Indigenous Rights Movements & the Law

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.

Thousands of Water Protectors from more than three hundred Native nations, as well as allied supporters from a range of social movements, gathere...

Morton County, ND – A new investigation by DeSmog and Muckrock reveals the behind-the-scenes role played by the National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA) in crafting narratives for law enforcement tasked with protecting the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from resistance by indigenous peoples and their allies. Emails obtained through public records requests show the Sheriffs’ Association contracted […]

Indigenous people are rejecting oil, coal and gas extraction in favor of renewable energy to save their land, increase employment and fight global warming

Authorities said the risky low-flying maneuver was used to warn demonstrators to disperse, but the reasoning doesn’t hold up.

Sheriffs in Minnesota worried about who would oversee an escrow account, funded by pipeline giant Enbridge, to reimburse the costs of policing protests.

Indigenous Sami activists in Norway and Americans of Sami descent forced the first bank to divest from the Dakota Access pipeline. This is how they did it.