Indigenous Rights Movements & the Law

The fight over the tar sands in North America is among the epic environmental and social justice battles of our time, and one of the first that has managed to marry quite explicitly concern for frontline communities and immediate local hazards with fear for the future of the entire planet. Tar sands "development" comes with an enormous environmental and human cost. But tar sands opponents-fighting a powerful international industry-are likened to terrorists; government environmental scientists are muzzled; and public hearings are concealed and rushed. Yet, despite the formidable political and economic power behind the tar sands, many opponents are actively building international networks of resistance, challenging pipeline plans while resisting threats to Indigenous sovereignty and democratic participation. Including leading voices involved in the struggle against the tar sands, A Line in the Tar Sands offers a critical analysis of the impact of the tar sands and the challenges opponents face in their efforts to organize effective resistance. Contributors include Angela Carter, Bill McKibben, Brian Tokar, Christine Leclerc, Clayton Thomas-Muller, Crystal Lameman, Dave Vasey, Emily Coats, Eriel Deranger, Greg Albo, Jeremy Brecher, Jess Worth, Jesse Cardinal, Joshua Kahn Russell, Lilian Yap, Linda Capato, Macdonald Stainsby, Martin Lukacs, Matt Leonard, Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Naomi Klein, Rae Breaux, Randolph Haluza-DeLay, Rex Weyler, Ryan Katz-Rosene, Sakihitowin Awasis, Sonia Grant, Stephen D'Arcy, Toban Black, Tony Weis, Tyler McCreary, Winona LaDuke, and Yves Engler.

In Landscapes of Power Dana E. Powell examines the rise and fall of the controversial Desert Rock Power Plant initiative in New Mexico to trace the political conflicts surrounding native sovereignty and contemporary energy development on Navajo (Diné) Nation land. Powell's historical and ethnographic account shows how the coal-fired power plant project's defeat provided the basis for redefining the legacies of colonialism, mineral extraction, and environmentalism. Examining the labor of activists, artists, politicians, elders, technicians, and others, Powell emphasizes the generative potential of Navajo resistance to articulate a vision of autonomy in the face of twenty-first-century colonial conditions. Ultimately, Powell situates local Navajo struggles over energy technology and infrastructure within broader sociocultural life, debates over global climate change, and tribal, federal, and global politics of extraction.

"With connections to traditional homelands being at the heart of Native identity, environmental justice is of heightened importance to Indigenous communities. Not only do irresponsible and exploitative environmental policies harm the physical and financial health of Indigenous communities, they also cause spiritual harm by destroying the land and wildlife that are held in a place of exceptional reverence for Indigenous peoples. Combining elements of legal issues, human rights issues, and sovereignty issues, Indigenous Environmental Justice creates a clear example of community resilience in the face of corporate greed"--

"From Flint, MI to Standing Rock, ND, minorities have found themselves losing the battle for clean resources and a healthy environment. This book provides a modern history of such environmental injustices in the U.S. and Canada"--

"Fracking, the practice of shattering underground rock to release oil and natural gas, is a major driver of climate change. The 300,000 fracking facilities in the US also directly harm the health and livelihoods of people in front-line communities, who are disproportionately poor and people of color. Impacted citizens have for years protested that their rights have been ignored. On May 14, 2018, a respected international human-rights court, the Rome-based Permanent Peoples' Tribunal, began a week-long hearing on the impacts of fracking and climate change on human and Earth rights. In its advisory opinion, the Tribunal ruled that fracking systematically violates substantive and procedural human rights; that governments are complicit in the rights violations; and that to protect human rights and the climate, the practice of fracking should be banned. The case makes history. It revokes the social license of extreme-extraction industries by connecting environmental destruction to human-rights violations. It affirms that climate change, and the extraction techniques that fuel it, directly violate deeply and broadly accepted moral norms encoded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Bearing Witness maps a promising new direction in the ongoing struggle to protect the planet from climate chaos. It tells the story of this landmark case through carefully curated court materials, including eye-witness testimony, legal testimony, and the Tribunal's advisory opinion. Essays by leading climate writers such as Winona LaDuke, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Bill McKibben, and Sandra Steingraber and legal experts such as John Knox and Mary Wood give context to the controversy. Framing essays by the editors, experts on climate ethics and human rights, demonstrate that a human-rights focus is a powerful, transformative new tool to address the climate crisis"--

"When Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists work together, what are the ends that they seek, and how do they negotiate their relationships while pursuing social change? Alliances brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders, activists, and scholars in order to examine their experiences of alliance-building for Indigenous rights and self-determination and for social and environmental justice;The contributors, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, come from diverse backgrounds as community activists and academics. They write from the front lines of struggle, from spaces of reflection rooted in past experiences, and from scholarly perspectives that use emerging theories to understand contemporary instances of alliance. Some contributors reflect on methods of mental decolonization while others use Indigenous concepts of respectful relationships in order to analyze present-day interactions. Most importantly, Alliances delves into the complex political and personal relationships inherent in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous struggles for social justice to provide insights into the tensions and possibilities of Indigenous-non-Indigenous alliance and coalition-building in the early twenty-first century."--Publisher's description

Rights of nature or Earth rights is a legal and jurisprudential theory that describes inherent rights as associated with ecosystems and species, similar to the concept of fundamental human rights. The rights of nature concept challenges twentieth-century laws as generally grounded in a flawed frame of nature as "resource" to be owned, used, and degraded. Proponents argue that laws grounded in rights of nature direct humanity to act appropriately and in a way consistent with modern, system-based science, which demonstrates that humans and the natural world are fundamentally interconnected.

The Standing Rock Reservation lies across the border between North and South Dakota in the United States, and is inhabited by ethnic "Hunkpapa and Sihasapa bands of Lakota Oyate and the Ihunktuwona and Pabaksa bands of the Dakota Oyate," as well as the Hunkpatina Dakota. The Ihanktonwana Dakota are the Upper Yanktonai, part of the collective of Wiciyena. The sixth-largest Native American reservation in land area in the US, Standing Rock includes all of Sioux County, North Dakota, and all of Corson County, South Dakota, plus slivers of northern Dewey and Ziebach counties in South Dakota, along their northern county lines at Highway 20.

The Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, also called by the hashtag #NoDAPL, began in April 2016 as a grassroots opposition to the construction of Energy Transfer Partners' Dakota Access Pipeline in the northern United States and ended on February 23, 2017 when National Guard and law enforcement officers evicted the last remaining protesters. The pipeline runs from the Bakken oil fields in western North Dakota to southern Illinois, crossing beneath the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, as well as under part of Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Many members of the Standing Rock tribe and surrounding communities consider the pipeline to be a serious threat to the region's water. The construction also directly threatens ancient burial grounds and cultural sites of historic importance.

The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) or Bakken pipeline is a 1,172-mile-long (1,886 km) underground pipeline in the United States that has the ability to transport up to 750,000 barrels of light sweet crude oil per day. It begins in the shale oil fields of the Bakken Formation in northwest North Dakota and continues through South Dakota and Iowa to an oil terminal near Patoka, Illinois. Together with the Energy Transfer Crude Oil Pipeline from Patoka to Nederland, Texas, it forms the Bakken system. The pipeline transports 40 percent of the oil produced in the Bakken region.

#NODAPL, also referred to as the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, is a Twitter hashtag and social media campaign for the struggle against the proposed and partially built Dakota Access Pipeline. The role social media played in this movement is so substantial that the movement itself is now often referred to by its hashtag: #NoDAPL. The hashtag reflected a grassroots campaign that began in early 2016 in reaction to the approved construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the northern United States. The Standing Rock Sioux and allied organizations took legal action aimed at stopping construction of the project, while youth from the reservation began a social media campaign which gradually evolved into a larger movement with dozens of associated hashtags. The campaign aimed to raise awareness on the threat of the pipeline on the sacred burial grounds as well as the quality of water in the area. In June 2021, a federal judge struck down the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's lawsuit, but left the option of reopening the case should any prior orders be violated.

The Red Nation (TRN) invites allied movements, comrades, and relatives to implement the Red Deal, a movement-oriented document for climate justice and grassroots reform and revolution. This is not a region- or nation-specific platform, but one that encompasses the entirety of Indigenous America, including our non-Indigenous comrades and relatives who live here. This is a platform so that our planet may live.

One way to become in right relationship with the planet and our environment is to listen to the voices of indigenous communities.

Native Americans in North America, who enjoy territorial sovereignty on their lands, are at the frontlines of environmental protection. Their efforts safeguard their rights, culture and livelihoods, as well as

Above –– Infrastructure Otherwise Report 001, Mapping a Many Headed Hydra: The Struggle Over the Dakota Access Pipeline (2017). Text by Katie Mazer,...

For most of its history, the United States worked to acquire indigenous lands through treaties, agreements, and sometimes through forceful relocation from tribal homelands. Tribes were left with what at the time were thought to be the least-desirable lands. But the Supreme Court has often ruled that federal Indian reservations include valuable implied rights.

Download Citation | The frontline of refusal: indigenous women warriors of standing rock | Indigenous women stand in solidarity on the frontline of refusal, protecting their ancestral homelands and their ways of life across North America... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate

A look at the use of drones to document the protests by Native American tribes and other advocates against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock reservation.

Indian nations today are faced with a critical dichotomy in their treatment by the federal government. For the most part, Congress has embarked on a path of promoting and encouraging economic development and self sufficiency, while the Supreme Court has taken virtually every opportunity in recent years to undercut the legal and practical basis of reservation self-government. Nowhere is this dichotomy more starkly illustrated than in the environmental arena.

Starting in April 2016, thousands of people, led by Standing Rock Sioux Tribal members, gathered at camps to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline

Over the past three decades, the environmental movement has promoted a view of American Indians as the "original conservationists"—that is, "people so intimately bound to the land that they have left no mark upon it."

While Trump is quick to defend his Confederate forefathers, he has been equally swift to desecrate places held sacred by Native Americans

The controversial projects may affect animals, climate, and people. Here’s how.

We must remember we are part of a larger story. We are still here. We are still fighting for our lives on our own land.

News Release Water Protector Legal Collective On Thursday, September 10, 2020, in a long-awaited ruling, United States District Court Judge Daniel Traynor

The Indigenous Resilience Center will work directly with Native American nations to address environmental challenges in ways that respect Native and Indigenous sovereignty and knowledge.

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Since April 2016, members of the Great Sioux Nation have been protesting, through nonviolent direct action, the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The 1,900-kilometer pipeline runs from the Bakken oil-shale region in western North Dakota to a tank complex in Illinois. Its route crosses the Missouri River directly adjacent to and upstream of the Standing Rock Reservation, one of several belonging to the Dakota and Lakota Sioux. A pipeline break would directly threaten the principal water source of not only Standing Rock, but more than 15 million other people.

The technology TigerSwan used at Standing Rock may be state of the art, but the use of policing to suppress indigenous protest is as old as the United States itself

The effort to divest from Wall Street—and stop environment-killing projects gained momentum after the historic pipeline protest. Here’s what a city needs, and could gain, from municipal banking.