nativenews: On Thanksgiving week, Native peoples are being tear-gassed in North Dakota [IMAGE: Law e
nativenews: On Thanksgiving week, Native peoples are being tear-gassed in North Dakota [IMAGE: Law enforcement officers use a water cannon amid protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline.] This year, as non-Indigenous Americans pick out their turkeys and count their blessings, members of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ in Standing Rock, North Dakota, reported being attacked with tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons in subfreezing temperatures as they protested an oil pipeline that threatens to contaminate their water and disrupt their sacred sites. Approximately 300 Native peoples and non-native water protectors were injured in one 10-hour clash with law enforcement on Sunday evening, according to the Standing Rock Medic & Healer Council, and 26 were taken to hospitals with severe head and limb wounds, eye trauma, internal bleeding and hypothermia from being doused with water in 22-degree F weather. “Basically, it’s an act of war,” said Frank Sanchez, a delegate from the Yankton Sioux Tribe, in an interview with The Huffington Post. The government says the $3.7 billion Dakota Access Pipeline is the safest, most efficient way to carry crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois. But the project has become a rallying point for Native people because the pipe would cut under the Missouri River within a mile of the Standing Rock Reservation, potentially contaminating the local Indigenous nation’s source of fresh water and encroaching on land that the U.S. government had agreed to set aside for them in an 1851 treaty. The clash between water protectors, and North Dakota law enforcement reached a boiling point on Sunday, November 20th, when force was used to keep water protectors off a barricaded bridge about a mile south of the pipeline construction site. Help the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ with donations, supplies, and legal funds. Keep reading -- source link
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