Dakota Access Pipeline Quotes

The winning candidate, now the president elect, calls for rapid increase in use of fossil fuels, including coal; dismantling of regulations; rejection of help to developing countries that are seeking to move to sustainable energy; and in general, racing to the cliff as fast as possible. Trump has already taken steps to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by placing in charge of the EPA transition a notorious (and proud) climate change denier, Myron Ebell. Trump's top adviser on energy, billionaire oil executive Harold Hamm, announced his expectations, which were predictable: dismantling regulations, tax cuts for the industry (and the wealthy and corporate sector generally), more fossil fuel production, lifting Obama's temporary block on the Dakota Access pipeline. The market reacted quickly. Shares in energy corporations boomed, including the world's largest coal miner, Peabody Energy, which had filed for bankruptcy, but after Trump's victory, registered a 50 percent gain.

Under capitalism, neither Democrat nor Republican can save Indigenous lands or Black and Indigenous lives. The continuation of state-sanctioned racial terror against Black and Native people, from police violence to energy development, from one administration to the next demonstrates only radical change in the form of decolonization, the repatriation of stolen lands and stolen lives, can undo centuries of settler colonialism.

By following its own legal traditions, the arc of the Western moral universe never bends towards Indigenous justice. At best, it ignores it. At worst, it annihilates it.

Indigenous resistance is not a one-time event. It continually asks: What proliferates in the absence of empire? Thus, it defines freedom not as the absence of settler colonialism, but as the amplified presence of Indigenous life and just relations with human and nonhuman relatives, and with the earth.

In this particular era of neoliberal capitalism, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism—the specific form of colonialism whereby an imperial power seizes Native territory, eliminates the original people by force, and resettles the land with a foreign, invading population.

Obama spoke of being inspired by the courage of Black civil rights activists and freedom riders, who faced dog attacks, fire hoses, and police brutality, and “who risked everything to advance democracy.” Yet under his watch, private security working on behalf of DAPL unleashed attack dogs on unarmed Water Protectors who were attempting to stop bulldozers form destroying a burial ground; Morton County sheriff’s deputies sprayed Water Protectors with water cannons in freezing temperatures, injuring hundreds; and police officers and private security guards brutalized hundreds of unarmed protestors. All of this violence was part of an effort to put a pipeline through Indigenous lands.

Another inspiring example is Standing Rock,” I said, referencing the 2016 protests to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline that would likely threaten the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation’s primary water source and desecrate their sacred sites. “The police used pepper spray, tear gas, rubber bullets, and even sprayed the protestors with water in the freezing winter, and still the protestors stayed. Thinking about that now, it was the young people of Standing Rock who emerged as leaders in that occupation.

The first wave of guilt came with images of the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. The pipeline was constructed to transport crude oil through the Dakotas into Illinois. It was voted on and decided by White men and given permission not through voluntary easements, as was originally required, but instead through forced condemnations and evictions. The Standing Rock Sioux disagreed with the pipeline, as it was likely to destroy their ancestral burial grounds and taint their water supply with viscous, black poison. Their voices went unheard.