Standing Rock

Native tribes and other activists are engaged in a large and growing protest against an oil pipeline that would snake across the Dakotas from Canada on its way to Illinois. The protest is starting to attract media attention, which until now has been entirely soaked up by the Olympics and the Trump/Clinton Follies. For some reason, though, this protest still seems to be drawing considerably less media interest than the Malheur takeover by the Bundy gang last winter; don’t really know why…

Near Cannon Ball, N.D. — It is a spectacular sight: thousands of Indians camped on the banks of the Cannonball River, on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. Our elders of the Seven Council Fires, as the Oceti Sakowin, or Great Sioux Nation, is known, sit in deliberation and prayer, awaiting a federal court decision on whether construction of a $3.7 billion oil pipeline from the Bakken region to Southern Illinois will be halted.

The Sioux tribes have come together to oppose this project, which was approved by the State of North Dakota and the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The nearly 1,200-mile pipeline, owned by a Texas oil company named Energy Transfer Partners, would snake across our treaty lands and through our ancestral burial grounds. Just a half-mile from our reservation boundary, the proposed route crosses the Missouri River, which provides drinking water for millions of Americans and irrigation water for thousands of acres of farming and ranching lands.

Some of the commentary on the protest has gone well beyond the immediate matter at hand and grappled with the entire history of the encounter between the native peoples and European migrants/invaders that shaped the western hemisphere. Lawrence O’Donnell, the combative MSNBC pundit delivered a strong polemic on the subject.

Now, being that this is polemic, there’s no obligation for nuance or balance, or completeness. There’s a lot of truth in what O’Donnell says and I have no problem with the piece as far as it goes. But it’s not the whole story. As you might guess, the simple paradigm of the Europeans as the invaders of the Americas and the Indians as the invaded frustrates me. Not that it’s not true, it’s just that there’s so much more to the story. And too many get their history in soundbites, memes and polemics, rather than wading into all its glorious complexity.

It may be true that Dakota means “friendly,” as O’Donnell asserts, but the Pawnee, the Crow, the Shoshone, the Kiowa, the Arikara did not find the Sioux so very friendly when they stormed out of the Minnesota forests to conquer the northern Plains. Here’s a polemic on that subject…

I am currently reading “New Worlds For All,” by Colin C. Calloway. I have great respect for Calloway, who is a professor at Dartmouth, working in what is loosely known these days as “borderland history.” This is history that explores conflict, but also diplomacy, trade, cultural exchange and paints a frontier that is much more fluid and porous than the demarcation line between “civilization” and “savagery” that the term once described.

Calloway and Keith West are proof that all is not lost in academia. David Hackett Fischer, himself an outstanding, groundbreaking historian, notes in his introduction to Calloway’s “Scratch Of A Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America” that the rejection of triumphalist history that marginalized the stories of the native peoples, Africans and pretty much anybody who wasn’t of Anglo descent, itself carried a distorting bias.

In the late twentieth century, another generation of historians took a broader view of the many populations of North America, but they combined that broad approach with a deep hostility to Anglo-American culture.

Calloway, Fischer writes, corrects the weaknesses of both approaches, spending much time among the Indians, through remarkably diligent and empathetic research, but he also treats Anglo American culture with understanding and respect. The result is work that is…

…remarkable for its balance, depth and maturity of judgement.

Lord knows, what we need a lot more of right now is balance, depth and maturity of judgement.

I am reading up on the pipeline and the protest. I respect both the passion and the point of view of the Standing Rock Sioux. They may well be right about this, and I salute anyone who is willing to lay it on the line for their convictions. I also believe that oil must flow, and I suspect that pipelines are probably better and actually safer than rail cars for that purpose. I need to know more before I form an opinion — not that mine rates on this issue.

But this issue touches on my hunting grounds, the streams I trap, the veins of ore I mine, so…

I think it’s great that people are actually talking about native history on TV. I hope it spurs people to dive into this rich, wonderful, dark, tragic, profound history on a deeper level than politics and polemics permits. And you could do worse than to pick up any of Calloway’s books and start reading.