Activists have set up camp outside Whiteclay and say they won't leave until the fate of the village's four embattled beer stores is sealed.
Organizer Joe Pulliam said a handful of teepees and tents have been erected at the site known as Camp Justice, a longstanding memorial on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, just across from Whiteclay on the Nebraska-South Dakota state line.
"We set up last night," Pulliam said Monday.
The Whiteclay stores once sold millions of cans of beer and malt liquor each year, much of it to residents of the reservation, where alcohol is banned.
The stores closed indefinitely in April after the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission refused to renew their liquor licenses. Now the Nebraska Supreme Court is weighing whether to keep them closed forever.
People are also reading…
Pulliam said the activists plan to remain at Camp Justice — the site where two Pine Ridge men, Ronald Hard Heart and Wally Black Elk Jr., were found dead in 1999 — until the state's high court makes a final decision.
That could take several months or longer.
Oral arguments are scheduled for August, and the Supreme Court could still decide to return the case to a lower court for reconsideration.
Some of those gathering at Camp Justice were part of unrelated protests at North Dakota's Standing Rock Indian Reservation in response to the Dakota Access oil pipeline. The main Standing Rock protest camp, which was razed in February, housed thousands of people for months.
"If we have to do that, that's what we'll do," Pulliam said. "We're definitely going to have a voice, and the way we express our voice is to camp."