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Environmental Clashes on Native American Land

Framing Environmental and Scientific Disputes

  • 2020
  • Book
Author
Cynthia-Lou Coleman
Book Series
Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Part of
Springer Professional "Business + Economics & Engineering + Technology"
Springer Professional "Engineering + Technology"
Springer Professional "Business + Economics"
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About this book

This book explores how the media frame environmental and scientific disputes faced by American Indian communities. Most people will never know what it is like to live on an Indian reservation in North America, or what it means to identify as an American Indian. However, when conflicts embroil Indigenous folk, as shown by the protests over a crude oil pipeline in 2016 and 2017, camera crews and reporters descend on “the rez” to cover the event. The focus of the book is how stories frame clashes in Indian Country surrounding environmental and scientific disputes, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline construction, and the discovery of an ancient skeleton in Washington. The narratives told over social media and news programs often fail to capture the issues of key importance to Native Americans, such as sovereignty: the right to self- governance. The book offers insight into how the history of Indian-settler relations sets the stage for modern clashes, and examines American Indian knowledge systems, and how they take a back seat to mainstream approaches to science in discourse.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Setting the Stage
Abstract
This chapter sets the stage for the book by tracing media and environmental communication and by proposing a diagram where meanings are created and transmitted, moving through various junctures, over and over, in a recursive flow. The definition of environmental communication by J. Robert Cox, as a “pragmatic and constitutive vehicle for our understanding of the environment,” allows us to think of communication as both functional (pragmatic) as well as meaning-making (constitutive).
Cynthia-Lou Coleman
Chapter 2. The Arc of the Book
Abstract
Building on the diagram of the communication process offered in Chap. 1, this chapter explores two overlays on the diagram: one called the Media Hegemony Thesis, which examines power relationships in the process, and the other named Indigenous Metaphysics, which looks for Native knowledges and values in the context of conflicts featured in this book. I have accepted the challenge by critics to add muscle to the investigation of framing by examining how meanings transfer from one juncture in the diagram—such as social discourse—to another—such as mass media. I also ask how frames produce meaning, how meanings are constructed over time, the ideological nature of relationships unfold in discourse, and how equity and justice unfold in frames.
Cynthia-Lou Coleman
Chapter 3. Buckshot for Brains: Cultivating the American Indian Mind
Abstract
The human skull became a symbol of character in the 1800s when scientists and practitioners of phrenology linked the brain to race. Social discourse at the time cultivated the Caucasian mind as sophisticated and clever, and the Indian mind as savage and stubborn, paving the way for social policies that would treat Native peoples as subhuman and setting the stage for environmental conflicts between Indians and settlers.
I argue that the study of phrenology cultivated a narrative about the American Indian Mind, which would continue through many generations, and long after phrenology was discounted as a pseudoscience. Native Americans would endure the narrative that they are savage and war-like in disposition.
Such assumptions paved the way for political decisions that relegated Indians to the category of “non-civilizable” because of the nature of their brains and justified treatment that relegated Indians to a scientifically sanctioned sub-human classification.
Cynthia-Lou Coleman
Chapter 4. Black Hawk’s Skull
Abstract
The Fowler Brothers famously studied the skull of Black Hawk—an Indian warrior—before he died in 1838. The studies of his skull—published in the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany—describe Black Hawk’s mind as in a “savage state.” The warrior’s personality was characterized as bellicose, courageous, destructive and secretive: traits revealed by examining a plaster mold of his head. Public discourse surrounding the skull weaves intertextually with cultural notions that collecting skulls served as a gentleman’s pastime. A sign of refinement was displaying human skulls like household knick-knacks. A darker side to skull-collecting came from grave-robbers who could earn cash by selling Indian body parts to museums and collectors. As we learn later, one such collector dug up Black Hawk’s corpse and stole his skull.
Cynthia-Lou Coleman
Chapter 5. The Kennewick Man Story
Abstract
On the heels of stories about grave-robbing, we turn to the story of a 9000-year-old skeleton that was discovered in the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia River in 1996: Kennewick Man. The unearthing of the ancient remains exposes the bedrock beneath social discourse surrounding the discovery, where notions about the meanings of race, Indigeneity, justice and knowledge are forged. Although a federal law in the United States protects Native remains and relics, a group of scientists who wanted to examine the bones—rather than have them returned to tribes as required by law—won a lawsuit to enable them to examine Kennewick Man. The backstory is explained before we engage in the study of social discourse surrounding the skeleton.
Cynthia-Lou Coleman
Chapter 6. Discourse and Resistance in the Kennewick Man Story
Abstract
Discourse surrounding the 20-year-old battle over the remains of the Kennewick Man skeleton illuminates the ideological stances of local Native American tribes and the scientists who fought to examine the skeleton. Indigenous values concerning moral choices, traditional knowledges and spiritual practices held little sway over the scientists’ desire for evidence and data. The scientists argued that scientific and social progress would be halted if they were not accorded the freedom to examine Kennewick Man. Despite receiving short-shrift in media coverage, local tribes resisted attempts by outsiders to re-frame their arguments, noting that their principle concern is sovereignty: having the choice to make their own decisions about their ancestors.
Cynthia-Lou Coleman
Chapter 7. How Sioux-Settler Relations Underscore the Dakota Access Pipeline
Abstract
This chapter frames the controversy over rerouting a crude oil pipeline to run through the territory of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota—beneath the water supply—by examining the key events that shaped Sioux-settler relations in the 1800s. For years, settlers had been making their way Westward, and travel began in earnest in the middle of the century. Skirmishes erupted between migrants and Indians, and a treaty was brokered in 1851 that would ostensibly keep settlers at bay and reserve 134 million acres for Native peoples. But the treaty failed to restrain settlers, and discovery of gold, first in California, and then in the sacred Black Hills, became a turning point in hostile relationships. The battle at Greasy Grass, the murder of Crazy Horse and the massacre at Wounded Knee in the later part of the 1800s would be remembered as episodes that etched the fate of Native Americans at the hands of the US government.
Cynthia-Lou Coleman
Chapter 8. We Came to Fight a Black Snake
Abstract
This chapter examines a modern cultural clash over the construction of a crude oil pipeline on traditional Native American homelands in 2016 and 2017. The Dakota Access Pipeline snakes 1172 miles across four states and produces 570,000 barrels (23,940,000 gallons) each day. At today’s market price of 59.58 US dollars per barrel, that’s just short of 34 million US dollars per day. Critics charge that the pipeline represents a flagrant act of environmental racism, particularly in light that the course of the pipeline was redirected to skirt around the city of Bismarck’s water supply and instead run underneath the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s water source: Lake Oahe. This chapter explores scholarship on media coverage about protests over the pipeline.
Cynthia-Lou Coleman
Chapter 9. Concluding Remarks
Abstract
This final chapter argues that, as readers, we can deconstruct junctures of power, ideological beliefs and social equity by examining social discourse surrounding the discovery of a 9000-year-old skeleton in the Pacific Northwest and by the recent construction of a crude oil pipeline on traditional Sioux lands.
I argue that a sober examination of the discourse on the case studies shows power in play: where scientific viewpoints hold greater currency than Indigenous knowledges, and where empirical methods of conducting research sometimes displaces moral judgments. In essence, our beliefs are moored to cultural underpinnings that seem, well, normal. But, as critics have suggested, “normal” is the varnish that coats our beliefs. When scientists insist on their right to dig through the bones of an ancient human, their freedoms are framed as correct and just, because discourse conflates empiricism with truth. American Indian tribes in the Northwest argued that, in a pluralistic democracy like ours, their rights and freedoms are also just and no less legitimate than the scientists’ claims.
News discourse offers a metaphorical slate where meanings are created and negotiated. But the discursive slate is hardly blank—the slate is engrainedd with meanings that arise from struggles over power: who gets to frame messages, and what are the ensuing power dynamics? How are such messages ideological, and where how do equity and justice prevail?
We can see how the construction of the crude oil pipeline gets framed as “energy independence” that offers “freedom” from reliance on foreign sources of petroleum products. But the discourse poorly informs publics on who profits from such independence. Hidden from view are the junctures of power that link commercial power-brokers with government officials, news organizations, and other parties charged with making decisions and sharing information on behalf of all citizens. Social equity gets trumped by special interests, and, as a result, Native Americans pay the price for other Americans’ prosperity.
Despite the toll taken on equity and justice for Native Americans, resistance seen in the pipeline protest and the demand for the repatriation of Kennewick Man signals a transformation from transgression and defiance to resilience. Perhaps we can take heart, knowing that Indigenous voices are being heard via their own media channels, and without censorship from non-Indians.
Cynthia-Lou Coleman
Backmatter
Title
Environmental Clashes on Native American Land
Author
Cynthia-Lou Coleman
Copyright Year
2020
Electronic ISBN
978-3-030-34106-0
Print ISBN
978-3-030-34105-3
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34106-0

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