In this piece, 23-year-old Jackie Fielder explains why indigenous people in the United States are calling for groups and individuals to divest from big banks that finance oil pipeline projects. Jackie is a Mnicoujou Lakota, Mandan, and Hidatsa organizer with Mazaska Talks, founder of the San Francisco Defund DAPL Coalition, and a delegate of the WECAN Autumn Indigenous Women’s Divestment Delegation.
February was a particularly difficult month for indigenous activists around Turtle Island (North America). The month marks one year since the United States government deployed a handful of law enforcement officers to evict non-violent, unarmed Water Protectors from the #NoDAPL resistance camps that stood for 10 months.
From April 2016 to February 2017, thousands of indigenous people and their accomplices from around the world faced surveillance, rubber bullets, attack dogs, concussion grenades, and water cannons in subfreezing temperatures to denounce the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Thanks to this historic gathering on Lakota treaty territory, for the first time, many Americans saw for themselves the still-frayed relationship between Native Americans and the United States government. Through both amateur social media documenters and progressive independent media, we witnessed a revival of the 19th century Indian Wars, with the United States using Humvees instead of horses, informants instead of scouts, and protecting a multi-billion dollar oil company instead of protecting gold mining settlers. As the world wonders whatever happened to the #NoDAPL movement, indigenous people around Turtle Island are gearing up to shut down three more tar sands pipelines. To fight all these pipelines at once, we are calling on people around the world to divest from the banks financing our oppression.
To understand how banks are connected to the oppression of indigenous peoples, one must first understand that, contrary to popular belief, banks do not actually hold your money in a vault; they lend it. Because deposits are the primary source of funds for almost every bank, some of the deposits you make to one of these big banks will be loaned to corporations, including private prisons, oil companies, and assault weapon manufacturers. The profit the banks make is the difference between the low interest rates they pay depositors and the high interest rates debtors, like corporations, pay them to borrow the money.
Environmental organizations like Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Oil Change International, and Greenpeace have conducted research this past year to highlight the banks loaning funds to pipeline companies. Unfortunately, they found that almost every major bank is complicit in some pipeline company’s financing. The organizations have named dozens of other big banks as financiers of companies behind the Dakota Access Pipeline and three proposed tar sands pipelines: Trans Mountain, Line 3, and Keystone XL.
Why target banks rather than elected representatives or the courts? Indigenous advocates of divestment believe that as long as oil companies have big banks in their corner, they have the funding they need to sail through or skirt legal processes, influence politicians, and leave the public to deal with their environmental destruction.
Trump’s election victory spelled out disaster for the #NoDAPL movement based on his financial ties to and appointments of oil and pipeline moguls. He appointed former CEO of Exxon Rex Tillerson to be his secretary of state, and he was backed by Energy Transfer Partners — Dakota Access, LLC’s parent company — CEO Kelcy Warren, who donated $100,000 to Trump’s joint fundraising committee with the GOP, according to the Washington Post. And his personal investments have been tied to oil, too: Trump’s spokeswoman could not confirm if Trump had sold his stock in Phillips 66, which owns a quarter of the Dakota Access Pipeline; and his pick for energy secretary, Rick Perry, used to serve as a board member of Energy Transfer Partners.
In October 2016, Hillary Clinton responded to indigenous people’s cry for help with a neutral statement calling on protestors to let workers build the pipe, but also for protestors to be allowed to demonstrate peacefully.
Additionally, a federal judge presiding over the DAPL case acknowledged its approval as potentially harmful yet still allowed oil to flow through the pipeline.
This political economic system that strongly appears to be stacked in favor of oil companies has left us with only one more avenue to seek accountability, and that is the flow of money. By making billions of dollars available for these projects, big banks are apparently willing to evade internationally recognized standards around indigenous rights, forget dozens of environmental disasters, and ignore the plight of indigenous women across Turtle Island.
Take Enbridge, the company responsible for one of the largest inland oil spills in United States history. Enbridge has stocked pipe near their preferred route for the proposed Line 3 pipeline. The company wants to keep the existing Line 3 in the ground and transport nearly double the existing pipeline's volume of tar sands oil — an oil many scientists have urged us to stop using “to avoid passing tipping points, such as initiation of the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.”
Anishinaabe people, landowners, and other pipeline opponents have made their concerns over Line 3 loud and clear in a series of public hearings: it threatens their Manohmen (wild rice), their life-giving waterways, and our climate. So far, only BNP Paribas and U.S. Bank have promised to back away from financially supporting oil pipeline projects in the future, yet according to Rainforest Action Network’s analysis of finance data from Bloomberg Professional Services, Enbridge's Line 3 project has the financial backing of 36 other big banks around the world.
Another concern highlighted most recently in the public hearings on Line 3 is the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women, known on social media as #MMIW. For years, indigenous women who work with survivors of violence have inferred a connection between alarming levels of sex trafficking in and around areas of oil extraction to influxes of transient oil workers. The number of sexual assault, domestic violence, and sex trafficking incidents in North Dakota — home to the Bakken Formation and four Indian reservations — has tripled since 2008, according to advocates Melissa Merrick from Spirit Lake and Sadie Young Bird from Fort Berthold. Oil workers stay for months at a time in “man camps” while earning hefty paychecks for extracting oil from the earth and building pipelines to transport it.
In their attempt to address the concern of increased rates of sex trafficking and sexual assault in their review of Line 3, the state of Minnesota — of which the pipeline will go through — posited that Enbridge could educate or raise awareness of the issue among its employees and contractors, and donate to local and tribal law enforcement. As Ann Manning of Minneapolis aptly commented, the state provides no evidence that such solution would work.
Though pipelines bring many short-term jobs and a handful of permanent jobs, pipeline companies and the banks supporting them are essentially gambling indigenous women for short-term profits. While bank and oil company executives worry about whether their children are going to make it into an Ivy League school, we worry about whether ours are going to make it home.
Perhaps that is why this indigenous-led divestment movement has given renewed momentum to the fossil fuel divestment movement and the public banking movement. Seattle became the first city in the nation to cut ties with a bank over their involvement in the Dakota Access Pipeline after indigenous people led a massive campaign to push the City Council to make good on an earlier resolution in support of Standing Rock. The indigenous leaders of the Seattle campaign, Rachel Heaton (Muckleshoot) and Matt Remle (Hunkpapa Lakota), wanted other people around the world to get their cities to divest, so they founded Mazaska Talks, a platform dedicated to supporting and connecting divestment advocates. (Mazaska roughly translates to “Money” in Lakota, thus “Money Talks.”) Through this platform, their organization model of flooding the phone lines of city council members, packing city council meetings, and shutting down bank branches spread to dozens of other cities.
Since Seattle voted to divest, cities in California such as Davis, Santa Monica, Alameda, San Francisco, Oakland, and others have passed legislation to cut ties with banks over their funding of DAPL or are looking to establish a public bank.
The smaller cities, like Davis, California, are able to consider smaller neighborhood banks as alternatives. Bigger cities, on the other hand, often need bigger banks, and larger city campaigns are pushing for a more trustworthy option: establishing a public bank. A public bank is different from a private bank, in that it is owned by and accountable to local taxpayers rather than high-up stockholders. Furthermore, though bankers run the daily operations of a public bank, the people’s values can be implemented in the bank’s founding documents through elected officials.
The Bank of North Dakota, the only existing public bank in the U.S., has funded economic development, including infrastructure, agriculture, and student loans. That is how public banking holds promise for cities struggling with education equity, affordable housing, and healthcare access. However, local taxpayers can keep up the pressure on elected officials to ensure the founding documents reflect the values of the people.
Though oil flows through the Dakota Access Pipeline, (and the pipeline has spilled five times in just six months of operation) indigenous people will do as we have always done, and that is just doing what we can. For you, that may be closing your bank account with a big bank, closing your faith-based institution or school’s account with a big bank, or moving your town’s money out of Wall Street and into a public bank. Every dollar counts, as each is one less going towards the rubber bullets, water cannons, pepper spray, and surveillance we will continue to encounter as indigenous peoples in the way of this world’s greed. Together, we will make this world green again.
Related: The Line 3 Pipeline Shows that the Fight for Standing Rock Isn’t Done
Check this out:
