Washington Blocks Pipeline

‘Indian country will be forever grateful’

Bottom Line: The federal government’s refusal to allow progress on the Dakota Access pipeline as currently constituted is a major environmental victory with an uncertain ending.

Fireworks fill the night sky above Oceti Sakowin Camp as activists celebrate after learning an easement had been denied for the Dakota Access Pipeline near the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on December 4, outside Cannon Ball, North Dakota.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Following months of standoff and periodic clashes between law enforcement authorities and thousands of activists, the federal government announced this weekend that it would not approve current permits for construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline.

Army Department officials made the announcement on December 4. The decision halts building on the $3.8 billion dollar project, which has been partially stalled at the easement of the contested Missouri River, the primary water source for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

But even as pipeline opponents celebrated, they were faced with eviction from their encampments—concentrated at Cannon Ball, North Dakota—by order of the Army Corps of Engineers and North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple. The former authority had given the water protectors a deadline of December 5 to leave.

The Army’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Works, Jo-Ellen Darcy, said the decision to deny permits that would have allowed was based on a need to explore alternate routes for the 1,172-mile-long pipeline. Plans called for burying the pipeline approximately 100 feet below the Missouri River.

“Although we have had continuing discussion and exchanges of new information with the Standing Rock Sioux and Dakota Access, it’s clear that there’s more work to do,” she said.

The federal agency is now recommending that an Environmental Impact Statement be conducted with full public input and analysis to explore a possible reroute of the pipeline.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has long argued that the existing path of the energy project threatens the Missouri River and sacred sites. President Obama blocked construction of easements on both sides of the river in early September; last month, he publicly stated that the Army Corps of Engineers was considering alternate routes for the pipeline project.

“The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and all of Indian country will be forever grateful to the Obama administration for this historic decision,” said Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault II. “In a system that has continuously been stacked against us from every angle, it took tremendous courage to take a new approach to our nation-to-nation relationship.”

However, Energy Transfer Partners, which operates the pipeline, has publicly rejected the idea of a reroute. Consequently, tribal leaders and organizers hinted that their fight might not be over.

“We hope that [Energy Transfer Partners CEO] Kelcy Warren, Governor Dalrymple and the incoming Trump administration respect this decision and understand the complex process that led us to this point,” said Archambault.

“Our network is singing the victory song with the Standing Rock Sioux,” said Tom Goldtooth, director of the Indigenous Environmental Network.  “We are cautiously hopeful that this is a total win.”

At press time, two separate orders from the Army Corps and Gov. Dalrymple to evacuate the Cannon Ball protest camps were pending. The Corps’ directive was issued on November 25; three days later, Dalrymple ordered the immediate and “mandatory evacuation of all persons located in areas under the proprietary jurisdiction of the United States Army Corps of Engineers located in Morton County.”

The two directives were issued within days of Morton County Sheriff’s deputies spraying rubber bullets, mace and water in subfreezing temperatures on more than 400 people demonstrating at a bridge blockade not far from the protest camps. Both directives emphasized the importance of public safety.

“Pursuant to C.F.R. 327.12, I am closing the portion of Corps-managed federal property north of the Cannon Ball River to all public use and access,” wrote the Corps’ Omaha District Commander, Col. John W. Henderson. “I do not take this action lightly but have decided that it is required due to the concern for public safety.”

“The Army Corps of Engineers is seeking a peaceful and orderly transition to a safer location, and has no plans for forcible removal,” Henderson wrote. “But those who choose to stay do so at their own risk as emergency, fire, medical, and law enforcement response cannot be adequately provided in these areas. Those who remain will be considered unauthorized and may be subject to citation under federal, state, or local laws.”

Henderson added that his agency “has established a free speech zone on land south of the Cannon Ball River for anyone wishing to peaceably protest.”

In his executive order, Dalrymple invoked his authority to “minimize or avert the effects of a disaster or emergency” and cited the Army Corps eviction order. Pointing to the potential hazards of the upcoming winter, he said that at the camps, “large populations” were congregated “in tents, vehicles, temporary and semi-permanent structures which have not been inspected and approved by Morton County as proper dwellings suitable for winter habitation.”

Prior to the pipeline being halted, and as the December 5 eviction deadline loomed, many water protectors registered defiance.

“They may have to bring the Army to get rid of us,” said Toni Cervantes, 65, of San Francisco. “There will be a worldwide uproar if this is done as violently by the militarized police as it has been. I can’t even imagine. I’m just praying for a peaceful end to this whole thing.” http://bit.ly/2gqYPXA, http://bit.ly/2gBaYc4 and http://bit.ly/2gV63XE

Additional reporting by Theresa Braine.

Traditional Growth

‘We’re exposing our products to the non-Indian world’

Bottom Line: A certain hardy bean, grown on a certain farm in Arizona, illuminates a certain way of Native life.

The bavi bean field of Terry and Ramona Button is as much a testament to culture as it is a business.

Lee Allen

At their Gila River reservation farm in Sacaton, Arizona, the husband-and-wife team of Ramona (Pima by birth) and Terry (Lakota through adoption) Button cultivate thousands of acres of rough desert terrain. Here, at the foot of the San Tan Mountains, they till and tell of traditional times.

Ramona has been sowing seeds since she was a little girl helping her father transform the desert landscape into the family’s first 10-acre plot—half to raise forage for the animals, the other half for a sustenance garden.

“My father, Francisco ‘Chiigo’ Smith, was a carpenter, a blacksmith, an adobe block-maker, an herbalist, and a traditional healer,” she said. “You had to teach yourself how to do everything because we were self-reliant. He grew Pima wheat, corn, chiles, melons, squash, and tepary beans.”

It is that last crop that links the Buttons’ agricultural past, present and future.

Ramona grew up on her namesake farm working the fields and living in a two-room earthen floor adobe home built by her father. She and her husband began planting her parents’ allotment in the mid-1970s; they continued to expand their acreage, doubling and then quadrupling it.

Early on, before the advent of today’s equipment availability and weed-resistant crops, Ramona had to leave her job as a nurse at Sacaton Indian Hospital to run the hoeing and weeding crew. She supervised a crew of 15 community members and did so for 15 years until machines replaced human hands. The family-run endeavor began to grow in scope. And then community elders began asking the Buttons if they would grow tepary beans, also known as bavi.

Bavi are among the most drought- and heat-tolerant crops in the world; they are even found in Mexican deserts where annual rainfall is just three inches and temperatures hover near 120 degrees. They come in several varieties: black (S-chuuk), an earthy-tasting brown (S-oam) and a sweet white (S-totoah). They are high in protein, low on the glycemic index and contain soluble fiber helpful in controlling both diabetes and cholesterol.

When the community elders approached the Buttons about growing bavi, however, the beans were all but extinct. Fortunately, they had been handed down for generations amongst the Akimel O’odham (River People, Pima) and their Tohono O’odham (Desert People) cousins. Ramona’s father had the foresight to save some beans in a jar. These became the seed crop that helped save the world’s most drought-adapted bean species from disappearance.

Bavi are among the world’s most drought- and heat-resistant crops. Lee Allen

Bringing back the bavi allowed the Buttons to focus on traditional crops. “We keep a foot in both worlds,” Terry said. “We’ve dedicated ourselves to preserving crops of the Pima people and encouraging a return to a traditional diet. But in order to stay afloat economically, we utilize current cultivation technology. So we farm in a 21st century way, but still rely on traditional concepts.”

With anywhere between 4,000 and 7,000 acres under cultivation at any given time, the Buttons grow a variety of items that pay tribute to the area’s long Native heritage. Their fields range from more than 50 acres devoted exclusively to three types of tepary beans, along with garbanzo beans, black-eyed peas, and four varieties of corn that represent Pima, Hopi, and Supai tribes. There is also barley, hay, alfalfa, cotton, and three kinds of wheat.

“Pima people represent the dawning of Arizona agriculture and their practices were adopted by settlers who arrived later,” Terry said. To which Ramona added, “Life here on our 500-square-mile reservation is still very traditional in many ways, slower-paced than communities off-reservation.”

And although Ramona Farms offers wheat berries, wheat flours (pilkan chu’i) and corn products (huun) along with the other offerings, the family’s production centerpiece is the tepary (phaseolus acutifolius), native to Mexico and the western U.S. and grown there since pre-Columbian times.

Today, the family operates on the “share what you know” concept, knowing that their products provide nutritional benefits without artificial ingredients and wanting to pass that information along. “Our label says ‘Bring Our Traditions to Your Table,’” said Ramona. “We’re exposing our products to the non-Indian world and they’re being well received. More people are becoming health conscious, making wiser food choices, and looking for less processing and additives, which fits right in with what we’re doing.”

(A footnote: Earlier this year, Ramona Farms was honored with the Good Food Good Person Award in the annual Arizona Farmer+Chef presentations. The Buttons were acknowledged as farmers who “grow, raise, and make tasty, nourishing, healthy-for-the-mind-and-body foods, and see food as a way to create community.”) http://bit.ly/2gDoXBC

Remembering Sand Creek

‘They destroyed the home, but not the foundation’

Bottom Line: In Denver, a memorial to a Native massacre of more than 150 years ago is achieving poignant shape.

The proposed Sand Creek memorial is seen here in a computer rendering as it would be situated on Capitol grounds.

Courtesy Earth One Future

“Remember us. Don’t forget us, remember us.”

These words, passed down from survivors of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, have informed a proposed memorial to the slaughter in Denver, Colorado, to be situated across the street from the Capitol building.

The project, conceived in 2014—the 150^th anniversary of the murders—is coming ever closer to realization.

To date, $162,800 has been raised toward the goal of $194,000 for the “Remember Sand Creek” initiative. Since February 2015, the effort has been shepherded through the state legislature for approval and fundraising aid by One Earth Future. The organization is dedicated to achieving sustainable peace through building effective networks and resilient societies in fragile and post-conflict environments.

“The State Capitol Advisory Committee unanimously approved the proposed plan to site the memorial on state Capitol grounds,” said One Earth Future Senior Manager of Public Relations Debra Havins. The next step will be to bring the proposal before the full legislature in 2017.

Gov. John Wright Hickenlooper Jr. has supported the memorial, as have many Cheyenne and Arapaho elders. Forensic artist Harvey Pratt (Cheyenne/Arapaho) was commissioned for the design. He likes having something on the Capitol grounds to keep the memory of the people alive and to help Coloradans know their history.

“I think it’s important that the truth is told about our history—the history of America,” he said. “So many things have been hidden—violence, deception and deceit. All of those things have to be told.”

Pratt was born in Oklahoma. For him—as for so many in the diaspora of Cheyenne and Arapaho people—remembering what happened on November 29, 1864 is personal and not as distant as the hundreds of miles or 152 years might seem.

Some of Pratt’s ancestors survived that unprovoked attack, whereat 675 cavalrymen descended to Sand Creek on the peaceful village of about 700 Cheyenne and Arapaho people. But others did not survive. At the end of the bloody rampage, as many as 200 Native people—mainly women, children and elderly—lay dead and an equal number wounded.

“My great-grandfather and great-grandmother were both survivors,” Pratt said. His great-grandmother was Julia Bent, who was half-white and half-Cheyenne. Her non-Native father built Bent’s Fort along the Santa Fe Trail. After the massacre they, like so many others, were moved out of their home territory. Pratt’s family was dislocated to Oklahoma; others were moved there and elsewhere. The Northern Cheyenne in Montana, the Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes in Oklahoma, and the Northern Arapaho in Wyoming have roots in Colorado and ties to the Sand Creek tragedy.

Anxiety from the massacre, along with forced moves, rippled through history into Pratt’s generation. “Growing up,” he said, “my mother’s aunt, who lived with us, would say, ‘When you go to bed, put your shoes right by your bed because you might have to get up and run.’” The elders, he added, ”told little stories about that—who was injured … who didn’t make it.” In those stories, the children were told of the dying calling out, “Remember us. Don’t forget us, remember us.”

All of that Pratt kept in mind in designing the proposed memorial. His artwork centers on a fallen woman holding an empty cradleboard and reaching outward. She bears the wounds traditional to the Cheyenne people in mourning. The full memorial will also include a representation of a tipi without hides—just the poles “to show that they destroyed the home, but not the foundation.”

There will be a U.S. flag and a white flag, both flown over the village at Sand Creek, as the people were told to do to show they were not at war with the United States. The attacking soldiers ignored that gesture. So horrifying was the massacre that even then the U.S. Congress condemned it, thanks to some soldiers who came forward like Silas Soule, later murdered on the streets of Denver—presumably in revenge for his opposition.

Pratt has another vision to tie the past with the present and future. “On a pathway that we’re going to pour in concrete, six feet wide and 20 yards long, we’ll have descendants put their footprints in it—children and adults. It will show some running away from the battle and represent that we’re still here.”

Pratt feels a memorial at the Capitol will bring more attention to the past. Eerily, the proposed project will be situated across from the statue of a Union soldier appearing triumphant from the Sand Creek attack. The statue drew the shocked attention of John B. Judis, who wrote about it in The New Republic on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the massacre.

“There is now an additional plaque there that corrects the history,” Debra Havins said. Perhaps the proposed Sand Creek Massacre memorial will tell an even more complete and honest story.

“We are just going to bring history to life,” Pratt said. “We just want people to understand that there was more to what happened than what was told.” http://bit.ly/2gWwfkt

How Did I Miss That?

Goings on up north, the star-spangled Queen of Soul and the better side of Catherine Zeta-Jones

The BBC reported the response of Catherine Zeta-Jones, 47, to the intrusion of paparazzi into her Mexican vacation with her husband of 16 years Michael Douglas, 72. Angered by the publication of unflattering bikini photos, Zeta-Jones took to Instagram to say she was “sharing the photographs my husband took of my ass.”

Two conclusions from the photos she shared were that she is aging well and that she had just rendered the pirated photos worthless.

* * *

There was another case of a woman taking charge and doing it her way last month. The occasion was the Thanksgiving Day game between the Detroit Lions and the Minnesota Vikings, whereat the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, sang the national anthem. I don’t like “The Star-Spangled Banner” because it is not singable by ordinary people. But once in a while, somebody with Franklin’s range and power will get hold of that song and whip it into shape. She took over four minutes, and it was worth every second.

Have I changed my mind about the song? No, because you and I are not Aretha Franklin. But she made it as entertaining as it’s ever been.

“Whoa,” my Cousin Ray Sixkiller interrupted.

* * *

Reminded of the Jimi Hendrix version of the anthem at Woodstock, it occurred to me that Donald Trump’s white nationalist fans would not be happy that two non-white artists nailed the song. Then a third version by a non-white artist came to mind and I realized that the white nationalists would object to this one for a whole other reason: They think the national anthem can only be sung in English. Wrong.

* * *

Sputnik reported that the so-called Islamic State—known as Daesh among Arabs who don’t like it—has further diversified its economy by entering the black market for human organs. Last year, a Daesh-friendly cleric issued a fatwa that allowed organs to be removed from healthy captives to save the life of a Muslim. Some organs are reportedly taken from their own fighters, but only when they are dead. I would find this hard to believe had Daesh not done worse on video.

* * *

While I have nothing but good things to say about every time I’ve visited our Canadian friends, I can’t claim to always understand them. Sometimes, I can only report.

For instance, the BBC noted that on their Facebook page the Kensington Police Service—the guardians of Prince Edward Island—were threatening an innovative punishment for drunk drivers. They warned that the police cruiser would play the Canadian rock band Nickelback on the way to jail.  

The Facebook responses showed there was no failure to communicate in Canada, with one reader asking, “Doesn’t torture go against the Geneva Convention?” Another reader, apparently a Nickelback fan, suggested replacing the band in the drunk driving torture with Justin Bieber.

* * *

My puzzlement continued with another BBC report from the Canadian Parliament, where Conservative MP Michelle Rempei accused the government of treating Alberta “like a fart in the room.” This drew the ire of Green MP Elizabeth May for using the word “fart,” which May claimed was “distinctly unparliamentary.”

* * *

Maybe Canada should follow Wales and consider making an advisory list of “unparliamentary” words. The Welsh list contains words that register in the U.K. but not here, like “bleeding obvious” and “bollocks,” as well as such familiar terms as “corrupt,” “cowardly,” “deceit,” “deliberately misled,” “dishonest,” “dubious,” “evasive,” “hypocrisy,” “liar,” “mealy mouthed,” “misleading,” “misrepresented” and “sneaky.”

“How do you talk about politics,” Cousin Ray wanted to know, “without those words?”

* * *

KVUE reported that state workers at a new office building in Austin, Texas have been alarmed by the number of snakes showing up recently. In the last 16 years, only two persons have died from rattlesnake bites in the entire state.

Cousin Ray reminded me that Texas turned down Obamacare funds to expand Medicaid and has the highest percentage of people with no health insurance among the states. He asked if I wanted to bet that the two-legged snakes in state government killed fewer people than rattlesnakes. http://bit.ly/2gjcAav