DAPL & THE AMERICAN INDIAN AS “PROTECTOR”
In hindsight: To better understand the Dakota Access Pipeline debate, it’s important to recognize that American Indians have been contributing to a national and international conversation about environmental health and justice since the 1960s. They have been fighting for a cleaner environment for all Americans, rather than just protesting “progress” or energy development on their reservations.
The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) debate once again thrust American Indians into the spotlight as symbols of environmental resistance. As a reminder, it was in September 2016 that thousands of people descended on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota and camped out for months in an effort to prevent a Texas firm from building the Dakota Access Pipeline. The pipeline transports North Dakota Bakken crude oil along a route near Sioux land, and critics contended it would contaminate local water supplies and disturb Indian burial grounds and other sites the Sioux considered sacred.
But the debate also reinforced the stereotype of the anti-progress traditionalist Indian opposed to all forms of industrial development. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for example, called the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their supporters “anti-energy protesters,” denouncing them as a negative and disruptive force. But the Indians involved, which included members from nearly 300 Native communities, considered themselves protectors rather than protesters, fighting for a sensible energy policy rather than against one that jeopardized sacred waters and land. To better understand the DAPL debate, it’s important to recognize that American Indians have been contributing to a national and international conversation about environmental health and justice since the 1960s. They have been fighting for a cleaner environment for all Americans, rather than just protesting “progress” or energy development on their reservations.
American citizens often struggle to understand what Native people value, especially with respect to reservation land protected by treaties signed with the U.S. government. Indians and non-Indians came to share a sense of environmental crisis during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They all recognized a crisis of polluted air and water, littered landscapes, a loss of open space, and pesticides in foodstuffs. The crisis was documented in books with apocalyptic titles such as The Last Landscape and America the Raped, as well as in an influential 1967 essay published in the prestigious journal Science, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Television reports depicted oil spills and burning rivers and views of the earth from the moon landing in 1969 made visible the scope of the damage.
In April 1971 the Keep America Beautiful organization released the iconic “Crying Indian” public service announcement. The announcement appeared on billboards and in a television segment showing an American Indian figure paddling through industrial refuse and standing amongst roadside litter, a single tear on his cheek. The image helped cement the notion that American Indians were different, that they cared about using natural resources wisely and thus could model the behavior American society needed to ameliorate its environmental crisis.
But the Crying Indian image elided the ways in which Native Americans had tried to characterize their campaigns as a different kind of progress: not to resist particular modes and models of industrial development to sustain a “traditional” lifestyle on unchanging reservations but rather to articulate the boundaries of a reservation protected by treaty. They employed scientific conservation programs and asserted the special relationship they had with spaces they needed for their religious ceremonies. American Indians did not act as symbols like the Crying Indian but rather as allies in a larger struggle to protect land, air, and water from pollution that didn’t stop at the edge of the reservation.
In 1966 the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the largest pan-Indian organization in the U.S., wrote an editorial to condemn unrestrained growth: “Today we have the senseless cry of ‘Development.’ Soon the country will be completely asphaltized, parking spaces will abound where forests grew, life will indeed be pre-fabricated.” The editorial posed the central question for both Indian and non-Indian environmental critiques of the postwar period: “Are [Indians] then against progress? It seems to be a dangerous thing to be against progress as if progress had some divine attribute that places it above suspicion. People progress, but they progress by incorporating the best of their traditions with novel approaches to their social problems within their own social structures.”
American Indians did not act as symbols like the Crying Indian but rather as allies in a larger struggle to protect land, air, and water from pollution that didn’t stop at the edge of the reservation.
Even as they embraced tribal self-determination, Native activists and politicians incorporated the best of their traditions with novel approaches in collaborating with non-Indians. Natives worked with Environmental Protection Agency officials to establish their own environmental standards on reservations, promoted solar and wind energy projects, and applied for appropriate technology grants, thus joining a national appropriate technology movement to develop energy-efficient technologies that grew in the mid-1970s. They shared with all Americans a common ground increasingly vulnerable to unrestrained growth and the effects of conventional energy development. American Indian environmentalism in the 1970s proved to be an important vehicle for furthering U.S. citizens’ understanding of Native treaty rights and support of their calls for self-determination legislation, in part because most Americans could relate to the Native experience of environmental crisis.
Natives worked with Environmental Protection Agency officials to establish their own environmental standards on reservations, promoted solar and wind energy projects, and applied for appropriate technology grants
The DAPL debate forces us to address the significance of the question posed in a media piece on DAPL entitled, “Why does the “protector” compared to “protester” frame matter?” The environmental history of Indian-white relations shows us that when Americans come to understand and respect Native concerns and goals, and thus recognize Native people not as protesting Indians or as Crying Indians but as ecological citizens promoting a vision of community and national health, they can view the “environment” as a place where people live, work, play, and pray, rather than just as wilderness or “empty” space. Decades of successful efforts, waged by a diverse group of Americans working with Indian citizens, have safeguarded the nation’s water, air and land, and the nation’s health.
As oil begins to flow through the DAPL, and executive actions in Washington dismantle national programs and institutions such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — which was established in the early 1970s in response to American citizens’ demands for a cleaner and healthier environment — historical perspective shows us that Natives have not been anti-energy protesters opposed to progress, but rather have worked with Americans citizens and the federal government to mobilize against further damage to our environment and for sustainable and non-invasive energy solutions.
Paul C. Rosier’s column for the Lepage Center this fall focuses on environmental history. He is Mary M. Birle Chair in American History at Villanova University.
