I was in the area of the Pebble Mine Deposit last summer (for the month of June) and spoke to several natives about it. Very few I spoke to want the mine to happen and I don't believe it should either. Not one ounce of gold has been mined yet the stock has doubled over the past six months purely on speculation. Establishment of the mine means using an existing Alpine lake as the tailings settlement pond-effectively destroying any fishery in the lake and threatening the delicate salmon fishery that has been a lifeline for many Alaskan Native peoples for 10,000 years. It also means building a road through a significant portion of Lake Clark National Park (anyone see the "Alone in the Wilderness" films or read Dick Proenneke's book?)
To get an idea of the shear scale of this project, Lake Iliamna is about 22 miles across and 60 miles long.
3 comments:
the stocks not up on speculation. its up,nak, because they more than doubled their reserves. its not a gold mine its a polymetal deposit. im a christian, and engineer, and a native american, i want this mine to go through so i can have a job. speak for yourself paleface. i went to a lot of years of college and mining is very safe. and in case you didnt know only michigan has higher unemployment than alaska and the usa runs a massive trade defict. this mines key products wont be gold it will be copper and moly. to key metals the usa has to import. most of alaska is already reserved for 'nature' boys like you, the rest of us have to earn a living at more than cleaning fish for the white man, and a mine like this can be engineered to be very evironmentally safe. do us 'locals' a favor, pale face, and stay out of our affairs. the 'white christian' male did enough damage to our people as it is. from lying, to cutting back on our subsistence harvest, to overt racism, to selling your rot gut whiskey, to breaking every treaty and compact and slaughtering 70 million of the indigenous people as you grabbed the land in the name of Jesus.
As long as you embrace what you think the white man did to you and model your life after what you think is "progress" you will stay enslaved to the very people you are saying pillaged your land - and color of skin isn't what makes those men, its greed. God gave your ancestors everything they needed for 10,000 years. In the past 30 years you let reliance on petroleum, electronics, etc. destroy your people while you sit back and complain about no jobs. You have jobs, take care of your elderly and help your people to stop drinking.
I'm not crying "save the land so we have a nature preserve". I'm saying we don't need anymore gold, copper or molybdenum for people to worship.
I know what unemployment looks like and I also know how awful it is that most of the land in Michigan is private, most of the streams that used to have salmon runs don't, and even though the native population here in Michigan struck it rich in the casino industry all it has done is raise their incidences of substance abuse, child abuse, domestic violence, depression, and yes, unemployment.
You are selling out your people.
The post above came from Ricon, California, not Alaska.
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