Keystone Uh-Oh, Here We Go Again

The debate over the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, has been a persistent news story, albeit mostly tucked away from the headlines, for several years now.  The pipeline is an abstract idea to most.  It either represents economic progress or environmental catastrophe to people who have an opinion.  The sorts of arguments that are being made are largely hypothetical on both sides.  Advocates claim it is crucial for economic growth and energy independence, and that it would be safe as houses, and would employ construction and maintenance people across an enormous geographical area.  Opponents say that none of that is true and seem to have valid evidence to support their critique.  It has become yet another wedge issue between Republicans and Democrats, further adding to the obfuscation and abstraction of the issue at hand.
There are people, however, for whom the possible pipeline is no abstraction, these people are the ones who are going to have the thing cutting across their farms and their land, they are the ones who risk having their water poisoned by a leak (which is not the slim possibility that some make it out to be).  They might make a little money, but they risk their land and, for the most part their livelihood for the sake of some right of way fees.  Most them are not fans.
Particularly not enthusiastic are the Native American People whose reservations, which are technically sovereign nations, are being eyed up as prime real estate for the big tube.  The Rosebud Sioux staged a protest in DC on Tuesday as Congress was voting on approving the construction of the pipeline.  The vote failed for now, but it has already passed through the Republican controlled House of Representatives, and the suspicion is that it's not going to just go away when the Republican majority is seated in the Senate next year.
And thus the long and dubious history of our nation with regard to the Native American population adds another sorry chapter.  The Rosebud Sioux Nation called the approval of the measure in the House, "an act of war."  While that may sound like super-heated rhetoric to most of us on the outside looking in, let's please remember the history.  The United States only technically ended it's official policy of genocide against the Native populace in the Nixon administration.  We have basically given them the reservations they now govern and inhabit as a pitiful remittance for the fact that we took everything else away from them during our westward expansion.
You don't have to be a bleeding heart liberal to acknowledge that we have treated the Native populace of this continent with nothing short of absolute brutality and contempt.  No matter how many times you watch Dances with Wolves, you're probably not going to be able to truly appreciate how precious the little bit of their birthright we have actually left to them.
Even if I thought that the Keystone Pipeline was going to be an economic boom, as promised, and that it was going to be truly environmentally friendly, as promised, I would say it was still a bad idea if we have to step all over the sovereign rights of Native American people.  That would be much, much worse than an unfortunately named NFL franchise.
We have broken treaties too often, we have trampled their rights too often in the name of progress, we have not lived up to our own secular national ideals, let alone any sort of Christian values.
It's time for this sort of thing to stop.
I know they're small, I know they're a minority, but a history of suffering has to count for something.  The mistakes of the past are only justifiable if we learn from them.
Let's finally be better than that America.