Flooding and Nuclear Waste Eat Away at a Tribe's Ancestral Home
Source: New York Times
Flooding and Nuclear Waste Eat Away at a Tribe’s Ancestral Home
The federal government allowed a stockpile of spent fuel on a Minnesota reservation to balloon even as a dam project whittled down the amount of livable land.
By Mark Walker
Nov. 13, 2021
For decades, chronic flooding and nuclear waste have encroached on the ancestral lands in southeastern Minnesota that the Prairie Island Indian Community calls home, whittling them to about a third of their original size.
Two years after the tribe received federal recognition in 1936, the Army Corps of Engineers installed a lock-and-dam system just to the south along the Mississippi River. It repeatedly flooded the tribe’s land, including burial mounds, leaving members with only 300 livable acres.
Decades later, a stockpile of nuclear waste from a power plant next to the reservation, which the federal government reneged on a promise to remove in the 1990s, has tripled in size. It comes within 600 yards of some residents’ homes.
With no room to develop more housing on the reservation, more than 150 tribal members who are eager to live in their ancestral home are on a waiting list.
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With no remedy in sight, the tribal community is asking Congress to put into trust about 1,200 acres of nearby land that it purchased near Pine Island, Minn., about 35 miles away, in 2018. That would allow the tribe to preserve its future by adding land farther away from the power plant to its reservation. In return, the tribe says it would give up the right to sue the government over flooding caused by the dam.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/13/us/politics/tribal-lands-flooding-nuclear-waste.html
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