Evidence Emerges of Outrageous Militarized Police Collaboration with Oil Companies at Standing Rock [View all]

http://www.alternet.org/environment/clear-evidence-emerges-outrageous-militarized-police-collaboration-mining-companies

Clear Evidence Emerges of Outrageous Militarized Police Collaboration with Oil Companies at Standing Rock Against Protectors

Police departments around the country are sending reinforcements to North Dakota to support mining companies.

By Sarah Lazare / AlterNet
October 27, 2016

Today’s militarized crackdown on water protectors in Cannonball, North Dakota stems from high levels of coordination between the extractive industry, state officials and police departments. It was waged against a frontline camp seeking to block the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), which would cross beneath the Standing Rock Sioux reservation's main drinking water source and bisect the community's burial grounds. The attack took place under cover of a media blackout, with reports emerging that police were disrupting cellular phone reception.

Water protectors have already endured dog attacks, military-style checkpoints, low-flying surveillance planes, invasive strip searches, national guard deployments and mass arrests. “What’s happening today is a travesty on the human rights of Indigenous people,” Tom Goldtooth, the executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, told AlterNet. “I see this as glaring evidence that the law enforcement of this county and state is more concerned about protecting corporate rights of the extractive industry than tribal nations.”

There is evidence of close coordination between the companies backing the $3.8 billion crude-oil Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and police departments. Energy Transfer Partners, the parent company for Dakota Access LLC, said Tuesday that it intends to work with police to forcibly clear a frontlines water protectors’ camp. Energy Transfer Partners threatened that “in coordination with local law enforcement and county/state officials, all trespassers will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and removed from the land.”


Challenging the company's charges of trespassing, the frontline Sacred Stone Camp says they are taking back “unceded territory affirmed in the 1851 Treaty of Ft. Laramie as sovereign land under the control of the Oceti Sakowin.”

“We have never ceded this land,” Joye Braun, an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, said in a press statement. “If DAPL can go through and claim eminent domain on landowners and Native peoples on their own land, then we as sovereign nations can then declare eminent domain on our own aboriginal homeland.”

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