By Miki Meek
Fifty-six miles south of the Great Salt Lake, the Goshute Indians stand divided by tradition and the future of the land on the Skull Valley Reservation.
A possible storage facility for much of the nation’s highly radioactive waste has some tribal members crying environmental genocide on the land their ancestors roamed before the pioneers, the Mexicans and even the Spaniards. But their tribal leaders continue to tout the economic growth the facility could bring to the Skull Valley Band.
“There is nothing on this land,” said Leon Bear, chairman for the Goshute Skull Valley Band. “I believe the benefits from this thing could be awesome, and I want to build up the reservation to a point where everything that we have doesn’t have to be substandard anymore.”
For most of his 14-year career on the tribe’s executive committee, Bear has invested his time trying to attract business ventures in hopes of bringing economic development and money to a 118,000-acre reservation that lies on a stretch of sagebrush in Utah’s Western desert.
Bear believes that he finally hit the jackpot in 1997 when the tribe’s executive committee signed a lease agreement with Private Fuel Storage, a consortium of eight utility companies, to house a temporary storage facility for 10 million spent fuel rods in Skull Valley.
He envisions using the lease money to revive the heart of the reservation — 11 houses, an abandoned trailer home and a two-pump gas station with a convenience store that runs on volunteers. Bear said the lease money would finally enable the tribe to build new homes and other infrastructure that will bring Skull Valley Band members back to the reservation. The storage site itself would also create more than 40 jobs for tribal members, he said.
Out of 125 tribal members, 25 live on the reservation and more than half of the latter have incomes that fall below the national poverty level. The rest live in areas such as Salt Lake City, Grantsville and Tooele where they have found employment opportunities that Skull Valley can’t provide.
“Tribal members are already expressing that they would come back if there were jobs on the reservation,” Bear said. “If more of our people come back to Skull Valley, then things will improve here because they will bring back different ideas and visions that will help guide our future.”
Bear began to see a future for the Goshutes in spent nuclear fuel in 1990 when the Office of Nuclear Waste negotiator sought a voluntary candidate site to consider storing spent fuel temporarily. The tribe’s executive committee — Bear, Vice President Rex Allen and Secretary Mary Allen — submitted a grant application and began gathering data.
After investigating for six years the benefits and impact of such a facility in Skull Valley, the executive committee approached Private Fuel Storage and negotiated a 25-year lease on 800 acres of their land for an amount of money that neither Bear nor PFS will disclose. In 1997, their application was submitted and accepted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Now, they are awaiting licensing. If granted, PFS could start construction on the site in 2001 and begin packing 4,000 stainless steel casks onto giant concrete slabs as early as 2003.
But with the world’s largest nerve gas incinerator to the east, a coal-fired electrical power plant to the south and a radioactive disposal site to the north of Skull Valley, another hazardous waste facility is not the answer, said tribal member Margene Bullcreek.
“There is a diversion between our culture and the modern invasion of nuclear waste,” Bullcreek said. “Tribal members that are letting go of our culture and tradition are for it because their belief is that what is in the past is in the past and that we aren’t living in tepees anymore. They see this as a way to move forward.”
In March 1999, Bullcreek filed a lawsuit with 20 other tribal members in reaction to the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ approval of the Goshutes’ lease with PFS just three days after it was signed and submitted. Filed in the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, the lawsuit against PFS, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Secretary of the Interior charged that safety issues were not investigated and that proper tribal approval for the project was not obtained.
The lawsuit also asserted that outside of the executive committee, the rest of the tribe has never seen the PFS lease or been told how much money they will receive from it. Bullcreek said that she wasn’t even aware of the tribe’s negotiations with PFS until she sat down one morning to read the newspaper.
Their case was dismissed in February because the BIA said it was in the process of resolving allegations opposed tribal members made.
However, the Goshutes who oppose the proposal are gearing up to take their lawsuit back to court because over the past eight months the BIA has not addressed any of these allegations, said attorney Duncan Steadman.
From the beginning, Bullcreek has protested the tribe’s lease agreement with PFS. She formed an opposition group among the Goshutes called Ohngo Gaudadeh Devia, Goshute for “The Ridgetop Timber Community,” the same year the lease was signed.
The main aims of the group are to raise public awareness about the dangers of spent nuclear fuel and to preserve cultural traditions of the tribe for future generations, she said.
But with 21 members enrolled in Ohngo Gaudadeh Devia versus the 70 who have already signed a resolution in support of the nuclear storage site, Bullcreek fears that the tribe is on the verge of throwing itself into mainstream society.
“Being traditional is part of what we are as Native Americans, and this is something that has been passed down through the generations,” Bullcreek said. “We could have become a part of the melting pot a long time ago if the government would have had its way, but throughout the years we have managed to hold onto our identity. And in our identity we respect our land, our air and our animals because they are sacred to us.”
Sammy Blackbear, a member of the Goshutes’ general council and the main plaintiff in the lawsuit, says tribal leaders have taken advantage of the poor financial situation of many tribal members by buying their votes for the nuclear site proposal with cash payoffs.
“Tribal leaders and PFS flaunt money and materialistic things in front of people who don’t have anything to get their support,” Blackbear said. “They keep holding that money over their heads hoping that they will become desperate enough to put their signatures on the resolution.”
Blackbear also said that more tribal members would speak out against the lease if they weren’t afraid of receiving the same repercussions he and Bullcreek have experienced for their outspokenness.
Although Bear denies their allegations, both said the executive committee has threatened their tribal memberships and homes on the reservation.
Because Blackbear has not been able to resolve differences over the proposal with tribal leaders, he is putting all his faith into the lawsuit, which will be filed in the upcoming months. He said this is the only chance to keep the tribe intact and the nuclear waste site from becoming the view from the steps of his weather-beaten trailer home.
“If the nuclear storage site comes there will be no tribe,” said Blackbear, who will leave the reservation with his three children if the Nuclear Regulatory Committee approves the project. “This is our land — it’s what has been left to us by our ancestors. It’s not much, and you don’t see a paradise out here, but it’s ours and we are custodians of it. We are supposed to be looking toward the future of the next seven generations to see how our actions will affect them.”
See related story:
Utah working to stop Goshute nuclear waste 09/17/2000
