Wisconsin Resources Protection Council

by Al Gedicks and Zoltan Grossman

The following article appears in Cultural Survival Quarterly 25:1 (Spring 2001)

Native resistance to multinational mining corporations in Wisconsin has been growing in northern Wisconsin for over two decades. It started in 1975 when Exxon discovered the large Crandon zinc-copper sulfide deposit in Forest County, one mile upstream of the wild rice beds of the Mole Lake Chippewa (Ojibwe) Reservation, five miles downwind of the Forest County Potawatomi Reservation, and 40 miles (via the Wolf River) upstream of the Menominee Nation.

by Al Gedicks

“The attacks on our sovereignty and treaties are really attacks on our way of life, our way of viewing things. The environment is critical to our being. The same attacks to separate us from our resources and land are being used in Brazil, Alaska, and elsewhere. It’s really racism, with many different names and faces.”

1. Introduction

By Al Gedicks, Sociology
University of Wisconsin – La Crosse

Abstract: Multinational mining companies are finding it increasingly difficult to get approval for new mining projects in sensitive areas in most advanced capitalist nations. To overcome grassroots environmental resistance to new mining projects, multinational corporations, in cooperation with the state, have attempted a variety of strategies, including the following: (1)legislative initiatives to thwart local democratic control; (2) legal challenges to local zoning authority; (3) mass media campaigns; and (4) attacks on tribal sovereignty. The development and effectiveness of these strategies will be evaluated in the context of the intense controversy over metallic sulfide mining in northern Wisconsin.

From Barbara Rose Johnston (ed.)

Life and Death Matters: Human Rights and the Environment at the End of the Millennium

(CA: Alta Mira Press 1997)

By Al Gedicks, Exec. Secretary

WISCONSIN RESOURCES PROTECTION COUNCIL

210 Avon Street #4

La Crosse, WI 54603-3097

(608) 784-4399

Revised and Updated, August 1999

On March 29, 1995, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers held a public hearing on the Mole Lake Sokaogon Chippewa Reservation to take comments on Exxon/Rio Algom’s proposed underground zinc-copper mine next to the reservation. Tribal members testified about the historical origins of their present reservation and the significance of the wild rice which they harvest from Rice Lake on the reservation.