The Moonscape

Published May 9, 2023, 10:00 AM

Since “In Trust” aired, we’ve heard more stories about how Native wealth was exploited. Not far from Osage County, citizens of the Quapaw Nation tell eerily similar accounts of unexplained deaths and mismanaged mineral resources. Lead and zinc mining around Picher, Oklahoma, provided bullets for two world wars, but left Native families to restore land that looks more like the surface of the moon than the prairie.

Hi. I'm Alison Era. You might remember me from the previous episode of Intrust. I helped Rachel report some of the stories we told you about in this series. I'm also the Indigenous Affairs correspondent for KOSU, a public radio station in Oklahoma. Since Interest came out, I've been hearing from a lot of people who say that what happened to the O Sage wasn't isolated. I've heard from citizens of other tribal nations all over Oklahoma with their own stories, their own land with big mineral deposits, their own ancestors who were victims of exploitation or died suspicious deaths, and I thought it was important for you to hear some of those stories too, So I'm taking the lead on two bonus episodes. The first about a reservation not too far from the O Sage Nation. That's today on Intrust.

Okay. We are in Picture Oklahoma, and and it is basically I mean, if you can just picture mountains or sand dunes, very large sand dunes, just a little bit different color, that's what it looks like. And this large one behind is it looks like a small mountain.

That's Martha Barker, a Quapas citizen from Miyama, Oklahoma. She was the first Miss Indian USA, and with that title, she helped raise money and awareness for Native causes. Whenever she can, she draws attention to what happened to her family and their land on the Quapaw Reservation. That's why I went out to visit her on that land. And Picture Oklahoma in the northeastern part of the state, about one hundred miles east of Osage County, and that mountain she's describing.

It's the tailings from them running the orange stuff that they mine out of the ground. They run it through these big crushers to get the lead and zinc out of it, and then this is the leftovers.

More than a century ago, a massive amount of lead and zinc was discovered in this area, and those minerals were extremely valuable. A lot of the bullets fired in World War One and World War Two came from here. But that mining brought environmental destruction and toxic pollution two Now Picture and the surrounding towns are effectively abandoned.

It looks like a moonscape. It was on the list of the number one superfund sites in the United States, and its lead contamination, you know, in the water, soil, everywhere.

A superfund site is a place with so much hazardous pollution that the government has to come in to oversee the cleanup. This one's called the Tar Creek Superfund Site. You may be familiar with this area from news reports talking about a ghost town. One headline read, take a tour of America's most toxic town. This superfund site is sprawling covering Picture nearby Carden and Quapaw Land near the Kansas border, about forty square miles. Mining companies dug so much here that sinkholes dot the landscape, and some parts are blocked off with wire fences to keep people from going near there. But what often gets lost in all the stories about Picture is whose land this is? Quapaw Land and what happened to those Quapaw families whose land held some of the greatest mineral wealth America's ever seen.

When you drive into Picture, everything on the left hand side of the main drag and going all the way to Cardon is basically my family's cousins, families, uncles, aunts and stuff. It's all of our allotments. But you know, the lead and zinc is still down there. And it bubbles up, and the streams and wells and creeks and everything. When it rains, the water is orange and it foams.

I've been there and seen it. There's lead and zinc still in all those piles. After it rains, streams look slick like oil has been spelled around tar creek plants, and the trunks of trees are orange.

I have no idea what we can do with the land, but it's what we've inherited. So we've inherited a big mess, you know.

I want to back up here to say something about the Quapa and how they ended up in Oklahoma. Like a lot of tribes, they were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the eighteen thirties. The US government forced them from Arkansas and Mississippi to what's now Oklahoma. Before long, allotment came. That was the US policy to take communally owned land from tribal nations and divide it up and sell what was left to white settlers. Knowing that allotment was coming whether they wanted it or not, the Quapot decided to do it themselves. Martha said that process was corrupt.

There was a gentleman that came from New York City. He was Mohawk Indian, and he ingratiated himself into the tribe and kind of took over control of our council and befriended the BIA and took it upon himself to a lot the land. He added in his children, his wife, his in laws, anybody that would pay him two hundred dollars, he would add him into the tribe.

The BIA. The Bureau of Indian Affairs rejected the list several times, but Martha says the man befriended bureaucrats there too.

And so he lauded the land, all the good quality land, farming land, to his families and to the families that bought into the tribe. There's probably about eight of us, eight big families that couldn't speak English. We were given the land that was poor soil conditions, couldn't grow anything on. My grandmother tells stories about how when they first moved there, they couldn't drink the water. That's where the lead and zinc mines were discovered.

A lot of the mining on Martha's land was overseen by the US government like it did o sage mineral wealth as a trustee. Quapaw families say it wasn't managed well and that a lot of times it was mismanaged. The quapaus mineral rights belonged to whoever owned the land, so that wealth it wasn't evenly distributed. Some Quapasa citizens hardly got anything. Martha's family allotments had a lot of leaden zinc under them. One rich deposit was on the land of her great great grandmother named Anna Slagel. Martha told me a story that was similar to those I'd heard in Osage County. Anna at one point was married to a Quapa man, and when he died, she inherited his wealth. What happened after Anna inherited it, Martha says it was suspicious.

She owned several homes down here along the Spring River area and just kind of went back and forth between them. She went to the BIA to get a choffur because they had to pray everything.

You have to remember that a lot of Quapaw families couldn't spend any of their money without permission from the Bureau of Indiana Affairs.

She came back with this homeless man. He was non Indian, He's a white man, and he's like thirty years younger than her. She's an old lady. He's like a young young man. They wound up being married, and so she was killed by him. I don't know how else to say it, any other nice way. He drove She was asleep in the backseat of the car, and it was a big touring car, and he drove her off a cliff and he got out. He survived. She did not, and he inherited her money and her land. Luckily, she did have a will drawn up, so some of her children did get some of that land and money.

Do you have the death certificate?

I do not, but I have an article in a newspaper that tells the story about it. How she was any investigation, No, why no, No, are you kidding me? No? No, because he was a white man and she was full blood Indian.

The article Martha Mentions, from November of nineteen thirty four, says Anna Slagel was seventy when she died and had interests in seven mining leases. And according to Martha, some of Anna's wealth went to her driver and some of it to her children. But even the land her family did hold on to, it's not in great shape.

I'm sure This land was probably, you know, somewhat pretty before the mines went in, but now it's just forgotten. It's forgotten, just like a lot of the tribes are forgotten, a lot of the people are forgotten.

So how did the mining go as far as to turn a once pristine prairie into such a toxic wasteland. And if this was one of the biggest mining operations in the country, where did all the money go? It turns out there's a guy in town who knows the history of the mining industry better than anyone.

When you grow up in a small town like Pitcher, that's really all you know. There may be a town next to it, but really all you know is a small town.

This is at Kahili, even though picture is on the Quapaw Reservation. A lot of non native families moved here in the early to mid nineteen hundreds to work in the mines. Ed's family was one of them. That's next.

I was born in Flippin', Arkansas. My father was a sharecropper in Flippin' and in nineteen forty three he heard that there was work in Pitcher, Oklahoma. In the mind, my mother packed everything we had in a suitcase and cardboard boxes, and we caught the train to job in Missouri, and somehow we made it from jobling the wonderful Pitcher. And so I lived in Picture until I was a sophomore in high school.

Ed Kaheely is like a walking encyclopedia. He has boxes and boxes of old receipts, maps, photographs. Started as a retirement project. Before he moved back to Oklahoma, he lived in California, where he was a nuclear engineer for the government at the height of the Cold War. But Ed says, even with all the projects he had going on back in California, he couldn't stop thinking about Pitcher.

I had always kept ties with the area back here, maintained friendships and made a couple of trips a year.

So in the nineties Ed and his wife packed up their things and headed back to Oklahoma.

We live about nine miles east of here along the Spring River, and we built a home out there, raised cattle. I wanted to be nearby, but I did not want to live in Pitcher. You know, there's not a lot of lawns and parks and that sort of thing.

Ed's been researching, digging deep into the history of the mining industry. Ed's father worked for the biggest mining company in Pitcher, called Eagle Pitcher. At first, I assumed the company was named after the town. It wasn't until I started talking to Ed that I realized that town was actually named after the company.

And so they began to expand in nineteen fourteen, and they needed a town because this was open prairie for miles, and they needed employees, So they needed people. Eagle Pitcher built a first church in town, and they built a few homes for some of their their internal staff, and they built first water tower, and they did everything they could do to support the town, including providing law enforcement in a while, and crazy Town.

By the nineteen twenties, eleven thousand miners were living in and around Pitture. This was all happening on Couapa allotments, mining companies releasing and sometimes buying land outright from Quapaw families. And remember this was a time when thousands of Native Americans were deemed incompetent to handle their own affairs. So those leases and deeds they were going through the BIA.

They began to drill in downtown picture here just two blocks over from here, and discovered the mother load of the entire Picture mining field was beneath the city of Pitcher.

Ed says the BIA and the mining company would negotiate leases with the verbal agreement from the Quapa landowner, and.

Then the Bureau of Innan Affairs then was supposed to collect that money from the mining companies and then pay that to the Indian owner.

Ed's looked at thousands of these leases, and what he found was that the US government wasn't collecting the money they should have been for Quapaw landowners. Millions of dollars, he says, should have ended up with Couapa a lattes that mining companies kept for themselves. But it wasn't just the mining companies that were getting rich of the Quapaw land. As Ed was digging through all these documents at the Ottawa County Courthouse, he started to notice something else that there were way more leases than there needed to be.

There was a ponzi scheme that lasted for the lifetime of the mining fuel.

What Ed found was that Quapaw landowners would enter into an agreement to get a royalty rate for their land save five percent of the proceeds. But whoever got that lease they could release the land to someone else at a higher rate, and then someone may package that lease up with others and lease it to the mining company for even more Basically middlemen layers of investors and companies in between the quapaw a lattie and the mine operator taking their cut. But this scheme it not only cheated the Quapaul landowners, it also ate into the profits of the mining companies themselves, and slowly smaller companies started going bankrupt or selling to the big players like Eagle Pitcher. Eventually only a couple of companies had control of all the mining here, and those companies they got more and more desperate to extract as many minerals as they could. They went back to old mines and dug some more closer to the surface, and even dug into what they call pillars, the places that miners leave underground to keep the surface from collapsing. In the nineteen sixties, there were three bad collapses in one neighborhood. Those residents moved, but the ground kept collapsing and the toxic piles kept growing. Those giant piles they're called chat. While Ed and I were talking, he offered to take us to the top of one to see what it looks like today.

We are on top of one of the last tailing piles in the Pitcher mining field in downtown Pitcher. This particular pile is about one hundred and seven feet high and about a quarter mile in diameter. And from here we can get a panoramic view of the old mining field and you can see a large number of tailings mill tailings that are still in existence, you know, three hundred and sixty degrees from here, to give you some sense of the extent of the mining.

It was a clear and cold day up on the pile. You can see Kansas to the north, Missouri to the east, with chat piles stretching for miles between like giant sand dunes. There was a beat up plastic sled at the top of the chat pile. A lot of people who grew up here remember sledding down. These chat piles are shooting bottle rockets.

See those buildings down there. Those are in the worst zone, and the old reunion park where we used to have the annual reunion is severely undermined. It was the worst area that we found in all of the areas that we that we.

Studied, ed was hired in the early two thousands to examine the risk of cave ins, back when a lot of people were still living in and around Pitcher. His job was to figure out which parts of picture were most likely to collapse. We have read the report he submitted to the Army Corps of Engineers. The risk of cavens was so bad that one of their recommendations was to reroute school buses so kids weren't at risk of the ground collapsing from beneath them on their way to school. And there was lead in the soil and the water, which is a serious health risk because it can cause nerve and brain damage. At one point, the Indian Health Service took blood samples from kids around here and found elevated lead levels in thirty five percent of the children they tested. Eventually, the cavens and the lead pollution were so bad the state and the federal government came in to buy people out of their homes. That was about fifteen years ago. Most families didn't want to leave their community, a few refused. The buyout process was fraught with all sorts of allegations of corruption all the way up to the federal government. Ed said he spent a lot of time back then trying to advocate for local families. He was frustrated they weren't being given enough money to move ed wanted us to see one of those cavans up.

Close, this particular area. This is the third time this has collapsed. It has been filled and collapsed three times, so that you know, you can stand here and you can look in all directions and it looks like a pristine prairie, and then all of a sudden you get something like this and you say, no, wait a minute, is this really? Is this land really safe?

The hole was deep, maybe fifty or sixty feet. There was another a few hundred yards away.

Anybody want to go closer and look good? Yeah, I don't know. This is a small collapse. Yes, this is about sixty seventy feet across. As I mentioned, we logged one hundred and four that were over one hundred feet across.

As we drove around, we saw trash aerund, the base of some chat piles, beer bottles, children's toys, the skeleton of an old hotel. It was mid afternoon. If this was any ordinary town, school would be letting out people heading home from work. But this is picture it's quiet, eerie.

Okay, we're going to hop out here real quickly.

There was one other thing and wanted us to see. He took us to another place here The ground wasn't even ed, says he has a personal connection to this spot.

Okay, now, let me explain to you. During the buyout, they were trying to figure out where do we put all of the debris from these homes were destroyed. They came up with this bright idea that instead of taking all of that material to a sanitary landfill and paying for it, why don't we just put it in a hole in one of the big cave ins and you know, market complete and along with everything went in. Here is my old childhood home. His is in here, so I have a private stake in the in this place.

During the buyout, remnants of his home and the homes of others were put in a sinkhole. According to Ed, this land is going to collapse again with all the stuff that's wet and decomposing. At one point, the mining company Eagle Pitcher was on the hook for almost two million dollars for cleanup, but it filed for bankruptcy and ended up paying a lot less. Now it's owned by a private equity firm in Chicago. We contacted the firm, GTCR, but they declined to comment. We asked ed why he spends so much time on all this, Why not just leave his childhood home in the.

Hole and move on everything. We've wasted it, we've messed up. We have an obligation to fix and you know, and it's that simple. It is so easy to mess things up, you know. We've proven that time and time and time again. But it's a whole different thing to try to fix it.

Fixing picture fixing the Quapaw reservation won't come cheap or easy. But the Quapaw Nation is working on that on the ground and in the courts, and Martha Barker and other Quapaw citizens are doing their own reclamation. Those chat piles we've been talking about, they're more than just hills of rubble. They actually have value today. It's all raw material for making roads, lots of roads. That's next.

Different. Asphalt comes in different the chunks come in different sizes, and this is a very very sought after size.

That's Martha Barker again. She took us out to her family's land to show us one of the big chat piles. Right as we were standing there talking about the value of the piles, a truck drove up next to us. Martha weaved it down.

Oh, by Martha Martner.

Okay, there are you with the tribe or the remediation.

The guy told Martha he was with an asphalt company.

How friackin weird was that running into an asphalt guy, right? You know, that's the way it is. It's like when my mom, when she came down one time.

I couldn't help notice Martha's suspicions of this man. That's because there's a long history here between asphalt companies and landowners and Martha's mom she was right in the middle of it. Her name was Ardina Rivard Moore. She lived in Miama, a town about fifteen minutes south of Pitcher, were she taught Quapau language classes.

She would drive back and forth, and she kept noticing when she'd drive by picture that the chat piles were going down and down and down. And so she drove out there and she noticed there's just dump bload trucks lined up sixteen deep, just hauling off the chat.

When Martha's mom saw all those trucks, hauling off Chat from her land. It made her wonder how much money she was getting for it.

Her IM account hadn't changed in years, and I.

Am an individual Indian money account holds the money the government manages for Native Americans. If companies were taking Chat off her land, it should be showing up there.

No income was coming in, but obviously they were hauling Chat off. So she called her cousin. They went out the next day and they had a little pocket and stomatic camera and they started taking pictures of these big, huge trucks hauling off all this Chat. And she took her pictures. Armed with her pictures, went to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Miama and they told her, do not make trouble for this office. Yeah. While that just lit her fire.

Those pictures she took, they gave her the proof she needed. Chat being sold from her land wasn't being paid for. So in the early to mid two thousands, Quapas citizens boiled two lawsuits related to the sales of Chat. Both alleged that their trustee, the federal government, wasn't keeping track of all the sales and accused them of mismanagement. The one filed by Martha's Mom, Ardina and other plaintiffs was over piles that disappeared in recent years. A second case was over piles that disappeared decades earlier. The US has actually agreed to settle both lawsuits, though without admitting it did anything wrong. We reached out to the BIA and they said they're working to protect the trust assets of all Native Americans and Alaska Natives. They said that includes helping people who own mineral rights achieve economic self sufficiency through developing their resources. After the US settled those cases, one of them paid out, that's the one Martha's mom brought. But the other one needs an Act of Congress before the government can release the money.

It has been stuck in committee for the last year and a half will not make its way out.

This is Guy Barker. He's the former secretary treasurer for the Quapa Nation and he's an attorney who worked on both lawsuits. He's also Martha's son.

It is a true responsibility, you know, the same way as you and I have to pay for our electric bill or you know, make your house payment. This is a debt owed by the federal government and they continue to sit on it.

The payout they're waiting on. It's one hundred and forty million dollars to the Quapaw families involved in the settlement.

So there's a possibility and given the environment that we're looking at right now, with extraordinary expenses and quite a lot of debate over government spending, they could make a decision not to make good on their promise. And that's something that kind of continues to terrify some individuals that have worked on this for so well.

That money is important enough for quapaf families to pay bills, cover expenses, maybe help send their kids to college. But Guy says it doesn't even come close to the amount of wealth that was extracted from Quapaw land.

And so to imagine that amount of money that could have gone to a community, it's hard to wrap your head around, and to see what good kind of really could have come from it as impossible. But I know, having grown up around that area, we're very far from that in terms of reality. The unbelievable majority of our tribal members live under the poverty line and to see where that has kind of happened, and purely from a responsibility standpoint, is it's frustrating.

I asked Guy what he sees when he pictures the Quapa Reservation in the future. He says, just look at the part of the reservation that wasn't mined.

There's a huge piece of fresh water in a river that runs right through the center of the reservation. And there's an area where mining practices were never conducted, right and you drive through there and it's heavily wooded. It's very green, it's extraordinarily lush. It's beautiful, very hilly, you know, picturesque all over the place.

The Quapoun nation is currently working with the EPA to clean up the polluted land. Guy says it will take a long time, but an end it'll be worth the work.

And so hopefully in thirty forty years, you know, we can kind of see a completely remediated area. It's going to be a long process. I'm looking forward to it. I can't wait to watch an unfold come into the decades come. But it's certainly not going to happen overnight.

We've been telling you the story of the Quappa and the fight for their land. It's just one of the many stories I've heard about the taking of land, the taking of wealth. That part of Indigenous history is rarely taught in classrooms, and for decades, native stories have been written out of the narrative in popular culture, obscured by a shinier version of Oklahoma and the West that reduces Native people to relics or caricatures and places settlers in a more heroic light, or doesn't include Native people at all. One of the most known stories is a musical set in Oklahoma, with singing cowboys and dancing farmers, a big song about statehood, and a bright golden haze on the meadow. Except that's not the whole story. That's on the next bonus episode of Intrust. For more about the show, go to Bloomberg dot com slash Intrust. Intrust is a production of bloom and iHeartMedia. This episode was reported and hosted by me Alison Errera, Additional reporting by Rachel Adams Hurd. Victor Eveyas is our senior producer. Jeff Grocott is our senior editor. Stage Bowman as our executive producer and head of Podcasts. Additional support from Katie Boyce, Gilda Decarley, and Kathleen Quillion. Sound engineering by Blake Maples. Our fact checking was done by Molly Nugent. Theme music by Laura Ortman, Photography by Shane Brown.

You can email us at.

Podcasts at Bloomberg dot net. Find Intrust anywhere you get your podcasts.

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