Fearing painful history will repeat itself, tribes take stand in North Dakota against pipeline

NEAR CANNON BALL, N.D. – Verna Bailey stared into the silvery ripples of a man-made lake, looking for the spot where she had been born. “Out there,” she said, pointing to the water. “I lived down there with my grandmother and grandfather. We had a community there. Now it’s all gone.”

Fifty years ago, hers was one of hundreds of American Indian families whose homes and land were inundated by rising waters after the Army Corps of Engineers built the Oahe Dam along the Missouri River, part of a huge midcentury public works project approved by Congress to provide electricity and tame the river’s floods.

To Bailey, 76, and thousands of other tribal members who lived along the river’s length, the project was a cultural catastrophe, residents and historians say. It displaced families, uprooted cemeteries and swamped lands where tribes grazed cattle, drove wagons and gathered wild grapes and medicinal tea.

http://www.startribune.com/fearing-painful-history-will-repeat-itself-tribes-take-stand-against-pipeline/392828101/