Thread: PIPELINE HALTED: Feds block proposed route of Dakota Access pipeline after protests

Historic offshore oil lease near U.S./Mexico border to benefit South Texas

8 activists arrested during pipeline protest

By - Associated Press - Monday, December 5, 2016

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) - Police say eight activists have been accused of trespassing during a Vermont protest against construction of an oil pipeline in North Dakota.

About 120 protesters demonstrated outside the TD Bank branch and drive-thru in Montpelier Monday.

They’re targeting TD Bank because its parent company loaned money to the pipeline developers.

Police say the eight arrested refused to leave the bank’s lobby when the bank decided to close for the day.

The Army Corps of Engineers has denied a permit for the pipeline to cross under a Missouri River reservoir, a plan that the Standing Rock Sioux tribe says would have threatened its drinking water and cultural sites.

TD Bank has said it supports “responsible energy development” and employs “due diligence” in its lending and investing activities relating to energy production.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...eline-protest/

‘Colossal damage’: Navajo Nation sues US govt for $160mn over Colorado mine spill

Published time: 6 Dec, 2016 07:38


Aug. 6, 2015 - Durango, Colorado, U.S. - People kayak in the Animas River near Durango, Colo., in water colored from a mine waste spill. © Jerry Mcbride / Zumapress / Global Look Press

The Navajo Nation has filed a $160 million lawsuit against the US government for damages and ongoing injuries caused by an August 2015 mine spill which released millions of gallons of toxic waste near the tribe’s territory.

The filing, announced in a Monday press release, claims that the Gold King Mine spill negatively impacted communities along the San Juan River on Navajo Nation territory when it released millions of gallons of toxic waste – including lead, arsenic, and mercury – into the nearby Animas River, ultimately transforming the connecting San Juan River from a “life-giver and protector” to a “threat” to the Navajo people, crops, and animals.


Trump advisers propose tribes ‘privatize’ reservations

“In particular, it has impaired our ability to maintain the cultural, ceremonial, and spiritual practices that undergird the Navajo way of life. Through this claim and our corresponding lawsuit, we are demanding that the US government finally provide the Navajo Nation relief,” Navajo Nation Attorney General Ethel Branch said in the release, according to USA Today.

The lawsuit is aimed at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has claimed responsibility for the spill. It seeks $159 million in damages, as well as an additional sum of around $3.2 million to cover expenses already submitted to the EPA which have yet to be reimbursed.

A seven-page letter from the tribe to the EPA claims officer Kenneth Redden describes what happened the day of the spill, noting that “shortly after beginning the excavation, the operator hit a spurt of water. Within minutes, a massive volume of toxic water poured out of the mine uncontrollably."

It also mentions video footage during the blowout at the mine near Silverton, Colorado, in which a worker reportedly said “What do we do now?” It goes on to accuse the EPA of having “insufficient emergency protocols in place” and being “entirely unprepared to deal with the colossal damage it had unleashed.”


Obama administration to pay $500mn settlement to Native American tribes

The letter also claims the agency failed to notify the reservation’s residents of the spill for “nearly two days,” and accuses it of ignoring the “years-long buildup of contaminants in the Gold King Mine, despite being on notice of the risk of a blowout.”

The document stresses that the spill “continues to harm the Navajo Nation and will do so for years to come,” noting the ongoing need for medical monitoring, mental health counseling, ecological monitoring, and other programs aimed at identifying and addressing the “near and long-term impacts on the environment and Navajo people.”
The newest filing comes just four months after the Navajo Nation filed a separate suit against the EPA in August.

The mine spill ultimately tainted waters in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. The Navajo Nation is present in two of those states – southwestern Utah and northwestern New Mexico. The territory, which spans 27,425 square miles, also occupies portions of northeastern Arizona.

The Monday press release came just one day after the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe announced it had emerged victorious in its fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, stating that the US Army Corps of Engineers will not grant permission for the disputed pipeline to cross Lake Oahe, and that alternative routes are being studied.

The pipeline, which the tribe argued would threaten the community’s drinking water and damage sites of sacred significance, was the subject of a fierce standoff between protesters and local authorities, with many officers accused of using violent measures against peaceful demonstrators in recent weeks.

https://www.rt.com/usa/369306-navajo...n-epa-lawsuit/

Yeah, artist, that was awful what happened with that mine. The US government did that, EPA to be exact. EPA needs a major over-haul.

Pipeline protesters forced from camps by blizzard, deadly temperatures

By Derek Hawkins December 7 at 4:57 AM

Activists at Oceti Sakowin camp near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation brace for subzero temperatures expected overnight outside Cannon Ball, N.D., on Tuesday. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

FORT YATES, N.D. — Thick snowfall, howling winds and below-zero temperatures on Tuesday drove thousands of activists out of a camp near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation that for months has been the hub of the movement to stop the Dakota Access oil pipeline.
A blizzard moved in on the Oceti Sakowin camp Monday afternoon, blanketing the area with fresh snow and sending campers scrambling to reinforce the tents, yurts, teepees and wooden enclosures that have housed their growing numbers since April.
[Voices from Standing Rock]
Temperatures dropped below zero overnight and gusts of wind up to 55 mph whipped through the camp. By Tuesday morning, camp organizers and medics were urging activists to take shelter 10 miles away at the Prairie Knights Casino and Resort — one of the only major establishments for miles — saying their lives could be at risk if they stayed.
Teams of volunteers fanned out through the camp, checking tents and vehicles for people in trouble.
“We’re checking every lump,” one volunteer said.
The evacuation of Oceti Sakowin camp came after a momentous and at times chaotic weekend for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and other anti-pipeline activists, who say the $3.8 billion project threatens water supplies and disrupts sacred sites.

Helen Red Feather from the Oglala Sioux tribe and her daughter Kaiya Red Feather, 2, sleep on the floor of the Prairie Knights Casino at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on Tuesday. (Stephanie Keith/Reuters)
Starting late last week, more than 2,000 veterans from around the country flocked to the area to demonstrate against orders from North Dakota officials to clear the camp by Dec. 5. Activists — who call themselves “water protectors” — spent days erecting tents, chopping firewood and bulking up on supplies to prepare for their arrival.
Then on Sunday, the Army Corps delivered a long-awaited victory to pipeline opponents, denying an easement that would have allowed the pipeline to pass under Lake Oahe, a Missouri River reservoir that provides drinking water to the reservation.
[In Dakota Access pipeline controversy, Obama’s ties to tribes played pivotal role]
Celebrations at Standing Rock after pipeline victory
Play Video1:07
Celebration over the Army Corps’s decision was short-lived. After a night of singing and dancing, a crowd of veterans and other activists numbering in the hundreds staged a march on the road outside of camp, but heavy snowfall drove many to seek shelter.
By Tuesday morning, caravans of trucks and SUVs were carrying women, children and seniors out of camp to the casino. At least two community tents, one of them housing more than 20 veterans, had collapsed and flooded with snow. Medics were treating people for hypothermia.
Roads throughout North Dakota were closed or given no-travel advisories by the state’s department of transportation. The only two gas stations in the area surrounding Oceti Sakowin camp had run out of fuel, employees said.
Every room in the Prairie Knights casino was booked for several days, leaving many activists to lay down bedding in the hallways and stairwells. The main event hall was converted into an emergency shelter, with sleeping bags and cots lining the concrete floor and a group of medics triaging patients.
Cheyenne Poor Bear, 36, was selling red T-shirts reading “Standing Rock Solid” for $20 each at a table near the event hall’s entrance. The proceeds, she said, will fund the defense of an activist accused of firing a gun at police during a clash in the fall.
Like many anti-pipeline activists, Poor Bear said she was skeptical that the Army Corps’s decision would halt pipeline construction. Being trapped under the same roof for a night would help steel people for the fight ahead, she said.
“Being here in this weather and being here together is only going to make us stronger,” Poor Bear said. “We need it now. We know this isn’t a real victory.”
Veterans ask for forgiveness at Standing Rock
Play Video1:57
Tribe members held a series of ceremonies on the main event floor. Native Americans in feathered regalia danced, beat animal-hide drums and sang songs throughout the evening.
Hundreds more people chatted and smoked cigarettes down the hall in the casino’s main gambling room, surrounded by blinking slot machines. Alcohol sales were cut off, but the main bar served chicken fingers, french fries and burgers, and a buffet stayed open late into the night.
Julian Boucher, 56, was smoking Winstons and talking with three friends at the bar while an NBA game played on a giant flat-screen behind him. Boucher, of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, said he has made the 280-mile drive from Sisseton, S.D., to the Oceti Sakowin camp more times than he can count in recent months to deliver handmade teepees and other supplies. He said the camp has at least a dozen teepees he sewed and erected himself, and he trusts the structures to protect any stalwarts who chose to stay behind.
“If they’ve got firewood and they keep a fire going, they’ll be all right,” said Boucher, adding that he came to the casino because he worried his truck engine wouldn’t start in the cold. “A lot of people don’t know how warm a teepee is — they’ll hold up to these winds.”
Mimi Davis, a sixth grade teacher from Chicago, drove to camp with two friends in a rented Ford Escape on Friday, saying she was drawn by the sense of unity with the anti-pipeline movement. The trio slept comfortably their first two nights, but on Monday their tent’s tarp blew off and Davis took a bad fall in the snow, soaking her boots and pants.
She spent the night “severely chilled,” she said, then started to panic when she couldn’t warm up. Her friends found her a ride to the casino in the morning, she said, and she was wrapped in an emergency blanket in the medical area. Medics took turns warming her as she lay on a cot, she said.
“I just got uncontrollably cold and couldn’t stop shivering,” said Davis, 45. “It was just brutal.”
The punishing weather and the decision from the Army Corps seemed to bring the latest phase of the anti-pipeline movement to a close. In interviews Monday, Standing Rock Tribal Chairman Dave Archambault urged activists who had come from out of town to return home, saying their “purpose has been served.”
“It’s an opportunity for them to spend this winter, and if they celebrate holidays, to spend the holidays with their families,” he told KFGO. “I know their families are yearning for them to come home.”
In a separate interview with Reuters, Archambault said: “The current administration did the right thing and we need to educate the incoming administration and help them understand the right decision was made.”
Jason LaDucer said he made his first trip to the camp from Tacoma, Wash., in November. Days after he returned home, he saw the widely circulated images of police in riot gear spraying anti-pipeline demonstrators with water cannons and tear gas in subfreezing temperatures.
“When I saw that, I knew I had to come back,” said LaDucer, a 37-year-old from the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe. “I almost felt like a coward staying home.”
LaDucer said he returned this weekend with a contingent of veterans and immediately went to work chopping wood, building teepees and helping elders stay warm. Like many others, he was spending the night in the casino’s event hall Tuesday after the wood stove in his tent died and three wool blankets weren’t enough to keep him warm. He said he plans to keep coming back, and may eventually bring his teenage sons when the weather gets warmer.
“We’re here to protect each other,” LaDucer said. “When everybody’s coming together, it makes your heart explode.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...-temperatures/

FORT YATES, N.D. — Thick snowfall, howling winds and below-zero temperatures on Tuesday drove thousands of activists out of a camp near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation that for months has been the hub of the movement to stop the Dakota Access oil pipeline.

One type of difficult to live land they were sent to - others to the deserts.

Yes, the EPA did that ONE but MOST are from big gas, oil, mining & pharma/ag that DO NOT LIKE TO CLEAN UP OR PAY FOR THEIR TOXIC DESTRUCTION. Exxon Valdez litigation went on for over 20 yrs - still oil there, payout reduced to minimum and Exxon wants to deduct it from the little taxes they pay now. Oil companies are some of the highest profiteers, collect subsidies and should pay more not less.

DuPont chemical in Delaware pollutes for years with many cancer pockets for the residents; they get slapped with a little fine and THEIR board members get to play golf on their ORGANIC golf course. Monsanto is another notorious toxic polluter for years in asst'd industries.

All this expansion of dirty energy forms instead of expanding clean renewable ones is ECOCIDE.....The murder of ecology wherever it occurs when being built or breaking gas or oil pipelines, fire bomb trains. The expansion will cut thru natural habitats for creatures, destroying ecological systems that are vital for a healthy ecology & always the looming danger. These industries are RECKLESS.

The Indian reservations have much land they want to destroy for gas & oil expansion -$1.5 trillion worth. See how this plays out. Some tribes want to have a small amount of gas, oil for the revenue. They made out well with casinos.

Trump advisers propose tribes ‘privatize’reservations

Published time: 5 Dec, 2016 updated 6 Dec, 2016 09:55

Native American advisers to President-elect Donald Trump have proposed that tribal lands be removed from government control. While they say that the move could help impoverished tribes profit from oil and gas, critics have denounced it as “privatization.”

Two leaders of Trump’s Native American Affairs Coalition floated on Monday the idea of giving tribes more control over their land, which Reuters described as “politically explosive.” Some 55.7 million acres (225,000 square kilometers) of Native American lands are being “held in trust” for the tribes by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an agency under the US Department of the Interior.

Trump advisors aim to privatize oil-rich American Indian reservationshttps://t.co/TcagiekUJI#INDIGENOUS#TAIRPpic.twitter.com/wqtCPteJ72
— Indigenous (@AmericanIndian December 5, 2016

"We should take tribal land away from public treatment," said Representative Markwayne Mullin (R-Oklahoma), a Cherokee tribe member and chair of the Coalition. “As long as we can do it without unintended consequences, I think we will have broad support around Indian country.”

Ross Swimmer, a co-chair of the Coalition and former chief of the Cherokee Nation, said it was possible to turn over reservation lands to tribe members without opening them for sale to outsiders.

“It has to be done with an eye toward protecting sovereignty,” he said.


Dakota Access Pipeline ‘akin to cultural genocide’ - DAPL activist to RT (VIDEO)


The tribes are technically sovereign nations under a series of treaties signed with the US government during the 19th century. Natives on the reservations suffer from high rates of poverty, substance abuse and suicide.

However, the tribes also sit on approximately $1.5 trillion worth of energy resources, according to a 2009 estimate by the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, a tribal energy advocacy.

In 2008, BIA officials told Congress that the reservations contained about 20 percent of untapped oil and gas reserves in the US.

The Crow Nation in Montana and the Southern Ute in Colorado have made mining and drilling deals, hoping to generate funding for health, education and infrastructure.

The projects have progressed slowly, however, since federal stewardship of the land translates into a lot of red tape.

"The time it takes to go from lease to production is three times longer on trust lands than on private land," Mark Fox, chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes in Forth Berthold, North Dakota, told Reuters. Their operation produces around 160,000 barrels of oil per day.

"If privatizing has some kind of a meaning that rights are given to private entities over tribal land, then that is worrying," Fox said. "But if it has to do with undoing federal burdens that can occur, there might be some justification."

Privatization is an ugly word among the Native Americans, however. The tribes lost some 90 million acres under the 1887 Dawes Act, which parceled out Native land to individuals. The practice was only abandoned in 1934, with the Indian Reorganization Act.

“Privatization of Indian lands during the 1880s is widely viewed as one of the greatest mistakes in federal Indian policy,” said Kevin Washburn, member of Oklahoma's Chickasaw Nation and assistant secretary for Indian affairs at the Department of the Interior between 2012 and 2015.

The last time the gov't privatized Native land, it was repossessed by the gov't and sold off to white settlers, know your history @RepMullin
— Simmer Down Lewis (@_summerlewis) December 5, 2016

Mullin and Swimmer said the Coalition intends to preserve tribal control of reservation land, and keep the $20 billion or so in federal aid to the tribes flowing. They maintain, however, that the existing arrangement is preventing the tribes from benefiting from the resources in their possession.

"Privatization has been the goal since colonization – to strip Native Nations of their sovereignty," said Tom Goldtooth, head of the Indigenous Environmental Network and one of the organizers of resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline on grounds that it threatened the drinking water of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation. “Our spiritual leaders are opposed to the privatization of our lands, which means the commoditization of the nature, water, air we hold sacred.”

After months of protests by Native Americans and environmentalists, the federal government decided on Sunday to revoke the easement for the construction of the pipeline under Lake Oahe. Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the pipeline, said it would go ahead with the construction nonetheless.

https://www.rt.com/usa/369278-trump-...-reservations/

I'm sure they do but the companies can't go onto the Reservations unless the Tribes agree to it so they're safe from that or should be.

U.S. Army Corps Gives Eviction Notice to Dakota Access Protest Camp