The chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa asked lawmakers from oil-rich North Dakota on Thursday to support job training to help lower the high rate of unemployment on the state’s reservations.Job training he won't accept, apparently, is job training in the oil and gas industry.
Flashback: Turtle Mountain tribal council bans fracking, November 21, 2012.
An alert reader caught that. The Bismarck Tribune did not mention it. Hmmm.
Color me cynical.
Actions have consequences. I wonder if any state legislator will dare confront the Turtle Mountain tribal chief on this bit of hypocrisy. It probably would not be politically correct. Folks in Williston, Dickinson, Watford City paying a huge price for oil development, and now the Turtle Mountain folks think they should share.
Speaking of which, there's a great book at Amazon the tribal leaders could have their pre-schoolers read: Little Red Hen; only $3.99.
Keep in mind that the TMBCI Chairman that delivered the speech was not in office (nor was most of the new Tribal Council) when the fracking ban was passed. So he's personally not being hypocritical.
ReplyDeleteThey can just as easily do away with the ban.
On the other hand, there has been no talk of removing the ban, either.
I thought that might be the case when I did not see his name in the more recent article. However, as you noticed, the tribal council was not reported to have repealed their ban on fracking.
DeleteThere is not going to be any drilling in the Turtle Mountains to begin with; it would have been nice of the "new" council to have recognized the sacrifices their brethren are making elsewhere (by allowing fracking) and as an act of solidarity, allow fracking in the Turtle Mountains (again, knowing full well that it will never happen) and support fracking statewide.