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Vancouverites show support for Standing Rock pipeline battle
08/11/16
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Rally at SkyTrain station joined anti-Dakota Access Pipeline protests across Canada this weekend. Other locals journeyed to the North Dakota frontline.
Several British Columbians have made a pilgrimage to join the Standing Rock Sioux people’s standoff over a controversial oil pipeline.
One of them, Vancouver Anglican priest Laurel Dykstra, has been near Cannonball, North Dakota since last Wednesday and participated in a prayer event with more than 500 interfaith clergy in support of the Sioux.
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“Boarding a plane for North Dakota to pray and follow the leadership of some fierce Indigenous water protectors,” she posted on her Facebook page on Nov. 2.
In a later Facebook post, Dykstra — who started Vancouver’s Salal and Cedar Watershed Discipleship Community — described witnessing police using force against First Nations protesters.
“Indigenous people were pepper sprayed and shot with rubber bullets,” she wrote. “There is a huge disparity between how predominantly white clergy are treated and the indigenous water protectors.”
Others who traveled from British Columbia to Standing Rock Indian Reservation included Kanahus Manuel and her father, Art Manuel, both of Neskonlith First Nation near Kamloops, B.C.
Kanahus and two other B.C. indigenous women from the West Coast Women Warriors Media Cooperative have broadcast updates from the frontlines in North Dakota.
“We have mobilized many nations here at camp,” she said in a Youtube video filmed on the banks of the river where police used pepper spray and rubber bullets last week. “We're here to say we're not going to put up with it, that this pipeline is going to be stopped and our people are going to continue to fight back.”
DAVID P. BALL / METRO
Participants attend a solidarity protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline through North Dakota at a demonstration at Commercial-Broadway SkyTrain station on Saturday.
Meanwhile, Vancouverites rallied this weekend as part of cross-Canada solidarity protests.
Though much smaller than their Toronto counterparts, several dozen people held banners and marched around the intersection near Commercial-Broadway SkyTrain station on Saturday afternoon.
The protest came a day after the Indigenous Action Movement organized a round dance — a fixture of the Idle No More movement several years ago — in West Vancouver’s Park Royal shopping centre.
"As an entire nation of indigenous people,” wrote IAM founder Kat Norris on Facebook, “we feel the strength of being as one in the fight against corporate greed.
“What is happening to the people in Standing Rock impacts us all as a people.”
This weekend’s events, the largest of which saw hundreds march in Toronto on Saturday, were not the first to show support for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.
In Vancouver on Sept. 12, activists briefly took over a TD bank on East Hastings Street, several participants closing their accounts to protest the Canadian bank’s investments in the Dakota Access Pipeline project.
[Top photo: A woman wears a placard denouncing the Dakota Access Pipeline through North Dakota at a demonstration at Commercial-Broadway SkyTrain station on Saturday. David P. Ball ]
