WV: documentary on bomb-and-bury mining

[kunstler89]

Baltimore City Paper: Local Filmmaker Catherine Pancake Hopes to Bring the Devastation of Mountaintop Removal Mining to a Theater Near YouPancake's sister Ann - also a pro-mountain advocate - echoes what I've been trying to tell non-WVans for the last three years about the dangerous interaction of culture, stereotypes, and corporate colonialism in

Comments

[anonymous]

Great stuff. For those of you who are not familiar with WV history, the comments about the mythology of the hillbilly and the theft of natural resources at the end of the nineteenth century are essential to understanding what is happening in WV, KY and VA today. I highly recommend Altina Waller's great book Feud:Hatfields, McCoys and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860 - 1900. Read that book and you will never let another glib reference to feuding hillbillies pass without setting the speaker straight about what really happened.

Anse Hatfield, demonized by the New York press in the 1890s (This is literally true, the New York Herald Tribune nicknamed him "Devil" Anse.), had 4000 acres on Grapevine Creek in Mingo County, West Virginia stolen from him in the 1890s. That land has produced more high value coal than just about any comparable piece of land in the country. It is still being mined today.

BH

[bestiame]

in this week's city paper: a letter to the editor from jay, my VISTA leader who's from pinch, wv.