Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context

Abstract

Fighting for Our Lives#NoDAPL in Historical Context Nick Estes (bio) This essay puts the #NoDAPL movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) into historical context and within the longer histories of Oceti Sakowin resistance against the trespass of settlers, dams, and pipelines across the Mni Sose, the Missouri River, and into our territory.1 From the late summer of 2016 to the winter of 2017, more than three hundred Native nations planted their flags in solidarity at Oceti Sakowin Camp, the largest of several camps that also included Sacred Stone Camp, Red Warrior Camp, Two-Spirit Camp, the International Indigenous Youth Council, and various allied Indigenous and non-Indigenous camps.2 The pipeline will carry half a million barrels of heavy crude oil a day across four states (North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois), under the Missouri River twice, and under the Mississippi River to refineries in Illinois and the Gulf of Mexico for global export. For most, it's not if the pipeline breaks but when. After all, all pipelines break and leak. Crossing these major waterways, the threat posed to freshwater is immeasurable. Thus, the movement galvanized around the Lakota affirmation Mni Wiconi, or water is life. The pipeline crosses the Missouri less than a mile north from the locations of the camps. The original route crossed the Missouri River above the white-dominated border town of Bismarck, North Dakota. The Army Corps of Engineers rerouted the DAPL from above Bismarck, citing environmental and economic concerns, to its current location just north of Standing Rock.3 Standing Rock had no say in [End Page 115] this proposed reroute and stridently opposed the pipeline as early as September 2014. As it had in previous years, the Corps simply ignored Standing Rock's concerns, claiming sole jurisdiction over the parts of Oceti Sakowin treaty territory that includes the river.4 How and why did this happen? In 1803 the wasicu—the fat-takers, the settlers, the capitalists—claimed this stretch of the river as part of what became the largest real estate transaction in world history. The fledgling U.S. settler state "bought" 827 million acres from the French Crown in the Louisiana Purchase and sent two white explorers, Lewis and Clark, to claim and map the newly acquired territory. None of the Native nations west of the Mississippi consented to the sale of their lands to a sovereign they neither recognized nor viewed as superior. It was only after we rebuffed Lewis and Clark for failing to pay tribute for their passage on our river that they labeled the Oceti Sakowin "the vilest miscreants of the savage race."5 Thus began one of the longest and most hotly contested struggles in the history of the world. For the next hundred years, the United States led various unsuccessful military campaigns to suppress, annihilate, and dispossess us of our rightful claim to the river and our lands. Despite popular belief, we were never militarily defeated. Red Cloud's War and the War for the Black Hills led to the military defeat of the U.S. Cavalry, most famously, the annihilation of Gen. George Armstrong Custer's forces at the Battle of Greasy Grass in 1876. These wars, for our part, were entirely defensive. The Oceti Sakowin signed peace treaties with the invading settler government. The 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties provided temporary reprieve and defined the 25-million-acre territory of what became the Great Sioux Reservation and outlying, unceded treaty territory, which stretched from the eastern shore of the Missouri River to the Bighorn Mountains. Four decades of intense warfare, however, took their toll. More than ten million buffalo were slaughtered to starve us out. Settler hordes invaded and pillaged our Black Hills for its gold. Our vast land base diminished, and the treaties were nullified when Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act of 1876, which abolished treaty making with Native nations, and the Black Hills Act of 1877, which illegally ceded the Black Hills and created the present-day reservation system. The Oceti Sakowin have vigorously opposed these bald imperialistic maneuvers to usurp our self-determining authority over our lives and lands. Settler society entreated...