In Mandan, North Dakota, hundreds gathered Wednesday to call for the release of Lakota land defender Olowan Martinez, who was arrested on September 13 during a land defense action in which she locked herself to a piece of heavy machinery to stop construction of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline. Martinez has been held since then in the Morton County jail because she has a warrant out for her in Nebraska, where she’s been fighting the presence of liquor stores in the small town of White Clay, which is near her home on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. This is Olowan Martinez speaking to Democracy Now! when we were in North Dakota covering the standoff at Standing Rock.

Olowan Martinez: “White Clay, Nebraska, is a small town on the edge or on the border of South Dakota and Nebraska. And it’s four liquor stores, basically—or, yes, liquor stores, I guess you could call them. They make, you know, 4 million a year just basically off the misery and the suffering of my people, who are struggling with alcohol and alcoholism, abuses from alcohol.”

Amy Goodman: “So you’re saying it’s actually sort of a town of liquor stores that sell to people on the Pine Ridge Reservation?”

Olowan Martinez: “Yes, the majority of the alcohol they sell comes from Prisoner of War Camp 344, and it’s basically a very severe infection amongst our nation. And so, my idea, when we first started fighting White Clay, was to heal the wound.”

That’s Olowan Martinez, who has been held for over a week after protesting the Dakota Access pipeline. On Wednesday, Oglala Lakota land defenders also disrupted the North Dakota Petroleum Council conference in Minot. They took over the stage while Department of Mineral Resources Director Lynn Helms was speaking, and demanded an end to construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. They were then escorted away by police.