The Independent View: Anti-Keystone XL Pipeline D.C. Protest

Cowboys and Indians rode on horseback onto the National Mall on Tuesday to show President Barack Obama that opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline extends to the U.S. heartland.

“We’re here to show Obama, to show Washington, D.C., the very faces of the people that the decision on the KXL pipeline affects,” protester Dallas Goldtooth told a crowd on the Mall, where the group erected teepees that will remain through Saturday.

Ranchers and native tribes that oppose the pipeline formed the Cowboys and Indians Alliance, putting a non-traditional face on the anti-Keystone movement that has spanned the president’s time in office. Their goal, like that of their environmentalist counterparts, is to persuade Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry to determine that the pipeline from Canada would go against the national interest.

“We have stopped the pipeline in its tracks for the last five years,” said Jane Kleeb, of the environmental group Bold Nebraska. The new protest is meant to show that “tribes have the moral authority and the farmers and ranchers have the rights to their land,” Kleeb said.

Several tribes from across the country joined together in January at the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota and signed a treaty formally agreeing to oppose tar sands projects in their territories.

“Of all people, we know not to break a treaty,” Faith Spotted Eagle, an elder of the Yankton Sioux, told the crowd. And the ranchers, or “cowboys”, are concerned not just about protecting sensitive aquifers near the pipeline, but also about their land rights, several said at the protest.

“I’m here to support the neighbors to the north that don’t want the pipeline across their land,” said Julia Trigg Crawford, a Texas rancher who rode in on horseback.

She didn’t have so much luck with her own land. Part of the Oklahoma-to-Texas southern leg of Keystone XL, which has already been built, runs through Crawford’s ranch land on the Red River.

“Basically they came in and said a foreign corporation building a for-profit pipeline had more of a right to my land than I did,” Crawford said. The land can be used for grazing, but she can’t build a house or drive across it, she said. Crawford received a check for $10,395 two years ago but has never cashed it, she said.

On Saturday, the center teepee, adorned with the Indian names President Barack Obama received from Montana’s Crow Nation and the Lakota tribe and painted with symbols symbolizing land and water protection, will be presented as a gift to the National Museum of the American Indian. Organizers said the museum has agreed to house the teepee in its collection.

The organizers also expect 5,000 more protesters at a rally on Saturday. That will follow a week of events, including a “traditional ceremony” outside Kerry’s house. Organizers also said that activist group The Other 98% plans to use a high-intensity projector to project messages about Keystone XL onto the Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters Thursday night.

I agree with the stopping of the current project, because it is a bad deal.

We are taking a dirty tar oil and pushing it through a pipeline that will be built with a much smaller temporary workforce then has been indicated. It will go to a refineries that will generate revenue for the refineries. Get pushed back through a pipeline to a tax-free zone on the Gulf coast, to get shipped outside the United States. So we get no benefit of using the oil or any revenue from its sale.

So tell me why this is a good deal.