During a November 20 confrontation between the Morton County Sheriff’s Office and Water Protectors at the construction site of the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota, a deputy threw a concussion grenade that exploded near Sophia Wilansky. It tore much of her forearm off. Her father has released extremely graphic photos that can be seen here. She is 21, a resident of New York, who had joined hundreds of others to oppose the building of the pipeline through ancestral lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
Paul Blume, from KMSP-TV in Minneapolis, conducted a heartrending interview with Sophia’s father,
Her father told him: “She says the police are trying to hurt people. They’re not trying to control the situation, they’re trying to hurt people, intentionally, purposefully. Someone could die, someone will die, if something isn’t done.”
The sheriff’s office claimed the protectors had blown up one of their own with a propane bomb. But shrapnel extracted by surgeons who operated on Sophia’s arm is being kept as evidence to show that the sheriff’s office lied about the incident. Just as it lied when it claimed to the media the protectors set fires and that deputies put them out with a water cannon instead of deploying it as a weapon and injuring hundreds of those opposing the pipeline.
The attack occurred in freezing weather when protectors tried to unblock a vital highway that the sheriff’s office had pledged it would remove from a bridge weeks ago. This blockade forces hours of delay to travel from the reservation to Bismarck, punishing the Sioux and other locals.
Sophia had been at Standing Rock for three weeks. During the confrontation, she forged to the front line to deliver bottled water to the unarmed protectors standing up against the over-militarized police who are defending the Dakota Access Pipeline and NOT the people and their water supply.
Sophia was initially attended to by Oceti Sakowin medics. The blockade the Water Protectors were trying to open delayed her arrival at medical facilities in Bismarck, 50 miles away. She had to be driven to the hospital there in a private car. The Bismarck hospital is not equipped to deal with the level of vascular injury she suffered, and Sophia was flown to Minneapolis, where she underwent nine hours of surgery to save her arm. She won’t know for another week whether amputation might be required.
The 12-minute interview is below. I’ve bulleted key points from the video plus key quotes.