By Nathan Barton
Fresh news from North Dakota, that the acting Secretary of the Army may issue a record of decision as soon as Friday the 10th of February, which will allow the DAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline) to be completed has people in a tizzy. The pipeline’s completion and use will destroy and permanently damage identified sacred-land (so recently identified that it was not known to exist when the environmental assessment was done just a couple of years ago). (I’m being sarcastic.) AND it is guaranteed to irreparably pollute Lake Oahe and the entire Missouri and Mississippi Rivers downstream to the Gulf and thus destroy the water supply for millions of people (including several thousand Lakota). Never mind the other several dozen pipelines that have existed under the river (upstream and downstream), many for decades, that have not done so. DAPL is the straw that will break the camel’s back.
But the horror has already begun.
KFYR-TV reports that “Sanitation crews work to remove massive amounts of garbage from DAPL protest camp before spring thaw.” “Sanitation crews are working hard to dispose of six months’ worth of garbage from a community the size of Wahpeton or Valley City [about 8,000]. The mountains of debris need to be moved before the spring thaw occurs.
“Making a dent in the immense amount of trash being hauled out of the Oceci Sakowin protest camp is being hindered by the weather. All the garbage that was left behind is now frozen into massive chunks of junk. In a month, all this trash could become toxic.”
As Mama Liberty notes: “So much for concern about the “sacred” land there, or pollution from the oil. If each of these people had taken their own trash OUT, as any decent person would do after camping, there would not be such a mound of trash for taxpayers of the area to remove.”
A follow-up news story from KFYR reports that members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (SRST) administration have stated that “donations will pay” for the protest camp clean-up, now underway by SRST solid waste program personnel and a local contractor operating loaders, dump trucks, and other heavy equipment to collect the waste and deliver to a landfill, to protect the public health and environment. I suspect not a pound of that will be recycled.
While Mama Liberty notes this is a good thing (the donations), Debby and my first reaction was that the “donations” will come from the FedGov via the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Indian Health Service, and USDA – the usual agencies paying for municipal services and emergency response on poverty-stricken reservations.
As for the SRST administration, people (especially those that live under their jurisdiction and employed by them) know not to trust the Tribal Council and other elected officials, and that includes the overlapping county governments, especially the state government.
But these officials clearly understand the environists and activists who scream out for action and prevention of other people from going about their business to provide necessary goods and services to voluntary buyers. These people fall into two categories:
- Those naive enough to trust in government to do the “right thing,” and
- Those who are as hypocritical as the government officials, know that the right things will not be done, but that pious words will be spewed and the situation exploited to provide the government officials (and the environists and activists) with more power, more money in their pockets, and more opportunities to do it all again.
Most of these activists and officials, and nearly all the environists, are liberals and Tranzis, staunch allies, beneficiaries, and enablers of governments. The completion of the DAPL is a setback for their immediate goals. But never mind, they’ll soon come up with ways to exploit DAPL for their own benefit, while pretending to have the best interests of the tribal members and other residents of Standing Rock, North and South Dakota, and all the way to New Orleans (which is, of course, another example of this same sort of game).
The Price of Liberty 
I have friends from here, MI, who are so proud that they traveled out there to ” stand with those poor natives” to protect the land that is rightfully theirs. It is about making sure that we have clean water, etc. I even have a niece who was furious when Trump was elected. She said that her 5 year old son was crying because he was afraid that the world was going to have a nuclear war. I wanted to tell her that she was the worst parent that I knew, for filling the head of a 5 year old with stuff like that, but I didn’t. She would never understand. The liberals simply have no interest in the truth, and posts like this one go over their head so far, they might as well be written in sanskrit. But it is a great piece, for what it is worth.
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We are most certainly living in “interesting times.” The Chinese curse has never been more obvious.
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A very good friend of mine is a student of Native American culture especially those tribes that inhabited Wisconsin. He says that all Indian tribes left messes wherever they lived. When the garbage pile got too big, they would pick up and move. They never have been protectors of the land. Nor the wildlife. Here in Wisconsin they have special fishing seasons where only they can take Walleyes from our northern lakes at certain times of the year when they are vulnerable and spawning. Then they fill local dumpsters with the fish they do not want to clean. He has personally seen these dumpsters filled with enough discarded fish to feed a village. They say it is their heritage to do this. If so why are they not limited to using birch bark canoes and sharp sticks instead of aluminum boats with 50hp motors and fancy nets and compound bows?
I do not have any respect for anyone who lives off the government teat and blames the rest of us for their problems.
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Undoubtedly there were many tribes which did this – especially those who were nomadic, and had to move just because the game in the area was depleted, or because they used wild or semi-wild plants that grew and matured in specific areas, or for trade. Anyone who has visited or seen an archeological dig in Canaan or Mesopotamia will see the same thing as your friend talks about – vast middens (piles) of garbage. As indeed one saw around or near small American towns as late as the 1970s, and in Central and South America much more recently. Many of those traditions continue today, when they are allowed to. The throwing away of fish, for example, is probably a cultural matter: it is not the eating of the fish but the catching of the fish that is important to the men of that particular tribe. And to maintaining their tribal rights. Compare that to the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s destroying tons of milk, corn, wheat, and even livestock, “to maintain prices.” Never mind “stop growing the stuff,” but grow it and destroy it.
But at the same time, remember that the AmerInd tribes are as diverse as the old tribes or modern nations of Europe. Just as a Greek fisherman is totally different from a Norwegian or Irish fisherman, and a Volga-German farmer completely unlike a Breton or Basque farmer, and so forth. So a Tlingit fisherman on Puget Sound is very much different from a Seminole fisherman in the Everglades. And an Abenaki hunter in Vermont nothing like an Inde (Apache) hunter in southern New Mexico. And their societies and cultures as a different and distinct from each other as ever was a Lapp and a Corsican!
Anyone who has seen a Rainbow Family (hippie) encampment just after they leave before the cleanup begins, or a temporary campsite for the Sturgis or Daytona Rally, or even a National Guard base camp will see some of the same things. Look at Burning Man or Party Cove in Missouri. People, especially in mobs, and when they are raised without any understanding of personal responsibility – or think “let George (“government” as in George Washington) do it” are ugly, nasty, trashy, and make a mess where ever they are.
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I’ve never had the good fortune to be involved in an archeological dig in Mesopotamia nor do I know the differences between Greek fishermen and Irish fishermen (and really couldn’t care). My only point was that for these tribes to claim that the DAPL project will destroy previously unknown sacred land and pollute downstream waters, is a hypocritical stance based on their poor history of treating the land and its creatures. Their leaders are only looking for a bigger share of the government teat.
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Sadly, probably true. It also seems none of them considered that land “sacred” until all of this came up. People have been fighting over the habitable land since the dawn of time, and no tribe or country has any monopoly on being either the victim or the aggressor.
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Never forget, that Tramp owes a part of this project
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“Owes?” Do you mean owns? I don’t see that as a problem. He must “own” a share of a great many things around the world. That simply gives him some “skin in the game.”
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My immediate response to the posting..
And what does THAT have to do with the point I was making in the commentary? I was not addressing the ownership of the pipeline, the construction companies, or even the trash. Maybe Trump owns part of the contractor the tribe hired to help clean up the mess? So?
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