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NY Times, Sept. 9 2016
I Want to Win Someday’: Tribes Make Stand Against Pipeline
By JACK HEALY
NEAR CANNON BALL, N.D. — Verna Bailey stared into the silvery ripples of
a man-made lake, looking for the spot where she had been born. “Out
there,” she said, pointing to the water. “I lived down there with my
grandmother and grandfather. We had a community there. Now it’s all gone.”
Fifty years ago, hers was one of hundreds of Native American families
whose homes and land were inundated by rising waters after the Army
Corps of Engineers built the Oahe Dam along the Missouri River, part of
a huge midcentury public-works project approved by Congress to provide
electricity and tame the river’s floods.
To Ms. Bailey, 76, and thousands of other tribal members who lived along
the river’s length, the project was a cultural catastrophe, residents
and historians say. It displaced families, uprooted cemeteries and
swamped lands where tribes grazed cattle, drove wagons and gathered wild
grapes and medicinal tea.
That past has now become a poignant backdrop to protests over a $3.7
billion oil pipeline project that would cross a rancher’s land just
north of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation and plunge under a
dammed section of the Missouri River. The company building the Dakota
Access pipeline across four states and 1,170 miles says it will
transport oil safely and reliably. Opponents say a spill or break could
poison the river.
The protests have drawn thousands here to the Plains, stirring a new
environmental movement for dozens of Native American tribes across the
country who are supporting the Standing Rock Sioux’s efforts here to
block the pipeline. The fight is nearing a pivotal moment as a federal
judge in Washington prepares to rule by Friday on whether to allow or
block construction of a section of the pipeline near the tribe’s land.
History, like a river, runs deep here. And residents like Ms. Bailey say
the pipeline battle has dredged up old memories and feelings about lost
lands and broken treaties with the United States government, as well as
their worries about the future of land and water they hold sacred.
“The trauma we deal with today is a residual effect of 1958, when the
floods came,” said David Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock
Sioux Tribe.
The federal government has paid millions in compensation over the years
to tribes affected by the dam project, including more than $90 million
held for the Standing Rock Sioux. But people here say they are still
haunted by the memories of being told to leave their homes and seeing
families drift apart. The tribe has spent more than 20 years trying to
gain control of 19,000 acres of waterfront land that was taken through
eminent domain during dam construction.
“Even though it’s been more than half a century, they still feel this
loss,” said Michael L. Lawson, the author of “Dammed Indians,” a history
of the government’s dam projects along the Missouri. He said about
56,000 acres of Standing Rock Sioux land had been condemned for the dams
and 190 families relocated. Theirs was one of 23 reservations affected
by the project.
“Just about every part of their economy and living situation was
impacted,” Mr. Lawson said. “They lost their most important resources in
the bottom lands.”
For years, the legacy of the dam was perhaps the headline struggle for
the Standing Rock Sioux. Now the pipeline has brought widespread
attention, intense news media coverage and thousands of environmental
pilgrims to this serene stretch of North Dakota.
The Standing Rock Sioux have sued the Army Corps of Engineers, which
approved an important permit for the pipeline, saying that building the
pipeline would destroy sacred cultural and burial sites and raising
concerns that a leak or spill would poison their water supply. The tribe
has asked for a preliminary injunction.
The Corps says it reached out extensively to tribes before it gave
approval for the Dakota Access pipeline to cross bodies of water,
including the Missouri. The Standing Rock Sioux, it says, canceled a
meeting to visit the pipeline’s proposed crossing across Lake Oahe. The
tribe says it was not properly consulted.
In legal filings, the Corps said the Standing Rock Sioux also could not
point to specific sites that would be harmed by the pipeline. A tribal
history expert later walked the route of the pipeline, and said he had
found stone cairns and rocks arrayed in circles, spirals and other
patterns that he said probably marked burial sites.
As the judge’s decision nears, tensions and fears of violence are rising.
Last weekend, protesters upset that pipeline work crews were bulldozing
what the tribe calls sacred ceremonial sites broke down a wire fence and
surged onto a construction site. The sheriff’s office here in Morton
County called it a “riot,” and said protesters had kicked workers, hit
them with sticks and sent one to the hospital. Tribal officials say that
the demonstrators were provoked, and that six were bitten by guard dogs
brought in by the pipeline company’s security guards.
On Thursday, Gov. Jack Dalrymple announced that he was sending about a
dozen National Guard troops to help state troopers at a traffic
checkpoint about 30 miles up the road from the protest, and that he was
putting others on standby. Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier of Morton County said
his officers would increase their patrols and their visibility around
the demonstration itself.
“The worst fear is that this gets escalated in some way and someone gets
hurt,” Sheriff Kirchmeier said in an interview this week. “At some
point, there has to be an end game. This can’t be going on for long
periods of time.”
A total of 37 people have been arrested on trespassing and other
charges, but no one has been charged in connection with the clashes on
Saturday. Sheriff Kirchmeier said his office was still investigating.
The protests have attracted activists, actors and politicians. This
week, Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential nominee, camped out
with protesters and was seen on videos spray-painting a bulldozer that
sat at a pipeline construction site. On Wednesday, Morton County
officials said they had filed misdemeanor charges of criminal mischief
and trespassing against Ms. Stein and her vice-presidential running
mate, Ajamu Baraka.
The Texas company behind the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, said
that it was operating entirely within the law and its agreements with
landowners, and that it had all the necessary state and federal permits
to build the pipeline. The company sued the chairman of the Standing
Rock Sioux and other tribal members, accusing them of illegally
disrupting the pipeline’s construction.
Theresa Pleets, 81, said she had a deep personal stake in coming out to
the protest camp, a field speckled with teepees, campers, tents and fire
rings. She grew up in a two-room log house along the Missouri River,
where her parents would fill barrels with drinking water. After the
river was dammed, she said, her parents were relocated to a small,
government-built house.
“I want to beat the Corps,” she said. “I want to win someday.”
The house where Ms. Bailey was born had just one room, she said. She
arrived during a January blizzard in 1940, and her grandfather, Albert
No Heart Sr., took a horse-drawn sleigh eight miles south to the town of
Fort Yates to fetch a midwife, she said. She went away to boarding
school, and worked for decades in tribal administrative offices. Now,
she said, she tells stories of gathering firewood and wild berries in
land that is covered by water.
“My kids don’t believe it,” she said, “when I tell them how things were.”
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