(first airdate: December 5, 2016) In a surprising eleventh-hour announcement with an extraordinary timing, the Army Corps of Engineers on Sunday afternoon declared that it would not grant an easement for the nearly complete and hotly contested Dakota Access Pipeline to cross the Missouri River at Lake Oahe, the reservoir from which the Lakota Sioux of the Standing Rock Reservation draw their drinking water–a plan which has drawn many months of protest from hundreds of tribes and many thousands of others from around the nation and the world in a conflict that has thrown in sharp relief issues from the hundreds of years of transgressions against Native American treaty rights to the very current conflict between the commercial interests of big oil and the rights of everyone to a livable planet.
What made the Army Corps’ Sunday announcement particularly peculiar was that it came literally on the eve of a deadline the same agency had set for the evacuation of Oceti Sakowin, the largest of three encampments—makeshift towns, really — that have been set up to carry out what may be the longest single sustained example of civil disobedience in American History.
In last week’s KPTZ Compass, we covered the departure from Port Townsend of a caravan bringing support to that effort on Thanksgiving week. Among that contingent was KPTZ Correspondent Chris Bricker, who this week brings us a view from on the ground at Standing Rock.
P.S. In a live interview following this week’s KPTZ Compass, KPTZ DJ and Correspondent Cris Bricker, Pacific Northwest Standing Rock delegation spokesperson Megan Claflin, and local Standing Rock “truth-keeper” and webmaster Lois Barnett join KPTZ News Director Steve Evans in a discussion of the Army Corps of Engineer’s decision to deny an easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross the Missouri River on Sioux Treaty Land.
