The 1,200 mile-long, underground Dakota Access Pipeline skirts the northern edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, carrying crude oil beneath the Missouri River with plans to expand beneath Lake Oahe. On April 9, the Biden administration announced it will not block the pipeline 一 which lacks a key federal permit and threatens tribal drinking water 一 while an environmental review is underway. The decision to not halt the project is a paradigm of the federal government’s relationship with Native tribes, says Indigenous scholar Dina Gilio-Whitaker; it violates a treaty and the environmental rights of Native American communities. “That’s the settler colonial system operating as it’s designed to 一 it’s not designed for justice for Native people,” she says.