Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context
11/2/2016 Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context
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11/2/2016 Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context
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Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context
Little has been written about the historical relationship between the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline and the longe
histories of Oceti Sakowin (The Great Sioux Nation) resistance against the trespass of settlers, dams, and pipelines across the Mni
Sose, the Missouri River. This is a short analysis of the historical and political context of the #NoDAPL movement and the
transformative possibilities of the cu
ent struggle.
Thousands have camped along the banks of the Missouri River at Cannon Ball in the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation to halt
the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), which promises to ca
y half a million ba
els of heavy crude oil a day across
four states, under the Missouri River twice, and under the Mississippi River toward the Gulf of Mexico for global export. Camp Oceti
Sakowin, Red Wa
ior Camp, and Sacred Stone Camp, the various Native-led groups standing in unity against DAPL, have
ought
together the largest, mass-gathering of Natives and allies in more than a century, all on land and along a river the Army Corps of
Engineers claims sole jurisdiction and authority over.
How and why did this happen?
In 1803 the wasicu — the fat-takers, the settlers, the capitalists — claimed this stretch of the river as part of what became the largest
eal estate transaction in world history. The fledgling U.S. settler state “bought” 827 million acres from the French Crown in the
Louisiana Purchase and sent two white explorers, Lewis and Clark, to claim and map the newly acquired te
itory. None of the Native
Nations west of the Mississippi consented to the sale of their lands to a sovereign they neither recognized nor viewed as superior. It
was only after we rebuffed Lewis and Clark for failing to pay tribute for their passage on our river that they labeled the Oceti Sakowin
“the vilest miscreants of the savage race.” Thus began one of the longest and most hotly contested struggles in the history of the
world.
11/2/2016 Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context
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For the next hundred years, the U.S. led various unsuccessful military campaigns to suppress, annihilate, and dispossess us of ou
ightful claim to the river and our lands. Despite popular belief, we were never militarily defeated. Red Cloud’s War and the War for the
Black Hills led to the military defeat of the U.S. Calvary, most famously the annihilation of General George Armstrong Custer’s forces
at the Battle of Greasy Grass in 1876. These wars, for our part, were entirely defensive. The Oceti Sakowin signed peace treaties with
the invading settler government. The 1854 and 1868 Fort Laramie treaties provided temporary reprieve and defined the vast 25-
million-acre te
itory of what became the Great Sioux Reservation, which stretched from the eastern shore of the Missouri River to the
Bighorn Mountains. Four decades of intense warfare, however, took its toll. More than ten million buffalo were slaughtered to starve us
out. Settler hordes invaded and pillaged our Black Hills for its gold. Our vast land base diminished and the treaties were nullified when
Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act of 1876, which abolished treaty-making with Native Nations, and the Black Hills Act of
1877, which illegally ceded the Black Hills and created the present-day reservation system.
The Oceti Sakowin has vigorously opposed these bald imperialistic maneuvers to usurp our self-determining authority over our lives
and lands. Settler society entreated the Oceti Sakowin for the 1854 and 1868 agreements, not the other way around. We entered
these relationships with the understanding that both parties respected a common humanity with the people and the lands. In our view,
the settler state lost its humanity when it violated the treaties. Every act on our part to recover and reclaim our lives and land and to
esist elimination is an attempt to recuperate that lost humanity — humanity this settler state refuses and denies even to its own.
11/2/2016 Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context
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South Dakota and North Dakota statehood also played a major role in suppressing the Oceti Sakowin. Although we have never signed
any treaties with these states, they lay claim to the destinies of our lands, our river and our people. To do so, they have always used
violence and hatred. In 1890, a year after statehood, these two states drummed up anti-Indian sentiment to further
eak up and open
eservation lands for settlement. As a result, they fa
icated the Ghost Dance crisis; called for federal troops to intervene to protect
white property that resulted in the assassination of our military and political leaders such as Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull; and resulted
in the killing of over 300 mostly unarmed women, children, and elders at Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
Outright murder was never enough. The Dawes Allotment Act of 1887 and the creation of five smaller reservations attempted to
factionalize the Oceti Sakowin and opened up “surplus” lands to white homesteaders. From 1907 to 1934, millions of acres of the
emaining Great Sioux Reservation were lost. In the early 1900s, Missouri River Basin states began organizing to usurp Native wate
ights for large-scale i
igation projects. These states envisioned a dam system that would create large reservoirs that would primarily
flood Native lands. But there was a major problem. In 1908, a U.S. Supreme Court decision held that tribes maintained access and
control of water within original treaty te
itory, even if that te
itory was diminished. This became known as the Winters Doctrine. Fo
the Missouri River, the Oceti Sakowin possessed the prior claim to both the river and its shorelines as spelled out in the 1851 and
1868 Fort Laramie Treaties.
11/2/2016 Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context
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An opportunity for the states arose. After unseasonal mass flooding, Congress passed the Flood Control Act in 1944 — or what
ecame known as the Pick-Sloan Plan authorizing the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation to erect five dams on
the mainstem of the river. All of which targeted and disproportionately destroyed Native lands and lives. Of the five Pick-Sloan dams,
four flooded the lands of seven nations of the Oceti Sakowin: the Santee Sioux Tribe, the Yankton Sioux Tribe, the Sicangu Oyate, the
Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Of the
611,642 condemned acres through eminent domain in what was called the “taking area,” these nations lost 309,584 acres of vital
ottomlands. Inundation also forced more than a thousand Native families, in patent violation of treaties and without their consent, to
elocate. Entire communities were removed to marginal reservation lands, and many were forced to leave the reservation entirely. As
a result of condemnation, the Army Corps of Engineers claims sole jurisdiction over the river and its shoreline.
11/2/2016 Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context
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The dams, which promised and delivered wholesale destruction, coincided and worked in tandem with the federal policies of
termination and relocation. In 1953, Congress passed House Concu
ent Resolution 108 (HCR 108) that inaugurated termination
policy, and called for the immediate termination or ended federal recognition of the Flathead, Klamath, Menominee, Potawatomi, and
Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribes. That same year, Congress passed Public Law 280 (PL 280) that authorized states to assume
criminal and civil jurisdiction over Native lands. The Bureau of Indian Affairs supported these programs and ca
ied out the Indian
Relocation Act of 1956 that relocated thousands from the reservation to far-off u
an centers. HCR 108, PL 280, relocation, and the
Pick-Sloan dams did not just promote assimilation — they enforced genocide and elimination.
Through termination, relocation, and massive flooding, however, colonialism created its own gravediggers. The Oceti Sakowin unified
to thwart the state of South Dakota’s attempts to implement PL 280 to overthrow Native governments and assume control over thei
lands. Natives on relocation also began to organize. Groups such as the National Indian Youth Council and the American Indian
Movement (AIM) formed in the u
an centers to combat the wholesale destruction of Native life on- and off-reservation. In 1973, AIM
occupied Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which was a culmination of more than a decade of Red Powe
organizing. The occupation was the catalyst for a mass gathering of thousands at Standing Rock in 1974, which resulted in the
founding of the International Indian Treaty Council. At Standing Rock, more than 90 Native Nations from around the world built the
foundations of what would become four decades of work at the United Nations and the basis for the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples.
11/2/2016 Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context
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The anti-colonial uprising taking place in Oceti Sakowin treaty te
itory and spilling onto the world stage was met with violent state
epression. AIM leaders were assassinated and many were imprisoned. For example, Native leader Leonard Peltier, who participated
in this movement for the life and dignity of his people, to this day sits behind bars as one of the longest serving political prisoners in
United States history. From 1977 to 2012 South Dakota’s prison population increased 500 percent. One-third of its prison population is
Native, although Natives make up only nine percent of the total population.
With the advent of tarsands extraction and heavy crude pipelines destroying water supplies and scorching the earth, Natives and the
Oceti Sakowin have once again reunited. This unification first targeted tarsands and pipeline construction in so-called Canada in First
Nations’ te
itory. Successful blockades have halted pipelines. In 2014, the Oceti Sakowin began a massive organizing effort, with help
from allies, against the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline that, too, threatened to cross the Missouri River. Our Nation is made up of some of
the poorest people in the Western hemisphere organizing to oppose a fossil fuel industry made up of some of the most powerful and
wealthiest people on the planet. Despite these odds KXL was defeated on November 6, 2015. After mass protests, the Obama
administration denied the pipeline’s permit.
Two important lessons were drawn from the KXL struggle that were ca
ied into #NoDAPL. The power of multinational unity between
Natives and non-Natives was one of the movement’s successes. The other proved the transformative power and potential of anti-
colonial resistance to successfully mobilize poor people against the rich and powerful — and win!
11/2/2016 Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context
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Like our ancestors’ wars of the nineteenth century, our cu
ent war is