Library:Our History is the Future

Our History Is the Future
Author	Nick Estes
Publisher	Verso Books
First published	2019
Type	Book
ISBN	978-1-78663-673-7
Source	Libgen

Prologue: Prophets

Thanksgiving is the quintessential origin story a settler nation tells itself: “peace” was achieved between Natives and settlers at Plymouth, Massachusetts, where Mayflower pilgrims established a colony in 1620, over roast turkey and yams. To consummate the wanton slaughter of some 700 Pequots, in 1637 the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Bradford, proclaimed that Thanksgiving Day be celebrated “in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won.” Peace on stolen land is borne of genocide.

It was Thanksgiving 2016. We had spent a bitterly cold night at a Wyoming gas station off I-80, among a half-dozen other cars loaded with camp supplies and Water Protectors. Everyone was up before sunrise, hoping the interstate would reopen after the overnight freeze. Among them were Natives and non-Natives from the Pacific Northwest and West Coast, sporting fatigues and signature black and tan Carhartt jackets with patches declaring: “WATER IS LIFE.” “This is Trump country—we gotta hit the road!” one of the Water Protectors exclaimed, half-jokingly, to the packed truck stop bathroom. Outside, white men glared at us from their dually pickups. Wyoming is an oil, gas, and coal state, and it was sending its police to fight the modern-day Indian war that we were on our way to help resist. We filed into our cars and took the on-ramp toward Standing Rock.

This was my fourth and final trip to Oceti Sakowin Camp, the largest of several camps that existed at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers, north of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, from April 2016 to February 2017. Initially, the camps had been established to block construction of Energy Transfer Partners’ $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), a 1,712-mile oil pipeline that cut through unceded territory of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and crossed under Mni Sose (the Missouri River) immediately upstream from Standing Rock, threatening the reservation’s water supply.

This was not just about Standing Rock water: The pipeline crossed upriver from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation on the Missouri River, transporting oil extracted from that reservation’s booming fracking industry. It cut under the Mississippi River at the Iowa–Illinois border, where a coalition of Indigenous peoples and white farmers, ranchers, and environmentalists in Iowa opposed it. And it crossed four states—North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois. But it was Standing Rock and allied Indigenous nations, including Fort Berthold, who had put up the most intense resistance.

After North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple declared a state of emergency on August 19, 2016—to safeguard the pipeline’s final construction—the movement surged. Dalrymple deployed the National Guard and invoked powers under the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) that are normally used only during natural disasters, such as floods, fires, and hurricanes. EMAC also allows for state, municipal, and federal law enforcement agencies to share equipment and personnel during what are declared “community disorders, insurgency, or enemy attack.” In April 2015, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan had also used EMAC powers to crush a Black-led uprising for justice for Freddie Gray, a Black man killed by Baltimore police. This time it was an Indigenous nation that was declared the threat.

The encampments were about more than stopping a pipeline. Scattered and separated during invasion, the long-awaited reunification of all seven nations of Dakota-, Nakota-, and Lakota-speaking peoples hadn’t occurred in more than a hundred years, or at least seven generations. Oceti Sakowin, dubbed the “Great Sioux Nation” by settlers, once encompassed territory that spanned from the western shores of Lake Superior to the Bighorn Mountains. Only in stories had I heard about the Oceti Sakowin uniting, its fire lit, and the seven tipis or lodges—each representing a nation—arranged in the shape a buffalo horn. Historically, this reunification had happened in times of celebration, for annual sun dances, large multi-tribal trading fairs, and buffalo hunts. But the last time was also in a time of war—to resist invasion. Now, the gathering had become what the passengers of our car—Carolina, an Indigenous immigration lawyer, Dina, an Indigenous writer, and I—liked to call “Indian City”; at its peak, the camp was North Dakota’s tenth-largest city. Its population surpassed 10,000 people, possibly reaching as many as 15,000.

The camp was at a standstill when we arrived, and completely encircled by law enforcement employing hundreds of miles of concertina wire, road blocks, and twenty-four-hour aerial surveillance, in what resembled a military occupation. In an effort to sow division, TigerSwan, a private security contractor hired by DAPL to assist North Dakota law enforcement, infiltrated the camps and planted false reports on social media and local news comparing Water Protectors to jihadist insurgents. The #NoDAPL movement was “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component,” they claimed, in documents released by the Intercept. The effects were devastating, and many of the planted stories continue to circulate as truth, the divisions cleaved still festering. And because of the violent police crackdown on protests, including the infamous October 27 raid on the 1851 Treaty Camp, a hiatus had been placed on high-risk direct actions like placing bodies before earthmovers.

So the next day—Black Friday—we went to the mall. In Bismarck, North Dakota, shoppers, mostly white, flooded the Kirkwood Mall, eager to cash in on holiday discounts. Our plan was to disrupt Black Friday shopping, in unison with other Black Friday actions, to keep the message of #NoDAPL in the news and the fire burning in people’s hearts and minds. Back at camp, I had run into a childhood friend, Michael, and his partner Emma, and we had packed into his car. Through traffic was entirely blocked on Highway 1806, the fastest route to reservation border towns Mandan and Bismarck, and military checkpoints choked off business to Prairie Knights Casino—a major employer in the reservation and source of revenue for Standing Rock—and hampered residents’ access to off-reservation jobs and groceries. What resembled an economic embargo and, in different circumstances, could be considered an act of war against a sovereign nation, added an extra half hour to forty-five minutes to our drive.

The mall was packed. Bismarck police, all of them white, guarded the entrances with AR-15 rifles. Once inside, our goal was to create a prayer circle in the mall’s large food court, without getting caught; this meant we would have to “blend in.” That’s hard enough for Natives in a sea of whites.

Our cover was blown. A white woman cried out: “They smell like campfire!” Shoppers stopped and looked. She pointed to a group of women—faces wind and sun-burnt, jackets and skirts unwashed—heading toward the mall’s restrooms. Two cops, their AR-15s slung over their shoulders, approached, and grabbed and twisted one of the women’s arm. She was dark-skinned, and her black hair was neatly braided to her waist. I waited to hear her arm pop from dislocation or fracture, as the cop slammed her face-first on the thin carpet.

“I’m trying to go to the bathroom!”

“Shut the fuck up!”

Soon all four of them were sitting on the ground with their hands zip-tied behind them, and then the cops dragged them away. The smell of fire, a central aspect of camp life—ceremony, planning, cooking, eating, sleeping, singing, storytelling, and keeping warm—had given them away. “Oceti” in “Oceti Sakowin,” after all, means “council fire.” In another time, they might have been accused of “smelling like an Indian” because fire is central to Lakota ceremonial life; but now, smoke also indicated that one had come from the #NoDAPL camps.

“What’s your problem?” asked a white man, approaching the cops. With a leg sweep, he was also facedown, with a knee on his neck and knee on his spine.

“Quit resisting!” the officer shouted. They didn’t bother to pick him up, instead dragging him belly-first across the ground.

“He smelled like campfire,” shrugged the cop who had thrown him down.

Eventually, we formed a prayer circle—before cops began tackling, punching, and kicking us too. A man’s crutches were taken from him, and he hobbled on one foot as another cop tackled him. White men from the crowd began holding Water Protectors for the police or throwing them into the police line.

“Go back to the reservation! Prairie niggers!” one of them screamed in our faces.

White children looking on also screamed, though they seemed more scared of the police than of the Water Protectors. A woman got caught between the police and our retreating line, and cops grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to the ground crying. Her partner stepped in and was kneed several times in the face. A woman began running as we made our way through the exit doors and was tackled on the pavement by a cop.

We had flinched each time they nabbed one of us from the crowd, expecting the now-familiar chemical shower of CS gas or pepper spray—another odor that was mixed in with the smoke, and that, in a single attack, could dull a person’s sense of smell for days, sometimes weeks. But the presence of white shoppers and their families—unwanted collateral damage—protected us from being shot or sprayed. Instead, the cops used their hands and feet. Thirty-three were arrested. After Michael, Emma, and I escaped, we rendezvoused at the car.

Michael turned to me, his hands shaking. “Now I know what it’s like to be hunted.”

At camp, the smell of campfire brought us back to another world—an older world, an Indigenous world always thought to be on the brink of extinction, a place at once familiar to Native peoples and radically unfamiliar to settlers. In the twilight hours, Water Protectors told stories and shared the prophetic visions of a better world, not just in the past, but one currently in the making, as purple-grey smoke filled the spaces between tipis, tents, and lines of cars and trucks.

The camps had attracted Indigenous and non-Indigenous people from across North America. On my first day in camp, in August, I dug compost holes with my Ojibwe relative Josh—a cook from Bismarck—and built a cook shack at the camp’s main kitchen with my Diné relative Brandon and a Palestinian network administrator, Emad, from Yankton, South Dakota—himself a refugee from the US-backed Israeli colonization of his homelands. My Palestinian comrade Samia once called our sacrosanct duty at camp an “intifada on the plains,” because she saw it as an uprising against the same occupier. The cook shack, pieced together with genuine solidarity and gnarly fallen trees, survived a brutal Northern Plains winter and helped feed thousands.

I also knew Michael, a white kid from my small hometown of Chamberlain, South Dakota, along the Missouri River. I grew up in a single-parent, single-income household, in a mobile home literally on the wrong side of the tracks. Michael’s parents made ends meet by working at the Catholic-run Indian boarding school where my father and his siblings had their Lakota culture and language beaten from them. Along with other kids like us, both Native and white, the two of us bonded over skateboarding, punk rock, and left politics—everything we felt rebelled against the pervasive, and often violent, conservatism of our hometown.

Politicians and media attempted to play up divisions in the camps, depicting white Water Protectors as “hippies” who treated the movement like “Burning Man.” Those elements existed, and some Native people played along. But such portrayals gloss over meaningful solidarities. For example, our national camp, Kul Wicasa, welcomed everyone. Our camp’s leader, my friend and Tahansi (cousin) Lewis Grassrope, helped create the Oceti Sakowin Horn, inviting not only Indigenous, but also non-Indigenous peoples to participate. (Our families had shared political commitments that went back generations. In the 1930s his great-grandfather Daniel Grassrope, a traditional headman, and my great-grandfather Ruben Estes, a translator, traveled together to Washington, DC, to encourage Congress to pass the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act.) Lewis knew the importance of allies.

Two years earlier he and I had spent cold nights in poorly insulated tipis protesting our own nation. Of all the tribal councils, that of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe was the only to cast support for TransCanada, the company building the Keystone XL Pipeline. Our protest camp had little to no help from our own people, nor from the outside world. There were no television cameras or social media live streams, and there was no Mark Ruffalo. But now the world had come to #NoDAPL. A white woman named Maria, a local reporter and a friend from Chamberlain, embedded herself in the camp as a cook, feeding thousands. Abe, a white military veteran from Colorado, ran our camp security. In Chicago, my comrades Kofi from #BlackLivesMatter and Renae, a Nuu-chah-nulth revolutionary socialist, led solidarity delegations. And there were many more.

Political elites and corporate media have frequently depicted poor whites and poor Natives as irreconcilable enemies, without common ground competing for scarce resources in economically depressed rural areas. Yet, the defense of Native land, water, and treaties brought us together. Although not perfect, Oceti Sakowin camp was a home to many for months. And the bonds were long lasting, despite the horrific histories working against them.

Chamberlain is a white-dominated border town next to the Lower Brule and Crow Creek Indian reservations. The settlement began as Fort Kiowa, across the river, a notorious trade hub whose early history is depicted in the 2015 blockbuster film The Revenant with great historical accuracy, despite its tired trope of a white savior “playing Indian.” The film shows the nineteenth-century fur trade’s organized plunder of not only the river ecosystem, but entire nations of people, and its apocalyptic death-world of rape, genocide, poaching, trespass, theft, and smallpox. In the final scene, the main protagonist, Hugh Glass, a real historical figure, approaches Fort Kiowa, where he sees Native women and children begging outside the gates and being bought and sold inside by drunk white traders. These river trade forts were the first “man camps”: large, usually temporary, encampments of men working in extractive industries, from the fur trade to oil and gas development, where rates of sexual and domestic violence, and murders and disappearances of Native women and girls are intensified. As Ihanktonwan elder and member of the Brave Heart Society Faith Spotted Eagle has pointed out, “history teaches us that during times of crisis violence escalates;” indeed, the proliferation of violence against the land has been directly related to attacks on Indigenous women’s bodies.

This region—our homeland—is also part of He Sapa, the Black Hills, or the heart of everything that is. He Sapa is the beating heart of the Lakota cosmos, where we emerged from red earth, took our first breath, and gained our humanity as Oyate Luta: the “Red People,” or the “Red Nation.” During the last ice age, massive glaciers carved up the land. After the ice retreated, it left rolling hills and tunneling valleys that became buffalo roads, where herds that once blackened the plains traveled during seasonal migrations to and from water. The buffalo followed the stars, and the people followed the buffalo. To honor our relations, we called ourselves “Pte Oyate” (the Buffalo Nation), and “Wicahpi Oyate” (the Star Nation). In these ebbs and flows of migration, all roads led to Mni Sose, which translates to “roiling water,” for the once-astir and often-muddy river. Many Lakotayapi nouns, like “Mni Sose,” indicate not merely static, inanimate form, but also action. In this landscape, water is animated and has agency; it streams as liquid, forms clouds as gas, and even moves earth as solid ice—because it is alive and gives life. If He Sapa is the heart of the world, then Mni Sose is its aorta. This is a Lakota and Indigenous relationship to the physical world. What has been derided for centuries as “primitive superstition” has only recently been “discovered” by Western scientists and academics as “valid” knowledge. Nevertheless, knowledge alone has never ended imperialism.

The US military understood this vital connection to place and other-than-humans in the 1860s when it annihilated the remaining 10 to 15 million buffalos in less than two decades. A century later another branch of the military, the US Army Corps of Engineers, constructed five earthen rolled dams on the main stem of the Missouri River, turning life-giving waters into life-taking waters. A river that was once astir was now choked and plugged. After World War II, the United States also aimed to “get out of the Indian business”: to terminate federal responsibilities to Indigenous peoples that had been guaranteed through treaties, to relocate Indigenous peoples off their reservations, and to sell off remaining lands and resources to private industry and white settlers. The Pick-Sloan Plan, a basin-wide multipurpose dam project—which aimed to provide postwar employment, hydroelectricity, flood control, and irrigation to white farming communities and far-off cities—worked in tandem with Indian termination and relocation. With the flooding of the fertile river bottomlands, people were forced off the reservation. Remaining lands were largely uninhabitable, making relocation the only option for many. Thirty percent of Missouri River reservation populations were removed; 90 percent of commercial timber was destroyed; thousands of acres of subsistence farms and gardens were flooded; and 75 percent of wildlife and plants indigenous to the river bottomlands disappeared.

Oglala visionary and prophet Nicholas Black Elk, himself a Catholic, compared the invasion of white Christians as akin to the biblical flood. But unlike the Genesis flood that receded after 150 days, Black Elk’s apocalyptic deluge had no end. It has worked continuously to eliminate Indigenous peoples and their other-than-human relatives from the land, thereby severing their relationship with the land. According to the vision Black Elk described to poet John Neihardt in 1931, white men came like an endless wall of floodwater, creating “a little island,” or a reservation, “where we were free to try to save our nation, but we couldn’t do it.” Constantly hounded as fugitives, escaping from one patch of dry land to the next, the people “were always leaving our lands and the flood devours the four-leggeds as they flee.” The four-leggeds were bears, elk, deer, buffalos, wolves, and so forth—some of whom are presently extinct in the lands of the Oceti Sakowin. The Department of the Interior is tasked with managing the diminished lands and territories of both wildlife and Indians, survivors of an ongoing holocaust. “All of our religion of the old times that the early Indians had was left behind them as they fled and the water covered the region,” Black Elk lamented. “Now, as I look ahead, we are nothing but prisoners of war.” His “we” included the four-leggeds.

Over the last 200 years, the US military has waged relentless war on the Oceti Sakowin as much as it has on their kinship relations, such as Pte Oyate (the buffalo nation) and Mni Sose (the Missouri River). What happened at Standing Rock was the most recent iteration of an Indian War that never ends. DAPL was originally meant to cross the Missouri River upstream from Bismarck, a city that is 90 percent white. But the Army Corps rerouted it to cross downstream, citing a shorter route, fewer water crossings, and reduced proximity to residential areas. Now, it crossed the river just upstream from an 84 percent Native residential area—a suggestion made not by Dakota Access, but by the Army Corps, which went so far as to guide companies funding the pipeline to create environmental justice studies that would find no “disproportionate risk to a racial minority.”

In fact, the Army Corps had been one of the main driving forces behind choking the Missouri River after World War II. In 1946, without authorization from Congress, the Army Corps modified the Garrison Dam project to protect the small majority-white town of Williston, North Dakota, from flooding. Nothing was done, however, to protect against the flooding of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The 212-foot dam flooded 152,360 acres of reservation lands, dislocating 325 families (80 percent of the tribal membership) and destroying 94 percent of their agricultural lands. In 1955, the Army Corps selected the Big Bend dam site on Lower Brule and Crow Creek reservation lands, without notifying either tribal council. Six different sites were considered, four of which would not have flooded the agency town of Lower Brule. The reservation site was chosen for hydraulic reasons but also because its location wouldn’t flood the upriver town of Pierre, the white-dominated state capital of South Dakota, or its neighboring town of Fort Pierre. Big Bend Dam flooded and dislocated both reservation communities for the second time, forcing some families who had moved to higher ground to relocate yet again. The first flood took out the Crow Creek Agency (the combined headquarters of the Crow Creek and Lower Brule tribes). A quarter of Lower Brule’s population was removed during the first deluge, and half during the second.

My grandparents, Joyce and Andrew Estes—both Kul Wicasa from Lower Brule—fought the construction of the Pick-Sloan dams in the 1950s and 1960s. The dams flooded nearly all of my great-grandmother Cornelia Swalla’s allotment. My grandfather, a World War II veteran and, according to my father, Ben, a Lakota code talker, returned from the war to find his homelands and nation under threat from the very government he fought to defend. Our lands, and lives, were targeted not because they held precious resources or labor to be extracted. In fact, the opposite was true: our lands and lives were targeted and held value because they could be wasted—submerged, destroyed. Grandpa Andrew, nicknamed “Brown” for his dark complexion, later gifted his mother Cornelia’s remaining allotted lands to the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe so that our nation could rebuild the inundated Lower Brule town site. In 1937, my great-grandfather Ruben Estes, Cornelia’s husband and the first tribal chairman, opposed the state of South Dakota’s attempt to build dams on the Missouri River without Lower Brule’s consent. The old ones called Ruben “Tongue” because, after butchering his cattle, he gave away all the meat to elders and the hungry, keeping only the tongues for himself. My ancestors were tribal historians, writers, intellectuals, and fierce Indigenous nationalists at a time when Indians weren’t supposed to be anything but drunk, stupid, or dead. They were also Water Protectors, treaty defenders, and humble people of the earth, and they fought for and took care of Mni Sose as best as they could.

In 1963, my grandfather Frank Estes, who was named after Franklin Delano Roosevelt in honor of the “Indian New Deal,” wrote and published the first book on Lower Brule, Make Way for the Brules. His book was a study of Indigenous movement before and during the reservation period. It was a response to the forced removals caused by the Fort Randall and Big Bend Dams and a challenge to the confinement narrative that Native people should just stay “home” in prisoner of war camps, now called “reservations,” out of sight and out of mind. In 1971, my grandfather George Estes, with Richard Loder, cowrote Kul-Wicasa-Oyate—a more extensive history of Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, including the reconstitution of communities and families after surviving forced removal by the US military to our river reservation homeland in the nineteenth century, as well as the two forced relocations caused by the Pick-Sloan dams in the twentieth century.

My grandfather Andrew, who had an eighth-grade education, wrote in the preface of Kul-Wicasa-Oyate what would have been a fitting epigraph for this book about our nation’s history of the defense of our land, our water, and our people:

My people’s history has been lost or destroyed since the coming of the white man. My people, in many ways, have been lost and destroyed by the coming of the white man … This book is not the whole story of my people nor is it all that is best in our heritage. Some of our traditions, our hopes and our roots, we will never write down for the world to see. What we will allow the world to see is, in good part, in these pages. Read them my brothers and you white man, you read them too. It is a history of a proud people: a people who believe in the land and themselves. My people were civilized before the white came and we will be civilized and be here after the white man goes away, poisoned by his misuse of the land and eaten up by his own greed and diseases.

In September 2016, at a #NoDAPL protest in Chicago organized by the Native community and groups such as #BlackLivesMatter, I told this family history in front of a crowd of thousands outside the Army Corps headquarters. That city’s vibrant Native community was itself a result of federal relocation programs onto traditional Potawatomi territory, an Indigenous nation subjected to genocide and removed from its homelands in the place currently called “Chicago.” My ancestors could never have imagined that thousands, perhaps millions, would one day rally to defend the river, our relative Mni Sose. Half a century ago, there were no mass protests against the dams that still wreak havoc on our river, a history I have spent the more than a decade speaking and writing about, with little interest from the outside world.

As we marched, a light rain fell.

“Tell me what the prophecy looks like!” we chanted.

“This is what the prophecy looks like!”

And it was prophecy. Prophecy told of Zuzeca Sapa, the Black Snake, extending itself across the land and imperiling all life, beginning with the water. From its heads, or many heads, it would spew death and destruction. Zuzeca Sapa is DAPL—and all oil pipelines trespassing through Indigenous territory. But while the Black Snake prophecy foreshadows doom, it also foreshadows historic resistance and resurgent Indigenous histories not seen for generations, if ever. To protect Unci Maka, Grandmother Earth, Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples will have to unite to turn back the forces destroying the earth—capitalism and colonialism. But prophets and prophecies do not predict the future, nor are they mystical, ahistorical occurrences. They are simply diagnoses of the times in which we live, and visions of what must be done to get free. In the past, youth followed the guidance of Indigenous elders, the old ones. But in these prophetic times, it is the old ones who are following the leadership of the young, the youth leaders of the #NoDAPL movement—among them, Zaysha Grinnell, Bobbi Jean Three Legs, Jasilyn Charger, and Joseph White Eyes, among others, who brought the message of the Black Snake to the world through thousand-mile relay runs from April to July of 2016.

For the Oceti Sakowin, prophecies like the Black Snake are revolutionary theory, a way to help us think about our relationship to the land, to other humans and other-than-humans, and to history and time. How does one relate to the past? Settler narratives use a linear conception of time to distance themselves from the horrific crimes committed against Indigenous peoples and the land. This includes celebrating bogus origin stories like Thanksgiving. But Indigenous notions of time consider the present to be structured entirely by our past and by our ancestors. There is no separation between past and present, meaning that an alternative future is also determined by our understanding of our past. Our history is the future. Concepts such as Mni Wiconi (water is life) may be new to some, but like the nation of people the concept belongs to, Mni Wiconi predates and continues to exist in spite of white supremacist empires like the United States.

The protestors called themselves Water Protectors because they weren’t simply against a pipeline; they also stood for something greater: the continuation of life on a planet ravaged by capitalism. This reflected the Lakota and Dakota philosophy of Mitakuye Oyasin, meaning “all my relations” or “we are all related.” Water Protectors led the movement in a disciplined way, by what Lakotas call Wocekiye, meaning “honoring relations.” To the outside world this looks like “praying,” the smoking of the Canupa, the sacred pipe, offering tobacco, ceremony, and song to human and other-than-human life. The late Lakota linguist and scholar Albert White Hat Sr. notes that Wocekiye was purposely mistranslated to “praying” by Christian missionaries to describe “bowing and kneeling to a supreme power, which is much different from the original meaning of acknowledging or meeting a relative.” There was no equivalent to “praying” in the Lakota language, although the word has taken on that meaning because of Christian influence.

For the Oceti Sakowin, Mni Sose, the Missouri River, is one such nonhuman relative who is alive, and who is also of the Mni Oyate, the Water Nation. Nothing owns her, and therefore she cannot be sold or alienated like a piece of property. (How do you sell a relative?) And protecting one’s relatives is part of enacting kinship and being a good relative, or Wotakuye, including from the threat of contamination by pipeline leak—in other words, death. This would also spell death for the Oceti Sakowin and its nonhuman relations. In this way, the rallying cry of Mni Wiconi—“water is life”—is also an affirmation that water is alive. Hunkpapa historian Josephine Waggoner has suggested that the word mni (water) is a combination of the words mi (meaning “I”) and ni (meaning “being”), indicating that it also contains life.

Mni Wiconi and these Indigenous ways of relating to human and other-than-human life exist in opposition to capitalism, which transforms both humans and nonhumans into labor and commodities to be bought and sold. These ways of relating also exist in opposition to capitalism’s twin, settler colonialism, which calls for the annihilation of Indigenous peoples and their other-than-human kin. This is distinct from the romantic notion of Indigenous people and culture that is popular among non-Natives and has been aided by disciplines such as anthropology—a discipline that has robbed us of a viable future by trapping us in a past that never existed. In the last two centuries, armies of anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, hobbyists, and grave robbers have pillaged and looted Indigenous bodies, knowledges, and histories, in the same way that Indigenous lands and resources were pillaged and looted. Their distorted, misinterpreted Indigenous histories are both irrelevant and unfamiliar to actually existing Indigenous peoples, and they are deeply disempowering.

There exists no better example of Indigenous revolutionary theory, and its purposeful distortion, than the Ghost Dance. In popular history books, the Ghost Dance appears briefly, only to die at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. The Ghost Dance, in the revolutionary sense, was about life, not death; it was about imagining and enacting an anticolonial Indigenous future free from the death world brought on by settler invasion. It originated with Paiute prophet and healer Wovoka. In his vision, the Great Spirit’s Red Son transforms the earth. This Red coming of the Messiah wipes away the colonial world, bringing back the animals, plants, and human and other-than-human ancestors destroyed by white men and, in turn, destroying the destroyers. Wovoka did not predict the future. Rather, he profoundly understood the times in which he lived, and his prophecy occurred in response to the hardships brought on by reservation life. Its message of a coming Indigenous future spread like wildfire up the Western Canadian coast, down to the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico, and onto the Plains. The Ghost Dance unified Indigenous peoples behind a revolutionary movement—one that sought nothing less than the complete departure of the colonial reality. Its visions were powerful and remain so today. Indigenous dancing had itself been outlawed and was therefore a criminal act. Lakota and Dakota Ghost Dancers attempted to shut down the reservation system by refusing to send children to boarding schools or to heed the orders of Indian agents. But the absence of the colonial system was not enough to bring about true freedom; rather, freedom could only find its genuine expression in actions that would create a new Indigenous world to replace the nightmarish present.

The beauty and power of the Ghost Dance moved Oglala prophet Nicholas Black Elk, who saw it as parallel to his own vision: that the people must unite to nourish back to health the tree of life, so that it can bloom once again. The dance brought Black Elk new visions of Wanikiya, the Lakota word for the Red Messiah that literally means “to make live.” In 1932, poet John Neihardt published a literary interpretation of Black Elk’s vision in Black Elk Speaks, an influential book that Standing Rock scholar Vine Deloria Jr. described as “a North American bible of all tribes.” After the Seventh Cavalry Regiment massacred more than 300 Lakota Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee in 1890, the Ghost Dance and Black Elk’s vision were thought to be dead or dying, like Native people. Neihardt contributed to this notion by fabricating the most-quoted lines in Black Elk Speaks. “A people’s dream died there,” mourned Black Elk in this made-up version, seeing the carnage at Wounded Knee and his relatives’ bodies strewn across the bloody snow. “The nation’s hoop is broken and scattered.” But Black Elk never believed that, and he knew that collective visions for liberation didn’t die at Wound Knee. “The tree that was to bloom just faded away,” he said reflecting on the massacre forty years later, “but the roots will stay alive, and we are here to make that tree bloom.”

Roots are an apt metaphor to explain how the aspirations for freedom—the tree of life—had stayed alive. Ceremonies, dance, language, warrior and political societies, and spiritual knowledge were forced underground, each of them made illegal by the punitive Civilization Regulations and only fully “legalized” in 1978 with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. Like many, to protect himself and his family, Black Elk had converted to Catholicism, but he never lost faith in his vision. For him, liberation wasn’t a one-off event, a single action, or a moment. If history books do not altogether deny the Wounded Knee Massacre, sympathetic treatments tend to label the Ghost Dance as a “harmless” trend that would have faded into the past, like the Indians practicing it. But if it were just dancing that was the threat, then why did the United States deploy nearly half its army against starving, horseless, and unarmed people in order to crush it?

Indigenous resistance draws from a long history, projecting itself backward and forward in time. While traditional historians merely interpret the past, radical Indigenous historians and Indigenous knowledge-keepers aim to change the colonial present, and to imagine a decolonial future by reconnecting to Indigenous places and histories. For this to occur, those suppressed practices must make a crack in history.

Karl Marx explained the nature of revolutions through the figure of the mole, which burrows through history, making elaborate tunnels and preparing to surface again. The most dramatic moments come when the mole breaks the surface: revolution. But revolution is a mere moment within the longer movement of history. The mole is easily defeated on the surface by counterrevolutionary forces if she hasn’t adequately prepared her subterranean spaces, which provide shelter and safety; even when pushed back underground, the mole doesn’t stop her work. In song and ceremony, Lakotas revere the mole for her hard work collecting medicines from the roots underfoot. During his campaign against US military invasion, to protect himself Crazy Horse collected fresh dirt from mole mounds. Because he knew it to contain medicines, he washed his body with the dirt. Hidden from view to outsiders, this constant tunneling, plotting, planning, harvesting, remembering, and conspiring for freedom—the collective faith that another world is possible—is the most important aspect of revolutionary work. It is from everyday life that the collective confidence to change reality grows, giving rise to extraordinary events.

At Oceti Sakowin Camp, courage manifested through the combination of direct actions and the legal strategy to defeat DAPL in court, which the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe spearheaded. Direct actions drew media attention and thus amplified the messages of #NoDAPL and Mni Wiconi, putting pressure on the federal courts and institutions to weigh in on the issue of Standing Rock’s sovereignty. Direct actions also had the immeasurable psychological effect of empowering the powerless to action, by encouraging everyday people to take control of their lives and to shrug off the self-doubt and genuine fear that accompanies centuries of violent occupation. It also formed in everyday camp life.

The camps also performed another critical function: caretaking, or providing nourishment, replenishment, comradery, encouragement, warmth, songs, stories, and love. The ultimate goal for Dakotas, and therefore the Oceti Sakowin, “was quite simple: One must obey kinship rules; one must be a good relative,” wrote the Dakota scholar Ella Deloria. This was the underground work of the mole and the foundation of any long-term struggle, though it often receives less attention than headline-grabbing spectacles of mass protest and frontline action. Yet, both are equally important and necessary. As Dakota scholar Kim TallBear argues, caretaking labor is often gendered, and is seen as the work of women. But the fact that many contemporary social movements—in particular #NoDAPL, Idle No More, and #BlackLivesMatter—were led by women, and Two-Spirit and LGBTQ people, is important.

My friend and relative, Lakota Water Protector Marcella Gilbert, pointed out how these roles have been taken up by generations of Indigenous women. Marcella’s mother, Madonna Thunder Hawk, and her aunties, Phyllis Young and Mabel Anne Eagle Hunter, were all leaders and participants of the Red Power Movement during the 1960s and 1970s. They were all pivotal members of the American Indian Movement, helped found the International Indian Treaty Council at Standing Rock in 1974, and formed Women of All Red Nations that same year—movements I will describe later in this book. Their leadership continued at Oceti Sakowin Camp by seeing to it that the next generation carried on the tradition. Phyllis Young was a respected Standing Rock elder and former councilwoman. Madonna and Mabel Anne fell back into leadership roles in their own camps, teaching and mentoring young people. For Marcella, freedom was education. She was a product of the “We Will Remember” Survival School, founded in Rapid City, South Dakota, in 1974. Her mother, Madonna, helped to create the school, where students were taught treaty rights and Native culture and history. We Will Remember was one of many survival schools created to address rampant discrimination against Native students in public schools, and to undo the indoctrination of Christianity and US patriotism at government- and church-run boarding schools. For Marcella, the #NoDAPL camps continued the tradition, providing a radical grassroots education on Indigenous self-determination and political autonomy—what it’s like to live and be free—to thousands of young Native people. In other words, moments like #NoDAPL are ones where the Indigenous movement reproduces itself and grows.

Our History Is the Future explores the movement to protect the Missouri River marching under the banner of Mni Wiconi. How did it emerge, and how does settler colonialism, a key element of US history, continue to inform our present? #NoDAPL and Mni Wiconi are part of a longer history of Indigenous resistance against the trespass of settlers, dams, and pipelines across the Mni Sose, the Missouri River. The Oceti Sakowin—our relationship to Mni Sose, and our historic struggle for liberation—are fundamentally tied to our prior history of Indigenous nationhood and political authority. This book is less a story about objects, individuals, and ideas than it is a history of relationships—those between the Oceti Sakowin, Mni Sose, and the United States as an occupying power. By focusing on these relationships, we can see that Indigenous history is not a narrow subfield of US history—or of the history of capitalism or imperialism, for that matter. Rather, Indigenous peoples are central subjects of modern world history.

This is not simply an examination of the past. Like #NoDAPL and Mni Wiconi, what I call traditions of Indigenous resistance have far-reaching implications, extending beyond the world that is normally understood as “Indigenous.” A tradition is usually defined as a static or unchanging practice. This view often suggests that Indigenous culture or tradition doesn’t change over time—that Indigenous people are trapped in the past and thus have no future. But as colonialism changes throughout time, so too does resistance to it. By drawing upon earlier struggles and incorporating elements of them into their own experience, each generation continues to build dynamic and vital traditions of resistance. Such collective experiences build up over time and are grounded in specific Indigenous territories and nations.

For the Oceti Sakowin, the affirmation Mni Wiconi, “water is life,” relates to Wotakuye, or “being a good relative.” Indigenous resistance to the trespass of settlers, pipelines, and dams is part of being a good relative to the water, land, and animals, not to mention the human world. Contrast this with the actions of Energy Transfer Partners (the financial backers of DAPL)—and of capitalism, more broadly, which seeks above all else to extract profits from the land and all forms of life. This is not to suggest that Indigenous societies possess the solution to climate change (and in fact, many Indigenous nations actively participate in resource extraction and capitalist economies in order to strengthen their self-determination). But in its best moments, #NoDAPL showed us a future that becomes possible when everyday Native people take control of their own destinies and lands, while drawing upon their own traditions of resistance. I am interested in the kind of tradition of Indigenous resistance that is a radical consciousness, both anti-capitalist and anti-colonial, and is deeply embedded in history and place—one that expresses the ultimate desire for freedom.

In this book, I move through seven episodes of Oceti Sakowin history and resistance. This history is by no means exhaustive, but I have chosen to focus on these particular cases to show how they inform our present moment, and to chart a historical road map for collective liberation.

Chapter 1 tells the story of the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock and its origins in the battle against tar sands extraction and the Keystone XL Pipeline, whose defense of Lakota and Dakota lands are part of a tradition of resistance against US imperialism that began centuries ago. I turn to the beginning of that history in chapter 2, which describes the Oceti Sakowin’s emergence as a nation and its first encounters, in the nineteenth century, with the United States as a predator nation.

Before long, those encounters evolved into the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century—the subject of chapter 3—that raged across the Northern Plains, in which the Oceti Sakowin defended against US military invasion and counterinsurgency tactics. By the turn of the twentieth century, Indigenous people had been largely confined to ever-dwindling reservations. The Oceti Sakowin, however, confronted the US military—the Army Corps of Engineers—again in the mid twentieth century, as US policy turned to the use of large-scale river development to continue the project of Indigenous dispossession—with policymakers attempting, all the while, to relieve themselves of the responsibilities outlined in the treaties.

In chapter 4, I outline these schemes through the story of the mid-century Pick-Sloan Plan, which authorized the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation to dam the main stem of the Missouri River. These dams specifically targeted and destroyed Native lives and lands, with 611,642 acres of land condemned through eminent domain, 309,584 acres of which were vital reservation bottomlands. Flooding also forced more than a thousand Native families to relocate, in patent violation of treaties and without prior consent. The memory of this experience was still fresh at the #NoDAPL camps.

Chapter 5 outlines the story of the urban-centered American Indian Movement (AIM) and their 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation—the culmination of more than a decade of Red Power organizing. This became the catalyst for a mass gathering of thousands at Standing Rock in 1974, which resulted in the founding of the International Indian Treaty Council—a body that would eventually lead international efforts for Indigenous recognition that have had a deep, global significance.

Chapter 6 traces the history of twentieth-century Indigenous internationalism—particularly, the Oceti Sakowin’s central role in spearheading the four-decade-long campaign for Indigenous recognition at the United Nations, which was the basis for the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The global Red Power movement eventually became a catalyst for the contemporary #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock. Chapter 7 draws out these links, reflecting upon the ways our past and present struggles are connected, as they are to both past and present international anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements around the world.

1. Siege

To us, as caretakers of the heart of Mother Earth, falls the special responsibility of turning back the powers of destruction … Did you think the Creator would create unnecessary people in a time of such terrible danger?

—Chief Arvol Looking Horse,

Keeper of the Sacred Buffalo Calf Pipe

“We’re going to declare war on the Keystone XL Pipeline,” announced Oglala Sioux Tribal President Bryan Brewer, before a throng of cameras and microphones. It was late March 2014, at an opening ceremony for a spirit camp on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. A crowd erupted into bursts of akisas and lililis—Lakota war cries and the high-pitched tremolos of assent. Keystone XL (KXL), or any oil pipeline, would not pass through Oceti Sakowin territory without a fight. This is a war story. But it is not always with weapons that warriors wage their struggle.

A dozen tribal national flags fluttered behind Brewer in the prairie wind, a sign of growing unity among Indigenous nations. His speech marked the beginning of a historic resistance that was to coalesce against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016. It was not orchestrated behind closed doors by wealthy think tanks or big environmental NGOs. Rather, like its people, it grew from the earth and this humble landscape, often viewed as flyover country. It also grew from a deep history of struggles over land and water, and a fight for a livable future on a planet so thoroughly devastated by climate change.

Earlier in March, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, under the direction of its president, Cyril “Whitey” Scott, abruptly ended a lease with a white farmer renting reservation land adjacent to the KXL pipeline’s path. The pipeline snaked carefully through a complex checkerboard of private and tribal land ownership, a legacy of the 1887 Dawes General Allotment Act that broke up large chunks of reservation land by selling it off to white settlers. With yellow cornstalks still jutting through the snow from last year’s harvest, workers from the Wica Agli men’s health initiative, citizens of Rosebud, and supporting Native people erected tipis on reclaimed earth—directly in the path of the pipeline. They called the camp Oyate Wahacanka Woecun, meaning “shield the people.” Large, round hay bales were taken from another plot leased by a white rancher and stacked to surround the camp, forming a barrier against harsh winds. The thick straw walls, it was said, may have also stopped bullets fired in the cover of darkness by vengeful white farmers.

It didn’t matter if this was private property. It was still treaty territory, territory that generations of Lakotas and Dakotas had died defending and lived to care for. If not stopped, 800,000 barrels of tar sands oil would be transported each day across 1,200 miles of land—from Hardisty, Alberta, to Steele City, Nebraska—traversing 357 streams and rivers (all tributaries of the Missouri River), and crossing the Ogallala Aquifer, North America’s largest aquifer. Because everyone depended on the water, whether for drinking or agriculture, Mni Wiconi (Water is life) trumped the sacredness of private property. “It’s not an Indian thing, it’s not a white thing,” Rosebud Sioux Council Representative Wayne Frederick explained. “It’s everybody’s issue.”

White landowners from Nebraska were also at the camp’s opening, standing at the edge of the crowd holding signs that read “PIPELINE FIGHTER.” They had joined the Cowboy-Indian Alliance, a campaign led by a progressive group of white farmers and ranchers from Bold Nebraska and Dakota Rural Action. Some of the landowners, however, were libertarians who were more concerned with the sanctity of private property and the evils of “big government” than with Indian treaties and climate change. And while they captured much of the media attention around KXL resistance, they represented a minority of the affected white landowners from Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska. On the plains, solidarity with Indigenous nations is a hard sell that often comes down to land and money. By this time, TransCanada, the company building the KXL, reported at least 92 percent of the 302 South Dakotan landowners in the pipeline’s path had agreed to sell their lands voluntarily. The situation was similar in Nebraska and Montana. The holdouts had filed lawsuits to stop eminent domain proceedings, the seizure of private land for “public use,” the definition of which includes privately owned oil pipelines. But these were a mere handful of individuals, as compared to the many Indigenous nations who, for the most part, wholly opposed KXL.

This leg of KXL crossed through the permanent reservation boundaries of the Great Sioux Nation and unceded lands of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which forbids white settlement without Indigenous consent. The irony, Lakota historian Edward Valandra observed, was that any condemned private land would be “twice stolen”—land white squatters first stole from Natives would then be taken by a Canadian oil company. Settlers and private property have always been the vanguards of invasion, and the sanctity of private property never applied to Indigenous peoples. But instead of turning their backs, like the first settlers did to them, Native nations—such as Rosebud, Pine Ridge, Yankton, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock—welcomed the potential allies. After all, “Lakota” (or “Nakota” or “Dakota”) translates to “ally.” To turn away, on account of differences, those with shared enemies or mutual interests goes against the very being of Lakota culture.

Much as it has been for centuries, this conflict was about the land: who stole it, who owned it, and who claimed it. On the High Plains, land is a matter of race, class, and colonialism. KXL was possible only because Indigenous genocide and removal had cleared the way for private ownership of land. Federal laws such as the Dawes Act and the 1862 Homestead Act, which opened up 270 million acres of Native land, subsidized white settlement to supplant entire Native nations, and eventually concentrated it in the hands of a few. According to a 2002 report by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), white settlers own 96 percent of all private agricultural lands in the United States, and 98 percent of private lands overall. According to a 2012 USDA report, in Lakota and Dakota reservations, non-Natives collect 84.5 percent of all agricultural income, controlling nearly 60 percent of the agricultural lands and 65 percent of all reservation-based farms. This includes the white billionaire and media tycoon Ted Turner, who owns more than 2 million acres of ranchland across the globe and more than 200,000 acres of Oceti Sakowin treaty land in western South Dakota. The radical scholar Cedric Robinson identified this system, in which a single white man owns more wealth and land than entire Indigenous nations, as racial capitalism. Capitalism arose under a racist European feudal system. It used “race” as a form of rule—to subordinate, to kill, and to enslave others—and used that difference for profit-making. Racial capitalism was exported globally as imperialism, including to North America in the form of settler colonialism. As a result, the colonized and racialized poor are still burdened with the most harmful effects of capitalism and climate change, and this is why they are at the forefront of resistance. The legacy of racial capitalism and ongoing settler colonialism were why the Oceti Sakowin had gathered to oppose KXL in 2014, and why they would gather again to oppose DAPL.

KXL resistance emerged six years after the US housing market collapsed and the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, inherited the mantle of a white supremacist empire. As global temperatures continued rising, Obama committed to curbing carbon emissions, but as part of his “all-of-the-above energy strategy,” he also embraced the oil industry as it opened new markets and lands to exploit. US domestic crude oil production skyrocketed from 2008 to 2016—an 88 percent increase, thanks to the shale oil boom in the United States and the tar sands boom in Canada. With this acceleration came new oil pipelines and new sites of extraction. As 9.3 million US families—many of them poor, Black, and Latinx—faced home foreclosures, Indigenous lives, lands, waters, and air were once again sacrificed to help pull settler economies out of the gutter.

In response to the economic crisis, revolutionary flowers had blossomed in public squares around the world, offering for a brief moment a vision for a different world. In 2010, young people of the Arab Spring toppled dictators, and tragedy and betrayal soon followed. In 2011, disenchanted millennials of the Occupy Wall Street movement put anti-capitalism back on the agenda to challenge the rule of the 1 percent, the wealthy elite. In response, police bludgeoned, tear gassed, and jailed the 99 percent. Out of this chaos, a mass Indigenous movement reawakened, the seeds of which were planted generations before. While the movements of public squares arose in the cities, the Indigenous uprising mobilized city and country alike, everywhere Indigenous peoples and their allies were found.

During the winter of 2012 to 2013, Indigenous rebellion was afoot on Turtle Island. Its heartbeat was a drum, its voice a song. In what is currently Canada, Indigenous women of Idle No More led a mass movement of round dances (traditional healing and celebratory dancing and singing) in shopping malls and blockades of rail lines transporting oil. They protested Stephen Harper’s Conservative government’s abuse of Indigenous rights, privatization of Indigenous lands, and rollback of environmental protections to intensify fossil fuel extraction. As Cree Idle No More cofounder Sylvia McAdam noted, it was out of necessity that the movement linked Indigenous and environmental struggles to protest a system that, if not stopped, will continue to “devastate the very things needed to sustain humanity—our lands and waters—for the generations to come.” It was more than a battle for the present; it was a battle for the future. The growing alliances resonated across the Medicine Line, the US–Canada divide. In February 2013, one of the largest actions in the history of the US climate movement descended on Washington, DC. More than 40,000 people gathered outside the White House to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline, bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous movements committed to halting the extraction and transportation of highly toxic and volatile tar sands.

That summer, Métis and Cree women and elders led hundreds in a two-day journey through the Alberta tar sands during an annual Healing Walk. Jesse Cardinal, a Métis cofounder of the walk, described how “participants [saw] tailings ponds and desert-like areas of ‘reclaimed land’ that was once the boreal forest and now grows almost nothing.” It’s a stark and immense landscape, encompassing an area larger than the state of Florida. In Treaty 6 and Treaty 8 territories, tar sands extraction—by companies such as Suncor Energy, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell Canada—has poisoned water, land, air, plants, animals, and people. Duck and moose—staple foods of many Indigenous communities—have become contaminated with toxins, and harvests of wild berries and plants have been decimated. According to Cardinal, in this modern-day gold rush, “many ‘outsiders’ are driven here by their own economic desperation.”

Like the land itself, the bodies of Indigenous women, girls, trans, and Two-Spirit people are also seen as open for violence and violation. Resource extraction intensifies a murderous heteropatriarchy, meaning that grounding resistance in Indigenous feminist interventions has become all the more urgent. An influx of men has also flooded the region’s “man camps,” which house migrant oil laborers. Men outnumber women two to one in the tar sands boomtown of Fort McMurray, Alberta. While a movement has existed since the 1970s to honor the lives of the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women across Canada, the Two-Spirit Métis activist Sâkihitowin Awâsis has noted the “links between presence of the tar sands industry and heightened rates of missing and murdered Indigenous Two-Spirits, women, and girls.” It’s no coincidence that Indigenous women led the movement against the tar sands.

Put another way, settler states like Canada and the United States continue to settle the land, raping and killing Native women and Two-Spirit people in order to do so. From the 1970s onward, communities and activists have documented thousands of cases where Indigenous women, girls, trans, and Two-Spirited people who have been murdered, disappeared, and targeted by all forms of violence in Canada. The movement, operating under the hashtag #MMIWG (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls), holds rallies around Canada every February 14, honoring the lives of the disappeared and demanding answers—a call that has been partially answered by the creation of the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women. Canada’s death culture, however, is little different than its southern neighbor. In the United States, May 5 has been declared the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Native Women and Girls. In a 2016 report, there were 5,712 cases of missing Indigenous women nationwide; experts and activists, however, believe the number to be considerably higher.

And Canadian prosperity is gained not just at the expense of First Nations. More than half the world’s mining companies are headquartered in Canada, with properties in more than one hundred countries. Canadian extractive industries target Indigenous and colonized people throughout the world, and some have been linked to egregious human rights abuses, especially against Indigenous peoples. For example, beginning in 2007, Hudbay Minerals, a Canadian company with investments in the Fenix nickel mine, was linked to assassinations, beatings, gang rapes of women and girls, and arsons in Mayan communities in Guatemala.

The links between the extractive industry and violence against Indigenous peoples also turn up in the United States. The Bakken shale oil boom that began in 2007, and would eventually prompt the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline, made North Dakota the second-largest oil producing state, after Texas. Much of this occurred on the Fort Berthold Reservation, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) Nation, which sits atop some of the region’s deepest oil reserves. In 2011, Tex Hall, the tribal chairman, adopted the mantra “sovereignty by the barrel,” expressing a belief that oil wealth can strengthen economic self-determination and autonomy. Oil revenues, Hall hoped, would bring his nation out of crushing poverty and relieve the enduring devastation caused by the federal government’s construction of the Garrison Dam in the heart of the reservation in the 1950s, which forced the reservation’s residents from the fertile Missouri River valley onto the open, less productive plains. In short order, the MHA Nation became one of the wealthiest in Indian Country, and with this ascent came political corruption and high rates of violence, especially against women and girls.

“We found a crying, naked, four-year-old girl running down one of the roads right outside of the Man Camp. She had been sexually assaulted,” Grace Her Many Horses recalled. It was just one of many horrific incidents of rape, abuse, and sex trafficking during Her Many Horses’ time at Fort Berthold in 2013 as a tribal cop. Most of her calls were related to man camps or the oil and gas industry they served. Towns of thousands literally sprang up overnight, made up of mobile homes and FEMA trailers, as hotels overflowed. Existing towns doubled and quadrupled in population, taxing already overstretched or nonexistent social infrastructure, including reservation emergency services. Nearly all the new arrivals were men, leading to some of the highest concentrations of men, outside of prisons, in North America. While emergency calls and violent assaults were frequent, prosecutions were not. Non-Native oil workers exploited a complex patchwork of federal, state, and tribal jurisdictions in which tribal law enforcement has little or no jurisdiction over non-Natives, allowing perpetrators to escape tribal justice.

Since the Bakken boom, the rolling prairies and lush river valleys that had survived Army Corps flooding in 1953 have been replaced by miles of metal fracking rigs and heavy construction equipment. Clustered constellations of oil flares burning off methane are visible from space at night. “What we’re dealing with is a death by a thousand cuts,” said Kandi Mossett, an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network and citizen of the MHA Nation. She explained that cancer, asthma, and respiratory diseases have increased among the children and elders because of the toxic environment. Mossett herself is a cancer survivor. But this toxic landscape is connected to another. “You would never see this in Houston’s most affluent neighborhoods,” said Yudith Neito, a resident of Houston’s mostly Latinx community Manchester, where the air smells of burnt plastic and diesel from the oil refineries along the Houston Ship Channel next door. These are the refineries that process oil from the Canadian tar sands and the Bakken shale.

Nevertheless, in 2012, despite massive opposition, Obama fast-tracked the construction of KXL’s southern leg from Cushing, Oklahoma, to the Gulf Coast. “As long as I’m president,” he boasted in 2012, “we’re going to keep on encouraging oil development and infrastructure, and we’re going to do it in a way that protects the health and safety of American people.” But those protections didn’t extend to communities like Neito’s or Mossett’s—nor would they be extended, with the Dakota Access Pipeline, to Standing Rock and the millions who depend on the Missouri River for fresh water.

In response to Obama’s order, that same year the Tar Sands Blockade sprang into action, a coalition that reflected the diversity of communities affected: conservative landowners, green anarchists and leftists, Latinx and Mexican-American communities, and Indigenous organizations from Canada and the United States. At an eighty-day sit-in action obstructing KXL construction on its southern route, local authorities and private security crushed the opposition with beatings, Tasers, and pepper spray—a prelude of what was to come. It was also part of what Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein calls “Blockadia,” a “roving transnational conflict zone” of grassroots resistance to the fossil fuel developments—whether “open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands pipelines”—that are not simply causing climate change, but threatening the very livelihoods of communities.

But some communities remained disunited, especially among the Oceti Sakowin. Despite pulling together a historic alliance with non-Natives, one small nation remained an outlier—my own. TransCanada had carefully avoided crossing reservation lands to avoid provoking Indigenous resistance, except at one key location: the Lower Brule Indian Reservation, a place that received little media attention, despite its central role.

TransCanada needed to build a seventy-one-mile electric transmission line that connected hydroelectricity generated at the Big Bend Dam to one of seventeen pipeline pump stations at Witten, South Dakota. Because the power line crossed sixteen acres of Lower Brule land, it required tribal consent. Although a crucial detail, the power line project was easy to miss, buried in the thousand-page technical manuals TransCanada produced. It was also easy to miss the name of the Lower Brule Sioux tribal chairman, Michael B. Jandreau, listed among the “Consulting Tribes’ Points of Contact.” Jandreau was the longest-serving tribal chairman in US history, in office for more than three decades before dying in office in 2015. As his health declined during his last term, so too did faith in his administration.

After months of denying negotiating with the company, in March 2014 suspicions surrounding the Lower Brule Tribal Council’s collaboration with TransCanada had been confirmed. A November 12, 2013, Lower Brule Sioux Tribal Council resolution had been leaked to the public in which the council spelled out plans to pursue “prospective benefits and working relationships” with TransCanada and to inform President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden of its support for the Canadian oil company. Lower Brule’s actions directly violated the spirit of the Mother Earth Accord, which its leaders signed in September 2011 at a historic summit held in Rosebud with Alberta First Nations, Indigenous governments, grassroots treaty councils, human rights NGOs, and the Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Fort Peck, Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Standing Rock, and Santee Reservations. By signing the accord, the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe committed to end the extraction, transportation, and refinement of Alberta tar sands by asking President Obama to reject the presidential permit required for KXL. Now, Lower Brule had crossed a picket line, betraying not only their relatives in the Oceti Sakowin but also frontline communities around the world being devastated by climate change and extractivism.

The label “sellouts” stung, spurring the small nation into action. The Kul Wicasa, the people of Lower Brule, called an emergency town hall meeting, inviting tribal leaders and organizations from other reservations as well as the entire Lower Brule Tribal Council. Members of Owe Aku (Bring Back the Way), led by renowned Oglala environmentalist Debra White Plume, facilitated the meeting in a show of solidarity. From Lower Brule, the brother-and-sister twins Loretta and Lewis Grassrope, Kevin Wright, and Marlo Langdeau, among others, organized a town hall meeting calling on their nation to end its relationship with TransCanada, to uphold the Mother Earth Accord, and to join the growing alliance against KXL. More than a hundred attended, including the presidents of Pine Ridge and Rosebud. But the Lower Brule council boycotted the entire gathering.

“I used to be proud to be from here,” said Langdeau, with tears in her eyes, after Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, and Rosebud had booted TransCanada officials off the reservation. Now, their leaders refused to face their own people. “It’s embarrassing to be called a ‘sellout’ when you don’t even know what’s going on.”

When there was no response from their elected officials, the organizers took matters into their own hands. Lewis Grassrope and Kevin Wright attempted to occupy land in front of the proposed transmission line, but before they could establish a camp, Bureau of Indian Affairs police (a federal police agency that operates without tribal oversight) stopped them. Undeterred, they set up on Grassrope’s mother’s homesite, several miles north of Medicine Butte on reservation land. They called the camp “Wiconi Un Tipi,” which loosely translates to “the way we live when we live in community.” As the name suggests, this was about more than stopping a pipeline. It was about restoring dignity to a little nation of people that had earned the reputation as “the forgotten Sioux.”

For Grassrope, a former tribal cop, it was Indigenous people at the grass roots who made the movement. The ikce wicasa, the ikce winyan, (the common men and women, the humble people of the earth), were the ones who changed history, not “great men” or tribal councils. When humble people moved, the earth moved with them. “We don’t have a voice. We don’t have a standing. We don’t have influence. But as you can see here,” Grassrope said in November 2016, gesturing to seven tipis embodying the reunification of the Oceti Sakowin Camp at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers, “we are the tip of the spear. We’re saying, ‘mni wiconi.’ We’re saying, ‘treaty.’”

Wright, a firefighter, was a Water Protector from a different generation and a long-time dissident of his own government. In 1999 Wright joined members of the Lakota Student Alliance in a yearlong occupation of LaFramboise Island, a nature reserve in the middle of the Missouri River and, to the Oceti Sakowin, unceded earth. At the time, he also stood against the Lower Brule council’s support of federal legislation known as the “Mitigation Bill,” in which South Dakota lawmakers had proposed transferring jurisdiction over more than 200,000 acres of Missouri shoreline from the Army Corps of Engineers to the state of South Dakota. All Missouri River Indigenous nations objected to it except for Cheyenne River and Lower Brule, who chose to support it.

This history of bad faith on the part of both state politicians and their own tribal council was fresh in the minds of the Lower Brule opposition in 2014. To Wright and Grassrope, the primary conflict boiled down to governance. The reservation system and the imposition of the elected tribal councils had all but dissolved traditional governance. In its place, a winner-takes-all electoral system turned relatives against each other, and harsh political divisions broke down the family kinship unit, the tiospaye—an extended network of relatives that was fundamental to decision making and caretaking. The arrangement that replaced it instead fomented division and rivalry over scant resources, catering to outside corporate and state interests; it was a type of neocolonialism.

The divisions were a result of a sordid history of colonial land grabs. In 1889, in advance of North and South Dakota statehood and to encourage white settlement, Congress passed the so-called “Sioux Agreement” that broke up the Great Sioux Reservation into five separate reservations—Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Lower Brule. For traditionalists and treaty councils, it was hardly an agreement; the 1889 partition didn’t get the required three-fourths approval from adult Native men, as stipulated by the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. In their eyes the creation, under the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), of modern reservations, which later became separate governments, fractured national unity and undermined customary government and treaty law. This was the primary dispute in 1973 when American Indian Movement members, at the request of Oglala elders, took over Wounded Knee in protest of Pine Ridge’s IRA government, which was under the authoritarian leadership of Chairman Dick Wilson, who was criminalizing dissent. In short, AIM and their supporters opposed colonial administration. While AIM promoted traditional governance, it never achieved the reunification of the Oceti Sakowin on the scale realized at Standing Rock in 2016. But AIM’s militancy a generation earlier paved the way for the historic movement. While Indigenous nations rallied to support Standing Rock and the Oceti Sakowin, two years earlier Lower Brule was thrown into turmoil as grassroots councils called for overturning the status quo.

The so-called “Lower Brule constitutional crisis” of 2014 to 2016 was not an armed takeover like the one that took place at Wounded Knee in 1973. Nevertheless, it was without hesitation that supporters of the old order called it “an attempted overthrow of the tribal government.” And they weren’t entirely wrong. In the fall of 2014, a grassroots reform movement had galvanized under the slogan Mni Wiconi, electing three anti-KXL candidates to the six-person council: Sonny Zeigler and Desiree LaRoche as council members, and Kevin Wright as vice-chair. Michael Jandreau defeated Lewis Grassrope for the position of chairman by a slim margin. The new council members quickly set to work pushing for reform and transparency, and they met a strident opposition.

A November council meeting escalated to a shouting match, nearly ending in a fistfight between opposing sides, when Wright called for Jandreau’s removal for corruption and financial malfeasance, among other charges. In December, the opposition council members attempted to circumvent Jandreau and his supporters by appointing an entirely new council. This back-and-forth led to a flurry of lawsuits and countersuits, and day-to-day operations ground to a halt. After Jandreau passed away in April 2015, Grassrope was named his successor, but due to opposition from other council members, he never fully assumed the role. In May, in response to the unfolding political chaos, the Kul Wicasa Ospiye, a grassroots treaty organization, gathered signatures from the leadership of the traditional tiospayes of the Kul Wicasa to assert their right to be “self-governing” and that the people, not the federally recognized IRA council, were “the sole source for the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe’s existence.” The move underscored the gravity of the vicious power struggle that was unfolding, and the profound desire for an accountable government based on Lakota values, including kinship.

In Jandreau’s absence, and with the backing of the grassroots movement, Wright called for the removal of TransCanada from 1868 Treaty lands. “We see [TransCanada] as ‘bad men’ as defined by our treaties with the United States,” Wright said in a statement. He cited a treaty clause that allows for the removal of “bad men among the whites” who “commit any wrong upon the person or property of the Indians.” It was a bold move: the question of whether or not a corporation, which has personhood under US law, can be removed from treaty lands has yet to be tested in court. But for Wright and his supporters, the existential threat posed by KXL and climate change justified the risk. “This land is all we have,” Wright explained, “and we are obligated to preserve it for our future generations.” However, the action went nowhere, as the council had failed to form a consensus—or even to convene.

The Lower Brule opposition, even with support from the grassroots community, was unable to dramatically improve conditions on the reservation or to significantly change the structure of the IRA council during their brief two-year tenure. Nevertheless, their advocacy would have a resonating impact. After Obama denied the required presidential permit for KXL’s northern leg in December of 2015, the newly elected Lower Brule council changed course. One of its first actions was the passage of a resolution supporting Standing Rock’s battle against the Dakota Access Pipeline. And in December 2016, preempting Donald Trump’s incoming administration, which was expected to reapprove KXL’s northern leg, the council passed a resolution opposing construction of the Big Bend–Witten line that would power KXL, stating that they opposed oil pipeline development and the construction of any infrastructure related to it. Those two major victories would not have occurred without the tumultuous grassroots struggle against KXL, a movement that fed into the DAPL fight.

In November 2016 at Oceti Sakowin Camp, Lewis Grassrope was sitting in his tipi. It was one of seven that were arranged in the shape of a buffalo horn, with a large fire pit in the middle. The entire camp was arranged in a half circle facing Mni Sose and Wiyohiyapata (meaning “where the sun rises”). About half the size of a football field, the camp horn at the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball rivers was surrounded by Indigenous national camps—such as Ihanktonwan Camp, Oglala Camp, and Kul Wicasa Camp—and organizations’ camps—such as Indigenous People’s Power Project and Red Warrior Camp. The Seven Council Fires of the seven nations—the Mdewakantonwan, Sissintonwan, Wahpetonwan, Wahpekute, Ihanktonwan, Ihanktonwanna, and Tintonwan—had been lit, and a nation reunited. It was a dream come true. On the horizon, on a hill, shadowy figures of cops in riot gear idled under floodlights and behind tangled razor wire. But the constant drone of the surveillance aircraft circling above was hardly noticeable over the sounds of children playing and the boisterous chuckles around campfires. Young boys and girls sang round dance songs and raced horses along the shoreline. Men and women cleaned and sliced up tripe for menudo. This was Wiconi Un Tipi, Lower Brule’s national camp and one of the first camps to set up at Oceti Sakowin after Standing Rock put out the call in August.

“A lot of people didn’t believe, they didn’t have faith,” Grassrope said, reflecting on the adversity he and his small nation faced over the years. He looked outside his tipi to the life, breath, prayer, and song around him. “When KXL happened, the belief came back. When DAPL happened, the belief came back.”

The harbingers of the Dakota Access Pipeline arrived on an early fall morning, September 30, 2014, to Fort Yates, the headquarters of the Standing Rock tribe. A special meeting had been scheduled between the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council, and representatives of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and Energy Transfer Partners (ETP, the Texas-based firm financing the project).

Earlier in 2014, the Army Corps had rerouted the pipeline from upriver of North Dakota’s white-dominated capital, Bismarck, to upriver of the poorest county in North Dakota, Sioux County—the Standing Rock Reservation. In its environmental analysis, the Army Corps had concluded that the Bismarck path crossed a “high consequence area,” which meant that a spill would have an adverse effect. Not once did it mention Standing Rock, for which a spill half a mile upriver was of no consequence to the Army Corps. The new route also saved on time, constructions costs, and the unwanted headache of contaminating the drinking water of white settlers in the state’s capital.

In an audio recording of the September meeting in Fort Yates released by the tribe, Chairman David Archambault II can be heard whispering off mic, “What is the name of the company?” He then asks, “Dakota Access Pipeline, are they here?” No answer. DAPL was late. It seemed fitting. Amid the historic resistance unfolding against tar sands and KXL across the continent, DAPL seemed like an afterthought, arriving late and under the radar. At this time, a year ahead of the pipeline permitting process, hardly anyone had heard of DAPL. But those who saw it coming knew it was dangerous.

When DAPL representatives finally arrived, Archambault made Standing Rock’s position clear: “We oppose the pipeline,” he stated. Archambault cited a 2012 resolution that forbade any oil pipeline within the boundaries of the Fort Laramie Treaties of 1851 and 1868. Where federal and state governments have historically chosen to ignore them, Standing Rock has recognized and enforced its original treaty boundaries. In their report, DAPL representatives Tammy Ibach, Chuck Frey, and Joe Malucci mentioned that the pipeline crossed less than a mile north of the reservation boundaries, but they never mentioned treaty lands. They also never asked whether Standing Rock wanted the pipeline in the first place. DAPL was looking for “consultation,” not consent.

“It’s not consultation, because the plan’s already done,” Councilman Randy White rebuked the representatives. “And to me, that’s really wrong.”

Wasté Win Young, the Standing Rock Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, agreed. After studying the company’s initial reports, what concerned her most was the Army Corps’ intention to fast-track the project. (Despite their central role planning DAPL’s route, the Army Corps did not attend the September 30 meeting.) Unlike KXL, which crossed an international border and therefore required State Department review and presidential approval, DAPL was a domestic project. This allowed the Army Corps to assess the pipeline according to a Nationwide Permit 12, which only considers individual construction sites, rather than cumulative negative impacts on entire nations of people, ecosystems, or the climate. As Young pointed out, fast-tracking the project under Permit 12 regulations bypassed environmental reviews under the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. It also skirted the type of public scrutiny received by KXL and significantly undermined the ability of impacted communities to mobilize, protect, and defend themselves.

Moreover, DAPL cut through about 380 archeological sites, such as burials, with at least 60 at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers alone. Though not recognized as reservation land, under the National Historic Preservation Act’s Section 106, the presence of these culturally sensitive sites made the area “ancestral territory.” Any potential disturbance required the Army Corps to consult with Standing Rock in order to proceed, a procedure Young claimed the Army Corps had failed to do in the past. The place where the pipeline crossed the river also held deep historical and cultural significance. Many Horses Heads Bottom, where DAPL crossed the Missouri River, Young explained, was where Dakotas fled generals Sibley and Sully’s 1863 “columns of vengeance.” After the 1862 Dakota Uprising, the United States punished survivors of that war at the Whitestone Hill Massacre, where they gunned down more than 400 Lakotas and Dakotas on a buffalo hunt. It was a massacre nearly forgotten by settlers, but no less horrific than Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. The soldiers led a manhunt up and down the river, capturing or killing survivors. Mothers plugged their babies’ noses to silence their cries as they swam to safety across the river in the cover of darkness.

“I struggled with this last night,” said Young at the meeting. “Do we want to tell something so important and sacred to us to a pipeline company?” Descendants of those who survived that genocidal campaign were sitting in the room, face to face with the very people who would two years later bring a whole new wave of chaos and violence.

What concerned Councilwoman Avis Little Eagle was the water. “Every oil pipeline leaks,” she said, “and it’s going to ruin the water we consume and that future generations are going to consume.” Her fears were warranted: from 2010 to 2016, Sunoco Logistics, the operators of DAPL, had more than 200 of their pipelines leak; indeed, DAPL would leak five times within six months of beginning operation. Little Eagle also sat on the Standing Rock water control board, which, having reviewed DAPL’s route the previous day, passed a resolution opposing it on the grounds that it threatened the reservation’s source of drinking water, the Missouri River. This action fell in line with Standing Rock’s Constitution, which was drafted with the water in mind. Article 1 of the Constitution reserves jurisdiction over “all rights-of-way, waterways, watercourses[,] and streams running through any part of the Reservation.” A threat to its drinking water was thus a threat to Standing Rock’s sovereignty, as well.

“Our water is our single last property that we have for our people, and water is life—Mni Wiconi,” remarked Phyllis Young to the DAPL representatives. Young was a council-woman, a longtime AIM member, and Wasté Win Young’s mother. The elder stateswoman described her homelands as a “national sacrifice area.” In order to generate hydroelectricity to power homes in far-off cities like Minneapolis and Chicago, the Army Corps had flooded her home in the middle of a cold winter. “I know what it is to be homeless,” Young said. “I know what it is to be hungry in this great land of plenty, where we lived in the richest riverbed in the world.”

The dams, which I describe in chapter 5, were the reason why the Army Corps had final say over DAPL’s route: claiming sole jurisdiction over the river and shoreline, they had inundated the land in the 1950s and 1960s, usurping Indigenous jurisdiction, kicking people out of their homes, destroying the river that nurtured them, and shrinking reservation boundaries in the process. The Army Corps never sought the consent of Missouri River Indigenous nations for these incursions, nor did Congress ever authorize them to extinguish Indigenous jurisdiction over the river. Now, it was also without their consent that the Army Corps sought to route the Dakota Access Pipeline through their homelands.

“We are not stupid people. We are not ignorant people,” Young chided the DAPL spokespeople. “Do not underestimate the people of Standing Rock. We know what’s going on, and we know what belongs to us, and we know what we have to keep for our children and our grandchildren.”

This was a history she had lived through, and it was an intergenerational struggle her children had inherited. In 1974, Phyllis Young and Standing Rock council representatives, including David Archambault Sr. (David Archambault II’s father), organized the first International Indian Treaty Council at Standing Rock (detailed in chapter 6). Standing Rock gave AIM the mandate to pursue, at the United Nations, all legal means available to enforce the 1868 Treaty. The historic meeting brought together 5,000 people from ninety-seven Indigenous nations from around the world, and it was the beginning of a movement that culminated in a touchstone document on Indigenous rights: the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Unlike other federally recognized IRA governments at the time, Standing Rock had maintained amiable relations with treaty councils, grassroots movements, and even militants such as AIM. On occassions when, as in Lower Brule in 2014, the antagonisms between these bodies turned destructive or violent, the Standing Rock’s capacity to bridge these divides set it apart from other IRA governments. This history was decisive in the creation of the #NoDAPL movement, which began with the coalescence of tribal councils and Indigenous grassroots movements.

“It’s nothing for you to come and say, ‘We want to do this [build a pipeline]. We want to be friends with you,’” Young said to DAPL. To her, naming a pipeline, Dakota Access, and a state, North Dakota, after the very people they intended to swindle, and about whom they knew nothing, was an insult. “North Dakota?” she asked. “Miye ma Dakota! I am Dakota! Dakota means ‘friend’ and ‘ally.’” By trespassing, the pipeline company and the state didn’t behave as “friends” or “allies.” Quite the opposite.

“This is Dakota territory. This is treaty territory. This is where you agreed not to come into my territory,” she continued. It was a reminder that treaties are not an “Indian problem”; they are everyone’s problem. Signed between settler government and Indigenous nations, they are also the responsibility of non-Natives: an even older document, the US Constitution, regards treaties as “the supreme law of the land.”

If DAPL didn’t respect Standing Rock’s sovereignty or the Oceti Sakowin’s ancestral and treaty territory, then, Young warned, “We will put our best warriors in the front. We are the vanguard. We are Hunkpapa Lakota. That means the ‘horn of the buffalo.’ That’s who we are. We are the protectors of our nation, of Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires. Know who we are.” She left them with this final message: “We understand the forked tongue that our grandfathers talked about. We know about talking [out of] both sides of your mouth, smiling with one side of your face. We know all the tricks of the wasicu world [the colonizer’s world]. Our young people have mastered it. I have mastered your language. I can speak eloquently in the English language. My grandmother taught me. But I also know the genetic psyche. And I also have the collective memory of the damages that have occurred to my people. And I will never submit to any pipeline to go through my homeland. Mitakuye Oyasin!”

DAPL seemed to have forgotten the lessons imparted that day. “I really wish for the Standing Rock Sioux that they had engaged in discussions way before they did,” Kelcy Warren, a billionaire Texas oilman and CEO of ETP, told the Wall Street Journal in November 2016. “We could have changed the route. It could have been done, but it’s too late.” Apparently, Warren didn’t consider the initial 2014 meeting a “discussion,” nor did he accept Standing Rock’s flat-out refusal. In a 2016 statement to a federal judge, however, DAPL Vice-President Joey Mahmoud did confirm his company had received Standing Rock’s message loud and clear. He admitted the company was told “to stop the project” and to avoid Oceti Sakowin territory altogether. But Mahmoud found it “an impossible request to accommodate,” and he and his employees could hardly hide their contempt. In March 2016, an Army Corps archeologist warned in an email: “Someone needs to tell Joey [Mahmoud] the next RACIST comment will shut down the entire project.” The email concerned Mahmoud and his employees’ treatment of Native cultural resource workers who had identified culturally sensitive sites, such as graves and sacred sites, along the pipeline route. This wasn’t a “clash of cultures” or a lack of “cultural sensitivity” towards those they saw as different; this was full-blown settler colonialism—a struggle over the land and water in which a people were fighting for their lives.

#NoDAPL was also a struggle over the meaning of land. For the Oceti Sakowin, history is the land itself: the earth cradles the bones of the ancestors. As Tasunka Witko, Crazy Horse, once said, “My land is where my dead lie buried.” For others, however, the earth had to be tamed and dominated by a plow or drilled for profit. Because Native people remain barriers to capitalist development, their bodies needed to be removed—both from beneath and atop the soil—therefore eliminating their rightful relationship with the land.

Recognizing this, Standing Rock chose a legal route to stop the pipeline, filing a complaint in federal court against the Army Corps on July 27, 2016, the day after the Army Corps approved DAPL’s route across the Missouri River and through culturally sensitive sites. In late August 2016, as pipeline construction approached Highway 1806, Standing Rock grew desperate. Legal mechanisms weren’t working; more drastic measures had to be taken. Sensing what was coming, on August 15, DAPL filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction against a number of individuals, including Chairman Archambault, from interfering with pipeline construction (a suit dismissed on September 19). Four days later, the governor, Jack Dalrymple, a legacy Yale man, declared a state of emergency, asking for assistance from the federal government, DAPL, “and any entity we can think of.”

“Perhaps only in North Dakota, where oil tycoons wine and dine elected officials, and where the governor, Jack Dalrymple, serves as an adviser to the Trump campaign, would state and county governments act as the armed enforcement for corporate interests,” penned Archambault in a New York Times op-ed, days before police arrested him. “In recent weeks, the state has militarized my reservation, with road blocks and license-plate checks, low-flying aircraft and racial profiling of Indians.”

Standing Rock, the nation of the great Tatanka Iyotake, Sitting Bull, was facing down county, state, federal, and corporate powers. His people—some of the poorest in North America, and armed only with sage, prayer bundles, Canupas (sacred pipes), and the spirit of their ancestors—were facing down a mounting legion of police and private security backed by some of the most powerful people in the world.

On Friday, August 26, Chairman Dave Archambault II gave tribal employees the day off. He joined a prayer action at the location where DAPL crossed the highway and was arrested trying to break through a police line, along with eighteen others, during a two-day blockade of a construction site. Tribal cultural resource management experts, among them Tim Mentz Sr., an elder and citizen of Standing Rock, had identified at least twenty-seven burials west of the highway—on private land, and directly in the pipeline’s path. The immense historical importance of the discoveries, in other circumstances, would have given pause to tribal historians and scholars. Mentz characterized one finding—a rock structure arranged in the shape of the Dakota constellation Iyokaptan Tanka (the “Big Dipper”)—as “one of the most significant archeological finds in North Dakota in many years.” He notified a federal court of the discovery on Friday, September 2, and requested immediate action to protect the site. What happened the next day, Mentz and others believed, was no accident.

In the early morning hours of Saturday, September 3, 2016, blood was spilled in the struggle over hallowed ground. Caterpillar earthmovers came barreling across the prairie. A small army of attack dogs and their handlers, private security hired by DAPL, guarded the site, followed closely by a spotter helicopter whirling above; all of them were ready for a fight. It was Saturday of Labor Day weekend, a holiday celebrating the working poor who had picketed and protested (and were beaten and shot) to win an eight-hour workday. But this holiday weekend, it was unionized pipeline workers who clocked in while Indigenous people formed a picket line. The Indigenous marchers who showed up that day were working to protect their lands and waters—they were Land Defenders and Water Protectors. Workers who cross picket lines, on the other hand, are called “scabs” because they undermine working-class solidarity. The pipeline workers met a march of Water Protectors coming down Highway 1806, which had begun with the Canupa, a pipe ceremony (as had nearly all actions), to grant strength and protection for the ancestors who might be unearthed. When the Water Protectors saw the heavy machinery that morning turning soil, it was human remains—their relatives—that were unearthed. Native people quickly formed a blockade. The Water Protectors pushed down fences, throwing themselves in front of bulldozers. A white man jumped from a truck, spraying a line of women and children with CS gas, a chemical that burns skin, eyes, and throats and can cause blindness. The handlers—the people who train animals to hunt human beings: manhunters—sicced attack dogs on the picket line. Blood dripped from the dogs’ maws.

“In that moment, everything changed,” recalled LaDonna BraveBull Allard, Tamakawastewin, Her Good Earth Woman. That morning Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman was interviewing BraveBull Allard when the phone rang. “The bulldozers are here!” They rushed to film the scene. BraveBull Allard had been in the middle of telling the story of Nape Hota Winyan, her great-grandmother, a survivor of the Whitestone Hill Massacre, which occurred September 3, 1863; the same day 155 years later, Caterpillar earthmovers desecrated her ancestors’ graves. At Whitestone Hill, women tied their babies to dogs in hopes that they would escape the soldiers. As soldiers finished off the wounded, the order came to shoot the dogs. These terrible histories, separated by time, were eerily similar.

“They took our footprint out of the ground,” said BraveBull Allard of the havoc wreaked upon the land. “And who has the right to do that?” Before DAPL, Ladonna BraveBull Allard considered herself a tribal historian, but never an activist. That changed when DAPL released its plans showing the proposed pipeline crossing near the confluence of Mni Sose (the Missouri River) and Inyan Wakanagapi Wakpa (the Cannonball River), threatening the land and water. Once, shallow waters made it a place of passage, trade, and commerce. Large villages of the Mandan, Arikara, and Dakota peoples hugged the lush riverfront, and the Cheyennes and Pawnees were known to frequent the area, too. Many came to fast and hold ceremony; and because of its deep spiritual significance, the landscape was also considered neutral territory where, out of reverence, warring factions laid down their arms and camped within sight of each other without incident. Lewis and Clark misnamed it “Cannonball”—to their minds, the spherical sandstones resembled tools of war—but for the Dakota people, it was a place of life. They called it “Inyan Wakangapi Wakpa” (River that Makes the Sacred Stones). BraveBull Allard’s grandfather, Tatanka Ohitika (Brave Bull) held sun dances here, continuing to maintain relations with the landscape by putting medicine and prayer into the earth while also harvesting food from it.

It was here that water shaped earth—making sacred stones. It was also here that state institutions used water and earth to shape and destroy a people’s history. After the Army Corps dredged the mouth of the Cannonball River, the swirling waters stopped creating the sacred stones. In the 1950s, the Army Corps built the Oahe Dam, flooding the sun dance grounds and the most fertile, arable land. When land and water are taken and destroyed, so too is the possibility of a livable future.

“Our people are in that water,” recalled BraveBull Allard who, as a little girl, saw the floodwaters take her land. “This river holds the story of my entire life.” To honor this history, “Inyan Wakanagapi Oti,” the name for the Cannon Ball area, became the name for the prayer camp that BraveBull Allard helped found in April 2016. She was in Long Soldier District at a meeting on the KXL fight with Joye Braun, Jasilyn Charger, and Joseph White Eyes from Cheyenne River, and Wiyaka Eagleman from Standing Rock. Together they decided to start a #NoDAPL camp. BraveBull Allard approached Braun afterward and offered up her land.

On April 1, they attended a meeting with the Army Corps to give testimony against DAPL. The Oceti Sakowin, Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota nations arrived in caravans by horse, motorcycle, and car to show support. Indigenous youth organized a run. Elders came to offer their Canupas and prayers, and tipis went up; they called it “Sacred Stone.”

BraveBull Allard remembers one day coming down to camp after work: “They were roasting deer meat on the grill. The women were cutting meat on the side to dry it. Kids were running and screaming. All of these people sitting around the fire were telling stories and what it was like to live on the river. Here was the catch: nobody was speaking English. They were all speaking Dakota. I looked at them and I thought, ‘This is how we’re supposed to live. This makes sense to me.’ Every day I came down to the camp and saw such blessings. I saw our culture and our way of life come alive. Nobody can take that away from me.”

Between the first meeting with DAPL in 2014 and the founding of Sacred Stone in 2016, Standing Rock ran grassroots awareness campaigns about Mni Wiconi and #NoDAPL. Chairman Dave Archambault II traveled tirelessly from district to district, informing the reservation that DAPL was coming. The youth organized a water campaign called “Rezpect Our Water,” crafting the media message to the outside world and demonstrating this was a youth-led movement. But as construction began in April 2016, a sense of urgency grew. Given that Obama denied the permit for KXL, would he do the same for DAPL? Did he care about Native sovereignty and lives?

Archambault once had a connection to, and admiration for, President Obama. His sister, Jodi Archambault Gillette, had served as the president’s special assistant for Native American affairs from 2009 to 2015. On June 13, 2014, Obama gave the opening remarks at Cannon Ball’s annual Flag Day Powwow, accompanied by Archambault and his family. Obama’s visit was historic. Only eight sitting US presidents had ever visited Indian reservations, the last being Bill Clinton.

During his speech, Obama focused on Native youth and played off the oft-quoted line by Sitting Bull: “Let’s put our minds together to see what life we can build for our children.” “Let’s put our minds together to advance justice—because like every American, you deserve to be safe in your communities and treated equally under the law,” Obama told a crowd of thousands of cheering Lakotas and Dakotas.

Shortly after Obama’s visit, Archambault issued a statement assuring Native youth across the nation “that the President and First Lady are truly listening to them.” But were they really? Beginning in July 2016, thirty-eight Indigenous youth ran a grueling 2,000 mile relay from their homes in North Dakota to Washington, DC and hand-delivered to the White House and the Army Corps a petition with 160,000 signatures opposing DAPL’s construction. Tariq Brownotter, a sixteen-year-old Standing Rock youth runner and organizer with Rezpect Our Water, wrote to Obama: “After your visit to Standing Rock you said you felt we were like your own children. Mr. President and First Lady we have no doubt you meant every word you said and we know you have not forgotten us.” There was no public response from Obama to the youth’s demands to stop DAPL.

Not until November 2—months after DAPL began construction, and hundreds of arrests later—did Obama speak publicly about the pipeline, simply saying he wanted to respect Native sacred lands, was open to a possible reroute (by then the pipeline was less than a half mile from the river), and would take cues from the Army Corps of Engineers. He would “let it play out for several more weeks.” This stance angered both North Dakota politicians like governor Jack Dalrymple, who demanded federal intervention to crush the protests, and Indigenous people, who were being mercilessly brutalized by cops. Obama’s statement came five days after live video showed a militarized police force, acting on orders from the state of North Dakota, violently evict the short-lived 1851 Treaty Camp that blockaded DAPL construction crews on Highway 1806. Cops in riot gear conducted tipi-by-tipi raids, slashing tents and tipi canvases. They dragged half-naked elders from ceremonial sweat lodges, tasered a man in the face, doused people with CS gas and tear gas, and blasted adults and youth with deafening LRAD sound cannons. The 142 arrested were marked with a number in black permanent marker on their forearm, led onto buses, and kept overnight in dog kennels. To add insult to injury, personal belongings—including ceremonial items like pipes and eagle feathers, as well as jackets and tents—confiscated by the police during the raid were returned soaked in urine.

When asked what Obama thought about this level of brutality and dehumanization, the Nobel laureate admonished “both sides,” the unarmed protestors defending Indigenous land and the heavily-militarized, small army of police who ritualistically beat the Water Protectors, all the while extolling the virtues of civility: “There’s an obligation for protestors to be peaceful and there’s and obligation for authorities to show restraint.”

Three days before the 1851 Treaty Camp raid, Archambault wrote to US Attorney General Lorretta Lynch, urgently requesting a civil rights investigation into the escalating police violence. After declaring a state of emergency, Governor Dalrymple immediately went to work soliciting aid and personnel under the Emergency Management Assistance Compact. It was the largest mobilization of cops and military in the state’s history since 1890, when nearly half the standing military was deployed to crush the horseless and starving Ghost Dancers in Standing Rock. Seventy-six law enforcement jurisdictions responded to Dalrymple’s call and were deployed alongside the National Guard and private security firms hired by DAPL such as TigerSwan. The agencies that arrived were among the largest recipients of the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program that ships surplus military equipment to law enforcement agencies nationwide. For example, between 2006 and 2015 the South Dakota Highway Patrol, which sent troopers to police Water Protectors, obtained $2 million worth of military equipment, including dozens of assault rifles and five armored vehicles. The Lake County Sheriff’s Office in northwestern Indiana, which sent four deputies, had collected $1.5 million in military gear, including one hundred assault rifles and two armored trucks. (Demonstrating incompetence with this military-grade weaponry, one deputy shot himself in the foot with one of the assault rifles while deployed at the protests.) The fifteen-ton, tank-like MRAP vehicles, which were visible at nearly all the major police actions, were also Department of Defense military surplus placed at the disposal of county sheriff’s offices. Because of the large influx of equipment and personnel, police saw it “as a sort of law enforcement laboratory.” Tom Butler, a colonel with Montana Highway Patrol, called the multi-agency police response “enlightening and educational,” encouraging police agencies in western states like Montana to attend on account that they share “all those same issues” with states like North Dakota. To Butler, those “same issues” were the large, land-based Indigenous nations protesting extractive industries. In other words, these states had a lot to learn from North Dakota about how better to police their own “Indian problem.”

Despite the intimidating display of force, it was the standard-issue weapons of police—chemical weapons like tear gas and pepper spray—that inflicted the most pain and violence. As Paiute anthropologist Kristen Simmons points out, because these weapons were the dominant means of crowd control, rather than military combat gear, they inflicted more injuries upon Water Protectors. While the Geneva Protocol prohibits such chemical weapons in warfare, they are, paradoxically, permitted for domestic policing. For example, on November 20, a day known as “Backwater Sunday,” police sprayed Water Protectors with water laced with pepper spray from a water cannon mounted to an MRAP and shot with tear gas canisters, used as projectile weapons. Temperatures dropped below freezing. Police also used beanbag rounds, rubber bullets, and flashbang grenades to pummel the young, the old, the unarmed. More than 200 people suffered injuries—one Navajo woman lost an eye, becoming permanently disabled, and one white woman had her arm nearly blown off by an exploding crowd-control agent lobbed at her by police. Most, however, suffered from hypothermia and chemical exposure. Camp medics saved many lives that night by treating hypothermia with heat blankets and by applying an antacid mixture to chemical burns in the eyes, nose, and mouth to prevent suffocation.

In a Democracy Now! interview, Archambault also pointed out how police humiliated Water Protectors by strip-searching them upon arrest (he was also strip-searched in late August). According to Laguna Pueblo journalist Jenni Monet, strip searches were common and primarily reserved for Native people and people of color, while white inmates were often exempt. Monet also reported that some Native transgender people were separated from the general population and placed in solitary confinement as a “policy.” The police also targeted journalists covering the protests, arresting Amy Goodman in September 2016, Monet in January 2017, and several reporters from the media collective Unicorn Riot.

In his letter to Lynch, Archambault compared the policing tactics used against Water Protectors as “reminiscent of the tactics used against protesters during the civil rights movement some 50 years ago.” In an 2018 Netflix interview, Obama spoke of being inspired by the courage of Black civil rights activists and freedom riders, who faced dog attacks, fire hoses, and police brutality, and “who risked everything to advance democracy.” Yet under his watch, private security working on behalf of DAPL unleashed attack dogs on unarmed Water Protectors who were attempting to stop bulldozers from destroying a burial ground; Morton County sheriff’s deputies sprayed Water Protectors with water cannons in freezing temperatures, injuring hundreds; and police officers and private security guards brutalized hundreds of unarmed protesters. All of this violence was part of an effort to put a pipeline through Indigenous lands. In the twilight of his presidency, on December 4, 2016, the Army Corps denied the permit for DAPL to cross the Missouri River. But the move was too little, too late, and it was quickly reversed by President Trump within two weeks of taking office. (Trump also reversed KXL’s presidential permit, bringing back to life the all-but-dead pipeline project.)

Even though Obama had thus far turned his back on Indigenous youth and written off the violence inflicted upon them by police, their courage, demonstrated in the thousand-mile relay across the country, had won the hearts and minds of conscientious people, regardless of political affiliation. Following the historic run, the ranks of Sacred Stone swelled. By late August there were more than 90 Indigenous nations present, as well as allies from across the globe; by November that number had grown to nearly 400. Oceti Sakowin Camp was created partially to capture the growing influx of people, who came pouring in from all corners of the globe.

The media also arrived in droves, often covering the violent clashes between Water Protectors and the police that, while frequent, also gave a distorted view of both everyday camp life and the actions themselves. From August to October, marches and rallies occurred almost daily, and without incident. At first, they started from Oceti Sakowin Camp and headed several miles north, where the pipeline crossed Highway 1806. The keeper of the White Buffalo Calf Pipe, Chief Arvol Looking Horse, frequently led these early marches, beginning with a pipe ceremony. Later on, marches branched out to target construction sites or to provide a distraction for those brave enough to chain themselves to heavy machinery.

“Men have come up to me, young men who said they were ready to lay down their lives,” Archambault said to a crowd in late August. From the beginning, he had feared someone would be killed (fortunately, no one was), and his message was one of life: “But I told them, no! We do not want that! We want you to live and prosper and be good fathers and grandfathers.”

Indeed, Mni Wiconi and the spirit of #NoDAPL, enacted daily in camp life, embodied a brief vision of what Native life could be.

“I think it’s a rebirth of a nation,” Faith Spotted Eagle said. “And I think that all of these young people here dreamed that one day they would live in a camp like this, because they heard the old people tell them stories of living along the river. They heard them talking about the campfires and the Horse Nation, and they’re actually living it. They’re living the dream.”

All one had to do was walk through camp to witness that dream. Flag Row—a half-mile procession of more than 300 Indigenous national flags that lined each side of the road—cut through the heart of camp. Starting at the north gate, where new arrivals checked in with camp security, it was the “main drag” of the “Indian city”—the tenth-largest city in North Dakota at its peak. Alcohol and drugs were strictly prohibited. Media were required to report to the media tent. No photographs of children, or of anyone, were permitted without consent. Nor was the recording of prayers or ceremonies. Facebook Hill rose beyond the main camp kitchen; a grassy knoll with the only decent cellphone reception in the entire camp, it was where people reconnected with loved ones. (Someone jokingly called it “little Brooklyn,” for all the white filmmakers from Brooklyn who congregated there.)

The main camp was a fully functioning city. There was no running water, but the Cannon Ball Community Center opened its doors for showers. There was no electricity, but Prairie Knights Casino, the tribal casino two miles up the road, had Wi-Fi. And there were no flushable toilets, but Standing Rock paid for porta potties. Where physical infrastructure lacked, an infrastructure of Indigenous resistance and caretaking of relations proliferated—of living and being in community according to Indigenous values—which for the most part kept people safe and warm.

If you brought donations, you checked in at the main council fire. Supervised by Standing Rock elders, the council fire remained lit twenty-four hours a day. A steady rotation of young Native men, the firekeepers, fed logs to the fire at all hours, a humble but important duty. An Eyapaha (a town crier or emcee) handled the mic, announcing grand entries of visiting delegations, mealtimes, activities for children, missing or lost items, and guest speakers. At sunup and sundown, elders of Standing Rock and the Oceti Sakowin sang grandmother’s lullabies for the children and gave words of encouragement to Water Protectors. Next to the PA system stood several large fire pits with industrial-grade cooking pots, always boiling corn and soup. The main kitchen served three hot meals a day. (At its height, there were about thirteen free camp kitchens and a half dozen medic tents.) Elders and children ate first, following a meal prayer. If there were guests (and there were often delegations from around the world), they ate first. The donations tent was well stocked with sleeping bags, blankets, tents, socks, gloves, hats, boots, and so forth. Native families frequently arrived by the carload, sometimes wearing only T-shirts and gym shorts. Everyone was fed and clothed. Everyone had a place. At camp check-in, bodies were needed to cook, dig compost holes, chop wood, take care of children, give rides to Walmart, among other tasks. Many quit their jobs, instead making it their full-time work to cook and to keep others warm and safe. After all, one ceases to be Lakota if relatives or travelers from afar are not nurtured and welcomed. Generosity, Wowacantognake, is a fundamental Lakota virtue. And it was this Indigenous generosity—so often exploited as a weakness—that held the camp together.

It was an all-ages affair in which youth played a major role, and there was a fully functioning day school. The camp was an unprecedented concentration of Indigenous knowledge keepers. Standing Rock Lakota language specialist Alayna Eagle Shield saw this. She went to every camp asking if they could share their knowledge with the children families brought with them. “From there,” Eagle Shield recalled, “I was told that we need a school and a place for children to be.” So she founded the Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižin Owáyawa, the Defenders of the Water School, a name chosen by the students. Education centered treaties, language, culture, and land and water defense. The curriculum of Indigenous song, dance, math, history, and science was less about indoctrinating youth to be good citizens of settler society. As Indigenous educator Sandy Grande points out, the Defenders of the Water School provided anticolonial education for liberation—how to live and be free and in good relation with others and the land and water.

If one was willing and able, there were nonviolent direct action trainings hosted daily. Mark Tilsen, an Oglala poet and teacher from Pine Ridge, led most of the direct action trainings. He possessed a biting but magnetic humor that added a playfulness to otherwise-serious trainings on nonviolent resistance. Dallas Goldtooth, comedian and organizer with Indigenous Environmental Network, lightheartedly referred to Tilsen as the camp’s “spirit animal” because nearly everyone knew him and turned to him for advice on actions. Almost every day, Tilsen read aloud and explained the Oceti Sakowin Camp principles to new arrivals, whose numbers typically ranged from a handful to several dozen. The rules, which applied to everyone, were scrawled on whiteboards and hand-painted signs:

We are protectors.

We are peaceful and prayerful.

“Isms” have no place here.

Here we all stand together.

We are non-violent. We are proud to stand, no masks.

Respect locals.

No weapons or what could be construed as a weapon.

Property damage does not get us closer to our goal.

All campers must get an orientation.

Direct action training is required for everyone taking action.

We keep each other accountable to these principles.

This is a ceremony—act accordingly.

Campers were also directed to the legal tent, where they wrote a phone number in permanent marker on their forearms to call in case they were arrested. Volunteer lawyers from the National Lawyers Guild and elsewhere provided free legal aid and kept in touch with arrestees.

Prayer actions generally started with the call “Kikta po! Kikta po! Wake up! Wake up!”—a voice blaring over a megaphone as the sun rose. When there was an action planned for the day, an Eyapaha rode through the camp on a bicycle, a horse, or in the back of a pickup rousing people from slumber. “You didn’t come here to sleep. This ain’t a vacation. We came here to stop a pipeline!”

At one action in mid October, the Two-Spirit Nation led the prayer and march. Police intercepted the caravan of cars and barred vehicle travel on a gravel road. Only foot traffic, they said. By the time the march arrived at the construction site, more than a hundred police officers with riot gear and sniper rifles, a dozen SUVs, and an armored personnel carrier had formed a police line. The Two-Spirit Nation offered tobacco and water to the land and marched toward the police line. The officers rebuffed them, telling the entire crowd to disperse over a megaphone. But where? It was surreal, but soon it became a normal experience. Unlike protest marches in the cities where there are bystanders, buildings, and plenty of media, the majority of #NoDAPL marches happened on backcountry roads where there was no CNN, just independent media like Democracy Now!, Unicorn Riot, and Indian Country Today. Sometimes the police outnumbered protestors—in the middle of nowhere! Because it was private property, Water Protectors couldn’t go as far as the ditch on the road; the fields were off limits. And there were certainly no bathrooms or water fountains to be found in the midday heat. That day, the march was a grueling eight miles, and an elder fainted from exhaustion.

“What you’re doing here is wrong,” Brandon Sazue, the Crow Creek tribal chairman, approached the line of masked police as Water Protectors retreated once the action ended. “What we’re doing here is right, because we are not the ones [who are] trespassing. You are trespassing for big money. But we pray for you, we pray for your children.”

Sazue was a man of his people. In 2009, the IRS attempted to seize 7,100 acres of Crow Creek land—in Buffalo County, the poorest in the United States—for purported back payroll taxes. During the brutal South Dakota winter of 2009 to 2010, Sazue camped out on a portion of the land in protest of the sale. He joined the DAPL protests in August, providing tribal resources to the Crow Creek Riders, a group of youth horse riders. On October 27, Sazue was arrested during the police raid of the 1851 Treaty Camp.

While the media foregrounded images of the camp’s leadership, often donning headdresses, and frequently men, it was common for Two-Spirited people and women to hold leadership roles in all aspects of camp life—from sitting on the general camp council (composed of elders and traditional leadership), to leading direct actions. Candi Brings Plenty, an Oglala trans and queer healthcare specialist, was the leader of Two-Spirit Nation at Oceti Sakowin camp. For Brings Plenty, “Two-Spirit” is “an umbrella term for Indigenous people who identify as LGBTQAI+.” Colonization imposed a gender binary that largely destroyed historically plural Indigenous gender formations and fluid Indigenous sexualities, which are much more dynamic and expansive than those of the hetero-nuclear family introduced by white Christian society. Prior to colonization, Two-Spirited people also held social and cultural significance among Indigenous societies, from performing naming ceremonies to adopting the roles and responsibilities of male-, female-, or nonbinary-gendered people. Two-Spirit Nation played a central role in camp life, and one that went far beyond merely calling out heteropatriarchy. “We have Two-Spirit folk in security, at the school, at the medics, at the kitchen, and I sit on the Council,” Brings Plenty explained. In other words, Two-Spirit Nation was represented in all aspects of everyday life at camp.

The vision of an anticolonial Indigenous world coexisting with non-Indigenous people has been overshadowed by violent police crackdowns. There were important political victories, but they were short lived, too late, and not enough to stop DAPL. On November 25, 2016, the Army Corps issued an evacuation order for Oceti Sakowin Camp, setting December 5 as the deadline. On December 4, the Army Corps announced that they would not grant DAPL the easement to cross the Missouri River, pending a more thorough environmental assessment. This temporary win coincided with the arrival of more than 4,000 veterans, who braved a whiteout blizzard to march to the barricade where police were mercilessly dousing Water Protectors with chemical weapons and water in freezing temperatures. Veterans also staged a forgiveness ceremony, asking Indigenous elders—Arvol Looking Horse, Faith Spotted Eagle, Phyllis Young, Paula Horne, Jon Eagle Sr., and Leonard Crow Dog—for forgiveness for the horrors the US military inflicted upon Indigenous peoples that continued with the police and military violence against unarmed protesters. It was vindication for the months of brutality. But it didn’t last long.

While the punishment was collective, it proved effective at fomenting divisions. For months police blockaded Highway 1806, cutting off Standing Rock from the state of North Dakota and creating a strain between the camps and local community. Chairman Archambault asked Water Protectors to go home in December, in hopes of relieving the burden of the police checkpoints and constant influx of outsiders to the reservation. When Trump took office in January 2017, he expedited the environmental review process, giving the go-ahead for DAPL to drill under the Missouri River. With the camps largely evacuated, Standing Rock activist Chase Iron Eyes led a group called “Last Child Camp” to reclaim treaty land in response to Trump’s decision. Police quickly raided the camp, which was on private land, and arrested seventy-six, including Iron Eyes. In February, the Cannon Ball District and the Standing Rock Council passed resolutions calling for the evacuation of remaining campers at Sacred Stone and the defunct Oceti Sakowin Camp. It was a controversial move that pitted factions against each other at a critical juncture when unity was needed most.

On February 22, 2017, the Army Corps, Morton County deputies, and North Dakota Highway Patrol forcefully evicted the remaining campers at Oceti Sakowin. The same day, the Bureau of Indian Affairs raided and evicted campers at Sacred Stone—the only police action to take place on reservation land, and one that contributed to mounting divisions between grassroots organizers and Standing Rock. Those divisions came to a head at a March 10 Native Nations Rise march in Washington, DC, when Water Protectors booed Archambault during his speech and confronted him as he left the rally. The march garnered 5,000 attendees and arrived on the heels of the larger Women’s March. Despite the smaller turnout, it was a unified showing of support for Standing Rock, even if some didn’t agree with its political leadership. There was also mounting disillusionment with the established political order, both Democrat and Republican, for selling out the movement under Obama, and now under Trump.

“There’s only one resolution,” said Lewis Grassrope reflecting on the camp eviction and the march in Washington, DC. “Let us be who we are. Let us live. Let us be free.”

By the time that the last Water Protector was led off the land in handcuffs, 832 had been arrested. Four Water Protectors face years in prison. Red Fawn Fallis faced charges for discharging a firearm (later dropped) when she was arrested during the October 27, 2016, Treaty Camp raid. The gun belonged to Heath Harmon, an FBI informant, who had infiltrated the camp and had a relationship with Fallis. As it has for all political struggles, the state created a new generation of political prisoners to discourage other potential movements. Fallis’s family was active in AIM and had been also surveilled by the FBI. In their day, Dakota political prisoner Leonard Peltier, who is currently serving two life sentences, represented the suppression of the Red Power movement. During the #NoDAPL movement, Obama once again turned his back on Indigenous peoples. Because he had already issued so many pardons (including, for example, Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar López Rivera), and with so much pressure mounting from the horrific police violence against Water Protectors, many through Indian Country thought Obama would grant clemency to Peltier. But Obama denied his clemency application. And after #NoDAPL, there are even more Native political prisoners, more Leonard Peltiers: Redfawn Fallis was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison; Michael “Little Feather” Giron was sentenced to 36 months in federal prison; and Michael “Rattler” Markus and Dion Ortiz face years in federal prison.

Though not without its faults, the reunification of the Oceti Sakowin reawakened an Indigenous movement intent on making, and remaking, a world premised on Indigenous values, rather than on private ownership and heteropatriarchy. While Indigenous peoples committed themselves to caretaking relations, the police had also taken up their familiar role as caretakers of violence, attempting to snuff out the fires of resistance before they burned too hot or spread too far. But the fire of the prophesied Seventh Generation had been lit, and although the Oceti Sakowin campfire was ceremonially extinguished to mark the end of one form of resistance (and the beginning of another), its warm coals went on to rekindle the fires of Water Protectors’ home communities.

For Lakotas, fire is also a gateway to the past, because it is around fires that histories are shared and ceremonies held. Now, the long tradition of Indigenous resistance also includes the story of #NoDAPL. But to understand it, we have to look further into the past: to the history of the land, the water, and its people, the Oceti Sakowin.

2. Origins

There are no two sides to the history of the United States and its relationship to people who have lived here for thousands of years. There are no two sides to that story. You have no right to displace people, to steal their resources, and steal their lives … What America has done is criminal. And they’re still doing it. —Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

There is one essential reason why Indigenous peoples resist, refuse, and contest US rule: land. In fact, US history is all about land and the transformation of space, fundamentally driven by territorial expansion, the elimination of Indigenous peoples, and white settlement. From its original 1784 boundaries of the first thirteen colonies, the US rapidly expanded westward from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Pacific coast, annexing nearly 2 billion acres of Indigenous territory in less than a century. Most was west of the Mississippi River.

This includes the Missouri basin, a massive circulatory system of streams, rivers, creeks, and tributaries that empties into its main artery, Mni Sose (the Missouri River). In Oceti Sakowin cosmology, Mni Sose begins everywhere the water falls from the sky to touch the earth and trickle into one of these waterways. The river is 2,466 miles long, with a drainage basin encompassing a massive 529,000 square miles, a landmass one-sixth the size of the continental United States. The Oceti Sakowin and the Indigenous nations with which it has shared territory, and has sometimes fought, are as much defined by Mni Sose as they are by their own political, cultural, and social relationship to its life-giving waters.

In this world, water is life, and so too is the buffalo nation, the Pte Oyate. Vast buffalo herds once migrated according to the river’s seasonal ebbs and flows, followed by the hunting nations of the Northern Plains. At the center of this world is He Sapa, the Black Hills, the heart of everything that is. If He Sapa is the heart of the earth, then Mni Sose is its aorta. It is from this country that the Oceti Sakowin emerged as a nation, a people, and gained its humanity.

Much has been written about the history of the Missouri River. Yet, few histories have focused on the river’s role in the colonial project. Book titles such as Unruly River, River of Promise, River of Peril, and The Dark Missouri, as well as the settler nickname for the Missouri—“Old Misery,” for its frequent flooding and the property damage that ensued—depict the river as a deadly, treacherous, and inhospitable landscape. Early settlers often described the Missouri basin as an irrational and violent country, plagued by endless inter-Indigenous warfare; settlers saw Indigenous peoples as equally irrational and violent. “This is a delightful country,” wrote British trader Alexander Henry about the Northern Plains in 1800, “and were it not for perpetual wars, the natives might be the happiest people on earth.”

European and US explorers, traders, and settlers dubbed the many nations here “the Sioux,” mythologizing them as the most hated, the most feared, and the most violent North American Indigenous people. Viewed as a noble warrior society, they have come to symbolize the violent hypermasculinity of the frontier and are the basis of the standard image of Indigenous culture as equestrians who lived in tipis, wore headdresses, and aimlessly wandered the land like the wild game they called kin. The University of North Dakota’s racist “Fighting Sioux” mascot (retired in 2012), a disembodied head of a Native male warrior, represented such views. (Among the tribes in the state, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe stood alone in opposing it). The “Sioux warrior” myth is portrayed in the award-winning film Dances with Wolves (1990). Such stereotypes, however, are not confined to the realm of popular culture. Prominent US historians such as Richard White portray the Sioux as a pillaging band of expansionists who violently expelled their Indigenous neighbors, and who never crossed west of the Missouri River—with no small irony—until the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In fact, these attempts to classify the Sioux as imperialist newcomers—a label that more accurately describes the United States—marked the Sioux as nomadic, rootless, unsettled, and malicious, which made their removal, genocide, and colonization more palatable. Oral histories and careful Indigenous record keeping, including Dakota and Lakota winter counts, show otherwise. Winter counts marked each year or winter by recording a significant event with a pictograph on hide (or sometimes on paper), accompanied by an oral recounting of the event, and constitute a meticulous record of family, individual, and larger national histories. US historians, however, have misinterpreted winter counts to support their claims that the Lakotas crossed the Missouri River and subsequently “discovered” the Black Hills sometime around 1776.

The Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota nations never called themselves “Sioux”—that term derives from an abbreviation of “Nadouessioux,” a French adoption of the Ojibwe word for “little snakes,” denoting the Ojibwe’s enemies to its west. Instead, they simply called themselves the “Oyate,” the “Nation,” or the “People,” and sometimes the “Oyate Luta” (the Red Nation); as a political confederacy, they called themselves the “Oceti Sakowin Oyate” (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires). Their geographical span was vast. The oldest Dakota-speaking nations were located mostly in the western Great Lakes forests, glacial lakes, and rivers. They are the Mdewakantonwan (the Sacred Nation that Lives by the Water); the Sissintonwan (the Medicine Nation that Lives by the Water); the Wahpetonwan (the Nation that Lives in the Forest); and the Wahpekute (the Nation that Shoots Among the Leaves). The Nakota-speaking nations are the caretakers of the middle territory that began on the eastern banks of the Missouri River. Their names came from their location in the camp horn: Ihanktonwan (the Nation that Camps at the End) and Ihanktonwanna (the Little Nation that Camps at the End). And the youngest and largest, the Lakota-speaking nations, covered the vast expanse of the Northern Plains west of the Missouri River, called Tintonwan (the Nation of the Plains). Among the Tintonwans, there are also seven divisions: the Oglala (the Nation that Scatters Their Own); the Sicangu (the Nation of the Burnt Thighs, also known as the Brulé); the Hunkpapa (the Nation at the Head of the Circle); the Mniconjou (the Nation that Plants by the Water); Itazipco (the Nation without Bows, or the Sans Arc); the Sihasapa (the Blackfeet Nation); and the Oohenupa (the Nation of Two Kettles).

Like most human societies, the origin stories of the Oceti Sakowin are as diverse as its people and the lands they continue to live with and protect. To name but a few examples, their origin histories include emergence from the earth—from the Wase (red clay); emergence from He Sapa; emergence from Bde Wakan (Spirit Lake or Mille Lacs); descent from the Wicahpi Oyate (the Star Nation); descent from the Pte Oyate (the Buffalo Nation); and westward and southern migrations from the Atlantic Seaboard or Central America. None of these origin stories are more or less true than others. What they have in common, however, is their collective significance in defining both a historical experience within a specific geography, and the moral universe of how one relates to others and the land. The origin stories contradict settler narratives that describe the Oceti Sakowin as “late arrivals” west of the Missouri River, at best; or as expansionists, at worst—driven, like their US counterpart, by purely economic motives to control river trade by violently displacing other Indigenous nations.

In the absence of written law, according to Lakota author Luther Standing Bear, “a great tribal consciousness” reigned at the individual level in Oceti Sakowin societies. No human institution employed force or violence to compel behavior. Social conduct was based on mutual solidarity and kinship, in what Standing Bear calls Woucage, “our way of doing things.” The ultimate punishment for breaking group solidarity was exile, which “meant to lose identity or die.” An individual’s responsibility was first and foremost to ensure the survival of the collective. Decisions—concerning anything from hunting to travel to warfare—were made at the community level in the open council, a decentralized political authority that frequently rotated leadership, affording equal say, that is, to separate societies of men and of women and, in some cases, places of honor to Wintke societies, those who did not conform to the binary gender roles. An Oyate Okizu, or the assembly of the entire Oceti Sakowin, was called only for matters of great importance such as sun dances, or, in the late nineteenth century, the negotiation of treaties and repulsion of US invasion. In contrast to their own customary laws, Lakotas created the word Woope Wasicu to describe the white man’s law. Woope Wasicu described “the cruel equipment” of law—from armed soldiers and cops, to guns, cannons, balls and chains, and prisons. According to Luther Standing Bear, this kind of law “designated not order but force and disorder.” Next to the maintenance of good relations within the nation, an individual’s second duty was the protection of communal territory. In the east, the vast wild rice patties and seasonal farms that grew corn, beans, and squash demarcated Dakota territory. In the west, Lakota territory extended as far as the buffalo herds that traveled in the fertile Powder River country. For Dakotas, Lakotas, and Nakotas, territory was defined as any place where they cultivated relations with plant and animal life; this often overlaid, and was sometimes in conflict, with other Indigenous nations.

For example, the Lakotas were by no means the only Indigenous nation with connections to the Black Hills. When different peoples combined through alliance (whether through the formation of kinship relations, or purely for survival), they often incorporated aspects of one another’s histories. Among the more than fifty Indigenous nations who possessed similar, often overlapping, relationships and claims to the Black Hills were the Arikara, Osage, Shoshone, Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Pawnee, Mandan, Hidatsa, Kiowa, Ponca, Crow, Omaha, Winnebago, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Blackfeet.

Like the countries that constitute the United Nations, the political authority of the Oceti Sakowin didn’t prevent them from sometimes warring with other Indigenous nations. Luther Standing Bear, commenting on Lakota warfare in 1931, admits as much. He notes how the United States criminalized the assertion of Indigenous political authority to make war and defend territory. “We kept our lands to ourselves,” he writes, “by making all other tribes stay away from us.” When whites began to fear the Oceti Sakowin’s political power, Standing Bear observed, “they called us Sioux.” In settler vernacular, “Sioux” became equivalent to “criminal” and was used to justify invasion and endless war. But, as Indigenous scholars and intellectuals have contended for the last two centuries, war, diplomacy, and sovereignty are just a few of the Oceti Sakowin’s many characteristics. Nonetheless, “Sioux” warfare, diplomacy, and sovereignty dominate settler histories of nineteenth-century Indigenous life on the Missouri River and in the Northern Plains. This is not because Indigenous nations are inherently militaristic, but because they had come to know the United States—which the Lakotas called “Milahanskan” (the nation of the long knives)—best through its army.

The first Indigenous–US interactions on the Missouri River were military encounters. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson finalized the Louisiana Purchase from the French Republic: an annexation of 827 million acres. Louisiana Territory encompassed the entire Missouri River basin and more than doubled the territory of the fledgling United States. Shortly thereafter, Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to lead a military expedition up the Missouri River, bearing arms, flags, and “gifts,” to claim the “new” land and its people. Their goal was to proclaim US sovereignty over the region and its nations, and to bring the Indigenous people into trade relations with the United States. And of all the Indigenous nations, Jefferson mentioned only “the Sioux” by name. “On that nation,” Jefferson ordered Lewis, “we wish most particularly to make a friendly impression, because of their immense power, and because we learn they are very desirous of being on the most friendly terms with us.”

The Corps of Discovery (a unit of the US Army) met several divisions of the Oceti Sakowin as they traveled upriver. After navigating the Big Bend of the Missouri (present-day Crow Creek and Lower Brule Reservations) in late September of 1804, the expedition was intercepted by a camp of Sicangus, a political subdivision of the Lakotas. As per custom, the Lakotas hailed the corps with a plume of smoke that rose in the northwest, signaling the expedition had been spotted. The Lakotas sought council and some form of payment to pass through their territory, but Lewis and Clark rebuffed the Lakotas’ assertion to determine who shall pass and at what cost—clearly disobeying Jefferson’s instructions “to make a friendly impression.”

After eight days of failing to negotiate their passage without paying a toll, Lewis and Clark resorted to violence. According to John Ordway, an expedition volunteer, Clark informed the intransigent Lakota headman, Black Buffalo, that they were sent by Thomas Jefferson, who could “have them all distroyed [sic].” But, obviously surrounded and overwhelmed, Lewis and Clark’s threats were worthless. Because he led the negotiations between the Corps of Discovery and the Sicangus and he refused to let the expedition pass, Lewis and Clark took Buffalo Medicine (and possibly other leaders like him) hostage and to secure their passage north. (Buffalo Medicine was later released once the expedition was free from Lakota country.) Taking Indigenous hostages was common practice; Jefferson had earlier advised Lewis that “taking influential chiefs” or their children “would give some security to your party.” Reflecting on the encounter, Clark later wrote that the Lakotas were “the vilest miscreants of the savage race, and must ever remain the pirates of the Missouri.” “Unless these people are reduced to order, by coercive measures, I am ready to pronounce that the citizens of the United States can never enjoy but partially the advantages which the Missouri presents,” he continued. “[The Sioux] view with contempt the merchants of the Missouri, whom they never fail to plunder, when in their power.”

Historians have uncritically taken Lewis and Clark’s testimony of that first encounter at face value: they were waylaid by a band of river pirates straight from the pages of a Robinson Crusoe fantasy novel. This was most recently retold in popular accounts like US historian Stephen Ambrose’s 1997 bestselling book Undaunted Courage and documentarian Ken Burns’s 2001 PBS film Lewis and Clark. But in their estimation, the Lakotas didn’t make much of the encounter. Lewis and Clark came and left, and the Lakotas continued living as before. This was a fairly routine engagement: merely a different flavor of whites traveling through their territory bearing flags and guns. According to Clark, even the downriver and more “peaceful” Ihanktonwan “invariably arrested the progress” of all traders traversing the river by exacting tolls and demanding more accommodating trade prices. However, for the United States this first interaction held great significance, and it profoundly shaped their feelings toward a nation they viewed as criminal “pirates of the Missouri.” As Oglala historian Craig Howe observes, this exchange “gave rise to storm clouds of deceit that have in some sense darkened two centuries” of Lakota–US relations.

But for the historian Jeffrey Ostler, the foundation for genocide in US Indian policy had in fact been laid decades earlier, in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance. The ordinance opened up the area north of the Ohio River and in the Great Lakes region for settlement, creating territories that became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Additionally, Article 3 stated (of the “Indians”) that “in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.” While, as Ostler observes, this “did not call for genocide in the first instance,” it legalized genocidal war in the event that land cessions could not be achieved through “peaceful” means and Indigenous people were unwilling to submit to US authority.”

The 1823 Supreme Court decision Johnson v. M’Intosh, in which Chief Justice John Marshall spelled out the rights of the United States to Indigenous lands, also drew upon a centuries-old doctrine. Indigenous peoples, he ruled, only possessed “occupancy” rights, meaning their lands could be taken by powers that “discovered” them: the “Doctrine of Discovery.” The origin of this notion was a fifteenth-century papal bull known as the “Doctrine of Christian Discovery” that distinguished Christian from non-Christian nations. The latter were regarded as little more than “savage” peoples awaiting the gift of European civilization, and according to Lenape scholar Steven Newcomb, the United States interpreted the doctrine as describing Indigenous peoples as “politically non-existent, partially or entirely.” Therefore, Indigenous title to the land could not be extinguished where it did not exist. Commenting on the Johnson decision, Onondaga international jurist Tonya Gonnella Frichner observes, “The newly formed United States needed to manufacture an American Indian political identity and concept of Indian land that would open the way for the United States in its westward colonial expansion.” This founding myth eventually became known as “Manifest Destiny.”

In 1807, following the expedition, Jefferson appointed Clark brigadier general and Indian agent for Louisiana Territory, and he served as an Indian Affairs agent under the War Department until his death in 1838. The expedition and the annexation of land west of the Mississippi was a part of a rapid push westward, and the Louisiana Purchase was a landmark achievement. For one, it provided the means by which southern plantation capitalists could expand their “cotton kingdom” to new markets—hence the importance of imposing trade relations with the Indigenous nations. Without expansion, the plantation system was doomed to fail. Jefferson envisioned an “Empire of Liberty” for the lands west of the Mississippi; one that required the expansion of Black slavery and the transformation of Indigenous land into private property for advancing a yeoman farming empire. In this way, the expansion of the plantation system coincided with Indigenous dispossession and removal.

Jefferson saw the Louisiana Territory as a partial solution to the “Indian problem”—the problem being that the “Indian tribes” still resided on lands coveted by the United States. His primary targets were the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes”—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Seminole—and his intention was to break up and ultimately dissolve these eastern nations. Because these nations had become slaveowners with farms and plantations, like their white neighbors, their system of land tenure resembled a claim to permanence. Thus, they had to be departed. And new lands in the West offered a new opportunity for eastern Indigenous removal. For example, Section 15 of the 1804 Louisiana Territorial Act afforded that “the President of the United States is hereby authorized to stipulate with any Indian tribes owning lands on the east side of the Mississippi, and residing thereon, for an exchange of lands, the property of the United States, on the west side of the Mississippi, in case the said tribes shall remove and settle thereon.” Jefferson wanted to further concentrate eastern Indigenous nations into ever-diminishing territories. By making their wild game, land, and resources scarce, he could force them to either “incorporate” or “remove beyond the Mississippi.”

Dakotas, Nakotas, and Lakotas had been trading with the French and British for decades by the time the Lewis and Clark expedition arrived. By the early 1800s, the fur trade had enveloped Northern Plains life (the Europeans also brought the Bible, the gun, and disease), and the Lakotas had a vested interest in maintaining a foothold in the river trade; they certainly didn’t consent to the US claim over the land and waterway. But the Lakotas never saw themselves as owning the river; on the contrary, it was to the river that they belonged. The many centuries they spent living in relationship to the land and water reinforced this understanding. And by 1804 they also belonged to the river trade, both economically and politically, making the river a different source of their livelihood and survival.

Early settlers and traders heavily relied on Indigenous labor and patronage for trapping and hunting, while Indigenous societies in turn relied on trade goods such as cloth, guns, ammunition, knives, iron cooking utensils, and food items. From the early colonial times through the end of the nineteenth century, the fur trade was dominated by rival trading firms (and rival European colonizers), who encouraged sporadic inter-Indigenous trade wars. From 1806 to 1835, US Indian policy introduced a factory system of trade houses to curb the criminal behavior of these white traders, but the policy had little effect, because the US government and traders themselves participated in the same criminal enterprise of trespass and theft. All of these companies were in the business of trading beaver pelts, to be sold on the European and US markets; however, by the 1830s beaver populations had been all but exterminated.

Historians and archeologists largely view Indigenous peoples as responsible for the decline of fur-bearing animals in the Northern Plains, and the adoption of horse culture increased the ability of Indigenous peoples to hunt buffalo. But their capabilities never compared to the killing efficiency of white trappers and hunters. For example, the killing efficiency of the “Rocky Mountain system” of trapping, dominant in the early nineteenth century, rapidly depleted fur-bearing animals. Made up of heavily armed company employees, these units knowingly trespassed into Lakota and Arikara territories, fortifying their positions and trade routes as they advanced. According to Indigenous custom, no one was barred from hunting for subsistence and survival. But they did place restrictions on whites who hunted for profit; thus, these highly romanticized frontiersmen were in fact little more than poachers. As beaver populations declined and demand for their pelts decreased, buffalo robes were quick to fill their place. Yet when US companies began to bypass Indigenous peoples and dominate the trade, buffalo herds, like the beaver, were all but exterminated, from the 1870s to the 1880s. This expropriation went hand in hand with military-sponsored extermination campaigns, which began in 1865. Taking only the hides, white hunters not only left buffalo carcasses to rot on the plains, but also poisoned them with strychnine to kill off coyotes, wolves, and other scavengers—and sometimes starving Native people. Estimates place the precontact North American buffalo population at 25 to 30 million. It took settlers nearly a century to exterminate the herds in the east, forcing the survivors of the holocaust, much like their human kin, west of the Mississippi River. Annihilating the remaining 10 to 15 million in the Great Plains took just two decades.

These were acts of genocide. For genocide encompasses much more than merely acts committed during war, as most US historians believe. The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the intent of genocide as “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Examples include, but are not limited to, murder, torture, or the deliberate deprivation of resources needed for physical survival, like clean water, food (e.g., buffalo), clothing, shelter or medical services. This definition also includes actions targeting women specifically, like involuntary sterilization, forced abortion, prohibition of marriage, and long-term separation of men and women, all of which threaten the ability to produce future generations. (Another tactic is the forcible transfer of children.) United States policy has subjected Indigenous peoples to all of these genocidal acts. Some of which are historical, others are ongoing. “Settler colonialism is inherently genocidal in terms of the genocide convention,” writes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Although the genocide convention is not retroactive (it only became applicable in the United States in 1988, the year the US Senate ratified it), it is a useful lens for studying Indigenous history.

The fur trading forts were rampant with sexual violence. White traders, low-level laborers, and soldiers often stopped by for a drunken “frolic,” which involved demanding the sexual services of Indigenous women’s bodies—with or without their consent. Access to whiskey, treaty annuities, and trade goods sometimes came with the expectation that Indigenous men should forfeit their daughters’, sisters’, and wives’ bodies to white men (as if Indigenous women’s bodies were theirs to give), and soldiers also frequently raped Indigenous women whom they had taken prisoner. “To celebrate victory, troopers often rounded up the prettiest girls to be passed around among the officers, leaving the enlisted men with the less attractive, older women,” wrote Sicangu scholar Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve in her account, based on family oral histories of the well-known abuses against Lakota women at Fort Platte (in operation from 1840 to 1846). Many Indigenous activists today have identified “man camps,” the transient all-men communities of oil and gas workers, as hubs for the exploitation of Indigenous women through trafficking and sex work. In some ways, trading forts were the first man camps—the vanguards of capital that extracted wealth not only from the land, but also through the conquest of Indigenous women’s bodies. Later, these trade forts also became border towns, the white-dominated settlements that today ring Indigenous reservations.

The fur trade also violently transformed gender relations. As Driving Hawk Sneve recounts, Lakota society didn’t adhere to monogamous sexual values, possessed nothing on par with the puritanical Christian views of sexual conduct or marriage, and considered property in the home to be owned by the women. But Lakota women who married white traders were placed under the protection and control of a patriarch (a practice known as “coverture”). Descending from a society where women owned all the property in the home, losing control of their property, their bodies, and their children, and being placed under the dominion of a white patriarch was a harrowing, alien experience. Maybe this should come as no surprise. In white society women and children held little or no political authority and were little more than domestic servants. Diplomacy, trade, and war—the public sphere—were the sole privilege of men. This included the sale and trade of hides at European or US forts along the Missouri River, unlike the Indigenous systems they had replaced, in which trade, exchange, and the sharing of material wealth was intended to strengthen kinship relations, rather than a market economy and private ownership. During the fur trade, Indigenous women labored to prepare the buffalo hides, but they didn’t “own” the hides sold to whites because the hunting and sale of those hides was a male-dominated business. And white traders often owned or “married” multiple Indigenous women to increase their access to the women’s relatives—and their trade markets—or to sell her off to others. In this sense, the subordination of Indigenous women was lucrative for a trader and increased his social standing.

One of these men was the French Canadian trader Toussaint Charbonneau, who is famous for joining Lewis and Clark in November 1804, when the expedition camped among the Mandans at Fort Mandan. He offered up his services and those of his “wife,” a Shoshone woman by the name of Sacagawea, as interlocutors and interpreters for Indigenous peoples they would encounter upriver. Although Sacagawea has surpassed Charbonneau in fame for her aid to the expedition, little is known about her other than her services to white men. Captured by Hidatsas at the age of thirteen, Sacagawea was one of many women Charbonneau purchased throughout his life. Although she bore him children, Sacagawea was little more than chattel to Charbonneau—a piece of property he sometimes resented, and at others physically abused. And it wasn’t only Sacagawea whom he subjected to violence. In May 1795, while working for the Montreal-based North West Company, Charbonneau was sent to pick up supplies at a trading post near Lake Manitou. According to the journal of John Macdonell, a North West Company clerk, an elder Ojibwe woman caught Charbonneau “in the act of committing Rape upon her Daughter.” Furious, the woman stabbed Charbonneau with a canoe awl, “a fate he highly deserved for his brutality.”

Like Charbonneau, white traders, explorers, soldiers, and settlers believed they possessed the right to trespass freely across Indigenous territory, and they also believed they possessed unrestricted access to Indigenous women’s bodies and their children. Muscogee jurist Sarah Deer argues that rape “can be employed as a metaphor for the entire concept of colonialism” because it is not only experienced individually but is also part of an ongoing structure of domination—one with a beginning, but no end. More so than Indigenous men, the subordination of Indigenous women was about realizing profits in the fur trade. Violence against Native women undermined their customary political authority and used their bodies to create profit. As noted above, unlike their white counterparts, whose bodies were used for sexual reproduction, Indigenous women’s bodies increased white traders’ access to new markets through their kin—and by extension, land, capital, and political and economic influence. Thus, while Indigenous women did bear children for white men, their main use was for securing the future of white settlement. As Athabascan scholar Dian Million puts it, “Gender violence marks … the evisceration of Indigenous nations.” White traders and trappers appropriated Indigenous women’s bodies as much as they had appropriated the wealth of the land by harvesting and selling the skins of animals. The two practices went hand in hand.

But this was only one component of settler society’s attack on Indigenous women’s political authority. With women already shut out of the fur trade, the treaties, which barred Indigenous women from participation in this specific realm of diplomacy, offered an externally imposed means to recognize Indigenous men’s political authority. From 1805 to 1873, the United States made thirty-five treaties and agreements with various political divisions of the Oceti Sakowin—or, as they became known in treaty parlance, “the Sioux Nation of Indians.” Not one woman was allowed to “touch-the-pen,” place an “x-mark,” or formally consent to any land cessions, peace agreements, or political relationships with the United States. By the time the Oceti Sakowin had been forcefully confined to reservations in the 1890s, Indigenous women had been completely confined to the domestic sphere, while Indigenous men occupied the primary roles in the reservation political economy, including as reservation police, political leaders, and traders. Gender divisions were sometimes enforced by military rule, and the boarding school system, which was controlled by the military like the reservations, further entrenched these divisions, ripping children from their families and educating young girls and boys on their proper places in a “civilized Christian society”: homemaking for the girls, and wage labor for the boys. Finally, in 1924—after Indigenous peoples had achieved a relative degree of “civilization”—the United States granted them citizenship, annexing both Indigenous lands and lives into the US nation-state. It was not only within the home that Indigenous women’s political authority been domesticated, but also in the settler nation as a whole.

This upheaval of gender relations significantly undermined the political traditions of the Oceti Sakowin. After all, it was a woman who formalized the first compact—or treaty—with the human and other-than-human world. Pte Ska Win, White Buffalo Calf Woman—the most significant historical figure in Oceti Sakowin history—established not only the basis of customary and ceremonial laws of humans, but also how humans would exist in correct relations to the Pte Oyate and the nonhuman world. In his earliest entry on his winter count, the Sicangu historian Brown Hat depicts White Buffalo Calf Woman as a white buffalo arriving in the center of a camp circle in the first decade of the tenth century. Above her are the Calf Pipe, a yucca plant, and a cornstalk. To the right, in English, Brown Hat lists the various animal nations the White Buffalo Calf Woman brought into formal relations with the Oceti Sakowin: elk, deer, antelope, buffalo, beaver, and wolves. Corn kernels fall from her udders into water, making the connection between humans, plants, animals, the earth, and water. Therefore, no one had the right to cede these relations to the land, water, plants, and animals—because those relations were grounded in the first compact, the first treaty with Pte Ska Win. (This is why Arvol Looking Horse, the nineteenth-generation keeper of this Calf Pipe, led the prayer marches at #NoDAPL to honor those original instruction and the Oceti Sakowin’s first commitments.)

To gain access to Indigenous lands, white men had used Indigenous men to break communal land practices and undermine Indigenous women’s political authority. As a result, Indigenous women are largely absent from early historical narratives. Yet their power posed an obstacle to US annexation of Indigenous lands. It should come as no surprise that #NoDAPL was led primarily by Indigenous women, from youth leaders, such as Bobbi Jean Three Legs, Zaysha Grinnell, Tokata Iron Eyes, and Jasilyn Charger; to women like LaDonna BraveBull Allard, Phyllis Young, and Faith Spotted Eagle.

Zaysha Grinnell, a fifteen-year-old citizen of the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation, the descendants of Sacagawea, successfully petitioned her tribal council in March 2016 to oppose DAPL. She described the scene faced by her nation during the oil boom as similar to the one confronted by her ancestors during the fur trade, two centuries ago:

When these oil companies come in, they bring in the men … These men bring with them the man camps, and with that comes violence and sex trafficking. Indigenous women and girls near the camps are really affected by this and we are not going to put up with it. Making more girls into leaders, because we witness it firsthand, is so important.

As the first entry of capitalism in the Upper Missouri, the fur trade, spreading through existing Indigenous networks, brought with it apocalypse in the form of smallpox. By the time Lewis and Clark arrived, the European disease had already devastated the Missouri River Indigenous peoples several times, most likely being introduced by French and British traders. The advent of steamboats greatly increased the spread of smallpox. In 1824 Congress authorized the Army Corps of Engineers, a construction branch of the military, to regulate the navigation of rivers and harbors. By 1838 Congress had assigned the Army Corps to pull snags and clear the river for steamboat traffic coming from Saint Louis. The federal government assumed its authority over navigable waterways under the Constitution’s commerce clause—the same clause that also regulated trade with Indigenous nations. Indian affairs, under the supervision of the War Department, was tasked with the creation and management of federally subsidized trading posts to undercut British, Spanish, and French trade and bolster US influence over Indigenous nations. The increase in steamboat traffic intensified the fur trade; and the fur trade in turn intensified commerce and, therefore, US authority over the river. As R. G. Robertson points out, the fur trade “was the primary means by which smallpox reached the Indians in the interior.” In other words, the spread of smallpox and other diseases coincided with an intensification of colonial invasion.

Steamships transporting treaty annuities, ammunition, Indian agents, traders and soldiers to Missouri River forts and trading posts also brought disease and death. The consequences of their passage brought pure horror to Indigenous nations. In the summer of 1837, an American Fur Company steamboat, the St. Peter’s, traveled from Saint Louis transporting trade goods and Indigenous treaty annuities; it was, in turn, to collect Indigenous-harvested buffalo hides. It also knowingly carried, in its human cargo, the smallpox virus.

At Fort Clark, where the Mandans lived, along the Missouri River, the deadly virus arrived on June 19, 1837, via the St. Peter’s. As early as April, the crew had seen signs of the disease among themselves, but they nevertheless unloaded treaty annuities and loaded buffalo robes onto the ship that day. Smallpox, too, was unloaded, as the infected crew embarked on a drunken “frolic” with the Mandans. Within twenty-five days, the Mandans showed the first signs of infections. The only ones spared were elders who had built up an immunity, and who were already scarred from previous outbreaks. Children and adults writhed and stung from intense fevers. Putrid, hideous sores filled with pus, scarring them for life—if they survived. Francis A. Chardon, a fur trader at the fort, stopped counting the dead “as they die so fast it is impossible.” To end the suffering, parents killed their children; friends, relatives, and lovers killed each other; and some committed suicide. The smell of decaying corpses was discernable from miles away.

Many have speculated that Indigenous peoples were incapable of understanding infection and the spread of disease. What is clear from Chardon’s journals is that Indigenous peoples knew the source of their affliction—the fur trade and the trading forts—and sought retribution against the traders and the fur trade itself. “We are badly situated,” wrote Chardon, “as we are threatened to be Murdered by the Indians every instant.” Indigenous peoples knew traders and explorers sometimes carried smallpox or cowpox with them in vials for inoculations. George Catlin, a white painter and traveler of the American West, recounted a story he heard among the Pawnees that a trader threatened unleashing smallpox upon them if they didn’t submit to his will: “He would let the smallpox out of a bottle and destroy the whole [lot] of them.” “The Sioux had it in contemplation … to murder us in the spring,” Lewis wrote while he and Clark wintered with the Mandans in 1805 and 1805, “but were prevented from making the attack, by our threatening to spread the smallpox, with all its horrors among them.”

Accurate Indigenous population data does not exist, but some studies suggest that Indigenous nations with closer contact to the whites had increased exposure to diseases. These nations, such as the Mandans at Fort Clark, had positioned themselves as brokers in the fur trade, often settling near trading forts or allowing trade posts in or near their villages. Diseases were quick to spread in these intimate river communities, making quarantine or flight nearly impossible. Some calculations estimate that from 1780 to 1877, Indigenous river nations lost around 80 percent of their populations, with the Mandan, Caddo, Wichita, and Pawnee experiencing almost 90 percent population loss. Buffalo-hunting nations on the Northern Plains from 1780 to 1877 experienced a 40 percent population decline overall; among them, this figure approached 80 percent for the Assiniboine, Atsina, and Comanche. While smallpox epidemics arrived again and again to the Plains nations—1778, 1781, 1801—the 1837 outbreak was the most devastating for those along the Missouri River, nearly wiping out the Mandans and forcing them to join together with the Hidatsas and Arikaras. (The Lakotas and Dakotas, however, largely escaped the outbreak because of prior inoculation and by avoiding trading posts after learning of the epidemic.) In 1849 cholera killed about one-fourth of the Pawnees, along with many Lakotas. The last major smallpox epidemic in the region occurred in 1871, killing thousands of Assiniboines and Blackfeet.

Turning the river into profit required little capital investment in Indigenous lives, as long as the trade goods and annuities continued to flow. But it did require the continual extraction of furs. The employment of Indigenous societies as trappers, hunters, and patrons was the first effort at turning the river into a source of wealth. But the Missouri River wasn’t a “middle ground” scenario where all parties were equals, even when the British and French dominated trade. A popular convention in US history, the “middle ground” thesis posits that in some cases, such as the fur trade, Indigenous and white people found common ground in forms of trade where one group was not allowed to assert too much control or influence over the other. Lost in these imaginary and ahistorical situations, however, is the simple fact that early European and US colonization, in all its forms, was fundamentally extractive and imperial. Lakotas and Dakotas did actively compete with other Indigenous nations for control over the river trade, but such conflict never approached the holocaust brought by disease and the calculated violence of the US military and traders.

The Oceti Sakowin had good reason to despise the imposition of white traders and US forts. As the fur trade peaked, the Oceti Sakowin east and west of the Missouri began to wage defensive wars to expel the invaders whom they rightfully blamed for the disappearing buffalo and other animal kin. Foremost among their grievances was the devastation inflicted by white traders, emigrants traversing the land, and the increasing US military presence. Each was a foreboding sign of white encroachment. Instead of justice, however, what they got was a “peace” through the permanence of war.