Cherokee Woman Battles for Safe Environment
VIAN - On a quiet hillside in rural Sequoyah County, a sheet of paper rolled into an electric typewriter is a voice in the wilderness. At the keyboard is Jesse DeerInWater, who speaks for hundreds of people who worry about Mother Earth. Every month, she puts out the NACE News, an acronym for Native Americans for a Clean Environment.
The 45-year-old Cherokee is chairwoman of a grass roots organization that took Kerr-McGee to task in 1984 when the company sought a permit for a nuclear waste injection well at its Sequoyah Fuels facility at Gore. Kerr-McGee, which has since sold Sequoyah Fuels to San Diego-based General Atomics Technologies, withdrew its application a year later. In its place, the corporation sought a license to bury nuclear waste in pits 10 feet above groundwater
on a 25-acre site. That proposal also was shelved. But in DeerInWater's living room, 10 miles away, the battle still rages.The company, it was noted, continues to dump its waste into the Arkansas River and spread raffinate fertilizer on pastures in the area.
"What they are doing is harmful to humans and other living
things," DeerInWater said.
The outspoken mother and [grandmother makes it clear she
is "acting out of concern for her fam#ily and the community.
For that reason, she was featured in the January issue
of Mother Jones magazine, which previously had bestowed
on her the "Giraffe Award" - given to those rare individuals
who "aren't afraid to stick their necks out."
In this community of about 1,500, her actions, she admitted,
have made life more difficult.
"I think it (the controversy) kind of polarized the community,"
she said. "There were some people who quit speaking to
me. They felt I was endangering their family's livelihood.
There were also people who said, "Go for them. I wish you'd
done this before they ever built the plant.' "
The hairdresser began circulating a petition against the
injection well. When she asked her customers to sign it
some never returned. A short time later she was laid off.
She can't help but wonder if her activism was a factor.
"I spent four days in deep depression over that," she
said.
When Wilma Mankiller, then vice chief of the Cherokees,
learned what happened, she helped DeerInWater apply for
a grant funding Indian activists.
Soon she was getting paid to do what she felt she must
do: fight.
"By that time all the people who had agreed to fight
it were Native American, except those married to Indians,
so we formed it as a native American group," she said.
"We thought that since our tribal government owns beds
and banks of the river where Kerr-McGee was sitting that
they were probably violating our treaty rights by dumping
waste."
The group's first task, she said, was to educate the public.
"Most didn't realize it was a uranium facility," she said. "They thought it was oil and gas."
From the first public meeting where 30 showed up at an
Indian church in Vian to hear a speaker from Ralph Nader's
group in Washington, interest slowly began to build.
But obstacles still confronted DeerInWater.
"We found out a bunch of stuff but the local press wouldn't
print one word against Kerr-McGee," she said.
One influential community leader chided her for her involvement
and told her the area desperately needed the plant.
"He told me we needed it even at the expense of our grandchildren's
health," she said. "How can a human being think they would
be willing to sacrifice their own grandchildren for money
now? He showed me a perspective I couldn't even conceive."
Lost mail also plagued the new organization.
"The post office at Vian started losing our mail and
mail was not getting to where we sent it,"
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| post office at Vian |
When she complained, she said a local postal official lectured her about the importance of Kerr-McGee. She filed
a complaint with the postmaster general and moved NACE's
mailing address to the Marble City post office.
DeerInWater can be fiesty. The political science major
at Northeastern State University at Tahlequah refuses to
pin a political label on herself. She laughs when people
call her an "environmentalist."
"I never knew I was an environmentalist until the possibility
came up that my drinking water could be poisoned and I started
to fight back," she said. "I realized it's all terminology.
It sounds a lot better in the paper to say, "The corporation
met today with environmentalists' rather than "the people
they are going to poison.' "
DeerInWater recalled a life-threatening accident at the
Enrico Fermi Atomic Power Plant at Monroe, Mich., near Detroit
in 1966 that authorities attempted to conceal from the public.
She was living about 20 miles from the facility.
"They kept the accident secret. I could have been zapped
and I didn't even know a nuclear plant was there."
After she moved to Oklahoma she found herself demonstrating
at the Black Fox nuclear plant site near Inola, where she
was arrested. DeerInWater said she is realistic about what NACE can accomplish.
The organization, she said, cannot
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| Kerr-McGee Ok |
Gore facility, one of two in the nation that converts milled uranium into hexafluoride, one step in the process of making nuclear reactor fuel and weapons material. "We just want them to operate in as safe a manner as
they can and obey every safety law," she said.
Her avenues of seeing that goal carried out are the 500-paid
circulation newsletter, public meetings and, if necessary,
demonstrations. All in a town where most everyone knows
everyone else. There is no getting away from that.
"I've encountered racism and sexism," she said. "My
son's ball coach is a worker at Kerr-McGee. What am I going
to do, lie down and die? I just take my victory in degrees
and go on."
awesome, i am little jesse and the work continues
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