When President Donald Trump signed the orders to revive the Keystone XL pipeline and expedite an ongoing environmental review and approval on the Dakota Access Pipeline last week, he declared war on Indigenous nations across the United States say many Native American leaders.
But Joye Braun, on a press call organized by the Indigenous Environmental Movement (IEN) says Trump will be met with fierce and massive resistance by Native Americans and others against the pipelines. “He effectively called a war against the Great Sioux Nation, saying that he didn’t care about the indigenous people here in the U.S.,” Braun said, reports Inside Climate News.
Trump’s memorandum on the Dakota Access Pipeline urged the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to hurry up with an ongoing environmental review and get the project approved. The memorandum on the Keystone XL Pipeline asked that Canada’s TransCanada company go ahead and reapply for a permit to bring the pipeline across the U.S. border.
And while legal experts debated the legality of the president’s actions in moving the pipelines forward, leaders of the resistance movement that had originally been successful, vowed to continue mobilizing for a massive movement.
“We have demonstrated that there is interest and support from across the country and across the globe to support indigenous resistance to protect our rights and we want to continue that fight onward,” Dallas Goldtooth, campaign organizer with Indigenous Environmental Network said on Monday, according to Common Dreams.
After Trump’s orders were announced last week, the IEN vowed to launch a “massive mobilization and civil disobedience on a scale never seen of a newly seated president of the United States,” South Dakota’s Rapid City Journal reported on Sunday. They added that with over 1,073 water crossings, “any controversy over the proposed $8 billion Keystone XL pipeline holds the potential to make the Dakota Access fight seem like a warm-up exercise.”
And just so readers know the real facts, Reuters reported on Monday that U.S. steelmakers will receive very little benefit from the pipeline projects, despite Trump wanting American companies to make the pipes because “U.S. companies have limited ability to meet the stringent materials requirements for the TransCanada line.”
Digital Journal weighed in on the economic benefits and jobs that were supposed to be created with the construction of the pipelines, reporting that while Trump may be calling the pipelines job creators, they will have minimal impact on jobs or the economy.
