On Thanksgiving - Native Americans are Being Beaten, Gassed, & Shot in North Dakota

While most of America will spend hours with family preparing a feast of Thanksgiving, reflecting with gratitude on blessings bestowed over the years, those original to this land have a less idyllic perspective on this holiday — one steeped in the déjà vu of historical context playing out in a battle for clean water.

For the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the peaceful fight to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline isn’t environmental activism; it’s preservation of life, protection of a living entity — the Missouri River and Lake Oahe reservoir — as real as flesh, or plant, or animal. Opposing a potential threat of oil contamination to that water would never be a question — the Missouri has sustained generations and must sustain those to come.

But these water protectors wage this prayerful campaign of preservation with centuries of exploitation, brutalization, and genocide crisp in memory — both centuries old and as recent as Sunday night, when State agents chose the ironic weapon of water to devalue the lives of anyone daring to protect the water from careless corporate greed.

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/thanksgiving-day-native-dakota-dapl/