Oceti Sakowin Camp Closes: But the Struggle Continues

 Water protectors march out of Oceti Sakowin camp

The was a sense of poignancy, defiance and nobility as the last remaining residents of the Oceti Sakowin protest camp in North Dakota departed yesterday in advance of a 2pm deadline-to-vacate order signed by Governor Doug Burgum.

The thousands of native peoples from around the world who joined the protests represented the vanguard of a much broader grassroots protest movement.

Opposition not just to oil, but to the increasingly soul-less coalition of extremist political and social conservatives whose rigid ideology now serves the interests of the massive corporate monarchies that rule over the various fiefdoms of banking, fossil fuel and petrochemical production, agriculture, manufacturing, mining and telecommunications.  

The 150 or so protesters who walked arm-in-arm out of the snow and mud covered grounds of the Oceti Sakowin camp Wednesday afternoon ( under the eyes of over a hundred law enforcement officers from different states) were still singing, chanting and most importantly - standing.

With a federal court having ruled that drilling to run pipelines that will carry crude oil directly beneath a fresh water source the Sioux share with 20 million other people can proceed, this particular battle is done for now.

But the war of non-violent resistance is not over.

Hundreds of other protesters who defiantly stuck out the freezing temperatures of the winter in support of the sovereign rights of the Standing Rock Sioux are reportedly moving on to other protest camps in the area that have been set up on private land where government officials cannot order them off.

New EPA administrator Scott Pruitt

Others will take the next stage of the fight to court rooms and legislative chambers.

Even if many of those too are stacked with conservative Republicans who've shown a willingness to bend the law to the will of the alliance of oil companies, pipeline manufacturers and banks behind the DAPL regardless of the cost to human and environmental health.

Republicans like the climate change denying lackey of the oil industry Scott Pruitt.


After being sworn in last Friday as the administrator of the same federal agency he repeatedly sued as the attorney general of Oklahoma, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, addressed members of his staff for the first time on Tuesday.

As Rebecca Leber reported for Mother Jones on Tuesday, Pruitt delivered a generic 11-minute speech that was short on policy specifics and gave no indication of what the Trump administration has in mind for the EPA's role in addressing climate change.

As America comes to grip with the reality of a man who denies the existence of climate change heading up the government agency charged with protecting the environment, his confirmation doesn't bode well for grassroots environmental groups opposing oil and natural gas pipeline projects around the nation.

In the same way that an executive order issued by the White House has tasked members of Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) to begin an unprecedented roundup of illegal immigrants in the United States, regardless of how long they've been here or whether they've committed a criminal offense, in the wake of the inauguration on January 20th, efforts to remove the Standing Rock protesters increased in some unsettling ways.

   CLDC attorney Lauren Regan

According to an article posted on The Guardian back on February 10th, Lauren Regan, the executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Oregon reported that at least three different DAPL protesters were contacted directly by agents from the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) to ask them for information about the Standing Rock protests.

As she told The Guardian, "From the very beginning, law enforcement has attempted to justify it's militarized presence...by making false allegations that somehow these water protectors were violent." 

Rumors about FBI surveillance of Standing Rock protesters had been swirling on social media just days after Trump's inauguration.



An interview on the Tuesday February 7th episode of The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC with Cora Currier and Trevor Arronson, contributing writers to The Intercept, offered some chilling perspective and insight on the kinds of tactics the FBI likely used in Standing Rock to monitor protesters and undermine demonstrators.

Click the link above if you have a few minutes, it's definitely worth a listen.

Currier's and Arronson's contribution to an Intercept series called 'The FBI's Secret Rules', uncovered some fascinating details on the scope of FBI surveillance.

For example, they noted that in the late 60's and early 70's, the FBI employed approximately 1,600 informants as part of their notorious COINTELPRO program of domestic surveillance of groups they deemed subversive; including Civil Rights activists, Black Panther Party members, Vietnam War protesters, feminist organizations and the KKK.

By the post-911 era when the U.S. government was appropriating billions to anti-terrorism and homeland security efforts, the number of FBI informants had soared to over 15,000 - so it's fair to assume that the FBI had informants in place at the Standing Rock protests.

Oceti Sakowin camp structures burning on Wednesday

Members of local law enforcement were engaged in the same kinds of harassment tactics too.

A Monday February 13th article posted on the Website of
 The Guardian chronicled claims by several members of the veterans activist group VeteransRespond that local police stopped their vehicles simply for having out of state plates and conducted bogus searches.




Flagrantly illegal police searches that turned up small amounts of weed that some of the vets take for medical reasons to alleviate symptoms of PTSD which were used to arrest and detain the protesters.

As my friend James, who lives on the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma, reminded me the other night, Native Americans have been viewed as terrorist suspects by the U.S. government since long before the highly-publicized 1973 occupation of the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota by some 200 Oglala Lakota and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

As I write this late Wednesday night, there are reports that at least 50 to 75 protesters remain inside the Standing Rock protest camp, though local law enforcement have made no efforts to forcefully remove them even though the governor's order to evacuate expired at 2pm on Wednesday.

Despite the outcome, the Standing Rock protests brought global attention to both the sovereignty of indigenous peoples as well as the environmental dangers posed by the slew of oil and natural gas  pipeline projects being constructed across the United States, Canada and Mexico.

The intentional burning of temporary wooden structures at the Oceti Sakowin protest camp by departing protesters yesterday is symbolic.

Protesters claimed the burning of those structures was an "ending prayer", maybe it's meant to symbolize the end of this latest chapter of the ongoing war for Native American sovereignty.

The global support that the Standing Rock Sioux garnered raised awareness of the struggle for the rights of indigenous peoples in America and around the globe - but it also helped to galvanize a much broader protest movement that made its presence known on January 21st.

What happened in Cannon Ball, North Dakota reaffirms the power of peaceful protest, civil disobedience and non-violent resistance at a time when millions of Americans are gearing up to oppose the policies of the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress.

A chapter may have ended in the Sakowin camp with the assistance of the corpratocracy, federal and state entities including the FBI, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, federal courts and local law enforcement from multiple states.

But this story is far from over.

As one of the camp's leaders Phyllis Young noted in an interview, "The camps will continue, freedom is in our DNA, and we have no choice but to continue the struggle."

Dishonorable Dealings In the Dakotas?

The massive Crazy Horse Monument, Black Hills, SD

Even before the Sacred Black Hills territory was stripped away from the Great Sioux Reservation by an Act of Congress passed on February 28, 1877, an act which violated Article 2 of the Treaty of Fort Laramie signed nine years before on April 29, 1868, lawmakers and the federal courts (in conjunction with private interests) have consistently conspired to systematically violate the rights of the Sioux.


In what would become an unfortunate portent of the future, it was the discovery of gold in the Black Hills by European prospectors in 1874 that sparked the decision by the U.S. government to move the Sioux from the same very territory which had been promised to them by said government in perpetuity just over a decade before.

In fact, a 1980 Supreme Court Case decision in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians ruled that the Sioux had been unfairly stripped of their ownership of the Black Hills territory in 1877.

The high court awarded the Sioux the value of that land in 1877 plus interest, $106 million, but in a testament to their resolve, the Sioux refused to take it; preferring to wait to gain back their rightful ownership of the Black Hills.

That award has been held in trust in the U.S. Treasury and is reportedly worth over a $1 billion today.

In their majority opinion the Supreme Court wrote in part, "A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history."

Construction continues near a DAPL protest camp  

Could the justices who handed down that decision 37 years ago have predicted the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the 21st century?

Probably not - but history often repeats itself.

And construction on that controversial stretch of pipeline slated to carry another valuable natural resource, oil, under yet another stretch of land sacred to the Sioux, began again last Thursday.

Aided by another court decision.

As Nika Knight reported in an article for CommonDreams.org, on Monday U.S. District Judge James Boasberg denied an emergency request by lawyers representing the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux to halt contruction of the pipeline.

With that ruling, contractors hired by Energy Transfer Partners (the company building the DAPL), can continue to prepare to run a stretch of pipeline directly beneath Lake Oahe - a resevoir near Cannon Ball, North Dakota near the Missouri River.

Once completed, hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil a day will flow through that pipeline underneath a source of fresh water for some 20 million people.

Aside from the obvious environmental danger, lawyers for the Sioux also tried to make the case that the presence of the pipeline is an infringement on their religious rights because the oil will flow next to sacred lands.

But Judge Boasberg played down their concerns, saying in part, "as long as oil isn't flowing through the pipeline, there is no imminent harm to the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Sioux tribes."

But it's not Judge Boasberg's fresh water supply that will be threatened by an oil pipeline spill.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg 

Judge Boasberg was appointed by President Obama.

But as CounterPunch.org reports, he is, by virtue of his upbringing, a child of privilege and means.

He prepped at St. Albans, one of the most prestigious private schools in the D.C. area, and attended Yale and Oxford.

Clearly he's a learned man with extensive legal experience and a keen intellect.

But it's still fair and reasonable to ask the question: will he follow the law in this case?

Should the disturbing pattern of infringements upon Sioux tribal lands and sovereignty by the U.S. government and private interests motivated by profit in the 19th century be taken into account in the legal challenges to the DAPL?

Or will this scion of the establishment be more swayed by the collective legal muscle of the corporate lawyers working on behalf of Energy Transfer Partners and the group of banks (including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, HSBC and Goldman Sachs) that backed construction of the project with a $3.75 billion line of credit?

In all fairness to Judge Boasberg, he is scheduled to hear arguments at a hearing on February 27th to rule on the Sioux's request for an injunction against the U.S. Army Corps for their having granted the final easement that allowed ETP's contractors to begin drilling under Lake Oahe.

He also ordered ETP to provide updates to the court on a weekly basis so that all concerned will know exactly when oil will actually being to flow through the pipeline.

But those are all big "if's" considering how the federal government stripped the Sioux of the Black Hills 140 years ago.

And in the meantime, the forces of American of corporatocracy are quietly stirring in the vast open stretches around Cannonball, North Dakota near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation - and beyond.