Indian Country: Big Oil and Inter-Generational Trauma

[unhappycamper]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Indian-Country-Big-Oil-an-by-Georgianne-Nienabe-Dakota_Environment_Indian-Children_Oil-141011-328.html



"In the Anishinaabe universe there are eight layers of the world--the world in which we live, and those above and below. Most of us live in the world we can see. What we do, however, may intersect with those other worlds." ~~Winona LaDuke

Indian Country: Big Oil and Inter-Generational Trauma
By Georgianne Nienaber
OpEdNews Op Eds 10/11/2014 at 12:36:27

The threat of a new oil pipeline snaking its way from western North Dakota to refineries on the shores of Lake Superior prompted a summer filled with road trips through the vast grasslands of the Midwest. The result was a series about the pipeline and the people and ecosystems in its path. Searching for the Sandpiper was an exercise in investigative reporting, but in the end I realize it lacked something of critical importance. What was missing was a point of view that included the Native American sense of time, place, and spirituality that is almost impossible for outsiders to access.

When Winona LaDuke asked me to take a look at a piece she wrote for Indian Country Today this week, I knew immediately that her perspective needed an audience that Indian people often have difficulty reaching. Unspeakable Poverty of Loss: Intergenerational Trauma and the Bakken Oil Fields, is an elegy to a people on the brink.

It was not enough that the United States stole a homeland and forced tribes onto reservation at Fort Yates and Fort Berthold. Now, big oil is assaulting sacred lands with pipelines and fracking. Corrupt tribal leaders are buying mega-yachts to ply the waters of Lake Sakakawea while they wine and dine politicians and oil company lobbyists.

1954 Garrison Diversion project, which submerged a people under Lake Sakakawea, taking 152,000 acres of their best land. The dams drowned their villages, drowned their agricultural wealth, drowned their history and rewrote it in America's manual of agricultural progress.

[Nihil]

1. Excellent essay - thanks for posting it! (n/t)