DAPL Avoids Shutdown in Latest ‘Twist’ in Oil Pipeline Litigation
The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) is free to keep flowing Bakken Shale oil while an environmental impact statement (EIS) is completed after a coalition of Native American Tribes failed in the first test for an injunction.
U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (DC) Judge James Boasberg last year axed a key permit for the pipeline to cross underneath Lake Oahe, which necessitated the EIS. In seeking an injunction, the tribes, led by the Standing Rock Sioux, failed to demonstrate that among other things they would likely suffer irreparable harm in the absence of an order closing the pipeline.
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After hundreds of years of being dispossessed of its original homeland, the Mohican Nation, now located in Wisconsin, will have a small piece of its territory back in New York state.
“Our history over there is so complex,” said Heather Bruegl, director of cultural affairs for the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Nation, which has its seat of government in Bowler in Shawano County. “This gives us a little bit of a footprint.”
The 156-acre southern portion of Papscanee Island, just south of Albany, New York, was returned to the Mohican Nation this spring by the conservation group Open Space Institute after months of negotiation.
Shannon O’Loughlin is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the chief executive and attorney for the association, which formed in 1922 to serve Indian Country by protecting sovereignty and preserving culture.
“Harvard tends to cause delay, refuses to make decisions. And often causes extensive burden on Tribes by forcing them to produce evidence of cultural affiliation so they have a long history.
O’Loughlin says she’s concerned Harvard-educated students would go on to other institutions and perpetuate the same harmful repatriation practices and procedures.
“They have developed their inventories out of alignment with what NAGPRA requires,” she said. “They ve done so by failing to consult with tribes before they completed their inventory process.”
The United States Secretary of the Interior has announced approval of the construction and operation of the Vineyard Wind project the first large-scale, offshore wind project in the United States. Vineyard Wind 1 is an 800 MW project located 15 miles off the coast of Martha s Vineyard and will be the first commercial scale offshore wind project in the United States. The project will generate electricity for more than 400,000 homes and businesses in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, create 3,600 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) job years over the life of the project, save ratepayers $1.4 billion over the first 20 years of operation and is expected to reduce carbon emissions by more than 1.6 million tons per year.
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In early 2021, the Harvard Peabody Museum issued a statement apologizing for its reluctance working with Tribes to return some remains and funerary objects.
The social unrest of 2020 reignited the conversation of returning ancestral remains and sacred objects to their people.
Since contact, Indigenous people and settlers have had a contentious relationship, particularly as settlers appropriated items from traditional Native homelands. These items include totem poles, funerary and cultural objects – even remains of Indigenous ancestors.
Examples include in the late 1800s when the Edward Harriman Expedition removed a Teikweidi memorial pole from Southeast Alaska (1899). Or when anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička, a Czech-born anthropologist in the early 1900s known for unorthodox collection methods , such as stripping decomposing flesh from bones, or discarded the remains of an infant found in a cradleboard and sent it to the American Museum of Natural History.