Dakota Access Pipeline: colonial violence runs through it
For months, thousands of people have been travelling from all across the continent to North Dakota to stand with the Standing Rock Sioux against construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL).
The pipeline was originally meant to run near the state capital of Bismarck, but this plan was discarded because of fears it might contaminate the city’s water supply. And so the DAPL was rerouted, so it will instead cross through land containing sacred sites and burial places of the Standing Rock Sioux, and under the Mississippi River at Lake Oahe — the main source of drinking water for the reservation.
“Why not put it (near) Bismarck, if it can be so safe?” asked Standing Rock chair Dave Archambault II, in an interview with Democracy Now.
The protest against the DAPL has been treated like an enemy incursion. Peaceful marchers have been met with lines of police in riot gear: helmets and shields and rifles and batons. Military-grade equipment — armoured personnel carriers, surveillance helicopters, drones — are being deployed. In September, the governor of North Dakota activated the National Guard.
More than 100 protesters, as well as journalists documenting the exorbitant violence of the response to them, have been arrested. People charged with minor misdemeanours have reported being strip-searched and held in jail for several days.
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, who filmed the pipeline company’s security guards attacking protesters with dogs and pepper spray, was charged with criminal trespassing and then rioting; the charges against Goodman were dismissed on Monday, but the local county sheriff said he is continuing to investigate her.
Documentary filmmaker and journalist Deia Schlosberg could face up to 45 years in prison for reporting on indigenous activism against the fossil fuel industry, including in North Dakota.
At least 27 were arrested in protests on Oct. 10, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, celebrated as Columbus Day in much of the United States. This assault on indigenous activism in defence of sacred lands and waters was, in many ways, an entirely fitting tribute to Christopher Columbus, a man whose fauxdiscovery of the “New World” in the Americas inaugurated centuries of indigenous decimation and environmental devastation on the continent.
When Columbus’s Spanish-funded expedition stumbled onto the shores of the Caribbean islands in 1492, he saw the territories that lay beyond them as a bountiful arena open for unlimited plunder. The fact the land was already inhabited was not considered any significant moral or legal impediment. By then, it had already been established in Europe for several centuries (beginning with a bull issued by Pope Urban II in 1095) that territory occupied by non-Christians was terra nullius: “nobody’s land,” free for the taking.
“These unspoiled beaches filled (Columbus) with tireless enthusiasm and on Nov. 27 he prophesied that ‘all Christendom will do business here,’ ” noted eminent Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano in 1992, the quincentennial of Columbus’s mission.
“After five centuries of businesslike activity on the part of all Christendom, a third of the American forests have been destroyed (and) a significant part of the previously fertile land is sterile. The Indians, victims of the biggest expropriation in world history, continue to be pushed off their last remaining lands and their identity is still denied . . . At the outset the pillage and ‘othercide’ was performed in the name of God; now it is done in the name of Progress.”
The living colonial legacy of Columbus is on vivid display in North Dakota right now. It is apparent in the use of advanced technologies of violence, to quash indigenous resistance to the destructive “business” of environmental exploitation and extraction. It is apparent in the attempts to repress media that are making indigenous activists visible and indigenous voices audible, enabling continued perception of the land as terra nullius available for use and abuse.
But as Julian Brave NoiseCat and Anna Spice remind us: “The people who have endured centuries of dispossession and attempted elimination — the poorest of the poor, the most likely to be killed by law enforcement, the most easily forgotten — are still here and still fighting. They have built alternatives within and beyond capitalism for hundreds of years . . . (T)hey are envisioning a future without a Dakota Access Pipeline, and enacting a future where indigenous nations exercise their rights to define a more just, equal and sustainable path forward, as stewards of land, water, humanity, and each other.”