In general, it is pretty fundamental thing beyond this false (far)left/right canard that it is universally a recipe for unsavory ends when a situation manifests that amounts to increasingly cornering a group of people, bonus points when it gets ethnic and the like. This might be a massively "far" left leaning board to some, but only if you maintained some sort of robust ignore list or have a mighty strange reckoning as to what such a thing would constitute especially here under the auspices of the US.
This is about history, The Establishment, and absolute human rights with an environmental chaser---climate change will exacerbate the divide between the have not and the have far in excess, so it is telling to see people scrambling to defend legal technicalities and engage in appeals to authority/big business/hegemony all but indistinguishable to invoking divinity as tied to some divine right of kings bullshit from back in the day. Make no mistake: This will happen again, elsewhere, and encroach upon the uninvolved* as new excuses get polished up like the turds they are time and again.
At this point, I worry more for the immediate safety of all the protestors involved and their people than the pipeline itself poisoning the water---but that's only because the powers that be seem to be only a degree or so removed of Otherization and flimsy justifications to go rather lethal....damn near chomping at the bit to do so even. Hell, I was pretty worried some of these assholes would start mowing down the bison out of sheer spite and waste after the fact.
They need organizational support from other, larger groups as the only means counter to this escalation---the will in the broader media isn't there to cover the plight of Native folks, political will pretty much mirrors the level of representation they have at the federal level save the like of Sanders. If I awoke tomorrow to find the whole thing had devolved to violence and/or a massacre, that would be depressingly less of a shock and more of a clear sign of how the table has been deliberately set as a harbinger of how the US aims to deal with their most vulnerable minority as disasters loom and they become the stress test/experimental group for the incoming status quo for "Management" policies to come.
As with too many things in this damn country, we've been kicking this can down the road for a long time instead of facing up to it all---running low on road as all these things come to a head.
