“The Proposed Mine Was Inevitable:” A Conversation with Dr. Al Gedicks on NGOisation, Indigenous Resistance & Successful Struggles against mining in Wisconsin, USA
Editorial Note: Al Gedicks is a legend. We are pleased to share this interview with Al recounting the mining and Indigenous struggles of the 1970s-1990s in occupied Turtle Island, in the area known as Wisconsin, USA. Professor Gedicks emerges from the anti-war/military struggle in the 1960s, and militant action on the University Wisconsin-Madison campus, recounted in the book: RADS: The 1970 Bombing of the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin and Its Aftermath by Tom Bates (1992). Al’s work would continue by researching imperialism in Latin America, the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the struggle against mines in Great Lakes region. This interview, we hope, serves to remind people of these struggles and connect generations with this past, all-the-while reminding everyone that many of the extractivism issues, governmental institutions and non-governmental betrayals are not new, but continuous into the present.
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Alexander Dunlap (AD): Al, thank you for agreeing to talk with me. Well over a decade ago, I came across your book, The New Resource Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles Against Multinational Corporation’s (1993), at the Bound Together book store in San Francisco and I remember saying: “Yes! A book focusing on mining and land struggles… this is so important!” I bought it immediately, and the book did not disappoint. How did your journey into investigating extractive projects and Indigenous struggles for self-determination begin?
Al Gedicks (AG): In 1971 I was the research coordinator for Community Action on Latin America (CALA), a Madison, Wisconsin based anti-imperialist research and action group. CALA was one of four university-based centers funded by United Ministries on Higher Education to educate the American public about the nature and extent of U.S. involvement in the internal affairs of Latin American countries. This was a period of great repression in places like Brazil, Argentina, El Salvador and Guatemala. Much of this repression was supported by the U.S. military and the private corporations which exploited the labor, natural resources and Indigenous peoples of these countries.
As a young sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison I did research into why mineral resource dependent economies in Latin America did not benefit the vast majority of people in countries like Chile and Peru. After the 1973 U.S. supported overthrow of the democratically-elected socialist government of Chilean President Salvador Allende I began exposing the role of the U.S. based Anaconda and Kennecott copper companies in waging a covert war against the Allende government in response to its nationalization of Chile’s copper mines.
As economic nationalists in Chile, and other countries all over the Third World, began to assert their sovereign right to control their own natural resources, I noticed that Kennecott Copper Corporation had begun an active mineral exploration program in a dairy-farming community in Ladysmith, Wisconsin. Exxon Minerals was also exploring next to the Mole Lake Sokaogon Chippewa reservation near Crandon, Wisconsin and Phelps Dodge, a major copper producer, was exploring next to the Lac du Flambeau Chippewa reservation near Woodruff-Minocqua, Wisconsin.
It was during this period in the mid-1970s that I began working with citizen action groups and Indian tribes who were resisting corporate and governmental pressures to transform northern Wisconsin into a new mineral resource colony. Northern Wisconsin had previously experienced the boom-bust cycle of iron mining on lands stolen from the region’s Native American tribes. A century of iron mining had left the region economically depressed while mining profits enriched the absentee-owned steel corporations of U.S. Steel and Hanna Mining.
Through the analysis and political activities of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the more mainstream Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO), Indian tribes began to see themselves in analogous positions to those Third World resource colonies dominated by multinational mining and energy corporations.
In 1976 I was invited to speak to Wisconsin tribal representatives attending an AIO conference on mining held in Racine, Wisconsin. Exxon Minerals had just announced its discovery of one of North America’s largest and richest zinc-copper deposits immediately adjacent to the Mole Lake Sokaogon Chippewa reservation near Crandon, Wisconsin.
Two members of the Sokaogon Chippewa tribal council asked me to provide assistance to the tribe in its dealings with Exxon. The tribe was the smallest Wisconsin tribe by size and population and did not have the resources to protect its tiny 1,900-acre reservation from a large-scale underground mine. The tribe needed technical-scientific assistance, legal help, and fundraising support to develop an effective counterstrategy to Exxon’s mining plans.
No sooner had Exxon announced its discovery when most of the media, politicians, and even many mainstream environmental groups assumed that the proposed mine was inevitable. If the proposed mine discharged pollutants upstream from the tribe’s sacred wild rice beds, this was an unavoidable price for society’s demand for valuable minerals and economic progress. This was an updated version of the racist ideology of “Manifest Destiny” that justified and rationalized the dispossession of Indian lands and the destruction of Indigenous cultures.
In order to mobilize the resources necessary to assist the tribe, I developed the idea for a Center for Alternative Mining Development Policy that was inspired by the work of Dr. Shelton Davis at the Anthropology Resource Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as the work of Roger Moody at his Colonialism and Indigenous Minorities Research/Action in London. The Center, based in Madison, Wisconsin would provide technical-scientific assistance and organizational support for Indian and non-Indian rural communities targeted for mining projects. Several church funding agencies provided the initial funding for the Center. Dan Bomberry of the Seventh Generation Fund in Forestville, California also provided technical support and contacts with private foundations for the Sokaogon Chippewa mining committee.
At the same time Exxon was threatening the self-determination of the Sokaogon Chippewa. Exxon’s 1978 purchase of two Chilean copper mines represented a vote of confidence for one of the most brutal military regimes in Latin America and encouraged the Junta to maintain its repressive policies. Developing a corporate counter-strategy in defense of Native American self-determination was inseparable from an understanding of resource colonialism at home and abroad.
AD: It is great to listen to your experience and to speak with someone who has been working in land defense and Indigenous solidarity since the 1970s! There are aspects I find truly interesting and important here, it leads me to asking two questions. I really enjoy how your solidarity or information raising work against Latin American ‘Dirty Wars’—or politicide—quickly lead you to make connections to transnational companies grabbing Indigenous lands nearby. Do you think there is a tendency within universities to encourage students to study issues farther away and ignore the struggles closer to home? I ask this, as I get a feeling that examining Indigenous resistance and direct action in the “Global South” is more acceptable than struggles closer to home, presumably because it might force us to act, take a position or potentially interfere with business as usual. An example might be the popularity of Zapatista solidarity, meanwhile the American Indian Movement (AIM) was fading out. I am curious what comes to mind for you or how you experienced AIM and the onset of Zapatista solidarity—since you were there!
Secondly, I find it significant that you identify how “mainstream environmental groups assumed that the proposed mine was inevitable” and were quick to submit and avoid struggle. Could you speak more to the role of mainstream environmental groups in these struggles over the years? Specifically, how they operate to help or hinder land defense and native self-determination?
AG: In the 1970s, on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, there was a great deal of student awareness and opposition to the 1973 overthrow of the Allende government in Chile but very little awareness or support for the Menominee Warrior Society when they seized a vacant Roman Catholic novitiate in Gresham, Wisconsin in 1975 and demanded that it be turned over to the nearby Menominee Indian reservation for a hospital. They claimed that federal law allowed them to retake the land once it was no longer used for religious purposes. The 39 Menominee Warriors were inspired by similar takeovers done by the American Indian Movement at Alcatraz and Wounded Knee. Several AIM leaders came to Gresham to offer their support, along with a small group of treaty rights activists from Madison. Governor Patrick Lucey called out the National Guard to contain the standoff after local law enforcement cut off power to the novitiate, which resulted in pipes freezing, causing extensive damage to the property. The 34-day seizure ended when the Catholic order of Alexian Brothers agreed to sell the property to the Menominee Tribe for one dollar.
Figure 2. Several Indians, part of a group of seven, were wrestled to the ground at Check point No. 5 near the Alexian Brothers Novitiate Sunday when a fracus occurred involving orders to leave their car. Wisconsin National Guardsmen and state troopers pulled them from the vehicle and are shown putting on handcuffs before turning them over to local authorities in Shawano County. Source: Wisconsin Historical Society
The contrast between student awareness about the overthrow of democracy in Chile versus the Menominee Warrior Society takeover of a vacant building just outside the Menominee reservation is not surprising. The UW-Madison had many Latin American connections, including the Land Tenure Center and student exchange programs. Two married University of Wisconsin graduate students, Adam and Patricia Garrett-Schesch, doing doctoral research in Chile, were detained for 10 days in the national stadium where they were beaten and threatened with execution. They barely escaped with their lives after several UW faculty contacted the U.S. State Department to secure their release.
On the other hand, there has been a systematic erasure of Indigenous peoples from Wisconsin history. For example, Wisconsin’s coat of arms and state seal celebrates Wisconsin’s history of lead mining with a miner holding a pick and shovel standing above 13 lead ingots, representing mineral wealth and the 13 original United States. There is no mention that the development of this industry was based upon the forced removal of the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Fox, Mesquakie and Sauk nations from this rich mineral district in southwestern Wisconsin. From 1822 through the Black Hawk War of 1832, the Indian-controlled industry experienced a full-fledged lead rush of thousands of white and black settlers seeking wealth and permanent settlements. The lead miners seized the lead mines and the mining process from the Indians and provoked the Winnebago Revolt of 1827 and the Black Hawk War of 1832. The Black Hawk war ended in August 1832 with the massacre of roughly 1.000 Indian men, women and children at the Bad Axe River by U.S. Army troops as they attempted to cross the Mississippi River south of La Crosse.
A major factor at the root of non-Native opposition to the exercise of off-reservation hunting, fishing and gathering rights by Wisconsin’s Ojibwe tribes during the late 1980s was the lack of understanding about treaty rights and the history of Wisconsin’s suppression of these rights for more than a century. This ignorance and misunderstanding of treaty rights fueled the violent opposition to Ojibwe spearfishing and provided support for anti-Indian and anti-treaty groups. At the height of the anti-treaty protests in 1989, state and tribal leaders drafted legislation, known as Wisconsin Act 31, requiring instruction in the history, culture, and tribal sovereignty of the eleven federally-recognized Native Nations and tribal communities in Wisconsin public schools.
The dividing line between student support for struggles in the Global South vs. those closer to home began to crumble when Walt Bresette, a treaty rights activist from the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, made the connection between the Witnesses for Peace who volunteered to accompany civilians during the Central American wars and the violence against Native Americans in northern Wisconsin during the spearfishing conflict. Bresette wondered why people chose to go so far away to show support for others when there were urgent calls for solidarity closer to home. Walt said “You don’t have to go to Nicaragua to witness, you can witness in your own backyard.” He asked people to come to the spring boat landings in northern Wisconsin just like Witnesses for Peace volunteered in contra-attacked areas of Nicaragua.
Treaty rights supporters formed the Witness for Non-Violence for Treaty and Rural Rights in Northern Wisconsin. The witnesses were asked to document by video and recorders, the anti-Indian harassment and violence at the boat landings. By 1992, the efforts of the witnesses, increased cultural education and a federal court injunction against anti-Indian harassment decreased the violence at the boat landings. Walt went on to co-found the Midwest Treaty Network and the Wisconsin Green Party. He also founded Anishinaabe Niijii (Friends of the Ojibwe) to oppose destructive mining in northern Wisconsin.
I spoke at witness training sessions about the convergence between the anti-Indian movement, represented by groups like Stop Treaty Abuse (STA) and Protect America’s Rights and Resources (PARR), and the pro-mining policy of Governor Tommy Thompson’s administration in Wisconsin.[i] Governor Thompson’s top adviser was James Klauser, the former chief lobbyist for Exxon Minerals while the company was seeking state permits for a metallic sulfide mine next to the Mole Lake Sokaogon Ojibwe reservation near Crandon. Thompson responded to racist violence against the Ojibwe for exercising their lawful treaty rights by proposing to buy or lease treaty rights in exchange for cash and government services. Klauser was the governor’s personal representative in the treaty negotiations. But most tribes rejected such negotiations outright, and two voted down proposals in referendums. In July 1989 Walt invited me to expose the state’s “hidden agenda” behind the treaty buyout offer at a press conference in Madison. A subsequent feature story by the Milwaukee Journal provided further evidence that the treaty rights controversy was about corporate access to minerals in the ceded territory of Wisconsin and ability of the Ojibwe to protect their treaty resources from destructive mining projects.[ii]
The nineteenth century treaties that acknowledged the Ojibwe’s right to use natural resources were seen as a problem for multinational mining companies seeking to develop multiple mine projects in the ceded territory of the Lake Superior Ojibwe tribes. Not because the Indians had a direct claim to minerals – they definitely did not – but because mining threatens the environment, and a threat to the environment was a threat to fishing, hunting and gathering rights. Treaty rights provide the Ojibwe tribes with legal standing in federal courts to protect the habitat of fish, deer and wild rice.
When the anti-Indian movement increased its violence against the Ojibwe spear fishers, the state was able to intervene and suggest that some form of de facto treaty abrogation was a reasonable way of resolving the conflict. Throughout the controversy, both Thompson and Klauser continued to meet with representatives of PARR and the more militant STA. The political legitimacy extended to these racist groups served to prolong the controversy.
During my initial efforts to mobilize public support and resources to assist the Mole Lake Ojibwe to oppose Exxon’s proposed Crandon mine project I requested the help of several mainstream environmental organizations in Madison, Wisconsin. Their response was that the mine was inevitable, given the financial, technical and lobbying resources of a world class corporation like Exxon. This was the same mindset as most state legislators, DNR agency officials and the Governor. The best that they were prepared to offer was some lobbying with legislators at the state capitol to enact stringent environmental regulations that would limit mine pollution. This was unacceptable to the tribe because any pollution from the proposed mine would risk the destruction of the wild rice lake that was an essential part of the Ojibwe diet, an important cash crop, and a sacred part of the band’s religious rituals. Should Exxon build the mine, acid runoff and seepage could destroy the lake.
However, the attitude from one of the leading Madison-based environmental groups was that there was no point in opposing the project because that was a losing strategy. A more “realistic” political strategy would be to mitigate the environmental impacts of the mine and provide some economic benefits for the tribe. This position was no different than what Exxon was offering the tribe. By refusing to support the tribe’s opposition to the project, mainstream environmental organizations would preserve their reputation and fundraising ability among their wealthy donors and their access to the political establishment at the state capitol as a “responsible” environmental organization. There was no recognition that this was an issue of cultural survival for the tribe. Instead, the environmental establishment, along with the political establishment, decided that they knew what was best for the tribe.
At that point the tribe decided to go it alone and seek federal support for a social, economic and environmental impact study of the proposed mine. The tribe encouraged me to put together a research proposal and apply for the funding. I assembled a multi-disciplinary group of graduate students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and incorporated a research firm called COACT Research. We won a contract from the U.S. Economic Development Administration and produced a two volume socio-economic and environmental impact analysis of Exxon’s proposed mine on the Mole Lake Ojibwe community in 1980. The analysis challenged many of the claims made by Exxon Minerals about the environmental, social and human health impacts of the proposed mine.[iii] The results of the study put Exxon on the defensive and allowed the tribe to persuade many non-Natives in the Crandon area to oppose the mine.
The political condescension of Madison elites was not limited to the tribe. It also extended to rural Wisconsin communities. This was apparent when Kennecott Copper Corporation railroaded a tax bill through the legislature in 1974 that levied a ridiculously low 1.1 percent production tax on copper from their proposed Flambeau mine in Ladysmith, Wisconsin. [iv] A University of Wisconsin economist calculated that if Kennecott were to mine a deposit in Arizona identical to the one in Ladysmith, it would be paying three times the taxes.[v] A state representative who opposed the bill called it “one of the worst snow jobs ever put on in this house.” [vi]Another legislative critic attributed the swift passage of the bill to the fear that if the legislature did not act quickly it would be killing the prospect of mining jobs in an economically depressed area of the state.[vii]
After I wrote an op ed in the Madison Capital Times exposing Kennecott’s overthrow of the Allende government in Chile and its plans to develop a new mineral resource colony in northern Wisconsin I was contacted by Roscoe Churchill of Ladysmith who asked for my help in opposing the proposed open pit mine.[viii] Churchill was a retired school principal, part-time farmer, and Rusk County supervisor. He had initially welcomed the proposed mine as an economic boost to the local dairy farming community. That was before he received his property tax bill for 1975 and realized that his taxes had soared 72 percent over the previous year. The increase was created in large part by the inflated prices Kennecott was paying to landowners for area farms. Churchill also learned that the mine would provide long-term jobs only for about 40 residents over its entire eight-year life. Even more concerning was the environmental impact of a mine just 300 feet from the Flambeau River, one of Wisconsin’s most pristine waterways and a prime area for walleye fishing.
Figure 3 Looking downstream the Flambeau River from Dix-Dox landing at Oxbo in northern Wisconsin. Source: Wikicommons, Jeff the quiet
Churchill’s concerns about the proposed mine were reinforced when it became clear that the agency in charge of conducting a public hearing on the environmental impact statement (EIS) for the mine was prepared to exclude public comments or questions about the adequacy of the EIS. The hearing examiner for the DNR ruled that the only attorney allowed to ask questions would be the Kennecott attorney, who would be questioning his own witnesses. He also ruled that there would be no cross-examination of the Kennecott witnesses by anyone.
At one point in the hearing a farmer dressed in coveralls got up and asked if the hearing examiner could ask the Kennecott representatives to raise their hands. Then he asked if the DNR representatives could raise their hands. “Thank you sir,” he said, “for a while I had a hard time figuring out who was who.” Churchill said “the mining company wanted to railroad something, we could see that. They were some pretty high-powered people, and they had expectations of getting the mine started. They were treating us like a bunch of peasants who were just in the way. Let me tell you, there are not a bunch of dumb farmers around here.”[ix]
Roscoe Churchill and his wife, Evelyn, along with concerned citizens, later formed the Rusk County Citizens Action Group to slow down the mine permit process and eventually oppose the project entirely. During the final hearing on Kennecott’s mine permit, Churchill introduced a resolution to the Rusk County Board to stop the issuance of county permits until adequate laws were in place to protect the environment and sufficient tax revenues were available to pay for all the costs of mining to local communities. The 21- member board passed the resolution unanimously.[x] Since Wisconsin law requires that mine applicants show that the project would comply with local zoning requirements, the state hearing examiner had no choice but to adjourn the mine permit hearings indefinitely. Eighteen months later, the applications were dismissed. The whole experience led one corporate vice-president to describe the state in an internal corporate letter as “the Peoples Republic of Wisconsin.”
Kennecott did not give up on plans for the Flambeau mine project. Instead, they worked with the DNR and the Public Intervenor’s Office in the Wisconsin Department of Justice to convene a so-called “consensus process” to draft new groundwater rules that would overturn the state’s previously existing “non-degradation” standard and replace it with a “maximum contaminant standard” that would allow mining pollution of groundwater. One environmental group and one representative from the Town of Grant, where the Flambeau mine was proposed, were invited to participate. However, Kennecott and Exxon attorneys dominated the process. By presenting the legislation as a “consensus” among the different interests, the bill would be assured of passage in the legislature. When the final language of the bill was drafted, Roscoe Churchill and the Town of Grant were excluded from the meeting.
After this fiasco, Churchill and the Rusk County Citizens Action Group decided that they needed a statewide environmental organization to protect the clean waters of the state from metallic sulfide mining projects. In 1982 several of the groups opposing the Flambeau mine formed the Wisconsin Resources Protection Council. Churchill was elected president and I was elected secretary. One of the first priorities of WRPC was to establish a working relationship with several of the Ojibwe tribes that were concerned about proposed mining projects in the ceded territory of Wisconsin. Walt Bresette and the Midwest Treaty Network convened several meetings for numerous groups to share information and strategies in an Indian-environmental alliance in defense of tribal sovereignty and environmental protection.
AD: Damn! What a struggle. This remains an important and timely history, which—unfortunately—still lives in the present. This story demonstrates some of the key and enduring tactics employed by companies and the state. From ‘backdoor’ political maneuvering, targeting key politician, excluding public comment and, then, conspiring with different branches of government to force through these ecologically destructive projects. And the environmental NGOs! Their defeatist attitude and, if I am correct, largely indifferent disposition toward Indigenous nations by environmental organizations. I always imagined this attitude from environmental organizations that aim for ‘“realistic” political strategy would be to mitigate the environmental impacts of the mine and provide some economic benefits for the tribe’ as emerging in the 1990s. This history of struggle to protect Ho-Chunk, Ojibwe nations and, even, settler lands from mines, dams and extractivism remains intense. Al, thanks for this historical refresher, and demonstrating a high-level of commitment to Indigenous and environmental struggles.
References
[i] Al Gedicks, “New Colonialism: Mining interests are looking to reconquer the remaining Indian land,” Milwaukee Shepherd Express 11:45, November 7, 1991.
[ii] Dave Stewart, “Professor digs up new treaty theory,” Milwaukee Journal, April 15, 1990; Amy Rinard, “Mining foe sees ‘hidden agenda’ for treaty talks,” Milwaukee Sentinel, July 25, 1989; Sara Boludan, “Treaty talks resume: Monetary settlement may entice tribes,” The Daily Cardinal, University of Wisconsin-Madison, July 26, 1989.
[iii] Thomas Blewett et al., An Analysis of the Socio-Economic and Environmental Impacts of Mining and Mineral Resource Development on the Sokaogon Chippewa Community, Volumes 1 and 2, Madison: COACT Research, 1980.
[iv] John Stallard, Madison Capital Times, March 26, 1974.
[v] Mike Dorgan, “Copper Bonanza Was Given Away As Kennecott Wrote Its Own Ticket,” Madison Capital Times, July 29, 1974.
[vi] “1.5% Mining Tax Approved,” Madison Capital Times, March 28, 1974.
[vii] Dorgan, op.cit.
[viii] Al Gedicks, Chile Has Lesson for Rusk County,” Madison Capital Times, December 11, 1972; “Chile’s tough copper stand may help Wisconsin,” Madison Capital Times, June 19, 1972.
[ix] Mike Miller, “Mine Statement Is Called Industry Rubber Stamp,” Madison Capital Times, November 8, 1976.
[x] Don Behm, “Northern Environmental Stewards Oppose Consensus Trade-offs,” Wisconsin Academy Review, December 1981.