The Dangers of Fracking with Carol Davis

I’ll start way back it was probably I would say around maybe 1995-96 somewhere in there I was up in Canada way up north of Winnipeg in a ceremony and there were several tribal members who were there one of them was Debbie gone oh who is one of the spiritual leaders here and it was a teaching launch ceremony and so there was a lot of stories songs a lot of language that was going and one of the leaders stopped and he said I have a teaching that’s very basic but something some spirit was telling me that I need to review this and so he went through the role of the in the Ojibwe it was an Ojibwe ceremony the Ojibwe women are responsible for the water oh gee boy men are responsible for the fire and he talked about the balance so the women need the men the men need the women however - we need the men to help us with the water they need us to help them with the fire and he gave examples and about always must have been around now we’re gonna fast forward to 2011 in about July there was an article in the Minot Daily News written by one of our tribal members and it was about fracking on the Fort Berthold Reservation and I got a call from one of my friends our friends Larry do ffunny we all went to boarding school together so we’ve maintained this good relationship over the years and Larry called and he said what did you think of the article in the Minot Daily News and I said oh those old lucky Fort Berthold people there they go they get all the money and we still sit here in father no he said that’s not what I’m talking about he said fracking I said fracking what’s fracking and he said they’re using a lot of bad chemicals to get this oil out of the rocks on the Fort Berthold Reservation and he said that’s what fracking is about so I said well we were gonna have a book party I told you a little bit about her book club Larry was in our book club and we were having a book party at les the Fountains up near dunseith and Larry said let’s talk about fracking after we talk about our book and so I said that sounds like a reasonable thing to do so we also had a friend from the White Earth reservation who was coming there was Apollo and donesies at the same time and he was coming up for the powwow Bob Simek and so we said Bob why don’t you come up to lesss we’re gonna have a big meal and we’re having a book party after and you’re welcome to stay if you want so he said okay he said I like that kind of stuff so we had our big meal and we went under the trees less as a beautiful place went under the trees and we talked about this book and when we got done Larry said are we going to talk about fracking and Bob stayed Bob said what about fracking and that the conversation started where Bob had worked for the indigenous environmental native environmental necessary I can’t remember the exact title but he had worked for them and so he had done some work with fracking and awareness on some of the reservations and I’m not sure exactly where but probably in Minnesota and so he gave us fracking 101 and I mean we sat there and I could not believe benzene and some of these terrible chemicals that were being pumped into the to get that oil out and then we were calculating the amount of oil and it water and oil and it was like two million gallons and twenty percent of it was chemicals so in our visuals later on what we did was we showed it would take the big milk trucks in North Dakota people are familiar with the big silver milk trucks that go down the road and we said if you put 16 of them in a row and fill them with chemicals that’s so much chemicals going to one well and on the fourth bristle they had thousands they were projecting thousands of wells and Bakken air you had already reached I don’t know terrible numbers but it wasn’t a thought it wasn’t thousands at that time on Fort Berthold eventually it got there but after the book party I came home I spent the very restless night and I remembered that teaching lunch and so the next morning I got up very early and I called Debbie she said Carol you need to come over here and Debbie gives me permission to tell this story so it’s not something that I’m doing without permission you need to come over here she said bring your tobacco so I did I brought some tea and some berries and went up to visit Debbie and she said we had a water ceremony here recently and the spirits told us that there’s some terrible things going on with the water and so we went all over the state of North Dakota and we brought water into our ceremony into the next ceremony and again the spirits talked about the contamination that was going on with the water and so she said after that ceremony we labeled where we were getting all our water and after the ceremony we returned all the water to the spots where we got it because we didn’t know which one was contaminate and we didn’t want to contaminate some because it sounded so bad so she said I think we need to call the women together and so we did jakey was one of them that we called we called 40 women in about 25 women and their husbands and some children and so forth so showed up all together in a period of from July to November we probably had over a hundred people who participated including our tribal chairman who was some real Saint Claire at that time Merle had worked in new oil wells when it was free-flowing oil so he came to the meeting we do what a I guess thinking that he was going to tell us don’t worry about this but he was not aware of what fracking was and what they were doing