In Bridger on March 26, Cheyenne River Sioux tribal members and backers braved the cold to detain an oilfield mega load until law enforcement arrived. Courtesy/James Swan
Tribal members continue arrests of truck drivers
Cheyenne River officials call on Governor Daugaard to reroute oil hauling trucks
By Talli Nauman
Native Sun News
Health & Environment Editor EAGLE BUTTE — In four recent incidents, tribal officials responded to grassroots pressure for stopping heavy-haul oilfield traffic over Indian reservation roads, prompting Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Counselor Robin LeBeau to call on South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard March 28. “It’s a simple fix. All Gov. Daugaard and the South Dakota Transportation Department have to do is reroute the trucks,” LeBeau told the Native Sun News. Her call on the governor came after Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Chair Kevin Keckler responded to citizens’ arrests of truck drivers by ordering tribal police to escort the mega load carriers off the reservation. Tribal authorities have in place a resolution banning oilfield heavy-haul and mega load carriers from the Cheyenne River Sioux Indian Reservation. One of the citizens making the arrests, Cheyenne River Sioux tribal member Joye Braun thanked Keckler for stepping up to the plate. “Chairman Keckler is standing up for our sovereign rights and backing up the resolution with action, not just words. He’s walking the walk. I’m glad for that,” Braun told the Native Sun News. LeBeau said the tribe exercised its inherent sovereign treaty rights in establishing the resolution and acting to enforce it. “That’s a huge victory for all Indian Country, in my opinion, because we showed the state of South Dakota we make our own laws and enforce them,” she said. By an accord recognized by the Federal Highway Administration, the South Dakota Highway Patrol does not enforce traffic laws within Cheyenne River or any other Indian reservation boundaries unless assistance is requested. South Dakota could stem the problem
In the most recent of a string of four incidents, which occurred March 26, citizens called LeBeau to mediate and she requested that a highway patrol officer she encountered at the scene help turn around a big rig near Bridger, she said. Seeing that the carriers’ permits were out of order, the state patrol convinced the trucker to drive several miles back to the reservation’s southern line at the Missouri River to be cited, LeBeau explained. “This highway patrol sergeant saw how easy it was to honor a tribe’s law and turn a truck around and do his job on the other side of the river,” she noted. The reservation is the fourth-largest in the United States, with an area about the size of the state of Connecticut. It has approximately 310 miles of roadways in the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs system and nearly 205 miles of state and county roads. In recent years, some of these routes have been besieged by traffic resulting from the fossil-fuel energy development boom in the oil patches at the Bakken Formation of North Dakota and the tar-sands mines of Alberta, Canada. Oversize 18-wheelers with super loads, running to and from the hydraulic fracturing (fracking) sites located northwest of the reservation, can weigh up to 200,000 tons, LeBeau said. “It’s so big it’s a danger,” she said. Other drivers must pull their vehicles out of the path of the mega loads, which are usually accompanied by escort vehicles and utility trucks to lift power lines, she said. Truckers with vehicles that are wider or higher than the design specifications of the roadways or that have loads exceeding 80,000 pounds must apply for state permits. The federal government does not regulate them. “It’s a simple order the governor could issue,” LeBeau insisted. “Daugaard can tell the Department of Transportation, ‘You will not route any of these through Ziebach and Dewey counties on the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe’s land’,” she added. Proposed Keystone XL Pipeline part of the problem
United Urban Warrior Society (UUWS) founder James Swan told Native Sun News he was part of a group of people who were meeting in Bridger on the evening of March 26, when some heavy-haul trucks rolled by on the Highway 34. “People right there on that highway say they can hear them running all night long, so we went down to have a meeting to talk about what we can do and get some control over this,” he said. South Dakota officially disallows heavy hauls from one-half hour after sunset until one-half hour before sunrise, so the state needs to live up to its own enforcement responsibilities, he said. “We want to get the message out to those companies,” he added, indicating group members’ resistance to not only the mega loads, but also to other energy related developments. “We don’t want the fracking; we don’t want the pipeline; we don’t want the man-camps. They’re destroying communities,” he said. The Alberta-based TransCanada Corp. is seeking permits from the federal government to build the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline to carry tar-sands crude slurry to the Gulf of Mexico on a route that would go under the Cheyenne River at a location just barely outside the reservation boundary and across tribal members’ allotment land. A camp of up to 1,200 pipeline workers could be expected near Takini School, raising concerns over the potential abuse of drugs, alcohol and public safety for women and children, he warned. The UUWS Eagle Butte Chapter Chair, Braun said she went to the meeting mainly to hear Bridger community members’ concerns for protection against the project proposal. “Dupree and Cherry Creek had meetings about that, because the pipeline was originally scheduled to go straight through their communities, and then they moved it just a little bit south, and now Bridger is on the frontlines, maybe less than six miles from the pipeline,” she said. When the meeting-goers saw the trucks, several got into a van, which her husband Floyd Braun drove in front of a mega load, gradually slowing both vehicles to a halt. Then they made a citizens’ arrest, while standing and sitting in front of the trucks, Braun said. No children were in the vehicle, she noted. “I do not advocate people chasing the mega loads down,” she cautioned. “The only reason we did it is my husband has police training on a track and he knows how to do it.” She said he was a deputized security officer in Seattle, Washington. The event was not without connotations of violence, according to those present. They described a trucker trying repeatedly to force meeting-goer Elizabeth Lone Eagle’s vehicle off the road and a driver in another truck climbing out of the cab with a crow bar in hand. An airplane circled over the scene, they said. Request for Tribal Regulation pending
After some hours confronting the mega loads in the cold, the tribal members resumed their meeting and concluded that they will hold a spiritual camp on the Little family allotment to counter the pipeline construction, if the project receives permits to run through the property. So far, the company has no right-of-way lease there, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs claims the Cheyenne Rivers Sioux Tribe has authority over its leasing, according to Braun. She vowed to attend tribal council sessions slated to begin April 1, in order to support more specific language be attached to the resolution banning heavy hauling on the reservation. “We the grassroots people are the ones on the front line,” Braun said. However, she added, “We really don’t want to go out there and stop these mega loads. We want to give our tribal police officers enough to back up what they need to do. “We want to put teeth behind the law. We want to have fines for over height, over width, and overweight loads, and if they don’t pay the fine, to impound the load,” she said. “South Dakota isn’t regulating them enough either,” she added. Strengthening tribal law will mean that “if we have to say, “You’re not doing your job on your side,’ then we’ll say that by stopping them on our side,” she said. Mega loads inspire three incidents
The night of the citizens’ arrests at Bridger, another mega load parked at Eagle Butte was reportedly turned back. The night before, tribal member Joseph White Eyes put himself under the front end of a mega load parked in Eagle Butte, at the Cheyenne River Motel on Highway 212. The Braun’s joined him and contacted LeBeau. She and other tribal members came to the scene. Keckler told LeBeau over the telephone he wanted tribal police squad cars ahead and behind the load to escort it back toward Gettysburg on Highway 212, and they did his bidding, witnesses said. Previously, on March 14, Joye Braun almost single-handedly blocked a mega load that had stopped at the Ampride gas station, also on Highway 212 in Eagle Butte. Floyd Braun positioned Joye Braun in her wheelchair directly in the truck’s path. The driver responded by working with a dispatcher to return from whence he came, she said. She uses a wheelchair because rheumatoid arthritis would otherwise prevent her from being active; standing creates pain and other adverse effects, she said. LeBeau was “chilled to the bone,” during the incidents at which she mediated by request, she said. “It was so very cold but we were out there for a good cause. They’ve dug up and drilled up Mother Earth. She’s tired. She’s hoping someone will help her out. That’s why we’re taking it up.” Native activists have stopped other mega loads resulting from what are known as “unconventional” methods of oil development, such as fracking and tar-sands mining, in the United States and Canada. “We don’t agree with what these oil companies are doing to Unci Maka, poisoning Mother Earth, and it’s time to say, ‘Not on our lands’,” Braun declared. In South Dakota, she said, Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Standing Rock reservations also are grappling with mega load issues. (Contact Talli Nauman NSN Health and Environment Editor at talli.nauman@gmail.com) Copyright permission Native Sun News
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