#nodakotaaccess

[winkawpo]

[berniesrevolution]

A reminder of the difference between equally non-violent protests when the protestors are majority black and majority white in terms of the police.

And if you need a reminder of what happens when it’s non-violent Native Americans well…

[berniesrevolution]

Malia Obama joins Dakota Access pipeline protest at Sundance

President Obama’s 18-year-old daughter leaves family vacation earlier to go to Sundance, before starting her internship with film producer Harvey Weinstein in February.

Malia Obama joined a protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline on Monday. Looks like the Obamas aren’t done with politics.

The 18-year-old daughter of recent President Obama was praised by fellow protester, Shailene Woodley, who also attended the event at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

“It was amazing to see Malia,” the actress told Democracy Now.

“To witness a human being and a woman coming into her own outside of her family and outside of the attachments that this country has on her, but someone who’s willing to participate in democracy because she chooses to,” Woodley said. “Because she recognizes, regardless of her last name, that if she doesn’t participate in democracy, there will be no world for her future children.”

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[berniesrevolution]

This victory is completely due to the great work of Kshama Sawant and the Socialist Alternative Party along with left-wing activists!

#DivestDAPL

[berniesrevolution]

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

Last week, following President Donald Trump’s executive memo, the Army Corps of Engineers granted Dakota Access an easement to drill under the Missouri River just north of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota. For months, Standing Rock has led a coalition in vehement opposition to the proposed pipeline, which crosses lands promised to the Great Sioux Nation under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. The pipe has already desecrated the graves of Standing Rock ancestors and now threatens the community’s water supply.

The first few weeks of Trump’s presidency have brought the injustices of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy long festering beneath the surface of American society out into the open, and placed them on center stage. Trump’s Standing Rock decision forces us to confront another foundational injustice, one rarely if ever discussed in contemporary politics: colonialism.

For many, it is contentious and even offensive to suggest that colonialism endures in the present. In the American popular imagination, colonialism ended either when the thirteen colonies declared independence from Britain in 1776, or when the frontier closed and open warfare against indigenous nations ceased following the massacre of more than three hundred Lakota at Wounded Knee in 1890. Colonialism, according to these narratives, is Ancient History.

But ongoing colonialism is the central injustice that the indigenous movement resists and seeks to change. As indigenous poet and activist Bobbi Sykes once quipped, “What? Postcolonial? Have they left yet?”

If the Left is to understand and stand in solidarity with Standing Rock and the indigenous movement, it must take colonialism seriously.

American colonialism is rooted in the theft of land from indigenous people. It endures in the ongoing disavowal of indigenous sovereignty. Indigenous presence must be contained, removed, and then forgotten so that the United States can continue to live on, and profit from, lands taken from indigenous people.

Wiping out any trace of indigenous peoples allows the continent’s settlers to push forward without any moral reckoning, and without a thought or word about recognition, reparations, or repatriation. It enables the proliferation of myths, dreams, and even utopias predicated on fantasies of free land without a prior and rightful guardian.

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[winkawpo]

[berniesrevolution]

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

For Indians, defeat in the face of American Progress and Manifest Destiny was supposed to be a foregone conclusion.

In John Gast’s iconic 1872 painting “American Progress,” a youthful blonde woman clutching a schoolbook in her right hand and laying down telegraph wire with her left shepherds prospectors, farmers, and settlers westward as tribes and wildlife flee before her advance.

In the more familiar Spaghetti Western version of the same tale, Indians rise up out of the wilderness, put up a fierce but ultimately tragic fight, and then succumb to the inevitability of Cowboy Progress.

Last year, an indigenous-led coalition just north of the Standing Rock reservation along the banks of the Missouri and Cannonball rivers revived frontier insurgency. This time, the America they confronted was clutching the aspiration for “energy independence” in her right hand and laying down the Dakota Access pipeline with her left. She shepherded forward Energy Transfer Partners CEO, Dallas billionaire, and robber baron Kelcy Warren, alongside North Dakota governor Jack Dalrymple — a modern-day Custer who unleashed a militarized police force on unarmed water protectors.

With a brutal Great Plains winter weeks away, America braced for the inevitable. “How can this possibly end well?” the New York Timeseditorial board asked in November.

But then the seemingly impossible happened. At the eleventh hour, the Department of the Army denied an essential easement that would’ve allowed the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross under the Missouri River and ordered an Environmental Impact Statement to assess and consider alternative routes for the project.

(Continue Reading)

[hearthfire-heartfire]

Super simple instructions! Everything is on the infographic.

From the Indigenous Rising FB page:

“Via Chairman Dave Archambault and Standing Rock Sioux Tribe: Dear Water Protectors + Standing Rock Supporters, On December 5, I announced to the world that the US Army Corps would not grant the the final easement necessary for the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline. You made that happen. Now we need your help again. The easement was not granted with the understanding that the Army Corps would now require an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). The EIS more fully assesses the risks of building a pipeline so close to our water supply than the previous survey method employed by Energy Transfer Partners. The immediate next step following the announcement was for the Army Corps to publish a notice of intent to start the EIS in the Federal Register. Doing so helps solidify the decision, setting in motion a thorough regulatory process, thus making it harder for a new administration to reverse. A month later, the Army Corps has still not taken this critical first step. Time is now running out. Join us in a collective call to action; call the Army Corps and ask them to take action - not only for us, the Standing Rock Sioux - but for the 17 million Americans who live downstream of the pipeline. NOW is the time for an EIS. It must be in motion before the end of this administration. With deep gratitude, Chairman Dave Archambault ll Army Corps comment line: [phone]“