https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/3-tribes-at-the-heart-of-the-fracking-boom/

At 83, Ed Hall is tall and lanky and moves with a shuffle. He wears a baseball cap and has a youthful sparkle to his smile. It faded as he led me to a hilltop above North Dakota’s Lake Sakakawea, located on the Fort Berthold reservation of the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara (MHA) Nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes. The lake is vast, with a shoreline that stretches 1,320 miles. It’s also deep blue, and heartbreaking—at least for many who live here. As I came up beside him in the tall grass, Ed pointed to the center of the lake and said, “That’s my home.” His longing for home, and his despair at never being able to return there, has stayed with me. I think about it every time I see the lake.

I met Ed seven years ago through my work as a cultural anthropologist collaborating on a community-directed oral history project. Like many elders I spoke with, Ed explained that he was “born and raised under the water” at a town called Elbowoods. He was 18 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed the Garrison Dam on the Missouri River in the early 1950s, flooding the reservation’s towns and forcing tribal members to relocate. They moved away from the fertile bottomlands along the river where they had maintained self-sufficiency since time immemorial, to a period of economic hardship on the bluffs above. One of the new towns created during this relocation, where tribal headquarters are located today, is literally named “New Town.”