by Lauren McCauley at Common Dreams
Response comes the same day militarized police forcibly cleared hundreds of water protectors from protest site.
No longer able to sit on the sidelines and remain silent about the battle raging in North Dakota over Indigenous rights to clean water and sacred land, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton released a statement on Thursday about the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) fight—and it says “literally nothing.”
The statement was delivered via email to a handful of Indigenous journalists and news outlets and was said to be in response to a letter that Native leaders had sent to the former secretary of state asking for her help, as the Indigenous water protectors and their allies have faced tanks, militarized police forces, mace, and attack dogs as they’ve stood their ground in protest of the tar sands pipeline.
Fed-up about her months-long silence, Indigenous youth from the Standing Rock Sioux and other tribes also demonstrated outside Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, New York on Thursday asking for some sort of acknowledgement.
But coming the same day that over 300 police officers in riot gear and armored vehicles—brandishing pepper spray, percussion grenades, sound cannons, and non-lethal shotguns, according to observers—forcibly cleared hundreds of water protectors from the frontline camp recently reclaimed through eminent domain, the response struck many as non-committal and lacking appropriate “outrage.”
In other words, you’re going to protest by our rules. You’re going to do it as we tell you. Or you can’t protest.
— Alan Smithee (@ActualFlatticus) October 28, 2016
No part of this statement is concerned with the safety of the water protectors in any way. But the workers are in danger? How, exactly.
— Alan Smithee (@ActualFlatticus) October 28, 2016
The corporations (her donors) have a right to push their pipeline through sacred land (never mentioned). Despite the treaties we made.
— Alan Smithee (@ActualFlatticus) October 28, 2016
And what makes it all so unbelievably offensive? Is we all know Hillary Clinton didn’t write this. Not a word. She approves, that’s it.
— Alan Smithee (@ActualFlatticus) October 28, 2016
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