ACTIVISM AWAKENED
Local women joined the Dakota Access Pipeline protests
As the fight over the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) heads toward what appears to be a final showdown in court later this month, two North Penn women are watching the events unfold from 1,600 miles away with far more than just a passing interest.
Lansdale resident MaryBeth Lord, 60, and her sister-in-law, 58-year-old Sharon Brasch, of Montgomery Township, twice traveled to North Dakota last fall to stand with the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes, and thousands of others protesters, in their fight to stop the construction of a small stretch of the nearly 1,200-mile pipeline that opponents of the project say violates Native American sovereignty and, more crucially, threatens to contaminate the tribes’ water supply.
And in the process, Lord and Brasch say, their activism has been “woke” — to borrow from the current parlance — and now they’re bringing that fight back home to stand against other pipelines proposed for the East Coast that, in their estimation, pose similar ecological threats.
“We have got to come together and we’ve got to protect the resources everywhere — we’ve got to save it for future generations,” said Lord, a member of the nonprofit organization Global Mission of Peace, which fosters humanitarian projects “that empower people to make the world a better place.”
Like many Americans, Lord and Brasch first became aware of the backstory and issues surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline (also known as the Bakken pipeline) when protest efforts started ramping up last summer near Cannon Ball, N.D.
In 2014, the Fortune 500 company Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) announced plans to build the $3.8 billion underground pipeline to transport approximately a half-million barrels of crude oil a day from northwest North Dakota to Illinois. According to the Bismarck Tribune, citing documents filed as part of the project, the pipeline was originally supposed to cross the Missouri River north of Bismarck, N.D., but after it was determined that the route could threaten Bismarck’s water supply, the pipeline was rerouted to snake along federal lands within a half-mile of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, where it was slated to run under Lake Oahe, a reservoir on the Missouri River that’s the main source of drinking water for the Native American communities there.
The Sioux tribes began to publicly protest the situation, and as word spread beyond the region last summer — with the story picked up primarily by alternative news media months before larger media outlets took notice — other people began flowing to Standing Rock, forming a protest camp to stand with the “water protectors” and try to stop the construction of the pipeline, which at that point had virtually been completed other than the disputed stretch at Lake Oahe.
“By August, I had really
started to follow (the situation),” said Lord, who felt herself pulled toward North Dakota. “When you get a calling to do something, you don’t even know where it comes from, really. You just know that something is going on and you need to be there. So one day, I was dropping Sharon off at home and I just said, ‘I’m going to Standing Rock, I don’t know how but I’m going out there, and I would love it if you could go, too.’”
Brasch said she gave it some thought, then spoke to her husband, who told her that if it was something she wanted to do, she should go for it.
“And then the next day we packed up and left,” she said.
It was September when Lord and Brasch filled up their car with camping gear and set off on what turned out to be a nearly monthlong stay at Standing Rock.
“It was just like, here we go, let’s see what happens,” Brasch said.
When they arrived, Lord and Brasch were met by the heads of the protest camp and instructed where to set up their tent.
“When you first got there, it was odd — they don’t know who anybody is,” Lord recalled. “You could be an infiltrator, someone from DAPL causing trouble, so they were friendly but not quite embracing at first. They were welcoming, but you knew you were being watched.”
But within a day, Lord and Brasch said, their friendliness and willingness to help out in the mess tent and with other aspects of the camp helped them bond with members of the Sioux tribes and other protesters.
Every morning around 5 a.m., Lord said, they’d be woken up by the sound of “the damn helicopters circling over the camp” — helicopters that she believed belonged to either ETP or area law enforcement that were keeping eyes on protesters and trying to ascertain when they were assembling for daily “actions” and where they might be heading.
Those actions, the pair explained, mainly involved forming caravans — sometimes of 100 vehicles or more packed to the gills with protesters — to drive to pipeline construction areas and get as close as they could while taking care not to step on private property. “Every time you could organize yourself and get close enough, they would shut down the whole operation for the day,” Lord said. “The goal was to shut it down, because we knew they were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars every day and we just wanted to bleed them.”
Other actions involved marching to protest at banks that had invested in the pipeline, Brasch said.
“The scene was so amazing, so surreal — there were all the protesters, and then the Native Americans on horses there to watch over you and protect you,” Lord said.
Police presence at the protest sites was heavy and intimidating, the women said, although they didn’t witness any physical violence at that point.
“They were there in full riot gear and they’d be on their bullhorns telling us to get back in our cars and leave,” Brasch said.
“They would glare at you,” Lord said, “but I went up to them and tried to shake their hands. I’d say, ‘I’m from Pennsylvania, I’m a grandmom, and I’m here for the water and I’m here for my children and your children and all future generations.’ Some of them you could tell were very kind men, you could feel it in them — they were just there doing their job. And then others would look at you, like, ‘If you even touch me I will kill you.’”
After several weeks at Standing Rock, it was time for Brasch and Lord to drive back to Pennsylvania. But once back in Montgomery County, the pair began to see reports of violent clashes between police and protesters and a slew of arrests. It was October, and by then the pipeline dispute had become headline news. The pair were only home for a couple of weeks when they decided they simply had to go back to Standing Rock, and they flew out to North Dakota in November.
Things were markedly different than their first visit.
The protest camp was more than twice as big, Brasch said. But the mood had turned much uglier.
“The actions were different,” Lord recalled. “We’d be marching and chanting ‘water is life,’ and these infiltrators would be instigating a fight, getting right up in your face and yelling, ‘Get a job, you losers!’ I really felt the tension because by that point, people were tired, they had been fighting this fight for a long time and everybody’s nerves were frayed. The tribe elders had to remind everyone to stay peaceful and use restraint, because with so many more (protesters) there, there was more of a chance that it would turn into back-andforth violence, and that was scary because that’s all the police needed to be able to come in and start arresting everyone.”
Arrests and humiliating strip-searches were becoming the norm, Lord and Brasch said.
Then came the highly publicized Nov. 20 “Night on the Bridge” skirmish. Protesters who were allegedly trying to push past a blockaded bridge on a state highway in sub-freezing weather were sprayed with water hoses by authorities who also used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the throng. Nearly two-dozen protesters were hospitalized due to hypothermia, rubber bullet injuries and at least one heart attack, protest organizers said, while one police officer was struck by a rock and injured, according to reports. Brasch and Lord rushed to the scene and help tend to victims and were shaken by the events of that night.
“I’ll never, ever forget what I saw there,” Lord said. “That kind of thing should never happen in America.”
After 10 days, Lord and Brasch returned home again. A couple of weeks later, it was announced that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), which had been overseeing the pipeline project, had denied a permit for the disputed stretch of pipeline, halting the construction while preparing an Environmental Impact Statement (which some said could take up to a year) and exploring alternate pipeline routes.
At the time, the announcement was seen by many as a victory. But Lord and Brasch weren’t buying it.
“Our families were like, ‘You did it, you did it!’” Brasch said. “But we were thinking, OK, it’s a good sign but we’re not convinced because we know how big companies are. They’re not going to just stop.”
“I think the tactic was just to get (protesters) to leave, and a lot of people did leave,” said Lord.
Indeed, the reprieve was short-lived. In one of his first executive actions after taking office, President Trump signed an order for the USACE to expedite the process to push the DAPL process forward. In early February, the USACE granted a final easement to allow ETP to continue constructing the pipeline under Lake Oahe as planned. On Feb. 13, a federal judge denied an emergency request by the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes to again halt the construction, although the judge said he would hold one more hearing, on Feb. 27, to more fully listen to arguments from both sides.
Numerous media outlets have reported this week that construction is moving ahead quickly and that the pipeline could be completed and ready for oil to flow by mid-March.
For Lord, the whole project comes down to corporate greed and disregard for the environment, and neither she nor Brasch see any political heroes or villains.
“People want to say Obama is the good guy because he tried, and Trump is the bad guy because he said even before he was elected that he was going to push (DAPL) through,” Lord said. “But in reality, if (Obama) had any real power, he could have stepped in earlier and shut it down. Did he have some nice words? Sure. Did he do some things that looked pretty? Yeah. Did he really do anything? Nah. It’s not about the presidency; it’s about corporate power. Corporations rule our government. They own the presidency, so it doesn’t matter if it’s Obama or Trump in charge.”
For its part, Energy Transfer Partners has insisted that concerns about DAPL polluting nearby drinking water are “unfounded,” and the company and its supporters say that the pipeline is a safer delivery system for crude oil than trains — particularly in light of some recent fiery oil train derailments that have resulted in fatalities.
But Lord scoffs at such rationales. “If you are transporting oil (by train) and there’s a spill, you’ve got that contained, you can deal with that instantaneously. Yes, a derailment might kill a few people, and that’s absolutely terrible. But when you have pipes underground leaking for days or weeks or months, with millions of gallons of oil that have seeped into the soil and into the water before anyone notices, and you can’t clean it up and the water is polluted and millions don’t have water, isn’t that worse? It’s not a matter of if those pipes are going to leak — they all leak. It’s just a matter of when.”
Lord and Brasch are hoping for another late-hour reprieve to delay or stop DAPL construction, however remote the possibility seems at this point. But for both, the larger fight isn’t over — they’re redirecting their energies into more local battles. Both said they plan to march with the Coalition Against Pilgrim Pipeline (CAPP) on March 4 in Maplewood, N.J., to protest a proposed 170-mile dual-pipeline that would carry oil from Albany, N.Y., to refineries in northern New Jersey and potentially pass through sources of drinking water.
“Whatever happens at Standing Rock, I see it as a ‘victory’ in the sense that it’s inspired people, it’s woken people up,” Lord said as Brasch nodded in agreement. “People who never had an interest in any of this have all of a sudden woken up to the fact that we don’t have to live in a world like this. Water really is life, and I’m never giving up. I’m just a grandma doing this for all the generations to come.”
“When you get a calling to do something, you don’t even know where it comes from, really. You just know that something is going on and you need to be there. So one day, I was dropping Sharon off at home and I just said, ‘I’m going to Standing Rock, I don’t know how but I’m going out there, and I would love it if you could go, too.’ ” — MaryBeth Lord