Tribes split on drilling
Despite protests, some are drawn to Big Oil profits
WASHINGTON — Amid hundreds of protesters chanting “Standing Rock” and waving signs reading “Stand Up to Big Oil,” Jonathan Vez looked out of place in his black suit and eyeglasses.
A business trip to Washington happened to coincide with a protest outside the White House — one of a series across the country aimed at stopping an oil pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota. As vice president of the Navajo Nation, Vez wanted to show his support. But back home on the 27,000-square-mile Navajo reservation spanning New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah, dealing with oil
and gas development in recent years was not so straightforward.
“It’s been a real problem. You get all the fumes coming off the drilling sites, which is a real concern for us in terms of ozone depletion and asthma,” Vez said. “But boy, those (oil) companies will give out some good royalties.”
As the shale boom spread across the American West over the past decade, oil and gas drilling have increasingly found their way onto Native American reservations, long impoverished and eager for the royalty checks and jobs that oil brings. But with that development has come an uneasy tension for Native Americans whose traditions are based around a deep spiritual connection to the land upon which they live.
‘Modern-day gold rush’
A hundred miles north of where protesters are squaring off against the Dallas company Energy Transfer Partners to block its Dakota Access pipeline, the Mandan, Hidatsa and Sahnish Nation have become hugely wealthy from the oil boom in the Bakken Shale. Two years ago the tribes reported their wells were producing more than 180,000 barrels of crude a day — about one-fifth of the entire production of North Dakota.
“It’s a modern-day gold rush,” Tex Hall, former chairman of the tribes, told his membership at the time.
That same year, a pipeline carrying the brackish water that is a byproduct of oil and gas drilling burst, spilling some 1 million gallons into a nearby ravine and killing off plants and trees. Combined with the increasing truck traffic and sight of pump jacks across the landscape, opinion among some Native Americans is turning against oil and gas development, said Marisa Miakonado Cummings, chief of tribal operations for the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska.
Last year, Dine Citizens Against Ruining our Environment, an activist group within the Navajo tribe, joined with national environmental groups in a federal lawsuit to block a drilling project in New Mexico that they said threatened the tribe’s limited water supplies and encroached upon historic ruins.
“We know the miner- als in the ground are part of earth mother. It’s what we’re taught as little kids,” Cummings said. “As more tribes opened up their land to drilling, we’ve seen the consequences of that.”
Greater autonomy
For now, however, some tribal leaders continue to push the expansion of oil and gas operations across their lands.
Through lobbying operations in Washington, they have joined forces with the oil industry to try to loosen federal rules around drilling on tribal lands.
The Southern Ute tribe in Colorado, for example, was among the plaintiffs that sued to block the Obama administration’s increased regulation over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the drilling technique that spurred the shale oil and gas boom.
Oil and gas drilling has made the Southern Utes one of the nation’s wealthiest tribes, and the tribe’s oil company, Red Willow Production Co., has expanded beyond the reservation, including to the Gulf of Mexico.
Now, the Southern Utes and other tribes are backing legislation to reduce the authority of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in energy development on Native American lands. The bill, which passed the House last October and is under debate as part of the Senate’s larger energy bill, would give the tribes greater autonomy over the leases and presumably open more land for drilling.
A report last year by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that oil and gas production on tribal lands, which operate under a complex set of regulatory statutes dating back to the 1800s, lagged those on private lands. In one case, the GAO said, a tribe waited eight years for the Bureau of Indian Affairs to review energy projects, resulting in $95 million in lost revenue.
“Like other so-called energy tribes, we continue to face bureaucratic barri- ers that unnecessarily and unfairly impede our ability to carry out even basic realty transactions,” Clement Frost, chairman of the Southern Ute, testified before Congress last year. “These are hurdles that our neighbors operating on state or private lands do not face.”
The Bureau of Indian Affairs did not return multiple phone calls and emails for comment.
Sovereign nations
So far, anti-drilling and pro-drilling factions within tribes appear to be maintaining a respectful distance from each other. In part, the drop in oil and gas prices in recent years has eased tension by slowing development everywhere, including tribal lands. But the tortured history of Native Americans, through the Indian Wars and later resettlement onto modern reservations, has made protecting basic tribal sovereignty a priority.
Despite their own need to get oil out of North Dakota to out-of-state refineries, the Mandan, Hidatsa and Sahnish Nation have proclaimed their support for the Standing Rock Sioux in their fight to force the federal government to cancel the pipeline project.
As the pipeline protest wrapped up in Washington Tuesday, Tara Houska, one of the organizers and an adviser to former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, said she understood the financial pressures that encouraged many tribes to develop their oil and gas deposits.
“Tribes are sovereign nations,” she said. “They have to make their own decisions.”