The Keystone XL's Senate Failure Isn't the End of the Pipeline as an Act of War

By Vi Waln, Guardian UK

19 November 14

My Lakota people are still prepared to protect our clean water. This remains a death project

y Lakota people have a phrase – Mni Wiconi – which means “water of life”. Water is also Pejuta – our primary medicine. It is an extremely sacred element without which we cannot live, yet many people take it for granted. They do not realize: when our drinking-water sources are gone or contaminated, humanity will perish.

Water is also present in every single Lakota ceremony at which I pray – it is essential to our ceremonial way of life. Like our ancestors who sacrificed their very lives for our survival, many of us pray for the descendants who will soon stand in our place, and one of our most important prayers is for our descendants to always have an abundance of clean drinking water.

But TransCanada’s Keystone XL oil pipeline (KXL), which the company has proposed building directly over the Ogallala Aquifer, is still an immediate threat to all of us who drink water from that underground reservoir.

The Ogallala Aquifer is a major water supply for eight states, from here in North Dakota down to Texas and all the way out to New Mexico. Without clean water, these eight states will become uninhabitable. Many people – Indian and non-Indian alike – are prepared to fight the pipeline’s construction to protect the water and land, no matter the result of Tuesday evening’s vote in the US Senate.

Many Lakota people in particular view the construction of this pipeline through our treaty territory as a true act of war. After the US House of Representatives voted to approve the KXL project last week, Cyril Scott, president of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, condemned the vote:

The House has now signed our death warrants and the death warrants of our children and grandchildren. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe will not allow this pipeline through our lands. ... We will close our reservation borders to Keystone XL. Authorizing Keystone XL is an act of war against our people.

There are many people on this continent whose communities have been devastated by oil pipeline development, and it is immoral for our elected officials to put so many of us at risk of losing our only source of fresh water. The construction of KXL is not in the best interest of this country or my people. Keystone really is an act of war.

Yet we have people elected to the House and Senate who have sold their souls for campaign dollars funded by big oil corporations – the vote last week in the House and Tuesday in the Senate proved this. The elected officials who voted to force the approval of KXL have obviously not considered the needs of voters who depend upon the water and land to survive. Their votes showed that they really don’t care about the people, animals, farmers and ranchers in the eight states who depend upon the Ogallala Aquifer to live.

How arrogant of these politicians to try forcing the administration to speed up the approval to construct this death project! They are risking the lives of millions of people and animals whose only water source will be contaminated when the pipeline leaks – and this pipeline will leak, just as countless other pipelines have leaked.

On 29 March 2014, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe established a spiritual camp on tribal land adjacent to the proposed KXL route. Prayers were offered by Lakota medicine people, and a sacred bundle of medicine was put into the ground to protect humans, animals, water and land along the KXL’s proposed route.

Tuesday was bitterly cold on the plains of South Dakota, as we dug out of our first major snow storm. But some Lakota people remained at the spiritual camp, oblivious to the extreme weather conditions as they continued to maintain a prayerful presence close to the sacred medicine bundle.

We are prepared to protect and to fight for our Mni Wiconi because we will die without water. We pray every day for our unborn generations to have access to an abundance of clean drinking water – it is our way of being good ancestors.

That the Senate failed to reach the threshold to force the Obama administration to act is an answer to our prayers, but it is not the answer: this administration or the next could yet approve the construction of Keystone XL and still put our shared future at risk.