Monday, October 31st, 2016 was no ordinary day for many reasons. Firstly, because it was Halloween, but secondly, because so many people on Facebook saw their friends check in to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Most people, in fact, didn’t actually make the trek to North Dakota for Halloween, but checked in on Facebook as an act of solidarity with the people protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline Project, a huge crude oil pipeline that would span the US. While the protests against the pipeline being built have garnered many supporters, such as Hollywood celebrities, one of the demographics on the forefront of these protests has been the local Native American groups.
There are many reasons for people to oppose the imposition of this pipeline, mostly environmental. But for the local groups in this area, there are unique considerations that haven’t been given much light. While the Lakota and Sioux tribes of the area have been given jurisdiction over certain areas of the land as a result of the Fort Laramie treaties dating back to the 1800s, this pipeline will infiltrate the already-miniscule amount of land given to these tribes, land which was hard-won after they gave the majority of it up to the US government. Many of the Standing Rock Sioux also live downstream from where the pipeline crosses, and have a very valid fear that having this pipeline in place could pose a threat to their clean water supply. Furthermore, the creation of the pipeline, in an act of what some would call “environmental racism”, would dig up burial sites that are incredibly sacred to the people in the area. This is even more upsetting given that the company who is heading up the implementation of this pipeline, Energy Transfer, had originally planned for the pipeline to pass through wealthier areas of North Dakota, before moving it to Standing Rock.
It’s incredibly ironic that all of these events are coming to a head during Halloween, a time when many people take the liberty to fetishize and costumize aspects of different cultures, with Indigenous culture being an ever-popular one. Celebrities like Hillary Duff and Chris Hemsworth have come under fire for appropriating aspects of Indigenous culture as part of their Halloween costumes. Hillary Duff and her boyfriend took it one step further, incorporating a Pilgrim aspect as part of their costume, making for the most blatanty distateful couples costume of 2016.
What these events all boil down to is a lack of regard for the rights and considerations of Indigenous people in this day and age. And while it is no secret that our North American governments aren’t taking the steps to create reparations and good will with these communities, it is also disheartening to see their culture being boiled down to a popular Halloween costume by so many other people. It is imperative that as a society, we take a step back and look at the implications of all these events, and figure out ways that we can work towards accounting for these considerations in our everyday lives.
Image Sources obtained from:
http://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/6b295eaa3fc7c2658587bd1575815fe1
https://anarchicnews.noblogs.org/post/2016/08/26/north-dakota-gives-the-…
https://heavyeditorial.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/gettyimages-594890056…