A couple of weeks ago, I started a petition to Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) asking her to side with the Standing Rock Sioux against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The petition did pretty well, thanks to Navajo and others. And the National Journal took notice of Senator Heitkamp’s conflicts, as between a fossil fueled, pro-Keystone XL Democrat, and a Democrat who stands up for Indians who helped elect her: The Latest Pipeline Fight is Coming to DC (subscription may be required).
At the end of the week, the Climate Hawks Vote super PAC will deliver a MoveOn.org petition to Heitkamp’s office calling on her to oppose the pipeline. As of Monday, the petition had more than 10,400 signatures.
“Senator Heitkamp has over the length of her career said she supports native communities and has made it a huge part of her platform to support native women and native communities,” said Dallas Goldtooth, who works on fossil-fuel issues for the Indigenous Environmental Network. “That’s in direct contrast to support for fossil fuel. We’d ask her to join these communities in the fight against fossil-fuel extraction, refining, and development.”
By the time I was ready to deliver the petition on Thursday, I had over 26,000 signatures. So I printed out the names of the hundreds of North Dakota residents who signed my petition and stand with Standing Rock — along with their comments about the pipeline, some angry, some pleading, some ALL CAPS SPITTING RAGE. (The signatures from other states/nations are delivered by MoveOn electronically.) I walked it into Senator Heitkamp’s Washington, DC office, where I spoke with Bryce about the concerns of the climate community. He promised to let me know if she put out a statement on it.
Simply put, the Senator is in a box, caught between two constituencies. The natural inclination of a politician in a box is to hide in the corner and issue vague press statements on the need for finality. I’m hoping to hear that Good Senator Heidi Heitkamp, who sits on the Indian Affairs Committee and has been an outspoken advocate for tribes who delivered the votes enabling her 2012 victory, will stand with Standing Rock; I’m fearing that Bad Senator Heidi Heitkamp, known around the Senate as “the coal lady” for her work selling fossil fuels to skeptical Democrats, will stand with the Dakota Access Pipeline as she stood with the Keystone XL pipeline.
