ND blames feds for cost of pipeline resistance

BISMARCK, N. D.  – The state filed a lawsuit here against the U.S. government on July 18, trying to recoup the $38 million incurred as a result of former Gov. Jack Dalrymple’s emergency declaration to suppress the Oceti Sakowin resistance to Dakota Access Pipeline construction.

The lawsuit blames the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for having “abdicated its responsibility to prevent and then close” what the filing describes as “unlawful encampments on USACE lands” where the corps allegedly provided “safe havens” in which “trespassers were using federal lands as a staging area to conduct illegal activities.”

Energy Transfer Partners and associates developed the nearly 1,200-mile-long pipeline to ship fracked crude oil from the Bakken Formation, centered on the Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation, across unceded treaty land, to refineries and markets on the Gulf Coast.

The 41-page complaint specifically names the Oceti Sakowin, Sacred Stone, and Rosebud resistance camps as illegal, stating that the corps provisionally issued camping permits, but never completed them, because applicants failed to provide required assurance bonds.

The camps, on the banks of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers adjacent to the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation, attracted from 5,500 to 8,000 people at a time from April 2016 to March 2017, numbers that would constitute the 10^th largest city in North Dakota, according to the lawsuit.

Campers came from 48 U.S. states and countries all around the world to stand against construction and with grassroots indigenous and tribal government advocates of protecting treaty rights, sacred sites, clean water and climate justice.

The case charges that they were “trespassers at these unlawful encampments” many of whom “engaged in disruptive, illegal and sometimes violent conduct on federal, state and private lands, including blocking public highways, threatening individuals working on the DAPL pipeline and the local population (such as ranchers), and directly initiating violence against law enforcement personnel and first responders.” The state made 761 arrests during the joint law enforcement operation.

The state claims that “Because of USACE’s overwhelming failure to fulfill its legal obligations to enforce the law and protect public safety and the environment on federal land, North Dakota was required to mobilize its resources, including all of the major state law enforcement and emergency response agencies, the National Guard, as well as major support from local (county and municipal) law enforcement and first responder (e.g., ambulance, fire, medical, emergency response) agencies. Responding to this emergency cost North Dakota $38,005,071.66,” it says.

Energy Transfer Partners (since renamed Energy Transfer Operating) paid the wartime private counter-intelligence surveillance and security company TigerSwan to coordinate the eight-month militarized command that involved North Dakota and federal agencies in protecting the oil project.

Despite the widespread inconformity with the project, the outcome was its span across unceded 1851 Ft. Laramie Treaty territory and the Missouri River just upstream from Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s public water intake.

The developers achieved their goal of finishing the pipeline and pushing oil through it. However, the jury is still out regarding its permanence. This latest lawsuit joins many occasioned by the megaproject, not the least of which is that by the Standing Rock, Cheyenne River and Yankton Sioux tribes, which seeks to halt the flow, because the environmental studies required for the corps permit failed to address key environmental concerns.

(Contact Talli Nauman at talli.nauman@gmail.com)

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