Montréal en solidarité avec Standing Rock

Our honoured coverage of the November 7th, 2016 peaceful protest in Montreal in solidarity with water defenders and frontline communities at Standing Rock, who are resisting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). March with us to support the Indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The speakers at today’s march are Louellyn White (assistant professor of First Peoples’ studies at Concordia University); Bridget Tolley (founder of Families of Sisters in Spirit); Clifton Nicholas (Mohawk Indigenous activist and filmmaker); Kenneth Deer (journalist and educator from Kahnawake, known for his involvement in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples); Timothy Armstrong (Ojibwa radio host with Kahnawake radio station K103); and Bianca Mugyenyi (of the Leap Manifesto).

The DAPL is a massive fracked-oil pipeline being promoted by a shady group of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies and banks. The DAPL will destroy sacred sites, worsen climate change and be laid underneath the Missouri River, potentially poisoning the freshwater supply for eight million people. Furthermore, it would engender a renewed fracking-frenzy in the Bakken shale region where the pipeline would begin.

The DAPL is slated to cross Lakota Treaty Territory at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. For months the Standing Rock Sioux have been leading a protest against the construction of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. They have been joined by thousands in what has been described as the biggest gathering of indigenous movements in the US in a hundred years. In creating campsites along the route of the pipeline, they have managed to interfere with and physically block the construction works and have been a torch of inspiration for indigenous and ecological movements across the world.

The Montreal Standing Rock solidarity protest will take place on the unceded territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka (aka Mohawk) people. The island called “Montreal” is known as Tiotia:ke in the language of the Kanien’kehá:ka, and it has historically been a meeting place for other Indigenous nations, including the Algonquin people.

------

For more on our video and photography work, please visit www.coultonphotography.com, our Instagram page at instagram.com/coultonphotography, or on our Facebook page at facebook.com/coultonphotography