Some critical background info to better understand the issues at stake with pushing the Protectors off Oketi Sakowin and Red Warrior Camps, from the Washington Post:
Empowered by the Flood Control Act of 1944, the Army Corps erected the Oahe Dam in central South Dakota, forming a reservoir that extends about 250 miles upstream to within a short distance of Bismarck, N.D. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy dedicated the dam, hailing it as a symbol of a free society tapping its natural resources.
But for the Lakota tribes, the dam didn’t exploit natural resources. It buried them.
The project inundated and destroyed the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s “most fertile bottom lands,” home to medicinal plants, wildlife and timber, said Everett J. Iron Eyes Sr., former water and natural resource director for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and now a water consultant. In the process, he said, the Army Corps acquired 56,000 acres of land and destroyed 90 percent of the tribe’s timberland.
The Army Corps simply condemned the land and paid little to no compensation. The Standing Rock Sioux sued and won compensation — $90.5 million in a trust fund from which it can draw only from the interest on the account to spend on social welfare and economic development.
Iron Eyes said that the government also changed the tribe’s water boundaries. Originally, according to the law passed by Congress in 1889, the tribe’s territorial boundary stopped at the low water level mark on the east bank, giving it ownership of the water and river bed. After building the dam, the Army Corps seized strips of land on either side of the river. Those strips are the areas in dispute now, giving the Army Corps a central role in letting Energy Transfer Partners complete the line, or not.
“When they dammed the Missouri River, they did it specifically and purposely so that it would flood the Standing Rock reservation,” said Harry Sachse, a partner at the Washington firm of Sonosky, Chambers, Sachse, Endreson & Perry who has represented other Native American tribes. “So the Standing Rock tribe still feels very abused. The government drowned all of the towns the tribe built along the river.”
Under the Fort Laramie treaties, the Standing Rock Sioux’s northern border was recognized as the Heart River, which winds up to Bismarck, about 25 miles north of the Cannonball River that was declared the northern border by an act of Congress in 1889. The pipeline battles of the past three months have taken place near the Cannonball.
“They violated every treaty ever made with the tribe,” Iron Eyes said.
“It’s important not to lose sight of the greater sovereignty issue,” said Jennifer Baker, a senior associate at the law firm Fredericks Peebles & Morgan who has represented tribes. “That’s what the [Dakota Access pipeline] fight and all the fights against these ticking environmental bombs really boil down to. To overlook that would be to not do justice to such an important cause.”