1/ This is a photo of Regina Brave, taken in 1973. She is 32 years old. It was taken in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on a Lakota reservation during a 71-day standoff between federal marshals and militant Indigenous activists over Paha Sapa, also known as the Black Hills. (Thread.) 
2/ Taking place on the same site where the US Army massacred several hundred mostly unarmed Lakota nearly a century earlier, the Wounded Knee standoff helped launch the American Indian Movement, and Brave’s career as a Native rights activist.
3/ Brave’s photo went viral again in 2017, when police arrested her for protesting against the Dakota Access pipeline. Her photo was shared online as a symbol of Indigenous resistance.
4/ Now, Brave and other Lakota elders are staring down yet another encroachment on their historic lands: a 10,600-acre uranium mine proposed to be built in the Black Hills. bit.ly/2zcSq0r
5/ The Dewey-Burdock mine, proposed by a Canadian-owned firm called Powertech, would suck up as much as 8,500 gallons of groundwater per minute from the Inyan Kara aquifer to extract as much as 10 million pounds of uranium ore in total.
6/ Lakota say the project violates both an 1868 US-Lakota treaty and federal environmental laws by failing to take into account the sacred nature of the site. If the mine is built, they say, burial grounds would be destroyed and the region’s waters permanently tainted.
7/ Lakota activists have raised alarms about the risks uranium mining poses to their communities. While no evidence has definitively linked their health problems—birth defects, cancer, and kidney disease—to mining, many believe that uranium contamination is partly to blame.
8/ For Brave, the mine is just the latest battle in a long war to stop settlers’ affronts to Lakota lands. “They’re taking so much from [the earth] and not giving anything back,” she says. “I’m thinking we should say to them, ‘Get the hell off. Your rent is over.’”
9/ A few years ago, uranium was a dying industry. It seemed like the Lakota could drag out the legal battle long enough to make Powertech’s prospects no longer worth the fight. But under the Trump administration, the industry has seen a renewal in interest and funding.
10/ On top of allocating $150 million for domestic uranium, Trump has:
• Fast-tracked massive oil pipelines
• Opened millions of acres of public land to mining
• Nixed Obama-era rules requiring mining companies to clean up sites
• Expedited environmental impact reviews
• Fast-tracked massive oil pipelines
• Opened millions of acres of public land to mining
• Nixed Obama-era rules requiring mining companies to clean up sites
• Expedited environmental impact reviews
11/ A legal win for the Lakota would be an unprecedented victory for a tribe over the corporations that have plundered the resource-rich hills. And it could set precedents forcing federal regulators to protect Indigenous sites and take tribes’ claims more seriously.
12/ Tribes are beginning to win more rulings in favor of their long-forgotten treaty rights. In 2019, for instance, the state of Washington became the first to require the consent of tribes on projects that affect their people, lands, or sacred sites.
13/ A shift from merely consulting tribes to making projects contingent on tribes’ involvement and input, a central tenet of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, would represent a monumental change.
14/ Treaty rights didn’t stop white settlers from taking Lakota land in the past. And nobody knows how many sacred sites they destroyed—but now there’s a chance to protect those that remain.
15/15 Read @delilahtov’s feature story about the fight over the Black Hills, featuring photography by @WilcoxFrazier, online now: bit.ly/2zcSq0r
