Fireworks fill the night sky above the Oceti Sakowin Camp as activists celebrate after learning an easement had been denied for the Dakota Access Pipeline near the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on December 4, 2016, outside Cannon Ball, North Dakota. Photo by Indigenous Rising Media [Support the Indigenous Environmental Network
A temporary victory?
Army stops advance of pipeline
By Talli Nauman
Native Sun News Today
Health & Environment Editor
nativesunnews.today FT. YATES, N. D. ––As thousands of veterans seeking to halt Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) construction gathered here to protect Oceti Sakowin Camp participants from Gov. Jack Dalrymple’s order to disband by December 4; the federal government announced its concurrence with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s demand to reject the corporate permit application to build across the Missouri River. “The Department of the Army will not approve an easement that would allow the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under Lake Oahe in North Dakota,” the Army's Assistant Secretary for Civil Works announced December 4. Welcoming the announcement was Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chair Dave Archambault II, who had issued an emergency proclamation to protect camp participants from federal and state threats to close access to the camp located within U.S. Army Corps of Engineers jurisdiction on unceded 1851 Ft. Laramie Treaty land. “We wholeheartedly support the decision of the administration and commend with the utmost gratitude the courage it took on the part of President Obama, the Army Corps, the Department of Justice and the Department of the Interior to take steps to correct the course of history and to do the right thing,” Archambault said in statement on behalf of the tribe. The camp shelters thousands of pipeline resisters, dubbed “water protectors,” who settled here to back the tribe in its lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to prevent issuance of a permit for pipeline construction over sacred sites and across the Oahe Reservoir on the Missouri River a half-mile upstream from Standing Rock’s drinking water intake. “Water protectors around the world are celebrating today’s victory, which comes just one day before another round of veterans are due to arrive in Standing Rock,” Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Chair Harold Frazier said. He thanked the Obama Administration and water protectors. “Today we won the battle, but our fight is not yet over. While we will savor this victory, we must continue to prepare for the long road ahead of us,” he said. The court battle will continue and the political battle will wage on. But we will never stop fighting for our Unci Maka,” he said. Echoing those words and cautionary statements expressed by numerous water protectors, even as they sang songs and set off fireworks in festivities over the reprieve, was designated camp media representative Redhawk, who said, “Today has been a day of celebration here at Oceti Sakowin Camp, but our work is far from over." “Let me make this very clear: DAPL is most likely still drilling; they are still flying low flying aircraft over camps, and they are still shining flood lights on Oceti Sakowin,” he said. DAPL is the project of Energy Transfer Partners, Phillips 66, Enbridge Corp., and Marathon Oil Corp, which have raised more than $3.7 billion for the nearly 1,200-mile toxic fracked oil pipeline. It would move oil from the Bakken Formation centered on the Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation across the treaty lands in North and South Dakota through Iowa to Illinois.
Read the rest of the story on the Native Sun News Today website: A temporary victory? (Contact Talli Nauman at talli.nauman@gmail.com) Copyright permission Native Sun News
Join the Conversation
