After reading There There, I was curious about more of the specifics surrounding Native Americans today. I was surprised that things like blood quanta to measure ‘nativeness’ even existed, and I wanted to know what was the current situation surrounding things like their territory and sovereignty.
One of the stories I stumbled across was truly astonishing: Two months prior to detection of lead in the Flint MI water supply, a water supply serving the Navajo community was found to have exceeded safe uranium levels for more than a decade. I wasn’t planning on writing my blog about natives, and it was really just supposed to be a quick google search. Eventually, however, I fell down the rabbit hole of news articles and youtube videos. Going back to the story of uranium poisoning a native water supply, although state officials were aware of the problem, in contrast to Flint, no notification to the community occurred, and no federal outcry or resources resulted.
When I did more research, I found that more than a century of hard rock mining has left a legacy of >160,000 abandoned mines in the Western USA that are home to the majority of Native American lands. (National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2017)
I found out that in the current day, new mining companies offer to clean up old sites in exchange for new mining rights. Basically they take advantage of decades of abuse to commit more abuse. It’s like helping someone with their gambling problem to start selling them alcohol instead. I think it is comical how nefarious these people are. On top of that it feels like their evil plans are something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon.
Perpetua was the best example I found of this. Its a mining company seeking native lands in Idaho, and a review by the Environmental Protection Agency found that Perpetua’s initial plan for a 20-year operation would inflict “disproportionately high and adverse impacts” on tribes
Despite the blatant harm that the mining company would cause, Perpetua decided to prey on community weakness to buy their way in. In 2021, the New York Times reported that Perpetua has won over many nearby residents by promising to repair the damage done by more than a century of mining. It says it will restore creeks and reconnect the river so fish can swim freely. There have been years of cleanup efforts at the site, but Perpetua says it alone is willing to undertake a full-scale restoration that could cost $100 million. Yet, Mr. Nielsen, a local resident, has said “I think the benefit agreement was just their attempt to buy people off, in a legal way,”.
It honestly boggles the mind how things like this can just happen. Wherever you look, all over the board, Natives who were promised land and resource rights are having those things taken away. This also happens in a very broad scope; The Standing Rock protests of 2016 to the ongoing fight against the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska are all just examples of how Native Americans continue to face encroachment on their lands and destruction of their sacred sites. The history of broken treaties and forced removals that stretches back to the early years of European colonization has created a legacy of distrust and conflict that continues to shape relations between Native Americans and the U.S. today.
The next step on this yellow brick road leads to water rights. All of this pollution and exploitation has a massive impact on access to clean water. As a result of pollution and a lack of infrastructure many natives don’t even have running water. About 3,300 homes in more than 30 rural Alaska communities lack indoor plumbing. On the Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation, about one-third of the 175,000 residents are without running water. (US News, 2021)
The situation has gotten to the point where some reservations look like something out of a refugee camp. There are pictures of volunteers handing out water bottles to an insatiable sea of waiting hands. One native, Eloise Sullivan, uses an outhouse and often drives before dawn to beat the crowd at a water-filling station near the Arizona-Utah border to get water for the five people in her household. She estimated her family uses about 850 gallons (3,200 liters) a week.
After all the promises and treaties, it’s astonishing that things are even allowed to get this bad. I want to spend more time researching the laws and systems in place that allow these kinds of things to happen and will post an update for next week’s blog.
Hi, Varun, this is a great blog! Something I like about your posts that I think no one else really writes about is that they tackle real-world current situations (like news articles!), but you’re able to keep it very engaging with your commentary and knowledgeable explanations! Your decision to write about situations regarding Natives is an excellent indicator of how your learning and 2nd level thinking extend outside of the classroom and just goes to show how passionate and serious you are about topics you’re interested in. Moving onto the actual situation, I was just as shocked as you when I read that a lead detection in the water of Flint, Michigan, was uncovered quickly, but took 10 years for a Native community! It’s crazy to think how if we had an unsafe water supply here in Naperville, something would be done about it immediately, but it’s as if Native people aren’t even given the time of day for a problem as serious as this, and are not treated as a priority. It’s very unfortunate that back then and even now, Natives are still getting land and resources taken from them. You would’ve thought that something would’ve changed by now but no. Overall, you did a fantastic job on this post, Varun, and I hope you enjoy the book I gave you!
This is such difficult information to read 🙁
Hi Varun, very interesting post. I liked how you extended our in-class analysis of Native life in a more real and quantifiable manner. This method truly opened my eyes to the extent of Native mistreatment and legal manipulation that occurs in our modern world. I find that it is a depressing glance toward history, as when the initial European settlers arrived in the Americas, they used loopholes within contracts to take advantage of both the Native’s poor understanding of foreign languages as well as their lack of legal knowledge to practically scam them out of acres of land. It truly is sad to see that these imperialistic tactics are still being employed by large entities such as the companies you mentioned. This goes to show just how many holes there still are in the “free world”, where every minority is supposedly entitled to protective rights and liberties, which clearly aren’t enforced to their full extent in certain cases such as this one. On top of this, these Native communities and settlements are typically in poor states to begin with, with limited access to sustainable social services and a rampancy in substance abuse, which we saw the extent of in There There. So, for these companies to burst into these areas, and to offer what seems like help to an already deteriorating community but in reality is a deceptive tool to gain more profits is simply taking advantage of desperation, full stop. But overall, great job in laying out the issue with evidence, really helped shape the extent of the problem for me.
Sup Varun! It’s good that There There left such an impact on you for you to do outside research about Native Americans. When we learned about the blood quanta in class, I was shocked that not only did they need to prove that they were Native American, but enough Native American to be considered as. I’m looking forward to learning more about what you’ve found. Most people have heard about the Flint MI water supply having lead in it, but barely anyone has heard about the Navajo community’s water supply. I was in a similar boat as you; at first I thought I wouldn’t be too interested in news, but as I started reading I’d get more and more invested into what’s going on in the world. I think it’s completely outrageous how all the state officials had to do was not tell the community to avoid having to do anything about it. Maybe all those abandoned mines could be used as shelter for the Native Americans? Cleaning up old sites in exchange for new mining rights sounds like such a big scam to me because the Native Americans aren’t gaining any of their land back, just letting it get used and handed down.
Varun I personally think you had a very good blog and I love how you dived in to your own research in your own studies of Native American World. I do feel like Tommy orange is a very good job of bringing the reader in and I think personally he intrigued me with a lot of aspects of native culture and I will be very interested to learn more about them as well and educate myself on their culture and whatnot. Your blog actually gave me the opportunity to do that in a very efficient and informative way. Like for example I had no idea that a lot of mining facilities are a lot of mining places that happen to be on what used to be and should still be Native American land. I feel like you gave a lot of issues that are still current on going in a lot of issues that I feel like should be solved let alone talked about. I appreciate being able to read your informative blog and hopefully I get to read another one soon.