Sioux leaders gathered in South Dakota Monday to re-sign the Protect the Sacred Treaty in the wake of the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Through the exasperated exchange and days of hesitation, an uncomfortable and unspoken truth lingered in the air, tacitly acknowledged by the president himself: racism and bigotry are not foreign to the halls of American powerin fact, in 2017, the most powerful man in the world still has white nationalists' backs.