The moratorium is designed to allow the tribe time to conduct thorough research and establish rules and a regulatory program to prevent “environmental hazards” from industrial livestock operations “in a manner that protects the Band’s core interests related to human health, natural resource protection and economic security.” On December 1, 2022, the White Earth Band set a two-year moratorium on the development of large livestock and dairy operations within its reservation boundary. In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, along the shores of Lake Superior, started two years ago to set surface water quality standards for lakes, rivers and streams in its jurisdiction. ![]() The White Earth Band is one of a growing number of Native American tribes exerting their authority to protect reservation water reserves. Leveraging its treaty-granted sovereign nation status, the tribe is effectively establishing its own authority to issue permits for these farming expansions. (Photo by Keith Schneider / Circle of Blue) Taking A Stand In response, White Earth Nation is implementing a series of mandatory and enforceable pollution prevention and water conservation measures that challenge the orthodoxy of voluntary practices that states and the federal government have embraced for the last half century.Īlgae chokes North Fork of Crow River northwest west of Minneapolis, a consequence of nutrient pollution from farm fields. “When you look at the magnitude of these factory farms, the level of waste they produce, it’s horrible,” Fairbanks said. ![]() The agricultural operations bring ruinous nutrient pollution that has been documented in all of Minnesota’s farming counties, and massive groundwater withdrawals for irrigation and livestock. That way of life is under threat, however, as industrial-sized dairies, hog facilities, and big crop farms are beginning to surround the tribe’s 829,440-acre reservation near the North Dakota border. “Everything that revolves around that rice revolves around all of us,” explained Michael Fairbanks, the tribe’s chairman. The lakes and the magnificent bounty of wild rice still form the spiritual foundation of a culture, economy, and way of life for the tribe, which inhabits the White Earth Reservation that was created in 1867 through a treaty the United States signed with the Mississippi Band of Chippewa Indians. – It’s been centuries since the White Earth Band migrated west across North America, following an ancestral prophecy to go where “food grows on water.” One of seven Ojibwe bands in Minnesota, White Earth found that prophecy fulfilled along the many shallow clear lakes that lie in the state’s northern forests, where luminous green stalks of wild rice grow in abundance.
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