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That thousands of Indigenous persons from different nations and communities supported the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is not surprising. Violations of Indigenous consent are all too common in the U.S. and Canadian energy sectors. The United States and Canada both have millions of miles of energy pipelines that connect to many hundreds of shipping terminals, such as major ports in Seattle and New Orleans, and fossil fuel basins, such as the Bakken, Powder River, or Athabasca Oil Sands regions. Energy is also transported via rail and truck, which enlarges the network of fossil fuel–related transportation infrastructure. Maps of the U.S. and Canadian energy sectors show how lands above and waters below are covered with this massive infrastructure.

Scholars, including Deborah Cowen and Anne Spice, are examining the relationship between infrastructures and colonialism. Cowen (2017) writes that “[i]n colonial…contexts, infrastructure is often the means of dispossession.” Indigenous peoples never consented to being completely surrounded and enmeshed by pipelines, terminals, and processing/refining centers. Nor did Indigenous peoples consent to being surrounded by the numerous other industries, technologies, and populations whose activities and lifestyles are fueled by the burning of fossil fuels. Hence, Spice calls such infrastructure “invasive infrastructure,” since its construction and use were not consented to by Indigenous peoples, among other populations who face risks and harms (Spice, 2018). Such invasive infrastructure expresses the self-determination of various settler groups in U.S. and Canadian societies at the expense of Indigenous self-determination.

Indigenous peoples in North America are fighting against harms and risks associated with numerous pipelines, basins, and shipping terminals. In North America alone, resistance actions are taking place in response to hundreds of such situations. The Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, which crosses through Anishinaabe territories neighboring Minnesota and Wisconsin, threatens treaty-protected wild rice–harvesting areas. The Keystone XL oil pipeline crosses multiple Indigenous lands in North America, threatening to leak dangerous chemicals into waters and soils. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline in North Carolina is being built along a route that includes many Indigenous territories, and Indigenous persons were left out of the consultation process and environmental justice analysis in all of them (Sadasivam, 2020). The Enbridge Line 5 pipeline crosses Lake Michigan waters that are culturally and economically important for the Anishinaabe people, and the state of disrepair of the pipeline poses serious risks to water quality. The TransCanada Coastal GasLink threatens the lands and sovereignty of the the Wet’suwet’en people. The resistance movement of the Unist’ot’en Camp has been vocal about the lack of consent by Canada and the corporate backers of the project (see http://unistoten.camp).

The Gwich'in Tribe has been engaged in a long resistance to oil drilling and transportation in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The refuge is home to the tribe's history and relations with the Porcupine caribou herd. Luci Beach, a representative of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, said in a press conference that it is “unacceptable that another nation is allowed to be destroyed [for oil].” The Gwich’in Nation’s homeland spreads across northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada, and includes the ANWR. Gwich’in have occupied this land for more than 20,000 years and subsist primarily on hunting caribou. This land is sacred to the Gwich’in people, who call it “the sacred place where life begins” (quoted in Cultural Survival, 2005).

For decades, the Northern Cheyenne Tribe has struggled with the fact that its territory is in one of the largest coal basins in the United States, the Powder River Basin. The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs leased close to half the reservation for coal strip-mining, paying only 17 cents per ton to the tribe. “The extensive strip mining of the Northern Great Plains will cause considerable changes in the amount, distribution and quality of water in mined areas” (Woessner, Andrews, & Osborne, 1979). Gail Small (1994) writes, “Like many Cheyenne, I feel as if I have already lived a lifetime fighting [coal] strip-mining. We live with fear, anger, and urgency. And we long for a better life for our tribe.”

The Lummi Nation, one of the same group of Northwest Treaty Tribes, has taken action to block the establishment of a coal shipment terminal and train railway near its treaty-protected sacred area Xwc’chi’eXen. In addition to environmental protection, the Lummi reject the industrial capitalist values and colonial policies that ignore treaties for the sake of expanding carbon-intensive industries such as coal. The tribal chair, Tim Ballew, says: “We’re taking a united stand against corporate interests that interfere with our treaty-protected rights” (Connelly, 2015).

At the same time, Indigenous peoples are not always of the same mind on pipelines and extraction basins. Tribes such as the Navajo Nation, the Crow Nation, and the Three Affiliated Tribes have substantial investments in coal, gas, and oil. Yet, in each of these cases, the United States had used political and economic pressure to reengineer the governments of each of these tribes to be dependent on extractive industries, often forcing them to make hard choices between having access to resources or being recognized as sovereign. Scholars such as Melanie Yazzie (2018) are retelling some of the histories of Indigenous persons who for decades were resisting these pressures on tribal governance. For example, John Redhouse had researched, going back many decades, how the Navajo Nation was trapped in a network of fossil fuel infrastructure that pressured them to become dependent on extraction. While some people interpret the conflicts regarding fossil fuels between tribes to prove that tribes are advocates of extraction, that is too simple an interpretation. Tribal governments that advocate for extraction must be put into historical context.

In all these cases, the advocacy movements themselves emphasize the denial of consent as a critical reason why Indigenous peoples are facing the infrastructure of extractive industries in the first place. Or, in cases where tribes are co-opted by powers such as the U.S. government and corporations, the historical record clearly shows that these tribes were put in a position where they had to make hard choices that were not conducive to their self-determination.