“This government honors international treaties like they are the Holy Grail, but within our own homeland they find ways to break them,” said Standing Rock Sioux chairman David Archambault, who under the treaties and American law is the head of a domestic sovereign nation.

Lake Oahe illustrates his point. The lake, the site of the current dispute, exists because of a dam project built by the Army Corps of Engineers, the same agency that has been weighing whether and where the Dakota Access pipeline could be built.