Chairman Archambault Losing Control of Protest Camp as Factions Emerge

More news outlets are reporting that there are potentially rival factions emerging from within the protest camp at Sacred Stone.  Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Dave Archambault appears to be losing control of the protest site.  On KX4’s Point of View with Chris Berg, Sheriff Paul Laney noted the following:

“The majority, the mass amounts [of protesters] are calm and they are peaceful, but that two to three hundred people, who are not from North Dakota, are looking for a confrontation, they want a confrontation. And don’t let their rhetoric tell you anything different. Their actions speak for themselves.”

“We’ve had numerous threats against the lives of the officers here. Numerous threats of ‘they should all be shot,’ ‘I’d love to slit their throats.’ I saw one post where an individual had posted a double-barreled shotgun and said, ‘would someone send me a new one so I could go to North Dakota and kill all the pigs in North Dakota that deserve to die.’”

And now, leaders are calling on Chairman Archambault to take control of the camp – or in the least, to be clear that he has lost total control of the camp. Lt. Governor Drew Wrigley has been the most critical of Chairman Archambault, stating, “It would be helpful for [Chairman Archambault] to make public call and broad call….stop allowing the projection of illegal activity all throughout the area.”

With farmers, community members, media members, and pipeline workers routinely intimidated and threatened by Dakota Access Protestors, Wrigley called on Chairman Archambault to act:

“Outlaw the use of facemasks, and you’ll have a lot of these people who, by the way, have been doing the most egregious things, they’ll stop doing that activity. They’re wearing facemasks for a reason, they don’t want to be detected or maybe they’ve got other things in their background.”

“I would think that [Chairman Archambault] would have to explain that if he is in charge, he’d have to explain what he’s going to do, and we’re going to welcome those efforts, what he’s going to do to get the unlawful protesters off the land where they are standing unlawfully. He’s going to get them to stop projecting illegality onto other areas all in the surrounding geography. He’s going to make the people stop wearing face masks when they’re going out an assaulting and terrorizing people. And the list goes on and on. He doesn’t have control of those things.”

As more details emerge about the makeup of the camp, it’s clear that there is a specific group of protestors that operate outside of Chairman Archambault’s control.

Dakota Access and law enforcement officials respect the constitutional right to protest and are pleased to hear that the Chairman has engaged in a dialogue about moving the protest to reservation land. However, Chairman Archambault must take ownership for all aspects of the ongoing protest, the peaceful and the violent. A full condemnation of the violent tactics and tendencies