The days where Native American tribes were forced to give up their land are far from over.
Here are four sacred Native American sites in danger of being destroyed in the name of corporate greed.
Badger-Two Medicine
The Blackfeet Tribe calls the land of Badger-Two Medicine “the Backbone of the World,” the place where the story of their people began. But now the mineral-rich land, located in modern day Michigan, is in danger of being drilled for oil.
Solenext, LCC, the last of the 47 leaseholders of the land, filed a lawsuit so that drilling could begin. Earl Old Person, a member of the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council since 1954, is fighting to preserve what he calls “an altar to the Blackfeet Confederacy.” He wrote a letter to Obama urging the president to intervene.
The Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota peoples, who suffer from systemic poverty, turned down $1.5 billion offered to them for the Black Hills, land the Keystone XL Pipeline would intersect. That’s how much this land matters to them.
Rosebud Sioux Tribe President Cyril Scott has called the Keystone XL Pipeline “an act of war.”
The Osage Mounds
The Chahokian Mounds are the artifacts of an ancient, complex civilization. The modern Osage consider themselves to be descendants of these mound builders, the architects of the most important city to the Mississippians.
But the NFL’S St. Louis Rams are planning on paving over what’s left of it to build a new stadium. Indian Country Today Media Network reports that the project has a $1 billion price tag and that its construction is still in its early development.
Last week, I got arrested for kayaking next to a construction barge.
It wasn’t exactly a surprise. My kayak was one of dozens of small boats, bobbing on the water near Whey-ah-Wechen, a traditional village site near what the settlers named Vancouver, British Columbia. We were there for the same reason the barge was there: because a Canadian oil giant, Kinder Morgan, is trying to build a massive new oil tanker terminal to go with its massive new Tar Sands pipeline expansion, a devastating and reckless proposal that would threaten everything we hold dear in these lands and waters.
As we approached the barge, Kinder Morgan’s loudspeakers blared that kayakers would be arrested and prosecuted if we refused to leave their private property. Their private property. As Tsleil Waututh elder Amy George responded, “This is not their private property. My people have lived here for 30,000 years.”
The Tsleil Waututh Nation never ceded this territory. But the proposed site of Kinder Morgan’s new terminal is right in the heart of it, along the narrow inlet from which Tsleil Waututh, or “People of the Inlet,” get their name.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 