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The move is
significant because the company building the 1,100-mile
(1,886-km) oil pipeline, Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners
LP, has bought tracts of land and relied on eminent domain to
clear a route for the line across four states from North Dakota
to Illinois.
Video posted on social media showed police officers using pepper
spray to try to disperse dozens of protesters, who chanted, beat
drums and set up a makeshift camp near the town of Cannon Ball
in southern North Dakota, where the $3.8 billion pipeline would
be buried underneath the Missouri River.
The area is near the reservation of the Standing Rock Sioux
tribe. It was not immediately known who owns the occupied land.
In September, the U.S. government halted construction on part of
the line. The Standing Rock Sioux and environmental activists
have said further construction would damage historical tribal
sacred sites and spills would foul drinking water.
Since then, opponents have pressured the government to reroute
construction. The current route runs within half a mile of the
reservation.
Protesters on Monday said the land in question was theirs under
the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, which was signed by eight
tribes and the U.S. government. Over the last century, tribes
have challenged this treaty and others like it in court for not
being honored or for taking their land.
“We have never ceded this land. If Dakota Access Pipeline can go
through and claim eminent domain on landowners and Native
peoples on their own land, then we as sovereign nations can then
declare eminent domain on our own aboriginal homeland," Joye
Braun of the Indigenous Environmental Network said in a prepared
statement.
Energy Transfer could not be reached for comment.
Dave Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
said the proposed route should be changed.
"The best way to resolve this is to reroute this pipeline and
for the (Obama) administration to not give an easement to build
it near our sacred land," Archambault said in an interview.
In filings with federal regulators, the company said at one
point it considered running the line far north of the
reservation and close to Bismarck, the state capital.
(Reporting By Terry Wade and Ernest Scheyder; Editing by Cynthia
Osterman)
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