Still screwing the poor Native Americans after 238 years.

Yes

Yes they do. We had them sign horrible treaties for worthless land. First the casinos; now this. A deal is a deal!!!!!

The Keystone Pipeline, an act of war against Indians? ISIS wants to cut our heads off for our colonialist ambitions in Muslim lands, and now the Indians feel they are on the brink of war, I can't handle beheadings and scalpings.

If the Indian tribes and nations banned together because an Act of War is launched against them, will they use new weapons technology to fight? Will Isis cross the Mexican border and give them some Kalishnakovs and RPG training, will they start blowing up pipelines and make America burn under our feet?

People can only take so much. The Indian people were forced off their lands, killed, and now would have their way of life jeopardized to the point they could become extinct, what should we expect them to do, just vote libertarian at the polls?

I don't think anyone has considered our proposed energy independence drilling as an Act of War upon the Indian Nation and somebody should.

[Edited on 11/21/2014 by gina]

http://www.vice.com/read/the-oil-boom-is-ravaging-an-indian-reservation-in-north-dakota-1124

An Oil Boom Is Ravaging an Indian Reservation in North Dakota
November 25, 2014
By Cole Stangler

On the banks of Lake Sakakawea, a 370,000-acre reservoir that in the heart of western North Dakota's Fort Berthold Reservation—home to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) tribes—sits a 96-foot yacht.

When MHA Nation inaugurated the boat last summer, it advertised the flashy white vessel as a " dinner and enterta?inment" option for patrons of the nearby 4 Bears Casino & Lodge, a two-decade-old cash cow that's run by the tribe. Usually, though, "Island Girl" just sits idle. On this frigid November afternoon, like most days, it's propped up by blocks of wood on the empty marina.

It's hard to blame the casino hounds for their lack of interest. When it's six degrees outside—and during the winter months, the average temperature regularly plunges below zero—the thought of spending a night out on the windswept prairie water is literally chill inducing. Even the warmer weather has done little to encourage the yacht's use.

For most on the reservation, the boat is more symbolic than practical. It's a daily reminder that when it comes to the vast majority of the tribe's 14,000 membe?rs, tribal authorities have managed to piss away the benefits of the area's unprecedented and ridiculously lucrative oil boom.

Blessed with oil-and-gas-rich shale formations underlying Fort Berthold, the MHA government collects about $25 million in royalties a month. All in all, the tribe has collected about $1 billion in oil ?money since the fracking bonanza took off in 2008.

And yet life for much of MHA Nation is mostly bleak. Poverty, health problems, and drug abuse abound. Average life expectancy hovers below? 60. Meanwhile, the government's lack of transparency and its well-documented ties to oil and gas interests have left members in deep suspicion.

"The yacht, of course, is the most visible thing," says Theodora Bird Bear, a 63-year-old resident of Mandaree, an impoverished town of 600 on the reservation. "But if the yacht's there, what else is there? We don't know."

?

Fort Berthold alone is responsible for about a third of North Dakota's oil production, around 330,000 barrels a day. If the reservation were its own state, it would be the seventh ?largest oil producer in the country, just behind Oklahoma.

Some have reaped the boom's benefits. Fewer than half of the tribe's members own oil-rich land and earn royalties from leases negotiated with industry. (A smaller number of these landowners actually collect sizable amounts.) Most members' ability to benefit from the boom basically hinges on how much their government is willing to do for them.

"For some of those that own land, the oil boom has been great," Vance Gillette, a 64-year-old lawyer from New Town, tells me over beers in the casino lounge. "The rank and file don't own land and so of course there's some resentment there."

It's hard to blame them.

Thanks to the tribe's 1936 constitution, MHA government budgets aren't subject to the sorts of disclosure and auditing requirements that are standard among federal, state, county, or municipal bodies. This fact is made all the more staggering by the amount of money the tribal council controls: Last year's budget set aside $72 million in a general fund and $421 million in a loosely d?efined "special projects" fund.

"There was no definition of what those special projects were," says Bird Bear, who also runs a popular Facebook? ?page that documents the boom's impact on the reservation. "Nobody knows unless you're within the tribal government. The general membership doesn't know how the money is being spent."

The tribal council appropriates some of its money at monthly meetings, which are open to the public. Nevertheless, authorities often make significant spending decisions with little to no fanfare.

For instance, in September, officials broke ground on a $55 million hotel and casino project—a proposed five-story, 400-room development with four restaurants and a water park to be located directly across the street from the existing casino. Gillette says he only learned about this by reading the local paper.

The New Town News, in turn, does not publish all of its stories online. In order to track down the article, I had to call up the editor and ask for him to email me a copy. In other words, if you didn't happen to catch the September 19 print edition of The News or attend the meeting at which the council agreed to appropriate the money, you probably didn't hear about the new hotel.

Gillette shakes his head and takes a drag from his cigarette.

"There's a housing need, there is not a hotel need," Gillette says. "I can see the need for a Super 8 or something like that, but why do you need something like this?"

Inaction is another problem. Critics charge that authorities have ignored the most severe health and environmental troubles unleashed by the oil boom.

One is the sharp uptick in drug abuse. As outsiders began rushing into western North Dakota looking for jobs, they brought methamphe?tamines and heroin into the community. Tribal courts are now dominated by meth-related cases, but Fort Berthold still doesn't have any rehabilitation or treatment centers of its own.

"The meth up there is insane. The heroin up there is insane. They definitely need help," says one local law enforcement official.

After more than five years of frenetic drilling, the environmental footprint is staggering. It's hard to drive more than a few miles on the reservation without seeing evidence of flari??ng, the ecologically reckless but economically rational practice of burning off excess natural gas that's too expensive to get to market. At night, the fiery hills look like a scaled-back version of Mordor.

To be sure, flaring is common across the oil patch; but Fort Berthold bears the brunt of it. (Forty percent of natural gas drilled on the reservation is burned off into the atmosphere, twice the amount as the rest of North Dakota, ?according to state regulators.)

It's not just the air. Major questions loom over the community's water supply.

In July, a pipeline operated by the Houston-based company Crestwood Midstream spilled a million gall?ons of brine—a hyper-salinated, metal-infused watery byproduct of fracking—into a ravine that flows into a tributary of Lake Sakakawea, the reservation's primary drinking water source. As of today, no fines have been assessed.

VICE has learned that's because the tribe's former chairman Tex Hall—who himself owns a comp?any that drills on the reservation and once testified in? Congress against new frackin?g regulations—discouraged fellow officials from pursuing punitive action.

At this month's council meeting, I caught up with the MHA's environmental chief, Edmund Baker. He says that after the spill, Hall ignored his requests to obtain soil samples from the affected area.

"That's one of the major problems, the lack of deterrence," Baker says. "What kind of message does that send?"

Indeed, in the absence of a crackdown, the pipeline went on to spill twice more in the following months. In August, it spilled about 126,000 gallons. Then in October, the pipeline leaked another 6,300 gallons.

After losing his bid for re-election, Tex Hall left office earlier this month. Since the change in leadership, the tribe has worked with a third-party contractor—WH Pacific—to collect water and soil samples from the spill sites.

When Sierra Geraci, a representative from WH Pacific, finally briefed officials at the tribe's monthly council meeting, she revealed an unnerving amount of uncertainty: "We still don't know the full extent of the impact on the soils and surface water, the occurrence of groundwater contamination, the distance that contaminates have migrated towards the lake, the presence of radionu?clides in the drainage system, or the presence of metals in the creek sediments," she said.

Those samples are currently being analyzed at an EPA-certified laboratory. In the meantime, residents continue to use the water.

?

The recent change in leadership could usher in a new era on the reservation.

Earlier this month, MHA voters elected Mark Fox as their new chairman. On the campaign trail, Fox floated the possibility of "slowing" down the oil boom. That rhetoric alone was enough to scare producers, who vente?d their fears to state regulators.

It remains to be seen just how scared they should be.

There are some signs, though, that the swap in leadership will translate into more accountability. For instance, at the first council meeting under Fox's rein, the tribe finally agreed to assess a potential fine against Crestwood. And while it may seem trivial, MHA Nation officials broadcast the entirety of that council meeting on the radio—the first time that's happened in recent memory.

Others are skeptical that the new leadership will substantially alter the status quo. Fox, after all, served as the tribal government's tax director for the last four years.

"There's a big difference between campaigning and when you're actually in the driver's seat, so to speak," says Marilyn Hudson, a 78-year-old resident of Parshall who also runs the tribe's museum in New Town.

"I really never understood what this thing was about slowing down the oil boom. How would you do it? Would it be step one, two, three, four?" Hudson continues. "The oil industry and its relationship to landowners is probably just too big for one person to slow it down."

If the new leadership can't slow down drilling, then perhaps it can better distribute the wealth generated by the boom. Observers say the new council under Fox may proceed with some type of formalized "per capita" or "per cap" program—the term used for payments that some tribes dole out to their members. (Hall's government took some initial steps toward this.)

Setting up such a program could run into tax obstacles, though, according to Gillette.

"If it's general welfare—medical issues, for instance—then the tribe can justify it. But if it's just a $10,000 check, it gets trickier," says Gillette. "If they start making big payments, the IRS will come knocking."

Toward the end of our conversation, I ask Gillette what he thinks life will be like on Fort Berthold when the boom finally ends. Nobody quite knows when that time will come.

"I'll probably move, I don't know," he says with a laugh, as I struggle to gauge his sincerity. "The ones with money, they're out of here, in Bismarck, in San Francisco, in Arizona. If I had the big bucks, I'd probably be out of here, too."?

Cole Stangler is a DC-based journalist covering labor and environmental issues whose. His work has appeared in In These Times, The Nation, and The New Republic.Follow him on ?Twitter.

this pretty much explains the problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_sovereignty_in_the_United_States

this pretty much explains the problem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribal_sovereignty_in_the_United_States

Good link.

Am waiting for Dan Snyder to give us his take on this. 😉

Pushed the Navajo off Black Mesa in Arizona over the last 40 years for coal and uranium . This is SOP for the energy barons. As long as the wind blows, the river flows, the grass grows...what a crock. Nice to see the usual suspects avoiding this thread. Some truths are just self evident.

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/11/24/bias-ugly-19th-century-attitudes-toward-native-land-rights

http://www.bia.gov/cs/groups/xraca/documents/text/idc1-026971.pdf

BIA's Ugly, 19th-Century Attitudes Toward Native Land Rights
Joe Sexton
11/24/14

In his famous 19th century treatise, “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville noted that whereas the Spaniards “pursued the Indians with bloodhounds” and “sacked” the continent “with no more temper or compassion than a city taken by storm . . .” ultimately, “[t]he Spaniards were unable to exterminate the Indian race by those unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, nor did they even succeed in wholly depriving it of its rights . . . .” By contrast, de Tocqueville notes, “the Americans of the United States have accomplished this twofold purpose with singular felicity; tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity.”

Apparently not much has changed in the past 150 years.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs’ (BIA) public comment period for proposed regulations governing “Indian lands” closes on November 28, 2014. The proposed regulatory revisions may be found here. These proposed regulations concern “rights-of-way” over Indian lands; or, the rights of non-owners—like farmers, railroads, utility companies, and outside government agencies, among others—to access and use Indian lands.

To those who may not be familiar with federal policy over Indian lands, Tribal Governments and Americans Indian individuals can do very little with their lands without the approval of the BIA’s suffocating bureaucracy. Ironically, these are the same lands that were often promised to Tribes and their people by the federal government for their “exclusive use and benefit” in perpetuity. For anyone who has a basic knowledge of this area of law, the regulatory revisions may seem to be an effort to streamline the mind-numbing bureaucratic processes Tribes and individual Indians must navigate to make even the most basic decisions regarding their lands.

But to those who has seen the absolute ineffective and often times arbitrary nature of the BIA’s bureaucracy when it comes to governing Indian lands, these regulatory revisions do nothing more than perpetuate a resilient legacy of harm to Indian Country through laws, regulations, and executive actions emanating from Washington D.C.

Indeed, it is not hyperbole to contend that the these regulations—combined with the ineffective regulatory regime that presently has a stranglehold on Tribes and individual Indians’ right to make use of their lands—will result in a continued diminishment of Tribal sovereignty and individual Indian landowner rights, which will, in turn, continue the slow but steady federal government’s suffocation of Indian Country.

Specifically, the principal problems of these proposed rules include the following broad problems.

Unnecessarily ambiguous provisions in the proposed regulations open the door to state and local ordinances, taxes, and state courts—the judges of which are often times openly hostile to Tribal sovereignty and woefully ignorant of Indian law in general—governing Indian lands. Such an open door undermines Tribal sovereignty. The regulations should make Tribal sovereignty paramount if self-determination is, in fact, a central element of modern federal Indian policy.

The proposed rules include significantly greater power for the BIA to make decisions on behalf of Tribes and, especially, individual Indians, and to take actions impacting their lands without providing actual notice to the Tribal owners of those lands. This is disturbing to say the least. In essence, several of the revisions to these rules work to relieve the landowners of their right to have a say in what happens to their lands if it is too inconvenient for the BIA to track the landowners down and get their input. New regulations should empower the landowners, not disenfranchise them.

The proposed rules give increased authority for temporary holders of interests in Indian lands (e.g., a life tenant) to encumber Indian land with a right-of-way that may be permanent and impossible to undo (e.g., a road that could have destructive effects on the land and environment). So, a tenant who has an interest in a parcel of Indian land that the landowners may never have agreed to may make decisions that permanently damage those lands, leaving the Indian landowners to deal with the effects of those temporary interest holders. What other trustee aside from the federal government would be permitted to treat her ward’s realty with such disregard?

The proposed regulations contain an express presumption that the BIA must grant rights-of-way, renew rights-of-way, permit changes to rights-of-way, and allow for mortgaging of rights-of-way, all of which burden the title to Indian lands, unless the BIA finds certain limited reasons to reject such efforts to encumber Indian lands. This is a presumption against the protection of the rights of the individual Indian and Tribal landowners. Again, it seems that a trustee’s presumption should err on the side of protecting their wards’ interests. In this case, the BIA proposes rules that do exactly the opposite.
The BIA’s attempt to fast-track this significant regulatory overhaul may be the biggest problem here. Although there have been extensions of the agency’s unilaterally imposed deadlines to submit comments on these proposed rule changes, the BIA first published the proposed rules this summer, and had minimal consultation with those who will be impacted most profoundly: Tribes and individual Indian landowners. A couple of extensions of a deadline to submit comments is not enough. The BIA should have taken, and should still take, its time with these rules by making a much better effort to consult with those who will be impacted by these proposed rules.

In any event, it is alarming to still see the lack of regard for the rights of American Indian people interwoven through these proposed regulations. It is more troubling to consider the potential havoc these new rules may wreak on Indian Country. Hopefully these proposed regulations do not become law in such a way that allows the United States to, yet again, tranquilly and legally deprive the first Americans of their land rights.

Joe Sexton is Of Counsel at Galanda Broadman, PLLC. Practicing out of Yakima, Washington, he represents tribal governments and members in matters of cultural property and environmental resource protection.

Public comments to:

Email: consultation@bia.gov. Include the number 1076–AF20 in the subject line.

Looks like today Nov 28 is the last day for public comment. I just cut and pasted the letter LH posted last post and fired it off to the above email. Gotta put that number in the subject heading.

i did same thing brerrabbit....thanks