Greetings! I've been reading the threads here for a bit, the ones on what y'all colloquially refer to as TOB for quite a while now, and those on the WLCDF investorshub board way back (before I moved away from that one due to being moderated by what I felt was an unrealistically optimistic individual/somewhat rude pumper..)

Anyhow, this is my first time creating a log in and posting in this venue. Tried to put it on TOB, but I got tired of editing over and over to figure out what it was about the message that kept making the robot overlord on that one delete it..

I did a bit of what I suppose would be called opposition research. Reading through the documents submitted to the court by the new plaintiffs (thanks for linking us to those Roy!), many of the points they aim to make contain information cited as coming from the Hinkey Declaration. I believe this refers to Daranda Hinkey, who identifies herself as a member of the People of the Red Mountain group in an interview posted on protectthackerpass.org on June 4th (that article also specifies that the original interview appears in the Counterpunch political magazine, so we don't have to worry about this material mysteriously vanishing if folks from that side read this board). 

There are a few very interesting responses she gives the interviewer that I'd like to share. When asked for more details about the People of the Red Mountain, her response includes "I think there are 9 or 10 of us", and that they're disappointed that their leadership did not comment on the EIS. Here we learn that the People of the Red Mountain is a small group of dissidents that aren't in agreement with their own government, which did have opportunity to provide input at various times in the planning process. 

She also says "if this lithium mine hadn't come up, I don't think I would have been at Thacker Pass for a really long time. I think that's really special - even though the 'big bad mine' wants to come in, I was able to reconnect to this place, and a lot of people are being able to reconnect to this place." When the interviewer made a comment about his reaction to "hearing about your people reconnecting with themselves and this place", her response included the following: "And so yeah, it’s really beautiful, and just to think that if we weren’t here at this time and we were never able to reconnect with this certain place in the Quinn River Valley, then we wouldn’t have known that story; we wouldn’t have known this name. People know it, but it wasn’t asked. That question wasn’t asked of our elders, and so it could have been lost forever." The interviewer then summarized a bit with "Isn’t it strange? That memory could have been lost like you said, and the fact of it being threatened is what saves that memory". 

My reaction to this exchange is that the cultural significance being attributed to the area seems to be blown out of proportion as she indicates most of her people didn't even know the name or any historical stories about it until after the mine plans were in the works. If anyone knows how to get in touch with Ms. Laura Granier (LAC's representation for this court case), I believe the article I'm referencing would be useful information for her to have (particularly since the source is being used by the new plaintiffs and she seems to undercut their arguments here). The new plaintiffs' submittal to the court states that both groups perform ceremonies in Thacker Pass and plan to continue doing so in the future, but with the above as evidence I believe it would be fruitful to make them specify when people currently alive started doing those ceremonies. Their answer would almost certainly have to be that they didn't start until after LAC had made significant progress on the mine since they didn't even know there was any history associated with the location before then.

I believe I extracted the most relevant pieces of it for this audience's purposes, but for anyone that would like to read it in full, here's the link to the magazine's posting of the article: 

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/06/04/finding-ourselves-at-peehee-muhuh-an-interview-with-daranda-hinkey/

(I'd add it to the links section but I didn't see where the controls to do that are located and the associated video in the overall Agoracom quick tips section doesn't appear to like my phone. Will have to watch it on PC later.)

Best Regards,

Ganan