As the eve of the 2016 US presidential election draws nearer, and the world inches ever-closer to the edge of their seats, wondering who the winner will be to lay claim to the world’s most powerful seat for committing acts of good or evil, there is yet another David & Goliath story unfolding. It’s yet one more spin on the same old story that has been told in America for eons; a story that pits ‘The People’, who seek to do good for the planet, against ‘The Powerful’ who desire to pursue the same pathways of evil that continues to destroy the people and earth alike. This time the ‘David’ in this epic clash is the Standing Rock Sioux & The Great Sioux Nation, and the ‘Goliath’ is America’s Military forces in the guise of North Dakota’s Department of Homeland Security, its National Guard troops and a host of law enforcement agencies. The other ‘Goliath’ is Energy Transfer Partners and a host of Wall Street speculators, investors and worldwide banking interests who, collectively, could be likened to General Custer and his 7th Cavalry regiment of another time and place in Sioux Territory.
To fully understand what the conflict between the Standing Rock Sioux and Dakota Access Pipeline represents in the bigger scheme of things one has to know something about the history of the Sioux people and their relationship to America’s military-corporate powers. This latest epic invasion in the 21st century of the Great Sioux Nation’s territory in North Dakota isn’t anything new under the sun. It’s but the latest episode in a centuries-old saga of American military and corporate might operating in tandem, hand-in-glove, to constantly dispossess the Sioux and other Native American Nations of their homelands and all its natural, cultural and sacred resources.
Starting in the early 19th century there were the incursions into Sioux territory by American fur companies that sought to strip from the land, as much as they could, all its precious fur-bearing animals for Wall Street’s profiteers in the East; ever since, the homelands of the Sioux has been a non-stop scene of one epic clash after another between those who want to preserve the land and its natural resources and those who want to rape and pillage it.
This epic clash started in earnest in the mid-19th century with the westward movement of immigrants and refugees from the East. What started as a trickle quickly turned into a horde-like swarm of locusts. This epic struggle continued on with the building of wagon roads and railroads by one corporate enterprise after another across Sioux lands.
It really kicked into high gear when General George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry regiment undertook their Black Hills Expedition in 1874 in search of gold, in defiance of the terms of the Treaty of Laramie of 1868 between the U.S. Government and Sioux Nation that legally granted to the Sioux the lands and natural resources of the Black Hills, and specifically forbade trespass by non-Indians. Custer and his troop’s illegal incursions ultimately led to the gold rush that decimated the Sioux’s sacred Paha Sapa (Black Hills) and stripped it of all its precious minerals, timber and water resources under the protection of General Custer and his troops. This led, as a result, to General Custer engaging the Sioux Nation in a series of battles until he and his 7th Cavalry regiment were finally annihilated by the Sioux at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
General George Crook picked up where Custer left off and continued America’s relentless military-corporate war against the Sioux’s Chief Crazy Horse at the Battle of the Rosebud and Battle of Slim Butte. Following the murder of Chief Sitting Bull on the Standing Rock Agency where he lived, Chief Spotted Elk (also known as Chief Big Foot) fled with his band of Minniconjou and Hunkpapa allies before they were eventually caught by a remnant detachment of the 7th Cavalry who massacred them at Wounded Knee, in reprisal for Custer’s defeat, for which many received the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Like the modern-day treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza by the Israelis, the survivors of the Great Sioux Nation were all forced onto open-air prisons by America’s military-corporate powers who later more politely rebranded these prisons as Reservations. Canadian military-corporate powers did the same thing to their First Nation people with the only difference being that they used a copycat derivative to brand their open-air prisons as Reserves.
This thumbnail sketch of the horrific history of the relationship between the Sioux Nation and U.S. military and corporate forces is a sordid one that must be understood in order to properly comprehend and gauge the significance of today’s clash between the Standing Rock Sioux and the Dakota Access Pipeline and how it fits into the bigger historical picture.
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) came out this week in support of the Dakota Access Pipeline, the construction of which was 
A growing rift has split the country’s biggest union federation, the AFL-CIO. Many labor activists and union members are outraged that Richard Trumka, the federation’s president, threw the AFL-CIO’s support behind the Dakota Access pipeline project earlier this month.
As United States Energy Transfers Partners began building the Dakota Access Pipeline through territory sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, the tribe began an escalating campaign against the pipeline. By this summer nearly 200 tribes around the country had passed resolutions opposing the pipeline and many hundreds of their members joined nonviolent direct action to halt it. Amidst wide public sympathy for the Native American cause, environmental, climate protection, human rights, and many other groups joined the campaign. On September 9, the Obama administration intervened to temporarily halt the pipeline and open government-to-government consultations with the tribes.
September 15th’s 
Rob sat across the fire at Sacred Stone Camp from me, hands deep in his pockets against the deepening chill of the night. He was recounting the difficulties he had faced in his home state of North Dakota as an environmentalist while all his neighbors baulked at the term. Rob, you see, had come to Standing Rock, North Dakota, to support the local Sioux tribes in opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). As I pressed him more for what it was like where he was from and what people thought about the pipeline in the heavily oil-reliant North Dakotan economy, he finally professed that he wasn’t the best one to ask – his neighbors were reluctant to talk to him because he himself opposed the pipelines.
Last Thursday, September 15, 2016 AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka issued a statement: “The AFL-CIO calls on the Obama Administration to allow construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline to continue.” (Entire statement can be accessed here.) We, the Graduate Employees’ Organization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—I.F.T./A.F.T. local 6300 AFL-CIO—are disappointed and appalled that the AFL-CIO’s highest leadership would make such a statement. Our sense of justice and solidarity compel us to publicly voice our opposition to Trumka’s statement. He does not speak for the entire AFL-CIO. He does not speak for us. We, the GEO-UIUC, stand in solidarity with Sacred Stone camp and the over 200 Indigenous Nations which have united to oppose construction of the DAPL.
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