Fierce Hearts to the Front: Lessons at Standing Rock

Mist dusted my eyelashes as I squinted upward, trying to make out the shape of the wings in the swirling grey above. ‘Looks like a hawk’, I thought. My eyes briefly locked with a man across the loose circle, he had been looking up too. Others in the large camp formed on the border of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation were glancing at the twenty-foot berth that had quietly formed around us amidst the chaos of a camp of thousands at breakfast time. Some walked quickly past, others stared curiously and lingered around our circle.

Two representatives from each of the smaller camps within the main camp opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline were present. Many of these camps had formed based on geographic region or tribal nation, others on relationships and families. All of us were in various states of outward well-being — some looked like they had access to a shower recently, others not. All looked tired. All looked more vivid, more complete somehow. Living together, tracking the sun instead of the hours, reclaiming old ways of visiting and sharing songs, food, culture; being together for longer than a powwow weekend or a ceremony was changing us all, stirring ancient ways of knowing.

I was pretty sure this meeting had been called to kick our camp out. A few of us were still in jail as of this morning, for blockading yet another pipeline worksite a few days prior. Our camp’s social media livestreams were averaging 100,000 viewers and the oil company’s CEO (chief executive officer) looked redder and redder at every new press conference. Social media and citizen journalism were overtaking mainstream news on the story of Natives on the Plains staring down big oil. We were telling our own stories for once, and our voices were reaching folks across the world.

The flow of vehicles into the camps never ceased and the story of the Dakota Access Pipeline spilled across both broadcast media and the social media feeds of people all over the globe. Solidarity protests sprang up in communities thousands of miles from the occupation on the prairie. The story of our camp within the broader camp, or rather the lack thereof, as we were largely shrouded in intentional anonymity, was turning heads within our newly created villages.

The rumours flying around were extreme. A few weeks back, two Native women visited our camp, beginning by stating they had heard we were violent, that we had badly harmed someone, and asking for space to say what they came there to say. The pained shock on one of our Lakota matriarch’s faces was palpable. “You’re safe here,” Olowan said gently, then listened. By the end of that long meeting, those women’s faces were red with anger at those by whom they had been misled. One of them hugged us each tightly and told us to stand strong, to keep fighting. We opened the flaps of the tent to the constant presence of federal and state snipers on the hill, helicopters buzzing overhead, the tireless breeze, wood being split, laughter, cooking, chatter. They thanked us again and left.

Some eyes in this morning circle were giving a once-over to me and our other camp representative. Some eyes felt hard; others felt inquisitive.

The night prior, our camp had sat in our largest space together, deciding whom to send to this all-camp meeting called by the Standing Rock chairman as we balanced bowls of hot salmon chowder on our knees. The salmon was a gift from a tribe out of the Pacific Northwest. They had sent us over one thousand pounds of beautiful red gold, a traditional food that was nourishing both our bodies and our spirits in the growing cold. Gifts like these helped us to keep going, to centre why we were here and what was at stake.

After an hour of hemming and hawing, we had agreed to send two of the matriarchs. One was a respected Lakota elder and sun dancer, the other her protégé, Olowan. Deb White Plume smiled carefully and said, “Well I appreciate your vote of confidence, but this is what I would do,” and proceeded to override us all. Her eyes shone brightly in the lantern light as she spoke of us needing to stand up for ourselves, to properly represent our camp of mostly young people by sending young people.

Me and the other voice she picked looked sidelong at each other. “Okay, I’ll find my cleanest Carhartts,” he smiled as I gave a brief, uncertain nod to her. She had been directing, guiding, and challenging all I knew over these past months. Maybe she was impressing a lesson upon us about fractionation, about what can happen to a people erased when society notices us, what can happen under enormous pressure and worsening state violence. Maybe she wanted us to stand up and step up.

A small ripple went through one side of the circle. The Standing Rock chairman and another person had arrived. We stood in silence for the briefest moment, the fog of our collective breath whipped away by the relentless prairie wind. Then we were all shaking hands, saying hello to each other. Hellos quickly became a few jokes and easy laughter. My stomach did somersaults, preparing for how to respond to being asked to leave. I was a guest here among the Standing Rock people, like so many others. The elders to whom I was accountable, the fierce Lakota and Dakota women who directed and guided me, were firm in their commitment to continue resisting, to keep fighting for the water.

The laughter quieted. We were on to the serious matter. You could have heard a pin drop were it not for the thick, half-frozen mud we were standing in. One non-governmental organization (NGO) leader grinned at me. Here was the moment he had waited for. The non-violent direction action camp led by matriarchs, the camp of troublemakers who operated outside the NGOs and the tribal council, was finally going to be shut down. I saw his smile falter as the chairman began introducing the man with him, instead. This man was to act in an official liaison capacity, to be the go-between between tribal council and the camps. Some offers of collaboration points for us all were discussed. Folks traded needs and advice. Then we were walking away through what looked like would soon be snow.

“Well, that was unexpected.” I looked up to my fellow ‘representative’. “I thought we were done for, dude.” We both laughed in relief. “Back to it, then.”

“Go back to main camp!” bellowed over and over through a crackling loudspeaker at top volume. The police officer holding the mic to his lips was heavily armed and wearing a Flak jacket. The main camp was along highway 1806, the primary road between the Standing Rock reservation and Bismarck, just north of the reservation boundary. Now that construction on the pipeline had reached highway 1806, tolerance for the encampment had come to an end. The next step for Dakota Access Pipeline was the under-bore below highway 1806, then on to drilling the Missouri River. The Missouri River was a primary call for many of us — the proposed crossing was just a few miles north of the water intake for the Standing Rock people. It was where relatives and ancestors were buried. It was also the site of government-sponsored flooding and lost land after the building of a dam upstream. These waters were surrounded by prairie that had seen clashes between the United States and Native peoples, land that once held millions of bison and millions of us.

Thousands of people were in the road. Dozens pushed up against the massive line of armed police in riot gear. Voices cried out, police-driven tanks rattled forward, eagle whistles, the bangs of less-lethal munitions, and ear-piercing Long-Range Acoustic Devices cut through the chaos. Most people stood back from the advancing line of police shields, holding selfie sticks and livestreaming the brutality unfolding. Some tried to hold ground against the advancing riot shields.

Tear gas and mace filled the air. The screams and yells of our people being pushed back across the prairie by government agents undulated. I saw a police officer mace a group of young teens point-blank beside me, and my vision went red. These were our future, our children openly harmed for standing up for their drinking water. I came to when Bishop grabbed my arm, pulling me back seconds before a beanbag round exploded by my head; its pellets rained on my cheeks. Some folks were locking their arms to a truck parked in the middle of the road, anything to buy some time, to stop losing ground. I held a bottle of water to my friend’s lips as they blinked out mace. “Go, Tara. You have to go now.”

Police swarmed over the truck and kept pushing forward, grabbing anyone in reach. They reached a circle of elders holding pipes and threw them to the highway pavement, zip-tying their wrists. On the hills around us, young Natives on horseback were chased across the prairie by police on quad-bikes as shots of ‘less lethal’ weapons cracked.

Police used pain compliance on our people at the last blockade: twisting and contorting people’s limbs as they screamed. Blockades were made of basic materials by those brave few trying to stop Dakota Access Pipeline with their bodies, to offer an act of physical protection to the earth amidst destruction. Blockading is oftentimes controversial or discounted in movement circles. Too often, we are portrayed as violent insurrectionists as if the metal machines possessed more humanity, more rights than a human being blocking its path. Too often folks stick solely to marching and sign-making, as if we lack a diversity of tactics to fight injustice.

The rich foundation of resistance in these United States has become corrupted with the same privilege and extractivism we push back against. It has been further undermined by a narrative shift about protest, leading to a movement ecosystem in which policy change, permitted parade routes, and the least disruptive actions consume signicant swaths of energy. Direct actions are often relegated to the fringe, especially if those faces and voices on frontlines belong to people othered and oppressed.

Those brave few gasped for air as police covered their faces with cotton hoods and poured water on them. “For the sparks,” an officer said as a welder began cutting through the metal. One young person refused to let go of the blockade structure. Police zip tyed his hands to his feet, contorting his body until he was screaming in pain. He held on until the metal blockade came apart at the welder’s feet.

When the escalations of state violence reached the media, the camps exploded in size. The powwow-like welcoming space in main camp was never silent; a giant dome structure filled with lights, well-meaning folks and shameless hippies alike spewed multi-coloured lights across living structures of all shapes and sizes. The cold and wind grew sharper. Police brought out water cannons in sub-zero temperatures, a young woman named Sophia Wilanksy almost lost an arm, when she was hit by a flash grenade, the shrapnel of which was seized by the FBI at her hospital bed. Hundreds of US veterans arrived. The confrontation between former soldiers and the state was imminent.

At the beginning of December, not long after the veterans poured into camp, President Obama ordered an Environmental Impact Statement (‘EIS’). It was the more stringent environmental review that had been sought all along for the pipeline project. The environmental review would ultimately find, years later, that the permits for Dakota Access were invalid. As the camps erupted in cheering and we collectively allowed ourselves a moment of joy to celebrate finally being heard, many of us did so with the sadness of knowing what was to come. Donald Trump had won the election. He would be sworn to office in January. His was an agenda of expanding industry, expanding consumption, expanding endlessly. Indeed, Trump ascended to the Oval Office on a Friday — on Tuesday, he signed orders to move forward both the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone XL pipeline.

Shortly after the EIS announcement, our camp heard we had been formally asked to leave by the Standing Rock tribal council. This call eventually expanded to all camps, to all persons holding space; ‘go home’ everyone was told. By then — safe in the knowledge that Trump would be President, and absent any meaningful legal enforcement mechanism to prevent them from doing so — construction of the Dakota Access pipeline had fully resumed. A giant drill shook the camps at night as it bore toward the Missouri River. Federal and state snipers sat on hills surrounding the whole of our occupation, alongside an unloaded missile launcher. Drones were regularly spotted near tents and folks were on edge as a growing stream of vehicles drove away from the prairie and wave after wave of blizzards.

“We’re tired. I’m tired,” Olowan’s beautiful face with its big laugh lines and fierce eyes looked hurt, bewildered. “That drill … that goddamned drill. They want us to go.” I lowered my head and she grabbed my hands. “It’s okay, little sister. We’ve been fighting for 500 years and we’re not gonna stop anytime soon.” Her grip was strong.

Years later, I think of her grip, of her defiance. I think of how I stayed on the prairie until the tanks came for those who remained as the camps burned in February 2017. I think of LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, sitting in her hospital bed years later refusing to be still as her body fought a brain tumour, laying out her thoughts on the movement, still guiding and shaping my resistance and so many others. She spoke of how many were woken up during the Dakota Access resistance — the resistance that she helped inspire.

Many of the allies I met during that struggle are the same dear friends I see out in the woods, in the desert, in the old growth forests, in the mountains across Turtle Island today. Many I never saw again. For some, it was impossible to delineate between tribal government and tribal people. Folks left disappointed by activists and elected officials alike. For others, disillusionment with all that effort, all of those voices and campaigns and lawsuits, yet still the pipeline was built was too great to bear. Thinking circularly, thinking in terms of seven generations is not easy when all of us grieved the loss of the fight against the construction of Dakota Access Pipeline — after all that, they still built it through the Missouri River.

Recalling that time, I remember the basics each non-Native person was made to sit through upon entry to main camp. An ‘Indians 101’ type of crash course on how to be respectful or at least how to try. “Don’t ask to touch folks or their hair.” “Stop talking about your “spirit animal”, that’s culturally offensive, especially to those who have clan systems.” “Be open to listening, be respectful.” “Remember, you are a guest and this isn’t a living museum to gawk at.” Some of it stuck, some of it did not. Many folks came to the fight hoping for an ‘Indian experience’, wanting and vying for a chance to sit in a tipi, to share space with the mystical noble braves on the Plains, to eat frybread and take a selfie letting their followers know they were there. ‘Facebook Hill’, the spot with the best internet connection, was consistently busy.

Some folks came to stand in solidarity against Dakota Access Pipeline, which took different forms depending on the camp, on who was giving direction. Some came to stand alongside Native peoples. Some folks came to cook, to chop wood, to haul water. Some came with donations. Some came seeking fame; others sought anonymity. Some came out of sheer curiosity, to see what it might be like to throw off ‘normal’ for a weekend or two.

The dominant culture of apathy, of individualism, of consumerism as fulfillment is a constant in movement spaces, even as we work to heal our connections with nature, with one another. Those of us in the so-called Westernized world live in a societal structure based on extreme individualism. Communalism lives in idealized theory, personal comfort is the consuming reality. Much of the movement for change is approached via incremental policy shifts, dialogues, investment into ‘going green’ and that which does not require radical shifts away from individualism and personal comfort.

While there is much to be said about the efficacy and lasting impact of various methodologies of achieving social change, a constant throughout the history of Westernized society is everyday people making personal sacrices that resonate through time. Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat, Larry Kramer overtaking the streets, Nelson Mandela cracking the foundations of apartheid — names of people who hold powerful space in the world of making change, all of whom who did so at significant personal cost and risk.

Human beings are now grappling with existential crisis, with mass species extinction and experiencing our only home refusing to compromise. While much of the dialogue visioning climate solutions centres statistical data, a statistic that for some reason seems to hold less weight is that of Native peoples across the globe holding 80 per cent of what remains of earth’s biodiversity. Instead of legally empowering Indigenous peoples’ land rights and expanding Indigenous models of stewardship and well-being, potentially disastrous policies like ‘30 By 30’, (a plan to expand land conservation that mirrors US National Parks across the globe, policies that would drive out Indigenous peoples, who would then be subject to local nation- state’s political agenda), proliferate. Meanwhile, energy models steeped in new mass-scale extraction of precious minerals, mirroring fossil fuel extraction, receive huge government investments.

And in so much of Westernized movement spaces, most energy is poured into advocacy streams with little to no risk, streams that largely preserve the systems of individualism that must be undone for a habitable world to exist. It is critical that folks dedicated to protecting our children’s chance at a future continue to engage in solution-making processes, in local, national, and international governance systems and institutions that impact climate outcomes. It is equally critical that we recognize we must have balance in our movements, that there must be other ways of thinking and being that step outside of extreme individualism and privilege.

As some push for narrative shift, for a move away from the individualistic consumerism that is tearing away our children’s chance at a future, others are fiercely protecting what remains and encouraging others to stand with us. Land defenders are forcing dialogue from the decision-makers and building mass mobilizations, inspiring peoples all over the world via social media platforms that enable new narratives to be told.

We have been able successfully to kick open the doors to the highest levels of government, to force conversation on Dakota Access Pipeline, on Line 3 Pipeline, while simultaneously laying strong foundations and relationships for people’s movement building. Project-level fights oftentimes still result in industry wins, yet the social license of both industry and government alike continues to shrink under a wave of civil unrest. While the individual losses hurt, the collective movement and the desire to look to frameworks outside of extraction, outside of individualism, keeps growing.

“Was it really worth it?” my arresting officer said, as I blinked mace out of my eyes. “Your bosses didn’t build Line 3 today and the Army Corps is coming out here, again,” I said. His eyes darted back to the road. Zip ties dug into my wrists, my arms and back sang with the pain of rubber bullet wounds and new scar tissue.

And past the speeding squad car, the wind rustled the grass, a crowd of land defenders kept chanting next to an unmoving machine, a hawk flew overhead, and a swirl of water in the drought-stricken river danced anew.

*originally published in The Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Assembly (2024)