At the heart of much of the Native opposition to the Ambler Road is food.
Frank Thompson, first chief of the Evansville Tribal Council, received nearly unanimous support for a strongly-worded resolution against the road at a regional chiefs’ conference last March. “These are our homes and our villages, that is what we should be protecting,” Thompson said at the gathering. “I am not trying to take jobs away but there are other ways we have to be thinking of versus tearing up our land.”
He also questioned who would ultimately benefit from the development. Among the companies involved is South32 Limited, a global mining company facing a class-action lawsuit in Africa brought by the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference on behalf of miners with black lung disease. “Who are we doing business with,” Thompson said. “And if it is going to be mined, American boys and girls should be mining it, not foreign companies taking the money and the ore someplace else, and what are we left with. Trashed land. Maybe some jobs for a little while.”
On September 18, the United States Army Corps of Engineers announced that it was fast-tracking the environmental review of the first mine proposed in the district that the Ambler Road would serve. Ambler Metals, the partnership formed by Trilogy and South32, has proposed an open-pit mine spanning 1,727 acres and filling 121 acres of wetlands, ponds, and streams. Copper, zinc, and lead concentrates would be trucked along the Ambler Road to Alaska’s coast, then shipped elsewhere for smelting.
The public had until November 2 to comment on the proposal, which would include an open pit mine, ore-processing facilities, waste rock and tailings infrastructure, roads, and airstrips. And it could be only the first of several mines eventually served by the haul road.
The threat is much bigger than a single road, according to Thompson. “Imagine a rust belt, from Chicago to Columbus, Ohio,” he said. “This would be industrialization of the Brook’s Range,” which is one of the country’s last great intact landscapes, stewarded and relied upon by Native communities for countless generations.
Dining and Cooking