Two Marin elected officials began their journey back from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota on Tuesday, as Rep. Jared Huffman called for President Barack Obama to justify the Army Corps of Engineers’ decision to soon evict demonstrators from their main camp.

Marin Municipal Water District board member Larry Bragman and San Anselmo Mayor Ford Greene traveled together to the Oceti Sakowin camp near Cannon Ball, North Dakota — where the largest group of demonstrators has gathered — the day after Thanksgiving.

Native American-led demonstrations have been ongoing since spring aimed at blocking construction of the $3.7 billion Dakota Access pipeline. The pipeline is designed to carry crude oil from the Bakken fields in western North Dakota to Illinois.

The Sioux, who initiated the protests, are concerned because the pipeline is slated to run less than half a mile from their reservation and under the Missouri River, a source of drinking water for 17 million people. The Sioux say the pipeline would desecrate some of their burial grounds and other sites of cultural and historic significance.

“Everybody knows that people make mistakes and pipelines leak,” Greene said, “so the idea of a pipeline near drinking water is asinine.”

Greene said the threat the pipeline would pose to drinking water was one of several factors that prompted him to make the trip. He said he was also motivated by the pipeline’s furtherance of the fossil fuel industry despite global warming and disregard of Native American rights.

“Native people get lost in the American narrative,” Greene said. “We just disregard them.”

Held meeting

Bragman, a former Fairfax mayor and councilman, said regarding his motivations: “At first, I thought it was an impossible situation, but at this point we’re facing so many challenges that are so severe that I thought impossible is just not acceptable anymore.”

During their brief stay, Greene and Bragman, both attorneys, did some preliminary legal research and strategizing regarding a potential legal challenge to the plan to run the pipeline under Lake Oahe, an artificial lake created by the Army Corps on the Missouri River.

They met with Phyllis Young, a tribal councilwoman for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a member of its treaty council. Bragman said Young told them that Congress adopted legislation to compensate the tribe for 56,000 acres of prime ranchland that were lost when the Army Corps built the dam that created Lake Oahe in 1948.

Bragman said he was curious to find out if that compensation included “subjacent,” or underground rights, beneath Lake Oahe. Using a borrowed laptop computer at a nearby casino, he said he made some discoveries.

Who has rights?

Under a 1958 congressional authorization to partially compensate the tribe, “there is a specific reservation of right for oil, gas and all mineral rights whatsoever,” Bragman said.

“I believe under that clause the tribe retains rights to those subjacent, underground areas that the pipeline company is intending to tunnel through,” Bragman said.

He said another congressional action in 1992 “more sharply defined and limited the Army Corps of Engineers’ authority at Lake Oahe.”

“The Army Corps of Engineers has authority over the operation and maintenance of Lake Oahe,” Bragman said, “but the tribe has retained its right to the area beneath the lake bed that the pipeline would violate.”

On Friday, the Army Corps ordered the closure of Oceti Sakowin Camp effective Dec. 5 “to protect the general public from the violent confrontations between protesters and law enforcement officials that have occurred in this area, and to prevent death, illness, or serious injury to inhabitants of encampments due to the harsh North Dakota winter conditions.”

The Army Corps said it is establishing a free-speech zone on land south of the Cannonball River “for anyone wishing to peaceably protest the Dakota Access pipeline project.”

Huffman letter

On Monday, Reps. Huffman, D-San Rafael, and Raúl M. Grijalva, D-Arizona, sent a letter to President Obama requesting an immediate meeting with White House and Department of Justice officials to discuss closure of the Oceti Sakowin camp and “the shocking treatment of water protectors and peaceful demonstrators.” Native American demonstrators have asked to be referred to as “water protectors.”

On Nov. 14, Huffman and Grijalva led 21 members of Congress in a letter urging Obama to do everything in his power to de-escalate tensions, including denying the easement for the pipeline.

In their new letter, Huffman and Grijalva write, “Since then, headlines of mass injuries, frigid water being sprayed at demonstrators in sub-freezing temperatures, and of rubber bullets and similar anti-riot weapons being fired at peaceful, unarmed civilians, make it clear that this situation is only getting worse.”

Huffman said Tuesday that he had not yet received a response to the letter.

“The whole standoff in this area could be resolved by the Corps just withdrawing the granting of this easement,” Huffman said.

He said it is within Obama’s power to order the Army Corps to do so.

Huffman said, “The federal government should not be complicit in a project that is so potentially harmful to the environment and so obviously violative of sacred areas to Native Americans.”