Members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe met outside the steps of the Washington, D.C., courthouse August 25 to protest the construction of the pipeline, which they say would wreak havoc on their native lands and cause widespread water contamination.
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But in a development that stunned even the tribe’s lawyers, the decision by District Judge James Boasberg was put on hold by a federal order to stop construction near the tribe’s reservation until the Army Corps of Engineers can revisit its previous decisions in the disputed portion.
The project is due to pass near lands that are sacred to members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in the rural state of North Dakota.
Thousands of people from more than 200 Native American tribes have supported the Standing Rock Sioux’s efforts to protect their lands, waters and sacred sites during construction of the pipeline, according to the tribe.
The $3.8 billion pipeline doesn’t quite cross the Standing Rock reservation, but it will cross the Missouri River, less than a mile from the reservation.
After the tribe specified to the court which area it considered to be sacred and historic, Dakota Access workers began to plow under those areas.
That’s why the Standing Rock Sioux tribe has been peacefully opposing this project, and why Sierra Club staff and volunteers have been working behind the scenes in support.
The judge wrote that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers “gave the Tribe a reasonable and good-faith opportunity to identify sites of importance to it”.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe was ecstatic. A status conference is scheduled for September 16.
The issue with the pipeline, protesters say, is that the pipeline would run through land belonging to the tribe, which could have harmful effects.
“We will have to pursue our options with an appeal and hope that construction isn’t completed while that (appeal) process is going forward”, he said.
The planned 1,172-mile Dakota Access pipeline will run from North Dakota and South Dakota into Iowa and IL.
“There’s never been a coming together of tribes like this”, she said of Friday’s gathering of Native Americans, which she estimated could be the largest in a century.
The agencies said this fall they will invite tribes to formal, government-to-government consultations on what the federal government should do to better ensure meaningful tribal input and whether new legislation should be proposed to Congress. People came from as far as NY and Alaska, some bringing their families and children. About a dozen Guard members are manning a traffic information point on State Highway 1806 to free up law enforcement to have a visible presence near the protest site.
Energy Transfer Partners, which is leading a group of firms to build the pipeline, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Barack Obama said Friday that construction on the almost 2,000-mile pipeline would be shelved until the government can determine the effects it will have on the environment. The Great Plains Tribal Chairmans Association has asked the federal Justice Department to send monitors to the site because it said racial profiling is occurring.
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Conflict over the pipeline escalated last weekend when private security workers for Texas-based Dakota Access, the pipeline company, and protesters against the project clashed at the North Dakota construction site.
