A narrow dirt road leads away past a tiny cluster of houses and a stone mission church that make up this settlement on the Fort Belknap Reservation. It runs past the sun-dance lodge and the powwow grounds and into the forest that cloaks the Little Rocky Mountains of Montana.

At the end of the road is a place where Assiniboine and Gros Ventre Indians still hunt and seek visions. But the look of the place has changed drastically in recent years. Now there is a huge open pit and a towering wall of crushed stone there, remnants of a mountain that has been turned inside out for the gold inside.

A century ago, this piece of the mountain range was part of the reservation, and many in the tribes still smolder over the loss. They say that in 1896 their ancestors were forced to sell the gold-bearing land because of a form of blackmail typical of the time: If they did not sell, the government agent for the reservation would have withheld food rations.

The mine complex is contaminating much of this beautiful region. Between 1982 and 1993, six accidental spills or releases of cyanide solution occurred at the mines, contaminating both surface and ground waters. Additional leaks or spills may have gone undetected. Last year, the tribes filed a notice of intent to sue Pegasus Gold, which owns the Zortman mine, for damages to reservation water. The suit, under the Clean Water Act, resulted in a $37 million settlement, including a $1 million payment to the tribes and a $30 million bond against future damage. The settlement also required the company to fund a comprehensive ground water investigation and studies of the impacts of mining on the health of the Fort Belknap Reservation residents and aquatic resources.

In October 1996, expansion plans for the mine complex were approved which will roughly triple the area affected by mining operations in the Little Rocky Mountains. In January the tribes sued again in state court to stop Pegasus from creating a new pit until it cleaned up the old one. The tribes are also considering a lawsuit in federal court contending that federal agencies did not prepare an adequate environmental impact statement when they approved the new pit. The tribes maintain that the State should, at a minimum, wait for the studies required under the water quality settlement to be completed before allowing the mines to expand. Since 1979, Zortman-Landusky has been issued 24 amendments to its original operating permit, expanding it from approximately 500 acres to 1,189. Prior to the latest expansion proposal, no permit amendment received more than a cursory environmental assessment from regulatory agencies.

Much of the land on which the mines operate was patented to Pegasus or previous owners under the 1872 Mining Act for $5 or less an acre. Gold is extracted at the mines by blasting thousands of tons of rock per day from open pits, then crushing and transporting gold-bearing ore to leaching pads where it is piled in heaps and sprayed with cyanide solution to release the gold. An operation like Zortman-Landusky uses more than a million pounds of highly toxic cyanide annually. The mines also have the dubious distinctions of being the first large-scale mining operation to use the cyanide heap leach process and the lowest-grade mining operation in the nation. Nearly half of all the rock blasted from the Little Rocky Mountains does not contain sufficient quantities of gold to merit processing and is simply set aside in waste rock dumps. Almost 100 tons of ore must be processed to produce just one ounce of gold. It took about 16 years for the two mines to produce one million ounces of gold, which equals perhaps a small pickup truck load, valued at approximately $400 million

Redoubling the devastation of the land won't be as easy for the modern filchers. Tribal leaders say they are making sure the dynamics are different now than they were for their ancestors.

"They threatened their rations, so they gave in and made poor decisions," said Tracy Charles King, president of the Fort Belknap Community Council, the Assiniboine tribal governing body. "But starvation tactics are over. It's time for us to ask questions, get answers and be treated with respect."

The tribes say the two huge open pits in the area have poisoned wells, diminished the flow of streams and may have widely contaminated ground water. The mining company says those contentions are exaggerated.

"There's been a lot of allegations," said John Pearson, director of investor relations for Pegasus Gold at the company's headquarters in Spokane, WA. "And there have been studies done that have proved some of them absolutely false. Our environmental record and reclamation effort is a very strong one."

To add insult to injury, portions of the 1,200 acres already disturbed (the total permit areas is twice that) hold traditional cultural significance for the people. One such site was the mountain that the Zortman mine destroyed.

"That mountain they tore down was Spirit Mountain," said Virgil McConnell, 72, an Assiniboine tribal elder. McConnell said the other mountains were still used extensively for vision quests, several days of praying and fasting in the mountains in search of a gift from the Great Spirit.

"You pray, you do a lot of crying and pray to the Great Spirit," McConnell said. "But you can't go on a vision quest when there's blasting and a lot of noise. We tried to tell the mining company this, but they wouldn't pay any attention."

There seems to be a renewed sense of purpose among the tribes which have been mired in chaos because of overwhelming problems, like the 80 percent unemployment rate at Fort Belknap.

"Eternity," said Poncho Bigby, the director of the Fort Belknap Natural Resource Department. "We'll suffer the impacts of that mine for eternity."