Tag: standing rock
U.S. Army To Grant Final Permit For Controversial Dakota Pipeline

U.S. Army To Grant Final Permit For Controversial Dakota Pipeline

WASHINGTON/HOUSTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will grant the final easement needed to finish the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, according to a court filing Tuesday.

The line had been delayed for several months after protests from Native American tribes and climate activists. The $3.8 billion line, which is being built by Energy Transfer Partners, needed a final permit to tunnel under Lake Oahe, a reservoir that is part of the Missouri River.

The Standing Rock Sioux tribe, whose reservation is adjacent to the line’s route, has said they will fight the decision. The Army Corps had previously stated that they would undertake further environmental review of the project. The tribe was not immediately available for comment.

The 1,170-mile (1,885 km) line will bring crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken shale region to Patoka, Illinois, and from there connect to the Gulf of Mexico, where many U.S. refineries are located. The tribe had fought the line for months, fearing contamination of their drinking water and damage to sacred sites on their land.

Numerous activists who have been protesting in North Dakota have vowed to stay, although the primary protest camp is located on a flood plain on Army Corps land and is in the process of being cleared.

Their protests, along with those of climate activists, resulted in the Obama administration’s decision to delay a final permit that would allow construction under the Missouri River.

“The discord we have seen regarding the Dakota Access Pipeline doesn’t serve the tribe, the company, the Corps or any of the other stakeholders involved. Now, we all need to work together to ensure people and communities rebuild trust and peacefully resolve their differences,” said John Hoeven, Republican senator from North Dakota, in a statement.

The Army informed the chairs and ranking members of the House Natural Resources and Senate Energy & Natural Resources committees of their intent in a letter on Tuesday.

President Donald Trump, days after being sworn in, issued an executive order directing the U.S. Army Corps to smooth the path to finishing the line. Tuesday’s filing was made in U.S. District Court in Washington D.C.

(Reporting By Valerie Volcovici; editing by Diane Craft and Cynthia Osterman)

IMAGE: A North Dakota National Guard vehicle idles on the outskirts of the Dakota Access oil pipeline protest camp near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, U.S., January 29, 2017. REUTERS/Terray Sylvester

North Dakota Governor Orders Pipeline Site Protesters To Evacuate

North Dakota Governor Orders Pipeline Site Protesters To Evacuate

(Reuters) – North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple ordered an emergency evacuation on Monday for protesters at the main camp near the Dakota Access Pipeline due to “harsh winter conditions,” his office said in statement.

Demonstrators at a camp on land owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in southern Morton County, who oppose the $3.8 billion pipeline, were ordered to leave the area immediately and not return, according to an executive order signed by Dalrymple.

“Winter conditions have the potential to endanger human life, especially when they are exposed to these conditions without proper shelter, dwellings, or sanitation for prolonged periods of time,” the executive order said.

It added that the area in which the camp is situated is “not zoned for dwellings suitable for living in winter conditions.”

Most of western and central North Dakota are under a winter storm warning, according to the National Weather Service, which said the area would experience heavy snow through Wednesday.

Demonstrators have protested for months against plans to run the Dakota Access Pipeline, owned by Energy Transfer Partners LP, beneath Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, saying it poses a threat to water resources and to sacred Native American sites.

The companies say the pipeline would carry Bakken shale oil more cheaply and safely from North Dakota to Illinois en route to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries.

The 1,172-mile (1,885-km) project is mostly complete except for the segment planned to run under Lake Oahe, less than half a mile (0.8 km) north of Standing Rock.

The Obama administration in September postponed final approval of a permit required to allow tunneling beneath the lake, a move intended to give federal officials more time to consult with tribal leaders. The delay also led to escalating tensions over the project.

Police last week used water hoses in subfreezing weather in an attempt to disperse about 400 activists near the proposed tunnel excavation site.

(Reporting by Timothy Mclaughlin in Chicago; Editing by Chris Reese and Leslie Adler)

IMAGE: The Oceti Sakowin camp is seen in a snow storm during a protest against plans to pass the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, U.S. November 28, 2016. REUTERS/Stephanie Keith

12 Post-Election Ideas From Frontline Organizers

12 Post-Election Ideas From Frontline Organizers

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

When you find yourself in a suddenly darkened room, what do you do? Some rush blindly to where they think the door might be. Others stand still, let their eyes adjust to the different environment, reorient themselves, then cautiously move forward. Some search out people who might be able to show the way. Post-election, many people are reassessing and searching for the best way forward. Here are some ideas on where we should be going and what we should be doing from experienced, thoughtful people who are organizing on the front lines.

1. You Were Born for This Time

My friend Cherri Foytlin, a mother who lives in rural Louisiana in a deeply Republican area, spends her time organizing to protect our earth, water and the rights of indigenous people. For that she has been arrested and is subject to death threats. Right after the election she wrote: “Fear no evil. Joy and Love still live, and it is up to us to build the shelter for the Hope that they provide. Lower those pointed fingers, we will need them to grasp the hammer and forge the nails. Do not give in to your righteous anxieties. Our heroes have never left us. All the good that ever was, it is still here. You were born for this time.”

2. Join Allies

Marisa Franco, one of the founders of Mijente, calls on Latinos and African Americans to join together with whites who didn’t go for Trump. “No one is going to build it, no one is going to give it to us. Positioning folks like the people in Arizona who built resilience and strength, positioning people who have been survivors to teach others. People in the South, in Arizona have been doing that for years,” she said. “We’ve got to build bridges across communities.”

3. Fight and Dig In for the Long Haul

Jaribu Hill of the Mississippi Workers Center for Human Rights, said, “At a time when black women and men are murdered under the color of law, as the great Medgar Evers said, we cannot let up now! At a time when trans people are murdered by homophobic hatemongers, we cannot let up now! At a time when thousands of immigrants are targeted for exploitation and deportation, we cannot let up now!”

Patricia Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, insisted, “You don’t negotiate with hate. I don’t think now is the time for diplomacy. Now is the time to stand up around what is right and what’s wrong.”

Dave Archambault, Tribal Chair of Standing Rock, challenges us to dig in for the long haul. In honor of our future generations, we fight this pipeline to protect our water, our sacred places, and all living beings. “We’re about protecting our future. And that’s what he should be about. He should think, how can I protect my future so that 50 years from now, 100 years from now, there’s something there? And that if we continue to do what we’re doing at the pace that we’re doing it, in 50 years we’re going to see mass destruction because Mother Earth cannot sustain herself with all the activity that’s taking place.”

4. Humility, Grief and Hope

Equality Louisiana’s message the day after the election began with, “We’re not sure what to say either.” Humility is a starting point for knowledge. Like Socrates said, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

Likewise, it is okay to grieve. That said, neither humility nor grief is an excuse for paralysis or inaction. May Boeve of 350.org: “It’s hard to know what to say in a moment like this. Many of us are reeling from the news and shaken to the core about what a Trump presidency will mean for the country, and the difficult work ahead for our movements. Trump’s misogyny, racism, and climate denial pose a greater threat than we’ve ever faced, and the battleground on which we’ll fight for justice of all kinds will be that much rougher. The hardest thing to do right now is to hold on to hope, but it’s what we must do. We should feel our anger, mourn, pray, and then do everything we can to fight hate together.”

5. Courage

Pablo Alvarado of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network stated, “Fear has been the driving force of this presidential election. A fear which has spurred hatred, promoted violence and created an environment where families worry about their future, about their loved ones. Fear won last night, but this type of fear can only be defeated by courage and action.” Likewise, Justin Hansford wrote, “Woke up this morning, mind stayed on freedom. Stop acting like we never took a loss before, then won. My ancestors stared slavery in the face.”

6. Listen To and Talk Face to Face with People 

Social media is not a substitute for human to human communication. As Dream Defenders suggests: “We know it can be tempting to use social media as a way to engage in this moment, to understand where our people are at and to tell people what we think they are doing wrong. But right now, we need to stay centered, to foster actual human connection and build a shared commitment to struggle together.” Listening is part of our orientation. We listen to pick up clues from our fellow seekers about what is the best path, the best next step.

7. Solidarity

“Solidarity is our protection,” Reverend Deborah Lee of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity in California told David Bacon. “Our best defense is an organized community committed to each other and bound together with all those at risk.… We ask faith communities to consider declaring themselves ‘sanctuary congregations’ or ‘immigrant welcoming congregations.’”

DRUM (Desis Rising Up & Moving), an organization of South Asian and Indo-Caribbean immigrants, most of whom are Muslims and undocumented, called for action. “In the words initially chanted by working-class youth of the British Asian Youth Movement against neo-Nazi fascism, we are ‘here to stay and here to fight’ in solidarity with our black, Latino, LGBTQ, women and worker communities.”

8. Resistance

The Center for Constitutional Rights election statement was stark. “The dangers of a Trump presidency go beyond the attacks on people of color, women, Muslims, immigrants, refugees, LGBTQI people, and people with disabilities. His campaign was marked by the strategies and tactics of authoritarian regimes: endorsing and encouraging violence against political protesters, threatening to jail his opponent, refusing to say he would accept the results of the election if he lost, punishing critical press. Together with all those who value freedom, justice, and self-determination, we must resist and prevent at all costs a slide into American fascism.” They conclude, “Resistance is our civic duty.”

9. Continue Building Local and State Power.  

Sergio Sosa, director of Nebraska’s Heartland Workers Center, reflected on a 20-year history of community and workplace organizing. “People here have to remember the power they’ve built on a local level and use it,” Sosa says, “even in the face of a national defeat.”

10. Look Outward Globally

Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, an activist in the U.S., Iraq and Afghanistan, insisted on renewing our global connections. “Many U.S. people awoke this week with a new understanding of the dangers facing our common life together. These battles we fight are not a game, and they can escalate into even direr realities. I look to Afghanistan, I look to the simple facts faced by the Standing Rock protesters, and I know we must look back to the sorrows which so much of the world will commemorate today. These sorrows, so painfully real, can help all of us yearn above all for an understanding by people worldwide, and here in my own frightened, divided country—an understanding that we live in a real world, beset with multiple wars, and must at last turn to each other, prepared to live more simply, share resources more radically, and abolish all wars in order to build a real peace.”

11. Working People

Adolph Reed says organizing has to address the concerns of working people. “Defeating these reactionary tendencies will require crafting a politics based on recognition that the identity shared most broadly in the society is having to or being expected to work for a living and that that is the basis for the solidarity necessary to prevail and, eventually, to make a more just and equitable society.”

12. Organize. Organize. Organize!

No doubt we have to organize. But a note of caution: We are called to organize intelligently. Unless we organize in a thoughtful and humble way that understands the dynamics of race, class, gender, and place, as my friend Ron Chisom of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond likes to say, “We will not be organizing, but disorganizing.” There is no shortcut. We cannot organize for peace and justice if we do not model peace and justice in our organizing.

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. He is also a member of the legal collective of School of Americas Watch, and can be reached at quigley77@gmail.com.

IMAGE: Dakota Access Pipeline protesters square off against police near the Standing Rock Reservation and the pipeline route outside the little town of Saint Anthony, North Dakota, U.S., October 5, 2016. REUTERS/Terray Sylvester

Militarized Police Are Collaborating With Oil Companies At Standing Rock

Militarized Police Are Collaborating With Oil Companies At Standing Rock

Reprinted with Permission from AlterNet

Today’s militarized crackdown on water protectors in Cannonball, North Dakota stems from high levels of coordination between the extractive industry, state officials and police departments. It was waged against a frontline camp seeking to block the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), which would cross beneath the Standing Rock Sioux reservation’s main drinking water source and bisect the community’s burial grounds. The attack took place under cover of a media blackout, with reports emerging that police were disrupting cellular phone reception.

Water protectors have already endured dog attacks, military-style checkpoints, low-flying surveillance planes, invasive strip searches, national guard deployments, and mass arrests. “What’s happening today is a travesty on the human rights of Indigenous people,” Tom Goldtooth, the executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, told AlterNet. “I see this as glaring evidence that the law enforcement of this county and state is more concerned about protecting corporate rights of the extractive industry than tribal nations.”

There is evidence of close coordination between the companies backing the $3.8 billion crude-oil Dakota Access Pipeline and police departments. Energy Transfer Partners, the parent company for Dakota Access LLC, said Tuesday it intends to work with police to forcibly clear a frontlines water protectors’ camp. Energy Transfer Partners threatened that “in coordination with local law enforcement and county/state officials, all trespassers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and removed from the land.”

Challenging the company’s charges of trespassing, the frontline Sacred Stone Camp says it is taking back “unceded territory affirmed in the 1851 Treaty of Ft. Laramie as sovereign land under the control of the Oceti Sakowin.”

“We have never ceded this land,” Joye Braun, an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, said in a press statement. “If DAPL can go through and claim eminent domain on landowners and Native peoples on their own land, then we as sovereign nations can then declare eminent domain on our own aboriginal homeland.”

Today’s events indicate that Energy Transfer Partners is not bluffing when it says police are siding with the company. In fact, law enforcement has vocally rallied behind the pipeline, which is backed by Enbridge. “At some point the rule of law has to be enforced,” Cass County Sheriff Paul Laney said Wednesday,according to the Associated Press. “We could go down there at any time. We’re trying not to.”

The companies backing the pipeline already have private security under their employ. Dakota Access LLC confirmed to AlterNet in September that it had hired the notorious multinational security firm G4S during a period that overlapped with the protests, but would not state where its forces were located. Attorneys representing the Standing Rock encampments identified the companies behind the Dakota Access company’s brutal dog attacks, captured on video, as private security firm 10-Code Security, LLC and attack dog contractor Frost Kennels.

But according to Peter Kraska, professor and author of Militarizing The American Criminal Justice System: The Changing Roles of the Armed Forces and Police, the extractive industry also has taxpayer-funded security, in the form of police.

“We have romantic notions of the relationships between government and the private sector and tend to think the old days of police supporting owners of capital—the railroad companies instead of the workers—are from a bygone era,” Kraska told AlterNet. “Situations like these show that corporations and energy interests are exercising a monopoly on violence to continue the fossil fuel industry unabated.”

Steven Salaita, professor and author of the forthcoming book Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine, put it this way: “The current buildup of tremendous force at Standing Rock should be understood as a military invasion of a sovereign nation on behalf of a foreign oil company.”

The heavy-handed response does not stem from local coordination alone. The Morton County Sheriff’s Department said in a press statement released Sunday that, “Due to escalated unlawful tactics by individuals protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, Morton County has requested additional law enforcement assistance from other states. The state of North Dakota made an Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) request to states for assistance on October 7th.”

Remarkably, the EMAC program is supposed to be used to allow “states to send personnel, equipment, and commodities to help disaster relief efforts in other states.”

According to the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, “Several states have responded and have arrived or will be arriving to support Morton County. States that are currently assisting Morton County are: Wisconsin, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wyoming, Indiana and Nebraska.” AlterNet could not immediately reach Morton County for comment.

In Minneapolis, news that local law enforcement officers were being sent to Standing Rock sparked protests on Wednesday. The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that, “At the request of the State of North Dakota, and as approved by the State of Minnesota, on Sunday, Minnesota Sheriff’s Deputies from the Hennepin, Anoka, and Washington Counties’ Sheriff’s Offices were deployed to assist in Morton County, North Dakota.”

Those counties cover the bulk of the Twin Cities area, where local police been accused of placing protesters in danger, through a far-reaching culture of incitement against the Black Lives Matter movement. In one incident, St. Paul police officer Jeff Rothecker was forced to resign in February after he was caught encouraging drivers to run over Black Lives Matter protesters slated to gather for a Martin Luther King Day mobilization. Lt. Bob Kroll, the head of the Minneapolis Police Officer’s Federation who has ties to a white-power-linked biker gang, has repeatedly referred to protesters as “terrorists.”

As police departments around the country send reinforcements to North Dakota, the appeals of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe for federal protection from law enforcement violence appear to have had no effect. In a letter sent to Attorney General Loretta Lynch earlier this week, the water protectors asked the Department of Justice to intervene.

“To many people, the military tactics being used in North Dakota are reminiscent of the tactics used against protesters during the civil rights movement some 50 years ago,” the letter states. “But to us, there is an additional collective memory that comes to mind. This country has a long and sad history of using military force against indigenous people—including the Sioux Nation.”

Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet. A former staff writer for Common Dreams, she coedited the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahlazare.

Photo: A line of police move towards a roadblock and encampment of Native American and environmental protesters near an oil pipeline construction site, near the town of Cannon Ball, North Dakota, October 27, 2016. REUTERS/Rob Wilson