You're listening to Code Switch, I'm Shireen Marisol Maraji.

And I'm Jean Demby.

So over the last year, we've watched this heated fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline.

That of course is the oil pipeline that will cut through the great plains, including

land in North and South Dakota, land near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

The folks protesting the pipeline say that its construction violates ancestral need of

claims to those same lands.

Engaging the images from those protests are unforgettable.

Native youth on horseback, fists in the air, law enforcement and riot gear, tear-gassing

demonstrators, huge crowds, camped out and freezing weather.

Those protest signs that red water is sacred, water is life.

Those images are burned in my brain.

Yeah, and the fight over the pipeline is probably the most visible example of some really

old tensions between native tribes and their treaty rights in Indian country in that part

of the West.

And that's what we're digging into in this episode, the ongoing fights over some of these

treaties that were written 150 years ago in some cases.

But today we're not talking about oil and water.

We're talking about bison and elk and treaty reserved hunting rights.

Those are the hunting and fishing rights established through old treaties and the rules can

be totally different than the ones non-tribal members have to follow.

So in some cases, Jean, the tribes have longer hunting seasons or they can take more animals

...