Unbelievable Tri-State Mining Documentary

Christina Ward at Feral House/Process Media found this incredible short film about the Tri-State Mining District on the ever-important Internet Archive titled Men and Dust.

still from Men and Dust by Sheldon Dick

https://archive.org/details/men-and-dust-1940/men-and-dust-1940-10mbps.mp4

If you’re not familiar with the Tr-State Mining District it was a labyrinth of lead and zinc mines that covered the three corners of Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas. Its storied lead pollution has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the first and worst Superfund sites in the country. Generations of the local children were born disadvantaged from lead poisoning, the water is cadmium orange from heavy metals and the ground is sinking into the mines. What is more challenging that much of the land belongs to the Quapaw Tribe who leased it to the mining companies throughout the early 20th Century. It’s a story about the environment, but also politics, poverty, the social role of government responsibility, the nature of work and activism among other things.

The first half of my book, Earth A.D.: The Poisoning of the American Landscape and the Communities Who Fought Back deals with the many complexities of this site. So i have a particular interest in all the scholarship of this subject.

Men and Dust is like a surrealist Buñuel film about the mining industry. It doesn’t look like the WPA documentaries from the time it was released in 1940. It’s a must see for fans of cinema. I say that apart from my interest in this place and subject.

from archive.org:

Documentary sponsored by a labor advocacy group to draw attention to the industrial diseases plaguing zinc and lead miners in the tristate region of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma.

Note: Sheldon Dick initially came to the region to take photographs for a Tri-State Survey Committee report and stayed on to make Men and Dust. Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner write that the tristate advocacy campaign was pivotal in alerting the public to the industrial health hazards faced by American workers in some industries.