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Wednesday
Jan042017

From Keystone XL Pipeline to #DAPL: Jasilyn Charger, Water Protector from Cheyenne River Reservation

As reported by Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: Jasilyn, what was it like to grow up on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota?

JASILYN CHARGER: It wasn’t easy, especially for youth. It’s more about survival. And yeah, we go through all this poverty. We have suicides. We have infestation of meth, of alcoholism. But, for us, we are what grows after that. We are the life that grows after that nuke bomb exploded in the heart of our nation. We’re—we carry that within us, but it doesn’t define who we are. We really fight. We really say, yeah, all this bad stuff’s going on around us, but we don’t want that. We don’t want to hurt anymore. We don’t want to kill ourselves. We don’t want to make ourselves sick anymore. What we want is a better future for ourselves. The pain that we go through on the reservation, we don’t want our children to go through that pain, because that pain is hereditary. It passes—we pass it down to our children and so on and so forth. (emphasis added)

Watch the entire 33 minute interview.

(Democracy Now! has been doing regular reports on the Dakota Acess Pipeline water protector resistance for months. See links to its regular updates on its website, many of which are also reproduced daily, story by story, below in Beyond Nuclear's Human Rights website section.)