The Nez Perce Tribe filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court this week challenging the U.S. Forest Service’s approval of a large open-pit gold mine in the headwaters of Idaho’s South Fork Salmon River. The undammed Salmon River basin is a critical source of Idaho’s salmon, steelhead and bull trout.
Late last year, the Service approved Perpetua Resources Corporation’s Stibnite Gold Project that the Tribe says sits in its homeland, an area identified by treaties with the U.S. that reserve the Tribe’s sovereign rights to fish, hunt, gather, pasture and travel.
The Nez Perce said the mine will cause significant and long-term term impacts to the Tribe’s treaty rights and resources. That warning, it said, is according to the Forest Service’s own final environmental analysis.
The Tribe also said in its complaint, among the other issues it listed, that when developing its Final Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision the Service refused to consider alternatives offered by the Tribe. And it changed two forest plans – the Payette Forest Plan Standards and the Boise National Forest Standards – to fit the gold mine plan, when it should have been altering the gold mine’s plan to fit existing forest plans, the Tribe said.
Operations at the mine, will include diverting the East Fork South Fork Salmon River, a Nez Perce usual and accustomed fishing place, into a tunnel for over a decade as well as restrict Tribal members from accessing the area for fishing, hunting, and gathering, the Tribe said.
“Our treaty-reserved rights are the supreme law of the land and fundamental to the culture, identity, economy, and sovereignty of the Nez Perce people,” said Shannon F. Wheeler, Chairman of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee. “For nearly a decade the Tribe has consistently and exhaustively voiced our deep concerns to the Forest Service about the Mine’s threats to our Treaty rights upon which our culture and way of life depend and which jeopardizes our ability to transfer our knowledge and customs unique to this area to our children.”
Perpetua Resources’ proposed mine site is 45 air miles east of McCall, Idaho, adjacent to the Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness Area and within the homelands of the Nez Perce Tribe.
The Stibnite Gold Project mining plan is massive and consists of four phases, the Nez Perce complaint says: a three-year construction phase; a fifteen-year mining and ore processing operations phase; a seventeen-year surface and underground exploration phase overlapping with the first two phases; and a closure and reclamation phase beginning at the conclusion of the operations phase and extending for an undefined period of time.
The Yellow Pine Pit will be mined first but it must be dewatered. To excavate the pit, the Forest Service’s ROD authorizes construction of an about one-mile underground tunnel to bypass the East Fork South Fork Salmon River around the pit, the complaint says.
“The project’s scale of disturbance will be staggering: not including the re-mining of existing tailings, the ROD authorizes mining approximately 392 million tons of material from three primary pits,” the complaint says. “Of this tonnage, approximately 280 million tons will be development rock and approximately 112 million tons will be ore. The ore will be produced at a rate as high as 25,000 tons—or 50 million pounds—per day.”
The Nez Perce lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Idaho Aug. 29, is the second to challenge the Service’s FEIS and ROD for the gold mine. Conservation groups Save the South Fork Salmon, Idaho Conservation League, Idaho Rivers United, Earthworks, Center for Biological Diversity and American Rivers also challenged the Service’s rulings in February.
–See CBB, February 25, 2025, Lawsuit Challenges Proposed Massive Gold Mine On Idaho’s South Fork Salmon River, Lawsuit Challenges Proposed Massive Gold Mine On Idaho’s South Fork Salmon River – Columbia Basin Bulletin
While the Nez Perce complaint challenges the Forest Service and the Department of Agriculture, as well as Brooke L. Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture, the conservation groups directed their complaint to a wider group of federal agencies, including the Forest Service, NOAA Fisheries, departments of Agriculture, Interior and Commerce, along with Rollins, and Doug Bergum, Secretary of Interior.
The Nez Perce complaint says that the Service’s FEIS and ROD consisted of just two alternatives with very little difference between the two, while the Tribe offered five alternatives, none of which were adopted.
“The Forest Service dismissed our requests to consider alternative approaches that would avoid and minimize harm to our Treaty rights and life sources and instead adopted Perpetua’s goals and interests for the Mine,” Wheeler said. “We are filing suit to force the Forest Service to address the Mine’s enormous and long-term degradation and destruction to our Treaty life sources, and to honor our reserved right to fully and freely exercise our Treaty fishing, hunting, and gathering rights as the U.S. Government promised over 170 years ago.”
Before Perpetua’s predecessor companies began acquiring interests in the Mine in 2008, the Tribe had secured funding from the Bonneville Power Administration to restore legacy mining impacts on fish passage at the site. The Tribe’s Department of Fisheries Resources Management is still spending about $2.8 million every year to restore Chinook salmon, steelhead and bull trout populations and habitat in the South Fork Salmon River watershed, the complaint says.
The Tribe began work in the South Fork Salmon River in 2007 in order to fix the impacts of previous mining at the historical Stibnite Mine, the Tribe’s complaint says. The goal was to restore passage for anadromous and resident fish above the Yellow Pine Pit. However, before the Tribe could implement the fish passage, Perpetua Resources’ corporate predecessors began acquiring mining claims at the Stibnite Gold Project site and denied permission for the fish passage project, the complaint says.
In 2019, the Tribe filed a lawsuit against Perpetua Resources, then named Midas Gold, for discharges of arsenic, cyanide, mercury, and other pollutants at the Stibnite Gold Project site in violation of the Clean Water Act. That lawsuit was settled and Perpetua Resources negotiated a cleanup agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency and Forest Service under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. That cleanup work is ongoing at the Stibnite Gold Project site, the complaint says.
Perpetua Resources on its website said that fish haven’t been able to swim past the Yellow Pine pit since 1938, almost no topsoil can be found in the area due to extensive erosion and millions of tons of sediment are running into the waterways, degrading water quality and fish habitat. The Stibnite Gold Project is designed to begin addressing these historic challenges early in the project, the company said.
“Our plan for the Stibnite Gold Project is as much about restoring the site as it is mining it for the much-needed critical mineral antimony and gold,” the company said. “Redeveloping this already mined area will allow us to generate the funds needed to rehabilitate the environment.”
For background, see:
–CBB, Sept. 13, 2024, Forest Service Releases EIS For Massive Gold Mine At Headwaters Of Idaho’s Salmon River, Critical Habitat For Chinook Salmon, https://columbiabasinbulletin.org/forest-service-releases-eis-for-massive-gold-mine-at-headwaters-of-idahos-salmon-river-critical-habitat-for-chinook-salmon/