We, the undersigned citizens of the United States, demand that the President of the United States and our highest representatives in the federal government uphold the territorial and water rights of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, as protected by the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1851 and the Sioux Nation Treaty at Fort Laramie of 1868, as well as subsequent agreements. As citizens of the United States, we are parties to those treaties. We recognize that these treaties are living documents that must be honored. We urge the President to uphold his reputation for integrity and usher in a new era of renewed treaty-based relationships with Native nations, beginning with halting the Dakota Access Pipeline.

In authorizing DAPL, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a federal agency under the Department of Defense, violated these treaties, as well as the United States’ trust responsibility with the tribes, embedded in the U.S. Constitution and recognized in numerous Supreme Court cases. The trust responsibility, one of the most important principles in federal Indian law, is a legal obligation under which the federal government “has charged itself with moral obligations of the highest responsibility and trust” toward Indian tribes (Seminole Nation v. United States, 316 U.S. 286 (1942)). The trust responsibility is a “legally enforceable fiduciary obligation on the part of the United States to protect tribal treaty rights, lands, assets, and resources, as well as a duty to carry out the mandates of federal law with respect to American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages.” (U.S. Department of the Interior, Indian Affairs, Frequently Asked Questions. http://www.bia.gov/FAQs/ We understand that DAPL will transect the permanent homeland of the Dakota and Lakota people, crossing the Missouri River and the Ogallala Aquifer at sites, including Lake Oahe, which pose a significant threat to the water supply of those nations, threatening their inherent human rights to clean water and their homelands, both of which are protected under the Fort Laramie treaties.

As parties to those treaties, and all subsequent agreements between the United States and the Sioux Nation, we demand that those rights be respected and upheld. The Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 states that “no obligation of any treaty lawfully made and ratified with any such Indian nation or tribe prior to March 3, 1871, shall be hereby invalidated or impaired.” (25 U.S.C. Section 71).

The Indian Appropriations Act of 1871 and the ongoing trust responsibility, in conjunction with United Nations Resolution 64/292, which recognizes that clean drinking water and sanitation are essential to the realization of all human rights, leave little room to argue that the proposed pipeline has any place in Indian Country or elsewhere. The continuing assault against treaty rights serves to constrict basic human rights in Indian Country on a level seen nowhere else in the U.S.  This situation is reprehensible and cannot continue in a country that asserts that it serves as a role model to the world. As U.S. citizens we refuse to turn a blind eye to this situation, not at Standing Rock or anywhere else that treaty rights are threatened. The Native nations have upheld their end of the bargain; it is time the U.S. government did the same.

Finally, as global citizens impacted by a growing climate crisis, we ask the President to stand with those who have gathered at Sacred Stone Camp to protect the water supply of countless citizens who rely on the Ogallala Aquifer, and to insist on adaptive solutions to climate change. Only by standing together with Native nations in reciprocal, just relations will we see the change that will lead us through this collective, transnational and intergenerational challenge.