PS: The UN apparently agrees with O’Donnell. From the AP wires:
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe must have a say with regard to a $3.8 billion oil pipeline that could disturb sacred sites and impact drinking water for 8,000 tribal members, representatives of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues said Wednesday.
In a statement, the forum’s chairman Alvaro Pop Ac called on the U.S. to provide the tribe a “fair, independent, impartial, open and transparent process to resolve this serious issue and to avoid escalation into violence and further human rights abuses.”
Dalee Dorough, an Inuit member of the forum, which provides representation at the world body for indigenous peoples around the globe, said failure to consult with Sioux over the project violated the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Article 19 of the declaration, which the U.S. endorsed in 2010, says:
“States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned in order to obtain their free, prior and informed consent before adopting and implementing legislative or administrative measures that may affect them.”
“There has been a lack of good faith consultation with the indigenous people who will more than likely be impacted,” Dorough said in telephone interview from Anchorage, Alaska. “The U.N. declaration is fundamental because President Obama pronounced support for it and that they haven’t been consulted consistent with the rights of that declaration is highly problematic.”
Human rights abuses have already been documented as private security forces have set dogs on the indigenous protesters, as seen on Democracy Now!:
I can only conclude that the white supremacism of the colonial era has never ended. It is very much alive and all too well.
What I saw on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell was a courageous protest by the People, and the most abhorrent acts by white men and their trained attack dogs, and the rights of the first Americans to their sacred lands. What will our government do about it if the only news program is The Last Word? Amidst all of the political nonsense, Mr. O’Donnell has been the only MSNBC (or any, to my knowledge) to report the little girl, Alice Brown Otter, having walked from Standing Rock to Washington DC for Water Is Life and to ask that her tribal rights be recognized and given. The Keystone Pipeline is plundering its indifferent way through these lands and it would be a crime against humanity to add this intrusion to the hundreds of crimes against the People of Standing Rock since “manifest destiny” began with the conquest of the Great Plains. Respect for people and an alternate route (since the pipeline is unfortunately now a reality in progress) should be the proper course. I hope this little girl’s arduous trip is rewarded by changing the route of the pipeline. If it is not, then, SHAME SHAME on them.