{"id":34186,"date":"2017-02-08T12:23:00","date_gmt":"2017-02-08T20:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2017\/02\/standing-rock-outrage\/"},"modified":"2017-02-08T12:23:00","modified_gmt":"2017-02-08T20:23:00","slug":"standing-rock-outrage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2017\/02\/standing-rock-outrage\/","title":{"rendered":"Standing Rock Outrage!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
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November- Reuters News<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

In a brief story in the New York Times this morning, reporter Julie Turkewitz tells us that the Army has approved construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. It took Robert Speer, the acting secretary of the Army, two weeks\u2014from the time of President Trump\u2019s announcement that he was going to expedite the building of pipelines\u2014to announce his decision to Congress. Speer said he didn\u2019t need the entire environmental impact statement and news of other potential sites that President Obama had ordered, that he knew enough and is ready to offer the pipeline\u2019s owner a 30-year easement on this  \u201cdisputed patch of land.\u201d<\/p>\n

I glance at the NYT headline stories daily, then go to the opinion pages for the Times editorials, the regular columnists, and op-eds that relate to the day\u2019s news. Standing Rock is missing this morning. Not one editorial writer or columnist chose to weigh in; not one piece of writing from an outraged Indian at Standing Rock or anywhere else in this country got space.<\/p>\n

Indians, once again, are back page news.<\/p>\n

According to Turkewitz, \u201cthe chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, Dave Archambault II, responded to the decision by vowing to fight it in court. \u2018As native peoples, we have been knocked down again,\u2019 he said in statement. \u2018But we will get back up, we will rise above the greed and corruption that has plagued our peoples since first contact.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Didn\u2019t I just write about Indian Resilience? Didn\u2019t I believe that months of protests by members of over 300 North American Tribes and Natives from Hawaii and Central America, by environmental organizations and dedicated individuals from across the nation had convinced a country and its government that the planning for this pipeline was flawed, that the Army had once again short-circuited Indians, and that the proposed pipeline might endanger the water, the most critical of our natural resources?<\/p>\n

Every day I learn something from Alvin Jospehy. Today I learned that Indians still don\u2019t count for much in this country of ours. They are, as Alvin said, a sideshow in our history, or they are impediments in the way of progress. We\u2019ll put them in Buffalo Bill\u2019s Wild West Show and watch cowboys take the West, We\u2019ll glean spiritual knowledge from their commercial potions and sweats\u2014the old traveling Medicine Shows often featured Indian cures, and hippies in the 70s favored feathers. We\u2019ll celebrate them in pictures with Edward Sheriff Curtis, and picture them when it serves a purpose. Alvin liked to point out the State Department\u2019s use of a mistakenly idealized American Indian\u2014horse-mounted, feather bedecked Sioux of the Plains\u2014in their \u201cvisit America\u201d literature.<\/p>\n

For over 40 years, Alvin wrote painstakingly about America\u2019s curious and tragic historical omission of Indians. He paid special attention to broken treaties, and to the Sioux. In 1971, when he consulted on the movie, \u201cLittle Big Man,\u201d he went to the Custer Battlefield with Indian friends and wrote about the \u201creal Custer\u201d in Life Magazine. In 1973, weeks after the FBI-Indian confrontation on the Pine Ridge Reservation, he wrote \u201cWhat the Indians Really Want,\u201d a description of government misdeeds going back to the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, for the New York Times Sunday Magazine.<\/p>\n

If Alvin were alive today he would have an op-ed in today\u2019s New York Times. He would be visiting Standing Rock, and pointing out that the \u201cdisputed patch of land\u201d that investors, the State of North Dakota, and President Trump want for their oil pipeline is sacred, yes, is important for the water that flows through it, yes. But is finally, once again \u201cstolen ground,\u201d with a long history of broken treaties, and government dissembling, cheating, and war-making on the Indians who have lived their forever.<\/p>\n

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November- Reuters News In a brief story in the New York Times this morning, reporter Julie Turkewitz tells us that the Army has approved construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. It took Robert Speer, the acting secretary of the Army, two weeks\u2014from the time of President Trump\u2019s announcement that he was going to expedite the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247,590,574,593,594,592,370,595,591],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34186"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}