Excerpt from Resource Exploitation in Native North America: A Plague Upon the Peoples, Praeger, 2016
We begin our toxic journey with the Quapaw, in Oklahoma, whose homeland is now nearly uninhabitable. On March 25, 2013, the Quapaw sued the United States federal government for $75 million, alleging failure to clean up the nation’s largest lead and zinc mine, which had produced billions of tons of ore. Much of the reservation’s water had become polluted. Bullfrog Films and director Matt Myers made a documentary film on the Quapaws’ pursuit of justice, released in 2011. The film, simply titled Tar Creek, provides a searing portrait of human and natural damage wrought upon a 47-square-mile area in northeastern Oklahoma now known as the Tar Creek Superfund site, where residents are still seeking relief from acidic mine water in creeks, lead poisoning of children, and sinkholes that swallow backyards of contaminated houses.
With very little editorial comment – none is required – Tar Creek describes the demise of the Native American and European-American communities that supplied the materials basic to two world wars. The Quapaws, whose homeland once encompassed much of Arkansas, were removed to a small tract of land during the 1830s; whites later moved in around them. The Quapaws, once a nation of at least 35,000 people, were reduced to about 150, mainly by smallpox and other diseases. They were battling back when the mining ruined their new homeland.
The film’s interviews are striking, but lack a sense of coherence. Even so, the story is powerful. Following the mining, mountainous piles of “chat” (mining tailings) remained; local waters infused with sulfur ran rust-red. No one told the residents that the enormous piles of chat caused developmental difficulties for the children who played on them. Families laid out picnics on the chat piles and fathers built sandboxes filled with the gray sandy material that was poisoning their children.
Personal detail is the film’s strong point. Environmental problems, we are told, are people problems, as Tar Creek follows a tale of bureaucratic ineptitude. The federal government initially spent $138 million replacing soil around many houses, an average of $70,000 per house in an area where the homes themselves averaged $58,000 in value. All told, the remediation effort did very little to address systemic problems caused by leaks from the chat piles and massive water pollution. One report estimated that 50 large trucks would be required around the clock for 40 years to clear the chat piles – and then where would they dump it?
The film follows people’s responses as the government conducted a slow-motion buy-out in which very few people received anything close to what they would need to start over elsewhere. The camera pans a dead landscape largely bereft of animal, fish, and bird life as human communities slowly disintegrate. One resident compares his community’s fate to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. He is wrong, in a sense, because this environmental apocalypse – “forty-seven square miles of prairie turned into permanent wasteland” – is worse than anything described in Carson’s book.
Fully one-third of the Superfund sites declared by the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States are on Native lands.
By mid-2014, parts of the 40-square-mile Tar Creek Quapaw toxic mining site, most notably areas called the Catholic Forty and Chat Base 11 North were being cleaned up as part of the first Superfund project by the Quapaws’ tribal government, cooperating with state and local environmental agencies. “We completed the first cleanup less expensively and better than previous efforts,” said Quapaw Chairman John Berrey. “Our goal is to make this land useful and productive again. We live here and we care about the outcomes, so we are very pleased to have these two new agreements in place” (Quapaw Take Lead, 2014). Roughly 72,000 tons of contaminated material had been removed from the Catholic Forty by 2014 — a start, with a lifetime of decontamination to come.
