Standing with Standing Rock to Defend & Protect DAPL Protesters

Water is LIFE
Dakota Access Pipeline Rally
Washington Monument - November 27, 2016
Photo by thrasher

The Battle for Standing Rock continues to simmer as the confrontation heads towards a boil.

During Thanksgiving Week, Native Americans were tear-gassed and hosed with water cannons in sub freezing temperatures. Despite a media blackout, the alternative media is telling somebody the news.

Water cannon sprayed on protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)

Members of the Sioux Nation in Standing Rock, North Dakota, have been attacked with tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons in subfreezing temperatures as they protested an oil pipeline that threatens to contaminate their water and disrupt their sacred sites. Approximately 300 Native American and non-native protesters were injured in one 10-hour clash with law enforcement last Sunday evening. 26 were taken to hospitals with severe head and limb wounds, eye trauma, internal bleeding and hypothermia from being doused with water in 22-degree weather.

“Basically, it’s an act of war,” said Frank Sanchez, a delegate from the Yankton Sioux Tribe.

But reinforcements are on the way as U.S. Armed Forces veterans are heeding to calls to stand in support of the Indigenous protesters.

Organizer Wes Clark, Jr., best known as co-host of the Young Turks show, has stated that veterans will be willing to take a bullet if need be. The former U.S. Army officer has called the Standing Rock resistance “the most important event up to this time in human history.”

Titled “Veterans Stand for Standing Rock,” the Facebook page announces that hundreds of veterans will be joining the protesters from Dec. 4 to Dec. 7.

The Facebook group was formed with a five-paragraph military operation order that clearly delineated the “opposing forces” – “Morton County Sheriff’s office combined with multiple state police agencies and private security contractors.”

According to their GoFundMe Page, they are calling for “peaceful, unarmed militia…(to) defend the water protectors from assault and intimidation at the hands of the militarized police force and DAPL security.”

“Everyday becomes more evident that the defenders of America must stand with the Water Protectors. Let’s stop this savage injustice being committed right here at home,” it reads.

We hear at Thrasher's Wheat fully support the protests at Standing Rock and the call for veterans to stand alongside the brave protesters in the face of a most brutal and inhumane policing response that has seen peaceful, lawful protesters assailed with rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannons, and attack dogs. This is a battle that must be fought and won if any semblance of democracy, human rights and rule of law is to be preserved.

“This country is repressing our people,” says Michael A. Wood Jr., a Marine Corps veteran who recently retired from the Baltimore police force to work toward reforming law enforcement. “If we’re going to be heroes, if we’re really going to be those veterans that this country praises, well, then we need to do the things that we actually said we’re going to do when we took the oath to defend the Constitution from enemies foreign and domestic,” he asserted about his plans to go to Standing Rock.

Clark, explained that aside from the flagrant violations protesters are subject to in North Dakota, Natives are especially deserving of veteran support:

“First Americans have served in the Unites States Military, defending the soil of our homelands, at a greater percentage than any other group of Americans. There is no other people more deserving of veteran support,” he said.

Once there, the  veterans intend to engage in a traditional native healing ceremony with protesters, with whom they have been coordinating, according to the veterans. Then, protective gear like gas masks and body armor will be issued to anyone who needs it. The soldiers will march to bagpipes and Sioux war songs as they head to the banks of the Missouri River to meet police.

“Then, the veterans and their allies — or at least the ones who are brave enough — will lock arms and cross the river in a ‘massive line’ for their ‘first encounter’ with the ‘opposing forces.’”

Though the veterans have adopted a strict policy of nonviolence, they refuse to back down and apparently hope to use their military status to spotlight the egregious behavior of the police.

“We’ll have those people who will recognize that they’re not willing to take a bullet, and those who recognize that they are,” says Wood Jr. “It’s okay if some of them step back, but Wes and I have no intention of doing so.”

"The violence isn't coming from the protesters," Yakaitis told the Record Journal. "It's coming from the black ops security infiltrators who have come in to start violence so that the pipeline company and the police can point at us and say it's our fault."

Chatting w/ Dave Matthews on Pipelines, Farm Aid and more
photo by thrashette

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