Forest Service approved drilling permit without environmental review
A coalition of tribal nations and Indigenous-led organizers drove mining company Pete Lien & Sons from Pe’ Sla, the sacred prairie in South Dakota’s Black Hills that the Great Sioux Nation calls the “heart of everything that is,” winning what participants described as a rare victory against extraction on tribal land.
“We’re just not used to winning,” said Dr. Valeriah Big Eagle, who directs the Black Hills work of NDN Collective, an Indigenous-led advocacy nonprofit based in Rapid City. “We’re people used to being screwed over by the government at every level.”
The fight unfolded over roughly ten weeks, from the February approval of an exploratory drilling permit to the company’s May withdrawal of its plan. At its core was a permit the US Forest Service issued on February 27 allowing Pete Lien & Sons, a local mining and construction-materials company, to drill 18 boreholes on national forest land. At least 10 of the boreholes sat inside a two-mile buffer around the central meadow that the tribes and the agency had previously agreed to protect. The Forest Service approved the work with a “categorical exclusion” that skipped environmental review.
The permit drew opposition from tribes, local officials, and the public, according to organizers, but the agency granted it anyway. The coalition that formed to oppose it brought together nearly every tribe in the Dakotas, the NDN Collective, and two environmental groups: the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance and Earthworks.
The legal front moved first. In early April, NDN Collective, the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance, and Earthworks sued the Forest Service, and nearly every tribe in the Dakotas filed a second suit of their own. The courts were slow and the company was quick. When Pete Lien & Sons learned a restraining order had been filed, it went to round-the-clock drilling, boring as many holes as it could before a judge ruled.
The organizers could not wait for the courts. Two Oglala Lakota scouts went out to find where the drilling had begun. They traveled back trails until they saw a deer break ahead and a red-tailed hawk soar above them — less like a coincidence than being led, the scouts said. Over a rise, they came upon a road freshly cut to the dirt and, past a parked truck, a drill turning.
Before dawn on April 30, organizers sent up a drone and found the company had moved overnight, its crews now on two lit pads across the highway. The convoy had already set out — a caravan of about a dozen vehicles strung along the highway under a high, bright moon. With the ground still frozen, they climbed the Forest Service roads. At the only road in, 40 of them blocked the way behind them and put their bodies on the drill pads so no rig could run.
“It was supposed to be one day, to make a statement,” Robert Bordeaux, a Sičáŋǧu Lak̇ot̄a poet who joined the occupation, told the Guardian and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. “It went so well we decided to stay.”
For seven days, the organizers lived on those pads. The camp was intergenerational by design: a youth council out front and elders anchoring the camp. They held it through helicopters overhead, three lines of police and private security, and a night that fell to 10 degrees with no fires because the hills were experiencing a drought. They stayed warm with hand warmers and each other.
Ceremony was not a pause from the strategy, the organizers said — it was the strategy. Altars stood on both drill pads. When local news described the camp as “armed and dangerous,” the organizers livestreamed their own version of events. They knew it would be bad optics to drag an Indigenous prayer camp off a mountain on camera.
“The only weapons we had were our prayers,” Big Eagle said.
On May 4, a federal judge halted the drilling, finding the plaintiffs were likely to prove that the Forest Service had unlawfully waved through a supposedly under-a-year project whose permit required three years of work. Still, the organizers did not leave — they did not trust a company that could pay a fine to stop.
Days later, Pete Lien & Sons wrote to the Forest Service withdrawing its plan, and said it would not file another. The company did not explain the decision. Organizers said they believed the company would lose in court and that starting over could take years. For a family limestone-and-concrete business, an unproven graphite prospect was likely not worth the fight. Pete Lien & Sons did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.
The drilling was for graphite, a “critical mineral” of the energy transition and the key ingredient in electric-vehicle batteries.
“It’s to set a precedent to attack all sacred sites,” Big Eagle said. “This isn’t happening just here — it’s happening all over the country.” For the organizers, the graphite was almost beside the point: once a company has the right to drill, it can look for whatever else is down there.
More than 75% of the country’s lithium, copper, and nickel reserves lie within 35 miles of a reservation, according to data cited by the Guardian, and the communities in the path of those reserves are among the most underinvested in the country. Oglala Lakota county, home to the Pine Ridge reservation, has a poverty rate above 50%.
The Pe’ Sla campaign fits a broader pattern of battles over extraction on sacred and treaty land. In March, the federal government transferred Oak Flat, an Apache holy site in Arizona, to a copper company to develop one of the largest mines in North America; the tribe remains in court trying to reverse the transfer. In April, the Senate voted to strip protections from Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, a watershed in Ojibwe treaty territory where the bands still hunt, fish, and gather; the battle has since moved to the statehouse.
What set Pe’ Sla apart, organizers said, was the coordination of pressure across fronts. A lawsuit alone is slow; an occupation alone is easy to clear; a good story alone changes nothing without leverage behind it. The coalition stacked each tactic so the pieces protected one another. That coordination reached into the law: the coalition treated Indigenous sovereignty not as symbolism but as a legal instrument. Nine nations in federal court is a force no advocacy group can supply, the organizers said. The rest was homework — somewhere in the government’s own paperwork, on almost every rushed permit, is the shortcut it took to get there. At Pe’ Sla, organizers said, it was a one-year exemption stretched over a three-year project.
“None of this moves forward without all of us working collectively,” said Anissa Martin, who leads NDN’s Black Hills Land Back campaign. “Everybody had a role, and we understood that.”
Wizipan Little Elk Garriott, the president of NDN Collective and a former Interior department official, describes Pe’ Sla beginning with the sky. It is where Fallen Star came to Earth, and where, in a world scoured by fire and water, the people went inside to survive and later emerged. It is also where traditionally foraged plants like the timpsula, the prairie turnip with its short spike of purple flowers, grow, and its root, high in calcium, is what the tribes value most. Pe’ Sla is a church, a pantry, and a pharmacy at once — the ceremony, the food, and the medicine all right there in the ground.
The coalition’s longer-term aim is a full mineral withdrawal and the Sacred Ȟe Sápa Restoration Act, endorsed by all nine of South Dakota’s tribes, to return the region’s public lands. Asked what winning finally looks like, Martin thought bigger than any bill.
“Maybe NDN won’t even exist anymore,” she said softly, “because our people will be liberated. The land will be liberated.”
Months later, on the reclaimed ground where the grass is coming back, her words did not sound like a slogan. They sounded like a plan that had just, against every odd, worked.