FORT BELKNAP AGENCY - You don't have to look far on Montana's Fort Belknap Indian Reservation for reaction to the cyanide mining initiative on the Nov. 2 ballot.

The "No on I-147" signs are front and center in the tribal council chambers, prominent at Fort Belknap College and part of the scene at the Lodge Pole senior center 30 miles away, in the reservation's interior.

Initiative 147, repealing a voter-approved ban on the use of cyanide in gold and silver mining, has a high profile at the Fort Belknap reservation because of the Zortman-Landusky gold mine complex on its southern border. Acid-mine drainage from the abandoned cyanide operation is the top environmental issue for the reservation's Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes.

For some of Montana's voters, I-147 is a referendum on the mining industry itself.

Supporters say passage would encourage new mining, with its high-paying jobs, and the cyanide process can be used without environmental damage. Opponents resent corporate efforts to undo what voters approved in 1998, and say cyanide contaminates water, harms neighboring property and leaves taxpayers on the hook for cleanup.

"If that (I-147) goes through, the first thing they're going to do is start mining up here again," said Ken Lewis, an Assiniboine on the Fort Belknap Tribal Council. "The jobs aren't worth the damage it's going to do."

Montana is the only state with a ban on cyanide heap-leach mining, said Warren McCulloch, an administrator in the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.

I-147 advocates say extracting gold by rinsing piles of rock with cyanide is necessary to process low-grade ore economically. Passing the measure would tell the North American mining industry it is welcome in Montana, they say.

"Oro y plata" - gold and silver - are prominent on the state seal, but mining's glory days were decades ago. State labor statistics show mining today accounts for only about 3 percent of the state's economy, even with coal factored in.

"If I-147 were defeated, it officially sends the message … 'stay out of Montana,' whether cyanide would be used or not," said Tim Smith, manager of the Helena area's Montana Tunnels mine owned by Apollo Gold Corp., of Denver.

Another Colorado company, Canyon Resources Corp., is bankrolling the campaign to pass the initiative, which made it on the ballot after supporters gathered enough signatures.

Canyon Resources wanted to develop a cyanide gold mine near western Montana's Blackfoot River, fabled in Norman McLean's "A River Runs Through It." But the company's plans came to a halt when voters passed the cyanide ban six years ago, 52 percent to 48 percent. Still aiming to develop the mine, the company projects 14 years of metal production and employment spanning at least 20 years.

"Would it be a mine?" asked Richard DeVoto, Canyon Resources' chief executive and a former geology professor at the Colorado School of Mines. "Yes, it would be a mine, and those who are opposed to mining would be opposed to it. Cyanide is truly not the issue."

The initiative is the latest in a series of industry efforts to undo the cyanide ban, efforts that included a lawsuit in federal court. The Montana Environmental Information Center also asked the Montana Supreme Court last summer to order I-147 off the ballot.

State officials say that at Zortman-Landusky, often held up as a model of mining gone wrong, the biggest environmental problem is metals-laced water that must be captured and treated to avoid polluting streams.

"There is very little cyanide remaining in the water at Zortman-Landusky," said Wayne Jepson, a DEQ hydrologist who sees no end to the need for water treatment. How to pay for it is uncertain.

For people at Fort Belknap, there's no escaping the fact that the cyanide process was instrumental as Pegasus Gold Corp. calculated the economics of mining at Zortman-Landusky, then decided to proceed. The company mined in the 1980s and '90s, filed for bankruptcy in 1998 and forfeited a reclamation bond of $30 million, well below what cleanup and water treatment actually costs.

"There will be poison water coming off that mine site in perpetuity," said Jim Jensen, director of the Montana Environmental Information Center. "It has to be treated and someone has to pay for that water treatment. It isn't the company that created the problem - they've gone bankrupt and gone away, and their bond was insufficient. So it will be the taxpayer who will continue to pay."

The mining industry touts cyanide as safer than other solutions for extracting gold and silver from ore, and says the concentration for mining is only 2.5 times stronger than cyanide in almonds.

The Zortman-Landusky mines inarguably were a "heap-leach screwup," said Smith, on the steering committee for the pro-initiative Miners, Merchants and Montanans for Jobs and Economic Opportunity. But he added miners use cyanide safely in this country and others. He contends that pointing to Zortman-Landusky as an example of trouble to come is unreasonable.

"If there were no regulations in place, yeah, it would be very high risk," Smith said. "But what is being proposed with I-147 are a number of safeguards that would virtually eliminate the possibility of an extraordinary event."

DEQ says that while the initiative spells out some measures offered as safeguards and would put them into law, they are practiced already.

At Fort Belknap, tribal officials dismiss claims of safety nets. They also find little concern beyond the reservation for issues such as environmental damage disrupting Indian spiritual practices tied to the land.

Cooling summer splashes in Little Peoples Creek near the gateway to Mission Canyon have been a customary part of a Fort Belknap childhood. Today, though, some adults worried that mine drainage taints the water hold kids back, said Dean Stiffarm, tribal liaison on the Zortman-Landusky issue.

"We don't even know if our berries are safe enough to eat," said Catherine Halver, 75, a longtime tribal voice on environmental issues.

A 1998 study by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found "nothing flowing from the mine sites that would warrant people not engaging in those activities," said Scott Haight, who works on Zortman-Landusky issues for the Bureau of Land Management in Lewistown.

Voters should defeat I-147 because "these people cannot come into Montana, rape this state and leave," Halver said at the Lodge Pole senior center. "Pure and simple. This is our home."

Initiative 137, the cyanide ban that I-147 would reverse, passed after industry found itself quieted by a 1996 law prohibiting corporate spending to support or oppose ballot measures. A federal judge overturned that law less than two weeks before the 1998 election.

"The mining industry had its hands tied while environmental groups were playing on emotions about poisoning fish and people," Smith said. "This time, we're coming out like gangbusters."