Blackfeet, Conservationists Fight Drilling in Montana

Buster Yellow Kidney rode his horse into a clearing high on a ridge in the Rocky Mountains and gazed across to Goat Mountain, where he and his late wife used to fast and purify themselves.

“I’ve only gone back up there twice since she died,” the Blackfeet tribal elder said, his aging features set in a solemn mask. Then his face brightened and with a sweep of his gnarled hand, he added: “This whole country is sacred to us.”

His gesture encompassed the entire mountain stronghold from Badger Pass north to the Two Medicine River and Elk Calf Mountain, a 130,000-acre primitive area that lies wedged between Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness, southwest of the small town of Browning.

Yellow Kidney, who opposes any development of the area, and a government geologist had ridden miles up onto the east flank of the Rockies to get a view of the lands that are called Badger-Two Medicine. They were here to look over the sites where Chevron Corp. and a second company propose to drill for oil and gas.

The public lands--administered by the U.S. Forest Service as a primitive recreation area--were once part of the million-acre Blackfeet Indian Reservation and had been ceded to the government in 1896 by starving Indians in exchange for food. The Indians retained the right to hunt, gather wood and practice their religious rites in these sacred mountains.

Oil experts say the layered geological structures beneath the mountains may be rich in natural gas. And the government stands ready to issue drilling permits, blocked only by the protests of Indian traditionalists and a handful of environmentalists who point out these wild lands are the home of endangered grizzly bears and timber wolves.

The Blackfeet tribal council so far has avoided taking a stand on oil and gas development in the Badger-Two Medicine. However, some Indian leaders favor oil exploration in these mountains, but only if the impoverished tribe benefits economically.

The principles involved in the Badger-Two Medicine controversy have been debated in Congress and argued before the U.S. Supreme Court without resolution. There are no clear ground rules for deciding questions involving Indian sacred lands and environmental protections in the development of gas and oil.

The basic question remains: Should wildcatters be allowed to explore for oil and gas in an area of magnificent beauty that is also sacred ground for Blackfeet Indians?

For the forest service, the answer is emphatically yes. Development can take place without hampering the Indians’ religious activities or damaging the grizzly and timber wolf habitat, rangers say. The forest service Oct. 6 formally rejected all administrative appeals filed by opponents to block drilling.

The next move is up to the environmental groups and the increasingly militant Pikuni Traditionalists Assn., an organization of Blackfeet who practice ancient tribal rights and vow to block oil and gas development in the Badger-Two Medicine. If all else fails, some activists say they will physically block the drilling rigs.

Most agree that the decisions made here will have a wide impact on environmental issues elsewhere and on future claims of Indians to lands they consider sacred.

Environmentalists see this as a textbook case of conflicting land uses and say it is a battle they dare not lose.

“This is probably the most important case we’ve seen in the past decade,” said Tom France, attorney for the National Wildlife Federation. “It’s become a national test of where we want to go with our resource policies . . . (and) whether there are adequate protections for (Indian) traditionalists’ values,” France said .

On the other side, Chevron has no thought of backing off, even though issuance of the drilling permit has already been stalled for years. Said Chevron spokesman Dean Forsgren, “If we give up on this one, then everyone will assume we’ll give up on others, too.”

Government regulators say they too are being put to the test. Forest policies dictate a multiple-use approach to land management that includes hunting, fishing, timber harvest and the development of mineral resources. Oil and gas exploration are valid uses of the area, since it has not been officially designated a wilderness, forest rangers say.

For tribal elders like George Kicking Woman, 77, keeper of the First Thunder Pipe Bundle, the Badger-Two Medicine is the last vestige of the wild heritage of the Pikunis, a nomadic warrior tribe that was a part of the great Blackfeet Nation. The Pikuni, along with their allies--the Blood, Northern Piegan and Gros Ventre tribes--were buffalo hunters and raiders who dominated all of what is now Montana, much of Wyoming and hunted north into Alberta and Saskatchewan.

The Pikuni, southernmost of the Blackfeet tribes, were granted millions of acres by treaty for a reservation that stretched from the Continental Divide east across all of Montana, north of the Missouri River. By 1896, the buffalo had all been killed off and the Pikuni, now called simply the Blackfeet, were starving. They sold off most of their reservation for food and supplies, retaining only the right to hunt, gather lodge poles and worship in the Badger-Two Medicine.

Kicking Woman, a large, quiet man with gentle features, fears the old ways will be lost forever with his own passing and with the development of the sacred lands in the mountains. Up there in the Badger-Two Medicine there are no shrines, no altars. Instead, he explained, all of nature has spiritual significance, the streams, the otter that play there, the mountains.

“It’s pretty country and I don’t want it ruined,” Kicking Woman said in an interview on the sprawling reservation at the base of the mountains. “Leave it as it is, save the little streams . . . development will only pollute the area.”

The controversy has rekindled the old arguments over who really owns these lands, the government or the tribe. The small but active Pikuni Traditionalists Assn. and some members of the tribal council defiantly claim that the 1896 treaty was only a 50-year lease granting the whites surface rights to look for gold, not a sale of the land.

“It is our land,” said Curley Bear Wagner, a Vietnam veteran active in the American Indian Movement occupation of Alcatraz and other Indian causes. He talks militantly about blocking any oil development by outsiders, saying: “It’s nobody’s business but ours . . . the Blackfeet will take care of the land.”

There are about 9,000 Blackfeet living in a half dozen small communities scattered across the rolling prairies of the reservation that flanks the Rocky Mountains. Some raise cattle, others work for the tribe in law enforcement, road maintenance and administration of tribal businesses. Unemployment is high, running 80% in the winter, and poverty is pervasive.

Because the proposed wells in the Badger-Two Medicine are on federal lands, the tribe will get no royalties if oil or gas is found, forest officials and the oil companies say. They contend the tribe gave up those mineral rights nearly a century ago and any royalties would go to the federal and state governments.

The chances of striking natural gas in the multilayered, overthrust belt along the Rocky Mountain Front have long tantalized wildcatters. Here eons ago plates in the Earth’s crust collided in a tectonic force that lifted the mountains, stacking layers of sedimentary rock one on top of the other, forming the fractured, folded layers into giant gas traps deep underground.

Just across the border in Canada, Shell Oil discovered the Waterton Field, a huge, sulfureous reservoir that daily produces 150 million cubic feet of gas, tons of sulfur and nearly 10,000 barrels of propane, butane and liquid condensates. Similar, but smaller fields have been found as far south as Wyoming.

“This area is prolific,” said Ed Neibauer, president of the Colorado-based EPS Resources Co. that has two wells producing near the reservation, in the mountainous Black Leaf Canyon. “To date, we’ve discovered 25 billion cubic feet of reserves here,” Neibauer said.

A few miles to the north, the Badger-Two Medicine has been considered a good oil and gas prospect for decades. In the 1960s, wildcatters bulldozed roads into the pristine area, dragging geologic testing equipment behind them. Seismic crews exploded charges on the surface, sending shock waves deep underground so they could map the overthrust formations. At least one well was drilled, without success, and the leases were abandoned. Two decades later the scars of this early work remain.

Interest in the area was revived early in the 1980s. Seismic crews were again mapping the geologic structures and, high up on the side of Goat Mountain, Chevron found “an attractive prospect.” A second firm, the American Petrafina Co. of Texas, obtained a federal permit to drill on Hall Creek, just 2 miles outside Glacier National Park.

When the Petrafina permit was granted, the National Wildlife Federation filed an appeal with the Interior Board of Land Appeals, successfully arguing that the government had failed to consider the environmental impact a developed gas field would have on endangered species. The Petrafina permit was canceled and a Chevron application was put on hold.

The wildlife federation also filed suit in federal court, attacking the federal oil and gas leasing policies on public forest lands, contending the government had failed to consider the cumulative impacts such developments would have on wildlife and the environment. The courts agreed the forest service had not followed federal environmental protection laws. Government lawyers appealed, but the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case, letting the lower court ruling stand: Cumulative impacts must be considered before a permit can be issued.

These legal actions and appeals kept the drilling permits on hold through most of the decade, but the rulings weren’t definitive--they neither granted nor denied the permits.

Lewis and Clark National Forest rangers went back to the drawing boards, drafting a new, comprehensive environmental impact statement that would permit drilling in the Badger-Two Medicine while protecting the environment and the Indians’ religious rights.

A draft of this EIS was released last week and is expected to touch off another round of controversy because it recommends that drilling be permitted, but only under specific conditions that will not interfere with the ecosystem or disrupt the habitat of the bear and the wolf. Indian religious sites will be protected, rangers said.

“We still oppose development of oil and gas in the Badger-Two Medicine,” wildlife federation attorney France said. If the forest service approves the draft EIS as written, France said: “We will appeal again . . . or wind up in federal court.”

University of Montana students Robert Yetter and Mike Bader joined the fight against oil development two years ago, forming the Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance. They fear that an accident like a well blowout that occurred in Canada’s Waterton Field could devastate the area. They pointed out the Canadian blowout in 1982 spewed out deadly hydrogen-sulfide gases for 62 days, killed two well workers and damaged a wide area around the site.

“Possible releases of hydrogen sulfide threaten the lives of people, wildlife and vegetation,” Bader wrote in a recent newsletter. “Pipelines and drilling operations threaten the pristine water supplies and habitat for rare and endangered species.”

Oil company officials and government regulators say that new safety precautions will be required to prevent such a blowout. They say the wells can be safely drilled and a production field developed without serious impact on the environment or Indian rights.

“Because these are ceded lands, Chevron has addressed the religious and archeological issues,” said spokesman Walt McGuire. Chevron spent $110,000 studying the grizzly habitat and, he said: “The bottom line is . . . (development) will have no impact on the bear.”

In an effort to prove its environmental sensitivity, the giant oil company ran an ad in the Audubon Society’s magazine depicting a female grizzly and her cub sleeping undisturbed in their winter den on sacred Blackfeet lands while oil rig crews drilled through the long winter. When the bears awaken, the drill rigs will be gone and the area restored, says the ad copy.

Chevron plans to upgrade 9 miles of old dirt road into Badger Creek and extend the road 5 miles onto the slopes of Goat Mountain. The exploratory well will cost $10 million and will take a year or more to drill 11,000 feet into the overthrust zones. If the well is permitted, drilling would be halted during the bears’ mating season. Drill crews will work around the clock, the workers will be housed outside the area and will drive to work daily, McGuire said.

No one expects the controversy to be settled soon, either in the courts or by Congress. Last year several bills were introduced by Montana legislators, but failed to pick up enough support to pass. One would have granted the Blackfeet 50% of the oil royalties, another would have protected the area by designating it as potential wilderness.

The Blackfeet’s nine-member tribal council has repeatedly balked at taking a stand because the issues are so divisive. Individually, council members are reluctant to talk about the issue.

“The Badger-Two Medicine is ours, we claim it,” said Earl Old Person, lifetime chief of the tribe. He says he personally does not favor oil drilling unless the tribe somehow benefits, but refuses to be more specific.

The council’s unwillingness to take a stand makes dealing with the tribe difficult, said Lewis and Clark National Forest Supervisor Dale Gorman. Forest officials have tried to identify archeological and religious sites in the area, but thus far the forest’s archeologists have received little direction from the tribe and have found little evidence the area is or was used extensively, Gorman said.

Referring to elders like Yellow Kidney who occasionally go to the area to meditate and fast, Gorman said: “The government can’t create de facto wilderness or give up management because of a few individuals’ religious beliefs.”

Such comments anger Yellow Kidney.

“They put in the roads (in the 1960s) and didn’t ask us a question about that or give the tribe a veto,” said Yellow Kidney, who added: “The old people (who lead the tribe) have kept silent because they expect the worst from the government.”

NEXT STEP Critics have 45 days to comment on the draft environmental impact statement by Lewis and Clark National Forest rangers that was released last week. After the comment period, a final report will be issued and permits for drilling wells in the Badger-Two Medicine could be issued by next summer if court action does not block the projects.