Amid Upper Peninsula mining rush, tribe is still living with past pollution

• Decades of tribal, state and federal efforts to address mining pollution in the Keweenaw Bay are finally paying off
• At one polluted site, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community has seen some restoration success; at another, a $2 billion plan offers hope of a cleanup
• As prospectors scour the UP in hopes of setting up new mines, tribal officials say past pollution makes them fearful of repeating history

KEWEENAW BAY — After years of uncertainty, Dione Price hopes her community may win a long battle to clean up century-old mining waste.

Years of advocacy by partners including the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, where Price is environmental health manager for the tribal government, have resulted in a new plan to clean up the notorious Gay stamp sands, a waste pile visible from space that is smothering critical fish habitat in Lake Superior.

And 40 miles downstream, where yet more mining waste has washed ashore on the tribe’s reservation, native plants are eking out an existence on a scarred landscape thanks to the tribe’s habitat restoration efforts.

“It’s promising,” Price said, a testament to how far the UP has come toward healing environmental harms caused by the mining industry. 

But the two sites are also prime examples of why tribal officials are skeptical about the wave of prospectors combing the UP today in anticipation of a new mining boom.

As the EV transition fuels renewed demand for the nickel and copper buried beneath the peninsula, mining companies say they aim to do right by communities harmed by the industry’s past, particularly tribes whose fishing and hunting culture makes them vulnerable to industrial pollution and habitat destruction, and whose sovereign status gives them unique legal standing in environmental disputes. 

“This company is trying to take a different approach,” said Todd Malan, spokesperson for Talon Metals Corp., a company exploring mineral rights on and near the Keweenaw tribe’s reservation. “Bring tribes in from the very beginning, understand their concerns and have an openness to, what does a new type of mine look like to them?”

But as the tribe’s experience shows, the industry will have to overcome an unflattering reputation if it wishes to earn that kind of trust.

Beaches of lava

During an era predating modern environmental laws, mining companies extracted minerals from Michigan with little to no concern about their environmental impact. The Keweenaw Peninsula was ground zero.

After pulverizing ore in waterfront mills to extract valuable copper, mining companies dumped the waste rock directly onshore. Beaches of the black sand-like substance, a copper-laced basalt known as stamp sands, dot the peninsula.

For generations, nobody took much notice. 

“They used to call it Lava Beach,” said Theodore “Austin” Ayres, a member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community’s elected tribal council.

Then around the turn of the millennium, tribal fishermen noticed a decline in their catch at Buffalo Reef, a 2,200-acre trout and whitefish spawning ground in Lake Superior, just south of the former Wolverine and Mohawk mining companies’ mills.

Subsequent studies revealed that stamp sands from the mills, which operated in the Keweenaw Peninsula town of Gay from the mid-1800s until 1932, have been drifting into the water and gradually smothering the reef. 

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It’s not the only stamp sand pile to compromise the tribe’s land and way of life. Forty miles south on the tribe’s reservation in Baraga, billions of pounds of waste from another historic mill have washed ashore to form a wide artificial beach where almost nothing grows.

But hope is emerging for both sites, thanks to the work of the tribe and a broad set of partners including state, federal and government.

At Sand Point, tribal officials have spent years coaxing native species to grow in soil tainted with stamp sands, and are now planting willows and poplars that they hope will absorb heavy metals that are leaching out of the sand. 

Before restoration work started in the mid-2000s, “it looked like a barren wasteland,” said Erin Johnston, a wildlife and habitat manager for the tribe. Now, “things are living. They’re surviving. Some almost seem to be thriving.”

And at Gay, a task force of state, federal and tribal officials released a $2 billion, 20-year plan to build a jetty that will intercept the stamp sands as they drift downshore, making it possible to move them to a nearby landfill. 

Time is of the essence, said Jay Parent, an Upper Peninsula water quality supervisor with the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.

“The more time that goes on, the more it migrates towards the reef and onto the reef,” he said.

It’s not yet clear who will pay for the project, which would be among the most expensive environmental remediation efforts in Michigan’s history.

Both state and federal cleanup programs are woefully underfunded, and Price, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community’s environmental health manager, is not optimistic about getting the Wolverine and Mohawk companies’ modern-day successors to pay for cleanup. Their lineage can be traced to ConocoPhillips, a global oil giant that reported $15.8 billion in profits last year. No regulatory agency has contacted ConocoPhillips about the site, said company spokesperson Michael Walter.

Still, Price said, she’s confident money will shake loose. Charitable foundations have shown interest in helping save Buffalo Reef, and partners involved in the cleanup effort “are constantly looking” for other funding sources.

It’s not lost on her that the state and federal governments have authorized billions of dollars to support new mining, while those partners are still hunting for funding to recover from past mines.

“There's all this money going over to mineral exploration for critical minerals, and we're like, ‘Hey, we're still cleaning up from the last round,’” she said.

A better future?

As the energy transition fuels demand for “critical” metals used to make EV batteries, wind turbines and other technologies of the energy transition, government and industry have launched a coordinated effort to establish new mines.

Several companies are now exploring for nickel and copper in the UP, or pushing to establish new mines. In some cases, public dollars are underwriting the effort.

While many Yoopers cheer the potential for new jobs in towns that have struggled since the last mining bust, others fear the UP environment will be collateral damage.

Those concerns should come as no surprise, given the industry’s polluted past in the UP, said Carol MacLennan, a Michigan Technological University anthropologist who studies mining’s impact on communities.

“The lesson is, you live with this forever,” MacLennan said. 

Today’s UP mining rush is taking place on treaty-protected lands where the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and other tribes have hunting, fishing, and other use rights. Talon is exploring a mineral package that extends directly beneath the tribe’s reservation.

The tribe has not taken an official stance on Talon, but the tribe has a history of opposing new mines, and officials who spoke to Bridge Michigan said they fear a new era of industrial pollution and natural resources damage.

“There’s this sour taste in our mouths from historical mining,” Ayres said. “So when a company like that comes around, we all kind of have the feeling that ‘Great, we’re going to be dealing with these issues again.’”

Talon officials say they understand those concerns, and want to work with tribes to rebuild trust.

“We want to do things differently,” Malan said. 

For example, Talon has hired a tribal liaison and committed not to explore beneath the Keweenaw tribe’s reservation without consent. And if they find enough metal to develop a mine, Malan said company officials are open to “economic benefits sharing” such as hiring tribal citizens or paying mineral royalties.

“We hope by being open and transparent with the community, by trying to involve a tribal sovereign government from the very beginning … we can make people more comfortable when and if the time comes that we've had a discovery,” Malan said.

The flagrant environmental destruction of earlier mining eras would be illegal today. Modern regulations limit water, habitat and air impacts from mines, which are inspected at least four times a year to ensure compliance. After a mine closure, companies must monitor water quality for 20 years.

“You don't want to leave a problem where there's going to be extensive restrictions and things like that,” said Melanie Humphrey, a mining specialist with the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy. “That's what the industry is moving towards.”

Those modern protections reassure mining skeptics. But only to a point.

The stamp sand problem wasn’t discovered until nearly 70 years after the Mohawk stamp mill closed, and now it will cost billions to clean up. Tribal officials wonder whether today’s mine regulators are overlooking hazards that will only be discovered decades from now.

The question mining companies must answer, Ayres said, is “who’s going to be responsible for what comes after you?”