else that affects them, it means they have willingly accepted that action. An action can be acceptable when those affected by it understand and are “okay” with the risks, see the action as having impacts that are in their best interests, and are secure in knowing that they have the chance to influence and monitor how the action is carried out and completed. When someone dissents to an action, it means they neither understand the risks sufficiently (to consent confidently) nor wish to shoulder them, do not see any converging interests, and have reason to believe they will have no role in influencing or monitoring how the action is carried out. For the people of Akwesasne, they clearly did not consent to the presence of and pollution caused by the dirty industries in their region. The U.S. and Canada, and the corporations and communities benefiting from the industries, exploited the health, cultural integrity, and economic vitality of Mohawk peoples. They colonized Mohawk peoples by limiting Indigenous self-determination to prevent these harms and risks.
Denial of consent is one important factor causing environmental injustice across a number of cases. Broadly, environmental injustice refers to the problem that there are some groups or societies who suffer more harms and shoulder greater risks, such as the health problems of pollution. What really makes a particular situation an injustice is when the prevalence of harm or risk is a product of another group’s or society’s seeking their own benefits by taking advantage of others. Hence, the Mohawks, because they are Indigenous, suffered more harms and shouldered greater risks for the benefit of corporations, communities, and individuals of U.S. and Canadian societies. Colonialism, then, is an environmental injustice since it undermines self-determination through land dispossession, pollution, and other environmental threats. A key strategy of colonialism is the denial of consent, which can produce environmental injustice. Nations and corporations often consider groups of people, such as Indigenous peoples, as not worthy of consent.
This chapter examines Indigenous environmental justice issues through the lens of consent. In it, I seek to show why environmental injustices against Indigenous peoples are problems of consent. I compare the current situation of consent today with Indigenous traditions that privilege consent in terms of how a society is organized. Part of colonialism in contexts like the United States and Canada has been the reorganizing of societies in North America to undermine Indigenous consent. The dismantling of traditions of consent is one way to understand how colonialism attacks self-determination. Although the United States is a unique context, many of the consent issues in relation to environmental justice arise in other contexts around the world. Readers should come away from this chapter with a good sense of why consent matters in relation to injustice, and why affirming consent is a strategy for achieving environmental justice for the sake of future generations.
Consent, Indigenous Justice, and the Dakota Access Pipeline
Denial of consent is a key reason why environmental injustice occurs in the case of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in its territory. The story of the Tribe’s resistance to the pipeline was covered widely in national and international media in 2016 and 2017, and was considered a major issue in the U.S. presidential election during that time. Understanding why consent matters in Indigenous struggles against oil and gas pipelines and coal terminals involves learning about the culture, history, and self-determination of Indigenous peoples who are involved and the motivations behind the projects that threaten to cause pollution, land dispossession, and other environmentally related harms and risks.
The Lakota and Dakota peoples of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, who are part of the larger Oceti Sakowin Nation, are Indigenous peoples in North America. Oceti Sakowin peoples have a rich cultural heritage that involves respect and care for water, including Mni Sose (the Missouri River). The river flows through their territories. Jaskiran Dhillon and Nick Estes (2016) write that “Mni Sose (the Missouri River) is not a thing that is quantifiable according to possessive logics. Mni Sose is a relative: the Mni Oyate, the Water Nation. She is alive. Nothing owns her.” For Oceti Sakowin peoples, their lives and the waters of the river are interdependent. According to Craig Howe and Tyler Young (2016), “Mnisose, the Missouri River, is a living being…. Throughout her life, Mni Sose has nurtured the adjacent fertile bottomlands by intermittently inundating them with upriver nutrients, and she serves as a transportation corridor for peoples and their nonhuman relatives. Her waters and riparian areas provide sustenance to countless living beings.”
Nick Estes (2019) and Dina Gilio-Whitaker (2019) document decades of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance to nonconsensual actions of the government, corporations, and private businesses of U.S. settlers. Let’s consider some examples. In the 19th century, U.S. settlers overharvested bison, an animal depended upon by the tribe, without having ever attempted to make legitimate agreements or diplomatic arrangements over sharing the bison harvest. They overran the region with mining speculation in the late 1840s as gold was discovered in California and the tribe’s sacred Black Hills region. While treaty agreements were made that protected some Oceti Sakowin lands, such as in 1851 and 1868, continuous settlement and prospecting violated the terms of those treaties. The effects ultimately reduced the tribe’s land area from more than 100 million acres to 2 million acres by the late 19th century. The lack of Indigenous consent to these actions and outcomes led the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980 to claim that “[a] more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history” (United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 1980, 448 U.S. 371).
The end of the 19th century was by no means the end of nonconsensual U.S. actions. The United States imposed the Dawes Act or General Allotment Act (1887) on Indigenous peoples to break up their lands into private property, which would open up lands not owned by Indigenous persons to settlers. Indigenous extended kinship networks were forcibly broken up during allotment to make way for nuclear families who would be sedentary farmers. The United States literally endorsed actions that separated families and discontinued relationships that Indigenous persons had with lands outside their private property. The United States brokered leases of Indigenous private property, in many cases to settler farmers and ranchers and, later, to extractive industries, such as mining. Well into the 20th century, the United States, via its government or supported by churches, forcibly sent many Dakota and Lakota children to boarding schools, some as far away as Virginia and Pennsylvania. The schools divested students of their language, cultures, and knowledges, replacing them with technical skills for settler occupations. The children were sometimes physically abused or even murdered. In an effort to get Tribes like the Standing Rock Sioux to adopt a government that would endorse extractive industries, the United States imposed boilerplate constitutions, fashioned after corporate charters, that tribes could refuse to adopt at the peril of losing potential programmatic support from the U.S. government.
By the time we get to the national and international media stories about the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), there already had been decades of resistance to nonconsensual actions by the U.S. government (Estes, 2019). Of course, consent is a major issue regarding the construction of the pipeline. DAPL is a 1,172-mile pipeline, in operation since 2017, that transports crude oil from the Bakken Formation in Williston, North Dakota, to refineries and terminals in Illinois. The Bakken is one of the largest repositories of oil in North America. DAPL’s investors profit by offering a cheaper and safer alternative to rail or truck that also increases employment, state tax revenues, and energy independence. DAPL’s advocates claim the pipeline will meet the highest environmental safety standards. To avoid having to navigate multiple government permits for construction, the pipeline builders designed a route that passes mostly through private lands, with several exceptions. One exception is an area below the Missouri River, which required a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit and affects Mni Sose.
Part of the concerns expressed by Standing Rock Tribal members and many other Indigenous advocates is that neither the Tribe nor the water itself consented to the construction of the pipeline and to the future risks of leaks. James Grijalva (2017) discusses some of the concerns the Tribe had:
The Army Corps of Engineers did
