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Mní wičhóni. Water is life. Whether in the Lakota language or English, it’s a simple truth.
In North Dakota, “Water is Life” banners flew over the indigenous resistance camps that sprang up in 2016 at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers, opposing construction of DAPL, the Dakota Access Pipeline. Water protectors from over 200 native tribes across the Americas arrived, along with thousands of their allies. They called DAPL “the black snake,” a 1,168-mile long pipeline designed to carry over half a million barrels of fracked oil per day from North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields through North and South Dakota and Iowa to Illinois, bound for refineries on the Gulf Coast. DAPL’s passage through unceded Lakota territory, underneath the Missouri River at Lake Oahe, threatened the water on which the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe depends, along with 17 million people downriver.
Over Labor Day weekend 2016, we travelled to Standing Rock with our Democracy Now! news colleagues to report on the pipeline resistance. As indigenous water protectors put their bodies on the line, blocking destruction of sacred sites by DAPL bulldozers, we documented DAPL’s private security forces pepper spraying, beating and unleashing attack dogs on the nonviolent protesters. One dog had blood... Read More →
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