# data[].attributes.body
A standoff over the Dakota Access Pipeline will not end. Neither side is calling quits after a decision by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to halt a final leg of the oil-carrying project and research alternate paths for the pipeline to take. The Army Corps refused the permit to build a section of the pipeline under the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The Agency ordered that alternate routes for the pipeline be explored.

# data[].attributes.headline
As bulldozers cleared earth, hundreds of Native Americans from many different tribes rushed onto the construction site to protect the sacred site. 

# data[].attributes.subject
As bulldozers cleared earth, hundreds of Native Americans from many different tribes rushed onto the construction site to protect the sacred site. 

# data[].attributes.headline
Did the Dakota Access Pipeline Company Deliberately Destroy Sacred Sioux Burial Sites?

# data[].attributes.subject
Did the Dakota Access Pipeline Company Deliberately Destroy Sacred Sioux Burial Sites?

# data[].attributes.body
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed evidence in federal court documenting how some of the Dakota Access pipeline’s proposed route would go through a sacred burial site.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Lakota Indian tribe finds its roots in the northern part of the United States, particularly North Dakota and South Dakota. Sometimes known as the Western Sioux, the Lakota people -- whose spiritual system focuses on nature and connectedness -- often bury their dead with Sioux customs. Many modern Lakota maintain traditional cultural beliefs and customs, including funeral practices and ideas about the afterlife.

Beliefs About Death

Lakota burial ceremonies reflect the tribe's beliefs about death. The Lakota people view the world as a wondrous place and regard life as an immense gift. This tribe views death as an inevitable equalizer, something that happens to all living things despite their achievements on earth. The Lakota believe that the dead depart to a spirit world free of pain and suffering. Although the Lakota sometimes fear the departed, they do not fear death of old age, and they do not fear ghosts, though they often try to prevent ghosts from returning to stay with families of the deceased.

Burial Rituals

Typically, the Lakota bury their dead. Custom dictates that the tribe wait about a day and half before burial when a person dies at home, in hopes that the deceased might revive. Before burial, mourners dress the body in fine clothes and wrap them tightly in robes. Due to their fear of the dead, Lakota tribes sometimes burn the dwellings of the deceased and forbid members of the tribe to use that person's name. Bodies are typically placed on a scaffold to encourage the spirit's journey into the sky. Burial practices vary and include traditional earth burial, air burial -- in which bodies are left in the open, a practice often used for warriors who have fallen in battle --, burial under mounds or rocks and even tree burial, in which the limbs of a tree stand in for a scaffold. These methods vary depending on the tribe, location and resources.

Journey to the Spirit World

Much of the Lakota's beliefs about the spirit world manifest in their burial ceremonies. To help them on their journey to the spirit world -- a parallel plane of existence that can be reached by the living -- the Lakota take bundles of their belongings with them to the grave, including items such as weapons, pipes, tools and medicine. Mourners also place food and drink at the scaffold of the deceased and kill the departed's horse at this location, tying its tail to the scaffold.

Grief and Respect

Above all, the ceremonial beliefs and funeral customs of the Lakota are meant to show respect and reverence for those who have passed; in a mourning process that may last up to a year, this respect is often expressed through grief. Mourners express grief for the departed by singing, crying, wailing and running pegs through their limbs, cutting their hair or even -- in the case of female Lakota -- cutting off a part of their little fingers. To symbolize their grief for young children who have passed, the Lakota practice ritual crying and wound their own arms and legs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lakota Burial Ceremony Beliefs | Synonym

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Lakota Indian tribe finds its roots in the northern part of the United States, particularly North Dakota and South Dakota. Sometimes known as the Western Sioux, the Lakota people -- whose spiritual system focuses on nature and connectedness -- often bury their dead with Sioux customs. Many modern Lakota maintain traditional cultural beliefs and customs, including funeral practices and ideas about the afterlife.

# data[].attributes.body
Why would Dakota Access bulldoze lands that it knew or should have known were sacred?

# data[].attributes.body
Dakota Access literally plowed through a burial site and a significant ceremonial site that was JUST identified by the landowner and tribal experts a few days before.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why Are The Burial Grounds So Important?

# data[].attributes.subject
Why Are The Burial Grounds So Important?

# data[].attributes.body
A few weeks ago Standing Rock had a visit from the Dakota Police Department. They came to stop the protesters from causing more violence. What the police didn't know that they were standing on some Standing Rock burial grounds!!Protesters and the Sioux got angry and ordered them to get off their land.

# data[].attributes.body
http://peopleof.oureverydaylife.com/lakota-burial-ceremony-beliefs-3711.html

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/01/us/standing-rock-sioux-sacred-land-dakota-pipeline/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By Chip Colwell

This summer, Tim Mentz Sr. told the world via a YouTube video, which has now been removed by the user, about the destruction of his cultural heritage. A former tribal historic preservation officer of the Standing Rock Sioux, Mentz wore a baseball cap, rimless glasses and two thin braids of graying hair. He was upset and spoke rapidly about the area behind him, an expanse of the Great Plains cut by a new 150-foot-wide road.
Red Warrior Camp / Facebook
Two days before, Mentz had testified to the DC District Court to report the area that lay in the path of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) corridor holds 82 cultural features and 27 graves. By the next day, DAPL construction workers graded the area. Behind where Mentz stood in the video was a place known as the Strong Heart Society Staff, where a sacred rattle or staff was placed within stone rings. Here members of the elite warrior society would come to make pledges. Mentz explained the site is tangible evidence that Strong Heart members followed a "spiritual path."

As an anthropologist who has worked with Native Americans for more than a decade to document their sacred places in the paths of new power plants, power lines, water pipelines and more, the battle in North Dakota is all too familiar.

I have seen how the legal process behind environmental and archaeological reviews for energy projects, such DAPL, work-and often don't work. The tragedy in North Dakota for cultural heritage-and the violence against protesters that has resulted-comes in part from a failure of the U.S. legal system. Consultation with tribes too often breaks down because federal agencies are unwilling to consider how Native Americans view their own heritage.
Irreplaceable Heritage
"Archaeologists-they don't see these," Mentz said in the video of features, including graves, within the Strong Heart Society site. "The [archaeological] firm that came through here walked over these. They do not have a connection that we have to our spiritual walk of life."

If completed, the Dakota Access Pipeline would run from North Dakota to Illinois for nearly 1,200 miles, carrying up to 570,000 barrels of crude oil per day. DAPL would meander across the landscape, through farms, around cities, buried underground and across more than 200 waterways. The passage of the pipeline over and under waterways requires permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This federal authorization in turns requires compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA).
Paulann Egelhoff / Flickr
Passed into law in 1966, the NHPA arrived in the churning wake of WWII, when America's waiting future was threatening its irreplaceable past. The expansion of American infrastructure-highways, dams, electrical grids-was swiftly destroying ancient archaeological sites, cemeteries and historic buildings. With the NHPA, Congress declared that preservation of America's shared heritage is in the public interest.

When considering a new undertaking, a number of effects on historic properties must be considered: direct (like physical destruction), indirect (like spoiling a viewshed), short-term, long-term or cumulative (like how one pipeline may not harm a site, but perhaps a dozen of them will). The NHPA does not guarantee preservation. But it requires that decision-makers balance America's interest in development with the need to honor its history.

Beyond Consultation
For many years, Native Americans would have had little input on a project such as DAPL. But in 1992, Congress amended the NHPA to formally include traditional cultural properties. These are places that, because of their association with Native American cultural practices or beliefs of a living community, "are rooted in that community's history" and "are important in maintaining the continuing cultural identity of the community."

The amendments directed federal agencies, in carrying out their responsibilities under the NHPA, to consult with Indian tribes that attach religious and cultural significance to these sacred places.

In North Dakota, federal and state review and compliance measures for DAPL were combined. Archaeologists walked the pipeline's 357 miles in North Dakota, locating 149 sites potentially eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Engineers rerouted DAPL to avoid all but nine sites.
Chip Colwell
Archaeologists serve an important role in documenting historic properties. But they tend to view the world through the lens of science and history. They search out buried villages, pottery shards, bones, broken stone tools. Yet in my experience, they rarely have the expertise and knowledge to identify traditional cultural properties, which are grounded in identity, culture, spirituality and the land's living memory.
Tribal Surveys
Traditional cultural properties in the U.S. can often be archaeological sites, artifacts that ancestors once touched and places that mark ancestral homes. But just as often they can be a mountain where spirits dwell or a spring where water is gathered for ceremonies. They can be a traditional area for collecting plants or animals that sustain and heal communities. They can be origin places where ancestors emerged onto the earth or named places recalled in ancient tongues.

This is why documenting traditional cultural properties requires not the work of archaeologists but Native Americans as well. On one project I conducted with the Hopi tribe to detail cultural resources along a 470-mile power line, we needed weeks of research to identify more than 200 plant species that the tribe uses in its traditional religious and healing practices.

Chip Colwell
On another project I conducted with the Zuni tribe, I watched as elders explained to the archaeologists excavating a site in the path of a new Arizona highway that they had placed a survey flag in a semicircle of rocks - which was likely a shrine used to bless and protect the ancient village. When it comes to traditional practices, Native Americans see what archaeologists overlook.
Not Too Late
For DAPL, a tribal survey was not undertaken. In North Dakota the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers tried to engage in consultation dozens of times, but the Standing Rock Sioux largely refused because the federal agency only wanted to consult on a narrow corridor at water crossings instead of the entire pipeline.

Once, though, consultation did occur at Lake Oahe on March 8. Current designs call for the pipeline to go under this now controversial waterway, which the Sioux want protected. There Standing Rock representatives showed U.S. Army Corps of Engineers staff important cultural resources-a cemetery, ancient village and sacred stone. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials admitted they were unaware of some of these sites.

On Sept. 21 and then again on Oct. 20, according to an email I received from the North Dakota State Historic Preservation Office, delegations that included law enforcement, Standing Rock Sioux officials and tribal and state archaeologists went to the areas that Mentz suggested contained 82 sites and 27 burials.

Chip Colwell is senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and lecturer on anthropology at the University of Colorado in Denver. Reposted with permission from our media associate The Conversation.
They found on closer inspection-tribal archaeologists hadn't been allowed on private land-that none of the features were disturbed by the 150-foot corridor, with the exception of four rocks that might have been displaced. Two bones were recovered, but analysis showed them to be from a horse, cow or bison. It would seem that the main sites Mentz agonized over had escaped physical destruction. However, tribal input would be needed to determine if the sites, so close to the corridor, could still suffer from indirect and cumulative impacts.

Because consultation broke down and so little of the pipeline has received tribal survey, we must wonder how much has been missed. Even worse, we'll likely never know. Nearly 90 percent of the pipeline has already been completed.

This is an unfortunate but common occurrence. Last month I went out with traditional leaders of the Zuni tribe in New Mexico to identify traditional cultural properties under the NHPA in the path of a massive network of water pipelines. When we arrived, we found dozens of construction workers busily laying the new pipe. An archaeological survey was already completed; the construction had begun with the consent of the federal agency. We were too late.

Given that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is now saying it needs more information before making a decision about DAPL, let's hope in North Dakota there's still time to finally listen to the tribe.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Sacred Sites Were Destroyed for the Dakota Access Pipeline

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Chip Colwell This summer, Tim Mentz Sr. told the world via a YouTube video, which has now been removed by the user, about the destruction of his cultural heritage. A former tribal historic preservation officer of the Standing Rock Sioux, Mentz wore a baseball cap, rimless glasses and two thin braids of graying hair.

# data[].attributes.headline
Native Americans attempts to save Sacred Burial sites

# data[].attributes.subject
Native Americans attempts to save Sacred Burial sites

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Native American Protesters Attempt to Save Sacred Burial Sites from Pipeline Construction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Occurred on September 3, 2016 / Cannonball, North Dakota, USA "We were doing a peaceful walk up to the first construction sight and welcoming in the Colorado River Tribes. When we learned that the pipeline, which was notified of the sacred rock features and burial sights the day before, were destroying these sights.