Bowdoin College students symbolically stood with activists in Standing Rock, North Dakota by protesting TD Bank in Portland on Friday.

“We are here today to raise our voices in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux and demand that TD Bank end its line of credit in the dangerous and destructive Dakota Access Pipeline,” said Bowdoin student Isabella McCann.

TD Bank of Canada is one of a number of large banks to provide $2.5 million in credit to the Dakota Access pipeline — a controversial underground pipeline being built to transport oil from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota through South Dakota, Iowa and into Illinois

The Dakota Access pipeline has become a lightning rod for environmental activism in the last year. While the pipeline wouldn’t actually cross the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, tribe members claim that it would destroy burial grounds and sacred sites. Moreover, they claim that the underground pipeline could damage the tribe’s water supply if it sprung a leak.

Protesters from across the country have gathered at Standing Rock to protest the pipeline, seeing it as an affront to Native Americans as well as symbolic expansion of the fossil fuel industry. Those who cannot travel to Standing Rock have organized protests in their communities to “stand with Standing Rock.”

On Friday afternoon, dozens of Bowdoin students marched from Congress Square Park in Portland to the TD Bank offices at One Portland Square chanting and singing, stopping briefly outside of the separate TD Bank branch on Congress St.

Outside of the offices, protesters placed blue tape over their mouths while one student recited a native american poem. McCann, standing in front of the building, called on the bank to end its credit line to the project.

“For too long, for hundreds of years, the sovereignty and rights of native people of this country have been ignored,” said McCann. “Now this pipeline threatens to destroy the sacred burial grounds of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and it threatens the water source of the Standing Rock and thousands of others in the area.”

“TD Bank cannot continue to invest in this destructive project,” she continued. “This is about more than a pipeline. This is about basic respect for native people. This is about fighting back against the fossil fuel industry. This is about putting people over profit.”