James Garrett reprinted with permission from
Poison Fire, Sacred Earth,
TESTIMONIES, LECTURES, CONCLUSIONS,
THE WORLD URANIUM HEARING, SALZBURG 1992
pages 29-30

The white man, he comes and he goes. He can go. And he doesn't have to drink that water, but just shortly. But that's our homeland for thousands of years. That's our home, and we will never leave. No matter how contaminated it gets. We live there! We have always lived there and we will always live there. It's not right that Indian people should have to sacrifice their homelands so the rest of the world, the rest of the industrialized world, can have their damned old electricity! Or their nuclear bombs to destroy their enemies. That is not right. And anybody who says that's wrong, they must have evil inside of them.
You know, the nuclear fuel cycle, in our country at least, begins and ends on Indian homelands. They come and they dig it up. They contaminate the whole countryside with their dust that blows around and that gets into our aquifers. They take it away and they do whatever they want with it. They tell all the people of Europe, it's a good, clean industry, it's a great way to save the world. But I'm here to tell you that now they're knocking on our door because they can't find any place to store the damned stuff for eternity. They come to our homeland and they want to lease some land for 10,000 years!



Freda Meissner-Blau (Moderator)

I'm terribly sorry. I feel already somewhat like a disrespectful police watchdog or something like this, but I did want so much to give some time to our last witness this morning. That's James Garrett. He is an environmental lawyer, environmental jurist, and he's the Director of Environmental Affairs of the Cheyenne River Reservation, that's also in South Dakota, and he was a participant of the Leave-Uranium-in-the-Ground-Tour, which took place in 1988. Please, Jim, you have the floor.



James Garrett

James Garrett, Lakota Nation, South Dakota, USA. Degree in Environmental Law, Director for Environmental Affairs of the Cheyenne River Reservation in 1992.

Thank you for inviting me here to speak about the uranium situation in my homeland.

I'm a 20-year-veteran of the historical struggle to reclaim the sacred Black Hills. That struggle is an ongoing struggle for 113 years now. In the 1970's, I worked with an organization called The Black Hills Alliance, and we began to research all the atrocities that were occurring within our sacred homeland. There was the uranium mining that took place in the southern part of the Black Hills around a small town called Edgemont. That occurred during the late forties and middle fifties on up into the sixties. During that time, many tons of tailings were left behind, and eventually the mines were abandoned because of the low-grade ore. During that time, there was a spill that occurred and it contaminated the Cheyenne River. The Cheyenne River headwaters is right in that area and it flows out onto the prairie about 150 miles where it joins the Missouri River. It flows right by my house, and my entire reservation has to use that for their public water supply. The ground water underneath -- the water quality -- is too bad to drink, so we are forced to drink from the Cheyenne River.

During the seventies, the Highest Court in the land of the United States found that the Lakota people do indeed hold tide to the sacred Black Hills. They offered us money but we stood fast and said: "The land is not for sale!"

To this day, they will not return our sacred land, even though their highest hypocritical court said that we could, and indeed did, own the Black Hills. I still continue to struggle for the eventuality of regaining that sacred land.

I'm the founder of the Upper Missouri River Basin Environmental Research Center. That organization has been documenting all of the uranium activities that have gone on in the history of the Black Hills.

In the 1970's, during the so-called energy crisis when gasoline and petroleum were supposedly scarce, gigantic multinational corporations came into the southern Black Hills and started drilling holes wherever they felt like it; deep into the ground -- they were looking for uranium, and what they did was -- because it was too expensive to properly cap off those holes -- the uranium that they found mixed in with underground water aquifers and travelled underneath the ground to the wells that are drilled on the Pine Ridge Reservation -- a distance of about 50 miles.

In 1979, one of our organization members was a registered nurse at the Pine Ridge hospital and she started noticing a dramatic increase in spontaneous abortions among the women. And so she spoke to the resident doctors and they confirmed that they had their suspicions that it was abnormally high, also. So, when our friend and sister went to the head of the hospital to discuss it, to discuss what could be done, what kind of study could confirm the abnormal rise in these abortions, she was told: "Leave it alone, we will take care of it." During the night, that same night, everyone of the doctors was transferred out of that hospital and we never yet received a forwarding address for any of those doctors. We don't know where they are. So we initiated our own research study. We found a biochemist at the South Dakota School of Mines who made a kind contribution to our cause and conducted a very brief study of this situation. And this biochemist documented that there was -- during one month period that he was able to look at in 1979 -- there was 38 percent of the women in Pine Ridge that had spontaneous abortions. Out of the live birth children of that same time, 50 to 60 percent of them suffered some type of birth defect, most were respiratory ailments, some were liver ailments, kidney ailments [Study by W.A.R.N., Women of All Red Nations].

The Indian Health Service immediately saw that we were on to something, so they poured in tremendous amounts of technical and monetary assistance, not to us, but to the head of the hospital. I have with me the final reports that Indian Health Service has done, and they say there's been no problem. To this day, they stand behind their words and they say there's no correlation between those spontaneous abortions and the contaminated water supply.

However, I'm here to say that just because we're native peoples and we don't have the same level of education as the outside society, that doesn't mean that we are stupid. We're very intelligent people, we can make connections, we know how the world works. And we stand by what we say. We know that there's a connection. We just can't say it in the correct measurements that the scientific community would like for us to say, so that it can be validated and passed into the library and be forgotten on a shelf. That doesn't get it with us! What gets it with us is to have healthy families and to have healthy water that we can drink and not have to worry that our children may die of cancer 40 years from now. That's what we worry about. That is what my research institute is all about. So that some day we don't have to worry about the Black Hills being contaminated.

An old man told me a story one time, and he said that, prior to the white man coming to the Black Hills, all the spirituality in there was in perfectly balanced order. There was good and there was bad medicine in there and it was perfectly balanced. But when the white man intruded into that space, the Lakota were no longer able to control and protect that delicate balance anymore. And the white man released many bad medicines. Those bad medicines are the minerals, gold, and uranium, and ever since then, our people have suffered badly.

The white man, he comes and he goes. He can go. And he doesn't have to drink that water, but just shortly. But that's our homeland for thousands of years. That's our home, and we will never leave. No matter how contaminated it gets. We live there! We have always lived there and we will always live there. It's not right that Indian people should have to sacrifice their homelands so the rest of the world, the rest of the industrialized world, can have their damned old electricity! Or their nuclear bombs to destroy their enemies. That is not right. And anybody who says that's wrong, they must have evil inside of them.

You know, the nuclear fuel cycle, in our country at least, begins and ends on Indian homelands. They come and they dig it up. They contaminate the whole countryside with their dust that blows around and that gets into our aquifers. They take it away and they do whatever they want with it. They tell all the people of Europe, it's a good, clean industry, it's a great way to save the world. But I'm here to tell you that now they're knocking on our door because they can't find any place to store the damned stuff for eternity. They come to our homeland and they want to lease some land for 10,000 years!

My God!

They've only been there for 500 years this year. What makes them think they are going to be here for 10,000 years? The world is seven-eighths destroyed today because of those 500 years! What makes them think it's even going to be here another 100 years going at the rate they're going at now?

They're preying upon our poverty at home. We have 80 percent unemployment on our reservation, and they're dangling millions of dollars out in front of us and saying: "We will build you new hospitals, we'll build you new roads, we'll put everyone of your people to work, just let us lease this land for 100,000 years, or 10,000 years."

We're not stupid.

We know that if we bring that into our home we would have the best hospitals in the world, but those hospitals are not going to keep our children from being born without legs, or keep our children from glowing in the middle of the night, you know?

I think that's about all I should say here, I think I'm reaching my ten minutes. I'm getting too worked up emotionally to go on, I think. Anyway, I will leave it there.

Thank you very much for listening.