For a decade, indigenous activists in Canada and the United States have been in the forefront of opposition to fossil-fuel projects, including coal terminals and pipelines, the most famous of which is the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. President Obama rejected that pipeline last November after a long formal review punctuated by protests that included mass civil disobedience. Many of the indigenous activist groups—permanent ones such as the Canadian-founded Idle No More and ad hoc alike, owe their existence and tactics to strong women leaders.
On the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, the sixth largest in the United States, which straddles the border between North and South Dakota, a 13-year-old girl leader, Anna Lee Rain Yellowhammer has gotten into act. She’s started a petition asking Assistant Secretary of the Army Jo-Ann Darcy, who is in charge of the Army Corps of Engineers, to stop another pipeline, the building of which the Army Corps has partial jurisdiction over. Her project is part of a bigger anti-pipeline protest at Standing Rock, known by its Twitter hashtag: #RezpectOurWater. So far, the petition has nearly 91,000 of the 150,000 signatures Anna Lee and about 30 of her young friends hope eventually to get.
In the letter sent along with her petition signature at Change.org, Anna Lee wrote:
I’m 13 years-old and as an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, I’ve lived my whole life by the Missouri River. It runs by my home in Fort Yates North Dakota and my great grandparents original home was along the Missouri River in Cannon Ball. The river is a crucial part of our lives here on the Standing Rock Reservation. [...]
“My friends and I have played in the river since we were little; my great grandparents raised chickens and horses along it. When the pipeline leaks, it will wipe out plants and animals, ruin our drinking water, and poison the center of community life for the Standing Rock Sioux.
The pipeline at issue is the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The $3.7 billion, 1,154-mile, 30-inch-diameter conduit is slated to run from the fracked oilfields of North Dakota’s Bakken Shale formation to existing pipelines in Illinois. DAPL’s maximum capacity is set at 570,000 barrels of oil a day. That’s about half the current daily production in North Dakota. There are tribal pipeline foes not just at Standing Rock, but also among the other six Oceti Sakowin, together known as the Seven Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation. Many non-Indian environmentalists are allies in the fight.
Here is the video Anna Lee and her fellow young activists made to promote their effort:
x YouTube Video