Pipeline protests: 7 history lessons
Centuries of unkept promises underlie the Dakota Access tribal fight led by ‘water protectors’
CANNON BALL, N. D. Many terms tossed around at the Oceti Sakowin camp near the Standing Rock Reservation might be unfamiliar to the outside world.
“Water is life” — “Mni Wiconi” in Lakota — is the refrain used by those opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline, who call themselves “water protectors” in reference to their concerns about leaks into the Missouri River.
The safety of the water supply is the immediate issue at Standing Rock, but undergirding the fight is talk of treaties, discovery doctrines, environmental racism and centuries of unkept promises undergirding the pipeline fight.
Here are key historical points to help understand what has animated Native American tribes and their supporters.
THE DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY This legal concept was used by European Colonial powers to justify the taking of aboriginal land. Essentially, it gave land title to any Christian nation whose explorers set foot upon non-Christian soil. In 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court decision of John
son v. M’Intosh codified the doctrine into U.S. law, when Chief Justice John Marshall wrote an opinion stating that Native Americans could occupy land, but only the government could own it. Marshall, as it happens, stood to lose much of his own land if he’d ruled for the other side.
FORT LARAMIE TREATY, 1851 This treaty with eight Native American nations drew boundaries in the Dakotas, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana and offered safe passage to travelers on the Oregon Trail and the right of the U.S. to build roads and forts. The treaty has been ignored, but it was never rescinded.
This is the treaty referenced most often in coverage of the camp. Some land crossed by the Dakota Access Pipeline is within the 1851 boundaries for the Standing Rock, Cheyenne River and Yankton Sioux tribes, including the “treaty camp” from which protesters were ejected Oct. 27.
FORT LARAMIE TREATY, 1868 This treaty created the “Great Sioux Reservation,” which includ- ed the entirety of South Dakota west of the Missouri River. Much of the 1851 treaty land was included as Indian hunting ground. The U.S. promised to keep white settlers out of the reservation, but that promise collapsed quickly after the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, considered sacred by the Sioux.
ACT OF FEB. 28, 1877 In August 1876, just after Gen. George Custer’s defeat at the hands of the Great Sioux Nation, Congress attached a “sell or starve” provision to the Indian Appropriations Act that tied food rations to surrender of the terri- tory. Seven months later, this act passed, removing the Black Hills from tribal control. Overturning the 1868 treaty technically required a vote of three-quarters of the Sioux males, but that didn’t happen. The government got just 48 signatures from the Standing Rock Nation.
DAWES ACT AND SHRINKING RESERVATIONS, 1887-89
This move pushed individual land ownership into reservation communities. It offered U.S. citizenship to Native Americans who accepted individual tracts of land and agreed to “adopt the habits of civilized life” for 25 years. In 1889, just after North and South Dakota’s admission to the Union, Congress acted to further shrink Indian land holdings and created five smaller reservations. Homestead Acts further eroded their size into the 20th century.
PICK-SLOAN PLAN OF 1944
Massive flooding along the Missouri River inspired a plan to build a series of dams and reservoirs, including Lake Oahe. This required the taking and flooding of more than 200,000 acres of the tribes’ most fertile land, on which they hunted and from which they gathered the ingredients for traditional medicines.
The tribes were paid pennies on the dollar for the flooding. Standing Rock, which lost 56,000 acres of bottom lands, estimated the value at $23 million, according to lawyer and historian Peter Capossela’s 2016 book The Land Along the River. The Bureau of Indian Affairs appraised it at $1.3 million.
The land on which the main protest camp now sits and under which the Dakota Access Pipeline would be built belong to the U.S. by virtue of the Pick-Sloan plan.
UNITED STATES V. SIOUX NATION OF INDIANS, 1980
This Supreme Court case sifted through the facts of the 1877 taking of the Black Hills. The justices ruled that the congressional action constituted a taking of property under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. The government was ordered to pay the tribes $17.5 million for the land, plus interest. The tribes have yet to accept payment, however. The money — more than $1 billion — remains in a trust with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“We were paid, but we weren’t paid as much as the people across the river were paid.” Marcella LeBeau, 97, of Eagle Butte, S.D., whose family was forced off their land to make room for dams