I wanted to write a story about strength and resilience. I wanted to write a story about the singers, the horse people, and the earth lodge builders of the Mandan Hidatsa and Arikara peoples, the squash and corn, the heartland of agricultural wealth in the Northern Plains. That's the story I have been wanting to write. But that story is next. The story today is about folly, greed, confusion, unspeakable intergenerational trauma and terrifying consequences, all in a moment in time. That time is now.
For me, this story began at Lake Superior, a place that is sacred to the Anishinaabeg, the source of a fifth of the world's fresh water. I rode my horse with my family, my community and our allies, from that place, Rice Lake Refuge, to Rice Lake, on my own reservation. Those two lakes are the mother lode of the world's wild rice. Those two lakes--in fact, the entire region--are threatened by a newly proposed pipeline of fracked oil from what is known as the Bakken Oil Fields of North Dakota, from the homeland of those Arikara people. The pipeline proposed is called the Sandpiper. We rode, but we did not stop. Driven to go to the source, we traveled to North Dakota. That is this story.
Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara territory lies along the northern Missouri River, a land of gentle rolling hills, immense prairie diversity and the memory of 50 million buffalo. It is today called the Ft. Berthold reservation, and it is known as the sweet spot for Bakken crude oil. About 20 percent of North Dakota's oil production is coming from this reservation, in a state with 19,000 wells. Lynn Helms, ND Director of Mines, speaks from a panel, telling us that there are 193 drilling rigs in North Dakota--one-sixth of them, or 28, on the Ft. Berthold reservation, 14 on trust lands and l4 on fee lands. There are 1,250 active and producing wells on the reservation, with 2,150 leased and ready to drill. Then, Helms explains, these wells will be in the "harvest phase of production," soon. Everywhere, it is lit up, as if the Lord of the Rings' Eye of Sauron is sweeping its piercing, deadly gaze across the land.
That is what we see.
What we also see is that there's a huge change in wealth on the reservation. In fact, things have been going so well that the tribal council--which five years ago was facing a $200 million debt--is now well into the black. The tribal chairman (who just lost a primary election), Tex "Chief Red Tipped Arrow" Hall, is rumored to be a millionaire. The tribal council purchased a yacht, a 149-passenger yacht. That is a yacht to take Senators like Heidi Heidkamp and oil company executives out and about on the lake that drowned their culture, and to enjoy the beauty and opulence that many oil rich countries are accustomed to. The yacht sits quietly on a dock by the casino. No fanfare today.
So let us talk about poverty and how North Dakota and the U.S. have treated the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara people historically. It may be true of all Native people in the region. They were the poorest for many years, an unspeakable poverty of loss" intergenerational trauma and the meanness of America" all manifest during the Indian wars and in the smallpox epidemics that wiped out 90 percent of their people. That was crowned by the deepest of destruction--the 1954 Garrison Diversion project, which submerged a people under Lake Sakakawea, taking 152,000 acres of their best land. The dams drowned their villages, drowned their agricultural wealth, drowned their history and rewrote it in America's manual of agricultural progress.
The sense of despair was in some ways manifest in the landmark Dana Deegan case, in which Deegan abandoned and allowed to die her newborn infant, an unspeakable horror. For this she was sentenced to a decade in prison, in a highly controversial federal court decision. (Similar cases involving non-Native women resulted in supervised probation and reduced sentences.)
"The law needs to be changed, and Indians need to be treated the same as their non-Indian neighbors," Judge Myron Bright, dissenting judge on the federal appeals court, said of the verdict. Bright pointed to the historic trauma and abuse in the Deegan case as the basis for his dissent. In the end, there is no grief that I can imagine is deeper. Except perhaps the grief that is to come. That is unimaginable. And that grief could either be prevented by tribal leaders, or inherited by their children.
That is part of the question to be asked here. How much does the tribal leadership know about what is going on? And how much do the people know?
Kandi Mossett, a tribal member, along with many other community members like Theodora and Joletta Birdbear, have been fighting it all. They have been trying to protect their community for a decade from new threats and ongoing destruction. This includes the huge Basin Electric coal generation facilities, burning the dirtiest coal in America, just upwind from their villages; oil refinery proposals that have been accelerated through federal processes (when no new oil refineries have been built for decades in the U.S., but tribal sovereignty could shield this one and expedite its process), and then the fracking, the eye of Sauron. The women's Facebook page, This is Mandaree, contains a wealth of information. They are not alone, but the MHA tribal council has great influence, and money is power.
Fracking oil is a new technology. Despite industry claims, it is a big experiment, made possible because of a perfect storm: an entire lack of federal, state or tribal regulation, and unlimited access to water and air, into which everything is dumped.
The 2005 Energy Policy Act had something in it called the Halliburton Amendment. That amendment exempted the oil and gas industry from most major environmental laws. This includes special exemptions from: the Superfund Act (CERCLA); the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA, which manages hazardous waste); the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act, which maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the nation's waters; the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Clean Air Act. For the Clean Air Act, the exemptions involve emissions from any oil or gas exploration or production well (with its associated equipment) and emissions from any pipeline compressor or pump. The exemptions have worked out pretty well for industry and, one might argue, for the short-term leaseholder and for royalties. Not so for those trying to protect the environment.
Fort Berthold Reservation Environmental Director Edmund Baker has been a bit challenged in his regulation of the fracking industry. On July 8, the Crestwood Spill was discovered. About a million gallons of radioactive and highly saline water was found leaking from a pipe and headed to a stream and Lake Sakakawea. Industry officials, joined by Hall, talked about how, fortuitously, all had been saved by three beaver dams. Let's just say that "Leave it to Beaver" may be a bit of a simplistic environmental protection plan.
The spill was found. Always a problem, because when something is found, it has usually gone on for quite a while. (After all, the 800,000 gallon oil spill which occurred last year in the Bakken was discovered about two months after it had started seeping out of a quarter size hole in a pipe.) The Crestwood spill is estimated to be well over a million gallons of highly saline and radioactive water. Environmental Director Edmund Baker has not been able to review any of the spill data.
It is held by the Tribal Council.
"My officers had asked if they could get copies of the samples".my officers were denied," Baker said. "I don't have the data, I don't have any solid numbers" I never received anything."
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