Last Tuesday, Montana Attorney General Tim Fox announced that the state would intervene in the legal battle over the Keystone XL pipeline. “The Keystone XL Pipeline will bring jobs and economic development to Montana,” Fox wrote in a public statement. “The obstructionist litigation against it has dragged on for far too long—it’s time to settle the matter and begin construction.”



Fox, a Republican, is running for governor in 2020, and his support for Keystone XL was expected. Equally expected was the disappointment from environmental groups and tribal nations concerned about allowing another extractive pipeline to cut through the land.

What might have surprised outsiders, however, was how a pair of tribal nations reacted.



Within two days, Jestin Dupree and Brandi King, representing from the tribes living on the Fort Peck and Fort Belknap reservations, issued announcements on their Facebook pages: The tribes would no longer be participating in Montana’s recently assembled Missing Indigenous Persons (MIP) Task Force. The decision was swift and, as of a week later, remained intact, despite Fox reportedly personally calling Dupree to ask him to stay on the task force.

The MIP task force is the product of Senate Bill 312 and House Bill 21, which established a number of state responses to the ongoing epidemic of violence against indigenous women in the United States and Canada, colloquially known as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) crisis. These included an inter-tribal network on which families and law enforcement could post missing cases and a unique government position for assisting law enforcement with MMIW cases. The bills required multiple legislative sessions and votes to pass, and represented a long-overdue step forward for the tribal nations who had spent years merely trying to get the state’s attention.