Conservatives always write these hand-wringing diatribes about "free speech" whenever there's a right-winger that gets booed off a campus. Remember when a Dakota Access Pipeline protester got their arm nearly blown off by a police officer's concussion grenade? Or does the freedom of assembly not matter?
nobody gives a stuff because the DAPL protests were a bunch of virtue signalling yuppies that showed up one day, trashed part of the reservation, accomplished literally nothing, and left dozens of truckfulls of garbage when they left for the tribe to figure out.
What liberals as a whole didn't realize is that when they treat minorities as helpless children, those people become alienated from the liberal cause. The Sioux don't need white liberals to come protest, nor did most of them want them. Regardless of whether or not they were needed or wanted, every member of the tribe shouldered the burden of cleaning up their stuff that they left behind.
It's the typical liberal cycle; a minority group has a problem, white liberals believe them to be incapable of solving the problem themselves (infantilizing them), try to help by virtue signalling about the problem, and then fix nothing while alienating the group they wanted to help in the first place.
If liberals actually want to help the indigenous people, they should go to reservations and volunteer their time. Email or call the tribal council and ask what can be done to help. Standing around holding signs and acting like petulant children does literally nothing, and leaving literal tons of garbage behind only exposes the hypocrisy of the protest.
It's loving maddening to me, not even just as someone studying environmental science, not even just as a member of the indigenous community, but as a human, it is absolutely ridiculous to see the suffering of these people and then have a bunch of misguided, narcissistic liberals show up and cause even more problems for them.
In other words, only liberals would show up to protest an environmental issue and then leave behind thousands of pounds of garbage to leach into the soil and cost time and money of the tribe to dispose of.