Mni wiconi:“Water is life.”

Anti-oil pipeline activists have adopted the Sioux saying Mni wiconi: “Water is life.” It’s a fitting maxim. The Bakken Pipeline (Dakota Access Pipeline)  is 1,172 miles of 30-inch diameter pipe from North Dakota's northwest Bakken region down to a market hub outside Patoka, Illinois, where it will join extant pipelines and travel onward to refineries and markets in the Gulf and on the East Coast. If that description gives you déjà vu, it should: The Bakken Pipeline is only seven miles shorter than Keystone's proposed length. The Bakken Pipeline will in effect replace the "defeated" Keystone XL Pipeline and move oil to the same areas.

The media is now focused upon the protests at Standing Rock where campaigners from 260 indigenous ‘nations’, the largest of any such gathering since Wounded Knee in 1973, have rallied. Standing Rock is a political struggle for the right to assemble, protest and to create change. It is not just a fight to stop construction vehicles from digging up the soil but has also become about the preservation of the Indigenous way of life to determine their own destiny, the right to function without the U.S. government meddling in the internal affairs of native Americans.

“Now is a good time for activists concerned about preserving livable ecology from the profit gluttony of capitalism to return to the upper Midwest for a different, more “revolutionary” kind of politics. The nation’s unelected dictatorship of money and oil knows very well that politics is about more than elections. The petro-oligarchs pursue their government-corrupting pillaging of the common good and profit-addicted poisoning of the well to fuel their never-ending growth on a year-round, 24/7 basis,” said one article.