Still Fighting at Standing Rock

“The reality is that the frontlines are in the courthouse now,” said Freeman, a former public defender who moved from Colorado to live in North Dakota full-time to fight the DAPL arrest cases. She is one among a small cadre of lawyers and legal support workers who have put their normal lives on hold in order to seek justice for water protectors facing trial in the conservative, rural midwest. “The celebration and camaraderie of the camp—that’s gone,” she said, “but we’re left to stand with people going into the gauntlet, facing incarceration for being who they are.”

The Dakota Access Pipeline is now fully built, following President Donald Trump's January order to expedite its completion, which reversed President Obama’s block on the project. In June, crude oil began pumping from North Dakota’s Bakken Formation to Illinois, under the Mississippi river and through sacred Lakota land and burial sites.

There has already been one spill, albeit small. A major spill would contaminate the main water source of the Standing Rock Sioux and 17 million people who live downstream.

Last month, a federal judge ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for approving the pipeline’s route and completion, had not adequately considered the impacts of a spill into the Missouri River. The decision is a partial victory for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, but too little too late and oil is still flowing through the DAPL. Since February, anti-pipeline activists have taken their fight from North Dakota to new camps across the U.S., against pipeline construction and fracking operations in Nebraska, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12181154/still-fighting-at-standing-rock/