ABSTRACT
On 23 June 2014, Energy Transfer Partners through its subsidiary Dakota Access LLC announced a plan to construct the ‘Dakota Access Pipeline’, from the Bakken oil shale fields in North Dakota across South Dakota and Iowa to an oil tank farm in Illinois. When construction began in May 2016, there were already numerous lawsuits pending against the project as well as further regulatory hurdles. A group of 200 from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation made a dramatic ride from their reservation to what would become the protest campsite on 1 April 2016. Resistance to the pipeline failed in the end, although some court challenges persist. The struggle over the Dakota Access Pipeline is not an isolated event, however, but merely the latest chapter in an ongoing struggle between Native Americans and people of European extraction that began in 1492 and will continue into the future. This chapter examines the dispute between the Native Americans across whose sacred site the pipeline runs in the context of the more than five centuries of interaction between Native Americans and Europeans or European Americans, and in particular the legal theories that developed in US courts on Native American relations.
