creation stories: survivance, sovereignty,
and oil in MHA country
STEPHEN ANDREWS
Berthold
before Bakken, and Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara before Berthold. Before Tribe, there was river and sea,
and before water the back information of Time that shapes the meaning of this or
any other narrative.
It is January 2013, and
snowfall is beginning to thicken as these thoughts congeal into notes. Just returned from the first of several
interviews I was granted permission by MHA administrators to conduct, I am
awaiting a cheeseburger at the Wrangler Café in Parshall, North Dakota, home of
the Braves, located just on the eastern edge of its namesake oil field, which
was discovered in 2006 by EOG Resources in conjunction with consulting
geologist Mike Johnson.[1] Commentators
on the history of the Bakken boom point to the discovery of the Parshall Field
as the "eureka" moment that for oil investors and lease operators alike
transformed the Bakken from enormous potential to immediate "play." By the time
my burger arrives, seven years later, so to speak, I've already heard whispers
of another taking. Not the land outright, as in 1949, but a swindle of mineral
and drilling rights to the tune of nearly a billion dollars. The
more things change...
It
is 1943, and flooding along the lower Missouri has "caused billions of dollars
in damage and flooded thousands of farms in Nebraska and Iowa." After nearly "a
century of catastrophic flooding," the floods of '43 are a tipping point that
triggers a call for a massive engineering project to build a series of dams
across the upstream portions of the Missouri and tame the Big Muddy
(VanDevelder 26). The Pick-Sloan Plan, according to namesakes Colonel Lewis
Pick, of the Army Corps of Engineers, and Glenn Sloan, of the Bureau of
Reclamation, will provide access to irrigation for "four million acres of bone
dry prairie" upstream while ensuring flood control to downstream farmers in
Iowa and Nebraska (27). The "jewel in the crown" of the Pick-Sloan Plan will be
the Garrison Dam, set to be located in the heart of Mandan, Hidatsa, and
Arikara country. Once the dam is completed, the symbolic and economic heartland
of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Forth Berthold Reservation, an area that
includes the tribal headquarters at Elbowoods, will be submerged under "a six
hundred square-mile lake." The Tribes will lose 153,000 acres of bottom land
that has some of the richest topsoil in the world—18 feet deep in some
places, according to Cory Spotted Bear—and many will be forced to attempt
farming and ranching on the less arable "bad" lands west of the river.[2]
The Tribes, with help from Wyoming Senator Joseph O'Mahoney, fight valiantly
for four years to "forestall" what Paul VanDevelder refers to as an "inevitable
catastrophe" (28). On October 9, 1945, during Congressional hearings on the
matter, Senator William "Wild Bill" Langer of North Dakota asks the Chairman of
the Three Affiliated Tribes, Martin Cross, how long his ancestors had been
living in the area in question. "Since time immemorial," the Chairman replies
(117-18). Given that answer, what could possibly constitute ground of equal
value or the price of "just compensation?" By then, though, all involved know
too well that relocation to acreage of equal value would not be forthcoming in
a Plan that has all the earmarks of a fait accompli in which the cultural and
economic well-being of the Tribes seems a mere and increasingly irritating
afterthought. Built to accommodate the submergences and dislocations of what
the Elders would thereafter refer to as "the Flood," New Town, located on
Highway 23 some 70 miles northwest of Elbowoods and twelve miles west of
Parshall, will be established as the new tribal center as of 1951.[3]
As if in cruel mockery of the immemorial "heart" of Tribal life now lying
submerged under the waters over Elbowoods, New Town is about as far north as
one can go and still be on the Reservation. But at least it was dry.
Several other tribes
along the Missouri, including the Sioux, were traumatized by the effects of the
Pick-Sloan Plan. But as Michael L. Lawson points out, "the most devastating
effects suffered by a single reservation were experienced by the Three
Affiliated Tribes whose tribal life was almost totally destroyed by the army's
Garrison Dam" (29). Recently, in December of 2016, MHA Chairman Mark Fox highlighted
the irony of these tragic events in commemorating the restoration of nearly
25,000 acres that had hitherto been under the control of the Corps of
Engineers. "Half of our adult men were fighting for their country and
their homes in World War II when the federal government began making plans to
take our lands for the Garrison Dam," Fox said. "The flood caused by the Dam
displaced 90 percent of our people from their homes. It literally destroyed our
heartland" ("Interior Department"). The legal basis of such action, referred to
by the government as a "taking," can be found in Amendment V of the
Constitution: "'nor shall private property be taken for public use, without
just compensation." "Just
compensation," unlike beauty, is not in the eye of the beholder so much as in
the pen of the colonizing power, in this case represented by the Army and the
Bureau of Reclamation, both working on behalf of descendants of settlers rather
than in the best interests of the Tribes. As if to underscore this point,
amateur historian and blogger Judi Heit points out that "the Corps of Engineers, without
authorization from Congress, altered the project's specifications in order to
protect Williston, North Dakota, and to prevent interference with the Bureau of
Reclamation irrigation projects. However, nothing was done to safeguard Mandan,
Hidatsa or Arikara/Sahnish communities" ("Ghost Lakes"). Do I need to add that
Williston is not on the Reservation and that the majority of its residents were
white? When
all was said and done, according to legal scholar Raymond Cross, son of the
aforementioned Martin Cross, "just compensation" for the Fort Berthold Taking
Act (Public Law 437), signed into law by President Truman on October 29, 1949,
turned out to be 7.5 million dollars—a paltry sum indeed for land on
which the people had been living since "time immemorial."[4]
"Just compensation," then, turns out to be just compensation, just one more turn of the colonizer's screw, and
hardly surprising at that.
Colonization," according to Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, "is not just the invasion and inhabiting of a place owned by others; it is the setting up of laws to legitimize the power of occupancy and ownership" (2012 138). As an example of the kind of legitimizing she has in mind, Cook-Lynn points to this same "mid-twentieth-century Missouri River project, which, through federal law, destroyed millions of acres of treaty-protected land for hydropower over the objections of the citizens who lived there" (138). For Cook-Lynn, herself a member of the Crow Creek Sioux Nation that was also adversely impacted by the Pick Sloan Project, the social goods of cheaper power, accessible irrigation and effective flood control are each a metonym for a history of Native eliminationism in the name of social progress. As such, these "goods" will not be allowed to blunt the urgencies of her central and abiding question: "for how long will the courts and academia and the intelligentsia of this country refuse to describe this history as genocide?" (68 emphasis in original). As a means of pointing out the ramifications of that history, Scott Richard Lyons makes a useful distinction between "migration" and "removal." Lyons imagines that migration has a "value" akin to what "Gerald Vizenor has called transmotion: a 'sense of native motion and an active presence,' that is recognized by 'survivance, a reciprocal use of nature, not a monotheistic, territorial sovereignty'" (5). Removal, Lyons later states, "was a federal policy established in 1830 by President Andrew Jackson, and it would now go by the name of ethnic cleansing" ("Introduction" 8, emphasis added). Not only would it go by that name now, but as Cook-Lynn reminds us, "[o]n Indian reservations even today the writing and enforcement of the laws of colonization are always charted by the federal system, often without the consent of the governed" (138 emphasis added). Even today—pipelines and competing jurisdictions crisscross Indian Country and undercut the very idea of sovereignty.
In October of 2013, Lisa
DeVille and her husband, Walter, gave me a tour of the oilfields along an
unpaved BIA road in the Mandaree area, where
Fig. 2a
Fig. 2 the artificial palm trees are located at top left corner of this mini-man-camp.
Fig. 3 Where fracking is concerned, there is no oil without water In what will turn out to be an even greater irony than
the oil itself, the water of Lake Sakakawea, beneath which lies the Tribal
heartland, will be even more valuable than the oil.[6]
From Fox's perspective, MHA will have gone from what Raymond Cross, borrowing
from Bonnie Duran, calls the debilitating effects of "intergenerational
post-traumatic stress disorder" (Cross 2000, 958), a disorder underscored for
his generation by a righteous rhetoric of too much water and not enough solid
land, to a post-oil future in which MHA, facing West, will have surplus water
for a world that cannot get enough of it. "One day," Fox says by way of
emphasizing his point, "in this nation and in this world, a barrel of potable
drinking water is going to be more valuable than a barrel of oil." All the more
reason, then, to minimize wastewater contamination, which may turn out to be
easier said than done. According to a 2016 Duke University report, "there have
been approximately 3900 brine spills reported to the North Dakota Department of
Health by well operators." The report goes on to define "brine spills" as "the
accidental release of brine that may potentially impact groundwater or surface
water" (Lauer). The key words here are "accidental" and "reported," since both the
DeVilles and the aforementioned Tribal Business Council member, Cory Spotted
Bear (Twin Buttes Segment), are convinced that there are occurrences of illegal
dumping. Illegal dumping, while pernicious in its cumulative effects, may turn
out to be the least of their worries. On July 8, 2014, a
leak in Crestwood Midstream's Arrow Pipeline "dumped more than 1 million
gallons of brine and oil in a Mandaree tributary of the colossal lake formed by
the Garrison Dam" (Nauman). That "colossal lake" is what Fox is envisioning as
a liquid lock box for MHA's future. Moving
forward, as with looking back, the problem that the oversight of environmental
hazards presents is that so much is out of the direct control of MHA. In what
follows, I will trace out the implications for Tribal sovereignty as it
pertains to the aspirations of two MHA members—Lisa DeVille and Cory Spotted
Bear—both of whom I interviewed in the summer and fall of 2013. In doing
so, I will elaborate on and interweave four different types of creation
stories: the tale told by oil which, like the immemorial past of the MHA
people, is a resource buried under the weight of its own history; the
aspirational stories told by Spotted Bear and DeVille and the examples they embody
that take sustenance from that deep past in
order to progress toward a workable and sustainable future; the critique of
the dominant culture's political creation story as elaborated by Raymond Cross,
a legal scholar for whom the founding of a doubled America—"one Indian
and one non-Indian" (Cross 2004, 61)—might now, in a post-boom world,
become an opportunity for renegotiating "the existing civil compact between the
Indian and non-Indian peoples" under the aegis of what he calls, following
Charles Taylor and Clifford Geertz, "'deep diversity'" (64). These creation
stories will themselves be served by another type of creation story, the
writer's peculiar form of re-creation which we have come to call the essay. I.
Essay/assay: the first doubling All stories, according
to self-described "postindian ironist," Gerald Vizenor, are creation
stories—none more so than that late arrival, the essay. Merging the
neo-pragmatist critique of Richard Rorty with his own critique of the logic of
Manifest Destiny that he calls "manifest manners," Vizenor goes on to say that
"[t]he shadows in trickster stories would overturn the terminal vernacular of
manifest manners, and the final vocabularies of dominance" ("Shadow" 68). For "native stories," as Vizenor
explains in "Penenative Rumors," "are the canons of survivance: the tease of seasons, scent of cedar,
oneric names, shamanic creases, and the transmotion of sovereignty" (23). He
might as well have said "canyons," where the tease of natural reason sent by
cedars and the twists and turns of elemental forces over time have creased the
very landscape of selves that are decidedly "not... essence, or immanence," but
are instead "the mien of stories" (20). Quoting literary theorist David
Carroll, Vizenor is careful to emphasize that "master narratives"—the
upper case Creation Stories of manifest manners and final
vocabularies—"perpetuate an injustice" in their "denial of the right to
respond, to invent, to deviate from the norm" (27). Such deviations—which
I take to be synonymous with Vizenor's notion of mien—are definitive, if necessarily diffuse, as implied in
the following Vizenor quote from Jean François Lyotard's "Lessons in Paganism":
"the people does [sic] not exist
as a subject but as a mass of millions of insignificant and serious little
stories that sometimes let themselves be collected together to constitute big
stories and sometimes disperse into digressive elements" ("Shadow" 68). That
key word "mien," then, which figures as attitude and affect, is a sign of presence
and belongs neither to teller nor auditor but links them both to the
contingencies of the story being narrated. As
Vizenor suggests, every story impels many miens and no single story speaks for
the order of things. Since "[t]he native essay is the transmotion of nature,
culture, and sovereignty," the stakes, as Vizenor sees them in "Penenative
Rumors," are high indeed (25). In what amounts to an essay on essays, Vizenor
takes pains to point out the multifarious "miens" of the essay form. It is, he says,
"resistance," "contention," "mediation," "venture," and above all
"contingency"; it is also a "tease of creation" as well as a "trace of
survivance and sovereignty" (23-4). As if to underscore that the essay is
ultimately in the service of something larger than itself, Vizenor switches
from indicative to imperative mood: "The essay must tease creation," and "[t]he tease must reverse modernist
theses, models of the social sciences, and the narratives of a native absence
as an indian presence" (23, emphases
in original). In Vizenor's hands, the essay is the medium that best expresses
his sense that "the eternal tease is chance" (Postindian Conversations 19). "Chance," as I understand it, teases
us in the form of contingency, and provokes us in the form of risk. From that
perspective, Vizenor's notion of the essay is very much in line with that of
Michel de Montaigne, who is generally credited with being the inventor of the
modern essay. For Montaigne, the essay ushers forth "a new figure—an
unpremeditated and accidental philosopher" ("Apology"). Philosopher Ann Hartle
opposes "accidental philosophy" to what she calls "deliberate philosophy." The
former, being "nonauthoritative" (34), seeks not to "aim at a preconceived
conclusion" but instead follows a path "of discovery that allows the accidental
'some authority'" (87). Deliberate philosophy, Hartle stresses, seeks nothing
less than "divine stasis," as in
Plato's "eternal forms" or Aristotle's "first causes" (27) or in the implied
teleology of manifest destiny. With its reliance on the logical forms of "the
syllogism, the disputation, and the treatise," deliberate philosophy "assumes
the truth of one's premises," and so "aims at a predetermined conclusion" (87).
We can see that the protocols of deliberate philosophy are very much in line
with those of what Vizenor calls "modernist theses" and "models of the social
sciences." As he explains in Native
Liberty, "I write to creation not closure, to the treat of trickster
stories over monotheism, linear causality, and victimry" (6). The task of his project, then, is to
figure out how to restore "some authority" to the ongoing traces of "survivance
and sovereignty," traces that are constantly under threat of sedimentation by
the deliberative discursive pressures brought to bear by 500-plus years of
"accidental" indianness. Here, too,
Lyons' distinction between migration
and removal is on point: the
story-telling essay is a migratory form. "Stories," as Kimberly Blaeser reminds
us, "keep us migrating home" (qtd in Lyons, 5). Their discursive counterpart,
the argument grounded in "deliberate philosophy" with its quest for logical
purity, is necessarily a function of removal—more akin to assay than
essay. For
our present purposes, it is useful to know that the word "essay," used as a
verb, was once synonymous with the word "assay." Both imply a "trial" or "test"
(Hartle 4, 63). To essay, according to the OED, is to "put to the
proof." The emphasis, as I understand Hartle and Vizenor, is less on "proof"
than on "put": for the obligation of the essayist is to
chance the topic under review. In
what would seem a slightly different register, one tests for the presence of a
mineral by assaying, or proofing, its
ore. But are these truly different registers? Inasmuch as there is no gold standard for the logic of an
essay, how, for example, does one test for presence in an essay? As poet Diane
Glancy reminds us in a short segment on Vizenor entitled an "Essay on the
Essay," the "variable units" of Vizenorian language are "the four directions of
trick, disturb, interpret and realign." Glancy figures these verbs, each
stressing a dislocution or a dislocation, as cardinal virtues in Vizenor
country, even as they map out the contours of Glancy country as well. Within,
she goes on to explain, are "texture," and "a geology or geography of written
language as conduit" ("The Naked Spot" 279). The transmotion of Glancy's
figurations, from "texture" to "geology" to "language," invites a pivot from
the creative storytelling of essays
to the creation stories imbedded within geologic assays. In this case, the assays I have in mind are the core
samples by which petrologists test for oil. While the geologic story they tell
originates thousands of feet below ground and millions of years ago—from
time immemorial, we might say—the surface story plots out a narrative of
transmotion wherein the tragedy of removal might potentially allow MHA an
opportunity to frack out a migratory and redemptive irony of the last laugh.
After all, as we shall discuss, they, too, according to their creation stories,
came up to the surface from deep underground. II.
Reading from the ground up The idea of geology as a
story seems a foundational metaphor for North Dakota's Geological Survey
Department. In their 1997 guide book to the geology of the area around
Dickinson, North Dakota, Robert F. Biek and Edward C. Murphy explain that
"geologists often view the earth as a book." They go on to add that "the story
is not told in words and sentences... but in layers of rocks that record geologic
history. Each layer is like "a page in a book," with pages "grouped into
chapters and the chapters into four great volumes" (2). These "volumes," from
the earliest to the most recent, are the Precambrian or Cryptozoic, Paleozoic,
Mesozoic, and Cenozoic Eras (3). While Biek and Murphy go on to stress the
incompleteness of the text of geology, figuring that it might better be thought
of as an "incomplete diary," they nevertheless insist that the "record... with
careful observation can be pieced back together" (2-3). In The Face of North Dakota (2000), State Geologist John P. Bluemle
sounds a more cautionary note while utilizing a similar bibliographic analogy:
"The rocks and sediments found in North Dakota are not all the same age," he
writes. "Like the pages in a long and difficult history book, they record
events of the past. The 'book' however, is incomplete. Many pages are missing; other
pages—even entire chapters—are torn and tattered, difficult or
impossible to decipher." Missing pages notwithstanding, Bluemle assures his
readers that geologists "know" that "the record of life in North Dakota goes
back between 500 and 600 million years" (135). Much
of that knowledge is gleaned from core samples drilled in order to assay for
petroleum (Biek 3). And, in keeping with the bibliographic metaphor, these core
samples are readily available for review at the Wilson M. Laird Core and Sample
Library. With 18,000 square feet of climate-controlled storage space, this
voluminous facility "currently houses approximately 70 miles of cores and
34,000 boxes of drill cuttings," including about 95% of "the samples collected"
from "the North Dakota portion of the Williston Basin" ("Core Library"). Cores from the Bakken formation
constitute a significant portion of this archive, and to a State geologist they
provide the necessary texture with which to plot out their ur-text—a
creation story of the deep structure of North Dakota geology that intersects at
surface level with a complicated social history wherein land, water, and people
converge. The plot has its rising action in volume 2 (the Paleozoic Era), with
a series of transgressions and regressions of warm inland seas, and of the
consequent deposition and sedimentation of layers upon layers of mud mixed in with
the organic residue of lush, tropical vegetation.[7]
"Long after the sea... dried up," or so the storytellers say, "the weight of
thousands of feet of overlying rocks, coupled with heat from the earth's
interior" triggered in that organic slush chemical transformations that
produced petroleum. Additional pressure "caused the petroleum to migrate from
the source rocks (mainly shale) into more porous rocks (mainly sandstone and
carbonates)" [Bluemle 147-8]. As of now, the richest deposits in the Williston
Basin are to be found in the Bakken Formation, so named in 1953 by geologist J.
W. Nordquist after H.O. Bakken, the man who owned the land in Williams County,
North Dakota, on which the Amerada Petroleum Corporation took core samples from
its test hole #1.[8] A relatively
thin layer of source rock—only 46m thick at its "depocenter" (defined as
the site of maximum deposition)—the Bakken is a layer of "organic-rich
shales" that "overlies the Upper Devonian Three Forks Formation and underlies
the Lower Mississippian Lodgepole Formation" ("Diagenesis" 4). This would date
the formation at about 360 million years.
A
comparative analysis of core samples done by a well-trained eye can pinpoint
where the oil is and approximately how much of it has been generated. Indeed,
this is how the late Julie LeFever, geologist and longtime Director of the
Laird Core Library, earned her affectionate sobriquet of "Miss Bakken." She "knew where the oil was," according
to colleague Kent Holland. "She looked at nearly every Bakken core, logged it,
and put that information together.
She knew it was there before the technology existed to extract it"
(Orvik). According to a study published in 2001, by Janet
K. Pitman, Leigh C. Price, and LeFever, the Bakken "generated approximately 200
to 400 billion barrels of oil in place" ("Diagenesis" 1). As the 200 billion
barrel swing might indicate, oil generation estimates are in dispute. As
geologists develop ever more sophisticated computer models, the amount is
adjusted—sometimes higher, and sometimes lower. Even if all could agree
on a fixed amount, generated oil does not necessarily equal "recoverable" oil.
There is a great, and one supposes often frustrating, disparity between what
nature is deemed to have generated and what technology and pricing will allow
to be recovered. In a 2006 paper co-authored by LeFever and Lynn Helms,
legendary geologist Leigh Price is quoted as placing the recovery estimate "as
high as 50%." Headington Oil Company, operating in Richland County, Montana,
put a "primary recovery factor of 18%" for their operations, while North
Dakota's Industrial Commission came in with the most conservative estimate of
from 3-10%. Admitting that the "Bakken play" in North Dakota is still in a
"learning curve," LeFever and Helms go on to point out that technological
adjustments (including horizontal fracking) and the price of oil "will dictate
what is potentially recoverable from this formation" ("Bakken Formation"). In
2008, the State of North Dakota estimated that 11-14 billion barrels were
recoverable, whereas in 2013 the US Geological Survey put the number at just
under 7.4 billion (Gaswirth, et.al.).
Be
that as it may, they don't call it a "boom" for nothing. Actual production in
the Bakken, even with the recent plunge in oil prices, is still above a million
barrels a day.[9] And for
various reasons, not all of them good, that boom may very well reverberate in
MHA Nation for a long time. The Reservation is located right at ground zero of
what North Dakotans affectionately refer to as "the Patch." For MHA, the
metonym "the Patch" is counterpoised to an earlier metonym, "The Flood," the
traumatic effects of which have been intergenerational. It remains to be seen
as to what is ultimately "recoverable" within that scenario. Maps
of the Bakken Total Petroleum System (which also include the Three Forks
formation that undergirds the Bakken) show that the area under review stretches
east-west from longitude 99° in east-central North Dakota to longitude 107° in
eastern Montana, and north-south from the Canadian border (although the actual
geological formation extends into Manitoba and Saskatchewan) to latitude 45° in South Dakota. Compare those boundaries to the
following: Commencing
at the mouth of the Heart River; thence up the Missouri to the mouth of the
Yellowstone River; thence up the Yellowstone to the mouth of the Powder River,
thence in a southeasterly direction to the headwaters of the Little Missouri
River, thence along the Black Hills to the headwaters of the Heart River;
thence down the Heart River to the place of the beginning. ("Laws and
Treaties") So reads the language of
the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie. Starting at the mouth of the Heart, the
boundary circles back, as if to come home. These days, the southern boundary of "home" for the MHA
Nation is some 100 miles north, as the crow flies, from present-day Mandan, a
city situated at the mouth of the Heart on the west side of the Missouri across
from Bismarck, the state capital. A two and a half hour drive will get you to
tribal headquarters at Four Bears, across the river from New Town. At
approximately 500,000 acres, the tribal land base is miniscule compared to the
roughly 12 million acres allotted in the original treaty ("Demographics").[10] In
the oral tradition, this lost area is referred to as "the heart of the world." It was here, at the Heart River
villages, that the Mandan expanded their agriculture-based economy by
establishing a "great trading bazaar" that became a "commercial hub" along the
Mississippi-Missouri trade routes (VanDevelder 17). When Spotted Bear recounted
this history to me, he used the analogy of Sam's Club—a one-stop
retail-warehouse shopping experience under the corporate aegis of Walmart—to
connect MHA's past prowess as traders to today's commercial circumstances.
Archaeology bears this out. According to Elizabeth Fenn, at one particular
Mandan site in Hull, North Dakota (south of Heart River), "investigators have
unearthed items traceable" to locations as far-flung as the Pacific Northwest,
Florida, the Tennessee River, the Gulf Coast, and the Atlantic Seaboard (18).
Given the centrality of trade to agriculture-based and hunting-gathering
peoples alike, it would indeed be fair to call the Heart River villages "the
heart of the world." But the people of MHA had other reasons for calling this
the "heart" of their world. In one version of their creation story, Lone Man
and First Creator engage in a friendly contest to create their respective
portions of the world. They begin and end at the confluence of the Heart and
the Missouri (Fenn 5-6). As
it turns out, each of the Three Affiliated Tribes has some version of a
creation story that indicates an origin from deep underground. One Mandan account,
for example, as told to Wolf Chief by Chief, his Mandan father-in-law, tells of
"a high point on the ocean shore that the Mandan came from. They were said to
have come from under the ground at that place and brought corn up" (Bowers 2004
156). Wolf Chief was Hidatsa, and they, too, had tales that reckoned an
underground origin. In one account, from an unnamed source, it is said that
First Creator "caused the people who were living below to come above, bringing
with them their garden produce" (Bowers 1965 298). In Arikara origin stories
the people are likewise said to have come up from the ground, or from an
underground cave. As Star tells us, "A long time ago, people lived in the
ground" (Dorsey 18).[11] In
the time "long ago" it was corn and other garden produce that the people
brought with them from below. Since 2008, what comes from below has primarily
been a volatile mix of oil, natural gas, and wastewater. The nearly constant
movement of tanker and supply trucks is literally spreading and widening BIA
roads, most of which are unpaved. This constant rumble of oil-related products
is further complicated for MHA members by issues pertaining to resource
allocation, Native sovereignty, environmental concerns, and federal, state, and
local laws. Since the advent of
Bakken oil, MHA highway fatalities—"40 in the last few years," according
to Fox—have increased at an alarming rate[12];
drug and sex trafficking are rampant; and with the Four Bears Casino and the
expected revenues from oil, fewer and fewer youth are seeing any good reason to
further their education beyond high school. I learn all this from several
persons I was granted permission by Tribal administrators to interview during
the boom year of 2013. All of them
had at least a college degree, several had Masters, and one, Fox, a law
degree. Three of them had served
in a branch of the armed services. All are very alive to the deep irony of
recent tribal history in which MHA's best land had been "taken" in the late
1940s by the Federal government on behalf of the Pick-Sloan plan to dam up the
Missouri for purposes of flood control. The notion of "transgenerational
trauma" in reference to that post-Flood generation is a touchstone concept
expressed by almost all the people I interviewed.[13]
The youngest of these, Cory Spotted Bear and Lisa DeVille, live on the west
side of Lake Sakakawea, in Twin Buttes and Mandaree, respectively. MHA Nation,
and Mandaree in particular, turns out to be at the heart of the most productive
portion of the Bakken boom. Their stories show the extent to which creation is
an ongoing process. III.
Cory Spotted Bear "I'm to the top of my
head in the earth here," Cory Spotted Bear declares. We are sitting around the
dining room table of his house in Twin Buttes, North Dakota, on an early
afternoon in July, and he is explaining to me why he has no desire to move
away. Because he has just graced me with an hour-long survey of the history of
the MHA people, I think I know that this statement means more than a deep
personal commitment to the priority of place. As we have seen, since time
immemorial "the people" of MHA have always imagined themselves as having come
up from the ground. Spotted Bear, too, sees himself as emblematic of that
tradition. And at 36, he feels that he is just now beginning to emerge from the
ground up to grow into a vision of himself that he has been cultivating since
his senior year in high school. Signs
of a continuous past are all around us. There was the sweetgrass burned in the
smudge pot to welcome me into his home and to sanctify the time and space of
our conversation. There is talk of building an earth lodge on the grounds of
the local elementary school, just across the street from Spotted Bear's home.
Later in our conversation he will tell me that he is preparing for a sun dance
and will need to get a proper tree for the ceremony. Spotted Bear is a mesmerizing speaker, so I am not surprised
to learn that he is often called on by outside groups to talk about MHA-related
issues. For that reason, our time today will be limited, although he will give
me even more of it than I had hoped. A humble man, he seems almost embarrassed
to explain that shortly after I leave he will be relating his Tribal history to
a documentary film crew from Wales, chasing down the hoary old myth of the
"Welsh" Mandan. Spotted
Bear is proud to say that he grew up a reservation boy, raised in the old ways
by his grandmother, Olive ("Ollie") Benson. Mrs. Benson happened to be a
"full-blooded Norwegian," or masi,
but Spotted Bear tells me that because she was raised on the reservation and
because she had learned the old ways from her husband, Lorenzo "Larry" Spotted
Bear, he thinks of her unapologetically as a conduit for the old ways. One of
these teachings is to honor one's relatives. In light of that, Spotted Bear considers
himself to be "socially Mandan," while acknowledging his Norwegian and German
ancestry. "You must acknowledge your parts in order to be whole," he tells me.
But make no mistake, Spotted Bear affirms the synergy that the parts add up to
when he tells me, with pride quite evident in his voice, that, since both his
mother and father were half, he considers himself to be "full-blooded
Indian." Trying
to make tradition continuously present also means coming into contact with the
vestiges of genocide. There is the "historical trauma" that Spotted Bear identifies
with assimilation and acculturation when talking about his father and mother
and why they were ill-equipped to raise him. "After boarding school," he says,
"they say we did not know how to love our children." He was raised during
formative years by his Uncle and Aunt, Dennis and Berta, who taught him a good
work ethic by way of the many chores that a working ranch requires. Chores and good grades were a negotiating
point for the avid young basketball player. As
with many Native men, Spotted Bear sees in basketball an opportunity for young
persons to be "warriors." During his senior season in high school, he had what
he refers to as an "embarrassing experience with weed," one that left him
feeling psychologically unsettled for a couple of months. "I felt like
something was missing," he says, "I always felt like I was forgetting
something, or like there's something that should be there that wasn't
there." Spotted Bear says he
didn't really have a language for making sense of those uneasy sensations until
years later after he had begun sun-dancing. As he began to come to terms with
what he calls "the ceremonial way of life," he learned that "when we are not
doing good, part of our good spirit leaves us. It can't be around us anymore
because it is so pure, like a child." As he tells it, he now understands what
his spirit was doing during those two months. "It was up in the heavens,
talking to other spirits, talking to my ancestors, talking to my grandmas and
grandpas. And it was getting wisdom, and it was getting stronger, and it was
preparing to come back and start helping me down in this earth again." Grounded
once more, the consequences were very real for Spotted Bear. He began to think
about deepening his education in various ways. The BA he earned at Haskell and
the MA in Indigenous Studies from the University of Kansas may have provided
him with a credentialed portfolio that pointed him to the future, but his
experiences at these institutions also buttressed an intensifying commitment to
learning the old ways from his Elders, what he refers to as "teachings."
Without them, he would continue to feel as empty and rootless as he had after
that episode in high school. In asking about the old ways, Spotted Bear was
struck by how often his Elders would affirm the value of getting an education.
Both his Grandma Ollie and his Grandma Martina spoke of its importance, the
latter doing so on her deathbed. His late aunt, Alyce Spotted Bear, herself an
internationally recognized educator, had, during her stint as Tribal Chair,
guided MHA through the Joint Tribal Advisory Committee (JTAC) investigations
that eventually led, in 1992, to the allocation of an additional 149.2 million
dollar compensation for the tribal lands appropriated by the Forth Berthold
Taking Act.[14]
Raymond Cross had successfully argued that case all the way to the Supreme
Court. For Spotted Bear, a more complete education would have to embody not
only the academic finesse exemplified by Elders such as Alyce and Raymond, but
it would also have to include learning the intricacies of tribal ways that had
been passed down since "time immemorial." After
a detailed, and at times emotional, explanation of tribal and personal history,
Spotted Bear says, "Maybe you want to know my take on the oil." Based on my
introductory phone call, he knows that interviewing him on this topic is the
primary reason for my visit. But being a consummate host, he gently explains
the deferral in relation to the old ways. "The intelligent answer is the
pondered answer; I'm pondering things still," he says. "I'm okay with this oil
if we can do it in compliance. But because we went through so much trauma, we
tend to do things out of order. I could run an oil-field service, but are we going
to build a house on the ground or are we going to build a nice foundation
first?" After a short pause, he continues. "Let me paint a picture for
you: there are those of us who
absolutely love our way of life—the Earth way, the fact that we are
businessmen." It is in this context that he talks about Sam's Club and the
Mandan reputation as traders extraordinaire. Rightly proud of this tradition, Spotted
Bear thinks the oil can be leveraged in such a way that MHA can continue to be
trade brokers long after the oil is gone. "Today," he says, "what my view is
right now is that we can do these things in balance." Lest I get the wrong
idea about his self-interestedness, he quickly explains that he doesn't get any
oil revenue. "There is talk of a People's Fund," he says, "and I might possibly
get a monthly stipend off the interest from the fund.
Fig. 4 Are these trucks bringing water in or taking wastewater out? At
his invitation, we hop into his pickup for a tour of the area. He takes me up
on the buttes where many of the pump units, gas flares, and container pits are
located. We see trucks lined up at one site (figure 4 above). Are they bringing
the much-needed water for the fracking proppant, or are they waiting to carry
out the wastewater? It's hard to tell. But Spotted Bear frequently patrols the
backroads, doing what he calls "community watch" on what is, after all, his community. He occasionally queries
truckers pulled over to the side of a dead-end road or some out of the way
spot, and guesses they are probably illegally dumping drilling wastewater,
which, by some accounts, is "ten times saltier than ocean water" (Stockdill).
Fig. 5 This landscape scene could be the "before" to the scene with the pump, right.
"We left such a small scar on the
earth," he says wistfully, thinking back to his ancestors. "We lived in close
proximity to nature" (see figure 5, above). Then, as if to emphasize the
potential for oil to disrupt that equilibrium, he goes on to say that if "you
create a culture that you can be proud to claim, then in the process you are
reclaiming your past." To that end, he and others have started The Earth Lodge
Movement, dedicated to living in earth homes as sustainably and as
self-sufficiently as possible. "We are going to have a wind turbine," he says,
"even if we have to buy one from Menards." Spotted Bear's dream is that as
"inherent stewards of the land," MHA will be at the forefront of green energy.
It's in his cultural DNA, we might say. "I really believe I'm a plant, and that
I can walk around. This oil," he
continues, with a sweep of his arm, "this oil is going to make the wind blow
harder." I take him to be making a double-edged statement: that oil will make going green more
economically feasible, since the financial resources from oil revenue could
enable development of sustainable alternatives; and that if they wait until
after the oil dries up, going green will become more environmentally necessary
but by then it may be too late.
Since
my interview, Spotted Bear has been elected to MHA's Tribal Business Council,
where he currently serves the Twin Buttes segment (MHA is divided into six
administrative segments—the other five are New Town/Little Shell;
Parshall/Lucky Mound; White Shield; Mandaree; and Four Bears). The fact that
his subcommittee assignments are on the Education and Economic Development
committees bodes well, I think, for both Twin Buttes and for MHA. IV.
Lisa DeVille I first met DeVille in
the cafeteria at Fort Berthold College, in New Town, on July 10, 2013. She
immediately handed me an inch-thick dossier of documents related to various
issues, most of them oil-related, including some of her own environmental
impact studies. As I thanked her for the dossier, I couldn't help but think of
the Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, disaster four days earlier in which a train
containing Bakken oil had derailed and exploded, killing 47. The oil, so pure
as to be highly volatile, had been loaded in New Town. According to an article
in the Globe and Mail, local
residents in New Town "like to boast that the honey-coloured oil is so light they can
take it right from the well and pour it into truck engines because it requires
little refining" (McNish and Robertson). A point of local pride had just
erupted into an international nightmare, and as I would come to find out, those
are precisely the kinds of disasters that Lisa is concerned to prevent at the
local level. By the time I met her, DeVille had already
garnered quite a bit of attention as a go-to source for many journalists
working on MHA-related stories about "the Patch." Part of her appeal, I
suspected, is that she is very outspoken, absolutely unabashed about telling it
like it is from the perspectives that matter most to her: as a 37-year old
mother of five; as an enrolled member of MHA (Manda/Hidatsa); as a member of
Mandaree Segment much concerned with issues of equity and sustainability in
relation to the distribution of oil revenue that MHA holds in common; and as a
citizen who is very critical of the lack of oversight on the part of Federal,
State, and Tribal leaders in regard to environmental impact. As with Spotted
Bear, she, too, wants to push ahead into an oil-based future with an eye toward
promoting traditional values. Raised
in straitened economic circumstances, DeVille knows too well what it is to do
without. "I grew up hard," she informs me. "I didn't have a father. It was my grandmother who raised me. We
had alcoholism, my husband had alcoholism in his family. So we grew up hard. No
money. Sometimes we only ate once a day."
That personal past is what drives DeVille to focus her activism around
the holistic mantra of "healthy hearts, healthy minds, and healthy homes."
Given the amount of oil revenue coming into Tribal coffers, she is adamant that
there are "many, many, opportunities that Mandaree should be having right now.
Our children shouldn't be sitting there 90% obese. They shouldn't be sitting
there diabetic at the age of twelve or whatever. There should be a rec center,
and they should be incorporating more culture into our community." By "they," DeVille
means Tribal administrators, who, she feels, have thus far let them down.
Fig. 6 Emergency services are sorely needed in Mandaree.
Fig. 1 Residue from flares turns some snow in Mandaree yellow.
The
1940s Taking had such a traumatic effect on the Tribe as a whole that
reparation in whatever form is bound to be attractive, especially if it comes
with a healthy serving of poetic justice that made the bad land they'd been
shunted off to turn out to be the most valuable, at least in the short run. DeVille
is quick to point out that her husband, Walter, receives oil money from some of
his land but that, like Spotted Bear, she does not. All of this oil bonanza is
happening so quickly, and so inequitably, that she worries that MHA, in some
ways, is not ready for it. For this reason, they have to be prudent, she
thinks, about how they proceed. "We're modern today," DeVille explains, "but it
doesn't mean we have to give up our traditions." To punctuate her point, she tells
me that she knew what she wanted to be as far back as 7th grade. "It
was either going to be nursing, attorney, or business, one of the three. I
wasn't sure yet." She attributes her success in education to the fact that she
had people who believed in her. Her grandmother, who had just recently passed
away, made the biggest impact on her education. One day while they were picking
juneberries, she told her granddaughter, "People say there's oil under here,
but they can't get to it because of the boulders. They'll figure out a way to
get it, but I won't get to see it." "But she did get to see it," DeVille says.
"Then she told me, make sure you get your education, because you know the white
man, what they did to us before. When that oil gets here they're going to be
taking again. You get your education so when they put that paper in front of
you, you know what they're giving you." Or taking away, as the case may be. But DeVille is also quick to point out
that without sufficient oversight, Tribal authorities themselves may be
involved in underhanded or misguided deals that ultimately benefit themselves
at the expense of the Tribe.[15] Listening
to DeVille and her friend exchange opinions on this, I hear myself chiming in
with "The taking continues, but now it's an inside game," to which they readily
assent. One manifestation of this, as DeVille describes, is tribal leaders using
"tradition" as a way to bolster their own status. DeVille's own commitment to
tradition is very much in evidence in the way she talks about her own
upbringing and about how she is raising her own children. Her eldest son was
with her on the day we talked, and DeVille, who is Catholic, spoke proudly of
his having been selected to be a Tribal spiritual leader. "If you don't know
who you are," she says, "you're lost."
Since
our initial talk, DeVille's tireless efforts on behalf of keeping various constituencies—Tribal,
State, and Federal—attuned to the need for environmental awareness and
oversight have been recognized by the North Dakota Human Rights Coalition
(NDRHC). On Nov. 13, 2015, she received the Arc of Justice Award from the
Coalition. Barry Nelson, outgoing
chair of the Coalition, expressed the following sentiments in reference to her activism:
"Lisa DeVille embodies the NDRHC Arc of Justice Award in her lifelong quest for
justice and for advocating for the protection of the land about her. She is
someone that people can look to for inspiration and leadership." Nelson went on
to explain that DeVille was nominated due to her "strong record of achievement
combining skills in diverse areas of organizational development, group/staff
leadership, program development, project management, building partnerships and
community relationships." It is clear from the award and from her increasingly
diverse portfolio of committee and interest-group activities, including
membership on the Dakota Resource Council and the National Environmental
Justice Advisory Council, that DeVille is well on her way to becoming a State
and National figure on issues of environmental justice. But increased
visibility, while serving as a useful magnifier by which to augment her
critical opinion, is not her primary concern. Global exposure is merely a
function of local commitment. DeVille's primary concern is that MHA keep its
share of the exceptionally pure and extremely volatile oil safely on track for equitable and sustainable use for all members of MHA, now and in the future.
I
can easily envision a future in which Spotted Bear and DeVille both continue to
develop into exceptionally savvy and effective leaders. Spotted Bear's way of
surveilling his Twin Buttes community is to drive around and be a visible sign
of Native sovereignty; DeVille's way is to keep an ear to her scanner.
"Something happens almost every night," she says, "either a spill, something
tipped over, or something's exploded."
V: The
Fold in the Constitution
Raymond
Cross has consistently argued that if MHA is to benefit from the extraction of
oil rather than be victimized by it, then "reasonable legal and social
regulation" mandated by the Tribes will have to win out. If not, what looks
like a boon now may end up "jeopardiz[ing] the progress the tribal people have
made in their recovery from the disastrous effects of the Garrison Dam taking
some sixty years ago" (Cross 2011, 569). However, Cross thinks there is "reason
for optimism" since "both the federal and state governments have an important
stake in helping the tribe regulate oil and gas development." But in order to
turn Cross's optimism into hard fact, the other two governments will need to
"acknowledge the tribe as an indispensable
regulatory partner in the realization of this common goal" (569, emphasis
added). I take Cross's sly
invocation of "indispensable" as a way of gesturing toward the hard sovereignty
grounded in the commerce clause of Article I, section 8, clause 3 of the
Constitution, wherein is stated that "Congress shall have power to... regulate
Commerce with foreign Nations, and with the several States, and with the Indian
Tribes." Constructing the Tribes as "indispensable" partners is a way to undercut the authority of the halfway covenant
articulated by Chief Justice Marshall in Johnson
v. McIntosh (1823), in which the "doctrine of discovery" is presumed to
trump Native occupancy, and in Cherokee
Nation v Georgia (1831), wherein tribes are defined as "domestic dependent
nations."[16]
Rhetorically, if not legally, Cross's adjective "indispensable" turns
"dependent" into independent. Rhetorical
finesses notwithstanding, "the meaning of Indian tribal sovereignty within the framework
of U.S. Indian law" and its application across the legal landscape, as David
Carlson reminds us, remains "ambiguous." Carlson goes on to explain that "even
in the most generous interpretations tribal sovereignty has been held... to be
something inferior to state sovereignty" (30). This "something inferior"
originates with the Marshall Court's establishment of the "principle" that
"discovery gave title to the government by whose subjects, or by whose
authority, it was made, against all other
European governments, which title might be consummated by possession" (Johnson, emphasis added).
As
we were about to wrap up my October guided tour of Mandaree, we came upon a brown,
weather-beaten sign overlooking Lake Sakakawea, presumably set up by the BIA. Once
I read it, the situational irony between text and context was too tempting to
leave untended, so I got out and snapped a few pictures. The content of the
sign, as it turns out, is a quote attributed to Meriwether Lewis, one half of
the duo appointed by Thomas Jefferson to lead the Corps of Discovery.
This
scenery, already rich, pleasing and beautiful, was still further hightened by Immense
herds of buffalo, deer and elk... which we saw in every direction feeding on the
hills and plains. I do not think I exaggerate when I estimate the number of
which could be comprehended at one view to amount to 3000. (see figure 7 below)
Fig. 7 Excerpt from Lewis and Clark Journal
The
attribution is correct and is excerpted from a relatively lengthy journal entry
by Lewis dated Monday, September 17th, 1804. Given the placement of
the sign overlooking the Missouri near Mandaree, one might be excused for
thinking that Lewis was referring to what he encountered on that fall day in
what is now MHA country. As it turns out, though, the location that elicits
from Lewis such a gushing survey of aesthetic beauty "hightened" by a detailed reckoning
of material plenitude is actually located near the town of Oacama, in Lyman
County, South Dakota, closer to the present-day Crow Creek Sioux Reservation
than to the Heart of the World in Mandan country some 400 miles upstream (Journals 79-82). Placing the quoted passage back into the historical context
exposes some of the complications imbedded in the concept of sovereignty.
Reflecting
on the Lewis and Clark bicentennial "celebrations" that proliferated some 15
years ago along the expedition's route, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, historian and
member of Crow Creek Sioux Nation, offers a survey of a different kind. "As one
surveys the history of massive land thefts, treaty violations, U.S. court
decisions, genocidal policies, and the diminishment of tribal sovereignty that
followed the Lewis and Clark adventure," she writes, "the hope of many Indians
that people of good and free will may rise up and make correct moral
determination is fragile indeed" ("The Lewis and Clark Story" 42). Such
fragility is further exacerbated by the aesthetic and environmental imperatives
invoked by the sign itself. Dislocated from its point of origin, the sign
unavoidably becomes a sign of absence, emblematic of all the dislocations so
recently enacted under the right of eminent domain. Vizenor, in comments
reflecting on Jefferson's attitude toward Native Americans, says that "Natives
were named in connection with the vast distances of an unexploited nation."
Viewed as a direct threat to the "vast," "unexploited" distances described so
agreeably in Lewis's account, "Natives," Vizenor concludes, "were removed as a
vindication of the environment. The absence
of the indian in the histories of
this nation is an aesthetic victimry" (Fugitive
Poses 21 emphasis in original). This sign, then, in its presumption of a
universalizing pose that dislocates geographic and cultural specificity on
behalf of celebrating, in the abstract, what
was once here, affirms, as well, the ways in which aesthetic contemplation
itself is an avatar of discovery. Franklin K. Lane, the Secretary of the
Interior when the first National Parks Portfolio was published in 1916,
imagined such contemplative engagement with iconic American landscapes as a
"further discovery of America" ("Introduction"). Add to this the unavoidable
fact that one can no longer view this particular sign, at this particular place,
without making visual contact with the oil rig and pumps operating in the
background, and one can begin to appreciate the extent to which Native sovereignty
is indeed a vexed concept. Legal pragmatists like Cross would take solace,
however, in the fact that "sovereignty," as Carlson stresses, "is truly
meaningful in its use and not as a
mere formal category or abstract concept" (30). "Sovereignty is the guiding
story in our pursuit of self-determination," declares Lyons, "the general
strategy by which we aim to best recover our losses from the ravages of
colonization: our lands, our
languages, our cultures, our self-respect." As a guiding story, it is
necessarily a nested narrative, one that simultaneously invokes the promises of
home even as it threatens the possibility of homelessness. Best then to
imagine, as Lyons does, that the "pursuit of sovereignty is an attempt to
revive not our past, but our possibilities" (449). From that perspective, those
rigs and pumps are as much a sign of "possibilities" at work as they are a
prompt for environmental protectionism. If the sign proper underscores Native
absence, the rig and pumps that ostensibly "mar" the "beauty" of the landscape
affirm Native presence as much as they underscore global capital. Where work is
to be done on behalf of "environmental protectionism," that work will have to
be undertaken and enforced by the very people who have for so long been its
primary victims.
For
Cross, then, living the lessons of the Taking, here and now, means insisting
that sovereignty will have to be both protected by the Tribes themselves and
respected by State and Federal governments. According to Cross, it is
sovereignty itself that hangs in the balance of environmentally responsible oil
production. "[T]he biggest potential adverse effect," he writes, "would be to
erode the tribe's status as an economically viable, and culturally intact,
political entity. Therefore, development, if it is not regulated in a legally
and socially responsible manner, may threaten the tribe's cherished political
and legal rights as a federally recognized Indian tribe" (Cross 2011, 543). The
warrant for Cross's concerns in regard to the potential for erosion of
sovereignty, if not its evacuation altogether, can be found in an obligation
mandated by the 1886 treaty with the Federal government "to use its tribally
reserved lands... as the means of achieving economic self-sufficiency" (543). That
self-sufficiency, and the sovereignty that Cross insists it anchors, "will be
sorely tested by large-scale development on tribal lands, though, because
development brings with it novel regulatory challenges that will test the
tribal people's sovereignty in new ways" (544).
In
order to reinforce the Tribe's continuing socio-political ties to reservation
land, Cross references the tribe's creation stories that "tell of how Lone Man
and First Creator selected the Fort Berthold lands as the tribal people's
permanent homelands." He goes on to emphasize that by virtue of "the people's
continuing re-enactment of their cultural and religious practices, they strive
to renew their ties to these lands and to help secure the creator's continued
blessing for their good uses of those lands" (Cross 2011, 545). In anchoring
his call for tribal sovereignty in his people's traditional creation story,
Cross reaffirms his own status as a tribal member, an affirmation that in turn
acts as synecdoche for the Tribe's
adherence to the mandates of the 1886 treaty. From Cross's perspective, American
legal mandates and his own Tribal obligations constitute twin creation stories
that, if treated with mutual respect, may "enable" the two cultures to
"navigate in what has become a 'splintered and disassembled' modern world" (Cross
2004, 65). Following constitutional scholar Martin Becker, Cross views "the
privileged moment" of the founding of the United States of America as a signal
event when "[t]wo Americas—one Indian and one non-Indian—were
simultaneously created" (61). This creational
doubling up becomes, for Cross, an opportunity for a creative doubling wherein Native and non-Native Americans can
dialogically "re-negotiate" their "civil compact" with one another. The short term goal for Cross would be
very much in line with the notions he espouses on behalf of safeguarding MHA
sovereignty by virtue of having a greater say in regulating environmental
protections—it's about "mutual and reciprocal respect" (64).
Such
dialogue will have to "meet a high standard" of mutual receptivity in which the
"interlocutors must embody" what anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes as
"'new ways of thinking that are responsive to particularities, to
individualities, oddities, contrasts, and singularities,'" that are in turn
"responsive" to a "plurality of ways of belonging and being, and that yet can
draw from them—from it—a sense of connectedness that is neither
uniform nor comprehensive, primal nor changeless, but nonetheless real" (qtd in
Cross 2004 65). Such a radical doubling, Cross stresses, will not be found in
"dreary tomes written by constitutional law scholars or the drab scientific
texts written by Indian anthropologists or ethnographers"—will not be
found, as Vizenor might phrase it, in the texts of manifest manners. It will instead be through the
"respective 'creation myths' these people offer to justify the great individual
and collective sacrifices demanded by the founding of the shared America we
know and love today" (66). From that perspective, as Cross makes clear, it is the
recognition of Native creation stories, Native experiences and Native
sacrifices—in short, Americans' reckoning with Native
survivance—that will provide the grounds for this new foundation.
"Native
stories of survivance are the creases of transmotion and sovereignty," Vizenor
reminds us (Fugitive 15). A crease
implies a fold unfolded, a mind made up and then unmade, an opening that
refuses the very closure that created it. Such is the history of American
treaty making, and hence the necessity for strategies of survivance. But how often can one fold and unfold
along the doubled crease of the Constitution before wearing thin the fold that
binds us? Better to move forward
into the future—however accidentally—with a clear legal vision and
a trickster's soul, than to be doubled over in the pain of a traumatic past
that cannot be recovered.
And yet "recovery," as it pertains to a past immemorial and the oil beneath the ground, will continue to be a key word—for the costs associated with rising waters have been that high. One would love to imagine a future in which the people of MHA, if they are careful stewards of their treaty obligations and their natural resources, will be in the right place to make the profitable commercial exchange when the price for water rises, as it inevitably will. While the past clearly has levied its costs in the form of intergenerational trauma, MHA leadership will have to proceed into the near future with eyes wide open and ears to the ground in order to ensure that the next generation is not permanently scarred by the negative environmental and cultural effects so often associated with extraction (figure 8, below). There is, for instance, anecdotal evidence of an alarming increase in human and drug trafficking, both of which are
Fig. 8 Sign on BIA 12, just west of Mandaree.
To emphasize the path MHA must travel to
engage the future that is best for them, Fox uses the example of two nearby
tribes. His aspirational ideal is embodied by the casino-rich Shakopee Mdewakanton
Sioux, located just southwest of the Twin Cities. There, each enrolled member
receives over a million dollars a year (see Daily
Mail, 8-12-12). Based on the
money already coming in to MHA coffers and on projections of future revenue, Fox
says that MHA "should wake up and we should be Shakopee—or close to it." In
this ideal vision, "everybody's got a home, everybody can work if they want to,
have an education, [and their] health system's good." As an example of what not
to do, Fox points to the once oil rich Fort Peck Reservation, circa 2013. "If
we don't change the course of where we're at, we're going to end up being Fort
Peck," he admonishes. "Go to Fort Peck.
What do you see? Poverty is
worse, crime is worse. They didn't
make the right choices." As a case in point, in 2011, as Fort Peck geared up
for another run at extraction, residents of the nearby community of Poplar were
dealing with the recent past in the shape of a "plume of salty brine" that was already
contaminating the local drinking water (Groover). Poised between the promise of
Shakopee and the problems of Fort Peck, Fox emphasizes that "if the end result
of somebody coming in and extracting that oil" is that we have to "take the
revenue just to deal with the extraction of it, then we've made a poor choice.
If that is the end result, then we better just leave it in the ground like a
bank account."