Standing Rock is a modern-day Indian war. This time Indians are winning

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Almost everywhere these fossil fuel projects have emerged, Indigenous peoples have been their first and fiercest opponents: the Cheyenne stopping coal in Montana, the Lummi defeating an export terminal in Washington, and throughout my country of Canada, Indigenous peoples standing in the way of mines and tar sands pipelines. Forget all those supposedly progressive heads of state who have touted the Paris climate accord but effectively undermined it with their actions: real climate leaders, those keeping carbon in the ground, are doing so directly on the land.

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The Lakota, like other Indigenous peoples, have always had to be depicted as the "evil instigators." How else could they be "hunted like wolves," as one US general commanded in 1865; how else could the government violate the treaties that guaranteed them a huge tract of the plains, include the path taken by the proposed Dakota access pipeline. Their lands--seized for gold, parcelled for cattle grazing, flooded for dams--have shrunk and shrunk. That is why they are poor and America has become rich.

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But brave activism has shown that an unbroken history of ugliness and violence is never a guarantee of the future. It turns out treaty rights were never a specimen of the past. They were always living and sacred obligations. In ways clear to more and more people, they have also become the most powerful non-violent weapon for a habitable planet. Which means that honouring the treaty and land rights of Indigenous peoples is now not only a long-overdue moral and legal duty: a stable climate depends on it.