Dakota Pipeline Protesters Brace for Face-Off With Law Enforcement

Protesters near the site of the Dakota Access pipeline are bracing for a stand-off with law enforcement as they face orders to evacuate a camp that has served as the base of their opposition to the multibillion-dollar project.

Native Americans and environmental activists have lived at the Oceti Sakowin camp in North Dakota for months, fighting the construction of the pipeline that they say threatens the water resources of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and sacred land.

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have set a Wednesday afternoon deadline for protesters to clear out of the camp in

Many blessings and prayers ... for all those that are the water protectors and those who support them ...

I have a new saying... Greed Kills... and feel so a shamed that those can come in and take what they say is theirs... sad days ...

we have Trump to thank for this renewed attack on those poor people
I vote we bottle the water and shove it down trumps throat

And of course Obama for starting the whole thing? Did you say the same for Obama?

What about all those Protesters that left all the garbage they did and it will take 250 truck loads to clear it out before the thaw??? If not cleared out it will contaminate the water and the pipeline will not be the cause of it, but instead the people that protest and left all that trash that the Natives asked them not to come and destroy their land in the process will be at fault.

The Pipeline was not due to Trump this has been going on all through while Obama was in office..

Truth of it is the pipeline is going so far under where the lake is as they do many lakes and with no issues..

My girl! Plus my research the pipeline shouldn't(l (as proposed) affect anyone)

I have been here since 07. I have seen many anti posts. IMO this is really something that was inherited from a previous president

https://www.google.com/amp/amp.usatoday.com/story/94800796/?client=ms-android-metropcs-us

Interesting article. Starts with the Obama administration

Game plan, protests, riots, etc

I agree it started with the last administration...
but Trump did invest in it ...

so it is the supporters and the Indians that made a mess ...

that must be cleaned ... how about if there was know danger going in this pipeline ... and they did not take their land and rip up graves ... then their would be know mess to clean up ... which came first ...

Yes. He continued Obamacs project for the month and a half in office? My question is, where was the outrage with Ibama when it started under him, protests and riots under him?

Yes. He continued Obamacs project for the month and a half in office? My question is, where was the outrage with Ibama when it started under him, protests and riots under him?

Actually it might help to read up on it..

Many that are protesting have no idea the pipeline is not even on the Reservation land , it is not technically on the reservation it is private owned land... What they are protesting is actually for if something was to go wrong and it contaminated there water source... Since it is going under the lake that supplies their water source... The pipeline is being put 115 ft underground... This is something they do all the time with lakes...

Here are a couple articles on it..

At no time did the Reservation ask for any protesters to come and leave all their trash ect but now they are having to pay for the clean up...


http://time.com/4548566/dakota-access-pipeline-standing-rock-sioux/

https://daplpipelinefacts.com/

In no way am I'm saying it was right the process they took...But this was put into effect and okayed under Obama... not even sure why Trump is being blamed sure he most likely is invested in it but this was the safest and most logical way to go....

And in the end the pipeline is not even crossing the Reservation.. so anything that was destroyed was on private land actually... according to the articles I read.. I could be wrong..

Irregardless of which President it started under it more than just a question of the environment. Though if it is so safe that NOTHING will ever happen ..... why was it relocated from it's original planned course upstream from Bismark? Did Bismark have the same concerns?

The reason that The Sioux and Cheyenne are against it is that it infringes on their land.

TxsGal is quite correct that it doesn't pass through the actual reservation but it does pass through land that belongs to the natives.

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As settlers headed west in the middle of the 19th century, nations of Native Americans wanted them to keep their distance and their foreign diseases at bay. The United States wanted easements for trails and permission to build forts in Indian territories.

The result was the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1851 — a historic agreement that has found new resonance in the disagreement over the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

“It really is an important thing,” said Suzan Harjo, president of the Morning Star Institute and a longtime Native American historian and advocate. “These agreements — they all started out with peace and friendship.”

Harjo curated an exhibit on treaties at the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian and wrote an accompanying book, both called, “Nation to Nation: Treaties between the United States and American Indian Nations.” The exhibit is slated to be open until at least 2018. President Barack Obama in 2014 awarded Harjo the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for her decades of advocacy on behalf of Native Americans.

Because of the unique standing of treaties under the U.S. Constitution, many parts of the treaty remain in effect, according to Harjo, who said she believes Dakota Access Pipeline opponents are correct in citing the treaty in their efforts to stop pipeline construction on treaty lands that are privately owned and not part of the Standing Rock Reservation.

The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1851 was an attempt to establish Native American territories and set ground rules for the westward spread of settlers, Harjo said. More than 10,000 Native Americans came to Fort Laramie for discussions with U.S. officials. Because the fort couldn’t hold them, negotiations were held at Horse Creek, leading some to call it the Treaty of Horse Creek. Others call it “the Great Smoke,” because of the smoke when tribal leaders burned sage and buffalo grass and other symbolic things up to the Creator to signify the deal was done, Harjo said.

“They made this treaty, and it was a reasonable treaty on all sides,” she said.

A map drawn by Belgian Jesuit missionary Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet with information from famous guide and fur trapper Jim Bridger helped define the approximate boundaries of the tribes, Harjo said. The pool-table sized map now is at the Library of Congress.

The treaty also laid out rules for interaction among the tribes and with the United States, gave the government permission to build small forts and provided easements no wider than a Conestoga wagon for westward trails, said Harjo, who explained that is part of the reason for the width of railroad tracks: They originally had to fit in those same easements.

Areas on the Dakota Access Pipeline route run through the 1851 territories of tribal bands that make up the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the Yankton Sioux Tribe, as well as through the Great Sioux Reservation drawn up in the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, Harjo said.

However, Congress in 1889 divided the Great Sioux Reservation into six separate, smaller reservations, which have remained intact. While Congress forced the tribes on to smaller parcels of land, the treaties of 1851 and 1868 didn’t go away, Harjo said.

Grant Christensen, an assistant professor at the University of North Dakota School of Law, said he hasn’t reviewed the two Fort Laramie treaties close enough to give an opinion on any legal standing related to them. But, he explained the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution makes any treaty the “supreme law of the land" and the terms of treaties remain in place unless specifically repealed by Congress.

The U.S. Supreme Court also has held that subsequent treaties do not do away with an earlier treaty unless the new treaty specifically addresses and removes the terms of the older treaty, he said.

An example is a 1999 Supreme Court case called Minnesota v. Mille Lacs Band of Chippewa Indians, in which the Mille Lacs Band successfully argued they never lost the right to hunt and fish on lands laid out in an 1837 treaty despite an 1855 treaty that made their reservation smaller, Christensen said.

Harjo said she believes Standing Rock still has claims to the lands in the 1851 territories. The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1851 didn’t make the tribes change who they were, she said.

“They didn’t give up their right to speak their language or exercise their religion. They didn’t give up their ancestors’ graves. They didn’t give up their worship and other sacred places. They didn’t give up their right to have a clear blue stream to jump in to conclude the Sun Dance,” Harjo said.

Harjo said she believes the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and the 1996 Executive Order on Indian Sacred Sites — all of which she played a part in molding — have built on those treaty rights and also are in play.

“The native people in this situation haven’t begun to mount the kind of legal case that they could,” she said.



1851 treaty resonates in DAPL discussion