Native American land is under threat again – who will step in to defend it from destruction?

All the ingredients for trouble are there: protesters and security guards, augmented now by National Guardsmen called out by North Dakota’s governor. Everyone insists they want to avoid further violence, but a single mistaken gesture and tempers could boil over again

Native Americans head to a rally at the State Capitol in Denver, Colorado, to protest in solidarity with members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota (AP)

When you consider the United States and its shameful treatment of its Native American peoples – after slavery America’s second original sin – it always comes back to the Dakotas.

The cynical whittling away of the Great Sioux reservation; the theft of the sacred Black Hills in the 1870s by European-American occupiers and would-be colonisers bent on gold; the massacre of Wounded Knee in 1890 when those same colonisers feared the Indians were plotting an uprising to reclaim what had been taken from them: these all took place on those rolling, hauntingly beautiful northern plains.

Now another fight is under way, this time the consequence of an oil rush rather than a gold rush. It is over the path of a pipeline which the local Sioux say will desecrate further swathes of their heritage, and in the event of a spill would poison their water supply from the Missouri river. Once again the odds seem hopelessly tilted: the federal government, big business and the labour unions versus the impoverished Native Americans. But just possibly, the outcome could be different: what is happening in the Dakotas has galvanised Indian tribes and activists across the country. They’re determined, this time, to win.

At the centre of the dispute is the Bakken Pipeline, designed to carry each day up to 570,000 barrels of crude, the fruit of the great North Dakota oil boom, some 1,170 miles to southern Illinois. The $3.8bn (£2.9bn) project is being carried out by a Texas company, Energy Transfer Partners, along a route approved by the US Army Corps of Engineers under a fast track procedure, which the Sioux say prevented proper consultation.

Adding insult to injury, the pipeline was supposed to have crossed the river further to the north, close to North Dakota’s state capital of Bismarck. But risking a spill that endangered Bismarck’s water would never have done. So it was re-routed to the south - Who cares about the Indians?

Technically, the scheme does not directly violate Indian territory, since the pipeline will pass under the Missouri half a mile north of the reservation of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Even so, it will interfere with old tribal burial sites and other hallowed land. And this on top of the Oahe Dam, built downstream on the river almost 60 years ago and which flooded 200,000 acres of Indian land, displacing many thousands of people and obliterating settlements, a loss that has never been forgotten. With the pipeline, enough, finally, is enough.

Little noticed, the first protests began in April. But now thousands of Sioux and their supporters from the plains and beyond have gathered in a vast encampment close to the site. Everything had unfolded relatively peacefully – until last weekend’s Labor Day holiday, shortly before a federal judge in Washington DC was due to rule on a suit brought by the tribe that would halt work ahead of further consultation.

On the Saturday, however, the company sent in the bulldozers. Clashes broke out between protesters and company workers, in turn protected by a private security firm that used dogs and pepper spray. Six children were bitten, and two dogs were hurt; images that recalled the brutal civil rights fights in the south half a century ago. The company insists it has followed the law to the letter, and that its men were attacked by the activists.

All the ingredients for trouble are there: protesters and security guards, augmented now by National Guardsmen and called out by North Dakota’s governor. Everyone insists they want to avoid further violence, but a single hothead, a single mistaken gesture and tempers could boil over again. And, inevitably, the ghosts of the past are watching.

Of late the debate over Indian issues here has been confined to a political correctness set-to over the name of sports teams, most notably the Washington Redskins of the National Football League. But the North Dakota stand-off reminds of real grievances, stemming from real, savage injustices visited on Native Americans: disease, forced migrations, broken treaties, the slaughter of the bison, the upheavals caused by 19^th century gold rushes in California, Colorado and the Black Hills, in all of which the Indians paid a terrible price. And now pervasive and degrading poverty, that no well-meaning campaign against the name of an NFL franchise, or the grant of lucrative tribal casino concessions can make disappear.

But perhaps the odds are not as overwhelming as they seem. Pipelines can be stopped: witness the Keystone XL, that was to have transported crude from the Canadian oil sands across six US states to the ports and refineries of the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, Keystone generated a huge environmental and political row not unlike the one enveloping the Bakken pipeline, and was eventually cancelled.

The last thing Energy Transfer Partners, or the unions who say the scheme will provide hundreds of well-paying jobs, want, is a repeat. Hence, almost certainly, the drastic action last weekend – an attempt to create unchallengeable reality on the ground, to present the Indians, their sympathisers and the courts with a fait accompli.

This weekend may have brought a truce of kinds. The judge in Washington turned down the tribe’s request for a legal halt to construction. Simultaneously however, the federal government publicly urged the company to voluntarily stop work on a 40-mile segment of the pipeline most objected to by the Standing Rock Sioux. So maybe this is a fight not only that Native Americans believe must be won, but which can be won.

Press coverage is growing, and the issue is now nibbling at the fringes of the presidential race; Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate has joined the protests. So has the required quorum of movie stars, while the Indigenous Issues division of the United Nations is urging the US to ensure an “independent, impartial and transparent” process to resolve the issue.

And then there’s President Obama himself, who’s probably done more for Native Americans than any predecessor, and who actually visited Standing Rock in 2014. Thus far he’s stayed out of the argument. But there’s scant doubt where his sympathies lie. In 2015, he scotched Keystone on climate change grounds, and similar arguments could be used against Bakken.

Above all however, there’s the sense that what’s happening at the Standing Rock reservation is a last stand; not as Custer’s at Little Big Horn in the Great Sioux Wars of 1876, a defeat that led to total victory, but a last stand for Native American existence. “The US government is wiping out our most important cultural and spiritual areas,” LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a preservation officer for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, wrote last week. “As it erases our footprint from the world, it erases us as a people. These sites must be protected, or our world will end, it is that simple. Our young people have a right to know who they are. They have a right to language, to culture, to tradition.” Set against that, a change in a pipeline track is a small price to pay.