By Barbara With
Posted Nov. 5, 2016, on Wisconsin Citizens Media Cooperative
Reprinted in part with permission.
STANDING ROCK, N.D. -- It’s been eight months since LaDonna Brave Bull Allard opened her land on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation to establish the Sacred Stone Camp as a way to defend her people and their water against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) using sacred Lakota prayers.
Allard is the tribe’s Historic Preservation Officer. In 1863, her great-great-grandmother Nape Hote Win (Mary Big Moccasin) survived the Whitestone Massacre. The camp represents the continuation of her family’s long history of fighting for survival against resource extraction corporations, the Catholic Church, and the US government. But in organizing this resistance, the Lakota Dakota Nakota peoples known collectively as Oceti Sakowin or the Great Sioux Nation, seems to be at the center of an extraordinary moment in time, a perfect storm for an emerging world-wide peace movement.
Since last April, the camp has grown from a handful of Sioux to an expansive community representing over 300 tribes and various nationalities from around the world. It has also gone from a place of celebration to a war zone, complete with LRAD, rubber bullets, mace, snipers, dog attacks, helicopter and plane harassment, percussion bombs, road blocks, illegal arrests, strip searches, destruction of possessions and sacred items, tazers in the face, emotional trauma, and something called an "Active Denial System," a machine that operates like a giant microwave, heating the skin of the targeted human subjects....CLICK HERE to read the rest of this article on Wisconsin Citizens Media Cooperative.
*Author Barbara With is a citizen journalist from La Pointe, Wis., who traveled recently to North Dakota to visit the Standing Rock water protectors.
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