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General News    H2'ed 6/27/14

North Dakota Culture of Silence Opens the Door Wide for Big Oil

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So we packed up and headed west again, following the rail line and Enbridge Line 81.


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Enbridge Website

It was a late spring, the corn was six inches high at most, and a few deer were browsing in the furrows. We would detour south on County 4 to check out the Larimore Dam and Recreation Area that sits two miles from the proposed pipeline.

The Larimore Dam is a 66.7-acre reservoir on the upper Turtle River in Grand Forks County. Its watershed encompasses 41,344 acres-- protected waters under the hopefully watchful eye of the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers.

Line 81 had a small spill near Grand Forks in 2013. The company said less than ten gallons leaked, but Line 81 and its cargo of 210,00 barrels per day was shut down as a precaution while more pressure tests were done. It was a small leak compared to the rupture of Line 6B in Kalamazoo Michigan in 2010. 20,500 barrels polluted the waterway, and cleanup is still not completed.

After a call to the County Recorder's Office we decided to veer north on 281 and check out Cando. Cando is the county seat of Towner County. Founded in 1884, the population was 1,115 at the 2010 census. The story was the same there as it was in Lakota, but by the time we reached Cando, we had a map to offer to puzzled county officials who had absolutely no idea where the proposed Sandpiper would run. The newspaper of record, The Towner County Record Herald, was also in the dark. It is s strange feeling to be a writer going to the first source of information, the local newspaper, only to find out you know more than the staff.


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School in the abandoned town of Maza, south of Cando

And so it went until we reached Minot. On the way we drove right over the Geographic Center of North America, but were too focused on our maps to notice.

We came away from our journey through the small towns of the northern Great Plains with a better sense of history and a vanishing legacy of European settlers. It was only on First Nation reservations that we sensed awareness, but hopelessness seemed to feed on the knowledge that something big and unstoppable was happening.

"We woke up and we realized we lost it."(Fort Berthold Elder)

Are we being devoured by our hunger for cheap power? Are oil companies using a new embodiment of Manifest Destiny on the Great Plains?

When Sakakawea joined the Lewis and Clark expedition and offered her knowledge of trading routes, she opened the doorway to the West. Settlers arrived, so did smallpox, and the Mandan and Hidatsa were forced to abandon their ancestral homelands. The broken Fort Laramie treaty forced a final move by the tribes to the Fort Berthold Reservation with their allies the Arikara.

Are we collectively opening the door to unbridled oil exploration when we do not question intent or at the very least demand information on infrastructure? Are we a generation of unwitting guides, leading the way to the destruction of our culture and way of life?

Next: What happened at Knife River--A Cautionary Tale
Special thanks to Alyssa Hoppe of Honor the Earth

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Georgianne Nienaber is an investigative environmental and political writer. She lives in rural northern Minnesota and South Florida. Her articles have appeared in The Society of Professional Journalists' Online Quill Magazine, the Huffington (more...)
 

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