North Dakota pipeline construction halted until court date

The next day, they filed an injunction in federal court.

The pipeline is slated to run through burial grounds and sacred sites, John Eagle Sr. told Indian Country Today.

“This is not an Indian issue, this is a people’s issue”, she said. It goes across the Missouri River, and the tribe members anxious that any spills could impact water quality for almost 8,000 members of the reservation. The tribe has been holding peaceful “spirit camps” to protest the oil line and on Tuesday, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal chairman Harold Frazier arrived with several busloads of his tribal members and said it’s the biggest such gathering of Native tribes he can recall, with representatives from tribes coast to coast and Canada. “We don’t wanna give them a mile”. Tribes represented included Lakota Sioux, Oglala Sioux Ute, and Ponca.

Both sides took advantage of the pause in construction to regroup and strategize.

At a recent news conference, Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier discussed the indefinite stoppage of work, and he also stated that protesters were armed with firearms and “pipe bombs”, posing a risk to the safety of police officers and construction workers.

“The tribe is committed to doing all it can to make sure the demonstrations … are done in the right way”, said Dave Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, as reported by Think Progress. Only local traffic and emergency response vehicles will be allowed due the highway congestion and a large number of pedestrians and vehicles on the shoulders of the roadway. G4S did not respond to requests from teleSUR for confirmation.

Meanwhile, the North Dakota Department of Transportation announced Wednesday that Highway 1806 will be temporarily closed to southbound traffic 6 miles south of Mandan due to the protest.

Those claims lie at the center of a legal battle launched in July, when the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe sued the Army Corps of Engineers, claiming the tribe was not properly consulted before the Army Corps approved the pipeline.The pipeline passes within half a mile of the reservation, through burial sites and sacred landmarks, and crosses the Missouri River and Lake Oahe, which provide the tribe’s drinking water.

Archambault and more than two dozen others have been arrested in the past week for interfering with construction of the project.