This is a story as old as America itself, given a new twist by fracking and the boom that technology has sparked in North Dakota oil country. Since the late 1800s, the U.S. government has appropriated much of the original tribal lands associated with the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota for railroads and white homesteaders. A devastating blow was delivered when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri River in 1953, flooding more than 150,000 acres at the heart of the remaining reservation. Members of the Three Affiliated Tribes—the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara—were forced out of the fertile valley and up into the arid and barren surrounding hills, where they live now. But that last-resort land turns out to hold a wealth of oil, because it sits on the Bakken Shale, widely believed to be one of the worlds largest deposits of crude. Until recently, that oil was difficult to extract, but hydraulic fracturing, combined with the ability to drill a well sideways underground, can tap it. The result, according to several senior tribal members and lawsuits filed last November and early this year in federal and state courts, has been a land grab involving everyone from tribal leaders accused of enriching themselves at the expense of their people, to oil speculators, to a New York hedge fund, to the federal governments Bureau of Indian Affairs. indiancountrytodaymedianetwork/2014/04/18/land-grab-cheats-north-dakota-tribes-out-1-billion-suits-allege-154499
Posted on: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 13:56:59 +0000
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