Women of the Year: Barbara Miller has spent decades advocating for her Silver Valley community poisoned by mining operations

The lush wetlands and forested peaks of Idaho’s Silver Valley are hardly a visage of mass contamination.

But Barbara Miller, director of the Silver Valley Community Resource Center, knows what lurks beneath the foliage. For nearly 40 years, Miller has led the charge in advocating for the well-being of those in the country’s largest superfund clean-up site.

The oldest of 12 children and a product of the Silver Valley , Miller holds the unique distinction of one of few individuals in history to call the Cataldo Mission home. Miller’s father, a miner turned postal worker, and stay-at-home mother raised her on the property during the 50 years her family served as the caretakers of Idaho’s oldest building.

Miller has fond memories of her childhood and the “special place” she called home, including her loving parents and the nuns at her Catholic school, who instilled in her the values of compassion, integrity, goodness and caring for others, she said.

But one of the most prominent experiences that lingers with her is the sensation she would feel any time her family drove east through Pinehurst, where the Silver Valley begins to unfurl.

“That’s when, vividly, I remember covering my face because the smelter smoke early in the morning, and sometimes in the afternoon, depending upon the burn off, hurt so bad that you couldn’t tolerate it,” Miller said.

The Environmental Protection Agency first designated the region a Superfund site in 1983, after the health and environmental effects of the Silver Valley’s long mining history became too apparent to ignore.

The site boundaries were at first limited to a 21-square-mile area centered around Kellogg, where a century of mining millions of pounds of lead, silver, zinc, copper and gold poisoned the surrounding flora, fauna and residents. In 2002, the site was expanded to include the entire Coeur d’Alene River Basin – more than 1,500 square miles across North Idaho and Eastern Washington.

More than 200 mines operated in the region at its height. Each polluted the valley’s hillsides, waterways and atmosphere, but the largest contaminating incident occurred at the site’s namesake, the Bunker Hill Mine. In 1973, a fire destroyed the baghouse pollution filter at the mine’s smelter in Smelterville, Idaho, right around the time lead prices were skyrocketing.

Instead of shutting down operations for costly repairs, Gulf Resources and Chemical Corp. decided to keep the smelter running without proper filtration. Over the next year, the plant spewed hundreds of tons of lead into the atmosphere, leading to the highest blood-lead levels recorded among American children.

By the time the region was designated a superfund site, a decision needed to be made on whether the Silver Valley should even be inhabited, said Dr. John Osborn, a longtime environmental advocate and physician.

One option was to abandon the area like Times Beach, Missouri, the site of a dangerous toxic chemical spill. Another was to “undertake a forever commitment of institutional controls to put a veneer of cleanliness between vulnerable people, pregnant women and infants and children, and a highly contaminated environment,” Osborn said.

Officials opted for the second route.

“We have kind of rebuilt those communities and those economies in a contaminated environment, and we have done it with the promise that there will be institutional controls in place to protect those who are vulnerable, particularly the kids and pregnant women,” Osborn said. “And I guess the forever question is, ‘Are we doing that? Is it adequate?’ ”

The cleanup effort is ongoing, with a combined investment of multiple governmental entities and nonprofits. With the EPA at the helm, the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, Panhandle Health District, the Coeur d’Alene and Nez Perce tribes, Miller’s organization and many more continue to endeavor toward a cleaner, healthier future.

Since returning to the Silver Valley in 1986, Miller’s prime focus has been ensuring the community’s voices, those directly impacted by the pollution, have not been lost in the massive undertaking.

Over the years, she’s held more than a few contentious meetings with government officials, called town halls to share findings and health tips from renowned researchers and doctors, waded into lawsuits, held rallies, launched petitions, and advocated for transparency in just about every way she can. Those efforts inspired numerous people to nominate her as a 2024 Woman of the Year.

Miller would be the first to admit it has not been an easy journey. Her longtime friend and collaborator Betty Belisle said Miller’s had her own life greatly affected in trying to improve the quality of life for her neighbors.

She’s had to contend with a litany of criticisms, defamatory remarks and smear efforts in Idaho newspapers with vested interests in downplaying the contamination and its associated health risks. Those editorials, articles and letters to the editor often spilled out into her day-to-day life in the tight-knit community.

Miller’s heard officials refer to her and her neighbors as “stupid and leaded.”

She’s also spent nights incarcerated for minor legal charges in what she said were retaliation efforts for her advocacy. When her run-ins with the law would be published in those same papers, it validated those in denial of the health dangers in the region.

The efforts to discredit Miller have made it harder to get her community to understand how they’ve been affected and how they could organize to get their concerns addressed, Belisle said.

She theorizes that their organization faces an uphill battle, because some residents still harbor concerns around organizing that stem all the way back to the tribulations endured by mine worker unions more than a century ago.

“That’s the difference between Barbara Miller and myself. She would go ahead and do it by herself if she had to, and I probably wouldn’t,” Belisle said. “It’s a very arduous decision to make, to continue on when people are saying you’re crazy, or you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Still, Miller has persevered. Jeanine Smith, another longtime associate, said the progress in the cleanup efforts would not have been possible without Miller.

“It takes somebody like Barb to push to get people involved and thinking about your health, your children’s health,” Smith said.

Like Miller and Belisle, Smith grew up in the Silver Valley. She was friends with Miller’s younger sister throughout her childhood, and Miller was Smith’s catechism teacher. She’s always had a penchant for doing the right thing and serving others, Smith said.

And like many Silver Valley residents, the lead Smith was contaminated with as a child is likely still lurking within her own body, she said.

Reflecting on growing up in the region, Smith can remember the sting of the pollution in the air as it hit the back of her throat, the high school classmates overrunning the nurse’s office with nose bleeds and the miscarriages her sister and several other local women endured prior to the mine’s closure and eventual cleanup.

There’s also the clear environmental impacts. The Coeur d’Alene River her family frequently fished ran a murky grey color from the mine tailings, and the soil within the Valley would be coated with heavy metal residue, preventing anything from growing.

“When we grew up, the hills from Smelterville clear through to the other side of Kellogg were bare,” Smith said. “There was not a green thing living, basically. There were no trees.”

Even though the evidence was there, many in the area didn’t know any better at the time, Smith said. It took Miller, with a legion of health and environmental experts in tow, to open the community’s eyes, Smith said.

She added that what makes Miller so effective in her work is her encyclopedic knowledge of the history of the Silver Valley, the mining pollution and the resources available to residents in need.

That memory also helps Miller keep the government’s feet to the fire, Smith said.

“Barb has just pushed so hard for us,” Smith said. “She’s forgotten more than most of these government people know about the Valley and the contamination.”

A recent transplant may not be aware of Kellogg’s history at first glance, given the millions invested in recent years to shape it into a burgeoning ski town and into the surrounding landscape to remove contaminated soil and replace it with new plantings.

Miller welcomes the economic development those investments have brought, saying that supporting and advocating for the local economy is one of the resource center’s guiding principles. But she worries the work has been mostly cosmetic.

At her office she shares with a cancer center and a hospice, Miller flipped through a conference table blanketed with court proceedings, town hall presentations, newspaper clippings, government reports and photographs from over the years, sharing glimpses at moments over the course of her life’s work. She said she’s had a lot of help along the way.

“Even though it’s kind of a dysfunctional world in a lot of ways, there are those people, there are those churches, there are those groups and unions and people who do believe in quality of life, in the future,” Miller said. “Then you put that together and send a message and keep working to make it happen.”

The work is not done, Miller said. Still in her sights are two long-endeavored goals: Establish a regional lead health center and relocate the repository situated on the other side of Interstate 90 from the Cataldo Mission.

Miller and her peers have been advocating for a public lead health center for years, and have drafted plans, organizational charts and operation plans for the proposed clinic. They’ve consulted similar health centers in former mining communities on the East Coast and identified health experts and physicians who would be willing to lend their services. What they’re waiting on is funding, Miller said.

In 1991, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe filed a lawsuit against the Hecla Mining Company related to the pollution.

The state of Idaho and federal government later joined in on the lawsuit, and a settlement was reached in which Hecla agreed to pay the parties $263.4 million, with interest.

Miller said portions of the settlement were specifically earmarked to establish the center, but that the EPA has yet to put those dollars to use.

“It got put in the hands of the EPA, and the EPA controls it,” Miller said. “Even though it was the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s original lawsuit, and they supported the lead health center and they supported the shutdown of the mission repository for all the right reasons.”

Miller also argues the center would be an economic development on par with the investments made in local tourism.

“The people here are the core sustainable source keeping the valley going, and they need it,” Miller said, before lamenting some of the health issues she’s watched her neighbors struggle with for years.

As for the repository near her childhood home, Miller said it should have never been established there.

In 2008, the EPA and Idaho’s Department of Environmental Quality established the East Mission Flats Repository about 800 yards east from the front door of the Cataldo Mission. Miller and several other community members rallied to stop it but were unsuccessful.

In addition to its significant cultural and historical prominence to Catholics, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe and regional residents at large, there are several environmental concerns, Miller said. The repository and the mission are on a historic floodplain of the Coeur d’Alene River, and seasonal flooding could send those contaminated substances all the way downstream to Spokane, she argues.

“It’s flooded there since the beginning of time,” Miller said.

“I know that because my dad used to have to take us by boat to catch the school bus when the flooding season came, which was in the spring.”

The mission is one of the stops on Osborn’s environmental history tours he’s guided since the early 1990s. Hosted by the Sierra Club, the Rivers of History tour takes participants to significant places in local tribal, mining and potamologic history from the confluence of the Little Spokane and Spokane rivers all the way to Canyon Creek near Wallace.

The mission is a stop for a couple of reasons, Osborn said.

For one, it is the oldest standing building in Idaho, built in the 1850s.

It’s also the childhood home of one of the region’s most influential environmental advocates and greatly shaped the work Miller would go on to do.

“I think it’s important for people to know her story and her connection to that place, both spiritually and as an advocate,” Osborn said. “It’s from that place, standing on that knoll of the Cataldo Mission, where you can look out on 12,000 acres of heavily contaminated wetlands where hundreds of tundra swans die each year. And then it’s not far from there, upriver, where some of the worst lead pollution or lead poisoning of children in history occurred with the Baghouse fire.”

Osborn said Miller has been an unyielding force for the betterment of her community, and that it’s all rooted in her deep personal ties to the region.

The history of the Silver Valley is a rich tapestry, Osborn said.

Its mines enriched some of America’s wealthiest families, like the Guggenheims and Rockefellers, and served as the battleground for intense labor disputes that led to the assassination of a former governor in 1905.

It’s tied to Silver Thursday, when wealthy brothers who sought to control the silver market sparked a steep price increase before a major plummet in 1980.

And it’s the epicenter of the largest lead poisoning event in American history.

Those same mines also led to rampant pollution, which haunts the region to this day.

“It just goes on and on, and a lot of it’s pretty dark,” Osborn said. “There isn’t a lot of light in this story. But I would say one of those lights is Barbara Miller.”

Miller said when she reflects upon her life, and what she’s been able to overcome, she has no choice but to thank God for her steadfast nature.

“It’s like, ‘How did I do this? How was I able to do this?’ You know?” Miller said. “Because it’s not easy. It’s the grace of God that carries you forward, and you just keep going. Never, never, never give up.”

By the grace of God, and with support from family and friends, Miller said she’ll continue to advocate for the community she loves dearly.

“It’s the people that keeps me going,” Miller said. “It’s their families and their children. They obviously care about their community. They care about the future. They’ve supported this town. They’ve spoken out as best they can, and it hasn’t been easy for them.”

“They need and deserve help,” Miller said.