After promising drilling results over the past year, Donlin is now moving toward an updated feasibility study for their planned gold mine near Crooked Creek. The next step after that would be to begin construction, which requires a $6 billion investment.
Although the recent drilling has helped prove the value of the gold deposit, the mine has faced a series of lawsuits and growing community opposition. On Aug. 11, the company hosted a tour of the mine site as part of what they call an emphasis on transparency. Donlin and Calista hope that these informational tours can help ease people’s concerns and temper that resistance.
“This is a safe and environmentally sound mine,” said Dan Graham, the general manager of the mine, standing in the dining hall tent of the exploration camp. Graham takes issue with the way the future of the mine is framed.
“A lot of the discourse on the project centers around what I call a false premise of an either or proposition - either you can have the mine and you're going to lose your way of life, or you can preserve your river and way of life, but you can't do that with a mine,” Graham said. “To me, that's just false messaging for the project.”
The Donlin gold mine has been in the works for nearly 30 years, after the mine site area was selected by the Calista Native corporation during the Alaska Native Claims Settlement. Calista owns the subsurface mineral rights, and the nearby village corporation, the Kuskokwim Corporation, owns the land that the mine would operate on. Both of these corporations back the Donlin project. For a time, many communities downriver did too. But over the past 10 years, a growing number of tribes and villages in the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta have raised concerns over the project’s environmental impacts. In 2019, the Association of Village Council Presidents representing 56 tribes in the Y-K Delta passed a resolution opposing the mine, reversing a stance they had held since 2006.
Calista maintains that the majority of their shareholders still support the project.
“Over time as permits have been earned, things got a little more real, and I think it's natural that there's more concerns and fears that come into play,” said Thomas Leonard, Calista’s Vice President of Corporate Affairs. “You’re talking about emotions, and emotions aren't something you can argue with.”
Leonard says the main thing shareholders want is more jobs and training opportunities for themselves and their family members. Donlin says they hire local people and shareholders as much as possible, and they currently claim a 70 % shareholder hire rate. 60 % of Calista’s shareholders live in the Y-K Delta, and the mine would employ 3,000 people during construction and 1,000 thereafter.
Still, for at least for one Calista shareholder, Sophie Swope, all the talk of jobs feels like a big bait and switch. Swope was not on the tour.
"Calista said, it gives us hope for jobs, and that kind of rubs me the wrong way because here we are in Bethel and YKHC, our Regional Health Corporation, they have over 300 job openings,” Swope said. “There are plenty of jobs to be filled, we just need to get people the education to do that.”
Swope is the director of Mother Kuskokwim, a grassroots organization that opposes the Donlin mine. To Swope, Calista’s mission should not be to force controversial projects on their shareholders. Swope says there are serious concerns that the mine will destroy two salmon spawning tributaries, increase the amount of mercury deposited into the water, and create a tailings dam holding toxic mining waste which would have to be maintained in perpetuity. Corporate interests and tribal interests seem at odds in this Native-owned project.
“We are very different from any other tribes in the country being in Alaska, because we have the native corporations, and they are for profit,” Swope said. “So we're kind of put into this westernized state of mind about what we're supposed to be doing with our lands.”
The Mother Kuskokwim organization is circulating a petition opposing the mine and trying to gather shareholders representing 10 % of Calista’s shares. If they’re able to build that support, Calista’s will have to decide whether or not to hold a special meeting on whether or not to proceed with the mine- although they’re not obligated to.
Opposition has also come from the environmental law firm EarthJustice, which has filed numerous lawsuits against Donlin on behalf of 13 tribes in the delta. These lawsuits oppose a natural gas pipeline that would provide energy for the mine and allege that the project would violate state and federal water quality standards. Those lawsuits argue the mine poses an existential threat to Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region.
Kristina Woolston, Donlin Gold’s external affairs manager, said those lawsuits have not impeded the mine’s development timeline.
“Frankly it’s part of the opposition process, it’s what we see all over the world with development projects, with organizations coming from the outside and opposing a project,” Woolston said.
Still, any of these lawsuits could still delay if not derail the project, and potentially make it less attractive for investors.
Enrique Fernandez, the mine’s environmental program manager, thinks opposition to the mine is less likely to keep growing if people are better informed about the safety measures and water monitoring they have in place. In his view, the mine would be a huge boon for the Y-K delta.
“This is not just a job, this is something you want to see built,” Fernandez said. “This is one of the most economically depressed regions in the U.S., and I know what a game change this could be for this region.”
But to Mother Kuskokwim’s Sophie Swope, who grew up here and wants to build her life around the future of the river, that strategy for uplifting the region just isn’t worth the risk.
"There's so much more that we can do other than mining gold - the Yup’ik culture, we have kind of our pre-westernized attachment to the earth and I feel like going in and pulling away the earth is just such a big disruption to everything that we have had for centuries,” Swope said. “We have a livelihood, it's fully based around the things that are naturally provided to us, and it's just very much worth saving.”
