Activism for James Magaska Swan goes back to his high school days

"It involves a huge area that has a lot of fishing, hunting and wildlife, Right along the path of the river is a bald eagle nesting site. A lot of bald eagles live right there. They're still protected under the Endangered Species Act. River otters, another endangered species, will also be affected by a pipeline break," she said.

"So not only does the Dakota Access Pipeline threaten people, but a pipeline break will also be detrimental to wildlife," Braun informed this writer.

"The federal government and the governments of these northern states don't care, and the Dakota Access Pipeline execs went on record as saying, 'The people here are expendable'. Who in the hell are these people to say an entire people are expendable?! There are tons of historic and sacred sites here. And when they say 'the people are expendable', they're also saying that the whites and other races who live along the Missouri River are expendable, too," Braun said.

"Without water there is no life. You can't drink oil. You can't eat money," she added.

"People said we were crazy for fighting the Keystone XL Pipeline but we won. We will win against this pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline. We have prayer on our side and we have power with our Native and non-Native allies.

"Right now we have youth who are running all the way to Omaha, Neb., to see a colonel in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This is our land. The Army Corps of Engineers has the authority to tell these Dakota Access Pipeline officials that they cannot lay down this horrible monster.

"We have youth running to Nebraska from here and they will reach Omaha on May 3. They started their run on April 24," she said.

Col. John W. Henderson, Commander and District Engineer, Omaha District, of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, will visit the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe reservation on Friday, April 29. "We're asking all people to come to the Grand River Casino in South Dakota at 10:30 a.m. to show this Colonel Henderson to stop his shenanigans and say no to the Dakota Access Pipeline. We are not expendable -- not only Natives but non-Natives - we live here and we're not going to stand for this. We will slay this monster," Braun told this writer.

Frank Kipp, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe in Montana who went to high school with James Swan said, "Yes, that's where we met. At a charter school for American Indians called Indian Heritage High School in Seattle.

"We were just young guys. AIM was cooling down at the time and we'd go to AIM meetings and we were young guys. We'd listen to the older AIM members and see what was going on in Seattle, as far as Native rights projects were concerned. We had long hair then and we'd wear hats with eagle feathers in them. We were Blackfeet and we were stand-offish, my friends and I. Anyhow, James was a coastal Indian, as far as we knew, and we considered ourselves to be plains Indians.

"But we saw James and asked ourselves, 'Should we be his friend? And we decided to be his friend," Kipp laughed.

"James was always sort of militant, We were all fancy dancers. James would listen to XIT -- a Native rock band that sang about American Indian issues. They were sort of a militant band. James would always play their music and listen to it. Me and my other friends were interested in other rock bands. We were about 16 or 17 about that time," Kipp told me in a telephone interview on Tuesday, April 26.

"We were very young, but we had a militant side and we believed in our people," he said.

"I keep in contact with James today. I was in Rapid City and stopped by to see him. We hadn't seen each other in years and it was really good to see him," Kipp said.

Kipp said he believes what his boyhood friend James Swan is doing leading the UUWS "Is great. We have to have people who fight for our rights. What he did with the Rainbow People last year was phenomenal. That was ignorant what they did, those Rainbow People. They are a drug culture and smoke a lot of marijuana. It's a 'Rainbow People thing'. But it's not part of our culture. We don't believe in it. They come into the Black Hills and piss and crap all over the land. We don't know if Crazy Horse went through there. It's sacred land," Kipp told me.

"They come here and desecrate our culture. It's terrible and James was right at the forefront opposing these Rainbow People. He is a very brave man," Kipp said.

"We have to get this racism behind us. We need to start getting along with each other. I have Caucasian friends, black friends. We're all in this thing together on this planet....Most of us have a head, two arms and two legs. We're really sort of the same if you look at it this way.

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