Bob Barker was an American television game show host and animal activist. He hosted CBS's The Price Is Right, the longest-running game show in North American television history, from 1972 to 2007 (he also hosted Truth or Consequences from 1956 to 1975)
Barker spent most of his youth on the Rosebud Indian Reservation and was an enrolled member of the Sioux tribe. He joined the United States Navy Reserve during World War II.
He always ended The Price Is Right show with this: "This is Bob Barker reminding you to help control the pet population, have your pets spayed or neutered"
Robert William Barker died on August 26, 2023 at the age of 99.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a bid led by Dakota Access oil pipeline operator Energy Transfer LP to avoid additional environme
Background
On December 4, 2016, the outgoing Obama administration announced that it would not grant the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) an easement to cross under a lake on Standing Rock Sioux Tribal land without an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).
When Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017, he owned stock in the pipeline company, Energy Transfer Partners. The company's CEO, Kelcy Warren, just happened to donate $169,800 in support of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Trump also named Rick Perry as his Secretary of Energy. Perry sat on the board of Energy Transfer Partners. Its employees just happened to donate $1,521,200 to Perry's 2016 presidential campaign.
On January 24, 2017, Trump issued an executive action reversing Obama's veto and ordering expedited approval of DAPL. His Army Corps of Engineers issued an expedited "Finding of No Significant Impact" (FONSI), allowing issuance of the easement on February 7 with no EIS. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe sued on February 9.
Court Rulings
On June 14, 2017, the federal court ruled that Trump's Army Corps of Engineers had failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), in that its FONSI "did not adequately consider the impacts of an oil spill on fishing rights, hunting rights, or environmental justice, or the degree to which the pipeline's effects are likely to be highly controversial." It vacated the easement and ordered the Corps to issue new findings addressing these issues.
Unsurprisingly, in February of 2019 the Trump administration issued a new FONSI and once again granted the easement without an EIS. Litigation continued, and the pipeline company was added as a party. On March 25, 2020, the court ruled that the FONSI was again inadequate due to:
"...serious gaps in crucial parts of the Corps' analysis — to name a few, that the pipeline's leak-detection system was unlikely to work, that it was not designed to catch slow spills, that the operator's serious history of incidents had not been taken into account, and that the worst-case scenario used by the Corps was potentially only a fraction of what a realistic figure would be."
The Court again vacated the easement and ordered the Corps to conduct a new environmental impact review. Trump appealed, of course, but on January 26, 2021, the Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed the ruling that the Corps had "acted unlawfully" in issuing the easement without an EIS.
On September 21, 2021, the pipeline company petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, reverse the Court of Appeals, and allow the prior administration's easement to stand without an EIS. Yesterday, February 22, 2022, the Supreme Court denied the company's petition in its entirety.
NOTE: The pipeline is still in operation, as it has been since 2017. Although there is currently no valid easement, the Biden administration has declined to shut down the pipeline while the Corps conducts its new review.
"Whenever we think of indigenous people and landscape, we either invoke Rousseau and the old canard of the "noble savage," which is an idea racist in its simplicity, or alternatively, we invoke Thoreau and say these people are closer to the Earth than we are. Well, indigenous people are neither sentimental nor weakened by nostalgia.
There's not a lot of room for either in the malarial swamps of the Asmat or in the chilling winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless, through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it, but on a far subtler intuition: the idea that the Earth itself can only exist because it is breathed into being by human consciousness.
Now, what does that mean? It means that a young kid from the Andes who's raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit that will direct his or her destiny will be a profoundly different human being and have a different relationship to that resource or that place than a young kid from Montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined. Whether it's the abode of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant.
What's interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and the natural world. I was raised in the forests of British Columbia to believe those forests existed to be cut. That made me a different human being than my friends amongst the Kwagiulth who believe that those forests were the abode of Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven and the cannibal spirits that dwelled at the north end of the world, spirits they would have to engage during their Hamatsa initiation...
...Now the problem is that even those of us sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people view them as quaint and colorful but somehow reduced to the margins of history as the real world, meaning our world, moves on.
Well, the truth is the 20th century, 300 years from now, is not going to be remembered for its wars or its technological innovations, but rather as the era in which we stood by and either actively endorsed or passively accepted the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity on the planet. Now, the problem isn't change. All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities of life.
And the problem is not technology itself. The Sioux Indians did not stop being Sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow any more than an American stopped being an American when he gave up the horse and buggy. It's not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power, the crude face of domination. Wherever you look around the world, you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away; these are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to...
...And in the end, then, it really comes down to a choice: do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity?
Mrgaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said, before she died, that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities."
The Sioux or Oceti Sakowin (/suː/; Dakota: Očhéthi Šakówiŋ /otʃʰeːtʰi ʃakoːwĩ/) are groups of Native American tribes and First Nations peoples in North America. The term is an exonym created from a French transcription of the Anishinaabe term "Nadouessioux", and can refer to any ethnic group within the Great Sioux Nation or to any of the nation's many language dialects. The modern Sioux consist of two major divisions based on language divisions: the Dakota and Lakota.
Before the 17th century, the Santee Dakota (Isáŋyathi; "Knife" also known as the Eastern Dakota) lived around Lake Superior with territories in present-day northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. They gathered wild rice, hunted woodland animals and used canoes to fish. Wars with the Ojibwe throughout the 1700s pushed the Dakota into southern Minnesota, where the Western Dakota (Yankton, Yanktonai) and Teton (Lakota) were residing. In the 1800s, the Dakota signed treaties with the United States, ceding much of their land in Minnesota. Failure of the United States to make treaty payments on time, as well as low food supplies, led to the Dakota War of 1862, which resulted in the Dakota being exiled from Minnesota to numerous reservations in Nebraska, North and South Dakota and Canada. After 1870, the Dakota people began to return to Minnesota, creating the present-day reservations in the state.
The Yankton and Yanktonai Dakota (Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋ and Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋna; "Village-at-the-end" and "Little village-at-the-end"), collectively also referred to by the endonym Wičhíyena, resided in the Minnesota River area before ceding their land and moving to South Dakota in 1858. Despite ceding their lands, their treaty with the U.S. government allowed them to maintain their traditional role in the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ as the caretakers of the Pipestone Quarry, which is the cultural center of the Sioux people. They are considered to be the Western Dakota (also called middle Sioux), and have in the past been erroneously classified as Nakota. The actual Nakota are the Assiniboine and Stoney of Western Canada and Montana.
The Lakota, also called Teton (Thítȟuŋwaŋ; possibly "dwellers on the prairie"), are the westernmost Sioux, known for their hunting and warrior culture. With the arrival of the horse in the 1700s, the Lakota would become the most powerful tribe on the Plains by the 1850s. They fought the United States Army in the Sioux Wars including defeating the 7th Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of Little Big Horn. The armed conflicts with the U.S. ended with the Wounded Knee Massacre.
Pictured: Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Lakota chief and holy man, c. 1831 – 1890 December 15.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem threatened legal action against the Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes over checkpoints set up on roads leading to their reservations.
Two tribes - the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe - set up the checkpoints last month in an attempt to lock down their reservations amid fears infections could decimate members.
The move sets up a potential legal showdown between a governor who has avoided sweeping stay-at-home orders and tribes that assert their sovereign rights allow them to control who comes on reservations.
Tribal chairman Harold Frazier issued a statement addressing Noem, saying, 'You continuing to interfere in our efforts to do what science and facts dictate seriously undermine our ability to protect everyone on the reservation.'
“A Dream That Comes True”: Standing Rock Elder Hails Order to Shut Down DAPL After Years of Protest
Following years of resistance, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and Indigenous organizers across the country scored a massive legal victory Monday when a federal judge ordered the Dakota Access Pipeline to be shut down and emptied of all oil, pending an environmental review. “You ever have a dream, a dream that comes true? That is what it is,” responds LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, an elder of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and founder of Sacred Stone Camp, where resistance in 2016 brought tens of thousands of people to oppose the pipeline’s construction on sacred lands. We also speak with Ojibwe lawyer Tara Houska, founder of the Giniw Collective.
