Red Fawn in Texas lockup
Return of frontier justice?
By Talli Nauman
Native Sun News Today
Health & Environment Editor
nativesunnews.today
BISMARCK, North Dakota – The criminal prosecution of Red Fawn Fallis for her role in the mass opposition to Dakota Access Pipeline construction reveals a return to a reign of frontier justice in the heartland -- at least from a legal defense viewpoint.
The basis for her treatment was “consistent with the attitudes of hundreds of years of history,” said Water Protector Legal Collective member Bruce Ellison.
Ever since before the beginning of August, Red Fawn’s captors have been keeping her locked up in the
Carswell Federal Medical Center at Ft. Worth, Texas. There she is doing time on a 57-month prison sentence as a result of her bargain to plead guilty to federal charges of civil disorder and arms possession.
The pleas stem from an October 27, 2016 officer-involved weaponry discharge during the arrest of 142 pipeline resisters in one of the largest crackdowns of a seven-month joint law enforcement and private security operation to assure construction of the oil delivery system.
Red Fawn
Fallis is seen behind a screen before her sentencing at the federal courthouse
in Bismarck, North Dakota, on July 11, 2018. "My clothing was made with colors
of protection, and the sunflowers represented our mother and her love to be with
us in spirit through everything," she said on the website of the Red Fawn
Support Committee. Her clothes were made and owned by family members, she said.
Photo courtesy Red Fawn Support Committee
The operation targeted the self-proclaimed water protectors supporting the Standing Rock, Cheyenne River and Yankton Sioux tribes’ lawsuits against the private infrastructure investment, which threatens to pollute the Missouri River upstream from more than 17 million users.
The longest river in the United States, the Missouri runs through the jurisdiction of Lakota Territory, an area covering parts of five states that the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation) legally claim under the 1851 Ft. Laramie Treaty and the U.S. Constitution.
The date involved “was particularly violent in terms of police force,” according to one young Oglala witness who was on the frontline then. Dennis Martinez, who was a peacekeeper, or akicita for water protectors, testified that Red Fawn was doing nothing different than the rest of the water protectors. She was not even on private property.
Martinez testified he was facing toward fellow dissidents as they stood up to a militarized police line. He suddenly was shot with rubber bullets and bean-bag rounds. He also was struck and burned by a pepper canister, Ellison told the Native Sun News Today.
The first of five officers who singled out Red Fawn for arrest testified he received orders “to use his baton to push her back,” Ellison said of the scuffle that led to three handgun shots firing from a weapon belonging to a paid FBI informant who allegedly planted it on her.
“She was picked out” that day to deflect attention from the weapons discharges of police and security forces. Just prior to the incident, a helicopter had buzzed a horseback rider off his mount, rubber bullets hurt another rider’s horse so bad it had to be put down, and water protectors caught a corporate security guard red-handed with a loaded assault rifle in camp.
The camp rules prohibited guns. In addition, “Instructions to police, private security, state troopers, and homeland security, including South Dakota’s West Dakota team, were to look for people with guns to target them,” Ellison noted.
Pictures from October 27 show at least three armed security guards
dressed as water protectors, and they were not targeted, so the enforcement team members must have known about this illegal dupe, he surmised.
In addition, he said, “Peaceful demonstrators were attacked in any number of ways,” including using snipers to confront non-violent resisters, escalation of hardware and violence.”
The basis for this treatment of the Native Americans was “consistent with the attitudes of hundreds of years of history,” he said, recalling one eyewitness testimony of law enforcement threatening the use of rape as a tactic of warfare.
“We’re gonna close the camp today and we’ll look forward to a bunch of half-breeds being born,” the witness paraphrased the cop.
The scene was so appalling that there were over a half-dozen law enforcement officers who had tears in their eyes,” Ellison said, “and it wasn’t from the tear gas.”
Contact Talli Nauman at talli.nauman@gmail.com
Copyright permission Native Sun News Today
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