Last Camp Of DAPL Protesters Closes; New Battles Await Native Americans

Some time later this afternoon, the physical protests against Dakota Access Pipeline will essentially end as the last of the Water Protectors at Oceti Sakowin pack up and leave. The battle will, of course continue in other venues such as the courts. The Standing Rock Sioux had encouraged protesters to leave back in January as they were concerned about their ability to endure the harsh North Dakota winter. They continued to discourage protesters from returning even after the Trump administration and the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) reversed what Obama had decided in December and allowed the pipeline to continue.

In a cruel irony, ACE and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum ordered the last protesters to leave because of health and safety risks. As the snow melts, the protest area could be susceptible to flooding that would contaminate nearby rivers with waste from the camp. In essence, the Water Protectors are being forced to leave in order to protect the waters. It is yet another kind of Catch-22 similar to ones that Native Americans have endured in this country ever since its founding.

The Standing Rock Sioux will continue their battle in the courts. Last week the tribe, in conjunction with the Cheyenne River Sioux, filed a motion to stop the pipeline in a Washington, DC federal court, focusing on the violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty and refusal of the ACE to prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement on the potential effects on the tribal watershed.

The battle also continues in other venues, especially by pressuring those banks that are bankrolling DAPL. CalPERS, the enormous California public employees pension fund, recently put out a statement asking the banks investing in DAPL to have the pipeline rerouted around tribal lands. The statement cited the concern “that if DAPL’s projected route moves forward, the result will almost certainly be an escalation of conflict and unrest as well as possible contamination of the water supply.” Over 120 other major investors joined with CalPERS in that statement, including New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer who represents multiple New York City pension funds. CalPERS itself is under enormous pressure to divest from Energy Transfer Partners, the owner of DAPL, as well as Wells Fargo, a major backer of DAPL and a serial criminal bank.

While the fight against DAPL concerns oil and gas being piped through tribal lands, what is actually under those lands may create an even bigger battle. According to a recent Reuters story, “Native American reservations cover just 2 percent of the United States, but they may contain about a fifth of the nation’s oil and gas, along with vast coal reserves…The Council of Energy Resource Tribes, a tribal energy consortium, estimated in 2009 that Indian energy resources are worth about $1.5 trillion. In 2008, the Bureau of Indian Affairs testified before Congress that reservations contained about 20 percent of untapped oil and gas reserves in the U.S.”

Native American tribes do not “own” the reservation land. They have a right to live there but have no right to sell that land to non-Native Americans. There is no private ownership. The tribes have the right to extract resources such as oil and gas from their land but under much more stringent regulations than covers privately held land. According to one tribal leader, “The time it takes to go from lease to production is three times longer on trust lands than on private land.”

The Trump transition team commissioned a 27-member Native American Affairs Coalition that was largely made up Native American leaders who favored drilling and mining on reservation land. This group floated a proposal that would essentially privatize Native American land. The tribes would own that land and be free to do what they please with it, perhaps with the restriction on selling the land to non-Native Americans still in place. This would make it far easier for tribes to exploit the vast wealth that lies in their land, albeit with the help of private US companies. Several tribes already finance education, health, and other projects on their reservations through drilling and mining leases. This would simply speed up that process and make it easier.

Privatizing is a dangerous word when discussing Native American affairs. It represents a federal grab of tribal land, dispossession, and loss of culture and conjours up images of the Dawes Act in the late 1800s or the “termination” policy of the 1950s which simply removed lands from tribal control. In typical Trumpian fashion, this proposal, if adopted, would be described as eliminating wasteful regulation and allowing Native Americans to more easily exploit the resources on the lands they control. What would be unspoken is that this would also provide an excuse for the government to then reduce its nearly $20 billion in federal support for Native American tribes.

The reality is that the proposal would pit those who wished to exploit the land to further benefit the tribes against those who believe that this kind of privatization will further erode Native American culture and threaten Native American sovereignty. In addition, it could conceivably pit the resource-rich tribes against those less fortunate. In the cruelest way possible, this proposal would create a battle among Native Americans that, in large part, would ending up providing the greatest benefit to non-Native American companies and citizens. In so many ways, it would just represent a sad continuation of the last 240 years.