A coalition of Indigenous and climate protesters who build a protest camp to defend lands threatened by the construction of an oil pipeline
Context
Large oil corporations routinely displace Indigenous peoples from their lands to make way for industrial extraction and piping. Around 2016, for instance, plans were announced for the construction of a pipeline to connect the Bakken oil fields in western North Dakota with southern Illinois, USA. The proposed pipeline would cross beneath the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, as well as under part of Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, destroying natural ecosystems and cultural sites including sacred burial grounds.
Practice
When construction of the North Dakota Access Pipeline was announced, hundreds of Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people gathered at Standing Rock. They set up a camp and recruited others. By the end of the year, thousands of Indigenous protestors were joined by allies from environmental campaign groups, social justice movements, and the press. The protest gained increasing positive media attention with the hashtag #NoDAPL spreading on social media. Resonating with protests worldwide against corporatisation, institutional racism, and climate damage (Occupy, BLM, XR), #NoDAPL’s challenge was timely. The camp proved that a seemingly powerless grassroots organisation could attract thousands of supporters and sustain itself.
The camp based its organisation principles on practices of mutual-aid, interdependency, and responsibility in a system of Dakota and Lakota cultures that exists since before colonial settlement. A rallying cry at the protests was “water is alive” or “water is life” (“Mni Wiconi” in Lakota), signifying the protestors’ understanding of natural elements such as water as being animate and worthy of respect, in contrast to the US government-backed oil corporation’s extractive approach to nature as an inert and lucrative resource for the taking. Standing Rock and other areas in the North and South Dakota region contain Native American Reservations, to which Indigenous peoples have historically been confined, and into which white Americans have trespassed in search of gold and other natural resources. #NoDAPL was not simply about protesting the construction of a pipeline, it was also an opportunity to expose centuries of massacre, forced displacement and assimilation, structural impoverishment, and cultural prejudice against America’s Indigenous populations.
The story of the North Dakota Access Pipeline Protests is an unresolved struggle between grassroots politics and corporate power. The camp used familiar occupation and protest methods, including blockading paths for construction machinery. They also faced familiar methods of oppression, such as militarised policing. Though the camp and protest nominally failed, and the pipeline, built in 2017, continues to operate, the protest is remembered for its rallying cries for intersectional justice which garnered widespread support and forwarded important agendas of decolonisation and climate justice.