Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context
Nick Estes
Wicazo Sa Review, Volume 32, Number 2, Fall 2017, pp. 115-122 (Article)
Published by University of Minnesota Press
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/704723
[ Access provided at 21 Sep 2022 07:46 GMT from University of California , Santa Barbara ]
Fighting for Our Lives
#NoDAPL in Historical Context
Nick Estes
T his essay puts the #NoDAPL movement to stop the Dakota
Access Pipeline (DAPL) into historical context and within the longer
histories of Oceti Sakowin resistance against the trespass of settlers,
dams, and pipelines across the Mni Sose, the Missouri River, and into
our territory.1 From the late summer of 2016 to the winter of 2017,
more than three hundred Native nations planted their flags in solidar-
ity at Oceti Sakowin Camp, the largest of several camps that also in-
cluded Sacred Stone Camp, Red Warrior Camp, Two-Spirit Camp, the
International Indigenous Youth Council, and various allied Indigenous
and non-Indigenous camps.2 The pipeline will carry half a million bar-
rels of heavy crude oil a day across four states (North Dakota, South
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Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois), under the Missouri River twice, and under
the Mississippi River to refineries in Illinois and the Gulf of Mexico for
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global export. For most, it’s not if the pipeline breaks but when. After all,
all pipelines break and leak. Crossing these major waterways, the threat
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posed to freshwater is immeasurable. Thus, the movement galvanized
around the Lakota affirmation Mni Wiconi, or water is life. 115
The pipeline crosses the Missouri less than a mile north from
the locations of the camps. The original route crossed the Missouri
River above the white-dominated border town of Bismarck, North
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Dakota. The Army Corps of Engineers rerouted the DAPL from above
Bismarck, citing environmental and economic concerns, to its current
location just north of Standing Rock.3 Standing Rock had no say in
this proposed reroute and stridently opposed the pipeline as early as
September 2014. As it had in previous years, the Corps simply ignored
Standing Rock’s concerns, claiming sole jurisdiction over the parts of
Oceti Sakowin treaty territory that includes the river.4
How and why did this happen?
In 1803 the wasicu—the fat-takers, the settlers, the capitalists—
claimed this stretch of the river as part of what became the largest real
estate transaction in world history. The fledgling U.S. settler state
“bought” 827 million acres from the French Crown in the Louisiana
Purchase and sent two white explorers, Lewis and Clark, to claim and
map the newly acquired territory. None of the Native nations west of
the Mississippi consented to the sale of their lands to a sovereign they
neither recognized nor viewed as superior. It was only after we rebuffed
Lewis and Clark for failing to pay tribute for their passage on our river
that they labeled the Oceti Sakowin “the vilest miscreants of the sav-
age race.”5 Thus began one of the longest and most hotly contested
struggles in the history of the world.
For the next hundred years, the United States led various un-
successful military campaigns to suppress, annihilate, and dispossess
us of our rightful claim to the river and our lands. Despite popular be-
lief, we were never militarily defeated. Red Cloud’s War and the War
for the Black Hills led to the military defeat of the U.S. Cavalry, most
famously, the annihilation of Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s forces
at the Battle of Greasy Grass in 1876. These wars, for our part, were
entirely defensive. The Oceti Sakowin signed peace treaties with the
invading settler government. The 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties
provided temporary reprieve and defined the 25-million-acre territory
of what became the Great Sioux Reservation and outlying, unceded
treaty territory, which stretched from the eastern shore of the Missouri
River to the Bighorn Mountains. Four decades of intense warfare, how-
ever, took their toll. More than ten million buffalo were slaughtered to
starve us out. Settler hordes invaded and pillaged our Black Hills for
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its gold. Our vast land base diminished, and the treaties were nullified
when Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act of 1876, which
abolished treaty making with Native nations, and the Black Hills Act of
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1877, which illegally ceded the Black Hills and created the present-day
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reservation system.
The Oceti Sakowin have vigorously opposed these bald imperi-
116 alistic maneuvers to usurp our self-determining authority over our lives
and lands. Settler society entreated the Oceti Sakowin for the 1851 and
1868 agreements, not the other way around. We entered these relation-
ships with the understanding that both parties respected a common
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humanity with the people and the lands. In our view, the settler state
lost its humanity when it violated the treaties. Every act on our part
to recover and reclaim our lives and land and to resist elimination is an
attempt to recuperate that lost humanity—a humanity this settler state
refuses and denies even to its own.
South Dakota and North Dakota statehood also played a major
role in suppressing the Oceti Sakowin. Although we have never signed
any treaties with these states, they lay claim to the destinies of our lands,
our river, and our people. To do so, they have always used violence and
hatred. In 1890, a year after statehood, these two states drummed up
anti-Indian sentiment to further break up and open reservation lands
for settlement. As a result, they fabricated the Ghost Dance crisis and
called for federal troops to intervene to protect white property, result-
ing in the incarceration and assassination of our military and political
leaders such as Sitting Bull. The culmination of statehood resulted in
the killing of over three hundred mostly unarmed women, children,
and elders at Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.6
Outright murder was never enough. The Dawes Allotment Act
of 1887 and the creation of five smaller reservations attempted to fac-
tionalize the Oceti Sakowin and opened “surplus” lands to white home-
steaders. From 1907 to 1934 millions of acres of the remaining Great
Sioux Reservation were lost. In the early 1900s Missouri River Basin
states began organizing to usurp Native water rights for large-scale ir-
rigation projects. These states envisioned a dam system that would cre-
ate large reservoirs that would primarily flood Native lands. But there
was a major problem. In 1908 a U.S. Supreme Court decision held that
tribes maintained access to and control of water within original treaty
territory, even if that territory was diminished. This became known as
the Winters Doctrine. For the Missouri River, the Oceti Sakowin pos-
sessed the prior claim to both the river and its shorelines as spelled out
in the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties.7
An opportunity for the states arose. After unseasonal mass
flooding, Congress passed the Flood Control Act in 1944, or what
became known as the Pick-Sloan Plan, authorizing the Army Corps
of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation to erect five dams on the
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main stem of the river, all of which targeted and disproportionately
destroyed Native lands and lives. Of the five Pick-Sloan dams, four
flooded the lands of seven nations of the Oceti Sakowin: the Santee
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Sioux Tribe, the Yankton Sioux Tribe, the Sicangu Oyate, the Lower
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Brule Sioux Tribe, the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, the Cheyenne River
Sioux Tribe, and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Of the 611,642
acres condemned through eminent domain in what was called the 117
“taking area,” these nations lost 309,584 acres of vital bottomlands.
Inundation also forced more than a thousand Native families, in pat-
ent violation of treaties and without their consent, to relocate. Entire
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communities were removed to marginal reservation lands, and many
were forced to leave the reservation entirely. As a result of condemna-
tion, the Army Corps of Engineers claims sole jurisdiction over the
river and its shoreline, although Congress never granted it the author-
ity to do so.8
The dams, which promised and delivered wholesale destruction,
coincided and worked in tandem with the federal policies of termination
and relocation. In 1953 Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution
108 (HCR 108), which inaugurated termination policy, and called for
the immediate termination or ended federal recognition of the Flathead,
Klamath, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa
tribes. That same year, Congress passed Public Law 280 (PL 280), which
authorized states to assume criminal and civil jurisdiction over Native
lands. The Bureau of Indian Affairs supported these programs and car-
ried out the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, which relocated thousands
from the reservation to far-off urban centers. HCR 108, PL 280, re-
location, and the Pick-Sloan dams did not just promote assimilation—
they enforced genocide and elimination.9
Through termination, relocation, and massive flooding, however,
colonialism created its own gravediggers. The Oceti Sakowin unified
to thwart the state of South Dakota’s attempts to implement PL 280 to
overthrow Native governments and assume control over their lands.10
Natives on relocation also began to organize. Groups such as the
National Indian Youth Council and the American Indian Movement
(AIM) formed in the urban centers to combat the wholesale destruc-
tion of Native life on-and off-r eservation.11 In 1973 AIM occupied
Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which was a
culmination of more than a decade of Red Power organizing. The oc-
cupation was the catalyst for a mass gathering of thousands at Standing
Rock in 1974, which resulted in the founding of the International Indian
Treaty Council. At Standing Rock, more than ninety Native nations
from around the world built the foundations of what would become
four decades of work at the United Nations and the basis for the 2007
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.12
The anticolonial uprising taking place in Oceti Sakowin treaty
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territory and spilling onto the world stage was met with violent state
repression. AIM leaders were assassinated, and many were imprisoned.
For example, Native leader Leonard Peltier, who participated in this
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movement for the life and dignity of his people, to this day sits behind
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bars as one of the longest-serving political prisoners in U.S. history.13
From 1977 to 2012 South Dakota’s prison population increased 500
118 percent. One-third of its prison population is Native, although Natives
make up only 9 percent of the total population.14 The connections are
clear: there is a direct correlation between the mass incarceration of
Natives and the violent suppression of political dissent.
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With the advent of tarsands extraction and heavy crude pipe-
lines destroying water supplies and scorching the earth, Natives and
the Oceti Sakowin have once again reunited. This unification first tar-
geted tarsands and pipeline construction in so-called Canada in First
Nations’ territory. Successful blockades have halted pipelines. In 2014
the Oceti Sakowin began a massive organizing effort, with help from
allies, against the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline, which also threatened
to cross the Missouri River.15 Our nation is made up of some of the
poorest people in the western hemisphere organizing to oppose a fos-
sil fuel industry made up of some of the most powerful and wealthi-
est people on the planet. Despite these odds, KXL was defeated on
November 6, 2015. After mass protests, the Obama administration
denied the pipeline’s permit. (The Trump administration has since at-
tempted to revive KXL.)
Two important lessons were drawn from the KXL struggle that
were carried into #NoDAPL. The power of multinational unity be-
tween Natives and non-Natives was one of the movement’s successes.
The other proved the transformative power and potential of anticolonial
resistance to successfully mobilize poor people against the rich and
powerful—and win!
Like our ancestors’ wars of the nineteenth century, our current war
is also defensive—it is to protect water and land from inevitable spolia-
tion in the name of profit. The #NoDAPL movement is explicitly nonvio-
lent, which accounts for its mass appeal to Native and non-Native com-
munities. In spite of this, political violence as a tactic of state repression
has targeted water protectors who engage in nonviolent direct action to
disrupt the construction of the pipeline, as well as those not engaged in
direct actions.16 Natives at or near camp—whether involved in direct ac-
tions or not—were also targets for surveillance and repression. The camp
and the Standing Rock Reservation are under constant surveillance. The
reason: Native bodies stand between corporations and their money.
Halting the accumulation of capital, which in this context is the exploita-
tion of our river and lands, has piqued settler ire and spite.17
The prolonged peaceful encampment practiced an unsettling
countersovereignty. It drew the support and solidarity of more than
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three hundred Native Nations and countless thousands of allied forces,
sending a clear message to corporate interests: North Dakota cannot
manage its Indians, and the “Indian Problem” is out of control. After
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all, controlling the “Indian Problem” has always meant maintaining
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unrestricted access to Native lands and resources and keeping Indians
silent, out of view, and factionalized. At Standing Rock, an unarmed,
nonviolent prayer camp posed such a serious threat to settler proprie- 119
tary claims that former North Dakota governor Jack Dalrymple, who
has direct ties to the oil and gas industry, deployed the full force of the
Highway Patrol, various national sheriff’s offices, Homeland Security,
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the Border Patrol, and the National Guard. These forces were not there
to service an impoverished Native community or protect the integrity
of the land, river, or treaties. They were there to carry out the will of
DAPL backers Energy Transfer Partners, some of the richest and most
powerful people in the world, who have used attack dogs against un-
armed, nonviolent water protectors. More than eight hundred have
been arrested, including journalists. Even after most of the protests
have died down and the larger camps evicted, state repression con-
tinues against water protectors, as many remain tied up in the North
Dakota legal system.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains jurisdiction over
the river in violation of the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties, claims
it holds the final say about whether the DAPL can cross the Missouri
River. The #NoDAPL encampment, in an exercise in Native sover-
eignty, sat atop lands claimed by the Corps, which “permitted” the
camp’s presence and later ordered the forceful eviction of the camp
on February 22, 2017. On December 4, 2016, the Obama administra-
tion ordered the Corps to not grant the easement to DAPL to cross
the Missouri River until a full environmental impact statement review
would be conducted. Months later, after his inauguration, Trump or-
dered a reverse course. He urged the secretary of the army to grant the
easement, which it did. Construction on the pipeline and the tunneling
under the Missouri River continued. The eviction of the camps and
the drastic reversal of course between administration, however, do not
diminish the importance of Native resistance and the unresolved issue
of treaties. Oceti Sakowin and Native resistance, as it has for centuries,
will also continue until our common enemy is defeated.
Early lessons from this ongoing struggle can be drawn to help
strategize future possibilities. First, the colonial state does not possess,
and never has possessed, the moral high ground. It defends corporate
access to Native lands with pure violence as a political tactic to main-
tain its contested authority over the land. The North Dakota National
Guard has never in its history been deployed in force against an unarmed
“domestic” population—until now. The mobilization of the National
Guard, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, Homeland Security,
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the Border Patrol, and the seventy-six law enforcement jurisdictions that
aided Morton County under the Emergency Management Assistance
Compact (EMAC) must be fully considered for future struggles.
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Disaster relief, EMAC’s original intention, has become not only a new
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mode to quell uprisings (however peaceful or nonviolent they may be)
but also a way to facilitate the expropriation of Natives from their right-
120 ful land base. Second, the #NoDAPL camp has galvanized multinational
unity, primarily mobilizing everyday people in defense of Native sover-
eignty, self-determination, and treaty rights. Third, treaty rights, and
by default Native sovereignty, protect everyone’s rights. In this case,
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they protect a vital freshwater source for millions—the Missouri River.
Fourth, #NoDAPL’s anticolonial struggle is profoundly anticapitalist. It
is the frontline. It is the future of struggles to come.
Finally, we must seriously pose the question, what would Native
justice look like?18 One solution would be to demand restoration and
repair. The profits that corporations like Energy Transfer Partners
reap from colonial projects like the DAPL should be seized and used
to repair damage to the land and river. With this also comes a long-
term goal to restore the Missouri River to its rightful protectors—the
Oceti Sakowin—and its natural path. This means the Army Corps of
Engineers must relinquish its claim to the river and begin to demolish
the Pick-Sloan dams so that the river and its people may once again live.
A U T H O R B I O G R A P H Y
Nick Estes is Kul Wicasa from the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe. He holds
a PhD in American studies from the University of New Mexico and is
the author of the forthcoming book from Verso, Our History Is the Future:
Mni Wiconi and the Struggle for Native Liberation (2019).
N O T E S
1 The Oceti Sakowin include the 4 For Standing Rock’s opposition
Lakota-, Dakota-, and Nakota- to DAPL in 2014, see Sept 30th
speaking people. This essay DAPL Meeting with SRST, filmed
builds upon Nick Estes, “Fight- September 2014, YouTube video,
ing for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in 1:08:17, posted by Standing
Historical Context,” Red Nation, Rock Sioux Tribe, December 6,
September 18, 2016, https:// 2016, https://www.youtube.com
therednation.org/2016/09/18 /watch?v=GiFNVgsX77s.
/fighting-for-our-lives-nodapl-in
-context/. 5 For more on this encounter, see
Craig Howe, “Lewis and Clark
2 For the Oceti Sakowin Camp, see among the Tetons: Smoking Out
http://www.ocetisakowincamp What Really Happened,” Wicazo
.org; for Sacred Stone Camp, see Sa Review 19, no. 1 (Spring 2004):
http://sacredstonecamp.org; for 47–7 2.
Red Warrior Camp (now known
as Red Warrior Society), see 6 For an account of the history and
https://www.facebook.com current politics of the Wounded
R E V I E W
/RedWarriorCamp/; for Two- Knee Massacre, see Mario Gon-
Spirit Camp, see https://www zalez and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn,
.facebook.com/TwoSpiritNation/; The Politics of Hallowed Ground:
and for the International Indige Wounded Knee and the Struggle for
S A
nous Youth Council, see https:// Indian Sovereignty (Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1999).
2 0 1 7 W I C A Z O
www.facebook.com/IIYCFamily/.
3 See T. J. Raphael, “Bismarck 7 For an account of the history
Residents Got the Dakota Access of treaties and water rights 121
Pipeline Moved without a Fight,” concerning Standing Rock and
PRI, December 1, 2016, https:// the Dakota Access Pipeline, see
www.pri.org/stories/2016–12–01 Jeffrey Ostler and Nick Estes,
/bismarck-residents-got-dakota “‘The Supreme Law of the Land’:
F a l l
-access-pipeline-moved-without Standing Rock and the Dakota
-fight. Access Pipeline,” Indian Country
Today, January 16, 2017, https://
N O T E S
indiancountrymedianetwork tive Work Group, South Dakota
.com/news/opinions/supreme Criminal Justice Initiative: Final
-law-land-standing-rock-dakota Report 2012 (Pierre: State of
-access-pipeline/. South Dakota, 2012). For a his-
tory correlating the police and
8 For a history of the Pick-Sloan state violence and mass incar-
dams and their catastrophic ef- ceration of Lakota people, see
fects on the Missouri River Sioux, Nick Estes, “Off the Reservation:
see Michael L. Lawson, Damned Lakota Life and Death in Rapid
Indians Revisited: The Continuing City, South Dakota,” Funambulist,
History of the Pick-Sloan Plan and the no. 5 (May–June 2016), https://
Missouri River Sioux (Pierre: South thefunambulist.net/history/off
Dakota State Historical Society, -the-reservation-lakota-life-and
2009). -death-in-rapid-city-south-dakota
-by-nick-estes.
9 For a history of the termination
and relocation, see Donald L. 15 See Nick Estes, “Declaring War
Fixico, Termination and Relocation: on KXL: Indigenous Peoples Mo-
Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960 bilize,” Mass Dissent, May 29, 2014,
(Albuquerque: University of http://www.nlgmasslawyers.org
New Mexico Press, 1990). /declaring-war-kxl-indigenous
-peoples-mobilize/.
10 Edward Charles Valandra, Not
without Our Consent: Lakota Re- 16 For a discussion on state violence
sistance to Termination, 1950–59 and DAPL, see David Maile
(Urbana: University of Illinois Uahikeaikalei‘ohu, “On the
Press, 2006), 10. Violence of the Thirty Meter
Telescope and the Dakota Ac-
11 For a history of the National
cess Pipeline,” Hot Spots, Cultural
Indian Youth Council and the
Anthropology website, Decem-
origins of the Red Power move-
ber 22, 2016, https://culanth.org
ment, see Bradley G. Shreve, Red
/fieldsights/1020-on-the-violence
Power Rising: The National Indian
-of-the-thirty-meter-telescope
Youth Council and the Origins of Na-
-and-the-dakota-access-pipeline.
tive Activism (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 2014); and 17 For a discussion on the tactics of
Daniel M. Cobb, Native Activism Indigenous blockades and the
in Cold War America: The Struggle for halting of the flow of capital ac-
Sovereignty (Lawrence: University cumulation, see Glen Coulthard,
Press of Kansas, 2008). “For Our Nations to Live, Capital-
ism Must Die,” Unsettling America:
R E V I E W
12 For the history of AIM’s rise
Decolonization in Theory and Prac-
to the international arena, see
tice, November 5, 2013, https://
Roxanne Dunbar-O rtiz, “The
unsettlingamerica.wordpress
First Decade of Indigenous
S A
.com/2013/11/05/for-our-nations
Peoples at the United Nations,”
-to-live-capitalism-must-die/.
2 0 1 7 W I C A Z O
Peace & Change 31, no. 1 (February
2006): 58–74. 18 To begin this conversation, I
122 would suggest we take seriously
13 For an account of brutal state re-
the model proposed in Waziya-
pression against AIM and Leonard
tawin, What Does Justice Look Like?
Peltier’s case, see Peter Matthies-
The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota
sen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (New
Homeland (St. Paul: Living Justice
York: Penguin, 1992).
F a l l
Press, 2009).
14 For incarceration rates, see South
Dakota Criminal Justice Initia-
