Natives Brutalized by Police at Standing Rock — Happy Thanksgiving!

While people across the country celebrate Thanksgiving, there are a number of water protectors at Standing Rock in North Dakota claiming their independence from the tyranny cast upon them by an oil cartel, Dakota Access, working closely with police. Many are being brutalized by Morton County Sheriff deputies for attempting to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, which stands as a major threat to their water.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, along with allies from across the country, are stopping the Dakota Access Pipeline, not as an act of environmental activism but rather for the preservation of life. The Missouri River and Lake Oahe reservoir are likely to experience oil contamination, and this threatens all life in the area.

Demonstrating a critical lack of concern for human life and the pursuit of greed, Dakota Access is currently working with police to intimidate and brutalize the water protectors. Following centuries of exploitation, brutalization, and genocide, state actors are once again reviving the brutal oppression of Native people.

As Claire Bernish of The Free Thought Project reports:

But perhaps the only greater irony than weaponizing water against Native American water protectors is its occurrence during President Obama’s token proclamation of November as Native American Heritage Month — an utterly sardonic and hollow gesture, considering the deafening silence from the White House about the vigilantism against Native Americans by police protecting construction of a pipeline only Big Oil wants.

On second thought, maybe that’s the point. For the government of the United States, the heritage of Native Americans has been little more than an obstacle to complete domination of land. Its Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 — which should have ceded the very land to Indigenous peoples where the battle for clean water presently plays out — was fast abandoned with the discovery of gold in South Dakota’s Black Hills, and has been strategically trimmed when convenient ever since.

What better way for the State to celebrate Thanksgiving Day during Native American Heritage Month than by perpetrating or ignoring further brutalization and exploitation of peoples whose only crime was to have inhabited these lands centuries before Europeans arrived.

While the world watches in horror as a shameful history repeats itself in North Dakota, the first African American President of the United States fecklessly conjures the specter of genocide — also remaining embarrassingly tight-lipped on the parallel ghost of water weaponized against black civil rights protesters in the 1960s.