it expects to renew construction on the actual mine.
Still, the ruling could mean more lengthy delays for the binational mine, which was initially expected to be producing gold and silver already. While Argentine officials are eager to keep building, most of the ore is buried on the Chilean side. On the Argentine side, where Barrick fuels a third of San Juan province’s economy, officials have been watching closely and trying to figure out how to preserve thousands of jobs.
Barrick’s stock traded up slightly Monday at $15 a share after reaching near-historic lows due to falling gold prices and Pascua-Lama setbacks.
Rion Joaquin Ramirez, left, was named by President Barack Obama to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships on July 12.
By Richard Walker, Indian Country Today Media Network
Rion Joaquin Ramirez is general counsel for the Suquamish Tribe’s Port Madison Enterprises, which has expanded the tribe’s economic diversity and made it one of the largest employers in Kitsap County, west of Seattle.
Ramirez is soon to take on another significant responsibility: Helping select men and women who work for a year as full-time, paid assistant to senior White House staff, the vice president, Cabinet secretaries and other top-ranking government officials.
Ramirez, Pascua Yaqui/Turtle Mountain Chippewa, was named by President Obama to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships July 12. He was not available for comment; technically, the president has only announced his intent to appoint Ramirez to the commission, so Ramirez can’t speak to the media until the appointment is official, which should be within two weeks, according to the White House Communications Office.
There are 27 commission members. Other current members include Keith Harper, Cherokee, who represented the plaintiff class of 500,000 individual Indians in Cobell v. Salazar and is Obama’s nominee for representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council; retired four-star Gen. Wesley Clark; Peabody and Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist John Hockenberry; eBay founder Pierre Omidyar; former U.S. Sen. Paul Sarbanes of Maryland; and Brown University president Ruth J. Simmons.
Ramirez is the second presidential appointee associated with the Suquamish Tribe this year. In May, Obama appointed Suquamish Tribe Chairman Leonard Forsman to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.
The president appoints members of hundreds of federal agencies and commissions, but each has considerable influence over its area of focus. For example, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation manages the federal historic preservation review process and promotes historic preservation as a means of promoting job creation, economic recovery, energy independence, sustainability, and resource stewardship. In March, it endorsed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, saying it was “an opportunity to promote better stewardship and protection of Native American historic properties and sacred sites and in doing so … ensure the survival of indigenous cultures.”
Speaking as chairman of the Suquamish Tribe, Forsman said Ramirez has helped formulate Indian policy on the federal level and helped develop the legal infrastructure needed for tribes to expand their economies. “He’s been a part of our growth for quite a long time,” Forsman said. “He’s interested in the community, in the social aspects of the tribe, and he’s very familiar with families here and from other tribes.”
Ramirez is the son of Larry Ramirez, an American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame inductee who pitched for Cal State Northridge’s 1970 NCAA Division II national championship team and was the first Native American to pitch a winning complete game in the College World Series.
The younger Ramirez earned a B.A. from the University of Washington and a J.D. from the University of Washington School of Law. He was an associate at Dorsey & Whitney LLP and Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt, P.C., and served as counsel for the University of Washington’s Child Advocacy Clinic. He joined Port Madison Enterprises in 2004.
He is a past president of the Northwest Indian Bar Association and a former appellate court justice for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, where he is enrolled.
In 2012, Ramirez was a member of the Obama for America National Finance Committee and co-chairman of the Obama Native Outreach Group. He raised between $200,000 and $500,000 for Obama’s reelection campaign.
President Lyndon B. Johnson established the White House Fellows Program in October 1964, declaring that “a genuinely free society cannot be a spectator society.” His intent was to draw individuals of exceptionally high promise to Washington for one year of personal involvement in the process of government “and to increase their sense of participation in national affairs.” Fellows are expected to employ post-fellowship what they learned by “continuing to work as private citizens on their public agendas.”
Johnson hoped Fellows would contribute to the nation as future leaders. Indeed, most if not all have: Past Fellows include Tom Johnson, who later became publisher of the Los Angeles Times and chairman of CNN; Robert C. McFarlane, who served as national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan; Colin Powell, who became an Army general, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and U.S. Secretary of State; Timothy E. Wirth, who became U.S. senator from Colorado and an Under Secretary of State; and numerous authors, elected officials, journalists, military leaders, and assistant Cabinet secretaries.
The current class includes civic leaders, doctors, lawyers, military officers, public policy specialists, and a journalist.
According to the commission website, commissioners met in Washington, D.C. the first week of June and interviewed 30 White House Fellowship finalists. Commissioners will recommend 11-19 for appointment; fellows are paid at GS level 14, step 3 – currently $90,343 – and benefits, and cannot receive any other compensation during their Fellowship.
M. Kalani Souza, Native Hawaiian, head of the nonprofit Olohana Foundation, played the guitar for attendees of the Rising Voices of Indigenous People in Weather and Climate Science Workshop July 1 – 2 at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. He is also with the Federal Emergency Management Agency , University of Hawaii, where he is national director of population centers, working on Native community capacity for climate change.
By Carol Berry, Indian Country Today Media Network
The hydrologist had carefully studied the scientific data and knew for a fact that water would be present if he drilled. So sure was he that he ignored a Hawaiian elder’s warning against drilling for water in that spot. The scientist did indeed hit water—but it was red, brackish and undrinkable.
He had drilled on a hill that had been named, millennia ago, Red Water. Nearby was another site that had carried the name Water for Man for thousands of years. That is where the drinkable water could be found, but it did not take a hydrologist with fancy instruments.
“We assume contemporary knowledge displaces that of the past, but it’s not true,” said Ramsay Taum, Native Hawaiian, board director of the Pasifika Foundation and on the faculty of the University of Hawaii, after giving this example of science’s potential to erroneously override indigenous knowledge.
Taum’s comments were among several themes aired in a workshop, Rising Voices of Indigenous Peoples in Weather and Climate Science, sponsored partly by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) on July 1–2 in Boulder, Colorado. Also backing it were the Intertribal Council On Utility Policy, South Dakota; the Olahana Foundation, Big Island, Hawai’i; the Indigenous Peoples Climate Change Working Group, and the Getches–Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment.
During the two-day conference, scholars and tribal college students grappled with the readiness issues noted in President Barack Obama’s Climate Action Plan, which he released on June 25. (Related: Obama: No Keystone XL if It Increases Carbon Emissions)
Taum’s anecdote was just one example of the myriad ways in which traditional knowledge can trump scientific knowledge, even as climate change creates yet another Trail of Tears in forcing the relocation of Native communities due to flooding, fire and other encroachments on their traditional territories. The reliance on science to the exclusion of millennia of careful observation is another way in which culture is being eroded, participants said.
“The fear of our elders is that knowledge is running faster than wisdom,” said Papalii (“Doc”) Failautusi Aveglio, a hereditary Samoan leader and a faculty member at the University of Hawaii’s school of business.
Culture is not just lost via relocation. It can result indirectly when, for example, water contamination stops people from eating locally caught fish. Tribes then require money to buy replacement food, and the loss of local food sources ultimately ends daily fishing by grandfathers and grandsons in which tradition was passed down, said Michael MacCracken, chief scientist for climate change programs, Climate Institute, Washington, D.C.
Because of such changes, Native communities are increasingly involved in addressing climate questions, workshop planners said.
Even as Native peoples become the first- and hardest-hit by climate change, their traditional ways of relating to the natural world are distorted and undervalued by Western science. On top of that lies the irony that those least affected by climate change likely had the most to do with creating the conditions that caused it, said Daniel Wildcat, Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation and a faculty member at Haskell Indian Nations University.
The harsh climate effects could mean a “whole new Trail of Tears,” Wildcat said.
Yet such clashes between traditional and scientific knowledge seemed destined to continue, if one scientist’s insight is any indication.
“I’m not interested in reconciling science and Native knowledge,” said panelist Roger Pulwarty, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “They mean different things.”
Pulwarty was concerned about who would represent tribal peoples in seeking climate-change solutions, since asking them to collect information would be asking them to divulge potentially confidential tribal history. Taum countered that indigenous knowledge could be presented in different ways, sometimes embodied in stories that had been passed down through generations.
“One of the things indigenous people bring to the table is a whole different concept of our place in the world,” said Wildcat in summing up the workshop’s main underlying theme. “We have been treating life around us like resources—they’re not resources, they’re relatives.”
The emphasis of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will be on the influx of the cheapest goods and services and the promotion of transnational corporate profits, regardless of costs to the environment, communities or human lives. This will affect food, fishing, agriculture, energy extraction, retail goods, banking – literally all sectors of our lives.
Yet after three years of discussion, negotiators still refuse to tell the public what’s being proposed. While secrecy is the rule when it comes to the public, hundreds of corporate lobbyists have “cleared advisor” status granting them access to the text. Even more concerning, is that the U.S. trade representative is pushing to “fast track” the agreement.
Will you join Grassroots International, our Global South partners, and our allies in the US Food Sovereignty Alliance in saying “No!” to the TPP and the fast track?
Together we can stop the one of the most destructive, secret, corporate-driven policies of the decade.
Seattle, WA – (July 17, 2013) – For kids and young adults that have always dreamed of flying on the trapeze or walking the tightrope, the American Youth Circus Organization (AYCO) has opened the door to make that dream a reality this summer. Each year the festival rotates locations and this coming august, Seattle will play host.
Nearly 300 participants from around the world including the United States, Sweden and England, are expected to participate in the festival. The AYCO is partnering with the School of Acrobatics and New Circus Arts (SANCA) located in Seattle to support the growing circus community, and the young people that are a part of it.
The festival, which is a biennial event, provides programs for circus educators, young adults, young professionals, and enthusiasts to gather and socialize with their peers. Participants can choose from over 150 workshops and participate in social events and showcases. Intensives are also offered in contortion, tumbling and acrobatics, aerial techniques and creative acts. AYCO, and the event, benefits and educates the circus community, and provides a way to support and inspire youth circus programming throughout the United States. This year’s location in Seattle will benefit both its local circus community, as well as the city as whole.
“The benefits of the festival go far beyond learning how to juggle,” explains Amy Cohen, Executive Director of AYCO. “It does, of course, teach participants how to master many circus acts, but it also promotes social skills, self-discipline, and commitment. It promotes self-esteem, provides a creative outlet, and helps kids stay fit and succeed in school. The festival does not just help young people become better circus performers – it helps them become better individuals and community members as well.”
The benefits of the festival also extend to the local community and economy. It sheds light on Seattle’s growing circus community, and strengthens its influence worldwide. The city boasts the largest circus school in the United States and its pre-professional program is one of three in the nation. With the event bringing in so many participants, the local economy will benefit from the traffic and pull of the American Youth Circus Festival.
This year’s event will be held at the School of Acrobatics and New Circus Arts (SANCA) in Seattle, WA. The event will be held from August 14 – 18, 2013. Registration is open to the public.
For festival information, applications, & registration please visit www.americanyouthcircus.org.
Didi Garlow, Master Gardener at the Diabetes Garden helps fill planters to take home. Photo by Monica Brown
By Monica Brown, Tulalip News Writer
TULALIP, WA – The Diabetes Garden at the Karen I Fryberg Health clinic gave away, to their attendees, planter boxes with plants. The Diabetes Garden is a place where patients and community members can come to learn more about plant and garden care for a healthier future.
Community members and patients were invited to come out and fill a planter box to bring home so they can start a small garden. The planter boxes were filled with an assortment of vegetable, herb and flower plants and each person was given a fresh bag of soil to bring home.
This garden event will run until 1:00 pm Tuesday, July 16. But will continue during future, to be announced, garden and health clinic events.
Master Gardener, Roni Leahy on right, sorts out plants to take home Photo by Monica BrownPlanter boxes, plants and soil were given to each person. Photo by Monica Brown
In the early 1990s, James Childers attended the groundbreaking of the Redbird Smith Health Clinic in Sallisaw, Okla., five miles north of the little town where he lived. Redbird Smith was the first clinic built from the ground up by the Cherokee Nation and—Childers was surprised to see—it was a huge improvement over the typical Indian clinics he was used to.
As an architect, Childers had been doing healthcare projects primarily with the Sisters of Mercy system since 1980. He’d never pursued any government- or publically funded healthcare projects—but the Redbird Smith project got him thinking.
“The architect for that clinic was out of New Mexico,” Childers says. “And that’s what caught my attention. I thought, there’s no need for them to be going to Albuquerque to do clinics in Oklahoma.”
The building, staffing, and maintenance of healthcare facilities for federally recognized Native American tribes have fallen under the jurisdiction of Indian Health Service (IHS) since that department was established in 1955. Traditionally, these IHS clinics haven’t exactly been design-driven, nor have they been particularly reflective of the cultures they serve. Built to meet strict federal guidelines that could be easily replicated from site to site, most of these clinics “were just boxes,” Childers says. “They’re just very functional government buildings.”
Over the past two decades, however, tribes have begun investing more and more money earned through their businesses in improving healthcare for its members. Fueled by joint ventures between the tribes and IHS, healthcare facilities are getting the attention they deserve, with bigger footprints (to better serve the number of patients and house more varied services); thoughtful innovations based on wellness research; and culturally significant touches to celebrate the rich histories of the tribes and provide a positive community resource.
Since 1992, Childers (a member of the Cherokee Nation himself) has been a prolific contributor to these new facilities. Of the 19 joint venture projects between IHS and tribes across the country, Childers has designed seven of them—all publicly bid and awarded separately by each tribe.
Healthcare Design spoke with Childers about the legacy he’s building, as well as the process behind designing facilities that proudly demonstrate the tribal values and cultural wealth of a historically underserved population.
Healthcare Design: Your first tribal project was the Wilma P. Mankiller Clinic in Stilwell, Okla., in 1992. How did you approach that job? James Childers: That was an Indian Health Service facility. And as we went through the IHS program, we figured out that what it produced was the typical Indian clinic you might walk into anywhere: too small, overcrowded, no waiting room, no people amenities. Indian Health Service did a fantastic job of getting the most out of its square footage, but there were really no provisions for waiting areas.
We’re in a very rural area here in Oklahoma; these people might drive 40-50 miles for healthcare. And when they did, they brought Grandpa and Grandma and the kids. Everybody came. As a result, you’d go into these clinics and the corridors would just be lined with people.
The IHS design guidelines dictated that you be within 10 percent of their square footage limitations. So what we ended up doing was reducing the square footage in the mechanical rooms. By selecting the right kind of systems and putting a lot of this equipment on the roof instead of on the floor, I ended up under their program on total square footage.
So what they allowed me to do—after many meetings and discussions—was to take that additional square footage and put it into circulation. We increased the widths of corridors and increased the size of waiting rooms. This was all an effort to get Indian healthcare environments compatible with private care.
The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana stand to become the first tribes in the country to own a major hydroelectric dam. In Colorado, tribes are managing parts of hydro projects. All are examples of tribes regaining control of resources on their land. Aspen Public Radio’s Marci Krivonen reports.
Credit Marci Krivonen The Kerr Dam in Northwest Montana was built in the 1930’s on the Flathead Indian Reservation. It’s been owned by non-tribal companies since it was built.
In Colorado’s southwest, the Ute Mountain Ute tribe co-manages part of the Dolores Water Project. And, near Durango, the Animas/La Plata project is partially managed by the state’s two tribes. Ernest House directs the Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs.
“Not only do these water projects strengthen tribal sovereignty, but they also solidify a treaty obligation to the Utes here in Colorado. I think that by the tribe’s involvement in a lot of these projects, it provides a very important tool for future economic development, especially, specifically, water,” he says.
While the project is different, the goals are similar in Montana. When the tribes take over the dam there, they say, their sovereignty will be strengthened.
Jordan Thompson of Energy Keepers Inc. stands high above the Kerr Dam outside of Polson, Montana. The tribes in this area are preparing to take over the hydro project in 2015.
The massive Kerr Dam in Montana is near snowcapped mountains, close to ancient buffalo hunting grounds. Emerald green water violently sloshes over the lip of the dam and into the Flathead River. To say the area’s beautiful, is an understatement.
A 19th century treaty created the Flathead Indian Reservation, and later, white settlement brought agriculture. The massive dam was built on tribal land by a local power company in the 1930’s to quench the thirst of newly planted farms.
“This is a place of great spiritual significance for the tribes, and so when the dam was being built, they really resisted, they were trying to not have that dam built,” says Jordan Thompson.
Thompson’s with the tribally-run company that’s preparing to take over ownership of the dam. Despite tribal protests in the 30’s the dam was built and has been producing electricity ever since..
“There were just a bunch of people who built it, over 1200 people at one point. Ten tribal members were killed during the construction of it. It was built because the tribes were just powerless to do anything to stop it,” Thompson says.
Over the years, the dam supplied millions of dollars worth of power. The tribes received a small portion, as rent. Fish habitats were damaged, as the dam continued to generate electricity.
Now, the dam is about to change hands. A treaty signed in 1985 transfers ownership of the dam to the Salish and Kootenai.
“This is significant because it’s an assertion of the tribes sovereignty over the resources they’ve used for their entire existence,” says Sarah Bates with the University of Montana.
She studies water, natural resources and tribal lands. She says what the Salish and Kootenai are doing is a model for other tribes in the U.S.
“It’s happening around the country, this is something that tribes have the capacity to step up and play not just a stakeholder role, but actually an owner and management role. When they aren’t just participants in a process, but actually gain authority over those facilities, that’s a major step forward in asserting and realizing their sovereignty.”
Tribes in Oregon and New York state are now attempting to gain control of hydroelectric projects.
The 1000 foot boardwalk takes you to an overlook of the Kerr Dam, which stretches 540 feet across and 200 feet high.
The Kerr Dam is run by the company PPL Montana and the tribes are still negotiating the purchase price. PPL Montana values the dam at about $51 million, while the tribes say the number is closer to $16 million. Once the issue is resolved, tribal members plan to take over the dam in September of 2015.
This story is the result of an environmental fellowship put on by the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources.
A Bonneville Power Administration transmission-tower construction project has been on hold for more than a year as a landowner tries to defend ancient Indian archaeological sites and stops on the Lewis and Clark Trail.
The BPA wants to finish a project near an ancient-village site on land that runs past this bridge and around the bend on the Columbia River. STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
WISHRAM, Klickitat County —
All he was looking for was a little retirement property. But Robert Zornes, a Forks RV-park owner, wound up with quite a lot more.
“I kept seeing this property, 122 acres on more than a mile of the Columbia River for a quarter-million dollars, then it’s lowered to $100,000. And I am thinking, ‘This has to be a practical joke,’ ” Zornes said. So he bought it, right off a real-estate website, without ever talking to the property owner.
Then came the big surprise: He had purchased one of the most historically and archaeologically sensitive pieces of property in the state.
Home to a campsite and portage route on the Lewis and Clark Trail. A cave, with prehistoric Indian rock art. Indian burials, petroglyphs and story stones. And some of the last upland vestiges of an important Indian village near Celilo Falls, once one of the greatest Indian salmon fisheries, gathering grounds and trading areas in North America.
“I wanted a pig, a horse and a cow, or maybe a dog,” Zornes said. “I wasn’t looking for a historical property. I just wanted some place to retire.”
But since he purchased the property in 2011, Zornes often can be found in what he calls his war room: a study in his double-wide by the river, packed with historic photos and books — and documents from two years of frustrating correspondence with the Bonneville Power Administration.
The federal agency — which sells power from the dams on the Columbia and Lower Snake rivers — is in the middle of construction of a 28-mile, more than $200 million transmission line. Construction started right about when Zornes bought the property — and he soon received a letter from the agency informing him the BPA was about to cross the river and replace a tower near the cave. The new tower would be taller, wider and require blasting to construct — which he feared would destroy the cave and its ancient art.
And Zornes, as it turns out, is a history buff. As he put two and two together, he came to understand just how special the landscape he had purchased was. “BPA starts talking about a bulldozer and we kind of freaked out.”
BPA informed him in a 2012 letter that if he didn’t grant access across his property, the agency would dynamite an alternative access road, doing potentially more damage. The fight was on.
Zornes denied access across the easement on his property, saying it was granted to a different federal agency for another purpose, and since expired. He filed trespass claims. He invited the Yakama Indian Nation to revisit sacred lands on his property. He cold-called the lead preservation officer for the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail in Omaha and invited him to come have a look.
Zornes’ efforts so far have helped shut down construction of the project on his property at a cost of $2 million and counting. The agency contends its easement is valid, and that it can and will proceed with the project. Zornes is just as adamant in his opposition.
“You think the government is your friend,” Zornes said. “But they are more like the kid that beat you up for your lunch money.
“I’m not a senator, I am not a congressman. Here we are, two uneducated, lower- middle-class people in Forks,” he said, speaking of himself and his wife. “We have held them up more than a year. I think that’s significant.”
Bonneville officials say the agency has wanted to listen to all sides to reach agreements in the dispute, and stopped construction in order to do so.
“It’s a sensitive site, and we are trying to be extra careful,” said Lorri Bodi, BPA’s vice president for environment, fish and wildlife. She acknowledged there have been “bumps in the road.”
“We have discovered additional things, and certainly we have made some mistakes along the way,” she said. Those include a BPA contractor mistakenly bulldozing and destroying a prehistoric relic documented as a burial cairn on Yakama lands, despite promises to protect it.
Bodi contended the agency has made up for those mistakes and is working hard to minimize the damage by the project.
Preservation concerns
State records show a continuing pattern of frustration in getting the right answers from Bonneville, or any at all.
When the contractor bulldozed the cairn, the agency did not seem to appreciate the seriousness of the matter, state assistant attorney general Sandra Adix wrote Bonneville last summer.
Repeated attempts by the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation to gain specific information about the agency’s construction and its ongoing and potential effect on archaeological resources “seem to have fallen into a black hole,” Adix wrote in other correspondence.
The agency also has not included the National Lewis and Clark Historic Trail as a full partner in the consultation process, said Dan Wiley, chief of stewardship. “We have gotten short shrift and have continuously tried to bring to the table the recognition that this a unique site, a special site, and it deserves protection from further negative impacts.
“I don’t know if it is too late or not. That is really up to BPA and whether or not they have real concern about cultural resources, and protection of cultural resources.”
Wiley would like to see the transmission line located miles to the east. As planned, it will be in view from Columbia Hills State Park, with its petroglyphs, as well as the Lewis and Clark Historic Trail, and from across the river at the Confluence Project art installation planned at Celilo Village by internationally known artist Maya Lin.
It also will further clutter views of the Columbia River Gorge, but BPA already has obtained a promise from the Friends of the Columbia River Gorge not to sue in return for a payment of $1.8 million. The BPA also in December paid a more than $2 million settlement to the Yakama Indian Nation to allow the project to continue despite impacts to its culturally sensitive lands.
Conflict still unsolved
At Bonneville, there’s not at present a willingness to consider another alignment, top officials say. Because there is already a utility line across the river, landing on a tower dating to the 1950s near the cave. That alignment, chosen through a lengthy public review process as part of an environmental-impact statement, is preferred by BPA.
“It’s much like repaving an old highway; are you better off moving it, or leaving in the same place?” said Larry Bekkedahl, senior vice president for transmission services at BPA. “In this case we have chosen using the existing line, because it had lesser impacts than trying to find other routes that would move the line on both sides and have a new river crossing, as well as time delays. So the bottom line is we would reuse the existing line and not relocate it to another location.”
But what Bonneville has in mind is nothing like the impact of what is already there today, historic preservationists say.
“This is not just repaving,” said Allyson Brooks, Washington’s State Historic Preservation Officer. “It is the equivalent of taking a two-lane road and making it a superhighway. It is not the same thing. Maybe in essence, but in size and impact, it is greater.
“One of the reasons these are public processes is so people get to say what the impact is, it is not a unilateral decision. That is democracy.”
Bonneville has committed to moving the tower 20 feet farther north of the cave with its prehistoric rock art. But it will be a bigger, higher tower — 243 feet tall, compared with the 190-foot-tall tower near the cave today, with 22 lines instead of three. The new tower also has a much larger and taller footing, and requires controlled blasting to set it in the basalt cliffs above the river.
BPA assures the blasting won’t destroy the cave. But that’s still under review — and the agency’s credibility has been dented by historic sites and archaeology overlooked and even destroyed as construction got under way.
“We are still working on damage assessment for the cairn, and the impacts for the Lewis and Clark Trail are unresolved,” Brooks said. “If we could lessen the direct and visual impacts, we would certainly prefer that happening. It’s been difficult. It feels rushed, and in the rush the time hasn’t been taken to really balance things the way they should be balanced.”
To Zornes, the fact that one transmission line is there today doesn’t justify building another, it argues for backing off a place that already has been altered by industrialization. First came the railroad. Then the inundation of Celilo Falls to build the Dalles Dam in 1957. Then the transmission towers built that exist today — to be superseded now by even larger towers, with more lines.
“Our preference is no new towers,” Zornes said. “Two wrongs don’t make a right. The first tower should not have ever been placed on this historic and culturally rich and highly scenic bluff.”
Bonneville has since written Wiley to state the agency doesn’t believe the trail merits listing on the National Register of Historic Places, which would afford it more protection — a decision blasted by Washington’s Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, the National Park Service, and Johnson Meninick, Yakama Indian Nation cultural resources program manager.
The conflict remains unresolved.
“What is left is intact”
Wiley said it wasn’t until he came here in person that he understood just how significant this place is.
“You can only see so much from your desktop,” he said.
Once on the site, he walked the same sands that bedeviled Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery as they portaged around the roaring falls at Celilo, one of the greatest fisheries in the aboriginal world.
Just above on the cliffs is the very spot where William Clark likely stood to draw the famous Codex H map of what he called “the Great Falls of the Columbia” — Celilo Falls, with Indian lodges and fish-drying racks along the banks.
“It is a highly significant location for the two cultures of the Pacific Northwest and their intersection,” Wiley said. “What is left is intact. The palisades that are above the water are described in the journals. The walkway that Lewis and Clark took on the north bank, that is pretty much intact, and there is no other place on the planet that the events of Oct. 22 and 23 and 24, 1805, could have taken place.”
Just above Lewis and Clark’s portage route is the cave, used for tribal vision quests and other religious and spiritual rites for centuries untold. Inside, the light is soft, and drawn figures with outstretched arms keep an enigmatic vigil on the cool rock walls.
Through its narrow opening, the cave looks to a view not seen in all the centuries people have stood here: the transmission towers Bonne- ville already has built in its chosen alignment, just across the river.
STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Prehistoric Indian art on a cave on Robert Zornes’ property.
Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com
THE HILL
A high-profile lawsuit on the voting rights of Native Americans could help determine control of the Senate in the next Congress.
A group of 16 Native Americans, nine of whom are military veterans, is waging a protracted legal battle against Montana’s Democratic secretary of State and county administrators, arguing for improved access to voter registration sites.
The case will be significant for Democrats in 2014 as they vie to keep control of the upper chamber by holding retiring Sen. Max Baucus’s (D-Mont.) seat. Republicans need to pick up six seats to win back control of the Senate.
The litigation is moving forward at the same time as a recent Supreme Court decision that no longer requires a number of jurisdictions to get advance federal permission in order to make changes to their election laws.
The three Montana counties now being sued have historically lost Section 2 Voting Rights Act cases. However, for the state’s overwhelmingly poor and geographically isolated Native Americans — who vote predominantly for Democrats — the Montana fight is deeply personal. Tribal leaders say it is an issue of fundamental fairness.
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An estimated 50,000 Native Americans are eligible to vote in Montana. Many of them live on reservations throughout the sprawling 550-mile-wide state, which means driving more than 100 miles for some to reach polling sites established long before Native Americans got the right to vote.
It’s the distance equivalent of voters in Washington, D.C., having to drive to Gettysburg, Pa. and back to complete their late registration forms or cast early in-person absentee ballots.
If the state allowed more voting stations, known as satellite offices, on reservations, more Native Americans would have the ability to vote by a factor of 250 percent, a group supporting the lawsuit argues.
This group, which is providing strategic and financial support to the plaintiffs, includes Four Directions, a nationally known voting rights organization, and Tom Rodgers, the Native American lobbyist who blew the whistle on former lobbyist Jack Abramoff for charging Native American tribes exorbitant fees on lobbying.
The Department of Justice, Montana tribal leaders, the ACLU and the National Congress of American Indians have all backed the plaintiffs in the legal dispute.
The origin of the lawsuit began when Rodgers, a member of Montana’s Blackfeet tribe, received a phone call that U.S. Army Spc. Antonio Burnside, a fellow Blackfeet member whose tribal name was Many Hides, was killed last year in combat on Good Friday in Afghanistan.
In late April 2012, after raising the money to help celebrate the soldier’s life, Rodgers said a feeling of rage overcame him.
He noted that Native Americans have the highest percentage of military enlistees of any ethnic group.
“Some of the poorest of the poor can fight a war and die for you on a hellish moonscaped mountainside and then when they return home in a flag-draped coffin, you seek to diminish their native brothers’ and sisters’ ability to vote. Young dead soldiers do not speak. They leave us their deaths. It is us who must give them meaning by remembering them,” Rodgers said. “We got tired of the dark lies in rooms of white marble. Now the plaintiff warriors will take their faith in justice by acting with justice to other rooms of white marble: the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and Congress.”
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who won reelection last year, said that poverty and unemployment levels on reservations are higher than in the rest of the state, and that many Native Americans don’t have access to transportation or can’t take time off from work.
“Native Americans are about 6 percent of the population, so it’s absolutely significant,” said Tester.
“Everybody who’s entitled to vote, we ought to give them every opportunity to vote,” Tester said. “We shouldn’t be limiting participation, we should be encouraging it.”
The suit might have an impact beyond Montana as well. If it goes as far as the Supreme Court, major Native American populations in Arizona, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nevada, California, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon and Alaska could see their voting rights greatly expanded or restricted.
Democrats are facing challenging elections in four of those states next year.
Native Americans have played a crucial role in electing Democratic senators, including Tester and Sens. Tim Johnson (S.D.), Maria Cantwell (Wash.), Al Franken (Minn.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and Mark Begich (Alaska.). All have won elections by fewer than 4,000 votes.
But for now, Montana — where Democrats are scrambling to find a candidate following ex-Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s surprise decision not to run — is the central battleground.
Montana Secretary of State Linda McCulloch (D) says she supports the Native Americans’ demands, but that the lawsuit is misdirected.
At a video-recorded meeting with the tribes earlier this year, tensions between the two sides were palpable as they failed to negotiate a compromise after a nearly hour-long discussion.
“I care that the people at this table have equal access, and what is in my power as secretary of State to do, I can do,” said McCulloch. “What I do not have the authority over is establishing county clerk offices. That authority belongs to the county governing body, the county commissioners.
“We will support and assist any county whose governing body has made a decision to open a second county clerk election office that can offer services such as registering voters and issuing absentee ballots. You have my unwavering commitment to that.”
A spokeswoman for McCulloch, citing the ongoing litigation, declined to comment for this article.
The plaintiffs and tribal leaders rejected McCulloch’s remarks. They said Montana’s secretary of State should join the tribes by officially standing with the plaintiffs and leading the county commissioners to create the satellite offices.
J. Gerry Hebert, who worked on voting rights issues for more than 20 years in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, doesn’t agree with McCulloch’s assessment either, saying that this type of case falls directly within her office’s jurisdiction.
“The secretary of State is the chief election officer and as such has the overall responsibility to ensure that all the state laws are complied with,” said Hebert, now the executive director of the Campaign Legal Center. “And in this case, which is typically the case, a plaintiff will file a lawsuit and bring it against both local and state election officials, because it is both of their responsibilities.”
Although the issue has been in the local press for nearly a year, the Montana Democratic Party has not weighed in on the lawsuit, saying only that it supports greater access to polling sites and will continue aggressive “get out the vote” efforts.
“Increasing access to the ballot box on reservations and throughout Montana has always been a priority,” said Chris Saeger, a spokesman for the state’s party. “We would welcome any improvements that make it easier for Montanans to have their say in elections.”
“The Democratic Party of Montana has said we have done what we could,” Rodgers said. “But hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger, for the way things are, and courage, to make a difference.”
Carole Goldberg, a professor and vice chancellor at UCLA’s School of Law who has dealt extensively with Native American legal rights, said discrimination is widespread in many states with Native populations.
“There are persistent patterns where states have criminal jurisdiction on reservations and the counties that exercise this jurisdiction locate their facilities and services in a place convenient for the non-Native population and not the Native populations,” said Goldberg, who has donated to multiple Democratic candidates.
Barring a settlement, oral arguments are expected to begin this fall.
The federal agency — which sells power from the dams on the Columbia and Lower Snake rivers — is in the middle of construction of a 28-mile, more than $200 million transmission line. Construction started right about when Zornes bought the property — and he soon received a letter from the agency informing him the BPA was about to cross the river and replace a tower near the cave. The new tower would be taller, wider and require blasting to construct — which he feared would destroy the cave and its ancient art.
Bonneville has committed to moving the tower 20 feet farther north of the cave with its prehistoric rock art. But it will be a bigger, higher tower — 243 feet tall, compared with the 190-foot-tall tower near the cave today, with 22 lines instead of three. The new tower also has a much larger and taller footing, and requires controlled blasting to set it in the basalt cliffs above the river.
