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The Dakota Access Pipeline: What You Need to Know [1]

['Shelia Hu']

Date: 2025-03

ETP began planning for the pipeline in 2014 during the “Bakken oil boom,” when crude oil development was rapidly expanding in the region due to its enormous oil reserves and the emergence of hydraulic fracking technology. Prior to DAPL, companies shipped oil out of the region by rail on “bomb trains,” another dangerous method of transporting fossil fuels.

ETP’s initial proposal had the pipeline crossing the Missouri River approximately 10 miles north of North Dakota’s capital, Bismarck. The Corps rejected this proposal in 2015 after opposition from Bismarck residents, due to the route’s proximity to the city’s water supply. Yet the Corps ignored Standing Rock’s same opposition to the current route. Critics see this rerouting—or the government’s prioritization of drinking water for the largely white communities of Bismarck over that of an Indigenous reservation—as an act of environmental racism.

Indeed, for the Standing Rock Sioux, the DAPL issue is yet another reminder of how the U.S. government has exploited Indigenous Peoples over the centuries. DAPL crosses Lake Oahe within a mere mile of the reservation’s current boundaries—with current being the key word here. In 1851, the first Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed by several tribes and the U.S. government, designated new boundaries for Sioux territory (a mere fraction of the Sioux tribe’s historic territory). By 1868, a second Fort Laramie treaty formally established what was then the Great Sioux Reservation. About a decade later, however, Congress seized the reservation lands after the U.S. Cavalry discovered gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and later divvied up the Great Sioux into five separate reservations, one of which is Standing Rock.

The Sioux territory that is now Standing Rock lost even more land in 1944, when the Corps took 87.5 square miles via eminent domain as part of a larger project to construct five dams and reservoirs along the Missouri River. “The Oahe Dam destroyed more Indian land than any other single public works project in the United States,” wrote historian Michael L. Lawson in his book Dammed Indians Revisited. The dam’s construction displaced communities as it flooded the lands under what is now Lake Oahe, scattering tribal members and severely affecting their access to fertile lands, hunting and fishing grounds, medicinal plants, cultural resources, and each other—the effects of which have been felt for decades. Then, enter DAPL, with its threats to destroy even more, including Standing Rock’s water supply. Moreover, had the federal government honored either of the Fort Laramie treaties, the location of DAPL’s Oahe crossing would be on official tribal land.

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[1] Url: https://www.nrdc.org/stories/dakota-access-pipeline-what-you-need-know#environmental-racism

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