By Brian Trautman

December 8, 2016 (Cannonball, North Dakota) -- Over the past eight months, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of North Dakota have been joined by more than 200 allied tribes and tens of thousands of non-Native activists for a nonviolent resistance campaign against Energy Transfer Partners’ (ETP) $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The pipeline, which has been projected to transport at least 470,000 barrels of oil per day over 1,100 miles from the Bakken oil field to an existing hub in Illinois for delivery to refineries on the Gulf Coast, was rerouted in 2014 from north of Bismarck to the south, taking it through unceded treaty lands of the Sioux. Pipeline construction over this altered route desecrated sacred ancestral sites, and, until last Sunday, was slated to cross the Missouri River at the Lake Oahe reservoir, which would have threatened the safety of the drinking water of the Standing Rock Sioux and millions of people downstream.

By Miriam Raftery

“Bring body armor, gas masks, earplugs (we may be facing a sound cannon) but no drugs, alcohol or weapons…if we don’t stop it, who will?”—Wesley Clark Jr., a veteran and son of retired four-star U.S. Army General Wesley Clark Sr., former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe

November 23, 2016 (Cannonball, North Dakota) – Nearly 1,000 U.S. military veterans have signed to join  Veterans for Standing Rock December 4-7 to support Native American tribes standing up to protect clean water and halt the Dakota Access oil pipeline that they fear will burst and contaminate the Missouri River.  The pipeline also desecrates sacred Standing Rock Sioux sites.

The water protector activists have faced brutality at the hands of a militarized police force in recent days, including spraying a water cannon in below-freezing temperatures.  Three hundred people have been injured and 26 hospitalized, including a 21-year-old girl hit by a concussion grenade whose bone was shattered and now faces possible amputation of her arm.