Should we see the conflict over the pipeline as a microcosm of our bigger war around moving away from fossil fuel? At Renewable Now we do. This clash is as much around people's rights and health as it is over what fuels we should use. It is protection of land and resources. It is the old versus the new.
We believe this skirmish will get ever more public and, perhaps, violent. Much is at stake. Let's hope a peaceful resolution brings all people fairness and a reasonable economic future, one build, we hope, more on renewables but allowing natural gas to bridge our immediate needs:
The Dakota Access Pipeline battle is just the tip of the iceberg. Across North America, a reinvigorated Native sovereignty movement is flexing its muscles—and racking up victories.
As a seasoned Beltway lawyer and lobbyist representing Native peoples, Tara Houska is no stranger to public conflicts. A member of the Couchiching First Nation and Ojibwe tribe, Houska represents tribal interests on Capitol Hill on a range of land-use and environmental issues.
But when she saw a Facebook post in mid-July from a Standing Rock Sioux member named LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, Houska knew she had to act fast. An oil conduit known as the Dakota Access Pipeline was threatening traditional Native American burial sites, and if it ruptured, would pollute the Missouri River. Allard was putting out a call for people to take action on the North Dakota banks of the Missouri River.
Houska packed up her stuff, jumped in her car, and drove across the country to join the ranks of the self-described “water protectors” at the Standing Stone Camp, where she would spend the next three months. When she arrived, her tent stood alone in a big field. By the beginning of fall, it was just one of many along a well-ordered thoroughfare of tipis, RVs, and pickup trucks with camper shells. As thousands of people representing more than 200 native nations from across North America converged at the site, a solar-powered kitchen was set up, and an infirmary, too. Supplies streamed in from solidarity caravans.
On Labor Day weekend, the oil infrastructure firm Energy Transfer Partners leapfrogged its operations over a 20-mile section of the planned 1,172-mile pipeline route in an attempt to preempt a legal challenge by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. Houska and other water protectors rushed the bulldozers. The situation turned ugly, as private security personnel working for Energy Transfer Partners set attack dogs against Native American women. Videos of the melee, captured by Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, quickly went viral.
“Imagine: You’re in this field in North Dakota with no cell service, and you’re praying, and there are people with assault rifles and helicopters overhead,” Houska says. “And it’s all against indigenous people praying over the land—praying.”
Since that early-September skirmish, the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline has become the latest flashpoint in the national movement to keep fossil fuels in the ground. The #NoDAPL resistance, in Twitter parlance, has turned into a cause célébre: Mark Ruffalo has visited the encampments, and actress Shailene Woodley was arrested in one of several protests there.
The pipeline fight has also has become an international symbol of the U.S. government’s often-abysmal treatment of Native Americans. President Obama was questioned about it at a forum in, of all places, Laos. An arm of the United Nations is investigating whether the police actions at the site may have violated human rights standards or the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, putting federal officials on the defensive. In early September, the Justice and Interior Departments, along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, declared a halt to pipeline construction under the Missouri River and acknowledged in a sweeping statement that the matter calls for “a serious discussion on whether there should be a nationwide reform with respect to considering tribes’ views on these types of infrastructure projects.” This week, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would need more tribal input before making a final decision on whether to allow the pipeline to proceed.
While the ongoing federal review has stalled the pipeline at the Missouri River, construction is grinding ahead to the east and west of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, sparking other protests. During an October 27 confrontation on private lands owned by ETP, police and armed National Guard officials turned rubber bullets, pepper spray and sound cannons on marchers and their horses, one Native American activist fired shots, and more than 140 people were arrested. On Friday, 39 people were arrested at the construction site as heavy equipment there was vandalized.
In a November 1 interview, President Obama said federal agencies are investigating an alternative route, and wants the situation to be allowed to “play out for several more weeks and determine whether or not this can be resolved in a way that I think is properly attentive to the traditions of First Americans.” With American Indian activists vowing a “last stand” and Energy Transfer Partners’ CEO expressing optimism that a President Trump will greenlight the project (Trump is an investor in the company, according to The Guardian), resolution may take longer than several weeks. Winter is closing in on the northern Great Plains, and the encampments have shrunk somewhat, but the protectors remain at least 1,000 strong..."
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