Descendants of families who lost ancestral Quabbin Valley homes do it too: Peer into a manmade reservoir and wonder what might have been. That’s been a scene reported from the edge of a lake in the Dakotas once home to 190 Standing Rock Sioux families, until a 1950s Missouri River dam project pushed them out.
On one level, this is yet another pipeline fight, something our region knows well. It concerns the $3.7 billion Dakota Access project to move oil across four states to Illinois. In the domestic energy economy of today, this isn’t unusual. But opposition to the Energy Transfer Partners’ project is about more than the claims of environmental damage that are driving lawsuits and rallies.
Over the last few weeks, thousands of members of Native American tribes have arrived in the area of Cannon Ball, North Dakota, from all over the country. A story in the New York Times called this the largest and most diverse tribal action in recent memory; as many as 280 tribes are represented.
It is also fashioning a new environmental movement that, because it concerns lands sacred to the first Americans, contains echoes of this culture’s profound connection to nature.
In news stories, some who oppose the 1,170-mile pipeline say it risks contaminating water as it crosses a dammed portion of the Missouri River — a claim a U.S. District Court judge rejected last week.
Nonetheless, a group of federal agencies last week called on the Texas company to halt work within 20 miles of Lake Oahe in North and South Dakota. The company says it can transport the oil safely, a view the federal judge backed.
For the company, this oil is a commodity to get from Point A to Point B. For those who live along the way, it is perceived as a threat to a way of life still bruised from earlier losses.
It should come as no surprise that Native Americans, in light of decades of lost land and broken treaties, profoundly distrust the federal government. Given the rise of that same sentiment, on this they were truly the first Americans.
The chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, David Archambault II, has been repeating a native saying: “Water is life” — mni wiconi in the Sioux language. “When we start talking about water, we’re talking about the future generations,” he said.
The courts, politicians and bulldozers will decide this. The Standing Rock Sioux and their growing ranks of allies deserve to be heard first.