Deadline to leave Dakota Access Pipeline site approaching

ABC News reported on Wednesday that police started arresting protesters who failed to clear the Oceti Sakowin protest camp reportedly located on United States federal land near the construction site of the Dakota Access pipeline.

Two children were burned, one of them severely, at the Dakota Access camp evacuation Wednesday after remaining activists set fire to about 20 shelters and a vehicle in what was described as a departure ceremony.

(Top) Police make arrests as they move through the Oceti Sakowin camp.

Protesters and police have clashed multiple times since August, with more than 700 arrests tallied.

Thousands of protesters gathered at the site to join the opposition, but numbers dropped as winter set in and the battle moved to the courts, A.P. reports.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers set the February 22 evacuation deadline in order to speed the cleanup at the camp, which protesters left strewn with an estimated 4.5 million pounds of tents, teepees and trash, as well as between 200 and 300 abandoned vehicles.

Crews and contractors have worked since January to clean the site’s trash and waste left by the protestors.

Rob Keller, public information officer for the Morton County Sheriff Department, said authorities taking part in the camp clearing, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs, were aiming to avoid the scene painted by Frazier. Some walked across the frozen Cannonball River to another camp.

Organizers already are turning their attention to other projects, including the TransMountain Pipeline in Canada, where First Nations, Washington tribes and environmental groups on both sides of the border have filed lawsuits and are working on direct action to stop it.

Melaine Stoneman, a member of the camp’s women’s society, said the society is using its own resources to hire a bus to come to the camp’s south gate during the day.

“They intend to hold the space as long as they can”, said Eryn Wise of the International Indigenous Youth Council. “This has really brought our issues to the forefront, and the people, the world, can see us again”.

“We have the same goals”, Cheyenne River Chairman Harold Frazier said of himself and Archambault. About two dozen people who did not comply were arrested.

Afterward, officers showed visible relief, smiling, shaking hands and patting one another on the back. He compared the camp where tents had been set up and wooden structures built to something between a landfill and a junkyard.

The protest camp is on Army Corps of Engineers land nearby. That land also is Corps-managed but is on the Standing Rock Reservation, where North Dakota authorities don’t have jurisdiction. Dennis Banks, a founder of the American Indian Movement and a familiar figure in the camp, reminded some 60 people of what they had accomplished.

Protesters who were willing to leave peacefully were driven to Bismarck, N.D., and given bus tickets to go home. However, after only nine people used the center on Wednesday, it was closed today due to lack of use, according to state Emergency Services spokeswoman Cecily Fong.

U.S. District Court Judge Kames Boasberg, who is presiding over the case, green-lighted an expedited hearing schedule on Thursday, giving Energy Transfer Partners until March 23rd to respond to the tribes’ request for summary judgement.