Standing Rock, Coalsburg, and Environmental Racism

The Standing Rock standoff over the Dakota Access Pipeline was a reminder that colonization, and resistances to it, both exist in the present tense. Fossil fuel pipelines that despoil Indigenous lands and waters have become key flashpoints in long-standing anti-colonial resistance. An important precursor and inspiration for the Standing Rock camp is an Indigenous occupation in northern British Columbia, Canada. For the past eight years, the Unist'ot'en clan have reoccupied their traditional territory. When the camp began in 2009, seven pipelines had been proposed to cross their territory, as well as their water source, the salmon-bearing Morice River. But thanks to Unist'ot'en resistance, oil and gas companies have been blocked from building new fossil fuel infrastructure. The lesser known but wildly successful Unist'ot'en encampment holds crucial lessons for anti-pipeline and anti-colonial organizers across North America, or Turtle Island, as many Indigenous nations call it.

Abya-yala: Revista sobre Acesso à Justiça e Direitos nas Américas, 2018

Protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline led by water protectors from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota have brought human rights violations related to Indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, and sustainable development into the foreground of political debate in the United States. The struggle at Standing Rock has been strengthened by a coalition formed with activists from other Indigenous Nations, including representatives from the Amazon Basin, and from non-Indigenous movements and political organizations such as the Green Party and #BlackLivesMatter. This article reflects upon the centrality of Indigenous Sovereignty within the broader struggle for human rights and democracy in their most inclusive and substantive senses, especially in societies whose development has been built upon the violence of colonial expansion, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. The article also situates Indigenous rights within regimes of multiple articulated alterities in which ...

Saturation: An Elemental Politics, 2021

Environmental racism and settler colonial infrastructural projects like the Keystone XL pipeline pose a dire threat to Indigenous communities, global food supply, and the future of the High Plains ecosystem. The Ogallala Aquifer lying beneath the High Plains provides drinking water for millions of people and supplies a third of all irrigation groundwater in the continental United States. This freshwater aquifer is threatened by the construction of fossil fuel pipelines. Given this agricultural region’s importance to national and global food supply, an oil spill impacting the aquifer the High Plains relies on will have deadly and global repercussions. The ecological, political, and legal demands at stake in the 2016-2017 Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) created growing awareness of the present and future problems that would result from construction of fossil fuel pipelines like the Keystone XL. Indeed, water resource regulation in the United States has been shaped not only by industrial concerns and states’ rights but also by treaties between Indigenous nations and the United States. The Mní Wičoni / Water is Life movement’s urgent call to rethink the political ecology of water beyond settler colonial paradigms is considered here within legal, historical, literary, and ecological frameworks. This article examines the ramifications of United States treaty law and Indigenous water rights, considering the threats that fossil fuel pipelines pose both to land and to ancient, subterranean waters they traverse.

Women and Environments international magazine, 2019

Review of "Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance" by Nick Estes, at pages 90-91 of the 100/101 issue of the Women and Environments International Magazine, 2019.

Religion and Society

The No Dakota Access Pipeline resistance movement provides a poignant example of the way in which cultural, spiritual, and oral traditions remain authoritative in the lives of American Indian peoples, specifically the Lakota people. Confronted with restrictions of their religious freedoms and of access to clean drinking water due to construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), members of Lakota communities engaged with traditions specific to their communities to inform and structure the No DAPL resistance movement. A series of interviews conducted on the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation with tribal members reveal that Lakota spiritual traditions have been integral to every aspect of the movement, including the motivations for, organization of, and understanding of the future of the movement.

Starting in April 2016, thousands of people, led by Standing Rock Sioux Tribal members, gathered at camps to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)—creating the #NoDAPL movement. I am concerned with how critics of #NoDAPL often focus on defending the pipeline’s safety precautions or the many attempts the Army Corps of Engineers made at consulting the Tribe. Yet critics rarely engage what LaDonna Brave Bull Allard calls “the larger story.” To me, as an Indigenous supporter of #NoDAPL, one thread of the larger story concerns how DAPL is an injustice against the Tribe. The type of injustice is one that many other Indigenous peoples can identify with—U.S. settler colonialism. I seek to show how there are many layers to the settler colonial injustice behind DAPL that will take me, by the end of this essay, from U.S. disrespect of treaty promises in the 19th century to environmental sustainability and climate change in the 21st century. Updated and republished (2019) in Nature of Hope: Grassroots Organizing, Environmental Justice, and Social Change. Edited by C. Miller and J. Crane. University of Colorado Press, pgs. 320-337. Originally published in Whyte, K.P. 2017. The Dakota Access Pipeline, Environmental Injustice, and U.S. Colonialism. RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities: 19 (1): 154-169.

El Palacio, 2019

The discordant voices heard in the current debate over coal's future are frequently shrill. The competing narratives are strewn with hyperbole intended to influence voters, political leaders, and government policy decisions. This essay seeks to penetrate the exaggerations and misstatements of the competing interests and to separate fact from fiction in the evolving debate about the future of coal. The following discussion includes an analysis of the historic impact of coal mining on coalfield communities and the extent to which legislation intended to protect the health and safety of coal miners and the environment has succeeded.