What Would Sitting Bull Do?

AS SUMMER drew to a close, one of the great dramas in the planet’s ongoing environmental uprising erupted in a remote place, the Standing Rock Sioux reservation that straddles the border of North and South Dakota. The Army Corps of Engineers had approved plans for “fast-tracking” the Dakota Access pipeline, which would carry crude from the Bakken shale of North Dakota west to Illinois and then south to Gulf refineries. The pipeline was mostly on private land, and the company had gotten most of the necessary approvals from pliant state officials—but it had to cross the Missouri River somewhere.

The original plans had called for that crossing to happen just above Bismarck, a mostly white North Dakota city. But there had been concern about what would happen to the town’s water supply in the event of a leak, so the map had been redrawn, to take the pipe across the river just above the Sioux reservation. And the Army Corps had signed off on the plan—even though three other federal agencies, including the EPA, had raised serious objections. Just another day in the ongoing saga of environmental injustice that haunts this nation.

Except that this time something unexpected happened. The local Sioux said no: They erected an encampment blocking access to the construction work. And their message spread: White environmentalists joined them, as well as a crew from Black Lives Matter, but mostly other native Americans poured in, from all across the West—representatives of as many as 200 different tribal nations, according to reports. Chief Harry Goodwolf Kindness of the American Indian Movement commented that it has been well over a century since people from so many tribes had engaged in such joint action. “First time since the Battle of Greasy Grass,” he said, “so it’s been a long time.”

The 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass is better known to most Americans as the Battle of Little Big Horn—and invoking it here is a reminder of just how much native communities have suffered at the hands of the U.S. Army, whose Corps of Engineers is engineering this pipeline. Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge—Standing Rock may someday join that list, though hopefully as a peaceful triumph, not a bloody loss. A place where the tide began to turn.

I’m particularly glad that Indigenous people are in the spotlight here, because they’ve been at the forefront—all over the world—of the fight for a sane environmental future. Without their leadership the battle over the Keystone pipeline would never have been joined, much less won. In Australia, aboriginal leaders were crucial in stopping plans for the world’s biggest coal mine. In the Pacific, it’s native islanders who are leading the reaction to coral reef bleaching.

These may be among the sanest people on a planet where sanity is rarely the rule. As the rest of the world pushes us over a climatic cliff, native people—the only people who’ve managed long-term successful inhabitation of this continent, anyway—are doing their best to remind us of some basic truths. As the great warrior Winona LaDuke wrote from the reservation:

The Standing Rock protest camp represents that struggle for freedom and the future of a people. All of us. If I ask the question, “What would Sitting Bull do?”—the answer is pretty clear. He would remind me what he said 150 years ago: “Let us put our minds together to see what kind of future we can make for our children.”