By Jack Dugan
The Dakota Access Pipeline, after months of media neglect, has emerged amid headlines once again. Images of road blocks, tire fires, and beaten protesters have been saturating news feeds, all a result of the heavy-handed police-led suppression of the most prominent protest camp in North Dakota.
The Standing Rock camp has evolved drastically since the first tents were pitched. What was once a modest settlement, initially occupied mostly by members of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation, has since grown into something much larger and now considered the largest gathering of Native Nations in more than a century.
As the completion of the pipeline rapidly nears, police presence in the area has also grown significantly. What was once only private security is now police officers from numerous counties and states. With them they’ve brought pepper spray, rubber bullets, clubs, a sound cannon, and armored vehicles. This is coupled with the infamous DAPL security, whom are equipped with automatic rifles and attack dogs. There are no words to describe the exorbitance of this force.
The scene looks more akin to a military invasion than crowd control. The crowd has remained entirely peaceful, only placing prayer and nonviolent bodies between their sacred land and the pipeline.
The repression has been the most violent chapter in the story thus far. Dozens of the protesters attacked with pepper spray, their arms and hands broken with clubs, men and women then jumped and dragged zip-tied into police vehicles, ultimately to end up in jail.
Heavy-handed crowd work has become an unfortunate normality with law enforcement in protest situation, but this specific situation is unique. This is a militarized police force invading the Sioux Nation’s sovereign land to protect the economic interests of a private oil company.
The situation inflames the wounds inflicted the last time a group of armed white men invaded native lands. This is a glimpse of the Native American genocide once perpetrated by vindictive self-righteous 18th- and 19th-century colonizers. This pipeline and the police presence is a continuation of this colonist mentality: the economic benefits of raw material, stripped from a land in environmentally detrimental ways, trumps the dignity and humanity of the people who rightfully call that land home.
The Atlantic reports that “the land beneath the pipeline was accorded to Sioux peoples by the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. Eleven years later, the U.S. government incited and won the Great Sioux War, and ‘renegotiated’ a new treaty with the Sioux under threat of starvation. In that document, the tribe ceded much of the Laramie land, including the Black Hills of South Dakota, where many whites believed there to be gold.” The presence of both the militarized police and the construction of this pipeline has has become just another blunder in a long history of deceit.
To physically beat down a people who are so justified in their dissent is draconian. To utilize such grandiose technologies of oppression on those whom are only equipped with prayer and the desperation to save what little they have left is despotic. The police, along with the states and counties that sent them to Standing Rock, are standing on the wrong side of history.