Anybody with eyes and ears knows that North Dakota is a land meant for extraction. Driving through the countryside in eastern ND, it's obvious that every square inch of land is either allocated to farm land or small towns that support those who farm the farm land. Moving into central and western ND, cattle grazing land becomes mixed in with the farmland, but after crossing the Missouri it transfers over to mostly pasture. Sprinkled in are massive coal mines, oil fields, and small, delicate little state parks that are truly meant for either day trips or a place to put a camper so fish can be caught from our little reservoirs. We've taken a wild land and carved it up into neat pieces and mathematically calculated exactly how much of each mineral each acre needs so that over-exploitation doesn't occur.
This is the story of America, really. We expand, we fence, we sow, we reap, we profit, repeat. It's not necessarily always a bad thing- people in the world need to be fed right? In North Dakota this is most acute because we use as much space as possible for farm and ranch land. We fence off little areas of wilderness so people will leave it alone. I mean, look at the national park: there are oil wells literally outside the fences because companies will take any space they can, and how can a landowner turn down that kind of money in a lifestyle of western ND ranching? (not exactly the most luxurious of professions thanks to drought, too much rain, early freezes and blizzards, etc etc). I know that most of the talk is about finding a 'balance', but let's be honest with ourselves: industry always wins.
In the 1950s construction was finished on the Garrison Dam, a magnificent structure with amazing benefits. Hydroelectric power, water level and flood control, water recreation on the prairie- heck, even the Bible camp I work at lies on the shores of the dammed up Missouri River, and it's quite a beautiful place! But we seem to forget the dark side of the Corps of Engineers Project. Pristine river valley land, much of it owned by the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara) was flooded, with some native towns engulfed completely and permanently. Sure, the tribes protested, but industry wins.
Now we deal with the oil boom that just swept the state in the last eight or nine years. I recall a teammate who worked out west one summer describing running out around the Watford City area at the height of the boom, and the picture he painted was not as beautiful as it would seem. In the rush to make money and extract, roads were covered with trucks and running was made to be quite dangerous. I remember staying with family in rural New Town during this time, and they warned me before I went out to run that I needed to stay off the main gravel roads because of the truck traffic. They weren't kidding.
Now the infrastructure is starting to catch up, and one of the big pushes lately has been to get the oil off of the rail and underground into the pipelines. One of these, the Dakota Access Pipeline, has been gathering attention on major news outlets. The proposal would have the pipeline cross the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, which covers portions of South Central ND and North Central SD. Fearing the eventual pipeline leak into the water that they have come to rely on and have sacred meaning in, the natives there are taking a stand, or should I say run, against it.
You may have seen it in the news recently, but youth from the reservation ran more than 2,000 miles from North Dakota to Washington D.C. to deliver a high-profile petition with thousands of signatures and support from some celebrities, and they are asking for the Corps of Engineers to rethink the route and have conversation with the people there.
This is what running is. For them, running took the shape of fighting for what they believe in. Now, some of you reading this may think this whole petition is garbage. Why, you might ask, do they think they can also drive vehicles the whole way to protest an oil pipeline? Why, you might ask, do they use the very oil that they protest? How, you might ask, can we survive as a world right now without oil extraction in an attempt to find energy independence in an oil-crazed world? I don't know. But what I do know is that we all need to open up our ears to what others have to say.
Take for example North Dakota's proponent of worship- Theodore Roosevelt. He was a wealthy New Yorker who originally came to ND for hunting trips where he would shoot and kill enormous amounts of animals simply because he could. Later in his life, after a hunting trip in the Wyoming mountains where he killed hundreds of animals, he met the founder of the Audubon Society and was convinced to take a look at conserving land and animals, which he did. We now know him as the man who got the ball rolling on National Park and Wilderness areas.
We look at youth running 2000 miles for this cause, and we realize how important this is to them. We recall our own experiences running and wonder how awesome it must be to keep pushing forward, putting one foot in front of the other, for a cause we desperately believe in. Running, like I said before, is communal, and these folks had people to run and share experiences with. They used the ancient art of running to accomplish a mighty goal in order to stand their ground. Sometimes it takes a group of people running to get others to turn around and notice.
From an article on Indian Country Today Media Network:
"We are running for our lives against the Dakota Access Pipeline," said Three Legs, one of the participants, in a statement. "Now is the time for the people to hear our voices that we are here and we will stand strong."
Yeah, and they RAN the whole way for it. That's what running is.
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