EDITOR’S COLUMN: Pipeline needs to be built, but I stand with Standing Rock

Once the Rev. Jessie Jackson shows up at your protest, the one thing you know for certain is that you’ve completely lost control of your original message.

Usually that might be a bad thing, but for the protestors and disobeyers — both civil and uncivil — gathering outside Cannon Ball, North Dakota for weeks on end, it’s a good thing because their original complaint isn’t backed by the facts.

The casual observer might look at the coverage of the protests and think the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline is a modern day example of the imperialist white man once again exploiting Native people and expecting no one to notice or care.

But this isn’t what’s happening at all.

I was in Williston, North Dakota for most of the time this pipeline was discussed and debated, all the way from the Bakken shelf to its proposed destination in Chicago. Everyone, including the tribes of western North Dakota, had plenty of opportunity to contest, but other than Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which held up approval with a series of torch and pitchfork town halls that everybody in North Dakota watched with baited breath, nobody in the proposed path said ‘boo.’

In fact, from May 2015 to June 2016, in and around Williston, I never saw anything or anyone remotely resembling an environmental activist.

Upon arrival, I figured they’d be everywhere, especially with this being the hotbed of the ignominious tactic of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which, according to legend, contaminates drinking water everywhere it goes. In Williston, they brazenly advertised their love for this evil process with countless flares burning endlessly with such incandescence you could supposedly see them from space. This, too, was a commonly told urban legend, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a restaurant menu that didn’t contain a play on the word ‘frack’ as in ‘Frackin’ Chicken’ or ‘Frackin’ Goodness.’

There’s even a guy named Monte Besler who’d so famously perfected the art and craft of hydraulic fracturing, he, his license plate and his business went by the name “The FracN8r”.

All this shameless disdain for the purity of Mother Nature and hardly a single environmental activist in sight, Native or Paleface. Were this Alaska, no energy explorers would dare be so cavalier about their intention to strip the Earth of its natural resources.

Ultimately, there was only one reason I could come up with for this double standard: North Dakota is not pretty to look at, the weather isn’t nice and nobody thinks anybody really lives there, especially in the western part.

I suppose it’s like the way animal rights activists fought for years against the hunting of dolphins because they’re cute, even as the manatee was ignored almost to the point of extinction because the manatee is not so cute.

I would be remiss to not mention that there one activist in the Bakken who could be counted on any given weekend to be protesting off a desolate roadway in New Town, 70 miles east of Williston. Armed with a megaphone, homemade signs and a usually small legion of young backers, Kandi Mossett, of the group Indigenous Rising, spoke out even when oil prices were high, times were good, and not just oil companies and their workers, but the tribes, too, were living high on the hog.

Though nary a living soul in the Oil Patch wanted to hear what she had to say about environmental impacts or cultural desecration, she reminded them that, especially on the reservations, drug dealers and sex traffickers were enjoying halcyon days, too. That part they couldn’t dismiss or ignore. But hers was just about the only voice in the wilderness.

Even if it’s fact that the Army Corps of Engineers is designing the pipeline to cross under the Missouri River 92 feet below its bed, and no more than 19,000 barrels at one point would be traveling through with block valves on either end, monitored around the clock to detect pressure changes so that the pipeline is of virtually no danger to the water source, it doesn’t really matter.

Even if it’s a fact that the pipeline never actually crosses onto Standing Rock reservation land, and is a bajillion times safer than the only other option — transporting the oil in matte black death trains known as “Bakken Bombs” — that doesn’t matter, either.

All you have to do is say something vague and mystical like “Water is life”, repeat it in as many languages and dialects as you can, and watch as the manatee becomes the dolphin.

Next thing you know, Bernie Sanders is on site co-opting the ruckus into an opportunity to preach the virtues of green energy — a laudable goal, but one that has absolutely nothing to do with the safety of drinking water of the Standing Rock people.

You get actor Mark Ruffalo, Mark Ruffalo-ing all over the place, then a pack of buffalo, buffalo-ing all over the place as though some supernatural force were commanding them there — perhaps the same force that stayed the bluebird on Bernie’s podium in the middle of that campaign rally in Portland.

Finally, you get Jessie Jackson out there, the race card is officially played, and science and reason have gone out the window.

Now that we’ve gotten to this point, I’m all for these protests because they no longer have anything to do with the safety or lack of safety of the pipeline and everything to do with old wounds and a race of people, who, maybe for the first time ever, are rising up as a united voice demanding to be heard.

Having grown up on a reservation, about a third of my Facebook friends today are Native, and at least half of them are plugged in on this issue.

Many of them I see even make pilgrimages to North Dakota to join the protest, provide supplies, act as citizen journalists, or do whatever they can to assist those who will.

It’s an amazing thing to watch. Before, only a politically minded, militant few would care on any meaningful level what woe was befalling members of other tribes in other states.

Now, and maybe for the first time, it’s an actual movement with a purpose and a plan.