'Environmental Racism and Secret Societies' by American Indian Genocide Museum

Environmental Racism and Secret Societies

 

Obama's legacy will be that he rode the white horse of racism during his eight years in the office of the President of the United States of America. -- Steve Melendez, President, American Indian Genocide Museum

By Steve Melendez  

President, American Indian Genocide Museum

Reno Sparks Indian Colony Northern  Paiute

I remember reading a letter President sent to Indian Country the first time he ran for president. He promised that if he was elected, he would honor the treaties. Treaties are the supreme law of the land. The United States does not enforce the law because the Doctrine of Discovery (Johnson v. M’Intosh). It says that when the white man “discovered” the Americas, he owns everything. This was an 1823 Supreme Court decision.  What you are seeing at the Dakota Access Pipeline protest is white supremacist colonial law being perpetrated in the 21^stCentury by a black man who has the power to stop it and who should be aware of America’s long history of institutional racism. His legacy will be that he rode the white horse of racism during his eight years in the office of the President of the United States of America. The President must force himself to empathize with the people of Standing Rock, the original people of the land being called the trespassers and treated as though they are criminals. The President has to ask himself why the U.S. Government  has,  a half century ago, placed millions of dollars on the table to settle the Treaty of Ft. Laramie of 1868 rather than honor it. Should treaties be honored? According to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which all the nations of the world signed along with President Obama, they should. Treaties have boundaries drawn on maps which are landmarks such as the Missouri River which should be honored. To be honest, this country was founded on the breaking of God’s commandment, “Do not remove your neighbor’s boundary stone set up by your predecessors in the inheritance you receive in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess”. Deuteronomy 19:14

Treaties are international contracts and the way contracts work is that if you break a contract, the property reverts back to the original owner. That is the rule of law. How does a racist government deal with broken contracts? They say, since we discovered it centuries ago, WE have given YOU the right to occupy it, but in our magnanimous benevolence, we want to pay you what it was worth when we discovered it or finally got around to taking it---one dollar an acre!!! I know that sounds absurd but whenever the government speaks of the Indian’s right to be in this country, they speak of “aboriginal title” which means that, like the animals, they have the right to occupy the land but they do not own the land.  You can see this racist mind-set being offered to various tribes today in the form of “trust land”. The government wants to give you “trust land” to settle your treaty rights. But the late Harvard Professor, Austin Wakeman Scott  explained that the purpose of a “trust” is to “separate the benefits of ownership from the burdens of ownership.”  It is all smoke and mirrors because when they established their “dollar an acre price on the land, they put in writing that the land value was, “at the time of taking.” So what do the Indians end up with after they take what boils down to a thousand dollars apiece  or ten thousand dollars apiece if they don’t count the children and the grandchildren? They end up with the right to “occupy” government “trust” land!

The main fact kept from the public is that the Treaty of Ft. Laramie of 1868 placed the eastern boundary of the reservation at the Missouri River,  from Bismarck, N.D., all the way down to Chamberlain, S.D., and from there it continued is almost a straight line down to North Platte, Nebraska.  And that is just the eastern boundary of “The Great Sioux Reservation” which the Dakota Access Pipeline is violating. The reality is that the treaty is still in force otherwise the government would  not be trying to settle with the Sioux for a billion dollars! How can the United States government put a billion dollars on the table without openly trying to buy the land? Again it was the semantics of the forked legal tongue. The act of congress called the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1942 was the vehicle they used. It asked that a, “recommendation shall be for a direct appropriation by the congress in a specific amount “.

It is always difficult to understand racism in the 21^st Century , especially when it is disguised as the law. When the Sioux brought their treaty before the Indian Claims Commission in the 1950s, little did they know that their right to land ownership was never a consideration by the white man.

Anthropologist, Nancy Oestreich Lurie remarked at the time, “Even when there is understanding that awards are based on lost lands, there is bitterness because often it is not understood that compensation is based on the appraised value of land at the time it was ceded and not on the wealth the land generated for the white man since then.”

The burying of a pipeline through treaty designated land and the attempt to lay that pipeline 90 to 150 feet below the tribe’s reservoir  for drinking water is not only another breaking of the Treaty of 1868 but it is an environmental time bomb for the tribe---environmental racism  unabashedly  on display. After a gasoline pipeline ruptured twice in a two month period near Helena, Alabama, this year, it was revealed that half of the nation’s pipelines are nearly half a century old. Though gas pipelines are more corrosive than oil pipelines, degradation of the wall thickness of pipelines is always a risk, especially at bends that re-direct the flow.  Just because it is oil that is flowing through the pipeline, you may think that there cannot possibly be any corrosion in the pipes.  Bruce D. Craig, author of the book, Oilfield Metallurgy and Corrosion wrote, “…petroleum production is by its very nature corrosive…” He went on to say, “In petroleum production and drilling, the primary agents that cause corrosion are oxygen(O2), carbon dioxide (CO2), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and chlorides. More recently, elemental sulfur (S) produced from gas and oil wells has been encountered, and it, too, is corrosive.”

 Dakota Access Pipeline builders, Energy Transfer Partners CEO, Keley Warren, was interviewed by Houston Chronicle writer, Jordan Blum on November 12, 2016. Blum wrote, “Warren said he supports practical environmentalism, including building thick pipelines with carbon steel instead of cheap plastic to prevent leaks.”  When  such a ridiculous statement like that is allowed to go unchallenged, you cannot help but wonder if this was some kind of diabolical “insider” joke. You can’t help but wonder that  perhaps  the National Association of Corrosion Engineers is some kind of secret society.  Do they even exist at all? 

 

Steve Melendez  

President, American Indian Genocide Museum

Reno  Sparks Indian Colony -  Northern  Paiute