Standing Rock Protests

Many energy justice battles have been waged over the environmental impacts of energy infrastructures. Community members and activists frequently work to ensure that marginalized and vulnerable populations are not made to bear the environmental burdens of energy systems. One of the most famous examples of this principle of energy justice developed around the Dakota Access Pipeline. A major oil pipeline running from oil fields in North Dakota through South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois, the Dakota Access Pipeline posed a threat to regional water supplies, particularly those of the Standing Rock Reservation that straddles the North Dakota-South Dakota border. The pipeline also threatened to disturb what many Sioux considered sacred land, home to burial sites and ancestral remains. Beginning in 2016, indigenous resistance to the pipeline swelled into a nation-wide movement, with thousands joining anti-pipeline encampments at Standing Rock, including members of more that 300 federally recognized tribes. 
These issues reverberate through the primary source included here. In 2014, Phyllis Young, a tribal leader, delivered a speech at a hearing with Energy Transfer Partners, one of the companies behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. Defending the environmental integrity of her ancestral homelands, Young states that “You, as a human being, cannot drink oil… You need the water to survive.”