“The privilege of hunting, fishing, and gathering the wild rice, upon the lands, the rivers and the lakes included in the territory ceded, is guaranteed to the Indians, during the pleasure of the President of the United States.”

— Article 5 of the 1837 Land Cession Treaty

During the late 1900s, Indigenous people faced harassment and arrest when asserting their treaty rights in ceded territory in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. After many legal battles, a final ruling was made by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999 known as Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, which affirmed the rights of the Ojibwe to hunt, fish, and gather on the lands ceded by treaty.

While it’s true that “treaties have been ignored for so long,” there are also treaties, or sections of treaties, which the U.S. government upholds, or pushed for in the first place, because the settlers and government benefit greatly.

In the 1837 treaty, owners of the American Fur Company used their political connections to guarantee that when Dakota and Ojibwe people received compensation for ceded land—which amounted to $16,000 in cash and goods up front—the fur traders were set to receive over five times that amount.

Kevin Gover (Pawnee) is the director of the National Museum of the American Indian, and from his perspective, the beginning of U.S.-Native treaty making was promising because it seemingly included “American acceptance of tribal self-government and nation-to-nation diplomacy.”

“That promising start quickly morphed into disaster through broken and coercive treaties that promoted Indian removal and tribal land loss, as well as government policies that dismantled tribes as political institutions, obliterated tribal land ownership and fostered the forced assimilation of Native people into white culture.”

Kevin Gover (Pawnee)

When we asked what Everlasting Wind hopes will come from the White Earth Camp, she said, “that our people begin to heal.”

“We have so much generational trauma that’s carried; we carry that. And to this day we are still being traumatized. This is traumatizing. People don’t understand that; they don’t understand the magnitude of this.

Like I said ‘site specific,’ yes [the pipeline] endangers this area, and it endangers the waters and the wetlands and our wild rice, but it’s at a higher level of climate change. And so with climate change, that puts our natural elements—our four elements—out of balance; we are out of balance.

And that is what climate change is, it’s our environment out of balance. So, that puts our Anishinaabe lifeways at risk.”

Everlasting Wind