A youthful supporter of the campaign to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline | Photo: cool revolution, some rights reserved Commentary: An energy company plans a project that would destroy land Native people hold as sacred. Despite Native protests, neither state nor federal agencies intervene to protect those cultural sites. The project proceeds. The land is forever altered. Hundreds of Native people and their supporters converge on the site to protest and to grieve their loss.
Given recent news, not to mention the choice of photo at the top of this story, you could be forgiven for assuming I'm describing current events at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota. That's where the company Energy Transfer Partners is trying to push the new Dakota Access Pipeline through burial grounds and medicine wheels sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The project has already destroyed important sacred sites, and threatens to pollute the Missouri River and local groundwater if it's built and the inevitable spills ensue.
But I'm actually describing a gathering four years ago in the southernmost parts of the California desert. There, near the little desert town of Ocotillo, hundreds of Native people from across the southwestern United States gathered on June 24, 2014. They were there to mark the destruction of ancient cremation sites, ceremonial locations and other important cultural resources by Pattern Energy, which built the Ocotillo Express wind power facility in Imperial County.
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Indigenous people often pay the greatest price when the landscape is developed for the benefit of the world's industrial economy. When your culture is intimately interwoven with a healthy and diverse natural landscape, you're much more likely to take it personally when outside investors propose to pave that landscape.
Far too often it's not just Native culture at stake, but Native people's very lives. A 2015 survey by the group Global Witness documented 908 environmentalists killed in retaliation for their activism between 2002 and 2013. Of those 908 activists killed, 40 percent were indigenous people.
Right now the eyes of the nation are focused on Standing Rock. Non-Native environmentalists are lending important logistical support, and for good reason: aside from the cultural sovereignty issues raised by the project, the Dakota Access pipeline would make it a lot easier to ship oil from the intensively fracked Bakken oil and gas fields to shipping ports on the Gulf Coast. Climate change activists fear the consequences of making it easier to burn fossil fuels from the Bakken.
Sacred Stone Camp at the Standing Rock Reservation | Photo: Joe Brusky, some rights reserved
Those activists were largely silent when cultural sovereignty was under threat at Ocotillo.
Ocotillo wasn't the only project that posed a dire threat to Native people's culture and history. NextEra Energy's Genesis Solar Energy Project in Riverside County, which went online a month prior to the gathering at Ocotillo, made the news late in 2011 when workers discovered a large number of archaeological artifacts on and near the project's footprint. That discovery included human remains from an ancient cremation site along a transmission line route. When representatives of the Colorado River Indian Tribes attempted to rebury those remains nearby, in accordance with tribal custom, they unearthed even more remains. There were three separate discoveries of artifacts made by Genesis workers before the project was completed.
Federal archaeologists had declared the site more or less free of cultural significance. Native activists and independent archaeologists charged that those findings said more about the Obama administration's desire to get projects approved in a hurry than it said about what the landscape actually held. They were not at all surprised by the discoveries. Ford Dry Lake wasn't always dry. Eight thousand years ago the lake had water in it, and abundant people living on and near its shores for millennia. The landscape remains sacred to the Mohave people on the CRIT reservation, as well as to their Chemehuevi and Cahuilla neighbors.
Before Genesis went online local Native people held a funeral ceremony for the landscape, as they knew it would be hundreds, perhaps thousands of years before the land around Ford Dry Lake would be able to restore itself to a more natural state.
Some environmental groups opposed Genesis steadfastly. Others filed a formal protest of the Interior Department's decision to approve the project, then later withdrew that protest. Very few non-Native people mentioned damage to cultural resources as a concern in permitting Genesis to go ahead. Only one non-Native group - the labor group California Unions for Reliable Energy - mentioned cultural issues in comments on the project's final Environmental Impact Statement.
Thousands of individual artifacts from the site are now stored in a Southern California museum, a fate that deeply disturbs the likely descendants of the people who put them there.
Perhaps the direst threat to desert Native people's cultural resources never got built, but that had more to do with the global economy than it did with respect for native culture. Tessera Solar's Imperial Valley Solar Project would have occupied more than 6,300 acres in the Yuha desert in western Imperial County, not far from where the Ocotillo Express project's turbines stand today.
Imperial Valley Solar would have deployed hundreds of generators across the landscape, which would have focused sunlight with parabolic mirrors onto complex Stirling engines that would convert the energy contained in solar-heated fluid into electricity.
Examining evidence of stone tool working on the Imperial Solar site in 2010 | Photo: Chris Clarke
The 6,3
