Dakota Access Pipeline Research Articles

Seventh Generation: Voices of the Rezilient

In this phenomenological study, we examined the meaning of resilience for seventh generation Pueblo people who took part in the historic Water Protector movement against the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. Using focus group data from eight Pueblo participants, four themes were developed: (a) Creating Interconnectivity, highlighting the significance of resilience in fostering connections with all living beings and things across time; (b) Cultivating Resilience, emphasizing the role of relationships, especially with women caregivers and role models, in nurturing resilience; (c) Being Resourceful to Overcome Oppressive Hurdles, involving awareness of historical trauma, proactive actions like protests, and patience for change; and (d) A Way of Healing, illustrating how resilience serves as a source of healing through engagement in spiritual practices of prayer, ceremony, love, forgiveness, and sovereignty. These findings may encourage counseling psychologists to reflect Indigenous epistemologies of resilience for genuine decolonization of the psychological literature.

Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice by Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys (review)

Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice by Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys (review)

Scope-shifting: Bureaucracy, Energy Justice and the Dakota Access Pipeline

Through a study of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' (USACE) environmental assessment (EA) of the Dakota Access Pipeline's crossing of Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, this paper explores regulatory agencies’ “interpretive implementation.” We find that, in implementing the National Environmental Policy Act and Executive Order 12898 on Environmental Justice, USACE “scope-shifted”—facultatively expanding and contracting the scopes of its spatial, scientific and cost–benefit impact analyses—to expedite industrial expansion, contravening the policies’ original intents. In doing so, USACE's EA created various energy injustices by excluding local tribes (especially the Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes) and their concerns, e.g. treaty rights, local histories, climate change and especially potential oil spills with impacts on human health and subsistence resources. We analyze this scope-shifting through the lens of Karl Polayni's double movement between socioenvironmental protections and capitalist development. We elaborate this framework further via a triple-helix model that analyses ideologies, power relations and policies (here further complicated by both “law” and “interpretation” threads), as three intertwined strands that pull with or against each other, jointly progressing toward greater rights for vulnerable communities, “retrograding” toward earlier, oppressive conditions or simply stagnating. Ultimately, we argue that understanding scope-shifting and other forms of interpretive implementation as threads within the triple-helix policy strand, in dynamic tension or synchrony with other threads and strands, can help explicate agency decision-making processes. We hope that this conceptualization can elucidate the capacity of seemingly mundane bureaucratic practices for exacerbating, or potentially alleviating, energy injustice.

Centering Indigenous Approaches for a Better Cultural Resource Management: Lessons from the Dakota Access Pipeline

AbstractThe Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) has been one of the most nationally publicized of all protested pipelines in the United States. Since protests began at Standing Rock in November 2016, injustices to the natural and cultural environment inflicted by its construction have been scrutinized by the public, the media, archaeologists, and perhaps most of all, by Tribal nations residing in this area and throughout the United States. In this article, I focus specifically on the ways that the cultural resource management (CRM) process was manipulated and abused to benefit the monetary goals of Dakota Access, LLC and the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) over the interests and needs of Indigenous peoples. Following this discussion, I propose foregrounding the suggestions of Tribal nations through greater collaboration with these groups and changes to the archaeological legislation, both of which will lead to greater transparency and inclusivity in CRM.

Lawfare in America: A Commentary on the Standing Rock Sioux

ABSTRACT Renewed emphasis by the executive branch regarding the value of indigenous knowledge in government policy hints at the long historical trajectory of eliding native perspectives in American federal planning. Even liberal democracies can marginalize social groups through the enforcement or threat of enforcement of laws. Rules-based societies therefore can exercise disproportionate command through the application of laws in which sanctions are attached to noncompliance. This article follows Charles Dunlap’s definition of lawfare, where laws are applied, or misapplied, as a substitute for military action in order to achieve an operational objective. Lawfare so defined is a valuable lens through which to view the Standing Rock Sioux protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, a more than 1000 mile long underground oil pipeline from North Dakota to Illinois. This protest was effectively criminalized and dissent met with sanctions including incarceration. The case illustrates the fragility of rights when the law is applied to achieve operational objectives.

Settler colonial counterinsurgency: Indigenous resistance and the more-than-state policing of #NoDAPL

In 2016, the US-based private military contractor TigerSwan was denied a license to operate in North Dakota. Nonetheless, it coordinated a counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign employing war-on-terror tactics, brutalizing Indigenous and allied water protectors associated with the Indigenous-led movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) on Standing Rock Lakota territory. This article takes COIN as an analytic to show that US settler colonialism is a multilateral, internally conflicted, and anxious mode of power. The settler state both depends upon and disavows anti-Indigenous and anti-Black violence enacted by rogue civilian individuals and organizations, a phenomenon here termed ‘more-than-state policing’. The repression of #NoDAPL was not solely a boomerang by-product of the global war on terror but rather exposes an established infrastructure of settler colonial COIN intrinsic to US normal politics, in which Indigenous resistance and sovereignty are constructed as metastasizing, viral threats to settler colonial legitimacy. As modern COIN warfare has evolved from four centuries of North American settler colonial invasion and governance, settler colonial studies are key to grasping 21st-century topics of war, imperialism, securitization, resource extraction, and climate justice.

Ode to Museum Indians: In Honor of Ishi, James Luna, and the Dakota Pipeline Resistance

A two-act play/performance text inspired by James Luna’s performance of “Ishi: The Archive Performance”: Boston, July 2014, text courtesy of Elena Creef; see also Johns (2014).3 Contrary to Theodora Kroeber, Ishi’s story did not end with the publication of her book Ishi in Two Worlds (1961; also Kroeber and Kroeber, 2003). In fact, Ishi has had multiple lives since he died. Here are some of them. In fact, he became an indigenist rights activist participating in the Dakota Access Pipeline Protest (2022).

Communities at Risk for Mobilization: Neoliberal Governance and the (un)Contentious Politics of the Dakota Access Pipeline in Rural Illinois

An abundant literature has developed to examine the conditions under which contentious opposition emerges to oil pipeline development. In this article, we compare the process to site and permit two pipelines in Illinois – Enbridge's Southern Access Extension Pipeline (SAX) and Dakota Access' Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Landowners mobilized against SAX but not DAPL despite demonstrable opposition to both projects. Moreover, DAPL generated organized resistance from landowners in neighboring Iowa. We thus seek to explain non-mobilization in a community otherwise at risk for mobilization. Drawing on in-depth empirical data, we argue that the lack of visible resistance to DAPL in Illinois is a consequence of the neoliberalized regulatory landscape in which landowners are embedded. Unless able to demonstrate that pipeline projects generate specific economic grievances – which was possible for SAX but not DAPL – landowners perceive themselves as having no capacity to resist. An inability to leverage economic grievances or noneconomic attachments as grounds for opposition forces acquiescence to energy development. Ultimately, this case seeks to assess how state-level regulatory dynamics help enable or constrain social mobilization. Our research contributes to scholarship examining the impact of fossil fuel infrastructure expansion on rural communities and raises important questions about the capacity of such communities to navigate energy (infrastructure) development in the ongoing energy transition.

Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice by Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys

Reviewed by: Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice by Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys Claire Patton Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys, Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. xii, 352 pp. $24.95 (paper). For good reason, historians are fond of quoting William Faulkner's famous observation from his novel Requiem for a Nun, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Few recent events demonstrate the ability of the past to motivate action in the present than the 2014–17 opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys's Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice follows the stories of four Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) Nation women and their work protesting the pipeline near the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. This work shows that the past is inextricably tied to the present and that the legacies of settler colonialism still present themselves in the twenty-first century. Most importantly, this book shows how history creates the present we live in and that Native peoples remain active in confronting threats to their land. This book situates the protests against the pipeline in a long tradition of Indigenous activism and a continuation of the American Indian Movement of the late twentieth century. Although the pipeline did not cross current Standing Rock Reservation boundaries, it did go through land that historically belonged to the Lakota, as confirmed by the United States in the Fort Laramie Treaties of 1851 and 1868. The United States subsequently annexed much of this land, creating five separate reservations, including [End Page 208] Standing Rock, by 1890. Moreover, the pipeline went under the primary water source for the reservation, a direct threat to the people living there. The book follows the stories of Lisa DeVille, Jasilyn Charger, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, and Kandi White, with a separate section dedicated to each of these women. The book moves in a linear fashion, beginning in the early 2010s before culminating with the major public protests of 2016–17. Each section, in addition to telling the story of its respective activist, describes a portion of the protest. The primary connection with Native American history is found in the title of the book, the story of the black snake. According to Lakota tradition, a black snake would enter their land bringing death and destruction, starting with the water supply (90). It is a brilliant connection which could have elevated the book's storytelling. Unfortunately, Todrys missed this opportunity. The story comes too late in the book to be an effective metaphor; retelling this legend at the beginning and alluding to it again in at later chapters would have made for a more cohesive narrative. Additionally, the separation of the book into four sections is not a terribly effective technique. The overall story seems to stand without the women as the main framework, and each section ends up discussing all four women anyway. The book would have worked better if the separations had been delineated temporally, allowing the author to move between the four women more freely. One stumbling block the uninitiated reader must overcome is understanding how companies produce oil. The book might have alleviated this by containing a brief section on how companies produce oil and why there were so many spills with this pipeline. This would have helped reinforce the danger that life on the reservation was, and is, in. A timeline would also have helped clarify the sequence of events. As a final critique, it would have been fascinating to look at Indigenous water rights activism through the lens of borderlands studies. This field explores how different entities interact at their borders and how events on one side of the border affect the other side. Perhaps future historians can continue this scholarship through that framework. Todrys fully acknowledges the story is a sad one and wonders what the impact of the pipeline will be many years from now. Readers wanting a more hopeful ending will be disappointed. The activists did not achieve their end; the pipeline still ran. In the end, Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline...

Art, Affect, and Social Media in the ‘No Dakota Access Pipeline’ Movement

Indigenous-led activism against proposed oil pipelines has relied heavily on social media, as in the #NoDAPL campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline. This paper explores affective engagement in online activism, including the Standing Rock ‘check-in’ campaign on Facebook. Moving beyond dichotomous understandings of embodied vs digital activism, Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Mirror Shields Project employs digital media in order to support direct action at Standing Rock. Patricia Clough draws a direct link between affect and technoscientific understandings of the body in her concept of biomediated bodies. This helps explain how physical and digital activism are linked: the digital and the physical cannot be understood as independent of each other, since online engagement always has an embodied aspect as well. Luger’s Mirror Shields Project functions as a form of alterlife, in resistance to biopower, recognizing historical and ongoing harms while also creating new possibilities for resistance.

Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land by Taylor Brorby

Reviewed by: Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land by Taylor Brorby O. Alan Weltzien and emeritus Taylor Brorby, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land. New York: Liveright Publishing. 335 pp. Hardcover, $27.95. Montana novelist Thomas Savage, a gay man heterosexually married, threw his overtly gay novel manuscript into the Atlantic (ca. 1964) when his literary agent advised him it couldn’t be published let alone widely read. As we all know by now, his character, repressed gay Phil Burbank (The Power of the Dog), who contains strands of Savage, meets a painful death as he tries to come out again. In his friend Annie Proulx’s best-known short story, “Broke-back Mountain,” Ennis angrily asks his lover, “This happen a other people? What the hell do they do?” and Jack responds, “It don’t happen in Wyoming and if it does I don’t know what they do, maybe go to Denver.” As you might remember, a year after this short story was published, Matthew Shepard, a Wyomingite, didn’t make it that far. Even now, how much safe space exists for sexual minorities in the rural West away from the coastal region? That question arguably represents the central prompt behind Taylor Brorby’s beautifully written memoir. He reminds us that it’s unsafe, outside some urban precincts, for a man to hold another man in public. Brorby’s story shows him inexorably torn between his western North Dakota home and exile. He insistently and lyrically paints his native topography in the country’s least visited state. He’s a poet of a landscape few of us know let alone cherish, and his love runs deep. At the same time, as his title and subtitle clarify, this memoir tells an all-too-familiar story of environmental degradation and destruction, of callous extractive industries that strip-mine surfaces, gouge the depths, and leave scarred ground that’s the short-grass prairie equivalent of Pacific Northwest clear-cutting. He knows the Bakken oil patch and the Dakota Access Pipeline personally and painfully, as his anthology Fracture (2016) attests. He records his Iowa arrest for protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline (260–61), about which he’s written elsewhere. Brorby knows fracking means fucking the ground beneath: yet another example of Rob Nixon’s slow violence. North Dakota means [End Page 80] a horizontal place defined by a five-hundred-foot smokestack and a dragline and endless derricks; it is a “story of self-destruction. Everything leaves North Dakota full and comes back empty. The only way I’ve understood my home is by getting out, escaping its crushing weight, watching the destruction, now from the outside” (7). Our endless pursuit of oil leaves only wreckage in its wake—no new news—and the kind of boys (and girls) drawn to oil patches pose direct threats to the Native boy who, by adolescence, in familiar fashion, discovers himself a sexual minority subject to insult, ostracism, and worse. Brorby begins, “Center [North Dakota] is a place where people only end up” (5). His memoir makes a strong case for escape. He’s escaped to Bismarck by high school and St. Olaf’s College then the Twin Cities as he struggles through identity formation. It’s the old American story of getting the hell out of Dodge particularly if one doesn’t conform to local majority preferences, including heterosexuality. Brorby lives through extensive pain and seasons of tears as he negotiates his emerging self between his roots, his family and place, and new, more tolerant and cosmopolitan geographies. What a courageous story of redefining what and where one belongs. The most painful part of Brorby’s story concerns his parents who provided him and his older sister a range of creature comfort but who turned their backs when he came out to them. In such a memoir, coming out, unsurprisingly, forms a main theme and Brorby sketches several scenes in which his older sister, his grandfathers, and ultimately his two older nephews, affirm him and their unqualified love. Those embraces make his parents’ silent hostility all the more excruciating (they’ve not spoken in years). The...

Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization ed. by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham

Reviewed by: Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization ed. by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham Mikaëla M. Adams Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization. Edited by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022. Pp. x, 332. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-7663-5.) Inspired by the seminal work of Philip Deloria in Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence, Kans., 2004) and Coll Thrush in Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle, 2007), scholars of Native North America have increasingly pushed back against narratives that depict Indigenous people as rural, primitive, and premodern. Recent monographs by Andrew Needham, Colin Calloway, Daniel H. Usner, Laura M. Furlan, Kent Blansett, Douglas K. Miller, Nicolas G. Rosenthal, and Renya K. Ramirez—among others—have revealed the vibrant roles Indians have played in urban America as well as the creative ways that they have navigated and built lives in these metropolitan spaces. Far from being peripheral to the story of urbanization, Indigenous people, their lands, their resources, and their nations in fact have played a central role. Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization brings together cutting-edge scholarship on urban Native America and provides an important theoretical framework for making sense of this history in the context of American settler colonialism. Indian Cities is divided into four parts. Part 1 illuminates the savvy politicking of Indigenous people in colonial urban centers. As Nathaniel Holly reveals, ordinary Cherokees had “intimate knowledge” of the power structures of eighteenth-century Charlestown, South Carolina, which they used to access and define the terms of colonial trade (p. 27). Daniel H. Usner shows how the diplomatic rituals of Indigenous people in early New Orleans contributed to the “civic culture” of this port city, while also ensuring its survival through facilitating the exchange of goods and services (p. 52). [End Page 192] Part 2 turns to the nineteenth century and focuses on the ways that settler actions and mythmaking endeavored both to erase and to justify the erasure of Indigenous people from the nation’s burgeoning cities. Essays by Ari Kelman, Mishuana R. Goeman, C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, and Maurice Crandall explore how settlers performed Indigenous dispossession and disappearance in urban locales as far-flung as St. Paul, Minnesota, Niagara Falls, New York, Washington, D.C., and the mining boomtowns of central Arizona. As the authors point out, Indigenous people did not passively accept their presumed fate but instead fought for acknowledgment of their ongoing presence. Part 3 includes tales from the best-known period of Indian urbanization—the post–World War II era of termination, relocation, and Red Power. Elaine Marie Nelson and Sasha Maria Suarez extend the chronology of this era by showcasing how Native people made and remade Rapid City, South Dakota, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, from the early twentieth century onward. They show how Native communities devised strategies to survive economically, gather inconspicuously, and organize politically, as Suarez puts it, “(re)indigenizing the space of the city” (p. 199). Meanwhile, Douglas K. Miller and David Hugill focus on postwar Indigenous efforts to create community institutions in Dallas, Texas, and Winnipeg, Manitoba, that linked Native residents both to other “Indians living in urban places” and to their reservation communities (p. 220). These narratives of community organizing honor the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Indigenous people as they reclaimed urbanized home-lands or forged new connections that allowed them to survive and thrive in distant metropolises. Part 4 brings the volume up to the present with insightful essays on the anti–Dakota Access Pipeline movement and the COVID-19 crisis. As Dana E. Powell and Jennifer Denetdale reveal, the consequences of American settler colonialism for urban development are far from over. Although each essay makes a valuable contribution, the standout works are by Genetin-Pilawa and Powell. Genetin-Pilawa’s analysis of the ways that various Indigenous delegates proclaimed their presence in the U.S. capital deftly challenges readers to “take the time to look” for “hidden Indian histories” that may not be so hidden after all (p. 133). Through her detailed description of the grassroots construction of the Oceti Sakowin camp in South Dakota, Powell reimagines...

The double movement and the triple-helix: Divestment, decommodification, and the Dakota Access Pipeline

This paper investigates divestment movements’ attempts to influence investment decisions. I use the example of #DefundDAPL, which targeted private-sector funding of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), an oil conduit crossing the Missouri River a half-mile from the Standing Rock Reservation. I analyze activists’ engagements with banks as a manifestation of Karl Polanyi's second movement, that is, resistance to environmental destruction and human rights violations that accompany “commodification” (the subordination of social relations to the economy). I identify divestment as a “withdrawing” type of decommodification that restrains free-market dominance by defunding environmentally and socially destructive projects. Next, I explore how investment practices can be analyzed as a “triple-helix” comprised of three intertwined strands—ideologies, power dynamics, and private-sector policies—that pull one another toward commodification and/or decommodification as they coproduce each other in dynamic tension, creating a constantly evolving investment environment. Applying this framework to #DefundDAPL, I examine how activists’ success in mobilizing societal ideologies to paint DAPL as an unethical investment was informed by banks’ concerns about project profitability as well as by place-based conditions and relationships between banks and pipeline companies. Further, I find that private-sector policy changes in response to the DAPL controversy were prompted by evolving societal ideologies yet constrained by interbank power relations. In conclusion, I argue that a triple-helix lens helps unpack the black box of decommodification by revealing complex interactions among ideologies, power relations, and policy-making and demonstrates limits to private-sector initiatives’ ability to impose adequate restrictions on environmentally and socially harmful investment practices.

Rethinking the Beirut bombing, rethinking terrorism: theorising counterviolence

ABSTRACT After the January 6 attempted armed takeover of the Capitol, many commentators warned that describing the day as an act of domestic terrorism risked intensifying policing regimes targeting communities of colour. Others, however, encouraged the broadening of the domestic terrorism label to include armed white supremacists, given their violent efforts at regime change. Although these interventions have debated both the danger and utility in applying the terrorism label, few have challenged the concept of terrorism itself. Is terrorism a useful interpretive framework to understand the wide-ranging forms of political violence given that label, such as the September 11 attacks, the January 6 events, the Indigenous water protectors contesting the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Black organisers classified as “Black Identity Extremists” for protesting police brutality? What are the material dangers of collapsing divergent political groups embedded in vastly different power relations under the terrorism label? Guided by these questions, this article examines the evolution of political vies for power between state and non-state actors to theorise counterviolence as a conceptual framework capable of interrogating the relationship between power, politics, and violence to better understand acts facilely reduced to “terrorism.”

Cooperation without Submission: Indigenous Jurisdictions in Native Nation–US Engagements by Justin B. Richland (review)

Reviewed by: Cooperation without Submission: Indigenous Jurisdictions in Native Nation–US Engagements by Justin B. Richland Hayden L. Nelson Cooperation without Submission: Indigenous Jurisdictions in Native Nation–US Engagements. By Justin B. Richland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. ix + 221 pp. Illustrations, maps, references, index. $25.00 paper. The historical relationship between Native tribes and the United States government is one that is strained and often unbalanced. In this book, Justin B. Richland, an associate justice of the Hopi Appellate Court and professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, provides not only a legal history of tribal engagements with the US, but also a guidebook for improving that relationship. Richland borrowed the concept of "cooperation without submission (CWS)" from the Hopi lawyer and linguist Emory Sekaquaptewa, who regarded Hopi society as an intricate system of mutual respect and understanding between different clans, norms, and relations. Richland expands Sekaquaptewa's complex concept beyond the Hopi, arguing that CWS is a transferable Indigenous theory of jurisdiction while at the same time proposing that this could be a means of improving ongoing relationships between Native Nations and the US. Within the work, another important conceptual contribution is Richland's use of "juris-dictions." While "jurisdiction" is the legal authority of a sovereign state, "jurisdictions" is the everyday legal discourse on specific cases. Richland finds that Native leaders typically insert Indigenous norms and knowledges into their law-speech, making the legal landscape an important place to insist on tribal sovereignty. While Native leaders use the legal space to assert themselves, however, Richland argues that it is the failure of non-Natives to fully recognize Indigenous cultural and legal norms. Why have non-Natives failed to recognize CWS? A major part of this disjuncture lies in the longstanding patriarchal belief in Native Nations not as sovereign nations in their dealings with the US, but instead as lesser, subordinate, and prostrate to the primacy of American law. As Richland rightly points out, however, such domineering perspectives have often failed Native people. Ultimately, failing to recognize these Indigenous patterns of self-governance serves to erase their authority and sovereignty, which is a central component to the ongoing project of settler colonialism. Ultimately, Cooperation without Submission is a fine book that should interest Indigenous and legal scholars alike. While it may conflate the diverse cultural norms and legal practices of various Native Nations under the expanded Hopi concept of CWS, the book has merit in its examination of everyday legal discourse to [End Page 108] discover how Natives and non-Natives understand one another. Despite the book focusing very little on the Great Plains directly, scholars of the region should find interest in the theoretical framework of CWS, as well as the book's discussion on recent legal matters concerning Plains Native Nations, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline. The true marvel of this book is its assertion of Indigenous sovereignty in the legal landscape, which Richland suggests is a key component in taking steps toward decolonization and as a way forward in Native Nation–US engagements predicated upon a more equitable relationship of reciprocity, respect, and understanding. Hayden L. Nelson Department of History University of Kansas Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Riot, Strike, Riot: The New Era of Uprisings

Riot, Strike, Riot: The New Era of Uprisings

Is seeing believing? Comparing the influence of textual and visual policy narratives on public opinion

AbstractScholars have used the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to explain public opinion on a variety of policy issues and across venues. Recent work in the NPF has expanded the application of the framework beyond textual formats to accommodate policy narratives that are visual in nature. This article asks whether individuals respond differently to visual versus text‐based narratives. The research argues that visuals are more easily understood, dramatic, and memorable than text, suggesting that visual narratives may have a greater influence on policy attitudes. I explore these possibilities using Twitter narratives related to the Dakota Access Pipeline in the United States. Exposure to visual narratives significantly increased perception of issue importance, but contrary to expectations, visual narratives were no more effective at enhancing information recall, shifting attitudes, and encouraging activism than textual narratives. The article discusses possible reasons for these findings, the implications for narrative persuasion, and suggestions for future avenues of research.Related ArticlesChang, Katherine T., and Elizabeth A. Koebele. 2020. “What Drives Coalitions' Narrative Strategy? Exploring Policy Narratives around School Choice.” Politics & Policy 48(4): 618–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12367.Crow, Deserai A., Lydia A. Lawhon, John Berggren, Juhi Huda, Elizabeth Koebele, and Adrianne Kroepsch. 2017. “A Narrative Policy Framework Analysis of Wildfire Policy Discussions in Two Colorado Communities.” Politics & Policy 45(4): 626–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12207.Shanahan, Elizabeth A., Mark K. McBeth, and Paul L. Hathaway. 2011. “Narrative Policy Framework: The Influence of Media Policy Narrative on Public Opinion.” Politics & Policy 39(3): 373–400. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2011.00295.x.

Environmental Clashes on Native American Land: Framing Environmental and Scientific Disputes by Cynthia-Lou Coleman

Reviewed by: Environmental Clashes on Native American Land: Framing Environmental and Scientific Disputes by Cynthia-Lou Coleman Sebastian Wurzrainer (bio) Environmental Clashes on Native American Land: Framing Environmental and Scientific Disputes by Cynthia-Lou Coleman Palgrave Macmillan, 2020 AS CYNTHIA-LOU COLEMAN (WAZHAZHE), a professor of communication at Portland State University, observes in Environmental Clashes on Native American Land: Framing Environmental and Scientific Disputes, "Only a handful of communication scholars . . . have examined Native American perspectives" (15). Using a concise, economic writing style, Coleman asserts that communication studies overemphasize how meaning is produced at the expense of considering the systemic inequities in this process, particularly as they relate to mainstream media's disregard for Native American perspectives. Drawing on Jürgen Habermas's notion of the public sphere, Michel Foucault's discussion of power, and William A. Gamson's and André Modigliani's ideas about interpretive packages, she offers a nuanced reading of an eclectic mix of news sources that covered the Kennewick Man and the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) conflicts. She posits that the media constructed a framing for these events by drawing on a history of colonial tropes. For instance, the tribes that protested the mishandling of the Kennewick Man skeleton were regularly framed as "trouble-makers" beholden to "religiosity, myth or invention," recalling racist stereotypes of Indigenous peoples as savage and preindustrial (146–47). None of these insights are novel in the context of Indigenous studies, but that is not necessarily a criticism given that Coleman seeks to intervene in a field that typically overlooks Indigenous peoples. The opening chapters establish the "two prisms" through which Coleman filters the rest of the book: "the Media Hegemony Hypothesis" and "Indigenous Metaphysics" (143). She initially illustrates her premise by exploring the white supremacist pseudoscience of phrenology, specifically as it was applied to Native Americans such as the Sauk warrior Black Hawk. While the entire book is modular, this section—chapters 3 and 4—feels especially disconnected from Coleman's overall argument. She does, however, make a point that resonates across the book by coining the term "sciencing." As she repeatedly demonstrates, the performative "act of doing science" in the public sphere frequently overrules the actual validity of the science being done (37). The book transitions to an examination of the twenty-year conflict [End Page 158] surrounding the remains of Kennewick Man, a nine-thousand-plus-year-old skeleton found in 1996 in Washington State's Columbia River. In chapters 5 and 6, Coleman implies—but does not further explore—that phrenology influenced the anthropologists who initially classified Kennewick Man's skull as "Caucasoid." This classification fueled a fascination among media outlets about the possibility that the original inhabitants of Turtle Island were white. Coleman's most compelling argument is that the tribes who sought to reclaim Kennewick Man's remains soundly rejected the "Who was here first?" framing (74); they were instead concerned with their sovereign right to return their ancestor to the earth in accordance with their traditions. Perhaps more than anywhere else in the book, this highlights Coleman's reference to the media's systemic exclusion of Native worldviews (what she calls "Indigenous Metaphysics"). Coleman turns to the DAPL conflict in chapters 7 and 8, connecting it to three key events in the history of Sioux-settler interactions: the Battle of Greasy Grass, the death of Crazy Horse, and the Wounded Knee Massacre. She presents DAPL as an extension and reflection of this history, but she contends that in this most recent iteration, the Sioux were able to mobilize social media and bypass the hegemonic frameworks propagated by mainstream media. Coleman concludes on a more general note by highlighting how such instances of cultural resilience in a conflict like DAPL create the necessary groundwork for future Indigenous activists. Coleman's use of these prominent examples makes the book an ideal introduction to topics in Indigenous studies for entry-level undergraduates interested in environmental or communication studies. Yet this inevitably leaves ample room for further research. For instance, Coleman never really specifies what she means by "the media," leading to a series of conclusions that are apt but overly broad. She also concedes that "capitalism and colonialism" are...

Active depositors

Do households react to negative non-financial and climate related information about their financial institutions? Using branch level data for the United States, I show that banks that financed the highly controversial Dakota Access Pipeline experienced significant decreases in deposit growth. These effects were greater in localities with higher support for the protests and higher environmental awareness. Data suggests that locally oriented banks were among the main beneficiaries of this depositor movement. Overall, this paper adds significantly to our understanding on the non-financial preferences of household financial investment decisions and climate finance debate.

The Meaning of Standing Rock: On Imperialism, Indigeneity, Industrialization, and Imagination

The Meaning of Standing RockOn Imperialism, Indigeneity, Industrialization, and Imagination Sebastian Felix Braun (bio) Our History Is Our Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. By Nick Estes. London: Verso, 2019. 310 pp. Maps, photographs, notes, index. $26.95 hardcover. Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice. By Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. x + 311 pp. Map, photographs, notes, index. $24.95 paper. Standoff: Standing Rock, the Bundy Movement, and the Story of Occupation, Sovereignty, and the Fight for Sacred Lands. By Jacqueline Keeler. Salt Lake City: Torrey House Press, 2021. 236 pp. $19.95 paper. Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement. Edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. i + 420 pp. Maps, photographs, notes, references, index. $100.00 hardcover; $24.95 paper. "Standing Rock" became a trope in 2016. People stood with Standing Rock, went to Standing Rock, talked about Standing Rock, watched Standing Rock, fought for Standing Rock, wept for Standing Rock, and collected money for Standing Rock. Before that, Standing Rock was a place: the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, home to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Interrupting the border between North and South Dakota, its communities are mostly Lakota (Hunkpapa) and Dakota (Yanktonai) speakers. One of the Ihanktowanna communities is Cannon Ball, the northernmost community. It is not far from there that "Standing Rock" originated in 2016. Apart from its real presence in camps on and off the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, "Standing Rock" existed mostly, however, in cyberspace. This community reached out through social media and the internet, and eventually spanned the globe. As it expanded, it also changed. Many people who stood with Standing Rock had never heard of the actual place. Standing Rock became a feeling, a statement in its own right, a symbol, a manifesto. The reason for all the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at this point was the Corps of Engineers' responsibility to issue a permit for the pipeline to cross the Missouri River, now Lake Oahe. Since 2016, articles and books have been written, documentaries screened, and lawsuits filed over the meaning of Standing Rock. Here, I will discuss four of these books. Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys's Black Snake depicts the events surrounding the protests [End Page 147] from the perspective and through the experiences of four women, all involved in leadership roles. It sees Standing Rock as a fight for environmental justice and includes sections on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, further north on the Missouri River. Fort Berthold was, in 2016, reaping rewards and negative consequences from the Bakken oil boom. Jaqueline Keeler's Standoff compares Standing Rock to another occupation, the takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Both spoke out against the federal government, although one was inspired by Native connections with the land and the other by antigovernmental militia philosophy. Nick Estes's Our History Is Our Future attempts to put Standing Rock into a continuous line of Indigenous resistance. From this perspective, it is simply the latest incident in an ongoing conflict between two incompatible societies—the Oceti Sakowin on one side, standing for Indigeneity, and the United States on the other, standing for settler colonialism. Finally, Standing with Standing Rock is an edited volume combining thoughts about and surrounding Standing Rock. It reflects a variety of different perspectives about "Standing Rock," its contributors allowed to speak for themselves. The trope of Standing Rock becomes perhaps most obvious with the realization that none of the books are truly about the protests at the Cannonball River. While some of them go into some detail about the actual events—Black Snake most fully—they all use the protests as an example for larger issues and in turn engage in meaning making for the protests from these different perspectives. This is not a coincidence. Like the events at the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, which most commentators about Standing Rock use for comparison, after the camps were dismantled there seems to be no real lasting consequence. To prevent the hardships and violence people endured from being meaningless, they...