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<h1 id="reader-title">This Moment at Standing Rock Was Decades
in the Making<br>
</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Jenni Monet posted Sep
16, 2016</div>
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<p>Attack dogs and waves of arrests by police in riot gear
could look like isolated incidents of overreaction to
the activism stemming from the Standing Rock
reservation. But for the Lakota Sioux who live in these
marginalized hillsides, the escalated militarization
behind their battle against the Dakota Access pipeline
is a situation decades in the making.</p>
<blockquote class="pullquote">Many people of Standing Rock
are not surprised by the extreme response of law
enforcement against activists.</blockquote>
<p>North Dakota is not the whitest state in America, but
it’s arguably the most segregated. More than 60 percent
of its largest minority population, Native Americans,
lives on or near reservations. Native men are
incarcerated or unemployed at some of the highest rates
in the country. Poverty levels for families of the
Standing Rock tribe are five times that of residents
living in the capital city, Bismarck. In Cannon Ball,
the heart of the tribal community, there are rows of
weathered government homes, but no grocery store. Tucked
behind a lonely highway, this is where mostly white
farmers and ranchers shuttle to and from homesteads once
belonging to the Sioux.</p>
<p>Add to that a contempt that many Native Americans say
they feel from North Dakotans and particularly from
police, and many people of Standing Rock are not
surprised by the extreme response of law enforcement
against activists.</p>
<p>“We’ve run on empty for a number of generations,” said
Phyllis Young, a former tribal councilwoman for the
Standing Rock Sioux, the community that’s vowed to stop
the pipeline in its path. “But now we’re taking a stand.
We are reaching a pinnacle, a peak.”</p>
<p>The initial occupation began in April, but since early
August people from across Indian Country, and now the
world, have turned up every day by the hundreds to
protest ongoing construction—even if it means
confronting angry workers, lines of riot police, attack
dogs, and jail time.</p>
<p>North Dakota, a state of nearly 740,000 people, is
similar to other conservative states with sizable Native
American populations, places like Arizona and Oklahoma,
where natural resource extractions have terribly harmed
indigenous land—like the uranium mining fallout across
the Navajo Nation or the lead contamination on lands
leased by the Quapaws. Yet where these environmental
ordeals did not so much draw the kind of activism now
swelling at Standing Rock today, they have similarly
intensified attention to the greater systemic problems
that exist whenever ancestral tribal lands are targeted
for energy development.</p>
<p>For North Dakotans unaware of this context, the battle
against the Dakota Access pipeline has caught them off
guard.</p>
<p>“The outsiders coming in, we feel, are bringing this
unrest,” said Ron Ness, a multigenerational North
Dakotan. “Certainly it’s not the norm of the tribal
nations to do business here and who we all know and who
we are neighbors with.”</p>
<p>Ness, who is president of the North Dakota Petroleum
Council, represents the state’s overwhelming
conservative view of the protests—a combination of
annoyance and anxiety—that illustrates the historic and
cultural divisions of the Northern Plains.</p>
<hr width="50%">
<p>One thing all parties seem agree on, directly or
indirectly, is that this oil pipeline is not wanted
around water supplies. But whose water supply?</p>
<p>An early proposal of the Dakota Access pipeline once
examined a route that would have extended the
multibillion-dollar project 10 miles north of Bismarck.
But the company, along with the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers, rejected it, opting for a plan that would
snake a portion 92 feet below the Missouri River,
directly under Standing Rock’s main water source.</p>
<p>The Corps had evaluated the Bismarck route and
determined it was not a viable option. One reason: The
route posed a potential threat to the city’s water
supply. Municipal water wells were at risk, according to
the agency’s environmental assessment. Meanwhile, the
Corps stated that the initial route would have been
difficult to stay 500 or more feet away from homes, as
state regulations required. That’s when the agency
recommended the path of the pipeline traverse the
Missouri River underneath land belonging to the Corps,
an easement less than half a mile away from the Standing
Rock Sioux reservation.</p>
<p>The tribe argued environmental consequences would be
grave if the nearly 1,200-mile pipeline, transporting
450,000 barrels of Bakken crude a day, were to leak.
Standing Rock is now suing the Corps on claims that the
agency inadequately consulted with them prior to
approving the pipeline project. The tribe is appealing
the recent federal ruling denying its request to stop
construction. “We’re prepared to face the court,”
Phyllis Young said. “We have an ambitious agenda.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, defending the pipeline in North Dakota
lately has evolved into routine theater.</p>
<p>The Morton County Sheriff’s Department has so far
arrested as many as 69 people for what it described as
illegal protest activities. On Thursday three men
attached themselves to construction equipment. Many of
those arrested have been charged with criminal
trespassing. The majority are people who reside in other
states. At least two were booked with identification
from communities in Canada.</p>
<p>Morton County State’s Attorney’s office filed charges
against four activists involved in the tense clashes of
September 3, where private security guards hired by
Dakota Access and its partner, Energy Transfer Partners,
used attack dogs and pepper spray against protestors.
The demonstration, which was video-recorded by Amy
Goodman of Democracy Now!, effectively stopped pipeline
construction for the day. The affidavit, including
charges filed against Goodman, came in direct response
to Gov. Jack Dalrymple’s call to seek reimbursement from
anyone who costs the government money from their civil
disobedience. That threat was made the same day the
Republican governor activated the National Guard.</p>
<p>This week, Kolette Ostlund, a deputy court clerk of the
North Central Judicial District Office in Minot, North
Dakota, received a formal warning for her Facebook
comment made over the Labor Day weekend. The September 5
rant about the pipeline battle began: “Solution: let
them keep their sacred land. Go around their water and
burial grounds. It obviously means a lot to them and
they should have it ... Then ... Stop the monthly checks
and ALL the government payouts! Stop all the subsidies
and hand-outs. Done!”</p>
<p>She added, “The government has paid out enough over the
last few hundred years. Enough is enough!”</p>
<hr width="50%">
<p>At Sacred Stone Camp, where as many as 2,000 people
have journeyed to pitch teepees or tents to stand in
solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux, Ashley Thunder
Hawk stood in the wet grass and soft mud wearing a
single white flip-flop. “The other one broke,” she
laughed, wondering out loud how she would make her way
around the camp.</p>
<p>“There is racism,” said Thunder Hawk, a lifelong
resident of Cannon Ball. “We get treated shitty on our
own piece of land, but at the same time we go on the
other side and it’s worse. We get treated really
shitty.”</p>
<p>In recent months, Thunder Hawk said, she’d given up on
plans to move off the reservation and into the nearby
community of Mandan or Bismarck. A felony record made
getting a job and renting an apartment seem next to
impossible. For now, her focus was on exercising extreme
willpower, to ward off drugs, to resist alcohol, and to
ignore a wave of negativity that seemingly permeates the
reservation. The 24-year-old mother could count the days
of her sobriety: six months and 13 days. Ron Yellow Jr.,
the father of her only child, was on the same healthy
path.</p>
<p>In Thunder Hawk’s world, practicing sheer determination
is even difficult to do. “If you want to go somewhere,
you gotta drive maybe 50-60 miles north to have fun or
something, you know?” She paused and shifted her weight
onto her naked foot.</p>
<p>Yellow Jr., 37, added, “It’s why a lot of people say
that we’re stuck here.”</p>
<p>The social problems, many tribal residents say, began
when treaties were broken and ancestral lands were lost
to colonizers.</p>
<p>The existing land base of the Standing Rock Sioux was
determined by the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. When
the U.S. government claimed victory 11 years later,
following the Great Sioux War, the terms of that treaty
were amended. Threatened by starvation, the tribe, under
duress, ceded a great deal of Laramie land to the
federal government. In partial recognition of this
painful history, modern federal Indian law today accords
certain rights to tribes, including entitlement programs
linked to health care, housing, education, and even
gaming.</p>
<p>But even with these concessions, reservation life
across Indian Country is often bleak and exacerbated by
a disconnection from political power or voice.</p>
<p>Consider North Dakota’s strict voter-ID law. </p>
<p>Chase Iron Eyes, the first Lakota Sioux to run for the
state’s only congressional seat, said he has witnessed
many Native American voters being denied access to the
polls. North Dakota doesn’t have a voter registration
system. Instead, the state has required residents to
provide valid identification. Polling precincts have
accepted driver’s licenses and state-issued identity
cards, as well as identification from North Dakota’s
federally recognized Indian tribes. </p>
<p>But there’s one catch: All IDs must have a current
address.</p>
<p>“In Indian Country we all know damn well that we don’t
have physical addresses,” said Iron Eyes. The
38-year-old attorney and member of the Standing Rock
Sioux tribe is running for Congress, challenging
incumbent Kevin Cramer, a Republican, who’s been the
U.S. representative for North Dakota’s at-large
congressional district since 2013.</p>
<p>“I never had a physical address until I came back from
law school,” Iron Eyes continued. “Our whole lives we
have P.O. boxes, and so this is something that in the
law we have to prove discriminatory intent.”</p>
<p>In August, a federal judge issued a preliminary
injunction that will make it easier for Native Americans
to cast their ballots in the upcoming general election.
But the court ruling didn’t strike down the 2013 law.
With only weeks left before Election Day, North Dakota’s
secretary of state vowed to review the issue during the
next legislative session, in early 2017. Like so many
voter-ID laws nationwide, the North Dakota statute was
passed by a Republican-led legislature that claimed a
need to curb statewide voter fraud. </p>
<p>“If Native people don’t vote, what you get are
instituted roadblocks and military-style checkpoints,”
Iron Eyes said, referring to the National Guardsmen
staked out along Highway 1806, a direct response to the
pipeline protests. </p>
<p>Iron Eyes faces an enormous political battle.</p>
<blockquote class="pullquote">What happens here once the
pipeline battle ends? </blockquote>
<p>To begin, his opponent can outspend him by nearly a
million dollars. (T-shirt sales have been a humble
fundraising approach for the Iron Eyes for Congress
campaign.) The Democratic National Party will not
formally endorse him. With only around $40,000 in
campaign coffers, he lacks the money to interest the
DNC.</p>
<p>And so Iron Eyes must rely on a vast Native American
turnout to come even close to a win. Most tribal members
are too poor to donate. Voting, at least, is free.</p>
<p>To be sure, North Dakota is a state dominated by
Republican influence.</p>
<p>During North Dakota’s GOP convention last April, Cramer
was among the first to endorse Donald Trump. It was a
show of support soon followed by the state’s governor,
who now sits on Trump’s newly created agricultural
advisory committee.</p>
<p>The state’s Democratic senator, Heidi Heitkamp, is an
advocate for Native American programs in North Dakota.
But she has remained mostly silent on action swirling
around Dakota Access. On Thursday, though, she was
compelled to respond after online threats were made by
the hacker group Anonymous, targeting North Dakota
lawmakers and law enforcement. </p>
<p>“Threats of violence cloaked in anonymity never have
and never will have any place in North Dakota,”
Heitkamp’s statement read. </p>
<p>That Anonymous has entered the fight for indigenous
rights at Standing Rock, whether the occupation’s
organizers like it or not, helps amplify a very simple
narrative: “We decided to stand with Native Americans
whose lands you raped, whose sacred lands you
destroyed,” said its video mostly addressed to Gov.
Darymple. </p>
<p>Despite the passionate and widespread support for the
Standing Rock Sioux’s position, the outlook for
defeating a pipeline is grim. </p>
<p>The very fact that the tribal community is situated in
the state’s poorest county, Sioux County, prompts the
question: What happens here once the pipeline battle
ends? </p>
<p>Systemic poverty that has gripped this tribe goes
beyond a lack of money. It involves often young lives
burdened early by hopelessness, homelessness,
alcoholism, and chronic suicide. More than half of
Cannon Ball’s students drop out of school.</p>
<p>Addressing areas of insecurity would do Standing Rock
justice. Despite its position on the prairie, it’s a
virtual desert—of data, healthy foods, digital
technology, political representation.</p>
<p>“Fear of racism, it’s alive and well in the Dakotas,”
said spiritual leader Arvol Looking Horse about the
sentiments among the Lakota. “And today, it’s even
gotten worse because of our political leaders.”</p>
<p>Looking Horse was the elder who led a ceremonial
blessing for President Obama during his visit to the
Standing Rock Reservation in 2014. “Americans don’t even
know that we exist today,” he continued.</p>
<p>“But finally, the world is watching,” he said</p>
<p>“We have no choice but to stand on prayer and peace and
unity, because in our circle there’s no ending and
beginning. We are all equal.”</p>
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