A rare win in Indian Country: How tribes drove out a mining company in one week

“We’re just not used to winning,” said Dr. Valeriah Big Eagle, who directs the Black Hills work of NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led advocacy nonprofit based in Rapid City. “We’re a people used to being screwed over by the government, at every level,” she told the The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Guardian.

The fight to protect ancestral land from mining is a common one, and the struggles are often long, hard and lost. In March, the government handed Oak Flat, an Apache holy site in Arizona, to a copper company to gouge out one of the largest mines in North America — a transfer the tribe is still in court trying to reverse. In April, the Senate voted to strip protections from Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, a watershed in Ojibwe treaty territory where the bands still hunt, fish and gather; the battle has since moved to the statehouse. The consequences of losing aren’t abstract: poisoned water, sacred ground turned to open pit and the lasting health toll extraction leaves on Native land while the profits flow elsewhere.

But at Pe’ Sla, what the Great Sioux Nation calls the “heart of everything that is,” the coalition broke the pattern, moving on every front at once. It was a lesson, they said, in what organized power can still win.

The threat arrived the way these things usually do: as paperwork. On Feb. 27, the U.S. Forest Service quietly approved exploratory drilling by Pete Lien & Sons, a local mining and construction-materials company. They could drill 18 boreholes on national forest land, at least ten of them inside a 2-mile buffer around the central meadow that the tribes and the agency had agreed to protect. It was waved through with a “categorical exclusion” that skipped environmental review on land prayed over for thousands of years.

Pe’ Sla holds a sacred place in the world of the Great Sioux Nation. Wizipan Little Elk Garriott — the president of NDN Collective and a former Interior department official — describes it beginning with the sky. It is where Fallen Star came to earth, and where, in a world scoured by fire and water, the people went inside to survive and later emerged. It’s also where traditionally foraged plants like the timpsula, the prairie turnip with its short spike of purple flowers, grow, and its root, high in calcium, is the real gift. Pe’ Sla is a church, a pantry and a pharmacy at once — the ceremony, the food and the medicine all right there in the ground, the ground that was almost drilled open.

What the company was drilling for only sharpened the insult. Graphite is a “critical mineral” of the energy transition, the stuff in electric-car batteries. Which means the drills boring into the birthplace of a people were there to help save the planet.

“It’s to set a precedent to attack all sacred sites,” Big Eagle said. “This isn’t happening just here — it’s happening all over the country.” For the organizers, the graphite is almost beside the point: Once a company has the right to drill, it can look for whatever else is down there.

The clean economy keeps pulling the minerals of a green future out of the same colonized ground as coal and oil. More than 75% of the nation’s lithium, copper and nickel reserves lie within 35 miles of a reservation, and the communities in their path are among the most under-invested in the country. Oglala Lakota County, home to the Pine Ridge reservation, has a poverty rate above 50%.

Even though the permit drew broad opposition — from tribes, local officials and the public — the Forest Service granted it anyway. So the coalition of tribal nations, the NDN Collective and two environmental groups escalated.

The legal front moved first: In early April, NDN Collective, the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance and Earthworks sued the Forest Service, and nearly every tribe in the Dakotas filed a second suit of their own. But the courts were slow, and the company was quick. When Pete Lien & Sons learned a restraining order had been filed, it went to round-the-clock drilling, boring as many holes as it could before a judge ruled.

The organizers couldn’t wait for the courts. That’s when the two Oglala Lakota scouts went out to find where the drilling had gone.

Before dawn on April 30, organizers sent up a drone and found the company had moved overnight, its crews now on two lit pads across the highway. The convoy had already set out — a caravan of about a dozen vehicles strung along the highway under a high, bright moon. With the ground still frozen, they climbed the Forest Service roads. At the only road in, some 40 of them blocked the way behind them and put their bodies on the drill pads so no rig could run.

“It was supposed to be one day, to make a statement,” Robert Bordeaux, a Sičáŋǧu Lakota poet who joined the occupation, told me for Peace & Riot. “It went so well we decided to stay.”

For seven days, they lived on those pads — intergenerational by design: a youth council out front and elders anchoring the camp. They held it through helicopters overhead, three lines of police and private security, and a night that fell to ten degrees with no fires because the hills were experiencing a drought. They stayed warm with hand warmers and each other. Even then, the scouts said, the camp felt strangely calm — held, protected — as if the relatives they’d prayed to were with them.

“The only weapons we had were our prayers,” Big Eagle said — steady and warm, the big sister of the camp.

Ceremony wasn’t a pause from the strategy. It was the strategy. There were altars on both drill pads. And when the local news called them “armed and dangerous,” they live-streamed their own version of events. They knew it was bad optics to drag an Indigenous prayer camp off a mountain on camera.

On May 4, a federal judge halted the drilling, finding the plaintiffs were likely to prove that the Forest Service had unlawfully waved through a supposedly under-a-year project whose permit required three years of work. Still, the organizers didn’t leave — they didn’t trust a company that could pay a fine to stop.

Days later, Pete Lien & Sons wrote to the Forest Service, withdrawing its plan and saying it would not file another. The company never said why, but organizers believe the company would lose this round in court, and starting over could take years. For a family limestone-and-concrete business, an unproven graphite prospect likely wasn’t worth the fight. (Pete Lien & Sons did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.)

For the next community staring down a similar drill permit, the lesson isn’t any single tactic — it’s the stacking of them. A lawsuit alone is slow; an occupation alone is easy to clear; a good story alone changes nothing without leverage behind it. Pe’ Sla worked because the pieces protected each other.

That coordination reached into the law: The coalition treated Indigenous sovereignty not as symbolism but as a legal instrument — nine nations in federal court is a force no advocacy group can supply. The rest is homework: Somewhere in the government’s own paperwork, on almost every rushed permit, is the shortcut it took to get there. At Pe’ Sla, it was a one-year exemption stretched over a three-year project.

“None of this moves forward without all of us working collectively,” said Anissa Martin, who leads NDN’s Black Hills Land Back campaign. “Everybody had a role, and we understood that.”

This is just one of many fights the Great Sioux Nation has waged for generations, from mining claims to oil pipelines. The aim is a full mineral withdrawal and the Sacred He Sápa Restoration Act, endorsed by all nine of South Dakota’s tribes, to return the region’s public lands.

Ask Martin what winning finally looks like, and she thinks bigger than any bill. “Maybe NDN won’t even exist anymore,” she said softly, “because our people will be liberated. The land will be liberated.”

Months later, on the reclaimed ground where the grass is coming back, her words didn’t sound like a slogan. They sounded like a plan. And they had just, against every odd, worked.

Co-published by The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and The Guardian.

This story was produced by The Economic Hardship Reporting Project and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.