Cannonball ND– I arrived in the heart of the Dakota Access Pipeline, Standing Rock protest epicenter expecting to run straight into a chaotic battle between Native Americans and riot police somewhere in the middle of the road. All I had seen were the videos that had made it into social media feeds of protestors being shot with rubber bullets, maced, and beaten down with clubs but that is all I knew of the situation. I thought it was an ongoing, everyday unrest. No militarized vehicles ever appeared though, other than the occasional sheriff’s deputy passing by, I saw little law enforcement. What did appear as I crossed over a big winding hill, was a vast expanse of tents and tepees down in a flat area where the Missouri River flowed through. These structures covered both shores of the river. The next 11 days would not be what I expected at all.  As the corporate media begins it’s task to discredit the protestors as drug addicted partiers that are hardly focused on the pipeline at all, it is the job of all eyewitnesses to give their accounts so that the complicit corporate news media does not achieve it’s goal of destroying public