Top Quotes: “Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance” — Nick Estes

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 lowa 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.””

“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, Tiger-Swan, 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 mall was packed. Bismarck police, all of them white, guarded the entrances with AR-15 rifles. Once in-side, 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 like 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.””

“After World War IL, 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 re-moved; 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 Sâki-hitowin 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.”

“In 2012, despite massive opposition, Obama fast-tracked the construction of KXI’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.”

“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.”

“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’ paws.”

“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-de-livered to the White House and the Army Corps a petition with 160,000 signatures opposing DAL’s construction.”

“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 LAD 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.””

“While the Geneva Protocol prohibits such chemical weapons in warfare, they are, paradoxically, permitted for domestic policing. For example, on November 20, a day know as “Backwater Sunday,” police sprayed Water Protectors with water laced with pepper spray from a water cannon mounted to an MAP 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 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.”

“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.”

“” 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 fim: makers 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 Wichóni Nakicizin 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.”

“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 US — for purported back payroll taxes. During that brutal South Dakota winter, Sazue camped out on a portion of the land in protest of the sale.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

History

“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.”

“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.””

“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.”

“On December 26, 1862, a week before signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln ordered the hanging of the thirty-eight Dakota men at Maka To (or “Blue Earth” — present-day Mankato, Minnesota) as retribution for the 1862 US-Dakota War. The execution of the Dakota thirty-eight remains the largest mass execution in US history. Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey, who helped negotiate the 1851 Treaty with the Dakotas, then ordered the extermination or complete banishment of remaining Dakotas from the state. Settlers were encouraged and rewarded to take their own revenge with government-issued $25 scalp bounties, which later increased to $200.”

“On June 25, 1876, Custer and Brigadier General Marcus Reno led a group of 650 men against a camp of thousands of Lakotas, Cheyennes, and Arapahos. Among them were Sitting Bull, Pizi (or Gall), Inkpaduta, Crazy Horse, Pretty Nose, Left Hand, Two Moons, Wooden Leg, and many more who would be remembered as among the heroic armed resisters of the Cheyennes, Arapahos, Dakotas, and Lakotas. Custer led the first assault on the large camp, which was supposed to be a surprise attack. Custer’s men were quickly halted and forced to retreat uphill. Despite popular myths, Custer and his men never mounted a brave last stand but were instead taken down as they ran away from the Indigenous warrior men and warrior women. For his courage, Custer was promoted to the rank of general after his death.”

“Among Plains nations, it was common for warriors to be women. In fact, according to Northern Cheyenne histories, Buffalo Calf Trail Woman is credited for knocking Custer from his horse before he was killed. Indigenous women also knew what defeat meant — if they were not killed, their bodies would be forced over to the desires of their captors. They fought back not because they wanted to, but because they had to.”

“Among the most highly prized possessions were the gold-rich Black Hills. To secure title to the land, Congress passed the 1877 Black Hills Act, which stole the Black Hills from the Oceti Sakowin and opened it to white settlement. A clause of the 1868 Treaty stipulated that any future land cessions, including the Black Hills, must “be signed by three-fourths of all the adult male” members. Its passage was thus a clear case of fraud and theft, as the United States was able to obtain only 10 percent of the needed signatures.”

“All dancing and practicing Indigenous lifeways, in general, was a criminal act punishable by imprisonment or the withholding of rations. To reservation officials, it didn’t matter if the dancers were militant or nonviolent: Ghost Dancing was inherently an oppositional, political act.

Nearly a third of all Lakotas — between four and five thousand — along with many Dakotas, participated in the Ghost Dance, a figure that demonstrates its mass influence. As a resistance movement, its tactics included complete withdrawal from reservation life; opposition to reservation authorities; the creation of resistance camps in remote areas far removed the influence of the agency; the pilfering of annuity distribution centers (and sometimes white settlers’ cattle and crops); the destruction of agricultural equipment; and the refusal to send children to school, to speak English, to participate in censuses, and to attend work, church, or agency and council meetings; their tactics also included the refusal to live on assigned allotments, to obey “agency chiefs,” to cut one’s hair, to quit dancing, to wear white clothing and attire, or to use metal tools.”

“The Seventh Cavalry massacred between 270 and 300 Lakotas that day, including Spotted Elk. More than two-thirds among the slain were women and children. The Ghost Dancers fought back against the soldiers, inflicting casualties; if not for their struggle, there is no doubt more would have been killed, and that others would not have been able to escape. In the course of several hours, the cavalry chased down and killed the fleeing Lakotas.”

“The Army Corps’ discretion to plot the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2014 rested on power they assumed under the Pick-Sloan Plan, following which the Army Corps have continually asserted but never been officially granted — jurisdiction over the Missouri River flowing through Oceti Sakowin reservations. This was a direct violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which delineated treaty territory as encompassing the entire channel of the river flowing through it, including the eastern shoreline.”

“Because of the disastrous Dawes Act, between 1887 and 1932 allotment — and the “surplus” land sold to whites — devoured 91 million acres of Indigenous lands, leaving just 48 million acres for reservations. In order to limit the number of individual American Indians who could receive an allotment and become landowners, a racist federal “competency commission” issued patents based on racial mixture, disallowing “full-bloods” from becoming private owners, and instead keeping their lands in trust. This created conflict between landless “mixed-bloods” and “full-bloods” who kept allotments because they were deemed too “incompetent” to sell them to whites. Oklahoma tribes were hardest hit; for instance, the Osage lost 70 percent of their allotted lands during the oil boom of the 1920s.”

“A third of the residents of Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Lower Brule, Crow Creek, and Yankton reservations were removed to marginal lands on the open prairies or were forced to leave the reservation entirely; in either case, they could not reproduce the lives they lived in the lush river bottoms. In total, the United States took 550 square miles of Indigenous lands, an area half the size of Rhode Island.”

“In every war from the First World War to present, Indigenous peoples have served and volunteered at rates higher than the US population. The US military has also purposely distorted Indigenous warrior culture for its own ends, often enlisting Indigenous names and motifs, such as the “Lakota” helicopter or the “Tomahawk” cruise missile, for imperialist endeavors. Natives have served not so much as “national minorities” but more often as separate, sovereign nations. During World War 1, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, for example, independently declared war on Germany in 1917, choosing to send their soldiers to fight for their own nation. They did the same during World War II, independently declaring war on the Axis powers.”

“The channelization of the river benefited mostly downriver states, while upriver states would bear the heaviest burden by taking on the majority of the dams and reservoirs. Since most of the land to be flooded was Indigenous, this was a “burden” South Dakota and North Dakota politicians were willing to assume. In 1951 during an appraisal hearing, Standing Rock Chairwoman Josephine Kelly challenged this aspect of the Pick-Sloan Plan, and especially the Oahe Dam’s appropriation of Standing Rock lands. Someone asked why the dams were not built in the lower basin states, who benefitted the most from flood control, to which Kelly responded bluntly, in front of Army Corps and federal authorities:“Because there are no Indians down in that country.”

At no time did the state committee solicit the attendance or input of a single Indigenous representative from the affected reservations.”

“Federal policies such as the 1862 Homestead Act encouraged agricultural settlement on dry western lands unsuitable for settler farming techniques developed in the east. Pushed by the railroad lobby to spur settlement and therefore the need for railroads to transport agricultural goods, the 1877 Desert Land Act amended the Homestead Act and provided federal money for western irrigation projects. The Northern Pacific Railway, for example, also opened colonization offices in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and England to entice European immigrants to settle the Northern Plains and, therefore, to create a demand for railroad transportation. Conservation policy, influenced by President Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the century, led to the creation of the Bureau of Reclamation in 1902 to provide for the irrigation of arid lands in the West.”

“The loss of wildlife and plant life and the gardens also had a deleterious health impact. Prior to the dams, there was no diabetes. After the dams, diabetes rates soared. US Department of Agriculture commodity foods, such as canned meats and vegetables, white flour, and white sugar, replaced healthy foods. “Civilizing” the river landscape replaced a healthy diet of vegetables and lean meats with a high carb, sugar, and fat diet, causing generational health issues.”

Red Power

“In less than a decade from its founding in 1968, AIM would go from being a neighborhood patrol in the streets of Minneapolis, stopping police violence against Natives on relocation, to a far grander stage: the United Nations.”

“In 1968 AIM was founded by a group of Ojibwes — Dennis Banks, Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt, Patricia Bellanger, George Mitchell, and others — as a community patrol, partly inspired by the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, founded two years earlier in Oakland. Like the Black Panthers, the original focus was on community empowerment and service programs, such as creating survival schools to educate urban Native youth about native history and culture. But AIM also confronted the institutions of the state, such as the police and education systems. At the time, police often swept Indian bars, making mass arrests and profiling poor, urban Natives, many of whom were on relocation. Through community organizing and AIM patrols, often involving violent confrontations with police that ended in the arrests of AIM members, they succeeded in bringing the practice to a near halt.

Even in its early days, AIM was more than a protest movement. It founded survival schools in Minneapolis, Rapid City, and Pine Ridge — an alternative for youth who had faced discrimination in public schools. By the 1970s there were about sixteen AIM survival schools in urban centers and reservation communities.”

“When the movement swept through Oceti Sakowin country, it adopted a specifically nationalist character, focusing on the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and the Oceti Sakowin. In 1970, AIM, United Native Americans, and Lakota activists from South Dakota occupied Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills to bring attention to the 1868 Treaty and the fact that the land upon which the monument had been built was stolen. Activists pointed out that the monument itself was a form of vandalism — not “a shrine of democracy” but “a shrine of hypocrisy.” Each president — Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt — had participated in Indigenous genocide and land theft. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy called Washington “Town Destroyer” for his role in the extirpation of their villages. Jefferson had advanced Indigenous removal policies and begun the expansion of the US empire west of the Mississippi. Lincoln had ordered the hanging of thirty-eight Dakota patriots after the 1862 US-Dakota War and oversaw the 1864 Long Walk for Navajos in the Southwest. Roosevelt had “nationalized” millions of acres of Indigenous lands for national parks. While symbolic, there was a growing militancy to the tactics of takeover and occupation. Across the United States, BlA headquarters became the targets for protest. Among the protestors’ many concerns was the failure to uphold treaties. Critics in the federal government viewed treaty claims as mere rhetoric.

As the war in Vietnam intensified, by 1972 a full-throated treaty movement had crystallized. Eight Native organizations — including AIM, NIYC, and the Canadian National Indian Brotherhood, among others led a coast-to-coast caravan of thousands of Natives to Washington, DC, gathering participants in each city and reservation along the way, and occupied the BIA headquarters from November 3 to 9. The occupation and the negative media it attracted overshadowed the real issues of the caravan.

The Trail of Broken Treaties, as it was known, intended to disrupt the presidential election by drawing attention to unfulfilled treaty rights. Organizers drafted a document, primarily authored by Hank Adams, called the “Twenty Points.” The first point demanded, “Restoration of Constitutional Treaty-making Authority: This would force federal recognition of each Indian nation’s sovereignty.” The most salient points proposed the restoration and enforcement of treaty making. Although the federal officials promised to look into the demands, their response led to no action. A genius document, the Twenty Points was presented in 1977 at the United Nations, forming the basis of the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

“In February 1972, in brutally harsh winter conditions, four white men — Melvin and Leslie Hare, Bernard Ludder, and Robert Bayless — kidnapped fifty-one-year-old Oglala man Raymond Yellow Thunder, stripped him naked, beat him, forced him to dance as a “drunk Indian” for the entertainment of whites in a dance hall, and left him to die in Gordon, Nebraska. The town is on the southern border of the Pine Ridge Reservation. In common vernacular, the white-dominated settlements cities and towns — that ring Indian reservations are called “border towns.” In border towns, persistent patterns of anti-Indian exploitation, discrimination, violence, and criminalization define everyday Native life. Gordon was such a place. AIM was called to investigate the death by Yellow Thunder’s family, who were worried that the authorities would chalk it up as “just another dead Indian,” an all-too-frequent sentiment for dead Natives found off the reservation. Because of AIM’s advocacy, Leslie and Melvin Hare were charged with manslaughter and sentenced to prison. Yellow Thunder was immortalized in the “Raymond Yellow Thunder Song” that became the AIM anthem. The successful campaign earned AIM the respect of the Oglala elders and traditionalists in Pine Ridge, who called upon AIM again in 1973 to take a stand at Wounded Knee.”

Conclusion

“As they had for generations, most Natives in Rapid City lived in squalor in shantytowns near Rapid Creek, the downtown area next to the railroad district, or in Sioux Addition, the “Indian ghetto” (or “Red ghetto”) outside city limits and built upon remaining trust lands of the Rapid City Indian School, an off-reservation boarding school that closed its doors in the 1930s. The “Indian problem” had returned in the form of “urban Indians” who left the reservation.

To curb and control off-reservation migration into white towns, in 1939 South Dakota passed a series of “warning out” laws that required “transient” populations to fill out and sign “certificates of non-residence” that excluded them from poor relief, public welfare, voting, and establishing permanent residency. In Rapid City, Pennington County, and South Dakota more broadly, warning-out laws specifically targeted off-reservation Natives, barring them from legally residing within certain communities or receiving basic housing, social, welfare, educational, and medical services. Ramon Roubideaux, a Sicangu attorney from the Rosebud Reservation, described the practice at a 1962 civil rights hearing: “In Rapid City they follow that program religiously. They serve transient Indians .. a nonresident notice. This is what they call it. In other words, by service of this notice on the individ-ual, you prevent him [sic] from acquiring, as the statute says, a legal settlement. “36 Often county social service and health officials issued nonresident certificates when Natives applied for services, or they were simply denied services altogether. The labeling of Natives off reservation as“transient” did important work. It normalized the practice of settling-home ownership, citizenship, paying taxes, employment, and so forth — as a prerequisite for personhood, as opposed to the lifestyle of a “nomadic” or “transient” Indian. Questions of personhood and citizenship came to a head in 1972. It began with a flood.

On June 9, fifteen inches of torrential rain clogged the Canyon Lake Dam, which burst early the next morning, sending a wall of water down Rapid Creek. In a matter of hours, the flood swept away more than 1,300 homes, 5,000 automobiles, and 238 lives. Hardest hit were the poor-both Natives and whites — who lived near the creek in mobile homes and dilapidated structures. Although Natives made up 5 percent of Rapid City’s population, they accounted for 14 percent of those who perished in the flood, and a significant number of those displaced. The city received $160 million for disaster relief and urban renewal programs. The relief money, however, was allocated along racial and class lines. While all flood victims were equally entitled to relief, Mayor Don Bartlett, a liberal Democrat, observed, “That doesn’t mean that we just divvied up the money equally all around. The Indian who lost a shack and few sticks of furniture didn’t get as much as somebody who lost a $40,000 house with 25 years of accumulated possessions.” More relief was dispensed to white, middle-class homeowners and business owners. Discrimination didn’t end there. Many Natives fled to live with relatives elsewhere, including on the reservation, making them ineligible for relief. For those who stayed, temporary shelter was offered but was segregated.

While white residents re-sheltered within city gymnasiums and churches, hundreds of Natives were concentrated at “Camp Rapid” at the National Guard base, on land originally belonging to the Rapid City Indian School. The camp housed Natives in militarized conditions that were intensely policed and they were kept under constant surveillance, in what amounted to little more than an open-air concentration camp.”

“Relief was slow, uneven, and often used to collectively punish the Native community. Camp Rapid was supposed to be temporary, but months passed before all the Native families were given homes, although many white families had already been rehoused. HUD homes were made available at Sioux Addition for Native families — which became the federal housing project Lakota Homes — outside city limits. Yet, community harassment and policing intensified because Natives were now cordoned off into a designated neighborhood — a permanent fix to the city’s perpetual “Indian problem.” It wasn’t leaving the reservation but rather leaving the “Red ghetto” that made the Indian suspect.

The flood accomplished what could not be done previously: it gave the city a clean slate, as the built environment that had kept everyone in their place was destroyed. City officials viewed the flood as a social equalizer that leveled not only homes but also race and class divisions. Yet, the flood also cleared the way to reinforce structural racism in new ways. It removed (and killed the undesirable, poor, and Native people concentrated in the city center, literally forcing them out of town to make way for the business community’s “urban renewal” program to rebuild the destroyed downtown area.”

“For seventy-one days, Wounded Knee was an independent Indigenous territory, attracting worldwide attention and the support of revolutionary movements. For the first time, American Indians had a captive and sympathetic international audience, the awareness of which attracted a harsh military and police response.”

“In spite of an overall decrease in crime nationally and statewide over the last two decades, South Dakota’s imprisonment rate is ten times higher than the national average, growing over 500 percent from 1977 to 2012. Native inmates make up over 30 percent of the total population while only constituting about 9 percent of the state’s population. The rise in incarceration rates directly correlates with increased Native political activity in the 1970s. The historical process of elimination as a tool for political repression — removing Natives from the land and imprisoning them — has taken the new form of mass incarceration. The “Indian problem” was thus solved not through granting treaty rights such as access to health-care, employment, education, and social welfare but through the use of police and prisons.

Today, in Rapid City, South Dakota — a city located in the cosmological and political center of the Lakota universe, He Sapa (the Black Hills) Natives (mostly Lakotas) make up 12 percent of the urban population. Yet, more than half of the Native population lives below the poverty line — a rate higher than in most reservations. Three-fourths of the city’s homeless are Native. Natives also make up half the city’s jail population and are five times more likely to get arrested or receive traffic citations. These statistics reveal a general pattern of police violence against Natives in the United States. According to The Guardian’s “The Counted,” an online database of police killings, 2016 was a particularly deadly year for Natives. Police killed twenty-four Natives, more than they had the previous year and at a rate higher than any other group. Almost all the killings were at the hands of non-reservation law enforcement.”

“In 1980, AIM returned to the Black Hills and Rapid City. This time, however, Women of All Red Nations, an AIM contingent of women leadership, formed the Black Hills Alliance (BHA), a coalition of white ranchers and Native activists to halt uranium and coal mining in the Black Hills. Eleven thousand people from around the world gathered, succeeding in halted mining operations altogether. After the Alliance dissipated, AIM formed a short-lived encampment on the outskirts of Rapid City, named “Yellow Thunder Camp” (YTC), after Raymond Yellow Thunder. Their goal was to begin to reclaim the Black Hills region under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. Unlike the previous border town campaign, BHA and YTC garnered local white support under the umbrella of environmentalism and treaty rights. For example, a union of Black Hills gold miners supported both campaigns, citing the inviolability of Lakota treaty rights and concerns regarding corporate energy development that jeopardized “the health and welfare of working people.”

The alliance with white working people and farmers — historic enemies of Lakotas — proved vital because it demonstrated that working-class settlers and Natives shared a common struggle against corporate exploitation. Fighting for Native land rights and sovereignty was also necessary to protect the lands upon which both groups depended for their continued existence. If dispossession was the primary mode for exploitation in Rapid City and the Black Hills, then liberation for both Native and settler required upholding, at bare minimum, the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. For a while, white sentiments toward Natives in border towns actually improved.”

“The warm reception by Eastern bloc countries in Europe was in part due to a prolific Indian hobbyist culture. Under Socialist regimes such as the German Democratic Republic (or East Germany), Indian hobbyist clubs received state funding and played a significant role in providing transnational solidarity to American Indian causes. Much like the European Socialist regimes supported Black revolutionaries like Angela Davis, who was imprisoned by the state of California and later released, Eastern bloc countries provided genuine transnational solidarity to American Indian struggles. More importantly, where Indigenous peoples found a hostile audience in North America, they found a welcoming one abroad, especially among Socialist nations and other colonized peoples. The “red nations” of Europe and Asia now provided a platform of support for the Red nations of North America.

Treaty Council delegations were frequent, and the relationships they fostered were lasting and deep. For example, in 1979 when the Iranian Revolution erupted, revolutionary students took hostage fifty-two US diplomats and citizens, holding them at the US embassy for more than a year. By taking US hostages, revolutionary students hoped to prevent the US-backed dictator, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, from returning to power. Nearly forgotten, however, is the Treaty Council’s role in helping to peacefully end the situation, as well as the mail exchange program they ran for the US hostages. According to Russell Means, after the 1977 Geneva conference AIM’s ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) gave the Treaty Council “some credibility in that part of the world.” Since Means was barred from leaving the United States as part of the terms of his parole, John Thomas, a Dakota AIM member and Means’s second in command — “a witty, lovable guy who gets along with everybody” — served as a “roving ambassador” in Lebanon, Iran, and Egypt. The Treaty Council sent Thomas to Tehran after the Revolutionary Guards took over the US embassy “to see what he could do.” Ultimately, the students only allowed packages and mail to be delivered in person by an AIM member.

In one instance, Thomas arrived at the embassy with a bag of 150 letters. Iranian students welcomed him, and he was allowed to see one hostage, Army Sergeant Joseph Subic Jr. “You have our deepest sympathy. Our people [American Indians] have been held in bondage for 150 years by the US government,” Thomas told the sergeant.

“I know. Thank you for coming,” Subic answered. For their efforts Bill Means, John Thomas, and the Treaty Council received a formal “thank you” from the UN secretary general, commending the mail exchange for helping in “the negotiation of a peaceful settlement.”Although the mail exchange didn’t receive widespread publicity, the. humanitarian diplomatic mission showed that American Indians were at odds with the US government and its colonial policies, but not with US citizens in general.”

“International delegations were often guests of Indigenous nations in the United States, and Palestinian and Indigenous solidarity was particularly strong and visible. Both Palestinians and American Indians were unrecognized nations, stateless peoples, who were fighting settler-colonial regimes occupying their lands. At nearly every major Treaty Council event, Palestinians were in attendance. And it wasn’t just political meetings. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn recalls their presence at powwows in the 1970s and 1980s. “Groups of thirty, forty, fifty Palestinians with their guns, with their uniforms, came after the prayers in the morning, after and before the grand entry, and when people could go to breakfast and [were] having coffee and getting organized, the Palestinians were out on that tarmac doing military maneuvers,” she recalls. “They were invited there by our tribes.”

While American Indians sometimes referred to themselves as the Palestinians of North America, in the sense that they had been invaded and were being replaced by a foreign occupying power, not all Palestinians saw themselves as American Indians. To some, American Indians were a fait accompli — a lesson to Palestinians that they could end up stateless, unrecognized, in exile, or permanently placed on reservations if they did not overturn occupation. In the 1980s, when asked how he felt about the comparison, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat responded, “This is one part of our struggle to ensure that we do not suffer the same fate of the American Indians at the hands of the Yankees.””

“In 1980, the US Supreme Court confirmed the Oceti Sakowin’s claim that the Black Hills had indeed been stolen. “A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealing will never, in all probability, be found in our history,” the ruling stated.” As a result, the court awarded a $106 million settlement. The Oceti Sakowin responded nearly unanimously under a popular slogan: “The Black Hills are not for sale!” In the spirit of Standing Rock and the Treaty Council’s original 1974 contention, they considered a full restoration of the illegally taken lands to be the only just solution.”