Editorials

LaDonna Brave Bull Allard was a child when the floods came. “Where the Cannonball River joins the Missouri River ... there used to be a whirlpool that created large, spherical sandstone formations,” Allard wrote in Yes! Magazine on Sept. 3. “The river’s true name is Inyan Wakangapi Wakpa, River that Makes the Sacred Stones ... The stones are not created anymore, ever since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredged the mouth of the Cannonball River and flooded the area in the late 1950s.”

As the number of arrested and wounded mount, as the property damage increases and as the cost to taxpayers skyrockets, it’s time to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline protests. Local and state officials should never have let it get this far in the first place.

Eleven months ago, a group of armed militants piled into a couple of pickup trucks and headed for Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Once there, they took control of the headquarters building, stationed armed guards around the perimeter and began issuing ominous threats of violence unless the federal government relinquished control over 1.4 million acres of national forest.

Law enforcement did the right thing last week when they removed protesters from private land. They couldn’t allow the protesters to establish a camp on private property and block a highway. There were obvious violations of the law.