A #NoDAPL water protection effort in North Dakota was met by another big law enforcement response on November 2, 2016. Photo by Rob Wilson [GoFundMe]
What about any violence at Cannon Ball?
By Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
For the Native Sun News Today
nativesunnews.today The news stories that promote the fear of violence in Indian Country as it concerns the Dakota Access Pipeline movement’s defense of the Missouri River at Canon Ball, can be recognized as the media and political strategy that has always been used against Indian protests of federal and state Indian Policy for two hundred years. Headlines like A HOPE FOR PEACE; A FEAR OF VIOLENCE in today’s media are historical. They were written when Gen. G. Custer invaded treaty land in 1876 and indigenous tribal governments objected. They were written when white Minnesota settlers moved in on the Santee’s (uninvited) and threw hundreds of Indians in prisons for long sentences in order to claim the land. They were written when the American Indian Movement objected to the destruction of the Missouri River in the 1960s, and the passage of legislation that promoted “Relocation”, and “Allotment”, and “Jurisdiction”, and “Termination”, and a hundred other crimes against the People. The length and size of the police operation in North Dakota from official communities should assure white citizens who like their relatives, the pioneer invaders who cried: The Indians are coming, the Indians are coming” and then slaughtered thousands of those they feared, that they and their white needs will be protected. History is replete with evidence that native peoples are simply trying to live on their ancestral homelands.
Read the rest of the story on the Native Sun News Today website: What about any violence at Cannon Ball? (Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is a retired professor of Native studies, having taught at Eastern Washington University, University of California-Davis, and Arizona State University. She has published 14 books, with the latest being A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations. Born and raised at Ft. Thompson, South Dakota, she is a member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe. She is also Santee Sioux and Yankton Sioux.) Copyright permission Native Sun News
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