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An Indigenous tribe in the Upper Peninsula received a $75,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to study the impacts of legacy mining waste and other pollutants.

The Keweenaw Bay Indian Community recently got an environmental justice grant to identify historic and current environmental pollutants in the community, do an environmental risk assessment, and create public notice materials about the findings. The tribes LAnse Reservation is the oldest and largest reservation in Michigan, and the gateway to the Keweenaw Peninsula where there is a long history of copper mining and associated pollution.

KBIC President Kim Klopstein said the EPA funding will help the tribe complete a health risk assessment focused on environmental contaminants.

This study will analyze the impacts of risk values set for the general population that are not reflective of our tribal lifeways and those members who rely on the environment to hunt, fish, and gather, Klopstein said in a written statement.

Federal authorities said environmental pollution that harms water quality poses higher risks to tribal nations such as KBIC whose citizens consume significant amounts of fish, much more than the general population. Stamps sands are a well-documented pollutant in the Lake Superior watershed affecting the local tribal population.

Stamps sands are legacy mining waste, created when rocks were crushed during the historic copper mining process in the Keweenaw Peninsula. The tailings were piled along the Lake Superior shoreline in Gay, and decades of lake currents caused the stamp sands to drift down the shoreline and smother much of underwater Buffalo Reef critical fish spawning grounds for the largest of the Great Lakes.

Stamp sands are loaded with heavy metals such as mercury, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls, phthalates, coal tars, nitrates, and ammonia compounds.

The LAnse and Baraga area also is home to current industrial facilities, such as a mixed-fuel power plant, and several paint and industrial manufacturing shops.

Data collected during the environmental justice study may be used to develop future guidelines or recommendations for the community, or even lead to additional research efforts.

The EPAs environmental justice small grants program is designed to fund efforts that help residents of underserved communities, including people of color, low-income, rural, tribal, Indigenous, and unhoused people.

Other organizations in Michigan that received environmental justice grants include:

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Michigan tribe gets $75k grant to study effects of legacy mining waste, pollution - MLive.com