Pam Kingfisher on Defending Tribal Sovereignty from Industrial Chicken Farming
Interview by Spencer Roberts
RIFT: Hey, this is Spencer with Rift magazine - a Media for Us project - and we're here today with Pam Kingfisher, Cherokee water protector on the ground in the battle for tribal sovereignty in so-called Oklahoma. Thank you for joining us, Pam.
Pam Kingfisher: Thank you.
RIFT: Let's start from the beginning. You organized your community to resist development of poultry factories on tribal land. Give us a brief overview of the history of these developments and the resistance work you do with Green Country Guardians, the organization you founded.
PK: Yes, this came up pretty suddenly for most of us citizens that didn't realize what was happening in our communities. There are basically three counties that are really affected in northeast Oklahoma by the expansion of the Simmons poultry company. They had built a brand new four-million-some dollar major poultry processing plant just across the border in Arkansas. And to process that many chickens, you need the chicken houses within a 100-mile radius. So we were in their target area. Basically, the whole western half of their target area was Oklahoma and a bunch of Arkansas is divided between Simmons, Tyson, and a few other big corporate poultry, ag, and some meat producers. So by the time we found out about it, Simmons was pretty much about halfway through their plan. And they were coming in and buying land at about 2-3 times the value and offering people basically cash money, done deal and it was happening so quickly, we just didn't realize it. Starting on September 2017, we started tracking and we were awakened in April-May of 2018. We started tracking from that point the new houses and operations and, you know, we've lived with chicken farms and small farms forever here. We're farmers. We’re all farmers. I have 160 acres. I keep bees, a lot of my neighbors and I trade food, meat, we all have our systems and there's just a lot of dead chicken houses too sitting around because once you got done with your contract, you had to either spend a lot of money - hundreds of thousands of dollars - to rejuvenate the houses, come up to speed, they’re now very high-tech. They run on systems, where basically one man can operate the whole thing because there alarms, gauges, and temperatures and the whole thing is automated.
So we woke up because Simmons had given one family 3 or 4 different farms of chicken houses and you generally buy 10 acres that will house one house - you want six 6 houses, so you need 60 acres to get the water allotted feet per acre that you own in Oklahoma free. And they came in to a small town of Oaks, Oklahoma, which was one of the last stops - the northern stop on the two Northern Cherokee Trail of Tears routes. So we have an old church, a school that housed Cherokee children and now Native children. It’s still a boarding school there at Oaks, with some other historic places - the cemetery where many of our elders and families who walked on the trail of tears is right there. There was a trail from the mission well down to the cemetery and those [chicken] houses would have been right in the way - in the pasture, on the way to the cemetery on Spring Creek, which is a beautiful pristine creek. So we organized and in three weeks, we stopped it - did everything we could, got everybody going. The farmers walked away and said “we'll sell it to you, give you five days”. And we’re just farmers and regular people out here in the woods, so the Cherokee Nation stepped up and bought the farm for $380,000 and pulled it out of the chicken market. We preserved that piece of land, so that was pretty exciting. And from there, we just kept watching the houses go up, the whole area north of me became a construction zone for a full year, nothing but trucks. Everything came from Arkansas - all of the gas for the propane, all of the struts, the building materials, gravel - everything came from Arkansas, not bought in Oklahoma. It was real sad. So our bridges, our little roads, lots dirt roads they’re building these houses off of are just torn to pieces. People's lives are disrupted. We had eighteen community meetings in three different communities, bringing people together, sharing information about the potential pollution, the number of houses we ended up with - 213 new houses in these three counties 42 new farms, you know just massive amount of chicken manure and waste that includes carcasses that have been “composted”. It all goes into the waste.So I'll stop there and let you ask some questions. Again, that was 2018. We just staying on them through 2019, reading all of the applications for water, for waste, for all of that to really observe how poorly the Oklahoma agencies regulated anything and they really were a rubber stamp and worked five, six, seven, eight times with a group, a family, or a person to get their application correct. It was really kind of appalling. I don't get to take my test that many times or submit applications that many times and get help. It was really stunning. But every agency came and spoke to us, we got to ask our questions. We raised enough trouble and noise that we got a statewide 6 month moratorium on new applications, we got setbacks against the roads and streams for the first time in Oklahoma history. So we didn't totally lose, but we didn’t win, but we had some wins, so we're celebrating that, but continuing to just watchdog these horrible agencies who are just giving the water away early on. $10 permits for a house? Add some zeroes, what are we doing? Just giving it away. It's just crazy. So anyway I'll stop and let you ask some questions.
RIFT: So give us a little bit of a sense of the scale of these developments - the size of these chicken houses, how many chickens are inside each one, and how many are going up in Cherokee country?
PK: So as I said, in the year of 2018-19, we had 213 new houses. That's 42 new farms. So between those 42 farms, they have 213,000. Most farms have 6 houses. They've grown from 45’x400’ houses to 60’x600’. So they also host a lot more chickens and take a lot more water. So each house can contain up to 50,000 birds and each house will grow seven batches each year. So they have a system - chickens come in, they stay 7-8 weeks, they go out, they clean out the barns, they bring in the new babies and start over the cycle. So that much expansion concentrated in three areas that have the Spring Creek watershed, the Saline Creek watershed, and the Chance Illinois River watershed. So three really major drinking watersheds will be affected by this eventually. Not right away, but [eventually].
RIFT: So how does the nutrient runoff from these facilities affect the streams that support your community?
PK: We are yet to see that. We are monitoring, we have two groups doing monitoring. One lawsuit been completed. We won that lawsuit in favor of the citizens nextdoor to the poultry plant and it's in appeal. We have two more lawsuits being teed up and we have to prove. They continue to say we're just speculating and we don't have science and we say, “you don't have any science, either,” so we are putting it into action. Green Country Guardians is currently working with the OU Health Science Center on an air monitoring study and we are working with the USGS on a well monitoring study and continuing to work with the Cherokee Nation to keep any Cherokee citizens’ wells tested. Because I live on a well and will never access to county water. Many of the Cherokees up on top the tribe will pay to hook them up to county water so it's safer, but if they don't have access, we have to make sure those wells are potable - that we have drinking water, especially for the elders.
RIFT: So do we have any preliminary results from the air and water studies?
PK: No we're just getting going. Both of them had to achieve grants. They came out over the last year and a half. We continue to just work and to provide the OU hung preliminary air samples in homes to get enough data to get the grant. You know, all that because we're citizens. We have to pay for all this. Our agencies should be doing every bit of this work. We shouldn't have to prove any science. We shouldn't be testing the water in our creeks. I live below 48 houses in my creek. They have big lagoons up there. It's different than just a chicken house. It’s a CAFO. It's really nasty. But I shouldn't have to do this. I shouldn't have to pay. The state of Oklahoma is supposed to regulate. It's in all of their missions, whether water, environment… it's in their mission to protect the water and they aren’t. I shouldn't have to do this, but we are [doing it]. We have an attorney in this next lawsuit and we will be testing DNA. When we find E. coli, it will go to the laboratory in Ohio and we will test for poultry DNA. Do not tell that Cherokee elder in the courtroom that it is her runoff out of her sewage system. Do not even attempt to do that ever again to a full-blood Cherokee woman on the staff. It was horrifying. We will prove it. We will spend the money and go get the chicken DNA prove it. They can’t say it's hogs. They can’t say it's your cows. They can't say it's nothing, but if we prove it's chicken with DNA, come on. Sorry, I just get really upset about these agencies who do nothing but pollute and permit pollution.
RIFT: So the main corporation behind this construction is called Simmons Foods, but that's not a consumer-facing name, is it? What kinds of brands would readers see products labelled with in the grocery store?
PK: Chick-fil-a. Their biggest number one seller is Chick-fil-a. Simmons does not sell on the counter. Almost every college campus, the college kids are like, “What can we do to help?” We’re like, “Get Chick-fil-a off your campus, kid.” And that's also the religious right's crazy franchise to godhood or whatever, so yeah Simmons sells number one to Chick-fil-a, number two to China, which has been disrupted this year. But you know, America’s taking that chicken and we need it. Poultry’s a hot item. And the third is their bad one. They have a pet food plant. They put it in pet food and use all their leftovers. And then Tyson is in Springdale, Arkansas just up the road and Tyson is a front-facing company. They have some houses in Oklahoma, but they mostly go into Missouri and Kansas and Arkansas. And Simmons has a corner of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and maybe a toe in Kansas. It's like they divided up the territory. And then there's a couple other small chicken companies, like there’s Oklahoma Foods and they’re mostly an egg company. It's real small and they just have a few small egg-laying farms, which are only two houses, not six. And then we have the designer chicken guy. He just moved in on us and that's another story, I can't pull it all up right now.
RIFT: So [July’s] historic Supreme Court decision [McGirt v. Oklahoma] affirms Cherokee sovereignty, but a last-minute amendment or “midnight rider” slipped into a 2005 highway bill by Oklahoma senator Inhofe carved out an exemption specifically for Oklahoma tribes, restricting their ability to enforce the Clean Water Act?
PK: Yes and we have been looking at that for two years among ourselves. Some wonderful attorneys told us “You've got to undo this,” and believe that the five tribes in Oklahoma [Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Muscogee (Creek)] have that kind of power. And no one as a group had come together to oppose Inhofe and realize I think how much she had crippled their efforts to protect their jurisdictional areas. Now that we have a Supreme Court decision, which is an amazing and historic decision and we’ll see how it plays out the next few months. There was talk all week of senator Inhofe doing a new rider, but he did not have to. Governor Stitt just brought up the 2005 midnight rider in the transportation bill and reaffirmed it, sort of blew some life into it, and that will hold for right now, that the tribes do not have the sovereignty to work with the federal EPA to trigger any federal protections. And I believe it's not just [the] Clean Water [Act] but I believe it's [The Clean] Air [Act] as well. But the Clean Water Act really was what was a bee in my bonnet. Every other tribe in the country has that right and that is our sovereignty that they have taken from us in 2005. And they're using it right now for these poultry houses, so that the Cherokee Nation can't go above [the] state to stop all this pollution or even monitor it. So that's a real problem.
RIFT: So given that industry groups lobbied for this exemption back in 2005, is it fair to assume that they knew the letter of the law upheld the sovereignty of Native Nations all along and were trying to hedge against a decision like this?
PK: Possibly, but it's also [that] Oklahoma was formed as Indian Territory and then formed as the state of Oklahoma and opened up for “the land rush” and “sooners” to come in and take all the extra land. All the water laws are taking laws. It's all about mining and taking. Everything that was ever written to develop Oklahoma's about taking. So that's been the goal of every politician would never come to Oklahoma is to take and to be brilliant about how to take. And they did that by locking down these tribes in one state from accessing federal sovereignty protection. And to me that is just so racist and, you know, cleverly evil. Were they looking at a SCOTUS decision this many years later? I don't know, maybe. Maybe there that brilliant in chess, evil manipulations. I don't know, but it sure plays out in their hand that they have a stranglehold on the sovereignty and the federal protections awarded with that sovereignty to these tribes in Oklahoma, specifically the five “civilized tribes”. I wish they could get rid of that word. Because we are the major ones who are affected by this “reservation lands” within the SCOTUS decision. Most of the other tribes have small or different types of lands than what is in the SCOTUS decision with Muscogee (Creek). So how that plays out for the other four tribes besides the Creek is being talked about right now. And hopefully they can come together and focus and not only protect us from so many economic and other aspects of the jurisdictional pieces of criminality that are connected. This really is about jurisdiction. But to get rid of this midnight rider and really be sovereign nations this is critical in Oklahoma.
RIFT: We'll definitely be following the legal developments as the next months unfold. So I wanted to ask you about workers. The poultry industry has also come under fire recently from campaigns led by labor coalitions, like the League of United Latin American citizens and Venceremos in Arkansas, responding to the COVID infections and deaths among meatpacking workers and their communities. Some people might think that labor groups that staff these factories and the environmental groups trying to stop the construction might seem like natural enemies, but it's not that simple, is it?
PK: Yeah we're concerned about the workers and I've always, as an activist, been concerned about the workers in these situations because we need jobs and this is the very poor economic area. So even the Cherokee Nation has worked with some other companies when they processing plants in our jurisdiction to make sure they hire Cherokees. Because we do want our people to have jobs. For the most part, what we see here is the Simmons corporation making deals with growers. So they find contract growers and they write a pretty bullet-proof contract. And you've got to meet the marks or you lose. You lose all your money, you may have to go bankrupt, but you've got to meet your metrics, your economic markers all the time: “No more dead chickens than this.,” and you know, you’ve got to make the weight [requirements]. So these contract growers, for many years were the small, usual-run locals, being they Cherokee, non-native, we all live together here in our jurisdiction. So it was just basically local farmers that had land, maybe they had cows or were getting out out of cows. Then it became real clear that was the Hmong community that came in and the Hmongs had moved in pretty big time to Arkansas and Oklahoma for many many good reasons. They're good good people and great workers and so we started having a number of Hmong families selling at farmers markets and, you know, becoming a part of our community. And that was fine. They are all pretty much out of the poultry contracts now. They have either managed to get out or gone bankrupt or just ended the contract and then they moved on somehow. A few of them still sell fruits and vegetables at the farmers markets, so I know them and talk to them still. And now all of these new immigrants in this last round of 42 new farms were basically Vietnamese. And we are very curious about how they recruit. And we've seen some just very interesting pieces of how this works among an immigrant community. Someone gets the contract, they hire their friends, their family, they start to hire other families, they understand maybe she might speak better English and understand the paperwork. She just goes and gets another contractor buys another farm. So they just get good at it and then bring in more family and so, you know, that's a natural thing. Cherokees are like that. We do that. It’s okay. But what we're seeing now are land brokers who are here who are Vietnamese and like five minutes after a farm or some land here is posted on facebook, they get a call from this guy and he says, “I have a buyer for your land,” and she says, “Oh I don't need help selling the land,” and he says “You don't understand. They pay me. It’s sold. Cash. Here we come.” So they developed these systems. There's a man in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma who owns of a nail shop. He owns four or five of these farms. You build a new house with the barns. You pay a guy or a family $50,000 a year to run the farm, and you do your business when you're the poultry overlord. So this whole hierarchy within the families of that community has developed. On the 42 farms with 213 houses that I keep mentioning, 15 of those owners are from Arkansas. Two are from Missouri, one from California and 25 from Oklahoma. And one Vietnamese woman [in Askansas] owns 30 houses in Delaware County, Oklahoma. So she’s got multiple farms, multiple people working for her, and it's become this whole system and that’s interesting and scary. Now for the locals, if there's not enough land, if there’s not 60 acres for 6 chicken houses - this one woman is trying to sell 30 acres. [She told] the Vietnamese property broker “We don’t want any chicken houses, either. We don't have enough land for chicken.” And he paused for two beats, “What about marijuana growing?” because Oklahoma is now medical marijuana legal, so you can buy your grower’s license, then boom you are off and running make money. So they are savvy enough to go, “Okay you don’t want chickens, we’ll do marijuana.” Okay. That's a lot less water, it's all indoors, no pollution, so work going, “Marijuana’s okay.” But very interesting, I mean these communities are very smart, they’re going to make money, and they're here and that's all good, but what is Simmons doing in this process? What are they doing to these people, just churning through them. Using, abusing, and moving on. You don't make it, you’re on the side of the road. There have been very few peeps out of their big plant in Gravette, Arkansas around COVID. We've seen things further in Arkansas. I think they keep a lid on it, because their private company. They don't have to tell anybody. So we really don't know, but they are targeting immigrant communities and they’re using them in these really pretty predatory contracts. And the contract of gotten tighter and tighter every year of the process.
RIFT: Thanks for explaining that. So I also want to ask about the chickens in these facilities. What happens to them? Do you know anything about what goes on the inside? Do you see protecting the chickens as related to your struggle to protect the land and water?
PK: Well, yes, you know and no because we don't have access to anything inside. The agencies, even the department of ag, says they can’t enter these houses, which I find absolutely ridiculous. But we know that, for instance, the CAFO that is above me, which is a confined animal feeding operation, so each chicken is kept in a cage. And there's 48 chicken houses on the hill above me ran by Cobb-Vantress. I don't know a lot about the company, I need to research it, do all that. But they are developing the new DNA chickens. They’ve developed the eight-week chicken, that at eight weeks, it’s so heavy on the body, it just falls over. Its legs collapse. So they're designed to be fat meat growers for these eight week cycles in these houses to be grown at that speed. And that's just awful to me. I mean, I have chickens. I love chickens. Those are franken-chickens. They’re designed chickens. They are DNA-designed to produce big meat and big eggs - and lots. So that's cruel, I mean why do we have to do that? Chickens are perfect. They do their thing. It's just this high-speed, high-run, you know that that corporate agriculture - corporate food. It's not real food. Anyway, so when they bring them in as babies, we aren’t real sure what they give them, but we know they have to haul water in separate and [it] probably [has] hormones, antibiotics, things the babies need to survive those first two, three, four weeks and then they can start drinking the local water. We know that. But we found out from a Mennonite chicken farmer. You know it's not that the agencies know or that anybody's gonna tell us anything, except the whistleblowers, who do talk to us.And then they’re grown under the lights. The lights are lifted, the water’s lifted, the food is lifted, so as they grow, all of those things grow up with them off the ground. Any water that spills and whatever they're using as their litter on the ground - in Arkansas they use a lot of rice hulls. In Oklahoma, I don’t know if they’re using sawdust or some sort of a bark stuff they're bringing in. I really don't know, probably sawdust, there are a lot of woods around here in northwest Arkansas - and the water spilled from drinking goes in there, all the manure, feces, urine, everything goes into that. And any dead chickens, every day are just picked up and thrown to the back of the barn. And when it's time to come and pick up the chickens, the big trucks come in with the wire cages, they probably hold ten-fifteen birds in a cage. So there will be massive cages on the back of the trucks. We follow them all the time, feathers flying out all the way to Arkansas. In some places, they have these little herding chutes, where they herd them all in. Some of the big fancy trucks, which I haven't really seen on our roads, have big vacuum cleaners that suck up the chickens and toss them in, but I think these are more the plastic chutes most kind of run them in. Pretty, you know, low-tech out here [laughs]. And then, we see the truck turn around, head back [on highway] 412, over to Arkansas full of chickens, flyin’ feathers. And they're all scrunched up, white, scraggly and sad, you know, they don't look like my chickens, I’ll tell you that. So then they are put through the processing plant. There’s high heat, lots of bleach, I don’t know what all goes on in there. They have hazmat trucks outside and, you know, all that stuff is in the processing plant.And then back home, there we're winnowing out all of the what they call “cake”. So the dead chickens are thrown in the back of the barn, then they're gonna fork-lift up all the crappy junk off of the litter, anything wet, anything caked up with manure, with whatever, shove it to the back of the barn or winnow it down the middle. They're doing different things inside. They all have a compost barn outside and they used to empty the house to pull that cake out to the compost barn. Now they're leaving it in the barn for a lot longer time periods. We believe they're also getting a lot more that the compost barns won’t hold it all. So they're holding to really empty the cake into the compost barn. So that cake gets into the back, so all those carcasses, all the manure, all that urine, and all that wet litter gets piled up and heats up and “composts”. And my questions are, “Okay what are the levels of.. what's going on in there for those poor chickens, you breathing to be composting winnowed “cake” instead of having it taken out to the compost barn like you’re supposed to?” So you know, I mean these poor chickens, good lord, and then we eat them. You know, yum yum! So that's kind of the story and then the waste gets hauled off. It gets sold. OSU (Oklahoma State University) has a poultry litter marketplace and you can buy and sell your poultry manure. So a lot of people are making money off just going into the farms, picking up the composted cake out of the farms and hauling it off and selling it to a farmer to put on his land for land application with no regulation, no oversight. They call up and say, “I'm going to apply to my land. I want a little ticket.” They get a little ticket take off and go.
RIFT: Alright, so just starting to wrap up here. I have a couple more questions. The first one here is on a more personal note - What does this water and this land mean to you and your tribe?
PK: Clean water is everything to our people. Our ceremonies are based on water that's pure. It carries our prayers. It cleanses us. We have a two very specific water ceremonies that we perform, most people on a daily basis, for many on a weekly or monthly basis at the grounds as a group. And it's very important to our medicine people, our spiritual people, to any and all of our especially traditional food-based parts of our life. So for me to feel like I can no longer do my daily [ceremonies] in my water because it's affected by these houses, is that taking away my right to my religious beliefs? How does that affect my property rights? I have no rights, but they do? To me, it's really devastating spiritually to know that our waters are affected by all of this. And we live in a very porous geology. So the surface water, ground water, and deep aquifer water, we know mix. And that's real scary to me. On a larger global basis, the waters of the Earth are just in trouble and it’s really scary. You know, our babies are made up of, what, 95 percent of the waters they’re born next to. All those things, it just affects life. Water is life and it's a big part of our tribe as a spiritual practice.
RIFT: Thanks. So the last thing I want to ask is how people can help? Is there a place to sign up for updates, make donations, learn more online somewhere?
PK: Yes, we have two facebook pages. One is a forum [where] locals can speak and put things up, but Green Country Guardians on facebook is pretty active. There's just so much on there. The website - GreenCountryGuardians.org - is not real active, but the basics are there. We do have a newsletter and because of COVID and many other things, we’re not meeting face to face, so we have some volunteers that are ready to step up and do more online and we do have, with one of our sister organizations who’s raising money for the attorneys, there is a place to donate to the lawsuit and that’s at SpringCreekCoalition.org. And those things are also found on Green Country Guardians on the website and facebook.
RIFT: Great, we will link to those when we post. I think that's all I have is. Is there anything else you want to say or talk about?
PK: No, I think that was great.
RIFT: Okay thanks, I agree. Thank you so much.
