Yellow Earth

by John Sayles

  Harleigh is an activist in his way, a product of the casino era. The People were always traders, middlemen, toll-takers on the river. But there was a collective spirit, a balance that was always foremost in the minds of even the most mercenary leaders. Harleigh’s worldview, and her son’s, if she is willing to admit it, was developed watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

  The slide changes and yellow blotches appear on the northeast section of the red patch, as if it’s diseased. “Nineteen oh nine,” croons Harleigh, “the Native American Ripoff Act– I’m sorry, the Enlarged Homestead Act– is passed by Congress, opening up the prime grazing quadrant of the reservation to outsiders. You could get off a boat from West Podunkistan or East Transylvania, wander out here, throw a few spuds in the ground and claim up to three hundred twenty acres of our land.”

  An American flag replaces the map. “Nineteen twenty-four, we trade our status as wards of the government to become citizens of the United States of America. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, however, is not abolished.”

  A portrait of a smiling Franklin Roosevelt, sitting behind a desk, replaces the flag.

  “Nineteen thirty-four, Congress passes the Indian Reorganization Act, without asking if we want to be reorganized or not. The idea is to have us govern ourselves– unless it interferes with the federal, state, or local plans of white people.”

  The next slide is of a trio of men standing with the old river at their backs, their wives and children sitting on the ground wrapped in blankets. Teresa recognizes her Uncle Carl and her father’s best friend, Wiley Burdette. She remembers playing on the banks, remembers the grownups working in the fields, remembers the trucks– thousands of trucks, rumbling past to feed the huge dam they were building.

  “Nineteen forty-four, the Flood Control Act is passed. Eminent domain is threatened, and General Pick’s workers invade the reservation. The dam is completed and over one hundred fifty thousand acres are flooded, virtually all of our farmland, and half of our people are relocated– meaning everybody managed to get out before they were drowned.”

  There is a buzz of reaction as the new slide flashes on the screen, the old river gone, the lake like a snake bloated with a swallowed rodent appearing in its place, new little towns dotting the map upstream.

  “We are paid money for ‘land readjustment,’ the funds distributed on a per capita basis. Today over 57 percent of the land on what’s left of the reservation is not owned or controlled by the Three Nations or our enrolled members.”

  The screen goes black, then the lights come up and Harleigh steps to the front of the platform, scanning his audience. He works a room better than any chairman ever has, Teresa will give him that. Looks good in the outfit, nice sense of drama, a voice made to narrate nature documentaries.

  “A little reminder of our long history with the federal government,” he says. “And my question to you is– are these people we want to be in business with?”

  Some laughter at that. Harleigh and the tribal business council control only about an eighth of the land on the rez, but members who hold private tracts almost always follow their lead.

  The women Ricky calls the Front Four are here, taking up an entire row, each one more substantial than the next. They are related to everybody and not to be trifled with. They are both church ladies and the keepers of tradition, hosting bake sales, judging beadwork and Eagle Dance competitions, and voting as a block once they’ve made their minds up. Teresa went to high school with the oldest two, who always regarded her involvement with AIM as proof of loose morals and hippie inclinations. But they can be reasoned with and can see beyond the needs of their immediate families. They are watching Harleigh with their arms crossed over their chests, waiting for the pitch.

  “I think you all agree with me,” says Harleigh, on the move again, keeping his rhythm tight like a good evangelist, “that the answer is no. We want to be in business on our own. Sovereignty is the word, people, the right and ability to steer our own course that we lost starting back in 1870. That’s a long time of getting kicked around by the federal government. So why’d we put up with it so long? Well, no matter how brave our warriors were, their army was a hell of a lot bigger than ours, and besides that, we didn’t have two Indian-head nickels to rub together.”

  Harleigh drops his voice to a more intimate tone. “You see, folks, sovereignty is kind of a pipe dream when you got an empty belly. But that don’t have to be anymore. Cause the federal government left us a couple loopholes. By their own rules we get to decide that gaming is legal, even if the state that surrounds us doesn’t. And– and this is gonna turn out to be even more important– when they pushed us up on the shelf where the forage is sparse and the farming’s no good, they forgot to steal our mineral rights.”

  Another reaction to this, Harleigh nodding his head as he struts parallel to them all. “That’s right, that’s right, we got something they want, and this time, I am here to tell you, they’re going to pay what it’s worth. We are sitting on millions, maybe billions of dollars worth of shale oil. When Saudi Arabia tells the world to jump, the world asks ‘How high?’ Well from now on that’s gonna be the deal between the Three Nations and the oil companies and the federal government of the USA!”

  Applause now, and Teresa realizes that the horse is not only already out of the barn, it’s running full tilt across the prairie.

  “If we want our sovereignty, we want to control our own lives, we got to get out and compete in the white man’s world, to be in the real deal, not the Special Olympics, where they’ve shunted us off to for so long. Beat em at their own damn game! Which is why I’m so happy to announce the formation of the Three Nations Petroleum Company, which will be overseeing the development of our tribally held energy assets!”

  The lights go down again and a color-coded chart appears on the screen. “This is what it looks like, people,” says Harleigh, peppy as a game-show host. “The executive board is your elected officials, serving with no increase to their mandated salaries, and the stockholders are the enrolled members, man, woman and child, of the Three Nations. We’re all in this boat together, folks.”

  Lights up again, the audience abuzz, already spending their billions. Teresa calls out from the back of the hall.

  “What about all the trucks, Harleigh?” she calls. “What about oil spills and what gets into our drinking water?”

  Harleigh smiles. “I was wondering when we’d hear from you, Teresa.” A ripple of laughter. She’s on the council, the always-dissenting voice, the entertainment portion of the public hearings.

  “Drilling for oil can be a messy business, and those are all important matters to consider. It’s why I’ve appointed us a director of environmental vigilance-Rick McAllen. Ricky, stand up and show yourself!”

  Applause and some knowing laughter as Rick stands and turns to the people in the folding chairs behind him. He doesn’t meet Teresa’s eye.

  “As this process swings into action it’s gonna get pretty busy, lots of moving parts, and so if you’ve got concerns about the impact you go see Rick, he’ll have a direct line to the oil companies involved, and we’ll get things sorted out. There is accepted industry practice, of course, and we’ll make sure these people don’t cut any corners they’re not cutting over in Yellow Earth and the surrounding counties.”

  “Why wasn’t any of this run through council first?” Teresa again, stepping up into an aisle to be heard better.

  “We’ve got so many forms of land ownership here– tribal land, homestead land, fee patent land– and these oil-lease people are sharks, believe me. Too many of the council were missing, didn’t have five for a quorum, and it was thought we had to make a move before individuals started agreeing to leases they weren’t empowered to sign and muddying up the legal waters to where we’d be left holding the bag again when it come to cashing in on this bonanza that’s about to happen.”

  Harleigh is the master of not finding council members when there’s something big
he wants to ram through, but the truth is people love having him as chairman. Her Uncle Carl, who held the position as a fill-in for only a year, said it aged him ten.

  Harleigh is smiling at her, eyes sincere beneath the brim of his silver-banded Stetson. “There is a timing factor involved with this kind of oil play, Teresa. You saw the slide about the dam.”

  “I was there when it happened, Harleigh.”

  “Well, you may not hear the roar yet, but the big gates have already been opened and the water’s pouring in. You either get on the boat with me, or you go under.”

  “IT’S A LITTLE LIKE squeezing a pimple.”

  Noises and faces of disgust. Do kids still have pimples? The teacher with the cobalt blue eyes gives him a smile. Was it Miss Gatling? Old Man Gradenauer, administering Physics to his own high school inmates like a dose of purgative, had been born without a humor gene. ‘Needless to say,’ he would intone, and then say it in the least interesting way possible.

  “There’s a buried deposit, pressure is applied, and it’s forced to the surface.”

  “So it wouldn’t come up on its own?” asks the teacher. Mid-thirties, braids, which you’d expect maybe from the Art Department but not American History, whatever that means these days. Great smile. With a bonnet she’d look like the girl on the raisin box.

  “With liquid or gas,” explains Hardacre, “the deposit is often already subject to a good deal of geological pressure, but trapped beneath the surface by something like cap rock or a salt dome. In that case we just drill in to relieve the pressure and up it comes.”

  “Like opening a bottle of champagne,” says the Eager Beaver in the front row, no doubt president of the Science Club.

  “Same principle. There are leaks in the surface crust sometimes, which is how ancient man discovered this black, sticky stuff that burned really well. In Los Angeles you have the La Brea tar pits.”

  “Which, if you know Spanish, it means the the tar tar Pits,” says Mr. Wizard.

  Hardacre smiles. “We prefer to tap into deposits before they reach the surface and are polluted by the bodies of Ice Age predators. And these days we’ve gone well beyond the Jed Clampett method of oil discovery.”

  Even the teacher doesn’t get the Beverly Hillbillies reference.

  It’s been over twenty years, but walking in here today he got the old feeling in his stomach. My time is not my own, my life is not my own. He was good at the subjects he was interested in, didn’t cause any problems, and still felt sentenced each school day for a crime he’d never committed. They must have new cleaning products by now, but this place even smells the same.

  “We can read rock strata, we take core samples, we send vibrations into the earth and end up with something like a seismic photograph of what lies beneath.”

  “This is for fracking?”

  The teacher again. Could be married, which is just too much trouble. Though the flesh might be willing, his stress threshold is low.

  “Ah, the F-word.” This gets a laugh from everybody. “Hydraulic fracturing has been around since the late forties, and it’s really only an extension of traditional drilling techniques.”

  He goes to the blackboard, hopes the chalk doesn’t squeak. “In a shale oil deposit like the Bakken, the oil and gas lies not in pockets or pools but in individual molecules, trapped inside strata of rock. You’ve heard of getting blood from a stone? Well our method is only slightly less difficult than that, and until lately it was prohibitively expensive.”

  He decides not to get into oil price fluctuations and the Machiavellian scheming of OPEC, a field of conflict above his pay grade and not pertinent to geology. He draws a ground line and a stack of strata beneath it.

  “Let’s say our shale rock is down here. What we’ve got to do is drill down to just about this depth, it can be more than a mile deep, and then gradually angle the pathway of the pipe and begin to drill trunk lines horizontally.” He curves the dotted line indicating the drill hole into the layer of shale. He’s got them now, the seeming impossibility of this task always impressive. “But not only in one direction– we fan out in six, maybe eight, maybe more channels, really penetrating that strata. But now, how do we get those molecules out of the rock?”

  “Explode it?” calls a kid by the window.

  “You’re right, in a way. Back in the early days they tried dynamite to crack the rock, and besides stirring up a lot of fear and superstition, it didn’t work out too well. What we use now is basically forced water– you ever put the palm of your hand over a garden hose that’s running full blast? You know how it pushes and then sprays all over the place if you let up a bit? Well, we ram tons of water with a few things mixed into it to make a kind of sludge into that narrow drill hole, into those even narrower horizontal channels, and what happens? Thousands of tiny little cracks all along the length of them, like streams feeding into a big river, and when we pump the sludge out those cracks start to weep oil and gas molecules, which make their way down into the channel, then back to our vertical pipe and up”– he follows the flow back, dotting with his chalk– “right into the tank of your dad’s Jeep Cherokee.”

  Simple enough for their level and basically true. He tries not to let Mr. Wizard, hand rigid in the air, catch his eye.

  “So where does the ecological disaster part come in?” A pretty girl in the back row, kind of Indian-looking–

  “That’s not a very polite way of putting it, Jolene.” The teacher is just there on the sidelines, arms crossed, smiling, no indication that she prepped them for an ambush. If he’d had her in class he’d have spent the whole period fantasizing, no matter what the unheard subject, hormones overwhelming intellect. Watching her mouth, the way she moved–

  “Whatever human beings do on this planet in order to survive has its side effects,” says Hardacre, taking a step toward the class and dropping his voice into the patient-but-firm register. The Company has him do two or three of these in every community about to get the works, and he can glide calmly past desperate hope and open hostility.

  “Farming entails the use of fertilizer and the loss of prairie grass, the cattle business has impacted the rain forest, the Missouri River has been dammed nearby and no longer flows wherever it wants to. The ideal is to have the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks, and do what we can to minimize collateral damage.”

  What he can’t tell them, what he is probably too jealous of to share, is the fascination, the satisfaction, sure, call it the joy of orchestrating the entire carnival, holding the geological formation and the vast array of knowledge and machinery used to get at it in his mind, with the power to put it in motion. Because it isn’t two separate things, prize and seeker, but a single, complex organism, the oil as useless under the ground as blood spilt on a slaughterhouse floor. He sometimes feels like he is the organism, a creature conscious of every process running through its body– respiration, alimentation, digestion, drilling, casing, fracturing, extracting– each with its own character and quirks, depending on the individual well, no clones in the energy business. He can’t tell them, because it doesn’t translate into words exactly, the feeling– treasure hunters must be addicted to it– how even with all the reassurances of technology that the hydrocarbons are really down there, when that drill pipe starts to shiver and talk, and the rush of it, the rush–

  “How about earthquakes?”

  The Indian girl again. Probably got a list written in her open notebook, a litany of complaint–

  “I’m against them.”

  A good laugh this time. He steps away from the blackboard.

  “As a geologist I’ve been following the seismic problems they’re having in Oklahoma quite closely. I assure you that the depth and layout of the strata up here is totally different. Those rumblers are most likely caused not by fracking but by wastewater injection wells– after we’ve used the sludge to crack the shale it has to be put somewhere. Here we’ll be drilling those wastewater wells into a sandstone formation about fi
ve thousand feet down, like having a big sponge under you. And we’re nowhere near any fault lines.”

  “But there’s radioactivity.” Mr. Wizard this time, oozing with information.

  “Very good point. As you may know, most radioactivity is not man-made– it exists in the sun’s rays, it’s present in the Earth– radon gas being the most obvious example. The geologic formations that contain oil and gas deposits generally also include what we refer to as NORM– Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials.”

  “Which you bring to the surface.”

  The Indian girl, an edge of accusation in her voice. You don’t expect an eco-kid out here in God’s Country, but there’s probably even vegetarians now. Better than being totally clueless–

  “As part of our process, yes. And because they are displaced and concentrated in that process, they now become TENORM– Technologically Enhanced Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material. Now the amount and potency of those wastes varies enormously from formation to formation. We haven’t drilled here enough yet to know how hot our produced water is going to be.”

  “Doesn’t the EPA monitor it?” The teacher now, voice of authority and rational thought. Beautiful eyes. Miss– no, it was Mrs., wasn’t it? Mrs. Gatlin. Too bad–

  “The EPA has no legal authority over the UIC– that’s Underground Injection Control– associated with fracking. It’s commonly known as the Halliburton loophole.”

  “So you can just pump it wherever–?”

  “We make every effort to deal with our wastes responsibly.” The Company line, and true within the budget limitations applied to each well. He can’t tell anything from their high school faces, the children of ranchers, cattlemen, shopkeepers. Interested, semi-conscious, chemically sedated? Whatever, they deserve a warning, however cushioned in Company-speak.

  “But up to now,” he says, “no one has had the desire or the political will to slow the industry down long enough to figure out what the risks truly are.”