Cannon Ball, ND — Award-winning actor and longtime environmental and animal rights activist, James Cromwell, held nothing back in an interview Sunday, when discussing ongoing exploitation and brutalization of Indigenous peoples battling Energy Transfer Partners' construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

To Cromwell, like innumerable observers, that the government would lash out violently against Standing Rock Sioux water protectors and their supporters to defend the construction of a pipeline for Big Oil profit evinces systemic racism and oppression practiced since the first Europeans arrived in these lands.

Months of a veritable blackout by mainstream media, he contends, shows the appalling complicity of reporters obligated to deliver a narrative acceptable to corporate backers.

In a typical protest, Cromwell told The Young Turks' Jordan Chariton, "for the most part, the police arrest people, but they behave very rationally. When they come to the Indigenous community, they behave like thugs. And that shows the racism that sort of underpins the entire thing.

"It's either environmental justice for people of color in the East, or for Indigenous people here, in the middle of this country, who always get the short end of the stick."

To wit, Cromwell gave the interview from the Oceti Sakowin Camp, the largest of several encampments near the Lake Oahe reservoir on the Missouri River erected to peacefully block Dakota Access construction, and one of two which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers intends to evict as of December 5.

Led by the Morton County Sheriff's Department, unnecessarily-militarized law enforcement from at least nine states have unleashed the full fury of the Police State against the unarmed water protectors in a pattern of escalation and brute force. Tear gas, rubber bullets, Tasers, bean bag projectiles, concussion grenades, sound cannons, and weaponized water, have left hundreds injured, traumatized, and even maimed.