For a decade, indigenous activists in Canada and the United States have been in the forefront of opposition to fossil-fuel projects, including coal terminals and pipelines, the most famous of which is the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. President Obama rejected that pipeline last November after a long formal review punctuated by protests that included mass civil disobedience. Many of the indigenous activist groups—permanent ones such as the Canadian-founded Idle No More and ad hoc alike—owe their existence and tactics to strong women leaders.
On the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, the sixth largest in the United States, which straddles the border between North and South Dakota, a 13-year-old girl leader, Anna Lee Rain Yellowhammer, has gotten into the act. She’s started a petition asking Assistant Secretary of the Army Jo-Ann Darcy, who is in charge of the Army Corps of Engineers, to stop another pipeline, the building of which the Army Corps has partial jurisdiction over. Her project is part of a bigger anti-pipeline protest at Standing Rock, known by its Twitter hashtag: #RezpectOurWater. So far, the petition has nearly 91,000 of the 150,000 signatures Anna Lee and about 30 of her young friends hope eventually to get.
In the letter sent along with her petition signature at Change.org, Anna Lee wrote:
I’m 13 years-old and as an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, I’ve lived my whole life by the Missouri River. It runs by my home in Fort Yates North Dakota and my great grandparents original home was along the Missouri River in Cannon Ball. The river is a crucial part of our lives here on the Standing Rock Reservation. [...]
“My friends and I have played in the river since we were little; my great grandparents raised chickens and horses along it. When the pipeline leaks, it will wipe out plants and animals, ruin our drinking water, and poison the center of community life for the Standing Rock Sioux.
The pipeline at issue is the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The $3.7 billion, 1,154-mile, 30-inch-diameter conduit is slated to run from the fracked oilfields of North Dakota’s Bakken Shale formation to existing pipelines in Illinois. DAPL’s maximum capacity is set at 570,000 barrels of oil a day. That’s about half the current daily production in North Dakota. There are tribal pipeline foes not just at Standing Rock, but also among the other six Oceti Sakowin, together known as the Seven Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation. Many non-Indian environmentalists are allies in the fight.
Here is the video Anna Lee and her fellow young activists made to promote their effort:
As noted by Anna Lee and other youth in the video, the key threat the people at Standing Rock fear most is contamination of their drinking water and destruction of sacred ancestral lands not now on the reservation. It was once part of a much larger reservation encompassing all seven Sioux bands. But this was broken up in 1889, a direct violation of the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty which “guaranteed” these would be Sioux lands in perpetuity.
But the potential for tainting their water isn’t the tribe’s only concern.
[…] Kelly Morgan, Tribal historic preservation officer and archaeologist for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, said she wished the Army Corps had consulted more with the tribe. There have been meetings, she said, but she didn't view them as formal, government-to-government consultations—though that is how the Army Corps classifies them.
"As the tribal archaeologist, this whole area has a very rich cultural history," she said. "There are burials out there, cultural sites, and habitation sites" that have spanned multiple generations. During one of the meetings with the Army Corps, Crow Ghost took an officer to see a burial ground that would be impacted by the pipeline, a region that's off the property of the reservation but "is still aboriginal territory of our people."
The route for the pipeline was moved from near Bismarck because powerful people there feared a leak would pollute their drinking water. So the builder—Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners—altered the route. Now, if approved, DAPL will pass within feet of the northern boundary of the reservation and cross the Missouri River twice. The Missouri is now and has for more than a century been one of the main sources of drinking water for the Standing Rock tribe. But as in most matters, American Indians have little political clout.
Among other actions against the pipeline, there has been lobbying, a 200-person protest on horseback, a 500-mile relay run to take a different but related petition to the Army Corps headquarters in Omaha, and the establishment of a spirit camp of tipis near where the pipeline would cross beneath the Missouri.
Anna Lee belongs to one of the four Standing Rock Sioux bands, the Hunkpapa, whose renowned holy man and war leader 140 years ago was Sitting Bull. In the spirit of resistance he epitomized, she started her petition and made the video with her friends. Although 97 percent of the DAPL is to be built on private land for which almost all the easements have been settled, 37 miles of federal land, including the two crossings beneath the bed of the Missouri, are under the Army Corps’ jurisdiction.
Standing Rock Sioux tribal delegates have met with officials in numerous federal agencies, including the Army Corps, to get them to review the environmental effects on the tribe since these were not considered in the Corps’ original environmental impact statement. In addition to several of the Sioux tribes, the Sierra Club, Earth Justice and other environmental groups are also pushing the Army Corps to undertake a more thorough look at threats to water.
Beating the pipeline is a longshot. Unlike the defeated Keystone XL, DAPL won’t cross any international boundaries, so presidential action isn’t involved. And, in fact, the project is already under construction even though it hasn’t yet acquired all the needed permits. But neither Anna Lee nor others are getting ready to surrender:
“When this proposed pipeline breaks, as the vast majority of pipelines do, over half of the drinking water in South Dakota will be affected,” said Joye Braun, a community organizer from the Cheyenne River reservation. “How can rubber-stamping this project be good for the people, agriculture and livestock? It must be stopped.”
And Standing Rock Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault told reporter Chelsey Luger: “The Corps will get sued either way. If they approve of the pipeline, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe will sue them. If they reject it, Energy Transfer Partners will sue them.”