LAPWAI – Today, the Nez Perce Tribe filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Idaho, challenging the U.S. Forest Service’s final Record of Decision approving Perpetua Resources Corp.’s (“Perpetua”) Stibnite Gold Project (“Mine”), a massive open pit gold mine in the headwaters of Idaho’s South Fork Salmon River in Idaho. The Mine sits within the Nez Perce Tribe’s homeland, where the Tribe reserved in treaties with the United States its sovereign rights to fish, hunt, gather, pasture, and travel.

The Forest Service’s decision authorizes Perpetua to mine three open pits, establish ore processing facilities, build roads and transmission lines, and impound over 400 acres of the Meadow Creek valley with 120 million tons of mine tailings, inundating spawning and rearing habitat for native fish. The Mine will clear thousands of acres of vegetation, destroy hundreds of acres of wetlands, generate billions of pounds of waste, destroy fish and wildlife habitat, and impair surface water and groundwater regimes well past the life of the mine.

According to the Forest Service’s own final environmental analysis, the Mine will cause significant and long-term impacts to the Tribe’s treaty rights and resources. Operations will require 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 restricting Tribal members from accessing the area for fishing, hunting, and gathering.

Before Perpetua’s predecessor companies began acquiring interests in the Mine in 2008, the Tribe had secured funding to restore legacy mining impacts on fish passage at the site. The Tribe’s Department of Fisheries Resources Management still currently spends approximately $2.8 million annually to restore Chinook salmon, steelhead, and bull trout populations and habitat in the South Fork Salmon River watershed.

“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 jeopardize our ability to transfer our knowledge and customs unique to this area to our children.”

“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,” Chairman 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.”