THE STANDING ROCK

Time to save the world

Where in the world is all the time?

—Erykah Badu, “Didn’t Cha Know”

Sis, I know your parents have marveled since your kindergarten years about what you’d do with your life, who you’d become. But no one knows. Sometimes the non-plan ends up being the most rewarding plan. Just look at AOC, who went from a premed student to a bartender to a lawmaker by seeking out places where she could do some good, and it’s how she found her way into politics.

“I first started considering running for Congress, actually, at Standing Rock in North Dakota,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in 2018. “It was really from that crucible of activism where I saw people putting their lives on the line . . . for people they’ve never met and have never known. When I saw that, I knew that I had to do something more.”

In August of that year a group of thirty-eight people, mostly teenagers, from the Great Sioux Nation—a confederation of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Native peoples—set out to run two thousand miles from Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota all the way to Washington, DC. They were determined to deliver a petition to the US Army Corps of Engineers to stop the building of a massive oil pipeline meant to cross the Missouri River that would jeopardize the purity of the reservation’s sole source of water and even violate ancestral burial sites. The Lakota drafted a petition and received 157,000 signatures, including those of some celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, Shailene Woodley, and Jason Momoa. (We love when people pull up, as you put it, Rihanna!)

The Dakota Access Pipeline would carry oil in a 1,172-mile underground route from North Dakota to Illinois at a rate of 570,000 barrels per day.

The Lakota’s position was that the pipeline could be dug in a way that would avoid the reservation and not put their homes, their families, their land, and their way of life in jeopardy.

Sioux Nation families were deeply concerned that if an accident were to happen, and chances were it would, or if leakage occurred that was not detected initially, their only source of water would be contaminated, leaving their homeland uninhabitable.

Earlier that year, after the Standing Rock community learned that Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) had plans to create the Dakota Access Pipeline that would run from the fracked Bakken oil fields in western North Dakota all the way to southern Illinois, the young people of Standing Rock organized a grassroots movement called ReZpect Our Water. They vowed to remain in the encampment that blocked the construction until the pipeline project was “killed.” They created a Seven Council camp, with more than five dozen Native tribes represented. They established a water protectors’ camp that directed action and centralized spiritual protection of the water, culture, and the independent sovereignty of the indigenous people.

By September the encampments had grown, and more than three hundred Native tribes were represented, three thousand to four thousand water protectors were lodged in the pipeline construction areas, and several thousand more would join them on the weekends.

AOC had ridden up with some friends to Standing Rock in December 2016 to participate in the protest after the Army Corps of Engineers began digging the pipeline 1.5 miles upstream from Standing Rock Reservation. They had quietly granted a permit to ETP, in a streamlined process that avoided the ordinary public comment period. Sis, the protesters had been trying to reach out to the Army Corps of Engineers since 2014 but to no avail. Now they were supposed to feel comforted by an Army Corps environmental impact statement that had been ordered by three federal agencies due to legal actions by Native lawyers, which was issued that spring of 2016 and determined there would be no impact on the community. However, the report turned a blind eye to the proximity of the pipeline—less than two miles from their community.

ETP quietly purchased the land where some of the water protectors were located and moved construction equipment onto it, ignoring the cries of the protesters. Protesters chained themselves to construction equipment, and a private security force moved in to forcibly arrest them. One hundred and eighty people were arrested.

The water protectors remained at Standing Rock for many months; even into the dead of winter hundreds were still left.

Finally, in December 2016, President Barack Obama blocked ETP’s easement to cross the Missouri River about a half mile upstream from the Standing Rock Reservation. Construction stopped!

At a Martin Luther King Jr. celebration in 2017, AOC told the Park Avenue Christian Church, “[Standing Rock] was truly one of the most spiritually transformative experiences of my life. I remember leaving that camp and thinking, Lord, just do with me what you will. Allow me to be a vessel. And [when] I was driving off the camp I got an email asking if I would consider a run for Congress. I felt the spirit of that preparation. I felt like this was my charge. And I didn’t know if I would win. I didn’t know if I would lose. I knew I was being told to run.”

It was the first time in many years that a variety of Native tribes had come together as one to demonstrate their solidarity and to share their way of life with one another and their visitors. It was these stories of infringement, oppression, and the audacity to persevere through it all that inspired Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and hundreds of protesters to stand with the people of Standing Rock.

At Standing Rock, the indomitable AOC was birthed. She witnessed the struggle of people fighting against corporate and governmental forces that had manipulated the power of the police and the media, and called in their helicopters and dogs to enforce their will even when it was wrong. Something had changed inside her. She felt she could not remain silent; she also had learned a great lesson about change. A lesson that is not easy to learn or popular to believe: change is possible. She had to take action, and it was while she was at Standing Rock that the Brand New Congress initiative phoned her, and she answered the calling.

Unfortunately, in February 2017, President Trump approved the construction of the pipeline, which began again. But Standing Rock had still served its purpose as an inspiration to many . . . and as for Trump, he would soon have to answer to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.