The Treaty and the River: A Pipeline, the Missouri, and the Fight for Lakota Sovereignty

At the water intake near Fort Yates, North Dakota, a metal grate stands in the Missouri like a set of knuckles, drawing in the water the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation drinks. In the spring of 2016, young people from the reservation filled their bottles there and started running east with a staff and a bundle of petitions, asking the United States to stop an oil pipeline from crossing beneath the river just north of the reservation line.

The pipeline was Dakota Access, built to carry Bakken crude some eleven hundred miles to Illinois. Its crossing had first been drawn north of Bismarck. It was moved south to Lake Oahe, the reservoir that had risen behind a federal dam two generations earlier and swallowed the reservation's river towns without anyone there being asked.

Behind the camps that grew up around Sacred Stone that summer lay a long paper trail: the 1851 treaty at Fort Laramie; the 1868 treaty that set the Great Sioux Reservation apart for the "absolute and undisturbed use and occupation" of the Sioux; and the Black Hills claim, decided in 1980 when the Supreme Court ordered the United States to pay for land the Sioux nations still want back. They have never taken the money.

The runners carried their petitions the whole way, and the company kept building. Through the camps, the easement fight, the courts and the years after the camps were cleared, one river crossing became a national argument. What did the United States promise the Sioux, and what are those promises worth now?