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Standing Rock is standing tall. After 525 years, it’s time to actually listen to Native Americans
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Standing Rock is standing tall
After 525 years, its time to actually listen to Native Americans
The center of the fight for our planets future shifts. But this week its on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation straddling the border between North Dakota and South Dakota. There, tribal members have been, well, standing like a rock in the way of the planned Dakota Access Pipeline, a huge hose for collecting oil out of the Bakken shale and carrying it off to the Midwest and the Gulf where it can be made into gasoline. The standoff has been picturesque and dramatic, featuring American Indians on horseback. But mostly its been brave and lonely, far from most journalists and up against the same forces that have made life hard for Indigenous Peoples for centuries.
The U.S. Army, for instance. Its the Army Corps of Engineers that last month granted Energy Transfer Corporation the permit necessary to start construction near the reservation, despite a petition signed by 150,000 people, and carriedon footby young people from the reservation all the way to Washington. That would be the same U.S. Army thatwell, google Wounded Knee. Or Custer. Washita River. Pine Ridge.
Thats not really ancient history, not any of it. Its the reason that Native Americans live confined to bleak reservations in vast stretches of the country that no one thought were good for much of anything else. But those areasironically enoughnow turn out to be essential for the production or transportation of the last great stocks of hydrocarbons, the ones whose combustion scientists tell us will take us over the edge of global warming. And if former generations of the U.S. Army made it possible to grab land from Native people, then this largely civilian era of the Army Corps is making it easy to pollute and spoil what little we left them. As the corporation said over the weekend, it was constructing this pipeline in accordance with applicable laws, and the local, state and federal permits and approvals we have received.
But its not constructing it in accordance with the laws of physics. July was the hottest month ever recorded on our planet, and likely, say scientists, the hottest month since the beginning of human civilization. And in any event, those applicable laws, permits, and approvals are merely the cover for the latest plunder. A spill from this pipeline would pollute the Missouri River, just as spills in recent years have done irreparable damage to the Kalamazoo and Yellowstone rivers. And that river is both the spiritual and economic lifeblood of the Standing Rock Reservation, one of the poorest census tracts in the entire country.
. . . . .
http://grist.org/justice/after-525-years-its-time-to-actually-listen-to-native-americans/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=climate-newsletter&utm_campaign=round-2-image
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Standing Rock is standing tall. After 525 years, it’s time to actually listen to Native Americans (Original Post)
niyad
Aug 2016
OP
GoDawgs
(267 posts)1. It's not just the ACoE, the EPA won't be any help either
The folks of the Navajo Nation can't get any action from the EPA about dealing with tge fallout from the mine pollution incident on the Animas river last year. Also, they are still trying to get something, anything done about the radioactive contamination of their wells from uranium mining of decades past- EPA will only 'listen'.
The Corps of Engineers job is to bulldoze the Dakota pipeline through. Consequences be damned.
niyad
(113,259 posts)2. sadly, it seems you are quite correct.