In the last decade, global lithium production has quadrupled, predominately coming from two places. The first is a region in Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina known as the “Lithium Triangle.” Lithium sourced from this region is found in salt flats and extracted from pools of salty brine through an evaporation process. The second is Western Australia, where the mineral is mined from bedrock in places like Western Australia and Zimbabwe. Mining companies are preparing for similar endeavors in the United States in Nevada, South Dakota, North Carolina, and more.
Welcome to the “white gold rush” to procure lithium, a vital element used to produce the batteries that power the electric cars, solar cells, and other technologies of the green energy transition. This rush is in its initial stages, but already the same actors who capitalized on past oil and mineral rushes are positioned to continue business as usual. This time, climate change is being exploited to justify the same harmful extractive practices.
In recent years, a new “Green Colonialism” has underpinned a series of Biden administration actions to spur domestic mining operations. In 2021, Biden issued an executive order under the Defense Production Act ordering the Defense Department to consider at least five metals — lithium, cobalt, graphite, nickel and manganese — as essential to national security.
That order, along with incentives built into the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, have spurred a boom on domestic lithium and rare earth element claims. These projects disproportionately impact Indigenous communities, since most lithium, cobalt, and nickel reserves are located within 35 miles of a Native American reservation.
Such harm to Indigenous communities in the name of extraction is not new. Taylor Gunhammer, member of the Oglala subtribe of the Lakota people, sits on the board of the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance (BHCWA), a local organization that has been fighting to reign in mining in the region for more than a decade. In a recent blog post, he traced the historical connections between mining interests and the colonization and genocide of Indigenous people:
“Mining was the catalyst for the military violence and land grabs that have forced us and the land to our present condition, wherein the United States and the State of South Dakota carry out willful violations of Constitutional and Tribal treaty rights every single day. Granted, there are now various non-mining business interests in the Black Hills who are against the honoring of treaties with tribes, for their own economic reasons. But each and every one of them have illegal mining on treaty land to thank for the opportunity, since 1872.”
Although a variety of resources have been mined in the Black Hills region, the biggest conflicts have concerned gold and uranium. The dangers posed by uranium provided the catalyst for the Black Hills Alliance (BHA) to form in the 1970s, when the interests of non-native settlers aligned with Indigenous peoples in the region over a desire for uranium-free drinking water. During the 1970s, the threat of twenty-seven corporations exploring more than 5,000 claims in the Black Hills was high enough to begin opening doors to conversations. Through grassroots efforts initiated by the Lakota, a coalition eventually converged between the Lakota, environmentalists, other Black Hills residents, and off-reservation ranchers and farmers. (Zoltán Grossman provides a history of these movements in his book Unlikely Alliances).
The Alliance wasn’t without tension. As BHA co-founder Bruce Ellison recalled, “[The BHA] was looked at in the Indian community as a white organization and in the white community as an Indian organization. We looked at it as both.” Eventually, as Gunhammer wrote in his blog, settlers “came to recognize that their survival is tied irrevocably to the people who have always held the lands they occupy as sacred.”
These types of alliances have helped bolster efforts to oppose harmful mining operations and pipelines such as Keystone XL, and some of the same people who founded the BHA would later found the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance in 2009, focusing more specifically on mining issues. Still, these groups have not absolved historical injustices or alleviated all of the tensions between settler and Indigenous communities.
The Black Hills are unceded territory, meaning that the Sioux Nation Tribes never gave up their ownership to the US government. Restoring their rights to the land is so important to the tribes that, despite a poverty rate of roughly 49 percent, the Sioux refuse to accept the $1.3 billion currently sitting in trust, awarded when federal courts ruled that the land had been stolen in the 1870s. Still, mining companies remain poised to reap the bounty of lithium claims there in blatant disregard to Indigenous sovereignty. The BHCWA has been monitoring these developments, tracking projects, operators, and claims, which are present across the Hills. They have identified nine lithium operators in the region, including Patriot Lithium, Midwest Lithium/SDO, United Lithium, and IRIS Metals, currently undertaking exploratory work. The companies emphasize the need for clean energy while downplaying the environmental impacts of mining operations.
“I can see if you were in the middle of Mount Rushmore, maybe that’s not a good place to have a mine of any kind, lithium or gold,” Michael Dehn, the CEO of United Lithium Corp., said in an interview with Black Hills Fox News. “But if you’re out in the fringes, you know, ranch land, as long as you are not competing with the ranchers for resources, I think we can work well together, side by side.” It’s worth lingering on Dehn’s referral to Mount Rushmore — a not-so-subtle tell of whose culture Dehn considers worthy of preservation and protection. (Incidentally, there are now lithium claims up to within a quarter-mile of the border of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, and a state drilling permit that’s no more than 2 miles away).
“Mining companies don’t care about the impact so much as they care about making a profit,” Dr. Lilias Jarding, BHCWA’s executive director, said in the same segment, “and they come into places all over the world and mine and destroy communities and the environment and water. So, we don’t expect lithium companies to be any different in that way.” This lack of trust is justified. The environmental group Earthworks found that 76 percent of mining companies in the US polluted groundwater after saying they wouldn’t.
