Standing Rock

Long before Lewis and Clark paddled by, Native Americans built homes at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri rivers, using the thick earth to guard against brutal winters and hard summer heat. They were called the Mandan people.

Now, Native Americans are living here again. They sleep in teepees and nylon tents. They ride horses and drive quad cabs. For weeks, they have been arriving from the scattered patches of the United States where the government put their ancestors to protest what is one indignity too many in a history that has included extermination and exploitation.

It is called the Dakota Access oil pipeline and it could carry more than 400,000 barrels of crude oil a day from the Bakken region of western North Dakota across South Dakota and Iowa to connect with an existing pipeline in Illinois.

Standing Rock protesters say that the Army Corps of Engineers violated the National Historic Preservation Act when it approved the project through a fast-track process and that a more stringent environmental review should be done. The pipeline and its construction would damage ancestral sites of the Standing Rock Sioux and put the tribe’s water supply at risk.

William Yardley, LA Times

Tell your representatives in Congress that you support the protesters at Standing Rock.