Less than a month after Trump was elected, I went to Standing Rock, North Dakota. The forecast called for an epic snowstorm and it was already starting to come down as we arrived, the low hills and heavy sky a monochromatic white.
Days earlier, the governor had announced plans to clear the camps of the thousands of “water protectors” who had gathered on the outskirts of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation to try to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. The company was determined to build the oil pipeline under Lake Oahe, the sole source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux, as well as under another section of the Missouri River, which provides drinking water for 17 million people. If the pipeline ruptured, the tribal leaders argued, their people would have no safe water and their sacred sites would be desecrated. The movement’s Lakota-language slogan, heard around the world, was Mni Wiconi—“water is life.”
After months of confrontations with private security and highly militarized police, it seemed the governor now felt, with Trump on the way to the White House, that the coast was clear to crush the movement with force. The blows had been coming for months—about 750 people would be arrested by the time the camps were cleared—and when I arrived, Standing Rock had already become the site of the most violent state repression in recent US history. With the issuing of the eviction order, many were calling December 5, 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux’s “last stand,” and I along with many others had traveled there to stand with them.
In a surprise development, a convoy of more than two thousand military veterans had also come to Standing Rock to stand with the Sioux, prepared to face off against their fellow uniformed officers if need be. The veterans said they had taken an oath “to serve and protect” the Constitution. And after seeing footage of peaceful Indigenous water protectors being brutally attacked by security dogs, blasted with water cannons in subzero temperatures, and fired on with rubber bullets, pepper spray, and bean-bag rounds, these vets had decided that the duty to protect now required that they stand up to the government which had once sent them to war.
By the time I arrived, the network of camps had swelled to roughly ten thousand people, living in hundreds upon hundreds of tents, tepees, and yurts. Dozens of kids were sledding down a snowy hill. The main camp was a hive of calm, nonstop activity. Volunteer cooks served meals to thousands, trucks arriving with fresh ingredients all day. Young media-makers, world-famous musicians, and Hollywood actors were filing continuous dispatches about the latest developments, exposing their huge followings to the drama of the standoff. Seminars on decolonization and nonviolence were happening in the larger tents and a geodesic dome. A group of drummers was gathered around the sacred fire, tending to the flames so they were never extinguished.
Down the road, the newly arrived vets were setting up camp with impressive speed, employing skills honed on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, for a few, Vietnam. It struck me that the last time I had spent this much time with US military personnel was in Baghdad, where young men and women in these same uniforms were sent in to occupy a country that just so happened to have one of the world’s largest reserves of crude oil. After all the times American soldiers have been called upon to protect oil and gas wealth and to wage war on Indigenous people at home and abroad, it was unbearably moving to see these soldiers show up, voluntarily and unarmed, to join an Indigenous-led fight to stop yet another water-poisoning, climate-destabilizing fossil fuel project.
One of my first conversations at Standing Rock was with legendary Lakota elder LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, who in many ways had got all this resistance going when she opened the first camp on her land, the Sacred Stone Camp. That was in April 2016. Eight months later, here she was, eyes still sparkling, betraying not a bit of fatigue despite playing den mother to thousands of people who had come from across the world to be part of this historic movement.
She told me that the camp had become a home and a community to hundreds and then thousands. It had also become a field hospital—for those injured by the police attacks, and also those psychically frightened by what Trump’s rise was already unleashing.
Brave Bull Allard, who is the official historian of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, said that, most of all, the encampment had become a school—for Indigenous youth seeking to connect more deeply with their own culture, to live on the land and in ceremony, and also for non-Indigenous people who realized that the moment called for skills and knowledge most of us don’t have.
“My grandkids can’t believe how little some of the white people know,” she told me, laughing, but without judgment. “They come running: ‘Grandma! The white people don’t know how to chop wood! Can we teach them?’ I say, ‘Yes, teach them.’ ” Brave Bull Allard herself patiently taught hundreds of visitors what she considered basic survival skills: how to use sage as a natural disinfectant, how to stay warm and dry in North Dakota’s vicious storms (“everyone needs at least six tarps,” she declared sternly).
She told me she had come to understand that, although stopping the pipeline was crucial, there was something greater at work in this convergence. She said the camps were now a place where Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike were learning to live in relationship and community with the land. And for her, it was not just the hard skills that mattered. This moment was also about exposing visitors to the traditions and ceremonies that had been kept alive despite hundreds of years of genocidal attacks on Indigenous people and culture. This, she told me, is why the traditions survived the onslaught. “We knew this day was coming—the unification of all the tribes….We are here to protect the earth and the water. This is why we are still alive. To do this very thing we are doing. To help humanity answer its most pressing question: how do we live with the earth again, not against it?”
And this teaching needs to happen fast, she said—climate disruption is kicking in. If non-Indigenous people don’t start to learn how to take care of earth’s life-sustaining systems, then we are all cooked. With this in mind, Brave Bull Allard saw the camps as just the beginning. After the pipeline was defeated, she said, the Standing Rock Sioux needed to turn themselves into a model for green energy and sustainable living.
This vision of a movement not just resisting but modeling and teaching the way forward is shared by many of the movement’s key figures, including Standing Rock Sioux tribal council member Cody Two Bears. Dressed in a red sweatshirt with the word Warrior emblazoned in black letters, he talked about the early days of European presence on these lands, when his ancestors educated the visitors on how to survive in a harsh and unfamiliar climate. “We taught them how to grow food, keep warm, build longhouses.” But the taking never ended, from the earth and from Indigenous people. And now, Two Bears says, “things are getting worse. So the first people of this land have to teach this country how to live again. By going green, by going renewable, by using the blessings the Creator has given us: the sun and the wind. We are going to start in Native country. And we’re going to show the rest of the country how to live.”
At Standing Rock, I found myself thinking a lot about what it means to be a protector. Leaders of the movement here had insisted from day one that they were not “protesters” out to make trouble, but “water protectors” determined to stop a whole other order of trouble. And then there were all the vets in t-shirts that said To Serve and Protect, deciding that living up to that oath meant putting themselves on the front line to protect the rights of the continent’s First Peoples. And I thought about my own duty to be a protector—of my son, and his friends, and the kids yet to come, in the face of the rocky future we’ve locked in for all of them.
The role of the protector, in the wrong hands, can be lethal. In moments of crisis, strong men step into it with far too much ease, announcing themselves ready to protect the flock from all evil, asking only absolute power and blind obedience in return. Yet the spirit of protection that infused the camp had nothing in common with that all-powerful patriarchal figure. Here was a protection born of intimate knowledge of human frailty, and it was not the one-way, passive kind of protection that can go so very wrong. This protection was reciprocal and it blurred all separation: the water, land, and air protect and sustain all of us—the very least we can do is protect them (or is it us?) when they (or is it we?) are threatened. When the people here faced off against armored tanks and riot police, chanting Mni Wiconi, they were giving voice to that core principle: protect the water, because water protects all of us.
The same sense of vulnerability and reciprocity guided the veterans’ presence as well. On December 5, the Obama administration announced it had denied the permit to lay the pipeline under the tribe’s water reservoir. That evening, a “forgiveness ceremony” was held on the reservation. For hours, hundreds of vets lined up to beg forgiveness of the elders for crimes committed against Indigenous peoples over centuries by the military institutions they served.
Wesley Clark Jr., one of the main organizers of the veterans’ delegation to Standing Rock, began by saying:
Many of us, me particularly, are from the units that have hurt you over the many years. We came. We fought you. We took your land. We signed treaties that we broke. We stole minerals from your sacred hills. We blasted the faces of our presidents onto your sacred mountain. Then we took still more land and then we took your children and then we tried…to eliminate your language that God gave you, and the Creator gave you. We didn’t respect you, we polluted your Earth, we’ve hurt you in so many ways but we have come to say that we are sorry.
Amidst the tears and the sage smoke, we felt the touch of history. And something else too: a way to deal with rage and grief that went beyond venting. So soon after such a divisive, crude election, it came as a tremendous relief. For weeks, the screens that occupy too much of my life had been engulfed in that unrelenting rage, and in angry circular debates about who, or what, was the one and only true cause of the mess we were now in. Trump won because of the racism of America—end of discussion, some said. No he didn’t, it was the elitism of the corporate Dems—Bernie would have fixed everything, others roared. No, he won because of capitalism, the issue above all others—racism and white supremacy are a sideshow. No, identity politics is what destroyed us, you whiners and dividers. No, it was misogyny, you bunch of flaming assholes. No, it was the fossil fuel industry, determined to suck out their last mega-profits, regardless of how much they destabilize the earth. Plenty of good points were made, but it was striking that the goal was rarely to change minds, or find common ground. The goal was to win the argument.
And then, within minutes, all that venom dried up. Those battles suddenly made as little sense as putting an oil pipeline under this community’s drinking water source—a pipeline that was originally supposed to pass through the majority-white city of Bismarck, where it was widely rejected over concerns about safety. In the camps, surrounded by people who had been fighting the most powerful industries on earth, the idea that there was any kind of competition between these issues dropped away. In Standing Rock, it was just so clear that it was all of it, a single system. It was ecocidal capitalism that was determined to ram that pipeline through the Missouri River—consent and climate change be damned. It was searing racism that made it possible to do in Standing Rock what was deemed impossible in Bismarck, and to treat water protectors as pests to be blasted away with water cannons in frigid weather. Modern capitalism, white supremacy, and fossil fuels were strands of the same braid, inseparable. And they were all woven together here, on this patch of frozen land.
As the great Anishinaabe writer and organizer Winona LaDuke wrote of the standoff, “This is a moment of extreme corporate rights and extreme racism faced with courage, prayers and resolve.” It’s a battle that knows no borders. All around the world, the people doing the sacred work of protecting fragile ecologies from industrial onslaught are facing dirty wars. According to a report from the human rights watchdog Global Witness, “More than three people were killed a week in 2015 defending their land, forests and rivers against destructive industries…. Increasingly communities that take a stand are finding themselves in the firing line of companies’ private security, state forces and a thriving market for contract killers.” About 40 percent of the victims, they estimate, are Indigenous.
Since the election, I had been longing for some kind of gathering of progressive thinkers and organizers—to strategize, unite, and find a way through the next four years of Trump’s daily barrage, the kind of discussion that had been so abruptly interrupted in Australia on the day/night of the election. I pictured it happening at a university, in big halls. I didn’t expect to find that space at Standing Rock. But that is indeed where I discovered it, in the camps’ combination of reaction and contemplation, and in the constant learning-by-doing modeled by Brave Bull Allard and so many other leaders here.
At Standing Rock, they did not, in the end, manage to stop the pipeline—at least not yet. In a flagrant betrayal of the treaty and land rights, Trump immediately reversed Obama’s decision and allowed the company—flanked by layers of militarized police—to ram the pipe under Lake Oahe, without the consent of the Standing Rock Sioux. As I write, oil is flowing beneath the community’s drinking water reservoir, and the pipe could burst at any time. That outrage is being challenged in the courts, and extensive pressure is being put on the banks that financed the project. Roughly $80 million (and counting) has been pulled from the banks that have invested in the pipeline.
But the oil still flows.
I will never forget the experience of being at the main camp when the news arrived, after the months of resistance, that the Obama administration had finally denied the pipeline permit. I happened to be standing with Tokata Iron Eyes, a fiercely grounded yet playful thirteen-year-old from Standing Rock who had helped kick-start the movement against the pipeline. I turned on my phone video and asked her how she felt about the breaking news. “Like I have my future back,” she replied, and then she burst into tears. I did too.
Thanks to Trump, Tokata has again lost that sense of safety. And yet his action cannot and does not erase the profound learning that took place during all those months on the land. The modeling of a form of resistance that, with one hand, said no to an imminent threat and, with the other, worked tirelessly to build the yes that is the world we want and need.