Here’s a report from NFPA president Debo Powers on yesterday’s meeting in Choteau concerning drilling leases in the Badger-Two Medicine . . .
On Wednesday, September 2, an independent federal agency called the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) traveled to Choteau, Montana to hear from the public about proposed oil and gas development in the Badger-Two Medicine. The hearing was preparation for the ACHP’s recommendation to the U.S. Forest Service concerning whether or not the impacts of drilling can be mitigated.
Three members of the North Fork Preservation Association traveled four hours each way to attend the public hearing and stand in solidarity with the Blackfeet Nation who say that the Badger-Two Medicine is sacred and central to their culture.
The large meeting room at the Stage Stop Inn was packed with both native and non-native Montanans who showed their support for cancellation of the leases. The testimony took two and a half hours with each speaker having 2 minutes to speak. The only person who spoke in favor of drilling was the attorney for the company who holds the leases.
One member of the ACHP told me afterwards that it was impressive to see the non-native support for native people and their culture. He commented that common interests can bring people together.
Here’s an important message from our friends at the Montana Wilderness Association for anyone concerned about the potential for drilling activities in the Badger-Two Medicine region. Note that Debo Powers (debopowers@gmail.com) is organizing a car pool to attend the meeting in Choteau . . .
The Badger-Two Medicine (photo courtesy of Leanne Falcon and Glacier-Two Medicine Alliance)
On September 2, 2015, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) travels to Choteau, Montana to hear from the public about proposed oil and gas development in the Badger-Two Medicine. ACHP is an independent federal agency that promotes the preservation, enhancement, and productive use of our nation’s historic resources. In this case, the council will advise the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) whether the negative impacts of proposed drilling in the Badger-Two Medicine can be mitigated to avoid damaging the Badger’s sacred, cultural, and historical values.
We have a very simple message for the ACHP: any development in the Badger-Two Medicine will bring irreparable damage. The only recommendation the ACHP can make for preventing damage and desecration to this sacred area is this: Cancel the illegal leases.
We need your help to make this message loud and clear to the ACHP.
The USFS must consider ACHP’s recommendation in making its final determination about oil and gas drilling in the Badger. If the ACHP tells the USFS that the agency should carefully consider lease cancellation because the impacts cannot be mitigated, it strongly bolsters the case we have been making – that lease cancellation is the only good option for the Badger. But if ACHP proposes that the development can somehow be mitigated to decrease damage to the cultural property, it leaves the door open for drilling across the Badger. Encouragingly, the USFS last week recognized, in its response to a U.S. District court order, that cancellation is an option the agency could pursue.
The ACHP needs to hear from all Montanans about why the Badger-Two Medicine is an invaluable piece of Blackfeet, Montana, and American history.
We’re asking people to attend the meeting in Choteau on Wednesday, September 2 or else submit a written comment to ACHP, or both.
The meeting takes place in Choteau on September 2 from 3 to 6 p.m. at the Stage Stop Inn, 1005 Main Ave. North.
ANYONE WHO WOULD LIKE TO CARPOOL FROM THE NORTH FORK TO CHOTEAU ON SEPTEMBER 2 TO ATTEND THIS MEETING, PLEASE CONTACT DEBO AT debopowers@gmail.com
If you would like to speak at the meeting, you can pre-register to do so by contacting Katry Harris at 106permittodrill@achp.gov. People who have not pre-registered will be allowed to speak if time permits.
To submit a written comment, email it to Katry Harris at 106permittodrill@achp.gov or mail her your comments to:
Advisory Council on Historic Preservation
401 F Street, NW, Suite 308,
Washington, D.C. 20001-2637
All comments must be submitted by 3 p.m. (MST), September 4, 2015.
Here are some comment suggestions:
The Badger-Two Medicine area holds significant cultural and historical importance to the Blackfeet people, to the people of Montana, and to all citizens. Sacred lands should be protected from industrialization for posterity. What does the Badger mean to you and your family?
The Badger-Two Medicine is a living cultural landscape and an intact ecosystem. Its cultural value cannot be separated from its ecological integrity.
The ACHP should avoid making recommendations that suggest that the negative impacts of oil and gas exploration can be mitigated or avoided, because that is not possible.
The only option to avoid permanent damage to the Badger-Two Medicine is to not drill and to encourage the federal land managers to work together to cancel all of the remaining leases.
– Casey Perkins, MWA’s Rocky Mountain Front field director
The feds have decided to make a decision about energy leases in the Badger-Two Medicine region. By November 30, they will either commence to cancel the leases …or not.
This would be funny if the consequences weren’t so serious. Just read the darn article while I go bang my head on my desk . . .
Public land managers have submitted a court-ordered schedule framing the steps they’ll take to either lift a suspension of oil and gas drilling on a prized and culturally sacred landscape adjacent to Glacier National Park or cancel the energy leases outright.
In setting the schedule, federal land managers for the first time are considering the dissolution of energy leases in the Badger-Two Medicine area as an option to settle a dispute over whether they were granted illegally, as leaders of the Blackfeet Nation contend. The Badger-Two Medicine is home to the Blackfeet creation story and is at the center of a hard-fought legal battle, with the lease-holder calling for the drilling suspension to be lifted on one side and a vast coalition of tribes, conservation groups and Montana politicians urging permanent protection on the other.
The timeline to resolve the decades-old suspension of an energy lease in the Badger-Two Medicine was drafted after a federal judge ordered the U.S. Department of Justice, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service to draft a schedule for the agencies to complete their review.
The Wilderness Society weighs in on the issue of drilling leases in the Badger-Two Medicine region . . .
As the Blackfeet Nation’s leaders ramp up efforts to protect the Badger-Two Medicine area near Glacier National Park from oil and gas development, a nationwide conservation group has issued a report singling out the sacred region as a top priority for environmental safeguards.
The Wilderness Society’s 2015 edition of “Too Wild to Drill,” which identifies places the group believes should be off limits to energy development, featured the Badger-Two Medicine among three other lands deserving protection, including Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Colorado’s Thompson Divide and Grand Junction region and Utah’s Bears Ears and lands near Desolation Canyon.
Flanked on the northwest by Glacier National Park, on the east by the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and on the south by the Bob Marshall and Great Bear Wilderness, the 130,000-acre Badger-Two Medicine is central to the cultural identity of the Blackfeet.
The next chapter begins in the battle over the fate of the Solonex oil and gas lease in the Badger-Two Medicine region. The feds have, uh, decided to make a decision . . .
U.S. government officials plan to decide this fall whether to take steps to lift the suspension of an oil and gas lease on land sacred to Native Americans or to begin the four-month process of canceling it, according to court documents filed Monday.
The timeline for resolving the decades-old suspension of the lease in the Badger-Two Medicine area near Glacier National Park was created after a federal judge ordered the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service to come up with a timeline to complete their review.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based Solenex LLC sued to lift the suspension and begin drilling this summer on the 6,200-acre oil and gas lease it acquired in 1982. The suspension has been in place since 1993 while federal officials consider the environmental and cultural impacts.
The feds have until August 17 to make a decision on a suspended old lease in the Badger-Two Medicine region . . .
A federal judge has had enough in a longstanding delay on a Louisiana’s oilman’s attempt to explore the Badger-Two Medicine region for oil and gas.
On July 27, U.S. Disitrict Court Judge Richard Leon gave the U.S. Department of Interior 21 days to come up with a resolution on the decision whether to lift a lease given to the Solonex Corp. owned by Sidney Longwell near Hall Creek back in 1982.
The leases are just a few miles south of Glacier National Park near Marias Pass in some of the wildest country in the region.
The Blackfeet continue to fight attempts to drill in the Badger-Two Medicine region . . .
An American Indian tribe in Montana has taken the rare step of breaking off formal talks with the U.S. government and a Louisiana company that has been seeking for decades to drill for natural gas on land considered sacred by the Blackfeet people.
Blackfeet tribal leaders said that after three rounds of negotiations, they remain steadfast in their opposition to drilling in the Badger-Two Medicine area outside Glacier National Park and see no benefit to further discussions.
“We are not going to speak to anything other than no development,” said Blackfeet Tribal Historic Preservation Officer John Murray.
The Blackfeet tribe is keeping up the pressure to remove the remaining oil and gas exploration lease in the Badger-Two Medicine region . . .
The Blackfeet Nation’s leaders are ramping up efforts to protect the Badger-Two Medicine area near Glacier National Park, and recently highlighted the cultural, spiritual and ecological significance of a region threatened by oil and gas development.
On June 26, members of the Blackfeet Nation launched the most recent phase of a campaign to rally support for the area, with the aim of terminating 18 oil leases within the Badger-Two Medicine. The mountainous area, located between the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness, is a cornerstone of the tribe’s creation story, a spiritual nexus known as the “Backbone of the World” and a pristine, untapped ecosystem home to grizzly bears and other wildlife.
To celebrate the area, the tribe hosted Badger-Two Medicine Days, which among other Blackfeet traditions featured an all-night “holy smoke” ceremony led by spiritual elders, with the goal of warding off oil and gas development, said Tyson Running Wolf, secretary of the Blackfeet Business Council.
There’s no court decision yet on the Solonex energy leases in the Badger-Two Medicine region, but the judge is annoyed at the feds . . .
A federal judge is pressing U.S. officials to explain why it’s taken three decades to decide on a proposal to drill for natural gas just outside Glacier National Park in an area considered sacred by some Indian tribes in Montana and Canada.
A frustrated U.S. District Judge Richard Leon called the delay “troubling” and a “nightmare” during a recent court hearing. He ordered the Interior and Agriculture departments to report back to him with any other example of where they have “dragged their feet” for so long.
As expected, Solonex is in court playing hardball over their old oil and gas leases in the Badger-Two Medicine region . . .
A federal judge is scheduled to hear arguments Wednesday over whether a Louisiana company should be allowed to drill for natural gas on a longstanding lease near Glacier National Park that’s on land considered sacred to the Blackfeet Indians.
The 6,200-acre lease was suspended by federal officials in the 1990s along with dozens of others in the Badger-Two Medicine area south of Glacier.
Owner Solenex LLC of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, filed a 2013 lawsuit to lift the suspension on the lease issued in 1982. The company wants U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington, D.C., to decide the case so it can drill this summer.
