Looking at the future of pipeline protests
The caravan rumbled east on a back road in rural North Dakota, pickup trucks and hippy vans inching through the grey-green hills, searching for a passage through the shifting blockade. Overhead, a helicopter circled. Police trucks whipped by on the ground. They kicked up dust that streamed over the fields where black cattle roamed and protesters, desperate for a pee, ducked behind hay bales or hid in the taller grass.
The Water Protectors of the Oceti Sakowin, Red Warrior and Sacred Stone spirit camps, near Cannon Ball, N.D., set out that day to shut down construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline, a US$3.8-billion project that aims to connect the Bakken oilfields with a transport hub near Patoka, Illinois. If completed, Dakota Access could handle some 570,000 barrels of oil per day. That’s nearly half of North Dakota’s entire daily production. But though much of the pipe is already in the ground, the project itself — like Keystone XL before it — is in jeopardy.
While the world watches as their movement is live-streamed on social media, indigenous
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protesters have banded together with major environmental groups like the Sierra Club and 350.org to fight Dakota Access. For now, they’ve battled the pipeline’s owners — including Canada’s Enbridge Inc. — to a standstill. Protesters have confronted construction teams near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, south of Bismarck. Lawyers for the tribe have tied the project up in litigation and campers are now clashing with police.
On Thursday, police in riot gear used sound cannons, bean bag guns and pepper spray to drive protesters from a camp on private land directly in the pipeline’s path. The hours-long confrontation, shared and watched live on Facebook by tens of thousands of viewers, was the most heated yet of the increasingly prominent occupation. More than 140 people were arrested, according to the Morton County Sheriff ’s office. Several cars were set on fire.
Despite the setback, the protesters have vowed to carry on. “We won’t step down from this fight,” Dave Archambault II, one of the organizers said in a statement Thursday night.
The protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline are in many ways an outgrowth of the ones fought against Keystone XL. But they are also something bigger and something new. The camps that have sprung up in the Plains south of Bismarck have drawn what some are calling the largest gathering of Native American tribes in history. Thousands of people, from more than 200 tribes, have come from all over the United States and beyond to join the occupation.
One organizer has called this moment the beginning of a new Native Civil Rights Movement. They want Standing Rock to become the new normal on pipeline sites — in the United States, and in Canada too.
The Standing Rock Sioux Reservation begins 40 minutes south of Bismarck in a hilly stretch of the Great Plains where tumbleweeds still blow across the roads. The protest camps straddle the reservation’s northern border. Oceti Sakowin, the largest of the three camps, sits in a hollow between two hills on the banks of the Cannonball River.
The camps have drawn as many 8,000 people at a time, according to organizers. But the pipeline protests started modestly. In fact, according to Jonathan Edwards, they all began with a video game.
Edwards lives in McLaughlin, S.D., the largest town on the Standing Rock reservation. Last December, he was hanging out with friends, “and we were playing Call of Duty or something, and somebody was scrolling through Facebook and saw a small little article about the (pipeline).”
By that point, plans for Dakota Access were in their final stages and construction was nearly underway. The pipeline is a catch-up of sorts. Oil production in North Dakota has exploded in the last 13 years, from fewer than 30 million barrels a year in 2003 to more than 429 million barrels in 2015. But the infrastructure didn’t keep up. For years, more than half the crude oil leaving North Dakota has moved by rail. Dakota Access, owned by a consortium of energy companies, including Enbridge and Energy Transfer Partners out of Texas, was supposed to solve that problem.
The pipeline company held public hearings in North Dakota starting in May 2015. But Edwards said he had never heard of the project before reading about it last December. He was shocked to discover that if completed the pipeline would cross under Lake Oahe, on the Missouri River, just a few kilometres outside the Standing Rock border.
The company has always maintained that it did everything right here. Dakota Access obtained all necessary easements and rights of way, its lawyers wrote in one court filing, it obtained all federal, state and local permits to cross the Missouri River at Lake Oahe, and it conducted extensive consultations with affected tribes.
Indigenous opponents of Dakota Access have two broad complaints. One is that the pipeline crosses through traditional tribal territory, home to sacred sites. The other is that, by passing under the Missouri River, the pipeline would put the tribe’s water supply at risk. The protest’s main slogan, whispered among supporters like a benediction, is “Water is life.”
But in the early going, interest was paltry. “Not a lot of people showed up at the local meetings,” Edwards said. That began to change after the tribe reached out to Joye Braun, an activist from a nearby reserve who played a significant role in the fight against Keystone XL.
Braun, in her words, “heard the call” from Standing Rock in late January. At a meeting in late February, she pitched the idea of a ‘spirit camp’ — a hub for prayer and action that could serve as a focal point for opponents of the pipeline. Ladonna Brave Bull Allard, who now runs the Standing Rock tribal historic preservation office, offered a chunk of land that directly abuts the nearest pipeline site, to the campers. And on April 1, Braun and her cousin Wiyaka Eagleman pitched their tents and the Sacred Stone Spirit Camp was born.
There are several theories on how that tiny camp-out of two people grew into the large occupation it is today. Social media certainly helped. The message was amplified by celebrities such as Shailene Woodley (who was arrested while protesting in North Dakota in October) and Leonardo DiCaprio.
The camps grew steadily through the summer. But they truly mushroomed in September, when a violent clash between protesters and private guards went viral online.
On Sept. 3, crews were digging up a pipeline site just north of the reserve. Protesters from the camps confronted the workers, first from outside the fence. Eventually, they surged through the wire and came face to face with a team of private security guards.
After everything was over that day, the Morton County Sheriff ’s office released a statement decrying the protest as an “unlawful ... riot.” The sheriff said guards were attacked with wooden posts and flagpoles, and a dog was trampled by a horse. The protesters maintain the guards attacked them, they were sprayed with some kind of caustic chemical, and that dogs bit about 12 people.
Regardless, the footage — of snarling dogs straining toward men and women with their hands in the air — provided a defining visual for the growing camp.
Wulff Cole, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, in Oregon, drove 25 hours to join the camp because of that footage. “When I first heard about that I said, ‘I have to be there or I’ll never forgive myself.’ ”
Kabale Niquay, a member of the Atikamekw Nation in Quebec, drove down to Standing Rock from Manawan, northwest of Quebec City, in midSeptember. Niquay said he came to support this protest in solidarity with the local Dakota and Lakota people. “All nations are rising up,” he said. But he’s also hoping to drum up support for a spirit camp of his own next summer, in Quebec, in opposition to the Energy East pipeline.
Niquay isn’t the only Canadian to have joined the Standing Rock protests. Cars with Manitoba, Ontario and Alberta plates are littered throughout the Oceti Sakowin camp. Edwards said he spoke recently with a First Nations group in British Columbia. They were looking for advice, he said, on setting up their own anti-pipeline camps.
Vicky Granado, a spokeswoman for Energy Transfer Partners, said the plan is still to have the pipeline ready for service by the end of this year. Meanwhile, the federal government ordered a temporary halt to pipeline construction within two miles of Lake Oahe in September. That moratorium remains in place, for now.
As for the campers, some have vowed to stay through the winter, if necessary. “I don’t think they really understood who the people are descended from who they’re trying to lay this pipeline through,” said Edwards. “I mean my mother’s last name was Shoots The Enemy. She’s deceased now. But I don’t think she got that name weaving baskets.”
I DON’T THINK THEY REALLY UNDERSTOOD WHO THE PEOPLE ARE DESCENDED FROM WHO THEY’RE TRYING TO LAY THIS PIPELINE THROUGH. — JONATHAN EDWARDS, PROTEST ORGANIZER