Gold mine
The kids here have such a different frame of reference than I'm used to. I was going over vocabulary words with the 4th grade. They all knew what poachers were. One thought that ancestors was aunts who are sisters, but one of the girls explained it by saying when you go over water you pray for the souls of your ancestors, because that's where they go when they die.
Barb's brother John was here this weekend. He just quit his job with the forestry service in Idaho and was going back to his cabin in Minnesota. So for once we were on the way for someone. We all loved him. He fixed our clogged sink (it had a rock in it), and left us a bunch of his food.
Speaking of food, we've got our government commodities now. We really could live just off that, since we get frozen beef, chicken, bison, canned vegetables, fruit, cereal, and flour and the like. I feel a little ashamed that I'm on government assistance now. Though everyone here is. The unemployment rate on the reservation is over 80%, and practically all the kids are on free lunch. I don't think we even collect money at lunchtime. But when my Dad was unemployed we qualified for free lunch and food stamps, and my parents always refused to go on it. I come from a very self-reliant family, and its been plugged into my mind that you don't accept assistance from the government or people outside of the family. Of course I accepted financial aid in college though, since who can pay $30,000 a year? A lot of people at Kenyon, actually, but that's because they're insanely wealthy.
On Sunday, this couple that we've become friends with took us for a tour of White Cow and Mission Canyon. John brought his gun along in case he saw an elk. He said one of the previous volunteers cried when he killed a deer and gutted it, but if he saw an elk, we'd just have to cry. An elk would supply him with meat for a long time. Hunting season has started, and that's what most of the men are going to be doing for the next two months. John said that some people were mad that the elk all migrate to the reservation, and then only the tribe members could hunt them. So someone would get a helicopter and drive them off the rez. But last year they all waited down from the helicopter, and then it drove the elk right to them.
It was so gorgeous up in the mountains. We saw wild peppermint and picked a bunch. We also saw the old gold mine. In the 1880s, gold was found on this mountain on the reservation, so the government sent some agents out to buy that land for a pittance. There was a lot of pressure, and some of the names signed on the contract were people who didn't exist. They were told that if they didn't sell the mountain, they wouldn't get any food. The government rented the land to Pegasus, a Canadian mining company for $2.50 an acre. They made billions, and took off the top of the mountain, using cyanide and arsenic to strip the mountain in the 1980s. Now the water around there is poisoned, and Pegasus has declared bankruptcy to avoid paying to clean the area up. It just makes me so mad. They never did find the mother-lode. Its still on the reservation, but the tribe is not going to rape the land to get it.
But besides that blot on the landscape, it was so beautiful. I felt so happy. And now that I know the lay of the land a bit, I can explore it on my own.
