Here at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, we are bracing for the second unusually powerful storm in less than a month. As Winter Storm Wesley bears down, promising more severe weather for our Oglala Sioux Tribe homeland, the reservation still has a long way to go to recover from flooding caused by Winter Storm Ulmer in mid-March.
That storm damaged more than 75 structures, displaced 1,500 individuals and destroyed critical culverts and roads, causing millions of dollars of damage to our infrastructure.
In the wake of Ulmer, Pine Ridge President Julian Bear Runner joined the South Dakota State Senate in requesting a federal disaster declaration for South Dakota (SR-7), which would trigger quicker action by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Our president is also seeking assistance from South Dakota’s leadership. Just over a week ago, he delivered a letter to Governor Kristi Noem requesting assistance from the South Dakota National Guard on recovery efforts and emergency response to future storms.
Now, Governor Noem too has joined her senate and the Oglala Sioux Tribe in requesting federal aid.
“The first storm created devastating impacts for our tribal nation,” Bear Runner said in a statement yesterday. “It is our great hope that going forward we will be able to work hand in hand, in a timely manner, with state and federal agencies to respond to the long-term challenge of recovery.”
Serving as both an attorney for the Lakota People’s Law Project and in public relations for President Bear Runner, I am intimately aware of our direct tribal communication with FEMA—but the agency has only one tribal liaison for Region VIII, which includes all of South Dakota and five other states. At least five Sioux tribes in the region have suffered damage from Ulmer. The most significant effects have been felt here at Pine Ridge, as well as the Rosebud and Cheyenne River Reservations.
We hope the Kos community will join thousands of others in signing onto our petition to President Donald Trump spelling out the need for a federal disaster declaration similar to the one declared for Nebraska several weeks ago.
The relationship between worsening storm systems and climate change is not lost on the Bear Runner administration. Our young president is holding Washington accountable for negligence in regard to climate policy.
Trump’s insistence on circumventing court decisions designed to reign in oil pipeline development on, or near, Sioux tribal land is particularly egregious given our current suffering. Mr. Trump apparently has no respect for scientific or indigenous perspectives on what is causing these super storms, and he has no respect for the rule of law.
As you may know, on the heels of Ulmer, a Trump executive order attempted to circumvent a Montana court ruling blocking the Keystone XL pipeline, a project which would move 800,000 gallons of tar sands crude oil daily from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico across unceded Sioux treaty lands.
And today, the Washington Post reports that a new pair of executive orders are in the works to speed up KXL and other pipelines and further placate the oil and gas lobby.
Steve Wilson, the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s emergency response manager, said that, since taking his post in September of 2016, he's experienced an increase in extremely unusual weather at Pine Ridge. “Last July, we saw baseball-sized hailstones and 60 to 80 mile-per-hour winds,” Wilson said. “And this current flooding is the worst I’ve seen in my lifetime. Weather patterns are changing.”
I will say that I was heartened to see Carmen Yulín Cruz, mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, mention our situation at Pine Ridge in a recent national news appearance, and I absolutely echo her stated concerns about FEMA’s failure to provide for communities of color in the aftermath of natural disasters under the Trump administration.
Despite $10 million in damage caused to our homeland during the hailstorm last year, no support has been forthcoming from FEMA. Now we face yet another weather catastrophe, and at least for the moment, we are once again largely without help.