Tribe offers pipeline protesters in N.D. place to gather during winter

BISMARCK, N.D. — The Standing Rock Sioux’s tribal council has voted to make tribal land available for those protesting the Dakota Access oil pipeline, though an organizer from another tribe said many of the several hundred gathered will remain on federal land without a permit.

The council voted 8-5 Tuesday to use the reservation land — which is about two miles south of the large Oceti Sakowin, or Seven Council Fires, camp on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers property — so permanent structures can be built to protect protesters from North Dakota’s notoriously brutal winter weather.

“The cold is coming and the snow is coming,” tribal chairman Dave Archambault II said Wednesday. “It makes sense to be proactive and not reactive.”

But the offer is too late, said Cody Hall, a protest organizer who is part of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe in South Dakota.

“Some people might move, but I don’t think the majority of them will,” Hall said of the camp’s population, which averages 500 to 700 people, though it sometimes swells to well over a thousand. “The (Standing Rock) tribe sat on its heels too long and people started losing faith.”

Archambault countered that it took time to identify an appropriate spot for a new encampment on the 2.3 million-acre reservation that straddles North Dakota and South Dakota.

The camp, which is the overflow from smaller private and permitted protest sites nearby, began growing in August and at one point was called the largest gathering of Native American tribes in a century. All were there to protest Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners’ $3.8 billion pipeline, which tribal officials believe threatens sacred sites and the Missouri River, a source of water for millions.

Protesters do not have a federal permit to be on the corps’ land, but the federal agency had said it wouldn’t evict them due to free speech reasons.