U.S. President Barack Obama said this week the federal government is considering rerouting the controversial Dakota Access pipeline. This is big news.
The nearly $4-billion (U.S.) project has been enveloped by a protest that looks and feels a lot like the civil rights movement of the 1960s. At the centre of the demonstrations are the Standing Rock Sioux, whose ancestral territory the pipeline crosses. They have been joined by activists from around the United States.
[Webpage editor: The author below is not happy with a recent negative report (see here) about BC's carbon tax. A proposed carbon tax in neighbouring Washington has divided environmentalists in that state.
Activists and tribal members Kandi Mossett, Dean Dedman, and Dallas Goldtooth are racing to release new footage of the protests against Energy Transfer Partners, which is building a controversial four-state oil pipeline from North Dakota to Indiana. They can’t get solid reception at Highway 1806 in North Dakota, where they’re calling me from, so they’re deciding how to upload the content quickly. Phone reception begins to break up.
Morton County, ND – Over two hundred multi-state law enforcement and National Guard personnel attacked water protectors gathered on unceded 1851 Oceti Sakowin treaty land just north of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the late morning of Thursday, October 27th.
CANNON BALL, NORTH DAKOTA — The caravan rumbled east on a back road in rural North Dakota, pickup trucks and hippie vans inching through the grey-green hills, searching for a passage through the shifting blockade. Overhead, a helicopter circled. Police trucks whipped by on the ground. They kicked up dust that streamed over the fields where black cattle roamed and protesters, desperate for a pee, ducked behind hay bales or hid in the taller grass.