Fossil Fuels, Fossil Waters: Aquifers, Pipelines, and Indigenous Water Rights

What is it about?

Environmental racism and settler colonial infrastructural projects like the Keystone XL pipeline pose a dire threat to Indigenous communities, global food supply, and the future of the High Plains ecosystem. The Ogallala Aquifer lying beneath the High Plains provides drinking water for millions of people and supplies a third of all irrigation groundwater in the continental United States. This freshwater aquifer is threatened by the construction of fossil fuel pipelines. Given this agricultural region’s importance to national and global food supply, an oil spill impacting the aquifer the High Plains relies on will have deadly and global repercussions. The ecological, political, and legal demands at stake in the 2016-2017 Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) created growing awareness of the present and future problems that would result from construction of fossil fuel pipelines like the Keystone XL. Indeed, water resource regulation in the United States has been shaped not only by industrial concerns and states’ rights but also by treaties between Indigenous nations and the United States. The Mní Wičoni / Water is Life movement’s urgent call to rethink the political ecology of water beyond settler colonial paradigms is considered here within legal, historical, literary, and ecological frameworks. This article examines the ramifications of United States treaty law and Indigenous water rights, considering the threats that fossil fuel pipelines pose both to land and to ancient, subterranean waters they traverse.

Featured Image

Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash

Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash