New West Film Review

Documentary Explores Environmental Threats to Native American Lands

By Jenny Shank, 11-08-05

	The indomitable Gail Small.

Homeland: Four Portraits of Native Action, which will screen at the Denver International Film Festival on November 15 and 16 and on Montana Public Television on November 8, offers a compelling, in-depth look at the environmental pressures that Native American reservations across the country are currently facing. In four segments filmed in Montana, Alaska, New Mexico, and Maine, director Roberta Grossman illustrates how Native Americans are fighting incursions on their land. The Bush administration’s policy of exploiting all possible sources of energy in the United States has pitted many tribes against the federal government and energy companies in the most intense legal battles they’ve faced since the last U.S. energy crisis of the 1970’s. Although each of the segments offers a David-versus-Goliath-like tale of an impoverished Indian reservation struggling against some of the wealthiest corporations in the country, Homeland is a hopeful film, in large part because of the charismatic, indefatigable tribal leaders who are heading up the fight.

Lame Deer, Montana, Northern Cheyenne Reservation
Gail Small is an indomitable Cheyenne lawyer who is leading the southeastern Montana reservation’s battle against energy companies. “All my life we’ve been fighting to keep strip mining off our land,� she explained. “We’re surrounded by Montana’s largest power plant, five strip mines, and the largest coal fire generating complex in the country.� Even when the tribe has succeeded in keeping power companies’ operations off the reservation, these companies frequently set up operations right on the perimeter of the land, dumping coal bed methane water into streams that the Cheyenne once used.

Although the government is now interested in natural gas instead of coal, to Small it seems that they are reprising the “coal wars� of thirty years ago, when tribal leaders who could not speak English signed a contract allowing coal companies to explore their lands. When the leaders realized that “exploration� meant the destruction of their reservation, they sued to break the contract. At the time, there was no high school on the reservation and Cheyenne children were bused 25 miles away to school in Colstrip, Montana. In Colstrip, many of the white children’s parents worked for coal companies, and the tension of the times took its toll: The Cheyenne were taunted and called “prairie niggers,� and many of them dropped out of school.

In the 1980’s, the Cheyenne won their court case and all the leases were cancelled. This was when Small started a non-profit organization called Native Action, whose goal is to provide information to tribe members about the economic and environmental choices they face. Although per capita income is less than $10,000 a year in the reservation, and as Small says, “we could all be millionaires if we signed� a contract with a natural gas company, for thirty years tribe members have voted this option down. But the Northern Cheyenne face a new legal struggle—recently the Bureau of Land Management approved methane exploration on the boarders of the reservation without consulting with tribe members, and so once again Small has filed a lawsuit.

Arctic Village, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska
Evon Peter, the young chief of the Gwich’in people in Arctic Village, has lead the fight to keep oil exploration out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The government’s planned drilling areas include a swath of land in the migratory path of the Porcupine caribou herd, the animals that the tribe depends upon for food and clothing.

The Gwich’in live in the far northeastern corner of Alaska, and they would have continued to lead lives isolated from most of America had not oil been discovered near their town. In 1960, President Eisenhower set aside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a protected area, but eight years later a major oil site was discovered west of the refuge. Since then, oil companies have fought to open up more of the land for exploitation, with only a brief pause after a wave of bad publicity from the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska on March 23, 1989.

Peter continues his legal battles with the powerful forces who support drilling in ANWR, and as he explained, he has to work at the same speed as those who are working toward the opposite goal, a pace that disrupts the traditional patterns of tribal life.

Navajo Reservation, New Mexico
In the 1950’s, Navajos worked in uranium mines with no protection from radiation, which led to a hundred percent increase in infant deaths, a lung cancer rate in miners that was 28 times higher the rate in other Navajos, and a quintupling of the bone cancer rate. The mines were eventually shut down after the Three Mile Island scare led to the downfall of the uranium industry.

In 1994, a uranium company initiated plans to resume mining in the Navajo Nation. They promised Navajo landowners thousands of dollars, and the landowners agreed to sell the mineral rights to their land. Mitchell and Rita Capitan, a middle-aged couple with four children, decided to organize a community meeting with the goal of blocking the uranium mining. Although as Rita said, “We lost some friends,� eventually they won over a large number of Navajos who signed a petition against the uranium mining. But their fight has been renewed, as the energy bills of 2001 and 2003 emphasize uranium exploration in the U.S.

Penobscot, Maine
The Penobscot tribe used to live throughout the state of Maine, but their reservation is now confined to a series of islands that are downstream from pulp and paper factories which pump pollutants, including dioxin, into the water. The cancer rate among the Penobscot is double that among the rest of Maine’s population, and tribe members suffer skin rashes, headaches, and lesions from the polluted water. The fish in the Penobscot River are so full of toxins that the state of Maine issued a health advisory stipulating that no should one eat more than one 8-ounce serving of this fish per month. This has posed a problem for the Penobscot, for whom fish is a traditional food and an important staple of their diet.

As the paper industry is a major force in Maine’s economy, it has lobbied the state legislature effectively to keep environmental regulations lax. In recent years, the state petitioned the EPA to take control of the permits for the paper mills, and Penobscot Chief Barry Dana led the legal battle against this action, which would allow for even looser environmental controls. The tribe ultimately lost their court case, but as is typical of the Native American leaders featured in Homeland, Dana remains optimistic: “Thirty years of environmental protections are quietly being dismantled. People are destroying the country, but it’s going to be people to bring it back. The wisdom that’s going to be the driving force behind this is held in this land’s first people. It’s our culture, it’s our traditions and our values that are going to save the planet.�

Homeland offers a cogent account of the legal battles that Native Americans have been fighting to avoid the environmental degradation of their lands, and it has won several awards, including the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and the Social Justice Award at the same event. Homeland is a finalist for the Best Documentary Award at the Denver International Film Festival, where it will screen on November 15 at 9 p.m. and November 16 at 6:15 p.m.

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