Earlier this month, Energy Transfer Partners presented at an infrastructure conference sponsored by Citibank, highlighting the Dakota Access Pipeline as a “growth project” under a section about how the company is “exceptionally well positioned to capitalize on US energy exports”.
Advertisement
More than 100 protesters appeared at the site, which is near the ongoing Farm Progress Show at the Central Iowa Expo Center in Boone.
Native Americans from reservations hundreds of miles around have joined the growing protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, causing the company to temporarily halt construction.
Leading national and local environmental, tribal, and landowners’ rights organizations have submitted a letter on to President Obama voicing concern about the Army Corps of Engineers’ approval of some of the permits for the Dakota Access pipeline.
But four prominent labor organizations sent their own letter, this one to North Dakota Governor Jack Dalyrmple, objecting that while the pipeline itself was “lawfully approved”, environmental activists have created unsafe conditions through unlawful protests and civil disobedience.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has also taken legal action to block construction of the pipeline.
The pipeline moves through ancestral land of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and the tribe has mounted protests against the project, according to a Yahoo Finance article. One man, Iyuskin American Horse of the Sicangu Lakota (Rosebud Sioux Tribe), spent more than six hours attached to a digger at a DAPL worksite in Mandan, North Dakota.
“We have seen the success our friends from Washington state have had in their battles to protect treaty rights against the transport of fossil fuels”, David Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, said in a prepared statement this week.
“People are using civil disobedience as a means to raise awareness of the issues and the need to protect the water and as a way to delay construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline”, Goldtooth said.
“We’re not in support of either side”.
Kirchmeier commended officers for showing proper restraint, and he reiterated that while the protest was nonviolent, it was illegal and was not considered peaceful.
As soon as American Horse was loaded in a police vehicle, work on the Dakota Access Pipeline resumed.
The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues is calling on the USA government to allow the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to have a say regarding a $3.8 billion oil pipeline that it says could disturb sacred sites and impact drinking water for 8,000 tribal members.
Dakota Access officials did not comment on the arrests.
Supporters of the project say it’s an important part of the nation’s energy infrastructure.
Advertisement
Members of a Michigan Indian tribe are heading west to help fight a controversial oil pipeline. Our culture, laws and values are tied to all that surrounds us, the place where our children’s future will be for years to come.
