On Sept. 9, the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama temporarily halted construction on the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, a proposed crude oil pipeline that would stretch from North Dakota to Illinois. Although seemingly a win for protesters, it’s temporary and it took — no surprise here — way too long.
There are a lot of reasons for people to think this project is a bad idea. On one end of the spectrum, it’s an environmental issue. Building a pipeline near Lake Oahe, a major source of water, risks contaminating that water and irreparably damaging the ecosystems that depend on it. A great deal of Dakota Access protesters will tell you that is why they’re protesting — water is the ultimate source of life. On the other end of the spectrum is what I’m going to spend the rest of this piece talking about: tribal sovereignty.
Tribal sovereignty is a tricky topic to navigate, but it essentially means that tribes have the right to govern their lands, like the lands slated to host Dakota Access, and make decisions for themselves. At the same time, they are sometimes subject to the paternalistic power of the United States.
The best analogy I can come up with is this: they’re like local municipalities in that they have some power but are not entirely independent. On the other hand, unlike local municipalities, we, as the United States, are notoriously bad at co-existing with tribal nations.
Most of the problems Native Americans face — high rates of crime, poverty, unemployment, sexual assault, disease — stem from the fact that our government never listens to what they have to say. That, or we don’t want to put in the effort necessary to try. We’re never going to ask permission to build a crude oil pipeline through sacred tribal burial grounds. We’re just going to do it. And later on, when a tribe demands that we halt construction because it’s in violation of their sovereignty, we’re going to deny them that right.
The beauty of the Dakota Access protests is that they’re turning a black-and-white environmental issue into a conversation about our treatment of Native Americans. Because of this, Obama couldn’t afford to stay silent. He had to step in, not necessarily because he wanted to, but because his silence would be interpreted as apathy toward a struggling and impoverished people. Obama weighed big oil against tribal sovereignty and fortunately chose the latter.
But what happens when Obama leaves office and this is still a problem? We’ve got two potential candidates running to replace him. Republican nominee Donald Trump hasn’t talked about the pipeline, but he gets a pass on this because he doesn’t really talk about anything. The silence of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, though, is deeply troubling.
Even her supporters, myself included, have concluded that Clinton is not great on the environment. According to Greenpeace, she and her campaign have received $6.9 million from lobbyists connected to the fossil fuel industry, and she’s too lax on the extremely controversial practice of fracking. The environment is a make-or-break issue for many young voters, and Clinton, by staying silent on Dakota Access, is disappointing them. However, like I said earlier, she’s not shocking anyone.
This isn’t just about the environment, though. It’s about Native American rights, an issue that Clinton has been pretty strong with in the past. Her platform isn’t as specific or comprehensive as that of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, but the same basic, well-intentioned ideas are there. By choosing to stay silent on the pipeline, she’s voluntarily ignoring the sovereignty of tribal nations everywhere despite promising them otherwise. That’s the shocking part.
There’s a laundry list of reforms we need to enact and a boatload of history for which we need to apologize. Often, doing nothing is the harshest form of aggression, and we can’t let our next president, like the presidents before her, be an aggressor. We can do better. We need to do better, and it’s high time that we realize that.
