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Militarised police have been called in to protect the Dakota Access Pipeline from First Peoples protesters, but the problem is that these agents of Uncle Sam aren’t even in the United States. They are invading sovereign Sioux territory.
If you have been tuning into Democracy Now over the past few weeks you will be aware of the escalating stand-off in Indian Country over the railroading of the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline through Native American reservations. If you haven’t been looking at any alternative media then you probably haven’t heard a word about it. So far the United States’ government has contracted the Texas based gas and propane giant Energy Transfer to construct a pipeline to move crude oil from North Dakota to refining plants in Illinois in a bid to safeguard domestic oil supply.
This oil and gas is being sources at Bakken and Three Forks in North Dakota and these areas have been further tapped for their oil and shale gas resources by intensive hydro-fracking, causing serious environmental damage and polluting the water table. Not everyone is happy with this pipeline – in particular the indigenous Lakotah Sioux population whose land is being pillaged. Supporters of the pipeline may well scoff at these pesky natives, but the problem is that it is their land.
An area roughly the size of modern day Syria – including North and South Dakota – is legally the sovereign territory of the Lakotah Sioux. In 1868 the US government signed the Treaty of Laramie, formally recognising the independence of Lakotah. This treaty has never been rescinded, just routinely ignored by the United States in its drive to annihilate the Native American, or First Peoples, population. So technically what is happening right now across these so-called “reservations” is another invasion of the Republic of Lakotah.
Uncle Sam is on the march right now in search of every available source of exploitable oil, devastating communities clean across the globe. So long as the Lakotah Sioux or the people of Syria and Iraq have oil for the plundering then the US government will put the interests of money and profit before the needs of human beings and the environment. What we are watching right now happening to the Lakotah people is just another example of the brutality of the United States and its greed for oil, a force that is moving us ever closer to a serious international conflict with Russia and a world so polluted t won’t be worth fighting for anymore.
Native American Resistance Camp Fights Oil Pipeline
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