Indigenous locals (colorado springs) travel to Standing Rock to join pipeline resistance

(the local alternative paper has done a decent article on Standing Rock. Not being covered by the local fishwrap)

Indigenous locals travel to Standing Rock to join pipeline resistance



ggy Igloo is preparing for winter.

It may be unseasonably warm in Colorado Springs, where 34-year-old Igloo, otherwise known as Jonathan Ellis, normally spends his days DJ'ing at KRCC, but this is not a normal November for him. He has relocated to North Dakota with no immediate plans to return. There, he is camping on, praying for and protecting land that's the locus of a struggle against cultural and environmental desecration. In North Dakota, it's already pretty damn cold. "Most days I gather wood, haul water, spend a lot of time in the sweat lodge in prayer," says Igloo, who's of Inupiaq descent, via phone to the Indy. "I've yet to go to the front lines." The front lines he's talking about are in the advancing path of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) — a $3.8 billion, 1,172-mile infrastructure project piping crude oil fracked from the Bakken shale formation in northwestern North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa to hook up with a shipping point on the Mississippi River in Illinois where it would then head to refineries on the Gulf Coast for both domestic and international sale. Construction began in May under a fast-tracked permit issued by the Army Corps of Engineers and, as of press time, is about 90 percent complete.

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Indigenous women have long been leaders in the movement for climate justice.

These shifting sands brought a renewed sense of urgency to 53-year-old Dwanna Robertson, another Springs local, who made her second trip to Standing Rock on Sunday. As a young girl growing up as part of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma, Robertson was forcibly removed from her family during the government's campaign aimed at assimilating young natives into white settler culture through child welfare agencies. The Association on American Indian Affairs estimates that from the early 1940s to the late '60s, about a third of Indian children were separated from their families under the little-known but highly traumatic Indian Adoption Program. Robertson's mother — uneducated and poor but with a fierce protective spirit — took on the state, eventually winning back all five of her children. So ferocity is genetic for Robertson, who was hired as an assistant professor of Race, Ethnicity and Migration studies at Colorado College this year.

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To get involved and assist the water protectors, visit standwithstandingrock.net.



Protecting precious resources is also top of the mind for Damian Gomez, 61, a Black Forest resident who's half Navajo and planning his return to Standing Rock this winter if the cards fall right. He made his first trip last month. "My sister lives in Security, where it's not oil but it's all these chemicals from Peterson Air Force Base that got into the water, so they're having to buy bottled water, you know," he says. "Then you look at Flint, Michigan, and all these places all over the country where you can't drink the water, and it's like we're forgetting that water is life." Gomez says that projects like DAPL, regardless of whether they directly pass through his backyard or not, affect everyone by degrading the sanctity of water which is already in short supply in this part of the country. "I have five children, 27 grandkids and two great-grandkids," he says. "That's why I'm a water warrior."

Robertson posits another reason for why folks living in Colorado Springs ought to care about a pipeline that's states away: "When their drinking water gets ruined, where are they going to go? There's already been this influx to Colorado, which is a good thing for the economy, don't get me wrong, but the fewer inhabitable spaces in the U.S., the more people will have to relocate and will continue that historic shift westward. Always westward."

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http://www.csindy.com/coloradosprings/indigenous-locals-travel-to-standing-rock-to-join-pipeline-resistance/Content?oid=4182240