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The standoff at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota over the construction of an oil pipeline that threatens to contaminate water and ceremonial sites has focused attention on native peoples. Who knew that American Indians, along with thousands of supporters from around the world, would risk physical harm from authorities and endure harsh weather conditions in order to take a stand against corporate America and the U.S. government?
To most Americans, the clash between the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and the Dakota Access Pipeline seems like a rare, even surreal, resurrection of a last-century American Indian uprising. Once mythologized as war-driven savages (mostly by Hollywood), today’s image of the Indian is one of victims-turned-survivors. The culture now recognizes the decades of oppression, albeit mostly as something that has happened in the past.
But it is in fact part of a never-ending dynamic, one that has raged since the arrival of the first Puritans on the country’s eastern shores. It is a conflict that continues to define the broader relationship between tribes and the U.S. government. Standing Rock is only the latest example.
The history of Native Americans is clouded in illusions of transcendence, by Indians and non-Indians alike. Yes, even many Indians like to think of the first Thanksgiving as a peace offering feast to starving Pilgrims. But it was not long thereafter, as those early Europeans began settling the “new world,” that it became clear that there was an “Indian problem.” In the course of finding a solution, a number of those welcoming East Coast tribes were either obliterated, assimilated, or pushed farther west.
And when Thomas Jefferson commissioned Lewis and Clark to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase, which included most of the continent’s western land, the mission had a deeper, darker agenda. Plains tribes were greeted by the expedition with medals from the President. But they were more than salutations of good will. They were meant to signal a new social order.
A few Presidents later, Indians were told to regard Andrew Jackson as their “Great White Father.” Some father. Jackson, in defiance of a United States Supreme Court ruling that upheld the rightful claim of these tribes to remain in their homeland, forced thousands of Cherokee on a Trail of Tears to present-day Oklahoma. This deadly forced relocation became the first of many oppressive federal policies to rid the new republic of its Indian problem.
Each time the nation pressed westward, opening up lands to new European immigrants, the Indians were forced to make way for the expansion. By the late 1800s, in a quest to secure more Indian land, the U.S. government demanded tribes sign treaties that included ceding mass acres of land. What little land tribes clung to was no longer their own. These reservations were now held in trust, which meant they were ultimately owned by the federal government.
Carole Goldberg, a federal Indian policy expert at the University of California in Los Angeles, points out that through legislation and judicial rulings the U.S. government always held the upper hand when it came to dealing with the Indians.
“In its 1886 decision, United States v. Kagama, the U.S. Supreme Court observed that ‘because of the local ill feeling, the people of the States where [Indian tribes] are found are often their deadliest enemies,’ ” Goldberg says. “The word ‘deadliest’ was no accidental choice. In addition to population loss, indigenous peoples throughout the United States have experienced dispossession, removal, destruction of natural and cultural resources, and forced assimilation, often in direct violation of treaty promises.”
And, Goldberg continues, when tribes began pushing back against this massive theft of their land and resources, the tension escalated. “Resistance by tribal groups triggered fierce clashes with federal and state authorities, in what came to be known as the Indian Wars.”
The most defining battle of the Indian Wars came in the later part of the nineteenth century. President Ulysses Grant orchestrated a military conflict with the Lakota that ended in the 1876 slaughter of famed Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and his troops at Little Bighorn.
A recent article in the Smithsonian magazine, using newly uncovered documents, recounts the particulars of this covert operation, which ultimately resulted in the decimation of the powerful Lakota nation and the demise of its military leader, Crazy Horse. The article’s author, historian Peter Cozzens, concluded: “The Grant Administration launched an illegal war and then lied to Congress and the American people about it.”
The goal of this intrigue was to secure access to mining gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota. And it wasn’t an aberration so much as a blueprint.
The goal of this intrigue was to secure access to mining gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota. And it wasn’t an aberration so much as a blueprint.
After a century of blatant federal policies aimed at ridding the nation of Indians, which included more land theft through the Dawes Act of 1887, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 imposed white-style governmental rule over traditional tribal rule for Indian nations. It also created boarding schools and a relocation policy designed to “kill the Indian, but save the man.”
Today, such efforts at cultural genocide evoke mostly shocked reactions. But the war on the American Indian is far from over, especially when it comes to access to natural resources, of which the battle over Standing Rock is only the latest example.
In recent years, a new chapter in the Indian Wars story is being written. Tribes are battling mining and pipeline threats from multinational corporations, who often get either a blind eye or a thumbs up from the federal government. It was, in fact, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that ignored Standing Rock’s sovereign right to legitimately object to the pipeline construction. More recently, the Corps denied an easement to allow the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under the Missouri River, near the encampments at Standing Rock. It is a decision the incoming Trump Administration could undo.
“Although conventional military combat has ended, relentless pursuit of native resources by the dominant, nonnative society persists,” Goldberg says. “Whether it’s development on sacred or culturally significant sites, destruction of treaty-protected fish and game habitats, pollution of tribal water supplies, flooding of tribal lands for dams, or denial of state services to tribal communities, native people understand they are under attack by interests that will only be satisfied if tribes disappear or give up their rights to sovereignty and territory.”
It has become something of a cliché that varying concepts of land ownership are at the heart of the divide between native and nonnative Americans. We tell our schoolchildren that Indians never understood the idea that someone could own land, while whites have believed the opposite. But given how tribal people have been willing, in cases like Standing Rock, to use their bodies as human shields against corporate aggression, that way of looking at things might be in need of some revision. It is their land that the Standing Rock Sioux are trying to protect.
We tell our schoolchildren that Indians never understood the idea that someone could own land...but given how tribal people have been willing to use their bodies as human shields against corporate aggression, that way of looking at things might be in need of some revision.
And so the war continues, as it has since the first settlers arrived. The same story gets played out, again and again. When nonnative people want something native people have, they take it.
But one thing has changed. Today’s Native Americans have better tools to use in their own defense.
“Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, tribes have had new, nonlethal weapons to deploy in these wars,” Goldberg says. “Federal consultation requirements, tribal rights under environmental and Indian self-determination laws, international human rights measures, and resources from tribal gaming and other forms of economic development have enabled some tribes to fight back successfully.”
While such tribal victories may lead to better Indian and federal relations, Goldberg knows better than to suggest the conflicts are going to end anytime soon. “The Indian wars are being waged differently,” she says, “but they have not yet concluded.”