The Standing Rock and Red Warrior protest camps on the Sioux reservation have drawn support from more than 200 Native Tribes, including the Ute Tribes, as well as non-natives, Brugger said.
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Members of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians are making the 18-hour journey down to North Dakota to protest a pipeline.
Since numerous supporters can not make the trip to North Dakota in person, they wanted to join in prayer and in sending positive thoughts to those protesting.
The $3.8bn Dakota Access pipeline, which will funnel oil from the Bakken oil fields in the Great Plains to IL, will run next to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. It also poses a real threat of contaminating the Missouri River, the tribe’s only source of drinking water.
The Meyers previously signed easements with Dakota Access LLC in February 2015 allowing for a 50-foot-wide pipeline easement and a 100-foot-wide construction easement, records show.
A panel chaired by Gov. Jack Dalrymple voted Wednesday, Sept. 21, to borrow up to $6 million from the state-owned Bank of North Dakota to support policing efforts related to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, but not before members blasted the federal government for not providing more support.
“The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe are fighting for our lives, our people and our sacred places because of a failed process for approval of the Dakota Access Pipeline”, he said.
The DAP “treads over everything they hold sacred: their lands, their sacred waters, their ancestors’ graves in some cases”. As such, we denounce any government suppression of the right to protest and militarized policing of protesters by the state of North Dakota.
“Thousands have gathered peacefully in Standing Rock in solidarity against the pipeline”, Archambault said to the Council.
Grijalva said the pipeline threatened the natural resources of the Standing Rock Sioux and the project was part of a “long history of pushing the impacts of pollution onto the most economically and politically disadvantaged people and communities across this country”. Nevertheless, the corps said the merits of the challenge were unlikely to stand.
The proposed 1,100-mile pipeline would pump 570,000 barrels of crude oil per day across the Missouri River just upstream from the mouth of the Cannon Ball River, which flows through the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
They are leading a lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the agency responsible for issuing permits on this project.
The task force created last week consists of one person each from the Morton County and Mercer County sheriff’s departments, North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation and federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, Kirchmeier said.
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The encampment has been called the largest gathering of Native Americans in a century, and the first time all seven bands of Sioux have come together since Gen. George Custer’s 1876 expedition at the Battle of Little Big Horn.
