[su_label type=”info”]Staff Editorial[/su_label]
The latest chapter in the shameful history of U.S.-Native relations is being written before our collective eyes. For by the time this issue hits the streets, construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) project will likely have already resumed.
The $3.8 billion project is being built near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, across the Sioux tribe’s ancestral homeland, land that includes numerous burial grounds and other sacred sites, land that was “given” to the Sioux by the U.S. Government in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, and then later taken back.
The pipeline project is an injustice. A product of wealthy foreign investors, it would destroy sacred burial land of Indigenous people to transport “fracked” oil (oil extracted from the earth in a particularly environmentally harmful way) 1,100 miles from the Bakken shale fields of North Dakota to Illinois, to line the pockets of a few.
In an early plan for DAPL, the pipeline’s path crossed the Missouri River 10 miles north of Bismarck. But the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers rejected that plan due to concerns of how it might affect the municipal water supply of Bismarck.
Then, in a move that would probably be more shocking if it weren’t so utterly typical of the U.S. Government’s treatment of Indigenous people, the route was changed to cross near Lake Oahe—Standing Rock’s primary source of water.
The Corp was able to circumvent numerous regulations required by the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act by using a “Nationwide Permit 12” process, which treats the pipeline as a series of small construction sites (most of which are on private land).
The Standing Rock tribe filed an unsuccessful injunction that the Army Corp of Engineers were in violation of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) of 1966. Under the NHPA, all federal agencies must “take into account the effects of their undertakings on historic properties,” and to “involve the public, and identify other potential consulting parties” in the process.
Opposition to this project, which was announced in 2014, gained momentum over the course of 2016, culminating over the past two months in the largest showing of Indigenous resistance in more than a century.
Unlike the reaction to the white militia members in Oregon who captured a public wildlife refuge earlier this year for their own gain, the reaction to this peaceful resistance was blunt force. Private security contractors attacked demonstrators with impunity, even using dogs—video of which went viral. State law enforcement then got involved deploying a militarized police force in full riot gear to overwhelm the demonstrators. Nearly $6 million has been spent so far to counter this demonstration, with the state of North Dakota seeking an additional $4 million. That’s public money being used to forcibly remove Indigenous people from their ancestral homeland for private profit.
This is unconscionable. Legally it’s in violation of the NHPA and morally it is a violation of the dignity of the Sioux Nation. We call upon the U.S. Justice Department to stop DAPL and return to the Sioux their ancestral homeland.