Defenders of the Black Hills
Oil & Gas Order No. 17-2010 for Nakota Energy LLC
The following is the comments sent from Defenders of the Black Hills to the South Dakota State Historical Society and SD DENR.
Please consider these our comments regarding Oil & Gas Order No. 17-2010 for Nakota Energy LLC located in the vicinity of Bear Butte.
Report of Radioactive Pollution in the State's Water"Uranium activity as far south as Yankton" Rapid City, SD-- For the past five years, Defenders of the Black Hills, an environmental organization, has been quietly conducting water tests on rivers in the Region. Now their information is compiled in a report being sent to the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen's Association and mayors from towns along the Missouri River.
Update on Powertech Uranium Mining CompanyPowertech USA is the uranium mining company we have been fighting for the last five years. This past year, with others finally getting involved, Defenders has quietly stepped back, which is what we have done with other projects in the past. View PDF Document
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"Defenders of the Black Hills is a group of volunteers without racial or tribal boundaries whose mission is to preserve, protect, and restore the environment of the 1851 and 1868 Treaty Territories, Treaties made between the United States and the Great Sioux Nation."
Speaking about radioactive fallout, the late President John F. Kennedy said,
"Even then, the number of children and grandchildren with cancer in their bones, with leukemia in their blood, or with poison in their lungs might seem statistically small to some, in comparison with natural health hazards. But this is not a natural health hazard and it is not a statistical issue. The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby who may be born long after we are gone, should be of concern to us all. Our children and grandchildren are not merely statistics toward which we can be indifferent."
July 26, 1963 upon signing the ban on above ground nuclear tests
"The radiation levels in parts I visited with my students were higher than those in the evacuated zones around the Fukushima Nuclear disaster...." Nuclear Physics Professor Kimberly Kearfott, University of Michigan, in comparing the readings obtained in northwestern South Dakota at the Cave Hills open-pit, abandoned uranium mines.
"It must always be remembered that the various Indian tribes were once independent and sovereign nations, and that their claim to sovereignty long predates that of our own government."
Thurgood Marshall, US Supreme Court Justice
(McClanahan v. Sate Tax Commission, 1973)