Why the Rerouting of the DAPL Should Not be Considered a Victory
Early one morning last week, I woke up to the joyful news that the Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL for short, had been denied easement by the US Army to run over sacred Standing Rock Sioux land. The reason it was such happy news was because the pipeline would run under the Oahe Lake in the Missouri River, which was the primary drinking water source for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.
However, I was still very confused. Why were people so happy and why were they celebrating? This shouldn’t have been big news, and that’s what I thought when I first heard it. I didn’t understand why it took months of protest and for several veterans to come out to Standing Rock for the government to finally deny easement for the pipeline. I thought that this was America, the land of freedom, where clean drinking water is a right, not a privilege.
Maybe it was just because they were Native Americans, and throughout history, Native Americans have been oppressed, without anyone to pay attention to their cause. After the mostly Caucasian residents of Bismarck, North Dakota, realized that the pipeline would endanger their water source, without them having to say anything, the government immediately tried to find another way to build the pipeline somewhere else. Specifically, the new location was under the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s drinking water, which would end up with the reservation having a water crisis just like the people of Flint, Michigan did.
I thought to myself, isn’t it unfair that they already have to live on reservations? Because this is their land, and anyone who is not Native American is considered an immigrant in this country. In addition, Native Americans weren’t born in America; rather, America was born on their land. Looking back at US history, one can see that the American government had kept slowly reducing the amount of land that Native Americans had, until they had nothing left but reservations. And now they want to endanger their reservations, too. Should we really be considering winning the right to clean water a victory? I think not.
