LOUISE ERDRICH
Cattle now graze the floodplain of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers at Standing Rock, where the anti–Dakota Access Pipeline protest encampment once existed, but what happened there in 2016 reverberates. There is a powerful sense of unity and purpose among Indigenous people and environmental activists, but also an intensified collaboration between government law enforcement agencies and the private security firms hired by the corporate entities behind the large-scale fossil fuel pipelines. These groups are exchanging information about what worked to quell protest at Standing Rock. There, Indigenous-led peaceful prayer protesters faced water cannons used in freezing temperatures, attack dogs, beanbag cannons, tear gas grenades, tasers, rubber bullets, and long-range acoustic devices that beam concentrated sound intense enough to burst eardrums. If the Keystone XL pipeline, “game over for the planet” in the words of climate scientist James Hansen, wins court cases and crosses the Canadian border in Montana, these tactics and others will be the basis of a strategy of violent intimidation against protesters seeking not only to protect the water supply of Fort Peck reservation and surrounding communities, but to prevent the very worst effects of climate change.
In September 2018, the national American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Montana sued federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Interior, and Justice, over their refusal to release documents that detail antiprotest coordination between federal agencies and corporations. In advance of the civil action, the ACLU obtained, through right-to-know requests, the following information: The Montana Highway Department and US Department of Justice presented social networking and cyber awareness training in Circle, Montana. The Department of Justice hosted an “antiterrorism” training in Fort Harrison, Montana. The Bureau of Land Management hosted a “large incident planning meeting” in Miles City, Montana. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) hosted “field force operations” training in Sidney and Glendive, Montana. And there are more. In addition to these sessions, the ACLU has documented government and corporate spying on and surveillance of Indigenous and environmental activists through social media and other venues.
“The First Amendment protects political speech from undue government scrutiny, and the extent of such scrutiny is currently unknown,” wrote Jacob Hutt in an ACLU blog post. “If the government is planning to prevent or monitor Indigenous and environmental protests, the activists involved have a right to know about it.”
Interior emails obtained by Intercept detail how the security firm TigerSwan operated without a license in North Dakota to monitor and infiltrate anti-DAPL protesters, as well as attempt to control public narrative. By labeling peaceful protesters “jihadists” and “terrorists,” by calling the protest an “insurgency,” the camp a “battlefield,” and planting disinformation, TigerSwan fostered a good-versus-evil stand-off that helped spread fear of protesters and justify the violent tactics that law enforcement used. There is no profit in depicting protesters as human, ordinary, or speaking for the public good. When government agencies get their information from profiteers of violence, it is tainted by business incentives that exploit paranoia and, increasingly, by extralegal information gathered via aerial surveillance and radio eavesdropping.
In addition, using the language of terrorism to describe citizen dissent makes it sound as though there is some form of national security at stake. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Climate change is already politically destabilizing the world as droughts cause mass migration and war. And what TransCanada and Energy Transfer Partners is doing has intensified climate change and will continue to do so. New pipelines will not make gas cheaper, and they do not have anything to do with ensuring a strategic supply of fuels for the United States. Since 9/11, our country has become energy self-sufficient. If we put our money in the right place, we could be clean energy self-sufficient. The Keystone XL pipeline is being built to ship the world’s filthiest fuel, tar sands oil, which is obtained from stripping the boreal forest from Alberta, Canada. This heavy bituminous sludge would be pushed down to the Gulf of Mexico, and from there, refined and mostly exported.
In effect, the United States would pay an incalculable ecological cost in order to add billions to the Canadian economy. All along the way, this project has faced determined local and state opposition for good reason. All pipelines inevitably leak, and climate change is progressing more quickly and dangerously than anyone anticipated.
The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline would cross the Missouri River a quarter mile upriver from Fort Peck’s southwestern border. The intake plant for the Assiniboine and Sioux rural water supply system lies seventy miles downstream. The tribe has treaty rights to the waters of the Missouri River, but years of tribal requests, courtroom testimony, public comments, letter after letter of protest, newspaper reports, and even personal letters to Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, have gone unanswered. TransCanada’s risk assessment study for the pipeline makes no mention of the water supply for the Assiniboine and Sioux, or for the surrounding non-Indian communities that depend on that water. Sandra White Eagle, program director of the water supply system, says that when a pipeline spill occurs, it would reach their water treatment plant in a couple of hours, and then “we’re dead in the water.” Fort Peck has already suffered the carcinogenic contamination of its northern aquifer by fracking. They know exactly what can happen.
“The government has a history of punishing those that fight for what is right,” said Angeline Cheek, a Hunkpapa and Lakota activist, community organizer, and teacher from the Fort Peck reservation. “Now as people of different nations fight to defend their rights, land, water, identity and people, history is repeating itself. But the strength of our ancestors will remain within us.… We are the dream and vision of our ancestors. In prayers we are united—all my relations (mitakuye oyasin).”
Here in Minnesota, where I live, the ACLU is entering the fight for environmental justice. Another pipeline company, Enbridge, is pushing to build a thousand-mile tar sands pipeline, Line 3, which would cross tribal lands in northern Minnesota, endangering pristine lakes, wild rice beds, and the Great Lakes, which holds one-fifth of the world’s freshwater. ACLU Minnesota’s official comment to the Public Utilities Commission stated that the environmental impact statement regarding this pipeline was inadequate and that the pipeline was a form of environment racism. And again, this pipeline is not needed. The dirty oil is mainly for export. The Indigenous organization Honor the Earth has stated that Enbridge should clean up its old disintegrating pipeline and absolutely should not build a newer, larger, longer one, which would have disastrous consequences.
Law enforcement is already tracking Line 3 dissent, online and on the ground. The city of Duluth, over strenuous local objection, approved a proposal for $84,000 worth of riot gear to stop their neighbors from saving their water. And TigerSwan has reportedly initiated a nine-state dragnet to collect antipipeline activist information.
Antipipeline protesters are not using their First Amendment rights as a riotous social exercise, but are trying to save our place on this rapidly warming earth. Indigenous people know how quickly a world can end. It has happened to our cultures and our relatives many times. If fossil fuel interests are not checked, the resulting climate, blisteringly hot and with oceanic surges of water, will eliminate most of humanity. The so-called extremists opposing pipelines are acting on scientific fact. Energy Transfer Partners, TransCanada, and other giant pipeline corporations are operating out of an irrational and willful blindness that amounts to corporate terrorism. These companies seek to lock in fossil fuel infrastructure so that there is no clean energy alternative. In the face of such world-destroying greed, Standing Rock was an instance of collective sanity. Protest in Fort Peck, against Line 3 in Minnesota, or at other pipeline protests all over the world, is the triumph of hope over nihilism.
By defending the right to free assembly, the right to dissent, the right to know what the government is planning to quash Indigenous dissent and environmental activism, the ACLU is working toward a future place for us on this wildly beautiful, generous, living earth.