Winona LaDuke / Yes Magazine & Michael McLean / Jacobin Magazine – 2016-09-01 12:40:50
http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/an-oil-pipeline-and-a-river-what-would-sitting-bull-do-20160829
An Oil Pipeline and a River: What Would Sitting Bull Do?
Winona LaDuke / Yes Magazine
I am not sure how badly North Dakota wants this pipeline. If there is to be a battle over the Dakota Access, I would not bet against a people with nothing else left but a land and a river.
(August 29, 2016) — It’s 2016, and the weight of American corporate interests has come to the Missouri River, the Mother River. This time, instead of the Seventh Cavalry, or the Indian police dispatched to assassinate Sitting Bull, it is Enbridge and Dakota Access Pipeline.
In mid-August, Standing Rock Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II was arrested by state police, along with 27 others, for opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. In the meantime, North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple called for more police support.
Every major pipeline project in North America must cross Indigenous lands, Indian Country. That is a problem.
The road west of Fargo is rarely taken. In fact, most Americans just fly over North Dakota, never seeing it.
Let me take you there.
My head clears as I drive. My destination is the homeland of the Hunkpapa Oceti, Standing Rock Reservation. It is early evening, the moon full. If you close your eyes, you can remember the 50 million buffalo — the single largest migratory herd in the world. The pounding of their hooves would vibrate the Earth, make the grass grow.
There were once 250 species of grass. Today the buffalo are gone, replaced by 28 million cattle, which require grain, water, and hay. Many of the fields are now in a single GMO crop, full of so many pesticides that the monarch butterflies are dying off. But in my memory, the old world remains.
If you drive long enough, you come to the Missouri River.
Called Mnisose, a great swirling river, by the Lakota, she is a force to be reckoned with. She is breathtaking. “The Missouri River has a fixed place in the history and mythology” of the Lakota and other Indigenous nations of the Northern Plains, author Dakota Goodhouse would explain.
In the time before Sitting Bull, the Missouri River was the epicenter of northern agriculture, the river bed so fertile. The territory was known as the fertile crescent of North America. That was then, before the treaties that reduced the Lakota land base. But the Missouri remained in the treaty — the last treaty of 1868 used the Missouri as a boundary.
Then came the theft of land by the U.S. government, and the taking of the Black Hills in 1877, in part as retaliation against Sitting Bull’s victory at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. In a time prior to Black Lives Matter or Native Lives Matter, great leaders like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were assassinated at the hands of police.
One truth: the Lakota people have survived much.
Forced into the reservation life, the Lakota attempted to stabilize their society, until the dams came. The 1944 Pick Sloan project flooded out the Missouri River tribes, taking the best bottom lands from the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, the Lakota and Dakota.
Over 200,000 acres on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations in South Dakota were flooded by the Oahe Dam itself, forcing not only relocation, but a loss of the Lakota world. The Garrison, Oahe, and Fort Randall dams created a reservoir that eliminated 90 percent of timber and 75 percent of wildlife on the reservations.
That is how a people are made poor.
Today, well over two thirds of the population of Standing Rock is below the poverty level — and the land and Mother River are what remains, a constant, for the people. That is what is threatened today.
Enbridge and partners are preparing to drill through the riverbed. The pipeline has been permitted in sections from the west and from the east. The northern portion was moved away from the water supply of Bismarck, into the watershed of Standing Rock. That was unfortunate for the Lakota.
Despite Lakota legal and regulatory objections, the Dakota Access Pipeline construction began in May 2016. If finished it will snake through North and South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois, where it will link to a 774-mile pipeline to Nederland, Texas.
More than 570,000 barrels of Bakken crude oil will pass through the pipeline daily, along with 245,100 metric tons of carbon daily — enough carbon to combust the planet to oblivion.
The pipeline would span 200 water crossings, and in North Dakota alone would pass through 33 historical and archeological sites. Enbridge just bought the Dakota Access pipeline, noting that the proposed Sandpiper route — Minnesota’s 640,000 barrel per day Bakken line — is now three years behind schedule.
In late July, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe represented by Earthjustice, filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Standing Rock claims the project violates federal and treaty law. Standing Rock also filed an intervention at the United Nations, in coordination with the International Indian Treaty Council.
As Chairman Archambault explained in a New York Times story:
“The Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the National Advisory Council on Historic Preservation supported more protection of the tribe’s cultural heritage, but the Corps of Engineers and Energy Transfer Partners turned a blind eye to our rights. The first draft of the company’s assessment of the planned route through our treaty and ancestral lands did not even mention our tribe.
“The Dakota Access pipeline was fast-tracked from Day 1 using the Nationwide Permit No. 12 process, which grants exemption from environmental reviews required by the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act by treating the pipeline as a series of small construction sites.
“Without closer scrutiny, the proposal breezed through the four state processes.”
In Iowa where work on the pipeline is underway, three fires erupted causing heavy damage to equipment and an estimated $1 million in damages. Investigators suspect arson, according to Jasper County Sheriff John Halferty. In October 2015, three Iowa farmers sued Dakota Access LLC and the Iowa Utilities Board in an attempt to prevent the use of eminent domain on their properties to construct the pipeline.
The health of the Missouri River has been taken for granted.
Dammed in the Pick Sloan Dam projects, each project increases contamination and reduces her health. Today, the Missouri is the seventh most polluted river in the country. Agricultural run-off and now fracking have contaminated the river. My sister fished a gar out of the river, a giant prehistoric fish, only to find it covered with tumors.
Here’s just one case: In a January 2015 spill, saltwater contamination from a massive pipeline spill reached the Missouri River. In the baffling way of state and federal agencies, North Dakota’s Health Director David Glatt did not expect harm to wildlife or drinking water supplies because the water was diluted. The saying is: “The solution to pollution is dilution.” That is convenient, but not true.
Blacktail Creek and the Little Muddy River were contaminated after nearly 3 million gallons of saltwater with elevated levels of chloride contamination. All was diluted. But then there was that gar fish with the tumors.
There are pipelines everywhere, and fewer than 150 Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) pipeline inspectors in the whole country.
And now comes the risk from oil.
The pipeline companies generally discuss a 99 percent safety record, but studies have found that to be grossly inaccurate. A former Scientific American Editor, Trudy Bell, reports that PHMSA data from 2001 to 2011 suggest the average pipeline “has a 57% probability of experiencing a major leak, with consequences over the $l million range in a ten year period.”
Not good odds.
At Standing Rock, as the number of protesters grew from 200 to 2000, state law enforcement decided to put up a safety checkpoint and rerouted traffic on Highway 1806 from Bismarck to Standing Rock, hoping to dissuade people from coming and put the squeeze on Standing Rock’s Prairie Knights Casino, which is served by that road.
We just drove around; the scenic route is beautiful. And as supporters surge in numbers, the casino hotel and restaurants are full.
While North Dakota seeks to punish the Lakota, Chairman Archambault expresses concerns for everyone. From the New York Times:
“I am here to advise anyone that will listen that the Dakota Access Pipeline project is harmful. It will not be just harmful to my people but its intent and construction will harm the water in the Missouri River, which is one of the cleanest and safest river tributaries left in the Unit States. To poison the water is to poison the substance of life. Everything that moves must have water. How can we talk about and knowingly poison water?”
In the meantime, North Dakota Gov. Dalrymple announced a state of emergency, making additional state resources available “to manage public safety risks associated with the ongoing protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline.” He may have exceeded his scope of authority and violated civil and human rights to water.
Chairman Archambault’s interpretation:
“Perhaps only in North Dakota, where oil tycoons wine and dine elected officials, and where the governor, Jack Dalrymple, serves as an adviser to the Trump campaign, would state and county governments act as the armed enforcement for corporate interests.”
There are a lot of people at Standing Rock today who remember their history and the long standoff at Wounded Knee in 1973. In fact, some of those in Standing Rock today were there in 1973 at Wounded Knee, a similar battle for dignity and the future of a nation.
I am not sure how badly North Dakota wants this pipeline. If there is to be a battle over the pipeline, it will be here. For a people with nothing else but a land and a river, I would not bet against them.
The great Lakota leader Mathew King once said, “the only thing sadder than an Indian who is not free, is an Indian who does not remember what it is to be free.”
The Standing Rock protest camp represents that struggle for freedom, and the future of a people. All of us. If I ask the question “What would Sitting Bull do?” — the answer is pretty clear. He would remind me what he said 150 years ago: “Let us put our minds together to see what kind of future we can make for our children.”
The time for that is now.
This article was originally published by LA Progressive.
A Tale of Two Standoffs
Michael McLean / Jacobin Magazine
(August 2016) — In a cold January afternoon in eastern Oregon, Ammon Bundy smiled from beneath his brown cowboy hat at a young, bespectacled reporter before explaining why he and his men had seized a federal building while armed with rifles.
“The people need to be in control of their own land and not . . . have a people . . . three thousand miles away dictating how their own land works,” Bundy said. He was of course referring to the federal government, which controls and manages up to 80 percent of the land and natural resources in some Western states.
Bundy’s occupation stands in stark contrast to the one unfolding in North Dakota at this very moment.
There, hundreds of Lakota activists and their allies have blocked the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which, if built, would cross the Missouri River just miles above the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The pipeline jeopardizes not only the residents’ drinking water, but the water upon which millions of Midwesterners rely. Organizers insist that new protesters enter the site unarmed.
These two occupations participate in long-standing traditions of citizen engagement with and resistance to the American government. Bundy claimed that he was standing up for farmers and ranchers who were tired of federal intervention.
But the region’s history tells a different story: white settlers have almost always welcomed the state, relying on it to clear the land of the Indigenous peoples who lived there.
The Second Sagebrush Rebellion
Bundy’s occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge consciously imitated other protests that have unfolded over the past forty years. During the Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and 1980s, many ranchers demanded greater local control over land resources. And just two years before the Oregon standoff, his father, Cliven, faced down federal agents during a dispute in Nevada.
But what happened in Oregon revealed that the Bundy family’s objection to government intervention isn’t shared by other Westerners, nor does it reflect the region’s history.
Ammon Bundy displayed confidence in his men and certainty in his righteousness. But others weren’t convinced. For all his talk of honoring the people’s rights, the community he invaded didn’t want him or his fellow occupiers. And for all his talk of tyranny and noble rebellion, federal agents kept their distance.
Bundy himself expressed surprise at how easy it had been to take the compound in the first place: “The doors were open.” Apparently, the federal government did not think it necessary to fortify a bird sanctuary. And for all his talk of a popular uprising, no reinforcements arrived. When his men issued a public call for supplies, people started mailing them boxes of sex toys.
The rebels’ cause was rooted in historical fiction. Bundy’s argument that “the federal government did not have the right to be here” could not be more historically inaccurate or ironic. Historians of the American West have long established that the government created the region as we know it. No other place in the United States had so much active federal involvement.
As Howard Lamar notes in Dakota Territory, 1861-1889: A Study of Frontier Politics, Washington exerted tremendous control over the Western territories before they achieved statehood. In a land of brutal winters, grasshopper plagues, and deadly Indian wars, settlement would have collapsed without subsidies, land grants, infrastructure, and military aid.
As a result, many Westerners insisted on more government intervention, not less, when times were tough.
This pattern continued even after statehood. The Populist Movement of the 1890s called for active federal engagement that would break the railroad companies’ financial grip, invest in education, modernize the post office, and support small farmers. Although the Western Populists failed to achieve national success, they had a profound impact on the Progressive Era, when the government intensified its efforts to improve standards of living across the board.
Further, the West’s volatile ecology — which produced two great boom and bust cycles — necessitated government activism.
The first cycle came in the 1880s, when the cattle industry expanded so quickly that massive herds severely depleted the grasslands. Already stressed from a lack of resources, cattle died in droves during the brutal winter of 1886–87. Some companies lost up to 85 percent of their livestock.
The vacuum they left opened the door for farmers, who transformed vast tracts of land into wheat fields. But they too pushed the land to its breaking point. In tearing up the natural grasses and replacing them with crops — up to 90 percent, in some places — the farmers freed the topsoil and helped create the Dust Bowl, the seemingly apocalyptic event that arrived with the Great Depression.
The issue that motivated January’s Oregon occupation — federal control of land — grew out of this tumultuous environmental history. Clearly, the government had to do more than build infrastructure and provide services; it also had to proactively prevent environmental disasters from repeating themselves.
The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, which ended homesteading and formalized federal control of unsettled Western lands, expanded the government’s role in stabilizing land use. Ranchers were allowed to graze and water their stock after purchasing the necessary permits. Some ranchers, like the Bundy family, refused to comply.
It must have been difficult for ranchers to look out at seemingly untouched land and hold back. The West has always appeared in the American imagination as a wide-open space where you can strike gold if you’re up for the risk.
And so Cliven Bundy ignored the permit rules and allowed his cattle to graze on federal land, while his neighbors paid their dues. He racked up more than one million dollars in fees and fines, and when the federal government pressed the case, he and his supporters stood up to the Bureau of Land Management.
Two years later, when Oregon ranchers Dwight and Steven Hammond were convicted of arson following their own run-ins with government agents, Cliven’s son responded. Ammon Bundy rounded up his comrades, picked up his gun, and drove to Oregon.
American Expropriation
The Lakota occupation of the pipeline route is part of a longer and more violent history.
In the eighteenth century, the Lakota people transformed themselves into one of the continent’s great powers. When they adopted Spanish horses and focused their energy on the great bison herds, they also developed formidable military skills. Lakota hunters became feared warriors.
Their smaller group sizes and mobility also meant that they avoided the worst outbreaks of disease, which decimated their native rivals and allowed them to expand. By the American Civil War, the Lakota had secured a vast tract of land, including the best hunting grounds. They defended their hard-won empire with their lives.
Between 1866 and 1868, the United States military suffered a series of humiliating defeats as they tried to defend railroad workers and settlers from Lakota warriors. Red Cloud, a leader of the Oglala Lakota, forced the military off the tribe’s land and burned their forts as they left. The conflict ended with the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which promised the Lakota undisturbed control over nearly half of present-day South Dakota.
When the United States Army illegally invaded the Black Hills — both a spiritual center and a crucial source of food for the Lakota — in search of gold, another war erupted, with yet another stunning defeat for the American military. Americans call that 1876 defeat the Battle of Little Bighorn; the Lakota call it Greasy Grass, or, simply, Victory Day.
But the Lakota could not sustain their victories, not just against the United States military, but also against industrial hunters, who nearly exterminated the bison herds that once numbered at an estimated thirty million. Forced to give up the hunt and accept the corrupt reservation system, many Lakota nearly starved.
A Lakota Winter Count from that time depicts a man so hungry that he traded his horse for a bag of flour. In a cruel irony, one of the few ways that Lakota people could make money was by collecting the thousands of remaining bison skulls on the plains and selling them to fertilizer companies.
The Ghost Dance — a religious movement that predicted the removal of white intruders and the return of the bison herds — emerged from this desperation. Government officials with no experience and little interest in learning about these so-called savages believed that the movement presaged another war. They called in the Army, which sent a full one third of its fighting men to disarm the Lakota.
The 1890 massacre known as Wounded Knee had a predictable but no less devastating result. The Army killed upwards of 230 Lakota people, including women and children. One woman ran three miles before a cavalryman shot her in the back.
From Wounded Knee onwards, the Lakota, and indeed Native Americans throughout the nation, have engaged in an endless struggle to protect their land, resources, and people. They fought the federal government’s efforts to dismantle reservations, during which the government sold off supposedly surplus Indian land to white settlers for pennies on the dollar. This practice continued until 1934.
They have also had to fight to prevent their land from becoming a dumping ground for America’s refuse. Most notably, the Navajo have suffered the terrible effects of nuclear waste.
These issues came to a head in the 1970s, when the American Indian Movement, drawing on the language of Black Power and a heritage of resistance, occupied Wounded Knee and Alcatraz and brought national attention to the reservations’ plight.
The Dakota Access protesters have rooted themselves in this history, in the dual legacies of strength and subjugation. They see the pipeline as neither an aberration nor a singular event, but as a continuation of a brutal colonial history.
Peaceful Resistance
Their protest began in January, when North Dakota approved the Dakota Access Pipeline. Residents of the Standing Rock Reservation immediately petitioned the US Army Corps of Engineers to deny the pipeline’s final permit, citing both broken treaty promises and the potential risks to their water supply.
Close to two hundred thousand people signed the petition, including celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Jason Momoa, and Shailene Woodley, who joined the occupation last week. Officials at the Department of the Interior, Environmental Protection Agency, and Advisory Council on Historic Preservation also voiced their concerns.
In April, Lakota activists established a camp near the construction site to monitor pipeline workers, who began preparations before receiving formal approval.
Despite the protesters’ quick action, the pipeline moved forward. In July, while a group of Lakota youth were running from Standing Rock to Washington, DC to deliver the petition, the Army Corps of Engineers approved the permit.
In mid-August, when the construction process began in earnest, activists blocked the route. At first, a sizable police and security presence allowed construction to proceed. The activists on the frontlines requested support, and in contrast to the Bundy occupation, their allies answered the call.
What started as a small camp of a few dozen protesters has expanded to hold hundreds. Counting the surrounding area and satellite camps, that number could reach the thousands.
On Tuesday, Morton County sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier ordered pipeline workers to stop, citing concerns for everyone’s safety. But the following day, a federal court instituted a restraining order that will force the activists to clear the pipeline’s path. While protests will most likely continue, they will now take place off-site.
Western Fiction
In the resource wars of the American West, the government has rarely taken Native Americans’ side. Yet myths can be stronger than reality. The people who most benefited from state intervention now claim that the West was won by rugged individualists freed from governmental control.
Many of them deny that Native Americans faced violence and displacement, but were rather the ungrateful recipients of civilization. The Lakota, for their part, cannot afford this kind of historical amnesia.
The occupation in Oregon crumbled after just forty days when law enforcement agents shot and killed a man who pulled a gun on them. The remaining protesters surrendered to authorities, sacrificing their freedom in a struggle against imagined tyranny.
The Lakota, on other hand, are resisting a real and all too familiar danger. Their numbers grow every day. And, unlike the standoff in Oregon, almost no major national news outlets are covering the story. This too participates in a great American tradition: the true fight against oppression is the one nobody notices.
Michael McLean is a PhD student in history at Boston College.
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