PABLO - Salish Kootenai College's Johnny Arlee/Victor Charlo Theater hosted a panel on environmental justice last Saturday. Honor the Earth, a not-for-profit Native-led organization from Minneapolis, Minn., established by now Executive Director Winona LaDuke and Indigo Girls Amy Ray and Emily Saliers sponsored the event.

Four guest panelists offered perspective on some of the region's most pressing environmental issues. Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes' Director of Natural Resources Rich Janssen and Cultural Preservation Officer Francais Auld introduced attendees to the spiritual, cultural and environmental concerns here on the Flathead Reservation.

"This panel is an opportunity to look at some of the big pictures in North America," LaDuke, the discussion's moderator, said. "From the issues of our oil consumption and addiction that are best exemplified today by the tar sands of Alberta and the destruction of indigenous communities in the far north, to the cultural and environmental issues here in the Salish and Kootenai community."

Alberta tar sands

Canada's Eriel Tchekwie Deranger opened the discussion. A representative from the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation of Northern Alberta, she spoke of horrors barely fathomable in modern civilized society. Her small, isolated community nestled along the mighty Athabasca River has become host to the largest, most destructive and invasive method of extracting oil on Earth today.

According to Deranger, the tar sands project has been a second wave of colonization, "destroying our lands, traditional territories... essentially destroying our cultures because we have been left out of the conversation."

Vast marsh lands and plots of the great Boreal Forest are now wasteland - ripped up and dug out for open-pit mining of "Bitumen", not oil, but tar mixed with clay, minerals and dirt. Four tons of dirt are spun with two to three barrels of super-heated fresh water from Lake Athabasca to separate the oil from the sand and produce one barrel of crude oil.

Massive amounts of toxic by-products flow into toxic lakes, some 30-kilometers across. These " tailing ponds," as the industry refers to them, leech chemicals into the river systems at the rate of 11-million liters-per-day, Deranger said. Large enough to be seen from outer-space, these ponds of thick sludge are to blame for the deaths of thousands of animals: Bears, moose, caribou, rabbits and hundreds of migratory bird species that land, unknowingly, into the muck.

Another by-product is stored on the perimeter. Sulfur cakes sit five stories high uncovered and open to the elements, carried away by the wind and rain. According to Deranger, the air-quality in the surrounding areas is equal to cities in China of nine-million people.

"It leaves an immense ecological footprint and it takes an immense amount of [natural gas] energy to sustain this," Deranger said. "It's a scary, scary world that we are moving towards and this is only the tip of the iceberg."

For most of the year, the community of Fort Chipewyan is only accessible by air or boat, Deranger said. Basic essentials like milk and bread can cost up to $16 in the local grocery store.

"This is a community that needs to rely on the natural food sources that are abundant because it does not have a strong economic base," she said.

However, fish are now pulled from the water with crooked spines, lesions, tumors and high levels of cancer-causing chemicals. In the past year, there has been such an alarming increase in the numbers of cancer cases (53 in 45 people) that officials advise eating only one fish per month, in a community that has relied for generations on its waterways as the major source of nutrition.

One of the most alarming rates of cancer is bile duct cancer, which Deranger said is so rare, it's normally seen once in 100,000 people, but this population of 1,200 has had six cases in the past year. This cancer is directly related to arsenic, mercury and poly-cyclic hydrocarbons, which are by-products of tar sands development, she said.

"Canada is becoming a tarred nation," she said. "And the government has no concern."

About one-million barrels a day are shipped from Northern Alberta across the United States and Canada. Now, Deranger urged Montanans to protest a proposed pipe-line called the Keystone XL pipeline, a 1,980-mile long project, which will carry up to 900,000 barrels of Canadian tar sands oil through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma to Texas.

"We have a shot here in Montana of not doing the big stupid," LaDuke said in closing. "We have a shot at stopping a pipeline, at stopping the supply chain for the tar sands. [With stimulus money] don't build roads for the tar sands, build power lines for wind."

"We call this the holy land," La Duke said. "It's not someplace else, it's right here."

Local issues

Rich Janssen said he learned environmental stewardship from his grandmother, now 89-years-old. An enrolled tribal member and CSKT employee since 1993, he is now charged with the sometimes overwhelming task of protecting the 1.2-million-acre Flathead Indian Reservation.

"Flathead Lake is the largest fresh water lake west of the Mississippi River," he said. "It's the crown jewel."

According to Janssen, tar sands and coal-bed methane development in Alberta and British Columbia, Canada, will directly affect the Flathead.

"It's a big deal," he said of the issue, which he considers the area's No. 1 concern.

"We are now considered the best air quality that you can have," Janssen said. "To keep it that way, we've had to do a lot of fighting."

Other topics, such as invasive species like zebra muscles and lake trout are of primary concern.

"They are not intended to be in Flathead Lake," he said. "They can come into our water and are very difficult to get rid of."

The ongoing problem of illegal dumping causes the tribe to spend valuable resources, including time and money to clean it up.

"We have such a vast, wide-spread land and people can be very lazy," Janssen said. "We don't have the money or tax-base to pick up after people, but again, we do it because we feel it is in our best interest to protect our land."

Finally, Janssen addressed the 2008 fuel spill on Hwy. 35, which dumped roughly 5,000 gallons of oil into the Flathead water table. Two years and millions of dollars later, "we are still dealing with that today," he said.

Cultural woes

Francais Auld was raised by a traditional Kootenai family in Elmo. Now employed as a CSKT Cultural Preservation Officer, Auld spoke passionately about the places of cultural significance and the never-ending fight to protect them.

Auld and his family still have strong ties to the Kootenai traditions and cultural way of life. His first language is Kootenai and second language is English. He believes strongly that the language, songs, dances, prayers and gatherings at these places of cultural significance, "places you go to seek a vision," are being lost today because of the impacts of mining and recreation.

"We are in the time that things are different," he said. "The Earth is bleeding as we speak right now. How is that going to be taken care of? How far is that going to go?"

Through legal battles and legal systems, there are now some laws in place to protect these areas of "great importance," but according to Auld, "the sex, drugs, stealing, everything that comes along is because we don't visit our sacred sites often enough."

Auld spoke at length about the Chief Cliff mining project that has "checker-boarded our reservation" and is expanding. He, along with a group of Elmo's youth have been writing letters and encouraging formal action to halt the project, but nothing seems to work.

"It's been a hard, hard, hard climb with that," he said. "It's up to us as Indian people to share with our nieces and nephews and get them there, break that negative cycle. Hopefully, the foundations we are setting today will make some differences for the young ones to learn."

To our east

Arlee attorney, Pat Smith, presented on behalf of Gail Small, Executive Director of the non-profit organization Native Action.

For 30 years, the Northern Cheyenne Tribe has fought the mining and coal-bed methane projects along the Tongue River in Eastern Montana. What Smith calls a "spider-web of reservoirs and pipelines," these coal-mining plants surround the reservation on all sides and contribute to some of the worst air and water quality in the world. The proposed Otter Creek project would be the largest strip mine in the world and provide major spiritual and environmental concerns for the Northern Cheyenne people.

"We've got to do a major shift to alternative energy," Smith said. "Talk to everyone you can. Put a letter in the paper. We have to get off the oil addiction."