Pebble Mine: Alaskans don't want feds, enviros deciding their future

ILIAMNA, Alaska — Lary Hill grew up in a crowded house surrounded by generations of family deep in the Alaska bush country.

In Iliamna, some 180 air miles southwest of Anchorage, communities hunted and fished to survive.

Equipment is set up at the Pebble Mine project drill site in the Bristol Bay region of Alaska near the village of Iliamma. (AP Photo/Al Grillo)

Hill, 68 and an elder of the community of 120 residents, said his family had no idea they were poor until the federal government told them.

"We always had enough food to eat and a warm place to live, with family all around. We had no understanding of what poor meant," he said.

Then, through years of government-administered programs in which "being poor meant you could get free stuff," the destiny of the region's people seemed to be in the hands of bureaucrats.

Hill knows all too well, though, what the government giveth, it can taketh away.

"There's been a pattern here for so many years where the federal government, once they start giving us all these things, once they do that, we pretty much lose control over our own life, our own society," he said.

"If we don't behave, the government will take the benefits away," he added.

Poverty prevails in Iliamna and the region, where at least a quarter of the population is unemployed. Now there is opportunity in Iliamna, and the potential for so much more.

Hill and several others in his community are employees of the Pebble Limited Partnership. The development initiative of London-based Anglo American and British Columbia's Northern Dynasty Minerals, proposes developing the mine, a multibillion-dollar capital investment that would create thousands of good paying, short- and long-term jobs, according to PLP.

In conversations with Watchdog.org, Hill and other community members on the PLP payroll say they are not yet sold on the project. They want to know more about it.

If the large-scale copper and gold mine can't co-exist with Alaska's salmon fishing industry — if a mine can't operate without destroying their tribe's native land — they don't want it.

But they also don't want the government and environmental groups with an ax to grind telling them — again — what's good or bad for them.