 riding in the mountains with my one of my grandfather who is a working on the JB Ranch as a range rider. All of my education came out of all of the Hat Creek Valley. I was taught our where our hunting grounds were at and what time of year to go for them for deer and what time of year to go looking for berries and to harvest harvest their food for the winter. So the valley really means a lot to me. The meat is hard to find now because of all the logging that's happening, deer having to move out into other areas. Say for example we hunted for two or three weeks and never even saw deer you know see old tracks and that's about it. I mean it takes that long now to get something. I don't I don't believe that the wildlife is going to come back the way it used to be but I think we can we can keep it at a level that that the people in the area can can continue to go out and hunt and to provide to meet for their for their families. Now the Hat Creek project goes ahead and I don't think that that it's going to do the game any good. It's going to only make things worse. The berries harvesting of different berries is going to get worse and also the hunting is for sure going to get get to a level where it's almost impossible to find something. You better listen to the voices from the mountain. Trying to tell you what you just might need to know. For the Empire's days are numbered if you're counting and the people just get stronger blow by blow. You better listen when they talk about strip mining. Going to turn the rolling hills to acid clay. If you're preaching all about that silver lining. You'll be preaching till the hills are stripped away. You better listen to the cries of the dying minor. Better feel the pain of the children and the wives. We got to stand and fight together for survival. And that's bound to mean a change in all our lives. What I saw in the coast of Montana was really, I didn't know how to accept it, but I couldn't believe the size of the machinery that they were using to dig up the coal because they removed so much soil at one time. It was one scoop. It was just, I couldn't even imagine something like that happening. Trying to picture that in the Hat Creek is for 35 years. This is continuously happening 24 hours a day for 35 years. It's really a frightening thing to think about. Looking at the area, the coast surrounding was really flat. There was hardly any mountains for miles and you had these two generating plants burning up all this coal and just shooting all of the pollution into the air. We visited the University of Montana and we have contact down there, Clancy Gordon. We first worked on coal-fired power plants in an area back in West Virginia, Maryland. We were working in that area on the impacts of acid rains upon the coniferous trees that were grown on the Christmas tree plantations. And these were primarily the pines and furs that were grown there for commercial use of selling for Christmas trees. This acid rain caused a very slowness of growth, an abnormality of needles and twisting of needles and this type of thing. I would expect that there's going to be much more damage in Hat Creek than there is going to be in Colstrip. Number one, because of the high terrain, number two, because of the lack of scrubbers that BC Hydro is proposing. Colstrip has a sectionally good scrubbing system. It really removes a lot of the gaseous sulfur dioxide and removes a lot of the particulate. That's not true for BC Hydro. Research has been, they've been working on this for about 1952 on the phenomenon of acid rain transport. Most of that work has been done in Europe during the 50s and 60s. Now in the 70s, American scientists, the most Canadian scientists are very concerned about the transport of acid rains. And they've got it down pretty close. I'd say somewhere between 800 to 1,000 miles is how far that sulfur dioxide can be transported and converted before it's actually leached and washed out of the atmosphere. BC Hydro is not proposing something that will take to remove the gasses. So that sulfur dioxide gas will come out in many hundreds of tons a day at that size of plants. And that's one of the more toxic gasses to vegetation. It's also toxic to human beings at high concentrations. At this mine, we mine one seam of coal. It's called the rosebud seam. It averages about 23 feet in thickness. It's a medium grade subbytonous coal. It averages about 8,600 BTUs, a warranted sulfur content of 0.8%. It's not the best coal in the world as far as heat up or energy output, but it is a very clean coal. These are two of our coal haulers. They're Euclid 120s. They carry 120 tons of coal. They belly dump. We have 14 haulers. Our shop building. We're expanding this as the mine grows. That stockpile right now is about half full. When it's full, it will hold 95,000 tons of coal. It's divided into three zones with five feeters per zone to this underground conveyor. It's a weighing conveyor on an integrated grizzly system. And we'll convey the coal up to the top of the loadout. There's an automatic sampler. We sample each train as it goes out. So a train is constantly moving as it goes underneath. It never stops. We can load out at the rate of 4,000 tons per hour, or we can load a 10,000-ton train in two and a half hours. When we get the cars from BN, we average four train loads per day. We have been able to get as many as eight. With that amount, students, we can rotate that pile every 48 hours. So we've never had a fire. There's never been any spontaneous combustion or explosion. We work the pile with cats and keep it fed constantly into the conveying system. When they originally go in, they say there'll be no, no problem whatsoever. But when the problem starts, what can the rancher really do about it? The basic thing, he can either fight the industry or sell out. And in general, it's easier for the rancher farmer to sell out than to rather just fight through the courts the pollution problems that are being caused by that industry. So that's a typical problem in many, many areas where the damage occurs and therefore the company comes in and buys the property. And they acquire more and more property and therefore they have more and more to pollute. They're allowed to pollute more and more areas. That's to their own property right now. But it's a serious situation because it takes more and more agricultural lands out of production. And that's why we feel rather strongly about the sighting of power plants, aluminum plants, aluminum plants and so on are large polluting sources in agriculture areas. They just simply shouldn't be there because after all, you know, agriculture is the backbone of all strong countries. And without the agriculture, you have nothing. It's very hard to reclaim land, especially in an arid region such as the culture area. This is similar to the arid region around the Hat Crick area where they try not to put in the area. Around Hat Crick and the culture are very, very similar as far as rainfall, as far as vegetation is concerned. In fact, most of the same species grow in both places. One of the more interesting aspects of the studies that have occurred out there on that reclamation land is that they have put cattle back out on some of that land as well as on same weight cattle, same age cattle, so on, as well putting them on the native vegetation over there. And the animals actually gain less weight on that reclaimed land than they did out there on the native vegetation, which we found to be rather surprising. From the past experience here, what would you say that we're looking toward, like as Indian people, what are we going to be faced with? As far as the construction of any large scale construction, power plants, dams, roads, I think most of the people that are operators, pipe fitters, welders, and stuff are brought in from the outside. I don't mean outside of the country, but outside of the area, and they're there to do a job and make money, and they move on. They don't really care too much or respect the Indian tradition, culture, and cultural values. You probably should prepare yourself to deal with some of the impacts that I mentioned. A larger amount of students in your school, more demand for your hospital and medical services, your community events, affairs are going to be impacted by outsiders wanting to tend your powwows, rodeos, whatever. And also, I think just generally, there's going to be probably more crime, more drugs, more everything. It's just going to be increased quite a bit. There's no compromise with coal companies. You might as well face up to that. You compromise with the coal company and you might as well get rid of your reservation. They're going to get that coal as cheap as they can possibly get it, and they're going to give you the smallest piece of land. The government is going to give you as few privileges, as few as they can give. Because you're a problem. What are we going to do about the Indian problem? What the hell are we going to do about it? Well, they want to get rid of them. You know, they don't want to burn us in ovens like they did the Jews. They don't want to kill us like they did in the 1850s. So they were found in a sophisticated way, take our resources. It took millions of years to put the coal in the ground and to develop that ecosystem that you have there. And when you rip it out of the ground in one year or two years or ten years, then you're wiping out millions of years of history and then what's going to take place from there on nobody knows. I always imagine a lot of times that there's going to be a lot of four-lane traffic, a lot of planes, a lot of noise in the area after this hot creek coal comes in because they say it's going to be one of the biggest in the world. If the rivers are polluted and the watersheds are polluted then all bands are all, not only Indian bands, not only Indian people, but the people that use the benefits of the rivers downstream from here would be affected too because of the pollution that this plant would put out. Because everything, all the streams run down river and it probably goes as far as the delta down in Vancouver. You can grow almost anything here if you can apply water to it and you get a long seasonal summer. I just got no reason to move anywhere else. Would you move for BC Hydro? No, BC Hydro would pretty well have to pick me up and move me, but I'll be back. It's frightening to me. It's so difficult to compensate for large areas of land. How do they compensate for it? There just isn't that much land that's similar to this. It's rather unique this whole area here, the more heat units probably than anywhere else in Canada. We can grow things that just can't be grown in many other places with the exception of the southern states. There's a great future for this country, agriculturally. We're hardly touching it now, but we're going to see more fruit and vegetables grown, and it isn't as if they could say, well, we can't grow it here, now we'll move north. It's a very limited area that you can grow these kind of crops and we're going to run out of places to grow them in this country. That's why I would find it difficult to know how they could compensate people for this land. It isn't easily replaced. As far as the Hatch Creek project goes now, have you been approached by, say, BC Hydro and informed you on what their intentions are of the valley so far? Well, not directly, we haven't been. I'm not sure that even some of the ranchers in the area that's going to be directly affected are. I'm really not aware of that, but it's been brought to our attention through the media or word of mouth is how we have learned, and we are concerned now. We're concerned the effect that it's going to have on the environment, which directly involves people in agriculture, both with livestock, which is the main form of agriculture in this area. Plus, we've got several commercial alfalfa growers and from some of the information we've recently learned that this could be very detrimental to these alfalfa growers and they're growing this hay for dairy producers in the Fraser Valley and is an extremely important part of agriculture. And more recently, we've had some soft fruit and vineyards that are being established on a rather large scale in the area and I'm sure these people are going to be very concerned. What are some of the concerns of the people about the Hatch Creek coal mine? Well, some of the concerns are, you know, there are a number of concerns and I can just name a couple of them and one of them is in terms of the river and pollution. Pollution is a great factor that is affecting the river and which is, you know, really a detriment to our food source which is salmon fishing. That is a really important source of food and if something affects that then it affects the people's food supply. I notice that there's sawmills in the area and do a lot of the people work in sawmills? Yes, there, I think that's probably one of the major employment areas for a little over an area, specifically for our area and bridge over there we do have a logging operation and if the young trees coming along are affected by the Hatch Creek project and it burns off the foliage then we wouldn't have this opportunity to develop the forest resource again. It really does affect it negatively. The negative effects are far outweigh the positive effects especially for the people living within this area within radius of 50 miles in any given direction I think people are really going to have to sit down and think about it. I think we would be foolish to believe that the employment factors and things like that is going to be good for the community whereas we don't think it is. But as far as the coal is concerned with respect to generating the necessary energy that Canada needs from what I understand Canada isn't even going to benefit from it all this energy is going down to the states. So where is the benefit of the benefit factors? I think that the people would rather see a steady stable economy over a period of time that tells the whole story and Hatch Creek just doesn't offer that. At Construction Creek there's going to be 2,000 people brought in and what do you think the impact in these surrounding areas is going to be like Cache Creek, Cache Cove, Littlewood? I think that maybe when something like this happens like a big project like this takes place in a small area such as Cache Creek and Littlewood and the surrounding communities there's a great influx of people so there's quick clearing of land and bearing of cutting the trees and having to clear areas so they can put their houses on and there's also the factor of hunting, fishing, things like that I think this would deplete the overall stability of the way we live now What can be left in the area after 70 years and what are we going to be placed with? I guess when the Hatch Creek project has had its way and they've disturbed the area as much as projects of this type do disturb the small communities I think that probably when they leave they'll probably leave a big hole in the ground and will be left just without a big hole in the ground which was at one time probably good grazing land and good forestry land probably an overall nice place to live and it'll be just a very ruined environment and I think that 70 years down the road after that the people will still be suffering from this impact Has BC Hydro approached you in any way? They have interviewed the different branches and on the start they haven't and just in the last year they haven't bothered any but on the very beginning they held a few meetings in there but the accurate that never accomplished must you might say they practically own the whole country they do own this whole north end outside of just our place and well I imagine they've got a the largest percentage of the farming land west of the Thompson How many cattle do you have on the ranch hike? We keep 200