No you wont hear or see much of it in our babbling brook of bullshit that is the mainstream media, but there is a battle of resistance going on in Dakota that involves hundreds of people, has lasted for months and is still going on, in spite of a massive militarised police force doing its damnedest to break that resistance. According to the indigenous people of the area and other experts, the Dakota Access Pipeline, apart from going through their sacred ground, will pollute the water supply of the area and further afield, as it crosses the Mississippi River. However, this is capitalism, and the welfare of the many must be sacrificed for the profit to the few. You can rest assured that the state will do the bidding of the corporate bodies who want this pipeline, and come down hard on those who will be harmed by its construction. As the resistance grows, so the state repression will morph into a brutal attack on their rights. Those resisting need all the support and solidarity that can be mustered, this is a battle for the rights of ordinary people against the juggernaut of the corporate world and its minders, the state.
This from Act For Freedom Now:
Report Back from the Battle for Sacred Ground.
For months, hundreds of people, including members of nearly a hundred different indigenous peoples, have mobilized to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. On October 27, police raiding the Sacred Ground camp
encountered stiff resistance. We’ve just received the following
first hand report from comrades who participated in the defense of the
camp. Describing some of the fiercest clashes indigenous and
environmental movements in the region have seen in many years, they pose
important questions about solidarity struggles.
The Battle
When we arrive on Wednesday, October 26, we can’t find our contacts,
the friends and friends of friends who have been vouched into the
secretive Red Warrior camp. Word around the camp is that eviction is
imminent for Sacred Ground, the only camp in the direct path of the
proposed Dakota Access Pipeline. The tribe claims this land is territory
granted to them in the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, and that they were
using their own “eminent domain” to take it back when they set up the
camp. We decide to set up at Sacred Ground and to figure out how to make
ourselves useful in stopping its eviction.
The Sacred Ground camp is located about two miles north of the main
camp on highway 1806. The main camp itself is just north of the Standing
Rock Reservation, where two more NoDAPL camps, Rosebud and Sacred
Stone, are located. Before arriving, we had seen images of barricades
blocking Highway 1806 to the north of the Sacred Ground camp.
When we walk to that site, however, we find those barricades have
been pushed to the sides of the road, the northernmost one turned into a
kind of checkpoint. According to the people at the checkpoint, they
were ordered to remove the blockade by the camp leaders, who plan on
allowing the police to enter and evict the camp.
The “camp leaders” are hired Nonviolent Direct Action consultants.
They are utilizing a classic strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience:
they hope that the images of police evicting people in prayer will win
them the sympathy of the public. The people we speak with at the
checkpoint are clearly not buying this. But what can they do? Their
elders have hired these people to stage-manage the moment.
After some conversation with the folks on the barricades and with
the “camp leaders,” it is decided that we’ll leave the road open until
the police actually arrive, and then we’ll build up the barricades
quickly in order to slow their progress. This will hopefully buy time to
allow the people who want to get arrested while in prayer to assemble
and prepare themselves. For what its worth, this plan was crafted with
the approval of the “proper channels.”
As soon as this course of action is proposed, some new organism
bursts into life, and thirty people we’ve never met are loading logs and
tires and barbed wire onto trucks in the middle of the night. A plan
comes together for when and how to start blocking the road. The energy
is electric; the possibility of a real physical defense of this
strategically decisive camp is in the air and in people’s conversations.
“I don’t know who those ‘leaders’ are,” a Native guy tells us as we
throw tires on the side of the road. “They’re not my elders. I came here
to defend this camp, and I’m going to do what I have to.” We still
don’t know where the fabled Red Warrior folks are, but we feel that
we’ve found people we want to support in this battle.
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