We learned this from our exploration of the proposed Sandpiper Pipeline route through North Dakota and Minnesota. In North Dakota, county officials did not have access to maps of the Sandpiper, and residents had no idea a pipeline was proposed for their counties.
Lewis and Clark lived with the Knife River people before beginning their fraudulent expedition. Ironically, the Shoshone wife of a French Canadian trapper, Toussaint Charbonneau, led the expedition as a translator and guide. Sakakawea was immortalized on a now defunct US dollar coin, and a reservoir that now floods a good portion of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation is named for her. Under Lake Sakakawea are hidden pipelines. "Tesoro and Enbridge (at the far west end of its east-west line) cross with crude oil lines; WBI and Northern Border cross with natural gas lines; and Dakota Gasification Co. crosses with carbon dioxide." Enbridge would like to build another.
What would Sakakawea say today? Would she agree to act as a guide and interpreter for Lewis and Clark if she knew the consequences?
Today, representatives from the oil companies visit courthouse after courthouse along proposed pipeline routes, quietly researching deeds and following the letter of the law with public meeting notices that no one attends. Whether through ignorance or indifference, non-indigenous people on the plains are handing the new 'trade' routes over without a whimper of unified protest.
Will they, like Sakakawea, become unwitting guides to their own destruction? Will pipelines run under what were once family farms, finally polluted by oil leaks and forever uninhabitable?
The Enbridge Company is known for spills. There are an estimated 800 documented spills in the last ten years.
The Kalamazoo Spill spewed almost one million gallons of oil, and continued for seventeen hours without being discovered by the Enbridge Company. It was discovered by residents.
North Dakota has a website for company-reported spills, but can companies be trusted with reporting on themselves?
The Sandpiper pipeline, a proposed 375,000 barrels per day, would cut through a chain of lakes south of Park Rapids and Walker, towards Brainerd and McGregor, in Minnesota and then route to refineries in the Duluth and Superior area.
See Enbridge website
The Enbridge Company is also proposing to match that pipeline with a re-route of Line 3, carrying possibly another 400,000- 800,000 barrels of oil, and most likely another two pipelines, in the next decade. That is more oil than the Keystone XL.
In Minnesota, the route is being carefully examined, according to the Minneapolis Forum News Service.
The Sandpiper route across water-rich northern Minnesota has too many places where things could go wrong, they say -- dozens of open water and hundreds of wetland crossings. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency found at least 28 water crossings where it would be difficult or impossible to get oil spill cleanup crews to the site, if a spill ever occurred, because they are so far from any road.
In North Dakota, the proposed Sandpiper pipeline goes through Mountrail County and across two important aquifers. One aquifer supplies the Devils Lake recreational area with fresh water. No one in North Dakota seems to be making much of a fuss, except for tribal leaders and several Facebook groups such as No Fracking Way Turtle Mountain Tribe.
Social networking has become a critical resource for public information on fracking, oil spills and pipeline infrastructure on the Great Plains. But, is it enough?
A civilization was lost as a result of Manifest Destiny. So was cultural identity. Sacred lands are continually under assault from utility companies.
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