DAPL: The Evolution Of A Peaceful Protest -- May 10, 2017

Updates

September 26, 2017: North Dakota's bill rises for oil pipeline protest costs. 

The North Dakota Emergency Commission, headed by Republican Gov. Doug Burgum, voted to borrow an additional $5 million to cover law enforcement costs, bringing the total line of credit from the Bank of North Dakota to $43 million, the bulk of which likely will have to be repaid by state taxpayers. 

Original Post

 

Apparently, Part 1 of this story had to do with tracking the dollar donations for the DAPL protest.

Part 2: Witnesses saw good and troublesome behavior. Long, long article. Well worth the read. A big "thank you" to the reader who sent me the story. The lede:

A society of thousands that had its genesis in a prayer camp in the summer of 2016 at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers has evolved into something that is almost unrecognizable from those languid summer days.

Elliott Rhoades is a member of the Standing Rock Tribe and is a regular columnist with Teton Times. Rhoades is a former Vice Chairman for the tribe, a former tribal councilman, and he is the former Tribal Veterans Service Officer.

Here is a portion of a narrative he wrote for the paper.

“I went out to those camps as they were being formed, Red Warrior camp consisted of people who were intent on creating trouble and problems from the start. They intended to disrupt everything and everybody, thus creating problems then decided to leave.

The overflow camp consisted of everyone else who thought they should be a part of this protest, but had no idea of why? Hundreds of people were soon descending on Standing Rock with the intent of taking part in a peaceful, prayerful, non-violent protest to try and stop this pipeline from being completed. Thus putting an end to the route. This was the intent. But as you read, this did not happen…

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A Note For The Granddaughters

Virginia Woolf said writers were "collectors of phrases."

My grandfather has a small farm near Newell, SD, and had a few dairy cattle. He would have been up well before dawn and into bed late at night. I thought about that when I came across a most wonder line by Joyce Carol Oates in her memoir, The Lost Landscape, from page 252:

If you life on a farm the darkness before dawn is a familiar darkness and seems to bleed into the darkness after sunset as if daylight itself were but an idle interruption.