Tomgram: Chip Ward, Peace Pipes, Not Oil Pipes
By Chip Ward
Posted on September 20, 2016, Printed on September 20, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176188/ ;
In our new political world, the phrase "follow the money" has real meaning.
Consider the $1,530,000 that, according to OpenSecrets.org, billionaire
Kelcy Warren has personally given away in the 2016 election cycle to
influence your vote (or someones vote anyway). One hundred percent of his
dollars, just in case you were curious, have gone to conservative
candidates, including key congressional Republicans. Warren is a Texas oil
pipeline magnate who's wildly rich. According to the Wall Street Journal,
his 23,000-square-foot Dallas mansion, bought for $30 million in 2009,
includes a bowling alley and a baseball diamond that features a scoreboard
with Warren as one of the teams. As Sue Sturgis of the Institute for
Southern Studies wrote recently, With business partner Ray Davis, co-owner
of the Texas Rangers baseball team, Warren built Energy Transfer Equity into
one of the nation's largest pipeline companies, which now owns about 71,000
miles of pipelines carrying natural gas, natural gas liquids, refined
products, and crude oil. The company's holdings include Sunoco, Southern
Union, and Regency Energy Partners.
And as Dr. Seuss used to say, that is not all, oh no, that is not all!
Dont forget Energy Transfer Partners, part of the Energy Transfer Equity
empire. It's building the embattled Dakota Access Pipeline, which is
supposed to bring fracked oil from North Dakota to the Gulf Coast. Through
a PAC, it has given at least $288,000 to a bevy of Republican House and
Senate candidates. In other words, election 2016 will, among other things,
be an oil spill of an election. And should Donald Trump, a man who gives
conflict of interest new meaning, take the Oval Office by storm and so
ride to the rescue of the oil and coal magnates of America with his
drill-baby-drill environmental policies, that investment will matter even
more.
In the meantime, Warrens latest project -- that pipeline across the Dakotas
-- has run smack into resistance of an unexpected kind as it approached the
Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Faced with the prospect of fracked oil in
their drinking water, the tribe rallied other tribes (including tribes of
environmentalists) and, as of this moment, has miraculously stopped the
pipeline dead in its tracks. Think of whats been going on as an Indian
version of Occupy Wall Street. As environmentalist and TomDispatch regular
Chip Ward points out today, Native Americans, long ago discarded as the
dispossessed and forgotten losers of American culture, have returned with a
vengeance to protect not just the last wild places on our continent but the
rest of us as well. Its one hell of a story and on an overheating planet
that, as is increasingly said, needs to keep it in the ground, its not
just a heartwarming tale, but a matter of life or death. Tom
Indians and Cowboys
The 2016 Version of an Old Story on a New Planet
By Chip Ward
Cowboys and Indians are at it again.
Americans who dont live in the West may think that the historic clash of
Native Americans and pioneering settlers is long past because the Indians
were, after all, defeated and now drive cars, watch television, and shop at
Walmart. Not so. That classic American narrative is back big time, only
the Indians are now the good guys and the cowboys -- well, their rightwing
representatives, anyway -- are on the warpath, trying to grab 640 million
acres of public lands that they can plunder as if it were yesteryear.
Meanwhile, in the Dakotas, Americas Manifest Destiny, that historic push
across the Great Plains to the Pacific (murdering and pillaging along the
way), seems to be making a return trip to Sioux country in a form that could
have planetary consequences.
Energy Transfer Partners is now building the Dakota Access Pipeline, a $3.7
billion oil slick of a project. Its slated to go from the Bakken gas and
oil fracking fields in northern North Dakota across 1,100 miles of the rest
of the Dakotas and Iowa to a pipeline hub in Illinois. From there, the oil
will head for refineries on the Gulf Coast and ultimately, as the emissions
from fossil fuels, into the atmosphere to help create future summers so hot
no one will forget them. Keep in mind that, according to global warmings
terrible new math, theres enough carbon in those Bakken fields to roast the
planet -- if, that is, the Sioux and tribes allied with them dont stop the
pipeline.
This time, in other words, if the cavalry does ride to the rescue, the
heroes on horseback will be speaking Lakota.
Last Stand at Standing Rock
If built as planned, the Dakota Access Pipeline will snake through the
headwaters of the Missouri River, a life-giving source of fresh water for
millions of people who live downstream, including Native Americans. Its
supposed to pass under that river just a few miles from the Standing Rock
Sioux Reservation that straddles North and South Dakota. Protestors point
out that, eventually, the pipeline is likely to leak into that vital
watershed and the contamination could prove catastrophic. The Army Corps of
Engineers, which green-lighted the projects design, and Energy Transfer
Partners have continued to insist that there is no such risk -- even though,
suspiciously enough, they decided to change the pipelines route to avoid
the water supply of North Dakotas capital, Bismark. As ever, tribal
leaders point out, they were ignored rather than consulted in the planning
stages, even though the project was to pass directly through their lands.
When the Keystone XL Pipeline, slated to bring especially carbon-heavy tar
sands from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast, was killed thanks to
years of fierce environmental protests, the stakes were raised for the
Dakota Access Pipeline. Keystone was a disaster for the energy industry.
In its wake, opponents claim, the new project was fast-tracked without the
usual environmental reviews so that construction could be completed before a
Keystone-style opposition formed. Fast as they were, it turns out that they
werent fast enough.
Keep in mind that such a project wasnt exactly a first for the native
peoples of the region. In the wake of their defeat and confinement to
reservations in the nineteenth century, they lived through a profound
transformation of their landscape. Settlers let cattle loose on meadows
cleared of wolves, cougars, and bears. The rude stamp of progress followed:
fences, roads, dams, mines, sawmills, railroads, power lines, towns, condos,
resorts, and in the twenty-first century, vistas increasingly pockmarked
with frackings drill rigs and service roads.
In the Dakota prairies, hundreds of species of grass and flowers were
replaced by monocultures of soy and corn, while millions of cattle were
substituted for herds of free-roaming bison. As recently as the 1950s and
1960s, the neighboring Sioux and Cheyenne lost 200,000 more acres of
valuable reservation farmland to dams built without their permission.
Entire villages had to relocate. The Dakota Access Pipeline is just the
latest of these assaults and yet, in every way, its potentially more
disastrous. As Lakota Chairman David Archambault puts it, To poison water
is to poison the substance of life.
Slaughter, internment, and neglect were bad enough, say tribal leaders, but
threatening the peoples life-giving water was the last straw. As a result,
thousands of Native Americans drawn from 280 tribes across the country and
even around the world are now camping out at the construction site where the
Dakota Access Pipeline nears the tip of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
Almost two million signatures have been gathered on a petition opposing the
pipeline; dozens of environmental groups have signed on to the resistance;
and tribes nationwide have expressed their solidarity.
On September 3rd, the private security guards hired by Energy Transfer
Partners used pepper spray and dogs on those trying to block the pipeline.
This eruption of violence halted work until U.S. District Judge James
Boasberg could rule on the tribes request for an injunction to block
construction while its case was heard in court. On September 9th, while
conceding that the United States relationship with Indians has been
contentious and tragic, he denied that request. Then, in a move described
even by the Sioux as stunning, the Obama administration suddenly stepped
between the protesters and the pipeline construction crews. The
Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and even
the Army Corps of Engineers called for a halt to the process until the
permitting procedure could be reviewed.
Although putting an oil pipeline under a major river should have triggered
an environmental review, the Corps chose not to do one. Now, it will take a
second look. The administration also committed itself to finding better
ways to include Native Americans in future land-use decisions.
Where this goes next is anyones guess. The construction halt could, of
course, be lifted if the protesters were to disperse under a false sense of
victory. The Sioux now plan to litigate vigorously against the pipeline.
One prediction, however, is easy enough. The unity and purpose experienced
by the people in that encampment will resonate powerfully for years to come.
A movement has been born along the banks of the Missouri River.
Native Americans have played the crucial role in this campaign to keep it
in the ground, just as they were leaders in the successful struggle to
block the Keystone XL Pipeline, the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline that
would have carried dirty crude across Canada to the Pacific, and the
building of a massive coal export port on Canadas Pacific coast. As Native
American leader Winona LaDuke puts it, For people with nothing else but
land and a river, I would not bet against them.
This Town Aint Big Enough for the Both of Us
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the cowboys have been engaged in a
not-so-old-fashioned range war over who can best manage 640 million acres of
public lands now owned collectively by the American people. Backed by the
Koch brothers and their American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC,
legislators across the American West, where most of the public lands are
located, are calling on the federal government to cede control and
management of them to counties and states. This would include some of our
most beloved national parks.
In Utah where I live, the Republican-dominated legislature has put forward
the Public Lands Initiative (PLI). Its the latest round in a 30-year feud
pitting conservationists and businesses tied to tourism and recreation
against ranchers and miners. At stake: whether to give the last publicly
controlled wild places in the state formal wilderness status and federal
protection or (though this isnt often directly said) let private interests
exploit the hell out of them. Every few years the Utah legislatures
cowboy caucus has pushed just such a wilderness bill filled with poison
pills and potentially devastating loopholes that the local conservation
community cant abide.
Billed this time as a potential grand bargain to settle who controls public
lands and how they can be used, the PLI has proven no different. It was, in
fact, generated by local fears that President Obama might use his
wide-ranging powers under the Antiquities Act to create a new national
monument in the state as he left the Oval Office. This was exactly what
Bill Clinton did in 1996, establishing the Grand Staircase Escalante
National Monument on 1.9 million acres of land in southern Utahs
spectacular canyon country, already the home of five national parks.
That 1906 act, passed while Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House, gives
the president wide-ranging authority to create national monuments from
public lands in order to protect significant natural, cultural, or
scientific features. Since activities like drilling for oil and gas,
mining, timber cutting, and grazing are barred or tightly restricted on such
protected lands, Western politicians tend to regard them as a tool wielded
by conservationists to suppress economic development.
Grave Robbing for Fun and Profit
Sure enough, the nightmare of the cowboys is being realized. A coalition of
five tribes, all either presently in Utah or claiming ancestral lands there,
is now pushing a bold proposal for just such a national monument -- a park
co-managed by the five tribes and the National Park Service (which in itself
would be a significant first for the Native American community). It would
include 1.9 million acres of the ancestral grounds of the Navajo, Hopi,
Zuni, Ute Mountain, and Ute Indian tribes and would be known as the Bears
Ears after the areas most famous landmark, twin buttes that are said to
resemble a bear's ears.
Interior Secretary Sally Jewel recently toured the proposed monument and was
amazed by what she saw, including spectacular cliff-house ruins, as well as
paintings and rock carvings depicting clan signs, shamanic visions, and
ghostly herds of bighorn sheep and elk. Bears Ears would possess more than
100,000 archaeological sites, including many of the oldest and most
spectacular ruins in the United States. Members of the coalition of tribes
regard them and the ground littered with their ancestors artifacts and
bones as sacred.
A grassroots group, Utah Dine Bikeyah, did extensive groundwork collecting
data and interviews to create cultural maps of the region. The
extraordinary archaeological and historical record they built effectively
made their case that the ancestors of the coalition tribes have relied on
that landscape for hunting, gathering, and ceremonial activities for
centuries. The Utah conservation community, which had mapped out its own
plans for such a monument, stepped aside for the tribal proposal.
Protecting the Bears Ears is considered an urgent matter. A mere handful of
rangers currently patrol thousands of square miles of rugged canyons where
the looting of archaeological sites for fun and profit is a rural tradition.
In remote outposts like Blanding, Utah, Indian grave robbing was considered
an acceptable family pastime until agents from the FBI infiltrated the black
market for artifacts and busted a prominent local family. Ute leader Regina
Lopez-Whiteskunk expresses a motivating concern of the tribal leaders.
Without swift action, she says, we fear that the archaeological and
cultural riches of the Bears Ears will suffer shameful, disgraceful
dissolution and obliteration.
Her fear is well founded. In recent years, for instance, rural county
commissioners have led illegal all-terrain-vehicle rallies on a route
through Recapture Canyon that Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rangers shut
to motorized traffic because it crosses several key archaeological sites.
State and county politicians were not content to challenge the BLMs closure
of that canyon in court. Instead, they openly promoted such rides to defy
the feds. The last of these protests in 2014 did, in fact, significantly
damage unprotected archeological sites. The indigenous community saw it as
a shocking show of disrespect, like driving directly over cemetery graves.
The well-armed vigilantes who rode through Recapture Canyon were led by Ryan
Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy and the famous hothead of the Bundy clan.
You may remember the colorful Bundy boys. After all, they became the stars
of the cowboy rebellion against federal regulation on public lands. In
2014, BLM rangers were dispatched to Nevada to remove Cliven Bundys cows
from lands on which they had been grazing illegally for 20 years. The feds
claimed that he owed the taxpayers a million bucks in unpaid grazing fees.
He, on the other hand, insisted that such public lands belonged to the
ranchers whose grandparents first grazed them. The rangers sent to enforce
the law were met by hundreds of armed cowboys, many of whom took up sniper
positions around them. Faced with such overwhelming firepower and the
prospect of bloodshed, they withdrew and a range war was on.
The Gang That Couldnt Shoot Straight
That retreat in Nevada undoubtedly emboldened the Bundy clan and their
militia allies to seize Oregons Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January
2016. Well-armed, they occupied the visitor center at that bird refuge,
leaning on every cowboy cliché in the book. They dressed the part with
chaps, boots, buckles, and Stetson hats, carried American flags, and
regularly posed with their horses for news photographers.
In the end, despite the Marlboro Man look and the Clint Eastwood demeanor,
the Bundyites came across as the gang that couldnt shoot straight. The
constitutional revolution they wanted to spark by seizing Malheur fizzled
amid a festival of cognitive dissonance and irony: men carrying assault
rifles and threatening to use them proclaimed themselves peaceful
protesters and, while declaring it off limits, attempted to return land
to the American people -- land that they already owned. Federal agents
eventually arrested all of the principal players in both the earlier Nevada
standoff and the Malheur fiasco, except for one killed at a roadblock when
he charged armed rangers and reached for his gun. Trials began on September
7th and are slated to last for months.
Given the open hostility of state and local politicians to the protection of
sacred sites, as well as their willingness to break the law and offer tacit
support for vigilantes like the Bundys, tribal leaders decided to take their
concerns about protecting their ancestral grounds to the top. A delegation
traveled to Washington and met with President Obama, while a media campaign
was begun to persuade others to endorse the plan.
A broader coalition of tribes and the conservation community rallied to the
idea, especially because it was the first time that Native American tribes
had proposed such a monument. The vision of a park to honor sacred
indigenous lands, shaped and directed by Native Americans themselves, caught
the public imagination. The New York Times and Washington Post have both
written editorials urging the president to create such a park and Utah polls
show a solid majority of citizens in favor of it.
Peace Pipes, Not Oil Pipes
The genocidal policies that accompanied settlement across North America
crested in Sioux country at the close of the nineteenth century. The
survivors of the vanquished indigenous nations there were interned on
reservations. Their children were taken from them and sent to boarding
schools where their hair was cut, and their language and ceremonies
banished. This was -- and was meant to be -- a form of cultural genocide.
In the Bears Ears and Sioux country today, however, the culture of Native
Americans endures. The descendants of those warriors who died defending
their homeland and of those children taken from their families and their
native cultures have proven remarkably resilient. They are once again
defending their world and, as it happens, ours too, because even if you
dont share the Missouri River watershed, you live on a planet that is being
rapidly transformed by the sort of toxic cargo that will fill a future
Dakota Access Pipeline.
In the Hollywood Westerns of my youth, Indians were often one-dimensional
villains who committed atrocities on good white folks trying to bring
civilization to the frontier. As with so many notions I inherited in my
youth, reality has turned out to be another story.
Certainly, before the onslaught of colonialism, the way indigenous people
across the planet viewed what we now call our environment has come to seem
like sanity itself. The land, as the Sioux and other tribal peoples saw it,
was a living being saturated with spirits that humans should both
acknowledge and respect.
The Indians whom the cowboys and bluecoats fought didnt share European
concepts of cash, property, profit, progress, and, most importantly,
technology. Once upon a time, we had the guns and they had the bows and
arrows, so we rolled over them. But heres the wondrous thing: a story that
seemed to have ended long ago turns out to be anything but over. Times have
changed, and in the process the previous cast of characters has, it seems,
swapped roles.
An economy hooked on carbon is threatening life on Earth. The waters of seas
and oceans are warming fast; the weather is becoming unpredictable and
harsh. Perhaps its time to finally listen to and learn from people who
lived here sustainably for thousands of years. Respecting Sioux sovereignty
and protecting the sacred sites of tribes in their own co-managed national
monument could write the next chapter in our American story, the one in
which the Indians finally get to be heroes and heroines fighting to protect
our way of life as well as their own.
Chip Ward, a TomDispatch regular, co-founded HEAL Utah and wrote Canaries on
the Rim and Hopes Horizon. Returning from hiking trips in the Bears Ears,
he long kept his knowledge of the ruins he visited to himself, fearing the
vulnerability of ancient cliff houses and granaries to looters. He is
hopeful that they will now get the protection they deserve.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Chip Ward
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176188
Tomgram: Chip Ward, Peace Pipes, Not Oil Pipes
By Chip Ward
Posted on September 20, 2016, Printed on September 20, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176188/ ;
In our new political world, the phrase "follow the money" has real meaning.
Consider the $1,530,000 that, according to OpenSecrets.org, billionaire
Kelcy Warren has personally given away in the 2016 election cycle to
influence your vote (or someones vote anyway). One hundred percent of his
dollars, just in case you were curious, have gone to conservative
candidates, including key congressional Republicans. Warren is a Texas oil
pipeline magnate who's wildly rich. According to the Wall Street Journal,
his 23,000-square-foot Dallas mansion, bought for $30 million in 2009,
includes a bowling alley and a baseball diamond that features a scoreboard
with Warren as one of the teams. As Sue Sturgis of the Institute for
Southern Studies wrote recently, With business partner Ray Davis, co-owner
of the Texas Rangers baseball team, Warren built Energy Transfer Equity into
one of the nation's largest pipeline companies, which now owns about 71,000
miles of pipelines carrying natural gas, natural gas liquids, refined
products, and crude oil. The company's holdings include Sunoco, Southern
Union, and Regency Energy Partners.
And as Dr. Seuss used to say, that is not all, oh no, that is not all! Dont
forget Energy Transfer Partners, part of the Energy Transfer Equity empire.
It's building the embattled Dakota Access Pipeline, which is supposed to
bring fracked oil from North Dakota to the Gulf Coast. Through a PAC, it has
given at least $288,000 to a bevy of Republican House and Senate candidates.
In other words, election 2016 will, among other things, be an oil spill of
an election. And should Donald Trump, a man who gives conflict of interest
new meaning, take the Oval Office by storm and so ride to the rescue of the
oil and coal magnates of America with his drill-baby-drill environmental
policies, that investment will matter even more.
In the meantime, Warrens latest project -- that pipeline across the Dakotas
-- has run smack into resistance of an unexpected kind as it approached the
Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Faced with the prospect of fracked oil in
their drinking water, the tribe rallied other tribes (including tribes of
environmentalists) and, as of this moment, has miraculously stopped the
pipeline dead in its tracks. Think of whats been going on as an Indian
version of Occupy Wall Street. As environmentalist and TomDispatch regular
Chip Ward points out today, Native Americans, long ago discarded as the
dispossessed and forgotten losers of American culture, have returned with a
vengeance to protect not just the last wild places on our continent but the
rest of us as well. Its one hell of a story and on an overheating planet
that, as is increasingly said, needs to keep it in the ground, its not
just a heartwarming tale, but a matter of life or death. Tom
Indians and Cowboys
The 2016 Version of an Old Story on a New Planet
By Chip Ward
Cowboys and Indians are at it again.
Americans who dont live in the West may think that the historic clash of
Native Americans and pioneering settlers is long past because the Indians
were, after all, defeated and now drive cars, watch television, and shop at
Walmart. Not so. That classic American narrative is back big time, only the
Indians are now the good guys and the cowboys -- well, their rightwing
representatives, anyway -- are on the warpath, trying to grab 640 million
acres of public lands that they can plunder as if it were yesteryear.
Meanwhile, in the Dakotas, Americas Manifest Destiny, that historic push
across the Great Plains to the Pacific (murdering and pillaging along the
way), seems to be making a return trip to Sioux country in a form that could
have planetary consequences.
Energy Transfer Partners is now building the Dakota Access Pipeline, a $3.7
billion oil slick of a project. Its slated to go from the Bakken gas and
oil fracking fields in northern North Dakota across 1,100 miles of the rest
of the Dakotas and Iowa to a pipeline hub in Illinois. From there, the oil
will head for refineries on the Gulf Coast and ultimately, as the emissions
from fossil fuels, into the atmosphere to help create future summers so hot
no one will forget them. Keep in mind that, according to global warmings
terrible new math, theres enough carbon in those Bakken fields to roast the
planet -- if, that is, the Sioux and tribes allied with them dont stop the
pipeline.
This time, in other words, if the cavalry does ride to the rescue, the
heroes on horseback will be speaking Lakota.
Last Stand at Standing Rock
If built as planned, the Dakota Access Pipeline will snake through the
headwaters of the Missouri River, a life-giving source of fresh water for
millions of people who live downstream, including Native Americans. Its
supposed to pass under that river just a few miles from the Standing Rock
Sioux Reservation that straddles North and South Dakota. Protestors point
out that, eventually, the pipeline is likely to leak into that vital
watershed and the contamination could prove catastrophic. The Army Corps of
Engineers, which green-lighted the projects design, and Energy Transfer
Partners have continued to insist that there is no such risk -- even though,
suspiciously enough, they decided to change the pipelines route to avoid
the water supply of North Dakotas capital, Bismark. As ever, tribal leaders
point out, they were ignored rather than consulted in the planning stages,
even though the project was to pass directly through their lands.
When the Keystone XL Pipeline, slated to bring especially carbon-heavy tar
sands from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast, was killed thanks to
years of fierce environmental protests, the stakes were raised for the
Dakota Access Pipeline. Keystone was a disaster for the energy industry. In
its wake, opponents claim, the new project was fast-tracked without the
usual environmental reviews so that construction could be completed before a
Keystone-style opposition formed. Fast as they were, it turns out that they
werent fast enough.
Keep in mind that such a project wasnt exactly a first for the native
peoples of the region. In the wake of their defeat and confinement to
reservations in the nineteenth century, they lived through a profound
transformation of their landscape. Settlers let cattle loose on meadows
cleared of wolves, cougars, and bears. The rude stamp of progress followed:
fences, roads, dams, mines, sawmills, railroads, power lines, towns, condos,
resorts, and in the twenty-first century, vistas increasingly pockmarked
with frackings drill rigs and service roads.
In the Dakota prairies, hundreds of species of grass and flowers were
replaced by monocultures of soy and corn, while millions of cattle were
substituted for herds of free-roaming bison. As recently as the 1950s and
1960s, the neighboring Sioux and Cheyenne lost 200,000 more acres of
valuable reservation farmland to dams built without their permission. Entire
villages had to relocate. The Dakota Access Pipeline is just the latest of
these assaults and yet, in every way, its potentially more disastrous. As
Lakota Chairman David Archambault puts it, To poison water is to poison the
substance of life.
Slaughter, internment, and neglect were bad enough, say tribal leaders, but
threatening the peoples life-giving water was the last straw. As a result,
thousands of Native Americans drawn from 280 tribes across the country and
even around the world are now camping out at the construction site where the
Dakota Access Pipeline nears the tip of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
Almost two million signatures have been gathered on a petition opposing the
pipeline; dozens of environmental groups have signed on to the resistance;
and tribes nationwide have expressed their solidarity.
On September 3rd, the private security guards hired by Energy Transfer
Partners used pepper spray and dogs on those trying to block the pipeline.
This eruption of violence halted work until U.S. District Judge James
Boasberg could rule on the tribes request for an injunction to block
construction while its case was heard in court. On September 9th, while
conceding that the United States relationship with Indians has been
contentious and tragic, he denied that request. Then, in a move described
even by the Sioux as stunning, the Obama administration suddenly stepped
between the protesters and the pipeline construction crews. The
Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and even
the Army Corps of Engineers called for a halt to the process until the
permitting procedure could be reviewed.
Although putting an oil pipeline under a major river should have triggered
an environmental review, the Corps chose not to do one. Now, it will take a
second look. The administration also committed itself to finding better ways
to include Native Americans in future land-use decisions.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20Where this
goes next is anyones guess. The construction halt could, of course, be
lifted if the protesters were to disperse under a false sense of victory.
The Sioux now plan to litigate vigorously against the pipeline. One
prediction, however, is easy enough. The unity and purpose experienced by
the people in that encampment will resonate powerfully for years to come. A
movement has been born along the banks of the Missouri River.
Native Americans have played the crucial role in this campaign to keep it
in the ground, just as they were leaders in the successful struggle to
block the Keystone XL Pipeline, the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline that
would have carried dirty crude across Canada to the Pacific, and the
building of a massive coal export port on Canadas Pacific coast. As Native
American leader Winona LaDuke puts it, For people with nothing else but
land and a river, I would not bet against them.
This Town Aint Big Enough for the Both of Us
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the cowboys have been engaged in a
not-so-old-fashioned range war over who can best manage 640 million acres of
public lands now owned collectively by the American people. Backed by the
Koch brothers and their American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC,
legislators across the American West, where most of the public lands are
located, are calling on the federal government to cede control and
management of them to counties and states. This would include some of our
most beloved national parks.
In Utah where I live, the Republican-dominated legislature has put forward
the Public Lands Initiative (PLI). Its the latest round in a 30-year feud
pitting conservationists and businesses tied to tourism and recreation
against ranchers and miners. At stake: whether to give the last publicly
controlled wild places in the state formal wilderness status and federal
protection or (though this isnt often directly said) let private interests
exploit the hell out of them. Every few years the Utah legislatures cowboy
caucus has pushed just such a wilderness bill filled with poison pills
and potentially devastating loopholes that the local conservation community
cant abide.
Billed this time as a potential grand bargain to settle who controls public
lands and how they can be used, the PLI has proven no different. It was, in
fact, generated by local fears that President Obama might use his
wide-ranging powers under the Antiquities Act to create a new national
monument in the state as he left the Oval Office. This was exactly what Bill
Clinton did in 1996, establishing the Grand Staircase Escalante National
Monument on 1.9 million acres of land in southern Utahs spectacular canyon
country, already the home of five national parks.
That 1906 act, passed while Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House, gives
the president wide-ranging authority to create national monuments from
public lands in order to protect significant natural, cultural, or
scientific features. Since activities like drilling for oil and gas, mining,
timber cutting, and grazing are barred or tightly restricted on such
protected lands, Western politicians tend to regard them as a tool wielded
by conservationists to suppress economic development.
Grave Robbing for Fun and Profit
Sure enough, the nightmare of the cowboys is being realized. A coalition of
five tribes, all either presently in Utah or claiming ancestral lands there,
is now pushing a bold proposal for just such a national monument -- a park
co-managed by the five tribes and the National Park Service (which in itself
would be a significant first for the Native American community). It would
include 1.9 million acres of the ancestral grounds of the Navajo, Hopi,
Zuni, Ute Mountain, and Ute Indian tribes and would be known as the Bears
Ears after the areas most famous landmark, twin buttes that are said to
resemble a bear's ears.
Interior Secretary Sally Jewel recently toured the proposed monument and was
amazed by what she saw, including spectacular cliff-house ruins, as well as
paintings and rock carvings depicting clan signs, shamanic visions, and
ghostly herds of bighorn sheep and elk. Bears Ears would possess more than
100,000 archaeological sites, including many of the oldest and most
spectacular ruins in the United States. Members of the coalition of tribes
regard them and the ground littered with their ancestors artifacts and
bones as sacred.
A grassroots group, Utah Dine Bikeyah, did extensive groundwork collecting
data and interviews to create cultural maps of the region. The extraordinary
archaeological and historical record they built effectively made their case
that the ancestors of the coalition tribes have relied on that landscape for
hunting, gathering, and ceremonial activities for centuries. The Utah
conservation community, which had mapped out its own plans for such a
monument, stepped aside for the tribal proposal.
Protecting the Bears Ears is considered an urgent matter. A mere handful of
rangers currently patrol thousands of square miles of rugged canyons where
the looting of archaeological sites for fun and profit is a rural tradition.
In remote outposts like Blanding, Utah, Indian grave robbing was considered
an acceptable family pastime until agents from the FBI infiltrated the black
market for artifacts and busted a prominent local family. Ute leader Regina
Lopez-Whiteskunk expresses a motivating concern of the tribal leaders.
Without swift action, she says, we fear that the archaeological and
cultural riches of the Bears Ears will suffer shameful, disgraceful
dissolution and obliteration.
Her fear is well founded. In recent years, for instance, rural county
commissioners have led illegal all-terrain-vehicle rallies on a route
through Recapture Canyon that Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rangers shut
to motorized traffic because it crosses several key archaeological sites.
State and county politicians were not content to challenge the BLMs closure
of that canyon in court. Instead, they openly promoted such rides to defy
the feds. The last of these protests in 2014 did, in fact, significantly
damage unprotected archeological sites. The indigenous community saw it as a
shocking show of disrespect, like driving directly over cemetery graves. The
well-armed vigilantes who rode through Recapture Canyon were led by Ryan
Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy and the famous hothead of the Bundy clan.
You may remember the colorful Bundy boys. After all, they became the stars
of the cowboy rebellion against federal regulation on public lands. In
2014, BLM rangers were dispatched to Nevada to remove Cliven Bundys cows
from lands on which they had been grazing illegally for 20 years. The feds
claimed that he owed the taxpayers a million bucks in unpaid grazing fees.
He, on the other hand, insisted that such public lands belonged to the
ranchers whose grandparents first grazed them. The rangers sent to enforce
the law were met by hundreds of armed cowboys, many of whom took up sniper
positions around them. Faced with such overwhelming firepower and the
prospect of bloodshed, they withdrew and a range war was on.
The Gang That Couldnt Shoot Straight
That retreat in Nevada undoubtedly emboldened the Bundy clan and their
militia allies to seize Oregons Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January
2016. Well-armed, they occupied the visitor center at that bird refuge,
leaning on every cowboy cliché in the book. They dressed the part with
chaps, boots, buckles, and Stetson hats, carried American flags, and
regularly posed with their horses for news photographers.
In the end, despite the Marlboro Man look and the Clint Eastwood demeanor,
the Bundyites came across as the gang that couldnt shoot straight. The
constitutional revolution they wanted to spark by seizing Malheur fizzled
amid a festival of cognitive dissonance and irony: men carrying assault
rifles and threatening to use them proclaimed themselves peaceful
protesters and, while declaring it off limits, attempted to return land
to the American people -- land that they already owned. Federal agents
eventually arrested all of the principal players in both the earlier Nevada
standoff and the Malheur fiasco, except for one killed at a roadblock when
he charged armed rangers and reached for his gun. Trials began on September
7th and are slated to last for months.
Given the open hostility of state and local politicians to the protection of
sacred sites, as well as their willingness to break the law and offer tacit
support for vigilantes like the Bundys, tribal leaders decided to take their
concerns about protecting their ancestral grounds to the top. A delegation
traveled to Washington and met with President Obama, while a media campaign
was begun to persuade others to endorse the plan.
A broader coalition of tribes and the conservation community rallied to the
idea, especially because it was the first time that Native American tribes
had proposed such a monument. The vision of a park to honor sacred
indigenous lands, shaped and directed by Native Americans themselves, caught
the public imagination. The New York Times and Washington Post have both
written editorials urging the president to create such a park and Utah polls
show a solid majority of citizens in favor of it.
Peace Pipes, Not Oil Pipes
The genocidal policies that accompanied settlement across North America
crested in Sioux country at the close of the nineteenth century. The
survivors of the vanquished indigenous nations there were interned on
reservations. Their children were taken from them and sent to boarding
schools where their hair was cut, and their language and ceremonies
banished. This was -- and was meant to be -- a form of cultural genocide. In
the Bears Ears and Sioux country today, however, the culture of Native
Americans endures. The descendants of those warriors who died defending
their homeland and of those children taken from their families and their
native cultures have proven remarkably resilient. They are once again
defending their world and, as it happens, ours too, because even if you
dont share the Missouri River watershed, you live on a planet that is being
rapidly transformed by the sort of toxic cargo that will fill a future
Dakota Access Pipeline.
In the Hollywood Westerns of my youth, Indians were often one-dimensional
villains who committed atrocities on good white folks trying to bring
civilization to the frontier. As with so many notions I inherited in my
youth, reality has turned out to be another story.
Certainly, before the onslaught of colonialism, the way indigenous people
across the planet viewed what we now call our environment has come to seem
like sanity itself. The land, as the Sioux and other tribal peoples saw it,
was a living being saturated with spirits that humans should both
acknowledge and respect.
The Indians whom the cowboys and bluecoats fought didnt share European
concepts of cash, property, profit, progress, and, most importantly,
technology. Once upon a time, we had the guns and they had the bows and
arrows, so we rolled over them. But heres the wondrous thing: a story that
seemed to have ended long ago turns out to be anything but over. Times have
changed, and in the process the previous cast of characters has, it seems,
swapped roles.
An economy hooked on carbon is threatening life on Earth. The waters of seas
and oceans are warming fast; the weather is becoming unpredictable and
harsh. Perhaps its time to finally listen to and learn from people who
lived here sustainably for thousands of years. Respecting Sioux sovereignty
and protecting the sacred sites of tribes in their own co-managed national
monument could write the next chapter in our American story, the one in
which the Indians finally get to be heroes and heroines fighting to protect
our way of life as well as their own.
Chip Ward, a TomDispatch regular, co-founded HEAL Utah and wrote Canaries on
the Rim and Hopes Horizon. Returning from hiking trips in the Bears Ears,
he long kept his knowledge of the ruins he visited to himself, fearing the
vulnerability of ancient cliff houses and granaries to looters. He is
hopeful that they will now get the protection they deserve.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Chip Ward
© 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176188
