Dakota Access Pipeline Research Articles

Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation by Mark Rifkin

Reviewed by: Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation by Mark Rifkin Ashley D. Clemons Mark Rifkin. Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation. Duke UP, 2019. vii + 323 pp. Social and political movements have increased the volume on voices often silenced and shed light on issues often overlooked. Amid the rise of these movements, some attempts to unify minority groups in the US have also emerged. In this context, Mark Rifkin’s Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation addresses the challenges of and successes with theorizing Indigenous and Black people’s difference and solidarity. Rifkin uses the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and the Black Lives Matter movement as entry points to discussing misconceptions of the shared struggle and subjection of marginalized groups in the US. Smartly, Rifkin identifies himself as both non-Native and non-Black before carefully endeavoring to think through relations between Native and Black groups. Although he acknowledges potential intersections, he focuses through the speculative on aspects that distinguish Black and Indigenous people. He argues that the speculative “as a mode opens intellectual, political, and ethical possibilities for thinking and valuing the differences among Black and Indigenous political imaginaries” (8). Rifkin lays out his theoretical framing by paying particular attention to conceptualizations of difference and unification regarding Black and Indigenous people. He warns against exceptionalism as well as situating and connecting variations of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity within a singular power structure. Rifkin draws primarily from Black feminist thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, Glen Coulthard, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, and Patricia Hill Collins to understand the nuances of personhood, (de)humanization, sovereignty, nation, and territoriality. Additionally, he investigates dominance in terms of “enchattelment and settlement” (16) to critique those who would strategically view dominance as monolithic and demonstrates “varied formations of ‘we’-ness” (19). Furthermore, Rifkin exposes how the rationalization of singular structural oppression and shared struggle belies Black and Indigenous histories and trajectories. He suggests that seeing the groups and their backgrounds as nonidentical still risks hierarchical comparison. Specifically, when Rifkin frames territory, as it concerns authority and belonging, he enables a broader understanding, especially in discussing the settler-state. Territoriality’s place in this nation’s history of dominance and oppression also differentiates Native and Black people. To better illustrate his argument, Rifkin calls on Audre Lorde. Despite his lingering questions [End Page 792] regarding intersectionality’s effectiveness, he praises Lorde’s use of the theory, particularly in relation to difference and identity formation. He claims that considering difference as “a basis for relation, as opening the possibility for creative and sustaining engagement, involves tracking and contesting forms of misnaming and misuse that reify and distort distinctions in political formations and trajectories while still recognizing and reclaiming such distinctions as the medium through which to build connections” (31). Through this framing of difference, Rifkin shapes his analysis of Black and Indigenous relations beyond popular and dominant classifications. He accomplishes this through an Afrofuturist lens. In close readings of futurist narratives, he thinks through ways that anti-Black violence and struggles can translate into understandings of anti-Indigeneity. Through the term “settler” (54), he considers Black liberation in conversation with and apart from Indigenous sovereignty. Indigenous futurist and Afrofuturist texts and writers ground Rifkin’s analysis of identity strategies and narrative. By digging into the views of Black and Indigenous people in the future, Rifkin exposes patterns of white supremacy and oppression, which are distinctive yet familiar to both groups. He describes their struggles by using David Scott’s concept of problem-space and illustrates how Indigenous futurism and Afrofuturism imagine decolonization and freedom in the future. He mentions several texts as examples, including Grace L. Dillon’s Walking the Clouds. Most notable is his detailed reading of Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy and the fictional Oankali to address miscegenation, difference, and placemaking. Speculation has the potential to divulge both the real and the could-be-possible. It is in this area that Black-Indigenous relations can be addressed with little hierarchy and much revelation. Most poignantly, in chapter 3 Rifkin investigates carcerality. Walter Mosley’s Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World (2001) and Daniel H. Wilson’s...

Memes and Social Messages: Teaching a Critical Literacies Curriculum on DAPL

This article documents the design and implementation of a culturally responsive critical media literacies curriculum centered around media representations of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Students (grades 6-8) were invited to discuss media imagery relating to DAPL and to create memes reflecting their understandings. To situate this work, we articulate a framework that blends critical media literacies and culturally responsive and sustaining pedagogy. We analyze students’ spoken and multimodal responses to a curriculum that purposefully foregrounded Native perspectives and digital media. Ultimately, we argue that students must be invited to leverage their epistemic privilege in responding to contemporary social issues.

The Water Protectors at Standing Rock: Survivance Strategies for Gendered Relinking

Violence against Indigenous individuals and the land is exacerbated by the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Such violence stems from and is sustained by structures of settler colonialism. Analyzing RISE (2017), a documentary television series which followed the Standing Rock occupation, I argue the Water Protectors enacted their inherent sovereignty through strategies of survivance that delinked from settler colonialism and provided gendered relinking to Indigenous knowledges. The Water Protectors’ decolonial talk presented embodied messages of Indigenous survivance that highlighted their agency to resist settler colonialism. By asserting their active decolonial presence, the Water Protectors challenged settler colonial gendered violence, constructing new realities where Indigenous peoples and the earth are decolonized.

Medicines at Standing Rock: Stories of Native Healing through Survivance

In 2016, a historically large gathering of Indigenous peoples, tribal nations, and allies took place at the Standing Rock reservation, North Dakota, in response to the proposed construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Under the assertion of Mni Wičoni (Water Is Life), a social movement emerged with the purpose of protecting clean drinking water and Indigenous lands. Drawing on Gerald Vizenor’s theoretical framework that emphasizes storytelling and active presence over settler resistance, this study argues that Indigenous water protectors’ collective action in the movement, as well as their stories and remembrance of Standing Rock, are acts of survivance, in which they are able to denounce othering and challenge the colonizer’s gaze. While water is often described as a first medicine by Indigenous peoples, the water protectors’ stories in this essay suggest that the movement itself represented another remedy as well. Specifically, this movement represents a pivotal moment of cultural revitalization and community across what participants refer to as “Indian country,” in which individuals are able to engage in large scale grassroots decolonizing praxis rooted in spirituality and ceremony, and suspend genocidal traps of victimry that they have long battled.

The Goldilocks view: Support and skepticism of the impacts and pace of unconventional oil and gas development in the Bakken Shale of the United States

Residents of rural communities with histories of booms and busts in natural resource extraction often have divergent and simultaneously complex views on whether continued development of such industries is desirable. For instance, while many residents appreciate the economic benefits generated by these industries, some are also skeptical about disruptions resulting from expanding or continuing resource extraction. We use social representation theory and a mini-boom/bust framework to examine Bakken Shale residents’ perceptions of current and continued development of the oil and gas industry, including the role of industrial legacy and environmental concerns. Data from our 2016 survey indicates that about one in four residents see oil and gas development as positive for their community, but at the same time, felt relief that the most recent boom slowed in pace. We refer to this as the Goldilocks View of Development and see it as evidence of support for a mini-bust. In terms of continued development of the industry as represented by the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, we found a high level of support for construction, and that political party, belonging to a local organization, and trust in industry to address spills are key predictors of such support. As natural resource dependent communities such as those in the Bakken Shale continue to experience unconventional oil and gas development in a mini-boom/bust context, it is important to understand residents’ perceptions so that state and local governments can develop policies towards the industry that address local concerns.

Framing Standing Rock: Market orientation and television news

This article analyses news coverage by CNN and Democracy Now! of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock, North Dakota. Through an ethnographic content analysis (ECA) of a strongly and weakly market-oriented television news organization, we examine frames, sources used and time devoted to the story, to understand how market orientation may influence the journalistic decisions of television news outlets. We find that although both outlets framed the story primarily through the lens of protest and violence, the ways in which this was done differed significantly.

Networked publics in #NoDAPL protests: Interactions among activist publics and influence of locality and proximity on socially mediated networks

Hashtag “#NoDAPL” was used by environmental activists for a series of protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline beginning in early 2016. Utilizing 2 million tweets with the main hashtag, as well as the auxiliary hashtags, from around 550,000 unique users between November 2016 and February 2017, the study investigated the interactions among four groups—regular activists, Native American activists, reporters, and organizations identified based on their bio information, and the effects of physical location on network attention. Exponential random graph models (ERGMs) on the retweet network showed that Native American activists occupied the most prominent positions and that different groups assumed different network roles. Location analysis based on Poisson regression showed that physical proximity’s effects on attention depended on group status, and the effects were moderated by users’ authority. Implications of the study results on networked publics and the influence of locality and proximity on socially mediated networks were discussed.

Cheyenne River Sioux Traditions and Resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline

The No Dakota Access Pipeline resistance movement provides a poignant example of the way in which cultural, spiritual, and oral traditions remain authoritative in the lives of American Indian peoples, specifically the Lakota people. Confronted with restrictions of their religious freedoms and of access to clean drinking water due to construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), members of Lakota communities engaged with traditions specific to their communities to inform and structure the No DAPL resistance movement. A series of interviews conducted on the Cheyenne River Sioux Nation with tribal members reveal that Lakota spiritual traditions have been integral to every aspect of the movement, including the motivations for, organization of, and understanding of the future of the movement.

From Alcatraz to Standing Rock: Archaeology and Contemporary Native American Protests (1969–Today)

Public and professional responses to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests reveal a space where archaeologists can potentially connect past and present. Archaeology has already been applied to protests over labor conditions, environment destruction, and weapons proliferation in both the United States and United Kingdom. Extending that work to Native American protests raises awareness of the legacy of the broken treaties that underlie many of these actions. For example, the 1969–1971 occupation of Alcatraz Island is where contemporary Native American protest history often begins. A simple pushpin map of protests since then shows that the DAPL protest at Standing Rock was unique only in its extensive media coverage. Building greater awareness of these actions will improve the ways archaeologists carry out their compliance responsibilities and respond to an often-misinformed public. Working with tribal colleagues to identify protest sites would enhance existing efforts to protect ancient sites and reinforce the need for tribal input in evaluating impacts to its cultural landscapes.

Learning towards decolonising relationships at standing rock

The opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline that took place at Standing Rock in North Dakota was the largest gathering of Indigenous Peoples in recent U.S. history. Thousands of people, Indigenous and otherwise, came together from across North America and beyond to protect waters and sacred sites threatened by the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline. Our study examined the learning of Canada-based pipeline activists who travelled to Standing Rock to support the opposition. In this paper, we argue that participating in the Standing Rock resistance camp was an experience rich in informal learning and education for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants, and that this learning might be best understood as learning towards decolonising relationships. Building from the theoretical concepts of respect, responsibility, reciprocity, and relationship as the overarching umbrella, we outline three types of relationships central to how Standing Rock activists learned within the resistance camp: relationships to people, to community, and to self. A focus on these relationships – and the centrality of respect, responsibility, and reciprocity to them – provides insight into how the resistance community created opportunities for participants to start to unlearn settler-colonialism, and learn towards a decolonising relationality.

Constructing visual policy narratives in new media: the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline

ABSTRACT Increasingly, advocacy organizations are routing their communications through social media platforms. One notable difference from traditional communication outlets is the easy inclusion of visual elements within social media messaging. One such example of the turn toward the visual in online communication is the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), during which environmental groups livestreamed protests and posted images of demonstrators staring down police. This study examines the use and consequences of visual-based ‘new media’ platforms by applying the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) to the case of DAPL. The NPF focuses our attention on the role of policy stories, acknowledging that narratives have impacts on policy beliefs and actions. I compare social media messaging that includes imagery to that which does not, exploring creation of policy narratives as defined through the NPF. I do so by drawing on a dataset of more than 580 Twitter posts by five environmental advocacy groups from July 2016 through October 2017. My findings speak to the ways in which images and accompanying text interact to form more robust narratives. Visual tweets are also more likely to stimulate greater sharing behavior. These results have implications for interest group communications strategy.

Leaving behind the rhetoric of allyship

ABSTRACT In fights for social justice, allies and their efforts receive a significant amount of attention. This attention can be justified, as allies serve essential functions in efforts to eliminate inequalities and inequities present in social systems, which is central to work within social justice movements. However, ‘the term ally has been rendered ineffective and meaningless’. Through this essay, I argue that although allies play important roles in fights for social justice, the ally label can be misapplied, and has lost much of its meaning. The intentions and actions of allies have been questioned through multiple social movements, including Black Lives Matter and No DAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline) in the United States, and Palestinian activism outside of Palestine.

When psychologists take a stand: Barriers to trauma response services and advocacy for American Indian communities

ABSTRACT American Indians and other Indigenous groups face numerous traumas resulting from civil rights infractions. Often, these infractions began in historical contexts and continue into modern experiences. The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and subsequent activist response at Standing Rock are a prime example of how movements asserting human rights are met with resistance from dominant majority groups. Generally, this resistance turns violent as police and security responses from the dominant culture escalate despite the peaceful nature of demonstrations. This impacts mental health among oppressed populations. As #NoDAPL progressed, Indigenous psychologists felt moved to “Stand with Standing Rock” by supporting Water Protectors in need of trauma services. This was met with institutional and systemic barriers to treatment and lack of support from key professional organizations. This article addresses barriers faced by mental health professionals providing services on the frontlines and lists potential resolutions including the development of a crisis response team, infrastructure for communication with individuals onsite, culturally congruent healing, community-building, and prayer. The article serves as a case study for trauma provision among American Indian communities in crisis and is a reminder of the resilience and empowerment that occurs when Indigenous peoples from all over the world come together for a shared cause. This case study format can be a guiding example for service providers choosing to take a stand with marginalized communities asserting social change.

Tear Gas + Water Hoses + Dispersal Orders: The Fourth Amendment Endorses Brutality in Protest Policing

Thirty years ago, in Graham v. Connor, the Supreme Court determined that excessive-force claims against police should proceed via the Fourth Amendment, which theoretically protects an individual against unreasonable siezures. However, the Court showed extreme deference to law enforcement’s use of force by using a permissive reasonableness analysis that bestows on police great leeway to make quick split-second decisions in tense and rapidly evolving circumstances. The result is a test that, from its inception, has been too forgiving of police violence and misconduct. This lax reasonableness standard, along with qualified immunity principles, has shielded police from § 1983 civil rights litigation in excessive-force cases. However, the obstacles to relief are worse when the victim is not an individual in a regular street encounter but rather an activist during a protest—particularly an activist of color. This Essay explores this phenomenon through the lens of the Dundon v. Kirchmeier litigation that stemmed from the 2016 police assault on indigenous protestors opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. The encounter left 200 activists injured after law enforcement blasted them overnight with tear gas, special impact munitions, and fire hoses to remove them from the area. In refusing to enjoin the police’s use of these weapons against water protectors, the judge questioned whether the Fourth Amendment even protected activists since police sought to disperse them, instead of arrest them. The judge then reasoned that even if the Fourth Amendment applied, the police use of force was reasonable considering the volatility of the crowd despite information that the plaintiffs themselves were peaceful—thus attributing the conduct of the entire group to the plaintiffs and erroneously amplifying the threat to law enforcement. Both lines of reasoning threaten the safety of protestors. The first removes from Fourth Amendment protection the emblematic protest scenario where police use force to disperse protestors. The second turns the Constitution on its head, foregoing traditional Fourth Amendment analysis, which inquires whether the government intrusion is reasonable in light of the individual’s actions, not the actions of the whole group in proximity to the individual. This is most dangerous to activists of color who are most likely to be perceived as threatening by police and to be the subject of their ire.

Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist by Joanne Barker

Reviewed by: Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist by Joanne Barker Kara Roanhorse (bio) Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist by Joanne Barker University of California Press, 2021 US empire defines terrorism as the "unlawful" use of violence, fear, and intimidation, particularly against civilians, in the pursuit of ideological or political aims. The term primarily refers to intentional violence and is used most often in the context of war; however, terror and terrorism in relation to Indigenous people are reproduced differently under the US/Canadian settler empire. What does it mean to call Indigenous people terrorists on their own land? This is a question Lenape feminist Joanne Barker addresses in Red Scare: The State's Indigenous Terrorist, noting, "Indigenous People are identified and made identifiable by the state as terrorists in order to advance imperialist objectives" (p. vii). Two defining concepts she uses, the Murderable Indian and the Kinless Indian, are meant to be identifiers for how Indianness is "terrorism" and therefore justifies the genocide and Indigenous removal from their lands. The Indigenous feminist framework which Barker takes up disentangles settler policies, signifiers, and language used for antiterrorist laws and sentiments. Terror and the fear-driving discourses of settler empire reinforce a designation for settler justifications and weaponizing for harsher sentencing of the state's exploitation, policing, and violence under the systems of colonialism and capitalism. In the US and Canadian contexts, terrorism and terrorists are defined exclusively within settler political order. Thus, the "red scare" embodies the full spectrum of settler racism and xenophobic fear that justifies war-making against Indigenous people. The racism and fear further perpetuates into a belief that security and social stability [End Page 124] requires the extermination or genocide of Indigenous people. This is how they handle the so-called Indian problem. The business of utilizing fear in the name of order against Indigenous people is the basis of settler freedom: figures of terrorism created by state and capitalist industries authoritatively deem Indigenous movements as the ultimate threat to society. Barker is clear about the realities of contemporary Indigenous struggles like "NoDAPL" (No Dakota Access Pipeline), Wet'suwet'en land defenders, and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) movement. It is clear how violations of land and territory, the sexual and environmental violence are each intertwined with police violence, prompting many radicals to envision solidarity building as central to the state's historical and political contextualizing of "terrorism" under the US empire's neoliberal state. As Barker illustrates, companies of resource-centered extraction of gas and oil raise questions of identity by intentionally disavowing and challenging Indigenous territorial rights, sovereignty, and self-determination. The militarizing of police and increasing harm to the environment alongside the ongoing MMIW epidemic is why Indigenous feminists' critiques of the state and violence must be concise. Barker's succinct analysis of the political weaponization of identity fraud makes visible the ever-present conflicted and contradictory work of racist ideologies of cultural authenticity and rationalizations of state violence and suppression placed on Indigenous people. Figures of terrorism are made and remade by the United States and Canada to create order whereby Indigenous sovereignty and their movements threaten national security and social stability. Such threats are linked to all manner of protecting settler economic infrastructure and growth at any cost. Barker first introduces the figure of the "Murderable Indian" as "the first and last authentic Indian," crystalizing how Native people are subjected to a certain kind of criminalization, not just incarceration but of constant surveillance and other types of police violence from the state; they are "an affect of racist fears" and concerns for the settler public and thus require a national security response. The Murderable Indian serves to "license the state's counterterrorist, military, police, and vigilante responses to contain, punish, and deter" (p. vii). Barker asserts this Indian as one that is familiar because they are deemed too much of a threat, whereby the state responds to their terrorism with full force. The Murderable Indian faces the state's counterterrorist measures (including corporate security contractors, invasive surveillance, detention, interrogation, and incarceration), drawing from examples of police violence experienced by water protectors, land defenders, and the work...

Money Talks, Banks are Talking: Dakota Access Pipeline Finance Aftermath

Author(s): Cook, Michelle; MacMillan, Hugh | Abstract: This Article provides a Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) finance and divestment campaign retrospective. The Article explains: 1) how DAPL was financed, highlighting the dynamic in which banks take fees for the privilege of financing and refinancing pipeline debt; and 2) how joint venture ownership structures and corporate finance arrangements buffered against efforts to hold DAPL banks accountable. At the same time, many of the same banks finance gun industry and prison industry growth, alongside increased police militarization. Although, intersectional visibility of these financial ties is a start, victims of the financial industry lack enforceable corporate accountability mechanisms for seeking redress. DAPL banks managed to deflect divestment pressure and avoid meaningful remedial actions. These observations point to the need for systemic changes in corporate accountability mechanisms but also to reclaim and reimagine a world outside of capital, of future self-determined indigenous economic structures, new visions and practices of complementary currencies, and other banking alternatives.

The Dakota Access Pipeline, Indigenous Studies and Political Economy

The Dakota Access Pipeline, Indigenous Studies and Political Economy

Rewriting and Rerighting Indigenous Histories

Rewriting and Rerighting Indigenous Histories Andrew H. Fisher (bio) Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. London and New York: Verso, 2019. x + 310 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $26.95. David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019. 512 pp. Notes and index. $28.00. In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (second edition 2012), Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith posed a provocative question: “Is History Important for Indigenous Peoples?” Her answer was ambivalent but affirmed the need for “a critique of how we, as the Other, have been represented or excluded from various accounts. Every issue has been approached by indigenous peoples with a view to rewriting and rerighting our position in history. Indigenous peoples want to tell our own stories, write our own versions, in our own ways, for our own purposes” (p. 29). Over the past twenty years, dozens of Native American authors and scholars have turned to that task, yet the process of decolonizing the academy and the larger society has only just begun. The books considered in this review strike two more blows against the intellectual structure of settler colonialism and its logic of elimination, which seeks to destroy Indigenous cultures in order to replace them. Although they differ considerably in style and tone, Our History Is the Future and The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee share Smith’s commitment to “rewriting and rerighting” the position of Indigenous peoples in both the past and the present. Nick Estes (Kul Wicasa/Lower Brule) and David Treuer (Ojibwe) write to counter a historical tradition that Estes calls “distorted” and “deeply disempowering” (p. 16). Their interest in doing so is not historiographical but unabashedly presentist, as they seek to change the terms under which Native communities live today. “There is no separation between past and present,” argues Estes, “meaning that an alternative future is also determined by our understanding of our past. Our history is the future” (pp. 10–11). The history of Indigenous peoples is also, they insist, integral to the history of modern America and the world. [End Page 63] Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance emerged directly from the confrontation noted in its subtitle. Estes, a professor of American Studies and a Lakota citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (People of the Seven Council Fires, or Sioux Nation), was among the “Water Protectors” who stood up against Energy Transfer Partners and its government backers in 2016–17. For more than six months, a coalition of tribal members, environmental activists, and Indigenous allies from around the world staged peaceful protests to prevent the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from carrying crude oil beneath the Missouri River (Mni Sose) just upstream from the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota. Their movement drew both international media attention and militarized police, dispatched from multiple agencies and jurisdictions to clear the pipeline’s path by force. In the ugly crackdown that followed, law enforcement deployed anti-riot gear, armored vehicles, pepper spray, tear gas, water cannons, LRAD acoustic weapons, and counterinsurgency techniques against people armed only with drums and prayer feathers. Ultimately, the Water Protectors failed to stop the “Black Snake” (Zuzeca Sapa) from crossing the Missouri, but Estes found hope in the “meaningful solidarities” (p. 7) that had formed among activists from many walks of life. He also found inspiration for a book. Less than two years later, he published Our History Is the Future in order to “chart a historical road map for collective liberation” (p. 22). Estes’s book places the #NoDAPL movement in the larger context of Oceti Sakowin resistance to the entwined powers of settler colonialism and corporate capitalism. Since the early nineteenth century, when Lewis and Clark described the Sioux as the “vilest miscreants of the savage race” (p. 74), the tribes have generally been regarded as obstacles to American expansion and economic development on the Great Plains. Their heroic defiance of U.S. hegemony has made the Lakotas especially a favored subject among scholars...

Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement ed. by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon

Reviewed by: Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement ed. by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon Dawson Barrett STANDING WITH STANDING ROCK: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement. Edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. In Standing with Standing Rock, Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon, along with dozens of other contributors, present a historical flashpoint—a movement that is intergenerational, that inextricably pairs Indigenous sovereignty with the non-human environment, and that inspires and attracts people across borders and from different backgrounds. In effect, Estes and Dhillon ask why the Water Protectors' stand against the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) resonated so strongly with Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike, and then use the answer to challenge readers to join in the struggle to protect our world. As Lewis Grassrope states bluntly in the collection, "This means something to everybody. This is everyone's fight" (36). Standing with Standing Rock, like its subject, is a convergence. Through interviews, poems, letters, op-eds, and other essays, the many authors offer a range of perspectives on #NoDAPL—some first-hand, others from a distance. The Oceti Sakowin Camp—which brought together more than 300 Native nations and their allies—provides a focal point, but what makes this collection so provocative is how it also presents this moment as something larger and historic. At Standing Rock, Indigenous nations challenged the US government. Defenders of the natural world defied the destructive fossil fuel industry. Everyday people stood up to predatory banks. Non-violent activists confronted armies, [End Page 59] water cannons, and attack dogs. In short, #NoDAPL provides a glimpse at new possibilities for upending the current order. A logical companion to Estes' excellent Our History is the Future, this collection similarly connects #NoDAPL to a long history of Indigenous, anti-colonial resistance, while also framing today's struggle as a harbinger of a "decolonial future" (10). To that end, various pieces offer a primer on Indigenous sovereignty, treaties, and centuries of US government policies alternating between assimilation and elimination—a past that LaDonna Bravebull Allard reminds readers is "not ancient history" (46). The authors also offer a more immediate historical context, connecting #NoDAPL to contemporary struggles against gender violence, white supremacy, environmental destruction, and empire. These include direct and indirect ties to other movements for justice, such as Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, Sanctuary, Anti-fascism, Occupy Wall Street, and others. There is also an important link to the Global War on Terror, both through the mercenary forces that provided surveillance and joined heavily-armed police forces in their violent attacks on Water Protectors, and through a group of US military veterans who stood alongside Water Protectors and offered apologies for US crimes against Indigenous nations. Though it does at times give redundant information from piece to piece, Estes and Dhillon's collection flows better than many volumes that feature numerous entries and authors. Standing with Standing Rock is a real achievement. Its simultaneous depth and breadth is impressive. It has much to tell us about where we are and where we need to go. It should be useful, and appreciated, in a wide range of college courses—and beyond. Dawson Barrett Del Mar College Copyright © 2020 Mid-America American Studies Association

Left in the West: Literature, Culture, and Progressive Politics in the American West ed. by Gioia Woods

Reviewed by: Left in the West: Literature, Culture, and Progressive Politics in the American West ed. by Gioia Woods Daniel Worden Left in the West: Literature, Culture, and Progressive Politics in the American West. Edited by Gioia Woods. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2018. vii + 432 pp. Illustrations, contributors, index. $34.95, paper. This expansive and provocative collection of essays focuses on how Left politics took shape in western American literature from the Progressive Era to the present. As Gioia Woods notes in the volume's introduction, the literary Left is typically thought to be rooted in the urban centers of the East Coast, and while the leftist politics in the West shared many ideas and even writers with the East, "western leftists developed concerns unique to the region, elevating issues of industrialization and environmental degradation, Native American sovereignty, and immigrant communities' access to power" (3). Woods's introduction usefully contextualizes the history of leftist activism and writing in the West, from figures like Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to the recent struggle over the Dakota Access Pipeline. This broad scope is a key contribution of this volume. On the one hand, essays in the book address well-known political texts, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, Woody Guthrie's ballads, and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Yet on the other hand, many essays address archives, figures, and texts that broaden and complicate what might count as leftist politics in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century West. From essays about peace activists in Utah, Ward Moore's speculative fiction, Mari Sandoz's fiction and autobiography, and the environmentalist thinking of Peter Berg, to accounts of poet Jack Spicer's revision of frontier tropes, Edward Weston and Tina Modotti's photographic engagement with bohemian spaces, Deborah Miranda's blend of the personal and the political, and Louise Thompson's unpublished memoirs, the collection arranges a broad array of ideas under the banner of "progressive politics." The essays in the volume tend to be focused on particular archives or texts, and so the overarching connections between the variety and abundance of material in the volume can feel disconnected. Yet that is less of a problem with the volume than evidence of its success in expanding and revising our expectations about what fits under the rubric of leftist politics in western American literature. This edited volume adds to the already well-established scholarship on leftist politics in twentieth-century America, by drawing attention to the unique rapacity of political thinking and writing west of the Mississippi River. [End Page 116] Daniel Worden School of Individualized Study and Department of English Rochester Institute of Technology Copyright © 2020 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln