Native Americans from Wyoming, Colorado and as far as Oklahoma are pulling up by the busload to protest an oil pipeline in rural North Dakota.
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Fedorchak said the 1,172-mile, 30-inch-wide pipeline project was reviewed over a 13-month period, with hearings in Mandan, Killdeer and Williston a year ago.
Its lawsuit was filed Monday against Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Dave Archambault and several protesters opposing the project at a construction site. Pipeline construction started in late May but it was only this week that it moved onto location near the reservation where it will be bored very near the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball rivers.
Dakota Access workers left the construction site early on Monday after some protesters cut a fence and demonstrated in the building area. “There is no place for threats, violence or criminal activity”.
The pipeline route goes just north of the Standing Rock Reservation and under the Missouri River.
“The dangers imposed by the greed of big oil on the people who live along the Missouri river is astounding”, said Sacred Stone organizer Joye Braun in a statement on the group’s website. They argue the pipeline is unacceptable, and disrupting sacred land and affect their drinking water.
North Dakota transportation officials on Wednesday closed a several-mile stretch of Highway 1806 because of the protest along the road.
Dakota Access says in court papers that Chairman Archambault, Yellow Fat, five other named defendants and “Jane and John Does” have “engaged in increasingly obstructionist and risky behavior” to prevent pipeline construction.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe late last month sued federal regulators for approving the pipeline from North Dakota to IL.
Four more people were arrested Friday morning, Kirchmeier said.
The 1,172-mile pipeline is being developed by Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners. “It’s critical that as federal agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers review energy infrastructure projects, they follow all applicable environmental requirements, and respect treaty rights as well as the need for proper consultation with tribal nations”.
“I really don’t like this”, she said of the pipeline.
Dakota Access says hundreds of people showed up at the protest, bottles and rocks were thrown and the Morton County Sheriff’s Dept. had to evacuate the area.
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“This is a prayer camp movement to save our sacred land and water and has been entirely supported by the people and the campers…”
