Quick Thoughts: Elyse Semerdjian on Standing Rock

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Dec 6, 2016 United States
Quick Thoughts: Elyse Semerdjian on Standing Rock

Quick Thoughts: Elyse Semerdjian on Standing Rock

By : Elyse Semerdjian

[On 4 December 2016, the operators of the North Dakota Access Pipeline were informed they no longer had permission to pursue construction plans under Lake Oahe, the main water source of the nearby Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The announcement crowned many months of activism led by the inhabitants of Standing Rock, and which garnered growing support and solidarity across the United States and indeed worldwide. Jadaliyya Co-Editor and Quick Thoughts series editor Mouin Rabbani interviewed Elyse Semerdjian, currently a visiting fellow at Cornell University, to explain the background, development and implications of this standoff. The Quick Thoughts series provides background, context, and detail to issues that are, or should be, currently in the news.]

Jadaliyya (J): What precipitated the current crisis at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, and what is the status of the contested lands in North Dakota?  

Elyse Semerdjian (ES):  The 1,170 mile long North Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) was planned with the intent of burying a segment under Lake Oahe, the major water supply for the nearby Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. In Spring 2016, the Mni Wiconi movement, taking its name from a Lakota phrase that means “Water is Life,” emerged to resist the planned route. Water is at the center of the #NoDAPL protest—the pipeline is slated to run under the Missouri River and transport up to 570,000 gallons of fracked crude oil per day when completed.

The planned pipeline also renewed territorial disputes because the state of North Dakota claims the construction is on federal land, while the tribe claims that it belongs to them pursuant to a 1851 treaty. The water protectors have simultaneously argued that a segment of the pipeline’s path passes through a sacred tribal burial site. While the original 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty has been documented in maps, it is noteworthy that media coverage has treated these claims as mere assertions rather than facts grounded in historical documents. The New York Times uses this tentative language while their own maps demonstrate the disputed territory was granted to the Sioux by treaty. I view this as indicative of the ongoing problem of journalists neglecting to fact check authorities. 

Since Spring 2016, the “water protectors” have protested in the town of Canon Ball, North Dakota, less than one mile from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Using the non-violent tactic of prayer as resistance, they began with a few hundred protesters but quickly snowballed into an encampment of 11,000 protesters from all over the world, including indigenous groups from as far away as Hawaii and New Zealand.

(J): How have Native American communities mobilized to defend their rights, and have they been receiving support from other communities?

(ES): I have been observing the appeals to support Standing Rock via social media over the last three months. When the Morton County Sherriff’s Department began violently attacking the protesters, 1.4 million people “checked in” via Facebook in Canonball, North Dakota, in order to give the impression that they were physically present at the protest site. While the action was ridiculed by many, it was taken with the belief that social media was being used to track activists—something the Morton County Sheriff denied—and that checking in would somehow divert attention from protestors on the ground. From another perspective, it was amazing to witness acts of solidarity and empathy from everyday Americans who were following the events and sought to help in some small way from afar. In addition to small acts of solidarity, social media was used to circulate resources for donations, gofundme sites, and legal charities were created to support arrested protesters. 

Other forms of spiritual resistance were issued when indigenous Maori New Zealanders who traveled to Standing Rock to support protesters performed the haka, an empowering traditional war cry and a conjuring of a tribe’s pride and strength prior to battle, which they performed in front of the militarized police (the national guard was deployed along with local and state police forces). Those Maori who remained home sent video haka ceremonies to empower their indigenous brothers and sisters. Environmental activist Bill McKibben and public intellectual Cornel West visited the site, while celebrities like Shailene Woodley, Jane Fonda, and Mark Ruffalo brought publicity to the protests, and Patricia Arquette used her public standing to fundraise for and install composting toilets to help with sanitation. The camp was also visited by artists, intellectuals, and everyday citizen activists who sought to express solidarity with the protesters and offer assistance by way of support work.

(J): How have the government and security forces responded to the mobilization around Standing Rock?

(ES): Because history is not without irony, around Thanksgiving events heated up at Standing Rock. The militarized police forces—other state and local police forces and the National Guard organized to assist Morton County in subduing the protesters—intensified their attacks against the encampment. Simultaneously, the police claimed that the protesters were using slingshots and throwing rocks, bottles, and bags of urine and feces at them to instigate a violent response. In their attempts to dismantle the expanding encampment, the police deployed weapons against the protestors including the shocking use of water canons in freezing temperatures, a form of torture considering it can induce frostbite and hypothermia. Along with water canons, rubber bullets, tear gas, and concussion grenades hit protesters in the head, eyes, hands, legs, and genitals, prompting a letter of condemnation from the ACLU. In one case Sophia Wilansky, 21 was struck with an explosive device; her father noted, "The force of the explosion blew the bone out of her arm and all of the arteries and all of the muscle that supports her arm. It just blew out.”  It remains uncertain whether Wilansky’s arm will require amputation.

The authorities also cut off access to the site and ordered suppliers in nearby towns not to sell goods to the campers whose actions have cost the pipeline operator, Energy Transfer Partners, eight million dollars in delays. After the late November Thanksgiving protests, the US federal government ordered the protesters out by 5 December, asserting the authorities would create a “free speech zone” for protesters to dissent at an alternative location.

Last week, a veteran’s group called Veterans Stand for Standing Rock dispatched 4,000 indigenous and non-Indian vets to protect the encampment. It is too early to know at this point how significant this deployment was in the stand-off between the government and protestors, but the prospect of police firing on veterans, as they did on protesters, would have certainly cost the police dearly in the court of public opinion which was already swaying in the direction of the “water protectors.”

Finally, on 4 December, just one day before the deadline to dismantle the camp, the Army issued a statement noting it would not grant DAPL’s operators easement for construction, in effect halting the pipeline while promising to reroute its path in light of the protests. The #NoDAPL protestors have declared victory as of this morning.

I am cautiously optimistic about this outcome, because if we consider the broader shared ecology, moving the pipeline will endanger yet another impoverished community in North Dakota. It does not address the larger question of environmental degradation and threat to life posed by our addiction to fossil fuels, which are often masked with nationalist rhetoric about “energy independence,” meaning non-Arab oil. I am nevertheless optimistic about the success Standing Rock offers as a model for other efforts that are well underway, including the long-standing effort to crush the Keystone XL Pipeline that threatens to unleash as much carbon into the atmosphere as the Saudi fields have since its oil boom.  NASA scientist Jim Hansen has argued that the release of carbon from the oil sands in Canada, the target of Keystone XL, would be “game over” for the planet. Canadian First Nations tribes have been at the forefront of efforts to block Keystone XL, but Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, viewed as a progressive in American circles, only last week regressively approved pipeline expansion.

(J): How do these events fit into the broader pattern of relations between the US government and corporate interests, and Native American communities?

(ES): It was perhaps the images of protesters struck with rubber bullets that conjured memories for me of the first intifada where these technologies of violent suppression were innovated. The broader patterns in the global management of dissent are not lost on those of us who have seen them so clearly in the Palestinian case and in the counter-revolutionary tactics used by authoritarian regimes in the Middle East since the Arab Spring.

As for American Indians, as so many protesters pointed out at Standing Rock, they have been resisting colonization for five hundred years and statistics show that Native Americans are disproportionately targeted by police violence. More importantly, as the relevant maps show, treaties have been a basis for negotiating away the land rather than securing it. While so many tribes are simultaneously proud of the sovereignty they gained through these treaties—something that must be acknowledged, since this sovereignty is crucial to the survival of indigenous peoples—post-treaty land and resource loss has also been part of the ongoing experience of colonialization.

I have been thinking about the connection between settler colonialism and environmental contamination for a while now because where I live and work in eastern Washington state something similar happened.  Like Standing Rock, the Treaty of 1855, signed just feet from my campus, Whitman College, relegated the regional tribes in the Oregon Territory to reservations.  Land holdings shrank over time as government expropriation and privatization of land was used to chip away at previously guaranteed sovereign Indian territories.  The treaty also gave the tribes rights to a piece of territory the federal government later expropriated to build the Hanford Nuclear reactor used to build the nuclear bomb that incinerated Nagasaki in 1945. Today, the Hanford Reservation (yes, that is what it’s called) is a “superfund site,” the term used by the US government to describe land that has been contaminated by hazardous waste and slated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for cleanup because it poses a danger to human health and/or the environment.  

The contamination at Hanford has a continuing, invisible impact on indigenous peoples who continue to hunt and forage for sacred “first foods”—wild game, herbs, and roots—collected along the Columbia River basin, an area contaminated  with the billions of gallons of radioactive waste dumped into its banks and the river itself by the federal government.   The tribes have also had a more recent experience in 1999 when the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indians of Pendleton, Oregon were confronted with natural gas pipeline explosions on their lands. Two pipelines are buried beneath tribal lands. Neither was originally negotiated with the tribe and the pipelines form a lasting legacy of the infringement on their sovereignty.  These are not random occurrences but part of a world view that sees the land as empty wasteland precisely because it is occupied by indigenous people. This is why the DAPL was rerouted to Standing Rock after an earlier proposal routing it near the town of Bismark was rejected, in part, to protect water sources.  The standoff at Standing Rock raises the question, which communities are deserving of clean land and water and which communities are not?

In the 1880s, the Sioux found themselves in the middle of a gold rush which impinged on their access to the land. Perhaps we can think of the DAPL oil pipeline construction as the gold rush of the twenty-first century, as stubborn corporations try to extract the last of that non-renewable resource in order to cash in before it’s gone. What hasn’t been factored in as a cost of doing business is the pollution that comes with corporate greed. All of that operates as another government subsidy to corporations—since the EPA is staffed with representatives of the nation’s most polluting corporations, the penalties remain light relative to profitability. Pollution is underwritten as “free,” yet we know it is not “free” to communities who have to live in a toxic environment and live shorter, less full lives as a result. This is why the Standing Rock water protectors are an inspiration to so many communities who live with toxic or combustible water and live on polluted land. They pay the corporate subsidy with their health.

In future, when we write the history of what is happening at Standing Rock, it is certain that we will need to consider it (1) globally, in view of the ways that the Standing Rock encampment echoed some of the non-violent principles and strategies of Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, and Gezi Park but also innovated on those strategies by bringing spirituality front and center; (2) tactically, and examine the strengths and limitations of non-violent protest against militarized police forces; (3) environmentally, and recognize the leadership role indigenous politics is currently playing within the environmental movement, which has often been liberal and white. What does indigenous political activism mean for the future of environmental activism and the potential for intersectional approaches to global problems?  What ongoing colonial practices are at work with the appropriation of natural resources more broadly within the US (including uses of eminent domain and privatization to expropriate land and water)?  (4) holistically; in light of the disproportionate impact of pollution on the national and global poor, how should we be working to collapse racial and geographical distinctions, such as between urban and rural, in order to further advance environmental activism?
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Dec 1, 2016 Lebanon
Mouin Rabbani By :
Mouin Rabbani

Quick Thoughts: Mouin Rabbani on Aleppo and the Syria Conflict

[The ongoing full-scale assault by the Syrian military, Russian air force and allied militias on eastern Aleppo, which forms the most significant remaining opposition stronghold in the country, appears to portend a strategic turning point in the Syrian conflict. Jadaliyya turned to Co-Editor Mouin Rabbani, former head of political affairs for the office of the UN special envoy for Syria, to examine the various ramifications of these developments]

Jadaliyya (J): What are the prospects for the Syrian opposition if it is defeated in Aleppo?

Mouin Rabbani (MR): If the Syrian government successfully retakes eastern Aleppo, which seems increasingly likely, this will represent a strategic defeat of major proportions for the Syrian opposition as a whole and leave it in a very unenviable and many would add untenable position.

One reason the opposition appears to be on the verge of losing Aleppo is that it has effectively been abandoned by Turkey. It has recently also been getting less energetic support from Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, as the latter is increasingly pre-occupied with its Yemeni quagmire and domestic crises.

As the outlook for the Syrian opposition diminishes further post-Aleppo, it is likely to lose additional sources of foreign as well as domestic support and sponsorship. An already divided and fragmented opposition will fragment even further, and I would additionally expect it to become more localized as it switches to low-level insurgency while other elements try to pursue negotiations or some form of accommodation with Damascus. 

Many observers and analysts have also noted that the failure of the mainstream political and armed opposition groups to achieve regime change is likely to further strengthen the position of more extreme groups within what will remain of the insurgency.

(J): Will Syrian President Bashar al-Asad face further challenges if he succeeds in Aleppo?

(MR): I think it likely that however dominant the government emerges from the current conflict it will not succeed in quickly or easily re-establishing the status quo. This is because it is in the nature of such regimes that once they lose full control over their citizenry, it is virtually impossible to regain it. That I think forms the most important challenge over the longer term. Particularly so because the government is incapable of offering the basic services and amenities it provided before 2011, which were in any case already substantially reduced relative to previous decades. Furthermore, the Syrian economy can be expected to become even more dominated by well-connected cronies and similar figures than it was before.

Secondly, I think it is important to note that Damascus and its allies, although comprising a significantly more unified and coherent coalition than the one that is to varying degrees opposing the regime, also has internal differences of its own. The main one is that Russia would like to achieve a political resolution of the conflict, in which the concept of a political transition is replaced with that of an expanded government. In this formulation, elements of the political and armed opposition would be integrated into the regime to enhance its stability and re-legitimize key institutions such as the military. Needless to say, this outcome can only be achieved through a political process and negotiations. Damascus by contrast is opposed to any political process that entails meaningful negotiations and concessions to the opposition, including the limited agenda being promoted by Moscow–others would argue that it opposes any political process as a matter of principle and believes it can turn the clock back to early 2011. If Iran, which thus far appears to broadly share Assad`s stance on the resolution of this conflict, were for any number of potential reasons to come round to Russia`s position, this would represent a serious problem for Damascus.

Third, while the Syrian state has survived intact, it has also fractured and disintegrated to a significant degree. Re-establishing central authority over regime loyalists, including various new power centers such as the warlords and local militias that have emerged during this conflict, is also a challenge. Putting them out of business could pose serious risks.

The above notwithstanding, I suspect it is somewhat premature to begin discussing post-conflict challenges. Although an opposition defeat in Aleppo represents a major and indeed strategic turning point, this horrific bloodbath is unfortunately not yet over.

(J): How do you expect the international community to respond to current developments? 

(MR): This is a difficult question because the situation appears to be in even greater flux than in previous phases of this conflict.

My sense is that, its protestations notwithstanding, Washington has effectively ceded the Syrian file to Moscow. By “Washington” I mean the Obama administration, though I would add that Trump is unlikely to reverse course and would in any case find it difficult to do so.

Turkey also seems to be gradually disengaging from the conflict, on account of the combined costs of Russian hostility and domestic instability represented by the failed 2016 coup and its aftermath.

Egypt by contrast may be getting more involved in Syria, or at least aligning its views more closely with those of Damascus as relations with its Gulf patrons deteriorate and those with Russia, and potentially with Iran, improve.

The Gulf states, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar in particular, will be very interesting to watch during the next twelve months. They have convinced themselves that their problem with US policy towards Syria is Obama personally and his limited interventionist agenda in particular, and that his departure will signal a resumption of business as usual in the Middle East. Yet his successor has heaped more praise on Damascus than any US president since the Ba’thists seized power in 1963. Will the Gulf states fall into line once they realize the US position is essentially unchanged under Trump, or begin to pursue a more independent agenda? I suspect it will be the former, particularly given that their main gateway to Syria, Turkey, appears to be disengaging.

I presume that Moscow will want some kind of international endorsement of the endgame if and when this is achieved, whether through a UN process or other multilateral forum it can more easily control. But against this, Damascus will probably prefer a situation in which the international community is simply removed from the equation.

More broadly, it is important to recognize that this is not so much a Syrian conflict as it is a conflict in Syria, with all manner of local, regional, transnational and international parties pursuing competing agendas and proxy conflicts on Syrian soil. These parties and agendas are not going to vanish just because the insurgency appears to be absorbing a strategic defeat in Aleppo that may amount to a mortal blow.

But hovering over all these regional and international actors stands Russia, which together with Iran and militias recruited by the latter have been prepared to make the investments and sustain the losses required to promote their objectives. I think it is important to recognize that within Syria, Russia continues to retain escalation dominance.

(J): Would the fall of Aleppo mean that Asad has won the war? Can he win the peace?

(MR): The Russian intervention that began in late 2015 has removed regime change, and for that matter “political transition”, from the agenda for Syria`s foreseeable future. If in addition to this the armed opposition groups lose control of eastern Aleppo, and later perhaps Idlib and areas around Dera’a and near the Jordanian border in the far south as well, that strikes me as a pretty fair description of Asad having won the war or at least this phase of it which formed the greatest threat to his political survival.

Yet this “victory” will have come at such enormous cost in terms of blood, treasure, displacement, sovereignty, communal relations and all the rest of it that – combined with the thoroughly inflexible nature of such regimes when it comes to issues such as political compromise, power-sharing and national reconciliation – it is difficult to envision how Damascus can additionally win the peace.

I would also add to this the enormous if not existential challenges of reconstruction. Syria has experienced infrastructure destruction on an industrial scale, the economy is in ruins, the fabric of Syrian society has been shredded several times over, and the massive displacement, brain drain and capital flight will not be easily reversed with Asad still in power. Nor will significant Arab or international assistance be forthcoming.

This said, I do not expect to see a partition of Syria, particularly now that the Islamic State movement appears to be losing its territorial base, and that Moscow, Damascus and Ankara appear to have reached an informal understanding to prevent Kurdish self-government in northern Syria.