With all that is swirling around in the news and on social media about the interactions between protesters and police at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, Eve Bottando decided to go see it for herself.

With Indiana a long way from the protests to the northwest, Bottando, who lives in Gary, wanted to be a local voice for people in Northwest Indiana to be able to hear straight from her what she saw and heard there, she said.

“People do care,” Bottando said. “They want to hear this information, and they want to know this is information they can trust.”

People have gathered in western North Dakota for months in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, which stretches 1,172 miles from the Bakken Oil Field to Patoka, Ill., and would transfer hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil per day.

The company producing the pipeline, Energy Transfer Partners, argues it would be a safer way to transfer crude oil than railways, as well as create jobs and help the economies of the towns near the pipeline.

The North Dakota portion of the pipeline, which stretches across four states, is nearly complete, the company said. Still, thousands of people have gathered at Standing Rock in opposition to how close the pipeline runs to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe's water supplies and cultural sites, especially if a leak were ever to occur.

People, supplies and officers have been sent to North Dakota in the last couple of months from Indiana, and tribes across the country also have showed their support, including from southern Michigan.

The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Tribal Council sent supplies to protesters this week, said Paige Risser, communications director, in addition to letters already sent to President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Army Corps of Engineers expressing their support of Standing Rock.

Their tribal council also unanimously passed a resolution in September stating support of Standing Rock's “peaceful opposition to the construction of the pipeline and expresses support in the ongoing fight for environmental and cultural justice.”

What's happening at Standing Rock has garnered national attention, including in Indiana, with a rally protest Wednesday in downtown Hammond and the decision of some Hoosiers to go up to the site themselves.

When Bottando drove into Standing Rock on Thanksgiving Day with supplies and sage from Indiana, she was taken with the camp's level of organization, she said. She went through orientation on how to be a respectful guest of the tribe.

Bottando said she had a peaceful experience, meeting protesters and seeing the police in the area. To sum up her time in North Dakota, she points to a moment when she saw a Colorado water rafting coach she met walking around, voluntarily picking up trash without being asked.

“If you go out on I-65 with trash there, no one is picking that up,” Bottando said. “But people are coming from all over, and this guy is making sure that this camp is going to be clean.”

Bottando met a vegan chef, a nurse, an architect and even a family that brought their children from Alaska, she said.

“There are these beautiful little quirky things that are about everyday life and people who don't know each other finding common ground, literally and figuratively,” Bottando said.

Linda Felty, of Chicago Heights, Ill., said she had a similar experience in her three times going up to Standing Rock. While their goal was to be peaceful, they were prepared if they were arrested, she said, describing how she had a phone number written in marker on her arm in case she needed someone to call.

What troubled Felty the most, she said, was the weapons and militarized gear she saw on police. Felty said she worked with the Chicago Heights Police Department as a midnight dispatcher for 24 years before retiring in September, and while she said she is “all for Blue Lives Matter,” what she witnessed with police in North Dakota was “totally out of control,” she said.

About a dozen officers from Northwest Indiana were sent to North Dakota in late October as part of a Homeland Security agreement that allows them to help a state in need. In a release Wednesday, the Lake County Sheriff's Department said officers have been sent in the past for natural disasters such as to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and they were briefly in North Dakota to help with a personnel shortage.

The officers have since returned from their deployments, which ran from Oct. 22 to Nov. 8, but some people in Indiana, including those at the Hammond rally Wednesday, questioned why police from Indiana were sent.

Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, whose department has been at the center of the policing in the area, has said in news releases that the goal of law enforcement is to ensure the safety of everyone involved, in addition to protecting people's private property nearby and upholding the law. In the months of protests since late summer, some situations have turned into standoffs where water hoses, tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and dogs were used after police said protesters started fires or damaged equipment.

Hearing and reading about Standing Rock makes Karen Billings, of Chesterton, think of her family living in North Dakota, including her cousin, Angela Schultz.

Schultz, who lives in Minot, grew up in a town west of Mandan, N.D., near the protests. Growing up, she learned to appreciate the land and respect the nearby tribes in her tight-knit community, so it has been a different experience to see how what is happening at Standing Rock has impacted neighbors and nearby communities, she said.

“I feel like people that are not from North Dakota and are supporting the ‘NODAPL' should look at the social media sites for the local news, local police departments and the local newspaper and see the other side of where people in North Dakota are coming from,” Schultz said.

rejacobs@post-trib.com

Twitter @ruthyjacobs