Front Line Camp, Highway 1806, Outside Cannon Ball, North Dakota, October 27, 2016
A woman’s voice cries out: “We cannot let them cross! For our children and our grandchildren!”
“Stand in prayer!” a man warns, as a call and response rings out: “Black Snake Killers! Black Snake Killers!”
“We are going to stop this pipeline!” a youth boldly declares.
A female elder proclaims firmly in Lakota: “Mni Wiconi!” Water is life.
The voices of hundreds of Native Americans and their allies, punctuated by the high pitched “lilili” ululations of women and the deeper whoops of men, echo out across Highway 1806 and the adjacent field that they have dubbed “Front Line Camp.”
It is high noon, October 27, and the self-proclaimed “water protectors” are refusing to yield what is virtually the last bit of ground remaining in the construction of the 1,400 mile Dakota Access Pipeline. Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind what has emerged as the most controversial oil pipeline project in the United States’ history, has just 9,000 feet of construction on the pipe remaining before it reaches the Missouri River.
Arrayed against the protectors on this day is a vast phalanx of police from multiple states and agencies, National Guardsmen, and armed private security forces working for Energy Transfer Partners. This patchwork force — numbering well into the hundreds — have formed an human-and-machine chain fanned out across road and field. The equipment, weapons, uniforms, and tactics they deploy immediately bring me back to my 2011 and 2012 reporting trips to Afghanistan. In order to report on what I’m seeing here, in fact, I turn to a group of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, including several who are themselves water protectors. The similarity to the wars is no coincidence; James Reese, CEO and founder of TigerSwan, the company “in charge of Dakota Access intelligence and which supervises the overall security,” served as the lead advisor for Special Operations to the Director of the CIA for planning, operations, and integration for the invasion of Afghanistan and as a “High Threat Security Services” director for the State Department in Iraq and Afghanistan.*
[For more of this story, written by Antonia Jahasz, go to https://psmag.com/inside-the-b...9fa77f23e#.xf17ljftm]
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