The Dakota Access Pipeline battle is just part of a much larger war in this country. President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed energy initiative has many backers in the Republican-controlled Congress, and he has already voiced his support of the DAPL project.
But on Monday, two members of Trump’s 27-member Native American Affairs Coalition, which he formed in October, spoke out, suggesting reservation lands in the U.S. should be privatized, an idea that Reuters described as “politically explosive.”
“We should take tribal land away from public treatment. As long as we can do it without unintended consequences, I think we will have broad support around Indian country,” said Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), a Cherokee tribe member and chair of the Native American Affairs Coalition.
And state Representative Sharon Clahchischilliage (R-NM 4th District), a Navajo tribe member and coalition co-chair, said in October that she was, “outraged that Indian Country is prevented from harnessing our own energy resources by ever-increasing regulations.” Of course, she and Mullin received a generous amount of campaign funds from energy companies.
The fact is, almost 20 percent of our country’s oil and gas, along with large amounts of coal reserves sits on Native American reservations. These resources are estimated to be worth almost $1.5 trillion.
RT.com reports the reservations, 55.7 million acres (225,000 square kilometers), cover just two percent of the U.S. and are being “held in trust” for the tribes by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an agency under the US Department of the Interior.
But fellow co-chair and Cherokee nation ex-chief Ross Swimmer says he thinks it’s possible to privatize Indian lands while at the same time limiting land sales to non-native buyers, reports EcoWatch. “It has to be done with an eye toward protecting sovereignty,” he said.
Swimmer is a partner with a Native American-focused investment fund that has invested in Energy Transfer Partners, the owner of the heavily contested DAPL.
Many Native American leaders do not agree that privatization of reservation lands is right. “Our spiritual leaders are opposed to the privatization of our lands, which means the commoditization of nature, water, and the air we hold sacred,” said Dallas Goldtooth, the Keep It In The Ground Campaign Organizer at Indigenous Environmental Network. “Privatization has been the goal since colonization — to strip Native Nations of their sovereignty,” Goldtooth added.
Yet while the Standing Rock Sioux nation and its thousands of supporters vow to not give up the fight to preserve their water and lands from exploitation from energy companies, the oil industry is urging Trump to go ahead with the DAPL, and it appears that the pipeline’s approval is at the top of his “to-do” list.
