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A federal appeals court has upheld the cancellation of the last remaining oil and gas leases in Montana's Badger-Two Medicine area. The region, bordered by Glacier National Park, the Bob Marshall Wilderness, and the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, is the site of the creation story for the Blackfeet Tribe.
The possibility of oil and gas development in the area has been highly controversial since the Bureau of Land Management issued leases there in 1982. While many companies abandoned plans to develop those leases, one company—Solenex—fought for decades to drill in the sacred region, represented in court by William Perry Pendley, now the acting BLM director.
"Today’s ruling shows that these companies and their lawyers were not just on the wrong side of history but were also on the wrong side of the law when they waged their 40-year crusade to drill our ancestral land," said the Blackfeet Tribe.
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What we’ve been arguing is that public lands are bipartisan and that they unite us and they bring us together, literally, to heal and to recreate, and also to create jobs, and we are thrilled that this is happening, and we can actually focus on our work better. Instead of having to make sure that there's a pittance of money for this, we're going to actually have a reliable funding source.”
