Time to move Standing Rock pipeline
US PRESIDENT Obama has pointed a way out of a dangerous standoff over an oil pipeline being built in North Dakota. He told an interviewer that the Army Corps of Engineers was looking for a new pipeline route, away from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
It was a welcome hint of good news in a bitter confrontation. The $3.7 billion Dakota Access pipeline is meant to carry crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois. It would not enter tribal land, but it would pass close enough for the Sioux to fear grave damage from a leak or spill. Its current proposed route runs less than half a mile north of the reservation. Though the pipeline would mostly cross private property, the tribe argues that these have been the Sioux’s ancestral lands since antiquity.
A judge in September denied the tribe’s request for an injunction to block construction, but the tribe has continued to press the Army corps to withhold permits. The tribe’s sense of grievance is understandable, given that the pipeline was shifted in its direction, away from Bismarck, North Dakota, because regulators saw it as a potential threat to that city’s water supply.
A pipeline may well be the most profitable way to move a half-million barrels of crude oil a day, but is it worth it?
The law-enforcement response to the largely peaceful Standing Rock impasse has led to grim clashes at protest camps between civilians and officers in riot gear. The confrontation cannot help summoning a wretched history. Not far from Standing Rock, sacred land was stolen from the Sioux, plundered for gold and then carved into four monumental presidential heads.
The Sioux know as well as any of America’s native peoples that treaties, laws and promises can wilt under the pressure for mineral extraction. But without relitigating the history of the North American conquest, perhaps the protesters can achieve their aim to stop the pipeline.
“We are monitoring this closely,” Obama said. “I think as a general rule, my view is that there is a way for us to accommodate sacred lands of Native Americans.” There has to be.