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Mass. residents relieved, for now, with Standing Rock decision

The sun rose over the Oceti Sakowin camp in Cannon Ball, N.D., near Standing Rock, last month.Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff/File/Globe Staff

Massachusetts residents who have supported protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline expressed relief Sunday that the project’s proposed route has been blocked, but they cautioned that its final resolution remains uncertain.

“I’m extremely happy and extremely hopeful,” Lynn Currier, a Native American activist who lives in Randolph, said after the US Army Corps of Engineers announced that it wouldn’t grant an easement for the oil pipeline to pass underneath Lake Oahe in southern North Dakota.

However, she said the fight, which has included months of protest, is not over.

“We all know that we’re dealing with [Donald] Trump coming into office, so there’s still concern that he will try to flip it back when he comes in,” she said. “I don’t know if the Army Corps would let him do that, but who knows how politics will play out?”

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Currier said she is a member of the Miq Mac and Pennacook Abenaki tribes and spent a week at the Standing Rock Sioux protest with her son.

The pair arrived Nov. 20, she said, in time to see authorities using rubber bullets, tear gas, and water hoses on protesters, despite subfreezing temperatures.

“What I saw was horrific, and the people I helped were in very serious distress,” she said, describing some protesters who suffered hypothermia and others whose faces were covered in pepper spray. “It was shocking,” she said. “It was like being in a war zone.”

Currier said the protesters she met included many Massachusetts residents, some of them college students who traveled to North Dakota on their Thanksgiving breaks.

“People out there love the Earth,” she said. “They respect native people and are tired of seeing native people exploited.”

At the protest Sunday, Navy veteran and Harvard graduate student Art Grayson of Cambridge said he came to the camp with the Veterans Stand for Standing Rock group because he thought protesters could use his help.

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Grayson, 29, said that he ‘‘couldn’t stand by and watch people being abused.’’ He has finals this week but told his professors, ‘‘I’ll see you when I get back.’’

Provincetown resident Lise Balk King has not participated in the protest, but she has supported it from afar, having lived for years in the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota with her ex-husband, a tribe member.

She said she has many relatives and friends among the population.

“It just makes me feel so proud that folks are taking a stand, and the world has started to pay attention,” she said of the protests. “The idea is that everyone’s going to have to be vigilant, though. The reality is that, yes, they’ve won this battle, but they haven’t won the war.”

King said members of the Sioux tribes had fought to ensure their safety and basic rights.

“This is not about one side versus the other of competing economic interests,” she said. “This is economic interests versus folks who just want to live in a clean environment and in a peaceful way.”


Material from the Associated Press was used in this report. Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at jeremy.fox@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jeremycfox.