teleSUR English | 11/24/2016
The largest Native American uprising in at least 150 years — unfolding now in North Dakota against a billion-dollar pipeline that would cross sacred Indigenous land — has been met with a law enforcement counter-offensive that has reached national proportions.
What started as a “spirit camp” by the local Standing Rock tribe in April spiraled into an international standoff, with both sides pounding at the door of the White House with every successive military-style raid of the multiplying campgrounds. Video accounts of snipers, armored vehicles and dogs unleashed on the protesters — self-dubbed “water protectors” for defending the Missouri River which lies in the “Black Snake’s” path — have fed outrage from sympathizers across the web. Meanwhile, police officers and their allies have made the case for rebuffing their arsenal as they catch protesters committing what they call “violent acts.”
The tribes are fighting on the grounds that the U.S. government has historically snatched their land from them, and they are simply reclaiming what was theirs since before the nation was founded. They evoke the symbolic and spiritual value of the land and the water, soon to be polluted by sure-to-come leaks in the pipeline. The imagery has concentrated on a 40-mile stretch of land from Lake Oahe — named after a mission founded to convert the Sioux people but originally meaning “ a place to stand on” in the Indigenous Dakota language — but misses one key space slowly conquered by the state: the skies.
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Naomi Cohen | journalist 