Dakota Pipeline decision delayed to Sept. 9, thousands of indigenous activists continue protest

In Washington today, District Judge James E. Boarsberge said he will not issue a decision on a legal challenge by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Dakota Access, LLC, the private firm behind a nearly $4 billion oil project Native people say will destroy their land and cause unprecedented damage to human, plant, and animal life in the region.

From Native News Online, on the judge's decision late Wednesday:

He indicated that the central legal issue is whether or not proper tribal consultation occurred between the tribes and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Judge Boarsberge said there appears to have been a lack of communication between the Corps of Engineers and the tribes and the failure on the Corps of Engineers' part to perform the due diligence in the process in the development of the project.

The judge will render his decision on September 9, 2016 and he set September 14 as a date for appeal if either side is not happy with his decision.

Standing Rock Sioux Reservation Chairman David Archambault described the court hearing as an encouraging victory.

"For our children that are not even here yet, this is something that is very powerful, very special," he told Indian Country Today Media Network after Judge Boasberg said he needed time to weigh the evidence presented at Wednesday's hearing on the lawsuit brought by the Tribe against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

"Whatever the result is, know that we won, because we're changing policy on how pipelines are put in. These projects encroach on Indian country, so we're setting a precedent that's very powerful. And it's only done because we're able to unite and we're able to do it with prayer."

Over 4,000 people, many of them Native American tribal members, continue to protest in situ along the Missouri River. By occupying the land, they hope to stop the Dallas firm Energy Transfer from plans to pipe Bakken crude from beneath the river which represents the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's primary source of drinking water.

Protesters say the project will harm water supplies and destroy their sacred land, as have similar previous oil pipeline projects in the U.S. and Canada.

You can follow updates from activists occupying the Dakota Pipeline drilling site on Twitter with #NoDAPL.

The occupation has drawn together environmental activists and members of other Lakota/Dakota regional tribes, as well as people from other Great Plains, Southwest, and Pacific Northwest indigenous nations. They "camp in the open fields and protest near the parcel where the pipeline company has secured an agreement with the landowner to build," reported the New York Times earlier this week.

From the New York Times story:

The Texas-based company building the Dakota Access pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, calls the project a major step toward the United States' weaning itself off foreign oil. The company says the nearly 1,170-mile buried pipeline will infuse millions of dollars into local economies and is safer than trucks and train cars that can topple and spill and crash and burn.

But the people who stood at the gates of a construction site where crews had been building an access road toward the pipeline viewed the project as a wounding intrusion onto lands where generations of their ancestors hunted bison, gathered water and were born and buried, long before treaties and fences stamped a different order onto the Plains.

People have been gathering since April, but as hundreds more poured in over the past two weeks, confrontations began rising among protesters, sheriff's officers and construction workers with the pipeline company. Local officials are struggling to handle hundreds of demonstrators filling the roads to protest and camp out in once-empty grassland about an hour south of Bismarck, the state capital.

More than 20 people have been arrested on charges including disorderly conduct and trespassing onto the construction site. The pipeline company says it was forced to shut down construction this month after protesters threatened its workers and threw bottles and rocks at contractors' vehicles.

The Dakota Pipeline is an issue that affects farmers in the region. The Des Moines Register reports that the pipeline is already damaging land, and causing agricultural losses.

Contamination by toxic oil water is causing health problems and environmental destruction in other areas of native land throughout the Great Plains. An NPR feature from 2012 details the effects in Wyoming.

Just last year, a massive spill in the region left millions of gallons of crude oil and contaminated salt water into the North Dakota watershed.

Clean-up efforts about 15 miles outside Williston, North Dakota January 22, 2015. Nearly 3 million gallons of saltwater and an unknown quantity of crude oil leaked from a North Dakota pipeline into a creek that feeds the Missouri River, by far the largest spill of its kind in the state's history, officials said. REUTERS/Andrew Cullen

Clean-up efforts about 15 miles outside Williston, North Dakota January 22, 2015. Nearly 3 million gallons of saltwater and an unknown quantity of crude oil leaked from a North Dakota pipeline into a creek that feeds the Missouri River, by far the largest spill of its kind in the state's history, officials said. REUTERS/Andrew Cullen

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