By the time we get to the national and international media stories about the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), there already had been decades of resistance to nonconsensual actions by the U.S. government (Estes, 2019). Of course, consent is a major issue regarding the construction of the pipeline. DAPL is a 1,172-mile pipeline, in operation since 2017, that transports crude oil from the Bakken Formation in Williston, North Dakota, to refineries and terminals in Illinois. The Bakken is one of the largest repositories of oil in North America. DAPL’s investors profit by offering a cheaper and safer alternative to rail or truck that also increases employment, state tax revenues, and energy independence. DAPL’s advocates claim the pipeline will meet the highest environmental safety standards. To avoid having to navigate multiple government permits for construction, the pipeline builders designed a route that passes mostly through private lands, with several exceptions. One exception is an area below the Missouri River, which required a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit and affects Mni Sose.
Part of the concerns expressed by Standing Rock Tribal members and many other Indigenous advocates is that neither the Tribe nor the water itself consented to the construction of the pipeline and to the future risks of leaks. James Grijalva (2017) discusses some of the concerns the Tribe had:
The Army Corps of Engineers did not address the Tribes’ expert reports documenting numerous EA [environmental assessment] flaws and gaps, including: dismissing impacts on Indian treaty rights without analysis; violating NEPA [National Environmental Policy Act] regulations for actions with impacts that are “highly controversial” and “highly uncertain”; understating the risk of significant pipeline leaks; ignoring the inability of detection systems to identify slow leaks that could result in large oil discharges over time; inadequately analyzing spill risks; and depriving the public of comment by keeping the underlying spill modeling data secret.
Grijalva documents how an initial draft of the environmental assessment did not mention the Standing Rock Reservation less than a mile downstream from the proposed Lake Oahe crossing. Moreover,
The final EA “recognized” that fact, but rather than confront the health and cultural impacts of contaminating the Reservation’s largest water body and its shorelines, the EA instead re-emphasized the pipeline’s off-Reservation location, the expensive and high-tech nature of the horizontal drilling technique for putting the pipeline below the lake, and the very low likelihood of spills. Illogically, that same low risk of spills justified rejecting an alternate route upstream of the State Capitol of Bismarck, whose racial composition is overwhelmingly White. (Grijalva, 2017)
The Bakken region, where the oil going down the DAPL comes from, resonates with Indigenous persons as a place where Indigenous women and children are sex trafficked at the “man camps” for construction workers. Sarah Deer and Mary Kathryn Nagle (2017) describe how “the trafficking of Native women and children is not a new phenomenon.... Sexual exploitation of Native women and children, dating back to the times of the Spanish Conquistadors, often times accompanies the colonial conquest of tribal lands” (p. 36). Yet “the Bakken oil boom has created a renewed sense of urgency in areas that have recently experienced a rapid increase in oil extraction” (p. 36).
Decades of land dispossession, cultural assimilation, and violence against Indigenous peoples’ bodies are attacks on Oceti Sakowin self-determination. In all these cases, the lack of Indigenous consent was not accidental. In 2016, thousands of people, led by Standing Rock Tribal members, gathered at camps near the crossing of the Missouri and Cannon Ball Rivers to stop the construction. Allard (2017) writes,
This movement is not just about a pipeline. We are not fighting for a reroute, or a better process in the white man’s courts. We are fighting for our rights as the Indigenous peoples of this land; we are fighting for our liberation, and the liberation of Unci Maka, Mother Earth. We want every last oil and gas pipe removed from her body. We want healing. We want clean water. We want to determine our own future.
Self-determination means consent.
Violations of Consent: All Too Common
That thousands of Indigenous persons from different nations and communities supported the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is not surprising. Violations of Indigenous consent are all too common in the U.S. and Canadian energy sectors. The United States and Canada both have millions of miles of energy pipelines that connect to many hundreds of shipping terminals, such as major ports in Seattle and New Orleans, and fossil fuel basins, such as the Bakken, Powder River, or Athabasca Oil Sands regions. Energy is also transported via rail and truck, which enlarges the network of fossil fuel–related transportation infrastructure. Maps of the U.S. and Canadian energy sectors show how lands above and waters below are covered with this massive infrastructure.
Scholars, including Deborah Cowen and Anne Spice, are examining the relationship between infrastructures and colonialism. Cowen (2017) writes that “[i]n colonial…contexts, infrastructure is often the means of dispossession.” Indigenous peoples never consented to being completely surrounded and enmeshed by pipelines, terminals, and processing/refining centers. Nor did Indigenous peoples consent to being surrounded by the numerous other industries, technologies, and populations whose activities and lifestyles are fueled by the burning of fossil fuels. Hence, Spice calls such infrastructure “invasive infrastructure,” since its construction and use were not consented to by Indigenous peoples, among other populations who face risks and harms (Spice, 2018). Such invasive infrastructure expresses the self-determination of various settler groups in U.S. and Canadian societies at the expense of Indigenous self-determination.
Indigenous peoples in North America are fighting against harms and risks associated with numerous pipelines, basins, and shipping terminals. In North America alone, resistance actions are taking place in response to hundreds of such situations. The Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, which crosses through Anishinaabe territories neighboring Minnesota and Wisconsin, threatens treaty-protected wild rice–harvesting areas. The Keystone XL oil pipeline crosses multiple Indigenous lands in North America, threatening to leak dangerous chemicals into waters and soils. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline in North Carolina is being built along a route that includes many Indigenous territories, and Indigenous persons were left out of the consultation process and environmental justice analysis in all of them (Sadasivam, 2020). The Enbridge Line 5 pipeline crosses Lake Michigan waters that are culturally and economically important for the Anishinaabe people, and the state of disrepair of the pipeline poses serious risks to water quality. The TransCanada Coastal GasLink threatens the lands and sovereignty of the the Wet’suwet’en people. The resistance movement of the Unist’ot’en Camp has been vocal about the lack of consent by Canada and the corporate backers of the project (see http://unistoten.camp).
The Gwich'in Tribe has been engaged in a long resistance to oil drilling and transportation in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The refuge is home to the tribe's history and relations with the Porcupine caribou herd. Luci Beach, a representative of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, said in a press conference that it is “unacceptable that another nation is allowed to be destroyed [for oil].” The Gwich’in Nation’s homeland spreads across northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada, and includes the ANWR. Gwich’in have occupied this land for more than 20,000 years and subsist primarily on hunting caribou. This land is sacred to the Gwich’in people, who call it “the sacred place where life begins” (quoted in Cultural Survival, 2005).
For decades, the Northern Cheyenne Tribe has