Native Sun News Today: New Rapid Creek Watershed Action to help tribes protect Black Hills

Tuesday, June 30, 2020  

RAPID CITY -- Launching a Rapid Creek Watershed Action coalition June 16, members of the new local organization threw their weight behind tribal governments’ bids to rein in unfettered mining in the Black Hills.

The goal of Rapid Creek Watershed Action, or RCWA, is “to have the federally-controlled surface and subsurface lands within the Rapid Creek-Castle Creek Watershed upstream from Rapid City designated as a national recreation area and subject to a mineral claim withdrawal,” it announced.

The broad-based effort was initiated by a number of groups that invite others to join them by contacting them at their clearinghouse at rapidcreekwatershed.org

They are: Black Hills Clean Water Alliance; Black Hills Group, Sierra Club; Black Hills Paddlers; Clean Water Legacy; Dakota Rural Action; Black Hills Chapter Izaak Walton League; Rapid City Chapter NDN Collective; and Protect Pactola.

"Mining for gold poses a serious threat to our sacred water": Tribes are still waiting for the Trump administration to consult them about plans for gold mining on treaty territory in #SouthDakota. #MniWiconi #HonorTheSacred https://t.co/80PMMNo1vF

— indianz.com (@indianz) June 11, 2020

The Rapid Creek Watershed, or Mniluzahan Wakpa, is a significant native cultural resource at the headwaters of the Mississippi; it rises from the central Black Hills near the key Lakota sacred site of Pe’ Sla on tribal trust land.

The drainage is also important because it provides the water for South Dakota’s second-largest municipality of Rapid City, for the western state’s largest employer of Ellsworth Air Force Base, and for reservations, smaller communities, and agriculture along the creek that feeds into the Cheyenne and Missouri Rivers.

Upstream from Rapid City in the Black Hills National Forest, the Rapid Creek Basin is primarily used for recreation. Activities include hunting, fishing, bicycling, motorcycling, snowmobiling, boating, swimming, hiking, bird-watching, camping, equestrian activities, and ATV riding.

Outdoor recreation provided South Dakota residents 48,000 jobs with $1.9 billion in direct and indirect income in 2017. Direct spending on hunting alone in the Black Hills is about $89 million a year.

However, the sanctity, drinking water, irrigation source, recreational opportunities and income are under threat from​ proposed large-scale mining, the national non-profit American Rivers said in designating Rapid Creek one of America’s Most Threatened Rivers of 2020.

Further designating the Rapid Creek watershed as a “recreation area” will allow the existing land uses to continue “without disruption from hard rock minerals exploration or mining on public lands or claims,” RCWA says.

The national designation would make it so that mining claims not yet “proven” are subject to withdrawal from eligibility for exploration and mining.

The recreation area would assure that exploration and mining are off-limits where the surface or the subsurface of the land is federally-controlled, by the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management or Army Corps of Engineers.

In 2019, The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe demanded elimination of gold exploration and mining here, approving a resolution that called upon the U.S. Congress to exempt the Black Hills National Forest from the reach the 1872 Mining Act.

That act forces federal agencies to allow private mineral extraction on public lands, regulators claim. It also waives federal severance tax and compensation for losses incurred by landholders in miners’ accessing of target resources.

The resolution was a response to the Canadian Mineral Mountain Resources Ltd. prospecting and slated gold mining along the headwaters of the Mniluzahan in Lawrence and Pennington County west of Rapid City.

Contact Talli Nauman at talli.nauman@gmail.com

Copyright permission Native Sun News Today

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