Standing Rock actions on trial

Lawsuit attempts to revise history of Indigenous-led movement

“We stand with Standing Rock!”

That call echoed across the country—and world—during 2016.

The Tohono O’odham Nation in southern Arizona was among the 546 tribal nations who responded to the call to demand an alternative route for the Dakota Access Pipeline. The pipeline was slated to be built near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation under the Missouri River.

One little break and the half a million barrels of oil it carried daily could contaminate this drinking water source for millions of North and South Dakota residents.

About a hundred of us at Tohono O’odham Community College gathered that fall to register our support for Standing Rock’s Mni Waconi—Water is Life—movement with a photo. A contingent of about a dozen people soon would be driving more than a thousand miles to provide supplies and moral support as they joined the water protectors camping near the site of the planned construction.

As befitted a movement led by Indigenous youth, most of the departing Tohono O’odham water protectors were students.

Based on a lawsuit currently underway in North Dakota, however, it may be time to raise that clarion call again, but adding protection for Greenpeace.

Greenpeace sued over supporting role

Now the pipeline corporation, Energy Transfer Partners LP, is claiming in court that Greenpeace secretly aided and abetted destructive and violent behavior during the Standing Rock actions. And, although the number remains undefined, it wants the non-profit organization to pay up to $300 million for supposedly doing so.

This is wrong on so many levels.

I’ve been a fan of Greenpeace since soon after its formation in 1971—specifically because activists affiliated with it would put themselves in danger but would never condone using violence to get their way. The group’s non-violence credo fit well with my respect for the non-violent activism of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Indian Independence activist known as Mahatma Gandhi, and our nation’s own beloved Martin Luther King, Jr.

For another thing, the movement was clearly organized by Indigenous peoples and designed to be non-violent. As a Standing Rock participant told the court on Monday, he called in Greenpeace late in the game only because he was friends with one of their employees. He asked for supplies and help with nonviolent direct action training.

Energy Transfer is clearly gunning to gut peaceful protest.

“We know that this trial is about more than Greenpeace. This is about all of us fighting to protect our right to protest and free speech,” said Adrienne Lowry of Greenpeace, who emceed a webinar on Thursday arranged by the organization.

An environmental NGO operating since 1971, Greenpeace argues it risks bankruptcy if Energy Transfer wins the lawsuit currently underway in Mandan, North Dakota. Yet numerous credible accounts from the non-governmental organization and Indigenous participants show the NGO played only a minor role in the demonstration—a demonstration that should be protected under our First Amendment rights.

Thursday’s Greenpeace webinar featured a panel of three Indigenous women currently leading a variety of campaigns to protect water from oil and gas contamination. They were among those confirming the movement was Indigenous led from beginning to end.

Waniya Locke, a Standing Rock community member who participated in the protection efforts, dismissed the concept that the Netherlands-based Greenpeace International or its American offshoot, Greenpeace USA, played a defining role in the movement.

“It was prayerful. It was one of the most beautiful, profound experiences to be a part of in 2016,” Locke told about 500 participants in Thursday’s Greenpeace webinar. “We had over 546-plus tribes make it into town. And it was not NGO-led at all.”

“I had no idea Greenpeace was there, actually,” Winona LaDuke told Amy Goodman during a March 4 Democracy Now! interview. LaDuke is a member of the Mississippi band of Anishinaabe and a longtime author and activist who participated in the Mni Waconi movement at Standing Rock. “And I think a lot of Indigenous people didn’t. We all came for the water.”

Youth initiated, led actions

“Lakota/Dakota, the youth were the ones who led it,” Locke said. “They were protecting their future. They were protecting their own drinking water. They were protecting their own children who haven’t been born yet.”

A lengthy New York Times feature article from January 31, 2017—long before anyone could imagine such a lawsuit would come into play—recounted the history of the movement dubbed Mni Waconi (roughly pronounced “Mini Wachoni”).

The timeline described in this thoroughly researched article makes it clear Indigenous youth launched the encampment along the shores of the Mississippi, starting in April of 2016 with about a dozen living in a teepee.

Reporter Saul Elbein described how the movement started with 19-year-old Jasilyn Charger and her cousin, Joseph White Eyes, both Lakota Sioux who grew up on the nearby Cheyenne River Reservation. They united with others as part of the One Mind Youth Movement. As Elbein recounted:

Last April, Charger, White Eyes and a few One Mind teenagers and mentors helped establish a tiny “prayer camp” just off the Dakota Access route, on the north end of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Over the next six months that camp grew into an improbable movement that united conservative farmers with the old radicals of the American Indian Movement; urban environmentalists with the traditional chiefs of hundreds of tribes. …

But little remarked upon at the time was the unlikely seed from which the movement had grown: an anti-suicide campaign among a tight-knit group of youths, most younger than 25, impelled by tragedy and guided by prophecy.

Guided by prophecy

The prophecy of the black snake, part of a Lakota myth that has become associated with pipelines as well as a general darkness sowing disunity and dysfunction, was incorporated into the training One Mind activists received from the Indigenous Environmental Network.

Prophecy surrounding the black snake said it could only be overcome by the Seventh Generation—basically, Indigenous millennials born between 1980 and 2000—and only if the Lakota/Dakota peoples previously known as Sioux and their allies resisted resorting to violence, even in the face of violence directed at them.

And as the encampment spread, security police grew more violent. By November, news reports and social media videos showed police using rubber bullets and mace and ordering dogs to attack water protectors. This drew the attention of concerned veterans.

Even after the Army Corps of Engineers withdrew its permit for the encampment in November, most water protectors declined to leave. In fact, veterans by the thousands were arriving or on their way to stand in solidarity with the Indigenous peoples and their allies, leaving weapons behind, as instructed.

The encampment ultimately attracted an estimated 100,000 people, Greenpeace lawyer Everett Jack Jr. said in court last week. He noted some of the newcomers who arrived during the six-month larger campaign did not have the same values as the Lakota/Dakota organizers, describing tension between nonviolent protesters and people who “just wanted to burn stuff down.”

Movement rooted in non-violent action

Like the Indigenous youth and Standing Rock community members who spearheaded the demonstration, Greenpeace comes from a tradition of non-violence—in the NGO’s case, modeled on the Quaker tradition—and helps train protesters to “de-escalate” conflict to avoid violence. Although few Indigenous peoples knew they were there or even who they were, Greenpeace played a small role doing so during the Mni Waconi demonstration at the request of Indigenous organizers, Jack told the court.

The Indigenous organizers were taking every opportunity to pursue non-violent tactics. On December 2, some of the movement’s young people saw a Morton County Sheriff’s Department Facebook post requesting donations of granola bars, fruit soda and socks. They decided to donate. They brought containers filled with granola bars, warm clothes and water—telling the officers they brought the water instead of soda because they wanted them to stay healthy.

Some of the supporters who had swelled their ranks responded with anger about the interaction, wondering why they would help officers who were attacking them with batons, mace, rubber bullets and dogs. The youth explained that violence would ruin everything they were trying to build, according to the prophecy.

On December 4, just as the local people were wondering how to feed and shelter so many supporters as a blizzard moved in, the Army Corps of Engineers under President Obama announced it would deny the construction permit for the pipeline. Celebrations ensued.

That victory proved short-lived.

The struggle continues

The incoming president, Donald Trump, quickly reversed the decision in early 2017 with an executive order. In 2021, the Army Corps allowed the pipeline to continue operations while Energy Transfer completes its environmental impact statement. That statement is expected this year.

“We’re still fighting to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline,” Locke said. “And a reminder that the federal judge ruled in our favor that this pipeline was illegally built and illegally operating currently right now.”

Unfortunately, the issue is stretching into a lengthy marathon rather than the victorious battle it briefly seemed at the end of 2016. But that doesn’t surprise or deter the Indigenous activists featured in Thursday’s webinar.

“We must understand solidarity is a relationship, not a one-time action,” Crystal Cavalier, co-founder of Seven Directions of Service explained. “They always want to say it’s a protest or, you know, stopping a specific project. But this is about deep, long-term community building.”

Locke also focused on the positive. As a former instructor in the Lakota language, she said, it “brightens her heart” that many Americans came to know the phrase Mni Waconi for Water is Life.

If you missed it the first time around, now is a good time to memorize that phrase again.

It’s not time to sit down yet.

To participate in the Thursday webinar series offered by Greenpeace, use this link to sign up. A 2022 feature film about the Standing Rock movement, On Sacred Ground, won several awards from the Red Nation Film Festival.

CLARIFICATION: This story has been corrected to say the encampment ultimately attracted 100,000 people, to make clear that not everyone was there at the same time.

Here’s a video reviewing what transpired during the Standing Rock encampment.