As the project pushes on, it remains littered with litigation.

Currently, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and three organizations – the National Wildlife Federation, Huron Mountain Club and Yellow Dog Watershed Preserve – are waiting to hear whether Michigan’s Court of Appeals will hear their challenge of a 2006 state permit to build the mine.

In addition, the Huron Mountain Club, a private landowners club, filed a lawsuit in April contending Kennecott didn’t get permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The lawsuit claims that the permits are necessary since the project could harm the Salmon Trout River, wetlands, endangered species and sacred Native American sites.

So far lawsuits and knocking on government doors have proven fruitless and costly, Koski said. But the tribe will continue its steady drumbeat of opposition, pushing industry and government to respect their land, their water, their beliefs and their rights.

“An elder recently gave me a bracelet symbolizing a rainbow,” Koski said. “She said she saw that things were going to be changing.

“There is still a lot of hope.”

This article originally ran at Environmental Health News, a news source published by Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit media company.

4 Comments

1. 1. dbtinc 03:53 PM 6/12/12

   It's time for all this silly religionist nonsense to be relegated to the dump. Great spirits, god, magic sky people ... it's all the same.

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2. 2. marclevesque in reply to dbtinc 05:16 PM 6/12/12

   "It's time for all this silly religionist nonsense to be relegated to the dump. Great spirits, god, magic sky people ... it's all the same"
   
   Instead, I suggest it's time for less corporative chatter about "the great chief economist and his invisible hand", "socio-economic law", and "free market utopias".

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3. 3. notslic 06:46 PM 6/12/12

   While I tend to agree with anything that is anti-religion, the concept of worshiping the sun, the water, the animals and the land...the things that we need for life...makes sense. dbtinc obviously lives in the city; he goes to the market to get food, turns on the tap to get water. The concept of thanking the water for giving you fish, thanking the sun for growing your crops, thanking the sky for giving you rain, is beyond his little empty mind.
   
   Native worship is about and being thankful for LIFE.

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4. 4. Rockchips 05:59 PM 6/18/12

   What is this article doing in a scientific magazine?.

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