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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

COLUMN: Media blackout on Dakota Access needs to stop

I’d like to think of myself as someone who is fairly in touch with current events. I hate not being able to respond, “Yeah, I have,” when someone asks, “Hey, have you heard about (insert current event here)?”

So I was slightly taken aback when, in my political science class on indigenous and ethnic minority rights, the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy was broached. I had never heard of it before.

Dakota? Which one — North or South? Pipeline?

Fast-forward to a few weeks later and I still haven’t seen the issue crop up much in the news.

Granted, I’m not glued to a television network or news site 24/7, but I don’t think I should have to be, especially considering the gravity of this situation.

According to CNN, an Energy Transfer Crude Oil subsidiary, Dakota Access, has been constructing an underground oil pipeline spanning from northwestern North Dakota to southern Illinois since July.

The proposed pipeline would pump about 470,000 barrels of oil every day.

Proponents of the pipeline claim that it will help reduce the United States’ reliance on foreign oil, boost North Dakota’s economy and create between 8,000 to 12,000 jobs. They also 
assert that, environmentally, pipelines are the best way to transport oil.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe sued the federal government over the pipeline and want an injunction halting the work on the project. According to the complaint the group filed in federal court, the pipeline will “damage and destroy sites of great historic, religious and cultural significance to the Tribe.”

Opponents have been peacefully protesting the pipeline at construction sites in North Dakota.

Environmental groups oppose the pipeline, too. Greenpeace and the Sierra Club are two of them.

This really should not be a controversy, because the conflict never should have arisen in the first place. The government never should have given Dakota Access a green light on the project, because it infringes upon the ancestral lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

This disregard for Native American lands is just another example of the apathy our government — and, by extension, our nation — harbors towards Native Americans as a whole. As it happens, the media falls under that realm.

This story is worthy of news coverage. It’s a fight for justice (something we’ve seen a lot of lately with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement) and an environmental rights controversy. Yet it’s receiving very little coverage. So what gives?

Well, Counter Current News has a theory, and it’s a bleak one at that. In an editorial published on their website, they concluded that the pipeline controversy and protests have not received proper media coverage because the issue isn’t polarizing — that is, it “just doesn’t fit the script of deep, societal divides plaguing the nation’s law and order, nor does it fit in with the left-right paradigm.”

Their prognosis makes sense. Most people can agree that Native Americans have been wronged deeply in our country’s past. There’s nothing to the issue that will pit liberals and conservatives against each other, which is driving so many narratives in the media as the general election approaches.

As a result, it doesn’t create the drama and conflict like in so many of this year’s big news stories like Donald Trump’s rise or the death of Cincinnati Zoo gorilla Harambe.

Instead, it’s the same old, same old narrative – indigenous peoples fighting for their rights.

This same old, same old narrative is a worthy one, though, and deserves recognition and support. This country already has a mile-high pile of injustices committed against Native Americans. Let’s not add to it by ignoring the one that’s in the works.

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