News from Home

A few summers ago, the roads out to the country in Mandaree were completely jacked up. When I drove out to my Auntie Tillie's house, you had to drive sloooooooowly in case you hit one of the parts of the road that was tore up from all the trucks going back and forth from the oil wells. It was worrisome because there are a lot of older folks that live out that way, and at night it would be dangerous to run into one of those huge potholes.

The truck traffic was high, and sometimes I would see an elderly Native lady in a tiny car being pushed down the road by a huge semi. Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing -- the method being used to extract oil from the Bakken field drilling going on at Fort Berthold -- needs hundreds of gallons of water that must be hauled to extraction sites before being pushed down into the well, and hauled from the sites after the briny "produced water" emerges. The produced water then need to be either stored or treated, each of which produces its own set of environmental issues. The process requires much more truck traffic than other, older methods of oil extraction.

The way I experienced this was via the trucks. They are relentless. And every time I return home to visit family, there are more of them. Some of them hauling oil? Many of them endlessly hauling water and brine back and forth, back and forth.

My cousins and aunties tell me that the oil development on Fort Berthold is only in its beginning stages, and it will become much more extreme in the years to come. Already, the truck traffic is increasing, the community is changing as rig workers from Oklahoma and Texas are imported to supplement the existing labor pool, the roads keep getting torn up and rebuilt, and some tribal members see royalty checks from the wells on their lands -- or checks from oil and gas companies to tribal middlemen who support industry interests in the tribal government. At night, the roads are lit up by the gas being burned off of wells alongside the highways, towering, endless bursts of flame.

The Fort Berthold I knew as a little kid, as a young adult taking time off from college, as a graduate student continually scraping together dollars to return home as a relative, a researcher, and a tribal member, has a new rhythm. It's a rhythm that sometimes barrels down the highways at 70mph like a big truck hauling water -- when it's moving that fast the changes seem inevitable, unstoppable, and you may as well jump on board and try to make some money before you get left behind.

Sometimes the rhythm corresponds to the still quiet of my Auntie Tillie's house out in the country, nestled into a small valley, where you could still hear crickets and the sound of the wind in the cottonwoods and sometimes, sometimes, coyotes yelling around at night. The stillness of running on a gravel road with the sun pounding down on you. The stillness of sitting on the porch while auntie threshed beans. That stillness used to feel safe and comforting, a reminder of a way of life I never got to live because I was born long after the Garrison Dam flooded out our river valley lands. Now, it feels like the calm before a storm.

My relatives are worried. I'm worried. What will we have to repair after the storm has passed and companies with names like Concho, Abraxas, Continental Resources, Whiting, Marathon, Brigham, Hess, Samson, and EOG have taken what they wanted and disappeared to the next site? I don't think anyone knows, and that makes it scarier.