UPDATE: Shortly after this program was aired, and after this article linking to the podcast was posted, a group of praying Lakota at the Standing Rock protest site were confronted by at least 40 deputies of the Monroe County ND Sheriff’s office. They reported that the deputies — in full riot gear — aimed their guns at the unarmed men, women and children, and arrested 21 of them. One elderly Lakota woman in her 80s reported that in all her life living on the reservation “I never had a gun pointed at me until these sheriff’s did it.” She called the experience “terrifying.”
A Vietnam-era veteran living abroad who is Lakota said he fears that the current Standing Rock resistance movement could end in another massacre. He says that a friend from the days of the ’73 AIM occupation in Wounded Knee wrote him saying, “Standing Rock is not Wounded Knee 1973 –- they’re not armed, they have no cover, no security. This is more like the first Wounded Knee.” That Wounded Knee was when US Army troops in 1890 raided a Lakota encampment and massacred some 300 Lakota men, women and children.
Hopefully such an atrocity will not happen again, but the Monroe County Sheriff’s action is not a good sign. Increased support and solidarity, and demands for more media attention to this standoff, are the best defense in this latest struggle of America’s indigenous people.
Sioux resistance continues at Standing Rock, ND (L) and image of Keith Scott at the moment he was shot dead by Charlotte NC police
Levi Rickert, founder, publisher and editor of Native News Online, talks with “This Can’t Be Happening!: radio host Dave Lindorff about the latest developments at Standing Rock, North Dakota, where the Sioux People are still taking a rock-solid stand against efforts by the federal government and the oil industry to run a crude oil pipeline from North Dakota’s Bakkan oilfield south to St. Louis through Sioux lands and sacred sites. Rickert also talks about a meeting of tribal representatives from the 500 recognized Indian tribes in the US with Washington government agencies to hammer out a protocol for having “substantive” discussions between tribes and government agencies whenever a decision is going to impact them.
Rickert talks about how the whole indigenous community, including indigenous people in other parts of the world as remote as New Zealand and the Arctic, are sending support to Standing Rock to help Sioux activists and their supporters prepare for the long haul as cold weather starts to move into the prairie.
Lindorff also segues into a discussion of the worsening slaughter of unarmed people — mostly people of color — in the US by increasingly militarized and gratuitously violent state, county, local and federal police. To hear the whole hour-long program, please go to the Progressive Radio News’ This Can’t Be Happening! podcast of the show, which aired Wednesday.