CASS LAKE — As a teenager, Ryan White learned to harvest manoomin from his father and grandfather on the White Earth Reservation.
The Minnesota lakes are surrounded by towering pines, the shallows hidden by tall grass, where the sacred wild rice grows. Every fall, he rows out on one of these pristine lakes, some of which ban motor boats during harvest season to keep the water pollution-free and the wild rice beds undisturbed.
Among the tall grass, White fills his canoe with the grain that’s part of the Ojibwe creation story.
“Most ricers start out as polers, and you just push them around,” he said. “As you gain experience, you'll kind of figure out where the riper rice is, where the thicker rice is, and just get to know the bed and know the lake.”
But White, a citizen of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and the director of advancement and public affairs at Leech Lake Tribal College, also knows to avoid harvesting from a certain part of the lake — Pike Bay Channel.
The channel abuts an active Superfund site that is part of a federal government cleanup program for some of the most polluted areas in the country. The site sits between Highway 371 and Pike Bay, a 4,700-acre lake just outside the city of Cass Lake. Groundwater pollution stretches east beneath the channel and is migrating to the surface. And recent testing shows that the groundwater pollution is spreading south to Fox Creek, which flows into Pike Bay.
It’s putting wild rice harvesting — and Ojibwe traditions — in further jeopardy. And if contamination spreads, it could become a problem for communities downstream. Pike Bay and Cass Lake, the 15,000-acre body of water that gives the city its name, are part of a chain of lakes in Minnesota that form the headwaters of the Mississippi River.
The Environmental Protection Agency has been working to clean up the hazardous waste contamination in Cass Lake for more than 40 years. The primary solution is a water treatment plant that takes groundwater from multiple wells on the site, filters out the toxic pollutants and pumps the treated water into Pike Bay Channel, which connects Pike Bay and Cass Lake.
The system is meant to clean the contaminated groundwater and prevent its spread.
“It’s failing in both respects,” Eric Krumm, the Leech Lake band’s Superfund coordinator, told Buffalo’s Fire.
From 1957 to 1985, the St. Regis Paper Co. operated a wood preserving facility in Cass Lake. During that time, it used the land as a dumping ground for its waste.
Workers placed wood soaked in hazardous preservatives next to homes, filling them with the smell of tar and mothballs. They burned waste products and discharged about 500 gallons of sludge and wastewater per day into onsite holding ponds, storm drains and the city dump.
The main chemicals of concern are creosote, a tar-like byproduct of burning coal or wood, and pentachlorophenol, a manufactured chemical that the EPA is phasing out and will ban by 2027. Both substances are considered potential carcinogens by the EPA.
When the facility was active, the community was directly exposed to these chemicals at a swimming hole dubbed “Rainbow Pond” because of the iridescent sheen on the water from creosote runoff. In the neighborhood next to the facility, residents breathed in toxic fumes from the burning of the facility’s waste product, and contaminated soil and dust were tracked into homes.
The EPA designated the 163-acre facility as a Superfund site in 1984 and placed it on the National Priorities List. A year later, the St. Regis Paper Co. stopped operations. Residents were bought out of their homes. Businesses closed. And 42,000 cubic yards of contaminated sludge and soil were excavated and buried in a lined containment vault a quarter-mile from downtown.
The South Side neighborhood of Cass Lake is now a vacant field called “the great expanse,” surrounded by short, stunted pines. It serves as a reminder of the paper company’s pollution.
A ‘stable’ situation … or ‘stagnant’
The cleanup plan is now led by International Paper Co., a paper manufacturer headquartered in Tennessee, which acquired St. Regis and assumed cleanup in 2000. The EPA oversees cleanup, with the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe Division of Resource Management and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency providing feedback.
The groundwater treatment plan has remained unchanged since water extraction wells and the on-site water treatment facility were constructed in 1987, but the federal government and the band differ on its effectiveness.
The EPA’s 2025 Five-Year Review showed decreasing contamination at the core of the plume, but it also showed unsafe pentachlorophenol levels east of the plume near Pike Bay Channel and south near Fox Creek. Of 89 monitoring locations on the site, 58 had pentachlorophenol levels that exceeded the band’s standards, greater than 0.02 parts per billion (ppb), and 36 exceeded EPA standards, greater than 1 ppb.
The EPA calls these levels “stable.” Krumm calls them “stagnant.”
The treatment plant was supposed to reduce the groundwater plume and render it effectively contained by 2011. Yet, the treatment plant is still required today — 40 years later — to keep the plume in check. And according to the EPA’s 2025 report, the groundwater “cleanup timelines could extend well beyond 2051 if the system were to remain operating as-is.”
Groundwater testing by the Leech Lake Band shows that the plume has spread beyond the extraction boundaries and beneath Pike Bay Channel.
The EPA said this doesn’t necessarily mean that the plume is growing. Rather, as the agency does more testing, “the shape of the plume is changed to reflect that new data.”
There are also fears other chemicals may be present.
While the plant removes most contaminants, Krumm said, treated water “regularly exceeds” healthy limits of dioxins. This group of highly toxic chemical compounds is believed to have been introduced to the soil and waters of Cass Lake by workers burning waste and wood at the St. Regis facility in the ’80s.
Limits placed on traditional foods
Brenda Eskenazi, a University of California Berkeley public health professor who studies dioxin exposure, told Buffalo’s Fire that dioxin is a potent carcinogen that interferes with hormones and can cause fertility and developmental problems.
“It has a very, very, very long half-life,” she said, which “means it hangs out in the body and in the environment for very long periods of time.”
In 2001, the EPA conducted testing on white fish in Cass Lake, which showed dioxin levels in some was 10 times higher than those in nearby lakes. That has fed concerns that community members may be taking in chemicals indirectly through their food sources, including white fish and wild rice, which are staples of the Ojibwe diet.
The Leech Lake Band advises tribal members to remove as much fat, where dioxin accumulates, from Pike Bay and Cass Lake fish, while recommending that pregnant women and children avoid eating them altogether. But as stated in the band’s 2024 report, “consumption advisories for Treaty fish are like telling average Americans to limit meat or bread consumption.”
Limits are also placed on wild rice. Though the band has not issued a consumption guide for the grain, out of the thousands of pounds of wild rice it buys from tribal members each year for processing, Krumm said none are from Pike Bay Channel.
Brandy Toft, environmental director for the band’s Division of Resource Management, told Buffalo’s Fire, that there aren’t enough extraction wells to capture the contaminated groundwater and prevent its spread.
Standing among the tall grass at Fox Creek next to EPA monitoring wells, she said the groundwater is like a wave pool, and the contamination is like dye dropped into it. The extraction wells are like straws trying to suck all the dye out of the pool, but there just aren’t enough straws, she said.
“Especially in a subsistence Indigenous community that has every right, literally every right, to hunt, fish, gather in these areas or surrounding areas without fear or without exclusion from those zones because of contamination,” she said.
International Paper has not included plans to update the water treatment plant, beyond replacing filters, in their most recent remediation report. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Disrupting a way of life
Back at the Leech Lake Reservation, White harvests wild rice every year with his sons, 16-year-old Debwe and 14-year-old Arrow — a tradition he is passing down.
Eight years ago, he took his sons ricing for the first time. White said they were just “moseying along,” collecting rice here and there, when Arrow saw another little boy with more rice in his boat than him. Competitive, Arrow looked at his dad with excitement, urging him to hurry up.
Arrow’s love of ricing came “naturally,” said White. “He had just seen it in our people and how much we care about that rice. Even at a very young age, you know that it's important.”
Minnesota Ojibwe tribes, including Leech Lake, harvest wild rice in beds along the St. Louis River and in shallow lakes that make up the headwaters of the Mississippi River — and have been for centuries. Ojibwe ancestors were sent to the region by a prophecy that told them to travel west from the East Coast until they found the “food that grows on water.”
“It’s called the sacred berry, or the good berry,” said White. “It’s food, but also, it’s medicine. It’s who we are.”
He said wild rice has also provided for the Ojibwe. Today, many tribal members rely on a steady wild rice harvest to supplement their income in the fall.
“There's times where I had to use my income from wild rice to pretty much pay the bills, keep a roof over my head and keep the lights on,” said White.
But they have been limiting where they harvest since Pike Bay Channel is off-limits to tribal members.
“That's what may happen in the future for the entire Pike Bay and the surrounding waterways,” said White, “and all that connects to the Mississippi River. And we're pumping that directly into the lake.”
Community impact
So, why can’t Leech Lake tribal members just fish and harvest wild rice at a different lake?
Harvest practices are deeply tied to place and identity for Native communities, Anton Treuer, a Leech Lake citizen and a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, told Buffalo’s Fire.
“Being a Leech Lake Ojibwe person is connected to harvesting fish at Leech Lake,” he said. “The argument that someone should just pack up their bags and drive to Lake of the Woods and harvest a walleye that doesn't hurt them is silly for a variety of reasons.”
The St. Regis Paper Co. hasn’t used Cass Lake as its dumping ground for more than 40 years, but Treuer said it’s still in the consciousness of tribal members today. He explains it as “an icky feeling.” Is it safe to drink tap water? Is it safe to go swimming in Cass Lake?
“It never feels as safe as it should be, and people intentionally avoid that space to the degree that they reasonably can,” he said, which has an “immediate impact on people’s ability and willingness to participate in certain cultural practices.”
On top of limiting where tribal members can practice subsistence fishing and harvesting, the Superfund site also impacts ceremonies, said Treuer, who lives on the reservation near Cass Lake. Cedar, commonly burned in ceremonies, must be harvested out of town, he said, and the Superfund site occupies the area where first-kill ceremonies, a rite of passage for young Native hunters, were traditionally held.
Toft, from the band’s Division of Resource Management, called the Superfund a “black cloud over Cass Lake.”
“It just keeps hanging there,” she said.
The fight to preserve Ojibwe culture
But community members are making efforts to promote Ojibwe culture and language on the reservation.
Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig, a K-12 school, serves more than 200 students of various tribal backgrounds. Operated by the band, the school is located 15 miles from the town of Cass Lake, teaches kids the Ojibwe language and encourages cultural engagement. The school holds a Culture Camp each year where students take language classes, learn traditional crafts like drum making and beading, and take part in traditional Ojibwe pastimes.
The Leech Lake Tribal College also offers a course on nationhood and manoomin, taught by Leech Lake elder Elaine Fleming with help from White.
“When we’re on the water, I’ll be the one out there showing them how to rice — how to use the pole, how to knock, how to knock in a good way,” he said.
Treuer said other tribal initiatives are helping the band reclaim their land, language and culture. Around Cass Lake, signage is printed in both Ojibwe and English. And in June 2024, more than 11,000 acres of ancestral land, previously managed by the Chippewa National Forest, was returned to the band.
“The Ojibwe at Leech Lake, and really everywhere, we're in for the fight of our lives,” said Treuer, “to keep our language alive and to keep our cultural practices vibrant.”
Even if part of the reservation hadn’t been turned into a Superfund site, he said, the Ojibwe community would still be building back their culture from other impacts of colonization, including residential boarding schools and the mass slaughter of buffalo.
While 40 years of Superfund cleanup has accelerated those impacts, Toft said, in the centuries of Ojibwe history, a few decades isn’t deterring the community from fighting for their land and culture.
“We think differently,” she said, “and we're in for the long haul.”
What is a Superfund site? And how does cleanup work?
A Superfund site is land in the United States contaminated by hazardous waste that poses a risk to human health or the environment. The EPA manages these sites under the Comprehensive Environment Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), informally called Superfund, created in 1980 to direct cleanup and hold polluters accountable.
Here’s how the system works, what it means when a site is listed for cleanup and who’s held responsible.
How Superfund came about
CERCLA gave the EPA authority to clean up hazardous waste that threatens human health and the environment. It holds polluters responsible and establishes a trust fund — hence Superfund — for cleanup when a responsible party can not be identified. Infamous environmental disasters in the late 1970s, including Love Canal in Upstate New York and Valley of the Drums in Kentucky, prompted the federal government to make the Superfund.
The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which was passed in 1976 and most recently amended in 1996, is a waste management law for hazardous and nonhazardous waste. The EPA regulates hazardous waste under the law’s Subtitle C from the moment it’s generated to its final disposal — “cradle to grave.” The act also lays out what is considered hazardous waste, which include wood preservatives, some pesticides and coal byproducts. Groups that generate, transport, treat, store and dispose of hazardous waste must comply with the RCRA regulations.
RCRA prevents hazardous waste problems; CERCLA cleans them up.
What qualifies a site for the National Priorities List?
Along with being designated as a Superfund site, the EPA gives further importance to a site’s cleanup by adding it to the National Priorities List. The NPL marks a site for additional EPA investigation, ranks its severity and makes the cleanup process more public.
About the National Priorities List
- Purpose: Identify and prioritize hazardous waste sites that threaten human health or the environment.
- How sites are added: The EPA scores sites using its hazard ranking system and invites public comment.
- Criteria: Sites posing significant health risks or requiring complex remediation are added to the list.
- Deletion: Sites are removed once cleanup goals are met.
As of January 2026, there were 1,343 active NPL sites, 38 proposed and 459 deleted. All NPL sites can be found on the EPA’s website.
Who cleans up Superfund sites?
One goal of the EPA when creating the Superfund was holding the companies or entities responsible for hazardous waste pollution accountable.
In many cases, the EPA doesn’t head the cleanup process themselves. Instead, they assign cleanup to the potentially responsible parties, or PRPs, which can be current or past owners of a facility. However, if the party responsible for the pollution refuses, the EPA will sue to and head the cleanup themselves.
“EPA determines the cleanup required, and then the responsible parties are responsible for implementing that cleanup and paying for it,” said Phil Gurley, community involvement coordinator at region 5, which includes the St. Regis Paper Co. Site. The “polluter pays” policy holds the responsible party accountable for the pollution by demanding it cover cleanup costs.
But ownership can get complicated, especially if the site is active over multiple decades as in the case of the St. Regis Paper Co. Site.
The St. Regis Paper Co. began operating in Cass County in the 1950s. It used Minnesota lumber to make poles and treated them with hazardous chemicals at its Cass Lake site. The city’s residents reported sickness including headaches, breathing problems and skin rashes. Although most cases can’t be traced directly to the site, the health complaints are consistent with pentachlorophenol poisonings. The site was placed on the National Priorities List in 1984, designating the cleanup to the paper company.
Since then, the paper company has changed ownership twice. Along with the company's resources and operations, the new owners also inherit the Superfund site and cleanup responsibility.
What is ‘environmental remediation’?
Environmental remediation is the process of cleaning up pollution in the air, soil or water to protect human health and restore the environment.
Responsible parties, along with tribal, state and local authorities, implement this process with Superfund sites. They can use different remediation methods depending on the type of contamination:
- Soil remediation: This is the process of cleaning up contaminated soil to make it safe and usable. Oftentimes, this requires soil removal through excavation. Once the soil is removed, other cleanup methods can be used, including soil washing and soil vapor extraction.
- Groundwater cleanup: Contaminated groundwater can be treated above or under ground, which typically involves running water through filters or putting chemicals into the groundwater that act on pollutants and make them less harmful. A common above-ground treatment method is “pump and treat,” where groundwater is extracted through wells and cleaned at a water treatment facility.
- Bioremediation: This method uses living organisms, including microbes, fungi and plants, to speed up the natural biodegradation of harmful contaminants. It can treat the polluted area and turn contaminants into less harmful materials such as carbon dioxide, methane and water. Phytoremediation specifically uses plants for this purpose. Bioremediation methods are often less expensive and more acceptable to the public.
- Thermal desorption: This technology uses heat to separate contaminants from soil, sludge or sediment. The process is done in a machine called a thermal desorber that turns contaminants into vapors, which are then treated. The treated soil can be used to backfill excavated areas. This method can be quicker and provide better treatment than other methods.
What is the Superfund cleanup process?
Once a site is initially investigated, designated as a Superfund site and placed on the NPL, the EPA and responsible parties go through this cleanup process with the goal of site reuse and redevelopment.
Steps to the cleanup process:
- Remedial investigation: The EPA evaluates the nature and extent of the contamination. “We want to see where and how much contamination there is on the site,” said Gurley.
- Record of decision: The agency then presents a cleanup plan and sets a public comment period. “Oftentimes, public comments may slightly change our cleanup decision,” said Gurley, “or may bring up something that maybe we hadn't thought of.” The final record of decision lays out what cleanup alternatives will be used.
- Remedial design: “Our remedial design is our engineering designs for the cleanup,” said Gurley. “We have worked with contractors on that, or sometimes the Army Corps of Engineers, depending on the project.”
- Remedial action: The implementation phase of cleanup after investigation and design are complete. At the St. Regis Paper Co. Superfund Site, the responsible party excavated soil and sludge and buried it in an onsite containment vault. It also implemented a pump-and-treat water facility to clean groundwater pollution.
- Long-term monitoring: Through the cleanup process, the EPA also issues reports every five years. Each five-year review may include taking new site samples, inspecting the site and conducting interviews with residents. The EPA conducts long-term monitoring even after remedial action is complete.
- NPL site deletion: The EPA may delete a site, or a portion of a site, from the NPL if all cleanup goals have been met and the site no longer poses a danger to human health and the environment.
Depending on the type and extent of contamination, the cleanup process can get messy. For example, the St. Regis Paper Co. Superfund Site currently has five geographic operable units. Each unit requires different methods of environmental remediation and is in a different stage of the cleanup process.
“I think you could ask us on any specific day what is the most vexing or prevailing issue,” said Toft of the site, “and every day, every hour, we’d probably give you a different one.”
What happens after cleanup?
The EPA deletes a Superfund site from the NPL after cleanup goals are met. NPL deletion is the last step in the process, but EPA may require five-year reviews to check the long-term effectiveness of the site’s cleanup and to protect public health. Sites can be restored to the NPL if more cleanup needs to be done.
Once a site has been cleaned up and deleted from the NPL, the EPA works with the community to return the area to productive use. A site may be used for commercial or industrial purposes, such as a shopping mall or factory. In some cases, sites can be used for housing, community facilities and parks, or for ecological purposes, such as wetlands or wildlife preserves.
In its lifespan, a Superfund site will go through:
- Investigation
- Planning
- Cleanup
- Restoration
Is it safe to live near a Superfund site?
Exposure risk varies significantly across all sites. According to the EPA, a person isn’t necessarily at risk if they live near a Superfund site. In many cases, people are not being exposed directly to contamination. EPA monitoring keeps tabs on Superfund contamination. If there is an immediate threat, the EPA alerts residents.
Yet, living near a Superfund site may expose people to pollutants that can harm human health. It’s difficult to link specific health problems to a contaminated site, but the EPA has guides with known human health risks for common chemicals found at Superfund sites, including lead, asbestos and dioxin.
These chemicals can endanger a community’s water supply and impact the air quality. And because Native communities are often deeply rooted to the environment, through practices such as subsistence harvesting and fishing, they often face higher exposure risks.
Despite these risks, about 23 million people lived within a mile of a Superfund site in 2023, roughly 7% of the population, according to the EPA. Sites are disproportionately located in communities with high concentrations of people of color and low-income households. Almost 200 Superfund sites are on tribal land or impact Native communities, according to the EPA.
Impacted communities often emphasize the need for data transparency — knowing what’s in the soil or water matters as much as cleanup progress.
When considering exposure risk, remember:
- Safety depends on the cleanup progress. Human exposure status — under control and not under control — at each Superfund site is tracked by the EPA. You can search for your city on the EPA Human Exposure Dashboard.
- EPA, state and tribal agencies will let the public know about any health risks as soon as possible.
- The EPA encourages anyone living near a Superfund site to call and ask questions to prevent exposure.
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
