From the refineries, the oil would be sent chiefly overseasnot to gasoline pumps in the United States. November: TransCanada says the costs of Keystone XL have grown to US$8 billion from US$5.4 billion. The Tribes are taking a stand for their people, their culture, their water and their future, but they also are taking a stand for YOU, said NARF Staff Attorney Natalie Landreth. January: ConocoPhillips acquires a 50% stake in the project. Rosebud has land use, environmental, and utilities codes that apply, and TransCanada must comply with Rosebud law on Rosebud land. An influx of itinerant workers, like those required for pipeline man-camps, correlates with increased sexual assaults, domestic violence, and sexual trafficking. While TransCanada replaced topsoil and reseeded the area affected by the spill, it will take decades for the lasting damage of the spill to be known and remedied. However, maps now reveal that the pipeline will cross tribal lands and water suppliesso the pipeline and the president MUST comply with tribal laws and treaties. The first, a southern leg, had already been completed and now runs between Cushing, Oklahoma, and Port Arthur, Texas. The second segment was the hotly contested 1,209-mile northern lega shortcut of sortsthat would have run from Hardisty, Alberta, through Montana and South Dakota to Steele City, Nebraska. The people and the planet can claim more than a few victoriesand 2019 is looking better already. This decision reversed two previous administrative decisions and was done without any public comment or environmental analysis. Many had hoped that the disastrous project was finally done for in November 2015, when the Obama administration vetoed the pipelineacknowledging its pervasive threats to climate, ecosystems, drinking water sources, and public health. On November 17, 2020, the Tribes filed a federal lawsuit against the United States Department of Interior and the BLM over their January 2020 issuing of the KXL permit. The Keystone Pipeline System is an oil pipeline system in Canada and the United States, commissioned in 2010 and owned by TC EnergyAs of March 2020, the Government of Alberta. On the map users will be able to locate the pipeline route, pumping stations, pipe storage yards, and man camp locations (also known as construction camps). TransCanada's plan to dig a trench and bury part of its $7 billion, 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline right through this land has unearthed a host of Native American opposition, resentments and ghosts of the past. TransCanada failed to comply with Rosebud and Fort Belknap law. The proposed Keystone XL extension actually comprised two segments. The pipeline would consist of 875 miles of 36-inch pipe with the capacity to transport 830,000 barrels per day" (Parfomak, Pirog, Luther and Vann 4). See our original complaint filed. The following are quotes from the project partners: This map is a free and public tool designed to support impacted communities along the route about the risks of living in proximity to fossil fuel pipelines and development. The southern portion of the pipeline, from Oklahoma to Texas, has already been completed. The Keystone XL pipeline extension, proposed by TC Energy (then TransCanada) in 2008, was initially designed to transport the planets dirtiest fossil fuel, tar sands oil, to marketand fast. Phase 1 of the Keystone Pipeline was permitted in March 2008. This is great news for the tribes, people, and sacred places in the path of the proposed pipeline. Now, after the courts have told the United States it must follow the law, President Trump has attempted to circumvent the courts by issuing a new permit. January: Trump signs a presidential memorandum inviting TransCanada to resubmit their application for a Presidential Permit and directing the Secretary of State, Department of the Interior, and Department of the Army to fast-track the decision. (a) On March 29, 2019, the President granted to TransCanada Keystone Pipeline, L.P. a Presidential permit (the "Permit") to . Whats more, the whole process of getting the oil out and making it usable creates three to four times the carbon pollution of conventional crude extraction and processing. The State Department provided no explanation in the 2017 decision for its contradictory factual finding; instead, it simply disregarded its previous factual findings and replaced them with a new one. 840 miles (1,351 km) in the United States (Phillips County, Mont. The treaties and laws guarantee us protections, and we are committed to see that those laws are upheld., Fort Belknap Indian Community President Andy Werk also commented, The TransCanada announcement is a relief to those of us who stood in the pipelines path. Exactly how much was released will not be clear until it's all recovered, TC Energy said. Elections turn control of the U.S. Congress over to Republicans, who pledge to move forward on Keystone XL. The Dakota Access Pipeline The controversial construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) gained national and international attention when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers accepted an application filed by Energy Transfer Partners, a Texas-based developer behind the project. NARF and our clients are confident in our claims against the construction of the pipeline, and we are optimistic the court will not allow this case to be dismissed. Our health and safety should take priority over companies profits. State Disclosures. A two-week delay in the face of a pandemic would seem like the obvious course of action. Winning support in Indian country is one of the last hurdles for the project, which is touted as a key to North American energy . GIS allows for the creation of maps that display specific information related to the City. So this is a complete win for the tribes on the motions to dismiss. The Keystone XL pipeline was proposed by the energy infrastructure company TC Energy. The water delivery system for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe is called the Mni Wiconi, which translates to Water is Life. On February 11, 2019, an 1,800-gallon spill was detected in Missouri on the main Keystone line, and last year more than 400,000 gallons were spilled from the main Keystone line in South Dakota near a tribal community. March: Canadas National Energy Board approves the Canadian section of the Keystone XL. its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends. The cost is too high. Tribes and the United States government sign Treaties of Fort Laramie establishing respective territories. The presidential permit comes nearly a decade after Calgary-based TransCanada applied to . If you are worried about the KXL pipeline, take action now. It was a blatant attempt to prioritize corporate interests over the health and well-being of the regions citizens and tribes authority to govern their lands and protect their citizens. April: TransCanada submits a new route to officials in Nebraska for approval. The Fort Belknap Indian Community and Rosebud Sioux Tribe, represented by the Native American Rights Fund, continued their fight against the illegal permitting of the Keystone XL Pipeline with two filings in the US District Court of Montana. They have laws protecting their water and those laws must be respected. In his recent proclamation, Missing and Murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives Awareness Day, 2019, President Trump declared it imperative to end the violence that disproportionately affects American Indian and Alaska Native communities. In June 2021, TC Energy announced that it was abandoning its plans for building the pipeline for goodputting an end to a fossil fuel project that had loomed over waterways, communities, and the climate for more than a decade. Its mines are a blight on Canadas boreal, where mining operations dig up and flatten forests to access the oil below, destroying wildlife habitat and one of the worlds largest carbon sinks. This portion of the pipeline is called the Gulf Coast Pipeline. The one filed by Rosebud Sioux last week cites the fact that the Trump Administration has not undertaken any analysis of: trust obligations, the potential impact on tribal hunting and fishing rights, the potential impacts on the Rosebud Sioux Tribes unique water system, the potential impact of spills on tribal citizens, or the potential impact on cultural sites in the path of the pipeline. In return, they asked that the United States protect their lands from trespass and their resources from destruction. Early in his presidency, President Trump made it a priority to issue permits for the questionable KXL project without the required tribal consultation, environmental review, or consideration for treaty rights. The court also noted that the Tribes could file a new suit against the Bureau of Land Management given it has approved the pipeline in the remainder of the United States. The spill, more than 400,000 gallons of unprocessed crude, is the seventh largest on-shore spill since 2002. The tribes filed a response to TransCanadas motion for summary judgment and a memorandum in support of their own motion for partial summary judgment. These lands are Indian lands. Even as Trump and TC Energy tried to revive the pipeline, polls showed that a majority of Americans opposed it. Together with the Fort Belknap Indian Community, we brought a lawsuit to stop the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline through our territories. Five years ago, a pipeline spilled a million gallons of tar sands crude into a Michigan riverand were still cleaning it up. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe and Fort Belknap Indian Community have government-to-government treaties with the United States that the President cannot violate. President Trumps attempt to circumvent the judicial branch is extremely troubling because he has elevated the profits of a foreign corporation above the will of the American people and the laws of the United States. Farm to Table: The Worlds Largest Protest in India, 2023 The University of Alabama at Birmingham. But environmental reviews by both the Obama and Trump administrations concluded that the Keystone XL pipeline would not have lowered gasoline prices. However, despite youth and elderly leaders being in the front during the inevitable standoffs with police, Mace, tasers, and rubber bullets were used against the protestors. On Friday, December 20, 2019, NARF and their clients, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and the Fort Belknap Indian Community (the Tribes) received some great news from a Montana court. Watch President Bordeauxs full State of the Tribe address. June: TransCanada announces it will buy ConocoPhillips stake in Keystone. Share. Regardless of the new permit and political maneuvering, the President is required to honor the treaties and the Constitution. But the movement has had setbacks: a federal judge in Louisisana recently. This is one of the reasons for the lawsuit. US President Joe Biden has cancelled permits for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office. Finally, massive fossil fuel infrastructure investments like KXL undermine efforts to minimize global warming and prioritize clean energy like wind and solar. A timeline of the Keystone Pipeline project is below. See our request for intervention. Rather than honoring these legal obligations, the United States has chosen to blatantly violate them. Several indigenous leaders, including Dallas Goldtooth of the Mdewakanton Dakota and Dine nations and Faith Spotted Eagle of the Ihanktonwan Dakota nation, have seen Bidens executive order as a sign of the administration keeping its campaign promise to work against climate change and work with indigenous communities. In 2014, more than two million comments urging a rejection of the pipeline were submitted to the U.S. Department of State during a 30-day public comment period. Because of the highly corrosive and acidic nature of the tar sands oil, there contains a higher likelihood that the pipeline will leak. The Canadian federal government refused to provide child and family services funding for indigenous children living on reserves, a purposeful discrimination tactic against indigenous communities. Its no small feat extracting oil from tar sands, and doing so comes with steep environmental and economic costs. BILLINGS, Mont. Rosebud Sioux Tribe President Rodney M. Bordeaux responded to the announcement, This is great news for the Tribes who have been fighting to protect our people and our lands. In 2017, the US State Department released a study which proved that carbon emissions could be between 5 and 20 percent higher than the original 17 percent estimation. Bulldozers were seen this week grading the land in Tripp County, South Dakota, adjacent to Rosebud lands. January: Nebraska Gov. The lands, water, and promises made in those treaties were paid for, literally, with the blood of our ancestors and relatives. keep you informed with the latest alerts and progress reports. Some of the current concerns are rooted in our responsibility to take care of Unci Maka, which is grandmother earth. NARF will not allow the US government to ignore or forget the agreements made with tribal nations. Frighteningly, the KXL pipeline design would only detect 13,000 barrels (535,000 gallons) of tar sands crude leaked in a 24-hour period. August: The State Department releases its final environmental assessment that the pipeline would have a limited environmental impact. Obviously, that is not the case. Opposition outside the courts was swift and strong as well. The Natural Resources Defense Council works to safeguard the earth - its people, Keystone XL will need permission from the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, so this is not over.. Once they are gone and depleted, they are gone. What is missing is an appreciation of the long-term effects of an oil pipeline going through our sacred land. In that case, brought by a coalition of environmental organizations, the District Court had decided that the federal government did not follow the law when it issued its 2017 permit for the pipeline. January: Obama rejects the Keystone Pipeline, saying the December bill did not allow enough time to review the new route. This pipeline will benefit a Canadian company and its shareholders. In fact, the treaties were created specifically for this sort of violation. The Keystone XL pipeline would cross the United States border into Montana, then cut through the Great Sioux Reservation, as set forth in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, in South Dakota and finally Nebraska to Steele City where the crude would mix with US crude reserves and continue to Texas for export. Our water sources are threatened by the dirty tar sand crude, our ancestral homelands are in the direct path of the pipeline, and our people already are suffering the effects of nearby construction worker man camps. Dave Heineman approves the proposed route for Keystone XL, sending the project back to the State Department for review. These lands are well within the area of impact for even a small rupture and spill. We invite anyone interested in providing testimony to attend. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. The courts intervention is needed to protect the Tribes precious lands, water, natural, and cultural resources. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The pipeline faced more than a decade of sustained protests from environmental activists and organizations; Indigenous communities; religious leaders; and the farmers, ranchers, and business owners along its proposed route. The activities described in the projects Environmental Impact Statement, namely rock ripping, blasting, trenching, top soil removal, and replacement of removed materials as backfill would adversely affect Rosebuds mineral estate. It was proposed to be an extension of the existing Keystone Pipeline System, which has been in operation since 2010. Some people, seeing a map of the pipeline's proposed 875-mile route through the Great Plains, may picture the region in the terms of 19th-century explorers who called it the "great American desert . The pipeline, which had severe environmental and human rights implications, has been on a long road towards failure. June-July: Increased opposition to Keystone XL includes legislators and scientists speaking out against the project; the Environmental Protection Agency questions the need for the pipeline extension. The Tribes asked the court to rescind the illegal issuance of the Keystone XL pipeline presidential permit. They prohibited any construction until the Trump Administration and TransCanada conduct the necessary review. The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network. The pipeline had been projected to carry oil nearly 1,200 miles (1,900km). A spill would have been devastating to the farms, ranches, and communities that depend on these crucial ecosystems. Any project that crosses tribal lands must be in compliance with tribal laws and regulations. It has willfully ignored the pipelines impacts on tribal communities. With President Trumps illegal permit revoked, the Tribes plan to continue their efforts to ensure that TransCanada, and its proposed Keystone XL project, follows all applicable laws that are in place to protect tribal people and ancestral lands. In 2015, the Obama administration vetoed the pipeline due to its potential threats to the climate, drinking water, public health, and ecosystems of the local communities. The pipeline is certain to leak (it already has). (For evidence, note the 2010 tar sands oil spill in Kalamazoo River, Michigan, a disaster that cost Enbridge more than a billion dollars in cleanup fees and took six years to settle in court.) The US did not adequately review the pipelines proposed route and whether it crosses tribal territory. On November 17, 2020, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and the Fort Belknap Indian Community, represented by the Native American Rights Fund and co-counsel, filed a federal lawsuit against the United States Department of Interior (DOI) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) over their issuing of the KXL permit. Among other things, the complaint describes: NARF Staff Attorney Matthew Campbell explained, Before we allow a foreign company to build another pipeline to haul dirty tar sands across any American soil, we should be taking a hard look at the possible impact on American land, water, health, and safety. Do not allow TC Energy and the Trump Administration to ignore their legal and corporate responsibilities to the American people. The land, water, tribal sovereignty, and governmental services were not given to us in those treaties, President Kindle said. NARF has two important updates regarding our defense of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and the Fort Belknap Indian Community against the Keystone XL pipeline. The federal court denied the United States federal governments and the TransCanadas (TC Energy) efforts to dismiss the Tribes case against the KXL Pipeline. The decision echoed a seven-year State Department review process with EPA input that concluded the pipeline would fail to serve national interests. These sands contain bitumen, a gooey type of petroleum that can be converted into fuel. NARF is honored to represent the Rosebud Sioux and Fort Belknap Tribes to fully enforce the laws and fight this illegal pipeline.. On October 16, 2020, the court held that the Presidents permit only applied to the border and not the entire pipeline, but that the tribes could sue the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for its KXL permitting. September: TransCanada and ConocoPhillips file an application for the Keystone XL Phase 4 extension. This is one of the reasons for the lawsuit. One was Nebraskas Ogallala Aquifer, which provides drinking water for millions as well as 30 percent of Americas irrigation water. Low oil prices and increasing public concern over the climate led Shell, Exxon, Equinor (then Statoil), and Total to either sell their tar sands assets or whittle them down. And when tar sands oil does spill, its more difficult to clean up than conventional crude because it immediately sinks to the bottom of the waterway. The Fort Belknap Indian Community and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, represented by the Native American Rights Fund, have separately sued TC Energy and President TrumpRosebud Sioux Tribe v. Trump. Between the years of 1778 and 1871 alone, the United States government has signed over 370 treaties with different indigenous nations, nearly all of which promised peace, defined land boundaries, and protection of land, water, and hunting rights. 36-inch diameter pipeline Capacity of 830,000 barrels per day MYTH: Since the route permit was first certified in 2010, there is less need for Keystone XL in South Dakota. Although, the pipelines proposed path crosses the plaintiff tribes homelands, the tribes have not been consulted as required by law and DOI policy. These activities could cause irreparable harm to tribal waterways, cultural resources, and minerals in the path of the pipelines easement. When industry-friendly politicians took charge of both congressional houses in January 2015, their first order of business was to pass a bill to speed up approval of Keystone XL. It poured 407, 000 gallonsalmost 3,000,000 poundsof crude oil into the ground. The dire climate change findings in the SEIS support the argument against the XL pipeline. The United States formally agreed, among other things, to keep outsiders off Sioux and other tribal nations territory and protect tribal natural resources. Many indigenous populations have fought for over a decade to defend their water and land rights against fossil fuel companies. The online map can be found here: https://climatealliancemap.org/kxl-map U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Second Class Lauren Jorgensen. When that failedthanks to a lawsuit brought by NRDC and other groupsTrump reissued the cross-border permit himself. With the original permit revoked, the Ninth Circuit yesterday decided to dismiss as moot the case based on that original permit. Now TransCanada (TC Energy) wants to add more miles to their leaky Keystone Pipeline. If the Presidents goal was to avoid complying with the District Courts decision in that case, it worked. Meanwhile, major new tar sands projects stopped moving forward, despite investments from the government of Alberta, Canada. Nevertheless, in the mid-2000s, with gas prices on the rise, oil companies ramped up production and sought additional ways to move their product from Canadas remote tar sands fields to midwestern and Gulf Coast refineries. the desecration and destruction of cultural, historic, and sacred sites; the endangerment of tribal members, especially women and children; damage to hunting and fishing resources, as well as the tribal health and economies associated with these activities; the impairment of federally reserved tribal water rights and resources; harm to tribal territory and natural resources in the inevitable event of Pipeline ruptures and spills; and. Keystone XL Pipeline Map The proposed Keystone XL extension actually comprised two segments. The protests were primarily peaceful, with camps and prayer circles set up on the land where construction was to take place. The Keystone XL Pipeline Is Dead, but TC Energy Still Owns Hundreds of Miles of Rights of Way Many landowners who opposed the pipeline have begun a new fight, trying to regain control of the land . On January 20, 2021, President Biden signed an Executive Order revoking the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline permit issued by the Trump administration. Opposition to Keystone XL centered on the devastating environmental consequences of the project. Despite all of these facts, throughout the permitting process, there was no analysis of trust obligations, no analysis of treaty rights, no analysis of the potential impact on hunting and fishing rights, no analysis of potential impacts on the Rosebud Sioux Tribes unique water system, no analysis of the potential impact of spills on tribal citizens, and no analysis of the potential impact on cultural sites in the path of the pipeline, which is in violation of the NEPA and the NHPA. EPA staff perform oil and sediment sampling near Battle Creek, Michigan, after the Kalamazoo spill. The case is now up to the Tribes, and they will not allow a foreign company to break American law, take land that does not belong to them, ignore the voices and laws of the tribal citizens, and destroy an aquifer that feeds millions of Americans. Revoking the March 2019 Permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline. The federal government has a treaty obligation to protect tribal citizens likely to suffer increased rates of violence and abuse. NRDC advocates were part of a broad coalition that helped stop Keystone XLfor good. Construction has begun despite the fact that there are three lawsuits currently going on. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe has retained the NARF to represent its interests with regard to the Keystone XL pipeline.
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