Lakota Tribes "Refuse to Cooperate" With Tar Sands Proponents

[annm4peace]

The Keystone XL pipeline and a message from indigenous resistance.

As people gather to protest the greed and corruption of Wall Street in downtown Manhattan and throughout the world, the territories of indigenous peoples and nations have been the front lines of this conflict for a long, long, time.

Clayton Thomas-Muller, of the Pukatawagan Cree Nation, is an anti-tar sands campaigner with the Indigenous Environmental Network, and is responsible for coordinating an indigenous team which operates both in the United States and Canada supporting locally led tactics and strategies aimed at stopping the Canadian tar sands expansion and its encroachment into traditional and treaty territories of first nations in Alberta and British Columbia.

White Plume's message to TransCanada is one in which many who are filling town squares and city parks across the globe seem to be relating to in recent weeks. She told Truthout, "TransCanada needs us to be silent. TransCanada needs us to stay home. TransCanada needs us to be idle in order for them to build this pipeline and I refuse to cooperate with TransCanada."

[azurnoir]

1. I wish them good fortune in this n/t

[poverlay]

2. It's nice to know that someone out there knows how to treat our mother... n/t

[FirstLight]

3. A-Ho!

Sharing...and writing whoever I can to stand in solidarity!

[Tsiyu]

4. A-Ho

Keep on fighting the fight, Lakota.

This time, maybe you'll have some help and maybe "Black Eagle" will do the right thing by you and by the land.

[xchrom]

5. Good. Nt

[tama]

6. Occupy ancestral lands.

Power and many blessings to our Lakota brothers and sisters.

Aho Mitakuye Oyasin.

[Leopolds Ghost]

7. If we could kill MMS, we can do this. n/t

[catgirl]

8. K&R

[SpiralHawk]

9. This story is about a Cree leader, not a Lakota leader

There's some history between the two nations.

But the Cree are the Cree, and not someone else.

Whatever. Glad to see them taking a righteous stand.

[a la izquierda]

10. That was going to be my first comment.

I didn't read the whole article, but if they talk about the leaders of several indigenous groups, they have to re-title the article.

[annm4peace]

11. my bad.. here is the link. sorry about that.

http://www.truth-out.org/lakota-tribes-refuse-cooperate-tar-sands-proponents/1320241082

snip:

"Invading Treaty Territory

Pat Spears serves as president of Intertribal COUP, the Council on Utility Policy, which represents the energy policy and renewable energy development interests for 15 tribes in the Northern Plains, surrounded by the Fort Laramie Treaty lands in the states of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Montana and Wyoming.

The Fort Laramie Treaties, guaranteed by the US Constitution, secure the lands of the Lakota Nation for the Lakota People. The tar sands Keystone XL oil pipeline would pass through these lands while crossing the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the world's largest, which supplies fresh water to the surrounding reservations as well as eight US states.

In his testimony during a US State Department meeting in Pierre, South Dakota, on September 29, Spears, a member of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and a former tribal chairman stated, "The mining and pipeline transport of tar sands oil from northern Alberta has a devastating impact on the lands, water, forests, ecosystem, wildlife and the health of the Cree and Dine Nations and all indigenous people in Canada. This high carbon extraction process combined with the future burning of fuels compounds the impact on global warming. If tar sands oil mining is fully expanded, the impacts of climate change will be irreversible."

At a recent summit on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, non-Native ranchers and land owners from lands surrounding the proposed route of the tar sands Keystone XL oil pipeline, gathered to voice opposition to the project's construction.

Attending the summit was Lakota grandmother and activist Debra White Plume. The construction of the pipeline, according to White Plume, is a continuation of the destruction of her culture and of her nation.

White Plume told Truthout, "To us this oil pipeline coming in across our drinking water and surface water source, if our water line is contaminated by that oil it will be genocide for our Oglala Lakota people. There are 50,000 of us on the Pine Ridge Reservation," she continued. "Our Mni Waconi water line is our only source of drinking water so if the pipeline contaminates that it is genocide for our Oglala band of the Lakota Nation. A lot of us look at that in terms of the same impact the buffalo hunters had in exterminating the buffalo herds which sustained our people."

To the Lakota, the Keystone XL pipeline will be like a train running through their culture, as White Plume explained, seeing the relationship between how, "the railroads coming in through our territory all those generations ago not only split the buffalo herd in two, it impacted our access to the buffalo. It was also the transportation which brought the settlers and the pilgrims into our treaty territory and impacted our way of life and our freedom," she said."