A View From The Left-On Standing Rock and Land Theft

Workers Vanguard No. 1102	16 December 2016

On Standing Rock and Land Theft

(Letter)

28 October 2016

First of all, I agree with the fundamental line of the WV article, “Standoff at Standing Rock” (23 Sept. 2016 [WV No. 1096]), which rejects environmentalist arguments against any oil pipeline on principle: “We do not counsel the capitalist ruling class on the most effective way to run its economy.” WV correctly argues for “generous compensation” to the Native peoples when “socially useful development” (railroads, pipelines, hydroelectric projects) is involved.

At the same time, WV allows that when Native peoples’ land rights are being trampled on by government, as is the case in western Canada, then Marxists have to side with the Native peoples.

The only question is: are there any Indian land rights being trampled on at Standing Rock? WV rejects Bill McKibben’s argument that the pipeline goes “across land that was taken from the tribe in 1958.” Instead WV asserts that “in fact, the DAPL goes north of land seized in 1958 and does not cross it.” I have no way to know about this, so in the end, I just accepted WV’s conclusion on the basis of trust, namely, that the Sioux have no legal basis to argue about land rights in this case, though they of course have a historical argument to make about the treatment of Indians.

But last night (Oct. 27) I saw a segment of “The Last Word” with Lawrence O’Donnell which made me wonder that maybe some facts have been missed here. O’Donnell was interviewing actor Mark Ruffalo, who had just returned from Standing Rock. A rough partial transcript follows:

Ruffalo: They asked the young [Native] people to leave today. They said, “No, we’re gonna fight for our lives, we’re fighting for our water. This is a second genocide for us.”

They’re there to protect their land.

If you went to the 1851 treaty, the land treaty, this land belongs to the Natives.

O’Donnell: A treaty that we violated.

Ruffalo: This land belongs to the Natives, and all president Obama has to do is say, with the stroke of a pen, “that easement belongs to the Natives, back off!”

Leaving aside their foolish strategy of pinning their hopes on Obama (and also Hillary Clinton, who was presented a letter from the young Native protesters), Ruffalo presents some information I had not seen before, namely references to an 1851 treaty (actually there were two treaties that year) and some kind of “easement” held by the Sioux tribes. What’s that all about?

I simply don’t know, and Ruffalo may just be running on emotions and ignorance. The history here is full of treaties that were violated, but can a lawyer make a case that the tribes have an “easement” on nearby land, even if they don’t own it? If so, that may force a change in WV’s position.

PS – Today (Oct. 29) I found this bulletin from Indian Country Today which reports unambiguously that, on setting up a new camp directly on the path of the pipeline, “water protectors took back unceded territory affirmed in the 1851 Treaty of Ft. Laramie as sovereign land under the control of the Oceti Sakowin, erecting a frontline camp of several structures and tipis on Dakota Access property.” This confirms that the tribes claim concrete land rights which are being violated by the oil company.

Mark K.

WV replies: We thank Mark K. for his letter. About 35 miles of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) route crosses land that was stolen from the Sioux in the late 19th century, just one small example of the brutal dispossession of indigenous peoples that American capitalism was built on. The 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie recognized the Heart tributary of the Missouri River as the northern boundary of Sioux territory. The current border of the Standing Rock reservation lies roughly 30 miles farther south, along Cedar Creek and the Cannonball River. The Sioux are owed substantial compensation for the theft of the land between the Heart and Cannonball Rivers, a demand that we should have raised in our earlier articles.

This historic land grab does not change our attitude toward the pipeline. As the article quoted in Mark’s letter explained, we neither oppose nor support the DAPL. At the same time, we defend the anti-pipeline protesters against the vicious, racist police and company repression meted out against them. Our article also gave the example of the Northern Gateway pipeline in western Canada, which our comrades of the Trotskyist League of Canada/Ligue Trotskyste du Canada oppose because it brazenly flouts the land rights of the Native peoples who are the predominant population in the regions that the pipeline would traverse. That is not the case with the DAPL, which crosses land that has not been Sioux territory for almost 150 years and is inhabited by other people.

The Sioux territory recognized by the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty encompassed 60 million acres spread across North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska. (The territory north of the Heart River was territory of the Arikara, Mandan and Hidatsa.) The 1851 treaty, imposed at the time of the California gold rush, gave settlers the right to cross Indian lands. In 1868, the U.S. government enforced a second Treaty of Fort Laramie that restricted where the Sioux could reside within their own territory. By the mid 1870s, with the construction of transcontinental railroads and the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, settlers had encroached on the Sioux reservation. Meanwhile, government-encouraged hunting had almost exterminated the bison in the area, depriving the tribe of its main food source. The rapid westward expansion of American capitalism following the Civil War destroyed the material basis for tribal life.

The border of the Standing Rock reservation south of the DAPL route was established through an executive order by President Ulysses Grant in 1875. This was part of a genocidal policy that confined Native tribes to barren reservations. The policy was enforced through a series of wars designed, in the words of U.S. general John Pope, who led the 1862 offensive in Minnesota, “to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so.... They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromises can be made.”

The destruction of tribal society, which included centuries of broken treaties and land seizures, cannot be reversed. Capitalism offers American Indians only squalor and desperation on the reservations or pervasive bigotry and impoverishment in the cities. The working class should support the tribes’ struggles to claw back from the U.S. rulers whatever compensation they can. But it will take workers revolution that shatters the system of racist American capitalism to divert a meaningful influx of wealth to Indians and other oppressed populations, and embark on a massive program of economic development to lay the basis for a society of material abundance. A workers government will offer Native people the choice of voluntary integration into an egalitarian society or the fullest possible autonomy for those who desire it.

On December 4, the Army Corps of Engineers delayed the easement—government permission—for the DAPL to be laid underneath Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock reservation, in order to carry out an environmental study. Fear that the pipeline would contaminate the Standing Rock reservation’s water supply was a major component of the anti-pipeline protests. But oil pipelines, in addition to serving a socially useful function of transporting fuel, are safer overall than shipping fuel by rail or road. While construction is halted, oil from the Bakken shale field will continue to be transported across the Missouri River by other, more dangerous means. We fight for union safety committees that would enforce safety standards and practices in construction, operation and maintenance.

The environmentalists Mark mentions in his letter use the 1851 treaty in service of their demand to “leave fossil fuels in the ground.” With society currently dependent on fossil fuels, this reactionary program would be a disaster for Native peoples and everyone else. For the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara tribes on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, developing the oil wells in tribal lands on the Bakken shale brought desperately needed income to the tribe and dramatically reduced unemployment on the reservation. (At the same time, development on the reservation enriches the tribal bureaucracy, which dispenses government funds and controls jobs as well as the revenue from mineral holdings and land, while other tribal members go hungry.)

Human-induced climate change is a real problem, but nothing good can come from advising the world’s biggest plunderers on how best to power their economy, as the environmentalists do. The anarchic and crisis-ridden capitalist system not only breeds poverty and inequality but also is the main obstacle to addressing global warming on the necessary world scale. Freed from the fetters of production for profit, a workers government would strive to generate and use energy in the most rational, efficient and safe manner possible, including by developing other sources—nuclear, solar, wind, etc. Even then, it may well prove necessary to harness fossil fuels for a period of time. Only in the context of an international socialist economy that relegates hunger and poverty to the past can a rational plan be hammered out to modulate climate change and minimize its human toll.