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| The conflict over the Dakota Access oil pipeline has evoked America’s ugly racial past—and present. Photo: Sara Lafleur-Vetter |
By: Mark Sundeen
Two of our
country's biggest issues, racism and climate change, have collided on a North
Dakota reservation. This week, I loaded up my station wagon with water and
supplies and drove down for a look at a historic demonstration that could shape
the national dialogue going forward.
Last week, the Standing Rock Sioux
Tribe in North Dakota emerged as climate change heroes when, with little
political clout or media spotlight, they halted construction of the $3.7
billion Dakota Access oil pipeline. After tribal chairman David Archambault II
and others were arrested for pushing past barricades to block excavating
machinery, Leonardo DiCaprio tweeted that he was inspired, and Bill McKibben
touted Native Americans as the “the vanguard of the movement.” As the tribe
sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to stop crews from burrowing beneath the
Missouri River immediately upstream from their land, the homely,
unpronounceable hashtag #NoDAPL surged—short for No Dakota Access Pipeline.
Meanwhile, the defiance evoked
America’s ugly racial past—and present. “It feels like 1875 because Natives are
still fighting for our land,” tweeted Native American writer Sherman Alexie.
Archambault could have been describing Ferguson or Baltimore when, in the New
York Times, he decried racial profiling and claimed that “the state has
militarized my reservation.” In a touch of epic derp that would be funny if it
didn’t actually reveal how people of color are assumed to be violent, when the Lakota
invited relatives to pack their peace pipes and gather with them in solidarity,
the (white) county sheriff thought they meant pipe bombs.
By last weekend, several thousand
Native Americans from around the country had arrived at Standing Rock, the 3,500-square-mile
reservation with 8,250 residents. They were joined by a smattering of earthy
white folk and a crew of Black Lives Matters activists from Minneapolis. The
camp was just outside the boundary on land administered by the Army Corps.
State troopers blocked the highway to Bismarck, allowing protesters—or
“protectors,” as they insisted on being called—to leave but not return. In
the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the tribe’s lawyers
argued that the pipeline would pollute their water and desecrate sacred
burial grounds. Judge James E. Boasberg said he would decide in the coming
weeks whether to issue an injunction against the corporation building the
pipeline, Dakota Access, a subsidiary of Phillips 66 and a Texas company
called Energy Transfer.
Sensing
a conflagration of America’s two most volatile issues—racism and climate
change—I wrenched the backseats from of my station wagon, loaded it with a
mattress, five gallons of water, and five days worth of provisions, and drove
up to Standing Rock.
Just
after sunset, I crested a hill above the Cannonball River, and there, in the
flat, grassy bottom, beheld an iconic American sight: two dozen teepees and
scores of tents lit by headlights and campfires, sheathed in a
mist of tire dust and wood smoke, riders galloping bareback on paint
horses. At the central fire ring, I found circles of men pounding drums,
surrounded by women who wailed with them in old Lakota song, singing well past
midnight, fueled by cigarettes, coffee, and cough drops.
I
parked alongside a towering teepee on the riverbank, slept in the car, and in
the morning met my neighbors, a delegation of Pawnee elders who had driven 18
hours from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. The degree to which I didn’t know what I was
getting myself into was made clear when Chief Morgan LittleSun, 58, a warm and
affable welder and teepee builder, told me that his biggest concern coming up
here wasn’t cops—it was the Sioux tribes.
“Pawnee
and Sioux hated each other forever,” he said. Even though the tribes had signed
a peace treaty, LittleSun had seen hostility at powwows, and even fights.
I asked
when the Pawnee and Sioux tribes had made this uneasy peace.
“150
years ago.”
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| Photo: Sara Lafleur-Vetter |
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