Standing Rock Research Articles

Making and learning: Envisioning a third place for Lakota artists

ABSTRACT This case study discusses a course where 125 South Dakota State University School of Design (SoD) students collaborated with faculty, staff, and 30 artists at Sitting Bull College (SBC), Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, North Dakota, US. Students received authentic instruction through SBC artist workshops, conversations, and storytelling, then joined visioning exercises to design festival grounds, workshop spaces, kitchen and dining facilities, and guest camping. Students demonstrated that they understood the function of a “third place” by asking informed questions, reflecting on unique cultural requirements, and looking to the future to supply sustainable site and building recommendations. All interactions were held online. Students’ reflections were gathered using Brookfield’s Critical Incident Questionnaire. Tara Page’s embodied and material pedagogies are useful when making, designing, and learning about sites, local culture, and people. Future work will examine how knowledge, understanding, learning, and belonging strengthen the placemaking process to better prepare students for professional practice.

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...

The Ascension of Indigenous Cultural Property Law

Indigenous Peoples across the world are calling on nation-states to “decolonize” laws, structures, and institutions that negatively impact them. Though the claims are broad based, there is a growing global emphasis on issues pertaining to Indigenous Peoples’ cultural property and the harms of cultural appropriation, with calls for redress increasingly framed in the language of human rights. Over the last decade, Native people have actively fought to defend their cultural property. The Navajo Nation sued Urban Outfitters to stop the sale of “Navajo panties,” the Quileute Tribe sought to enjoin Nordstrom’s marketing of “Quileute Chokers,” and the descendants of Tasunke Witko battled to end production of “Crazy Horse Malt Liquor.” And today, Indigenous Peoples are fighting to preserve sacred ceremonies and religious practices at places like Standing Rock, Oak Flat, and Bear’s Ears. Though the claims range from “lands to brands,” these conflicts are connected by a common thread: they are all contemporary examples of Indigenous Peoples’ efforts to protect their cultural property. As issues surrounding cultural property play out on the global stage, there is a parallel movement underway within Indigenous communities themselves. More than fifteen years ago, in 2005, I conducted a comprehensive study of tribal law to understand what American Indian tribes were doing to protect their own cultural property within tribal legal systems. Since my original study, the ground around issues of cultural preservation and appropriation has shifted dramatically. Transformative changes in human and Indigenous rights—including the 2007 adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, among others—have reignited interest in Indigenous Peoples’ own laws. Inspired by a convergence of global events impacting cultural rights, in 2020 and 2021, I set out to update my survey results and analyze the tribal cultural preservation systems and tribal laws of all 574 federally recognized American Indian tribes and Alaskan Native Villages in the United States. This Article reports those findings, situating the results in a human rights framework and leading to a core, central thesis: the data reveal a striking increase in the development of tribal cultural property laws, as Indian tribes seek to advance human and cultural rights in innovative and inspired ways. Indeed, in this Article, I contend we are witnessing a new jurisgenerative moment today in the cultural property arena, with tribal law already influencing decisionmakers at multiple ‘sites’—international, national, and subnational—in real time, with great potential for the future. To further demonstrate this phenomenon, I highlight the case study of the recent agreement to repatriate the Maaso Kova, a ceremonial deer head, from Sweden to the Yaqui peoples, and I also introduce several other examples where the seeds have been planted for the growth of the next jurisgenerative moment in Indigenous cultural property rights.

Film and Video Review

Film and Video Review

TOWARD AN ECOCENTRIC CHRISTIAN ECOLOGY

ABSTRACTAnthropocentrism is an old and persisting problem for Christian ecology. This article argues that one way Christian ecological ethics can begin moving beyond anthropocentrism is by looking outside itself to other traditions that practice and observe a more ecocentric ethic. Specifically, it suggests an engagement with indigenous traditions of North America. Holding up the ecocentric tactics and discursive strategies employed by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (SRST) during the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests the article shows how American Indian ecologies can help move Christians toward a more ecocentric worldview. It then examines the ways certain Christian groups approached their allyship with the SRST during the DAPL protests and asks which of these groups approached this case of interreligious, ecological resistance most effectively as allies. That is, it asks which Christian groups partnered with the SRST in ways that actually aided the protests and, additionally, fostered the possibility of learning from the SRST’s ecocentric, indigenous religious ecology. The aim is to provide an example of how collaborative, respectful, anticolonial dialogue and allyship can happen between Christian and indigenous eco‐activists in a way that is mutually beneficial.

Catastrophe, Care, and All That Remains

Abstract During 2020 a menacing sense of doom and anxiety proliferated by the Trump administration's shock-and-awe tactics compounded the brutally uneven distribution of exposure, social atomization, precarity, abandonment, and premature death under the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has had especially lethal consequences for those who are impoverished, racially abjected, and deemed violable or disposable within economies of dispossession. For Indigenous peoples under US occupation, the mainstream news coverage of the pandemic's death toll on the Navajo Nation, on Standing Rock, and on other Indigenous nations came and went with little sustained inquiry into the conditions of colonization, critical for understanding the current moment. The obstinate negligence of the CARES Act toward peoples and communities most impacted by the pandemic is only one example of this intensified necropolitics. We focus here on conceptions and mobilizations of care and uncaring, and the catastrophe of the settler-capitalist state at this time. With all the talk about the need for self-care and community care in this period of concentrated epic crises, we ask: How does the discourse of care operate within an imperial social formation? Is an otherwise possible? What are our obligations in kinship and reciprocity? And how do we attend to these obligations in times of imposed distance?

Interview with Gordon Henry

Gordon Henry is an enrolled member of the White Earth Anishinaabe Nation in Minnesota and professor of American Indian Literature, Creative Writing and the Creative Process in Integrative Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. He is the author and co-editor of many books and collections, including The Failure of Certain Charms: And Other Disparate Signs of Life (2008). His novel The Light People (1994) won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Following some of the stages in his career and personal story, which he kindly accepted to share with me, this interview highlights some of the crucial key issues concerning Native American people and cultures, questions that still need a wider transnational space both inside and outside academia. Discrimination based on language has influenced the history of Native American people for centuries, starting from the forced education of the young in the 19th century and continuing in the 20th, in the context of Hollywood film productions. Linguicism, language-based racism (Phillipson 1992), is a topic that needs to be addressed in the light of the recent flourishing of extremist thought worldwide, which carries the abused rhetoric of ‘us vs them’ (van Dijk 2015) and, at the same time, spurs protest movements. This reflection goes hand-in-hand with the controversial topic of the appropriation of Native American cultural practices by old and new wannabes (non-people who are so much fascinated by Native American cultures that end up imitating them by, for example, choosing a Native name or emphasising certain aspects of the culture which they admire, often basing their beliefs on stereotypes), whilst people living in the Reservations are still neglected and the Native American and Alaskan Native population register extremely high suicide, homicide and alcoholism rates compared to the U.S. all races population (especially women). But, the efforts and educational programs aimed to preserve languages and cultures (like the Lakota Language Consortium or the Rosetta Stone Endangered Language programs), the vibrancy of the artistic scene in the visual, literary and music fields, the various forms of activism and community engagement projects (such as, for example, the MMIWG movement – Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls – the water protectors protest at Standing Rock, known as #NoDapl, or the prayerful journey called Run4Salmon in California) are also to be acknowledged as milestones in the process of regaining self-sovereignty by Native people. Against the background of these considerations, I am pleased and honoured to share thoughts, feelings and emotions with Gordon Henry.

Review: Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon

Review: <i>Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement</i>, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon

Review: Rutherford Falls. Peacock Streaming

Review: <i>Rutherford Falls</i>. Peacock Streaming

The Countersovereignty of Critical Infrastructure Security: Settler‐State Anxiety versus the Pipeline Blockade

AbstractScholars argue that blockades of infrastructure pose an economic threat to capital circulation. This explains how activists can gain power through strategic spatial occupations and why states seek to protect “critical infrastructure” from disruption. However, Indigenous‐led blockades of pipelines gain power not (only) by disrupting economic flows alone, but by eliciting state anxieties about the racialised political, psychic and economic project of settler colonialism. Analysing public discourse surrounding the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, including legislative measures introduced to criminalise protest since the blockade at Standing Rock, we reframe critical infrastructure security as a component operation of settler countersovereignty. The criminalisation of Indigenous dissent through the state’s escalation of protest legislation is an investment in maintaining settler political authority, leading us to conclude that blockades must be understood not only as a form of anti‐capitalist resistance, but also as a locus of anti‐colonial struggle.

Extraction, Indigenous Dispossession and State Power: Lessons from Standing Rock and Wet’suwet’en Resistance

When Indigenous-led resistance to land- and water-killing projects threatens extraction, settler-colonial state and corporate institutions use security mechanisms to eliminate such “threats.” Using as case studies the pipeline conflicts of the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s (especially Unist’ot’en Camp’s) resistance to Coastal GasLink (CGL) in British Columbia (BC), Canada, and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in North Dakota, United States (US), this paper explores how fossil-fuel extraction interacts with critical infrastructure (CI) securitization to further Indigenous land dispossession. I argue that although the Wet’suwet’en and Standing Rock cases both involved the state and corporations criminalizing Indigenous resistance to extraction—to uphold fossil-fuel capital interests—the Wet’suwet’en case is unique because Canadian actors attempted to pacify resistance through symbolic appeals to Indigenous rights. Indigenous communities across the world are violently oppressed for peacefully defending their water, land, and communities. However, the motives and strategies of violence are unique for every colonial jurisdiction exercising violence, and for every Indigenous community impacted. I compare and contrast the rationales and strategiesof both cases through an in-depth content analysis of passages from TigerSwan surveillance and BC Supreme Court injunction documents. I discuss my findings within theoretical debates on dispossession and securitization.&#x0D;

Pipelines, protectors, and settler colonialism: media representations of the Dakota Access Pipeline protest

ABSTRACT Indigenous Resistance to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) garnered national and international media attention in 2016 as thousands gathered near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in protest. Increased media attention spurred enquiry concerning the representation of the Indigenous peoples leading the movement, subjecting the movement to settler assumptions about Indigenous resistance. This research employs a qualitatively-based content analysis of 80 news articles reporting on the DAPL protest. These articles range in political bias and can be categorized in one of the following groups: Conservative Bias, Liberal Bias, Mainstream News, Local News, and Indigenous News. Commonly occurring codes and themes are analysed across each category. Word count and frequency of reporting are also considered to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the media representations as they develop through time. While the non-Indigenous-led media commonly cites water security and destruction of sacred sites as the reasons for protest, the Indigenous led media also cites treaty rights, tribal sovereignty, economic vulnerability, climate change, and colonial history more frequently, indicating a multi-dimensional and more holistic understanding of the movement and the Indigenous experience. The mainstream of U.S. reporting on the DAPL protests perpetuate a reductive, one-dimensional framing of the daily struggles of Indigenous Americans by ignoring the impacts of ongoing settler colonial operations.

Errata

Erratum for the article: Hoover, Elizabeth. “Fires were lit inside them”. Review of International American Studies, 12 (1/2019), 11-44. https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.7391&#x0D; The article "The Fires Were Lit Inside Them: The Pyropolitics of Water Protector Camps at Standing Rock" by Elizabeth Hoover, published in the Spring/Summer issue of Volume 12 of RIAS is regretfully missing a citation. Much of the history of the NoDAPL movement on pages 18-19 was drawn from a presentation compiled by Jennifer Weston, a Standing Rock Sioux Tribal member, educator, and language advocate who has been working tirelessly to inform the public about the Standing Rock Dakota Access Pipeline Opposition movement.

Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement

Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement

Voices of Indigenous Dallas-Fort Worth from Relocation to the Dakota Access Pipeline Controversy

After centuries of removals and attacks, most people have assumed that no Native Americans remained in northern Texas in cities such as Dallas-Fort Worth during the twentieth century. Oral histories bring to light voices of Native communities that have developed and sought to Indigenize the DFW metropole. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, diverse Native Americans began to gather and connect Indigenous communities in Dallas, which was designated as a relocation site. This article focuses on some Native voices that have been amplified in the region since the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe launched the No DAPL movement to protect the Missouri River, while acknowledging that Natives have been advocating and representing their communities in DFW for previous decades. This article features the Indigenous resurgence and renewal of intertribal community in Dallas since the late twentieth century by contextualizing the historical presence and experiences of Native Americans, including the author, in the city.

Book Review: Journalism, Politics, and the Dakota Access Pipeline: Standing Rock and the Framing of Injustice, by Ellen Moore and Environmental Clashes on Native American Land: Framing Environmental and Scientific Disputes, by Cynthia-Lou Coleman

Book Review: <i>Journalism, Politics, and the Dakota Access Pipeline: Standing Rock and the Framing of Injustice</i>, by Ellen Moore and <i>Environmental Clashes on Native American Land: Framing Environmental and Scientific Disputes</i>, by Cynthia-Lou Coleman

The Eagle, the Condor, and Exodus: New Directions in Political Theater and Border Spectacle

ABSTRACT This article identifies key actors and explains the strategies they utilized in two recent border events: (1) the protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, and (2) the migrant caravans originating in Central America. The study identifies the systematic use of two legitimizing narratives: (1) the prophecy of the eagle and the condor, and (2) the biblical story of Exodus. The present work advances new directions in border studies by analyzing borders as magnets for activism. We also demonstrate the malleability of messaging when shifting operations from one border to another and illuminate the effects of standard propaganda techniques combined with new technologies and media platforms in an era of hyper-partisanship.

Indymedia and Standing Rock: Media-historic moments

This article reviews the legacy of the global Indymedia Center (IMC), a news and information network of 175 autonomous media centres that operated in every world region autonomously of the dominant corporate and public service communications and information systems. Emerging first during protests against the neo-liberal practices of the World Trade Organization, the IMC represented a media-historic moment, one of the first times that social movement media activists were able to bypass the dominant media to produce their own reports and circulate them directly to activists and supporters around the world. My review examines the composition of the IMC’s infrastructure and volunteer force, and their technological and communications repertoires in relation to the dominant communications systems, and consider their legacy in succeeding cycles of social movement contention. I then compare the legacy of the IMC with the more recent media-historic moment of the Standing Rock Sioux water protectors who in 2016 tactically employed a land-based mobilization with a movement-directed online and offline communications assemblage to mobilize against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on their traditional territory. Capturing more US and international dominant media attention than any previous Indigenous movement, and reaching even more people with their self-generated media, they countered the neo-liberal extractivist paradigm of resource exploitation and also affirmed their Indigenous sovereignty, history and knowledge systems. Finally, I summarize some of the similarities and differences between the two cases and suggest questions for further study.

Automated Mapping of Historical Native American Land Allotments at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation Using Geographic Information Systems

The General Allotment Act of 1887, also known as the Dawes Act, established the legal basis for the United States government to break up remaining tribally-owned reservation lands in the U.S. by allotting individual parcels to tribal members and selling the remaining “surplus.” This research explores the processes involved in mapping these historical allotments and describes a method to automatically generate spatial data of allotments. A custom geographic information systems (GIS) tool was created that takes tabular based allotment land descriptions and digital Public Land Survey (PLSS) databases to automatically generate spatial and attribute data of those land parcels. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of North and South Dakota was used as the initial study area to test the mapping technique, which resulted in successfully auto-mapping over 99.1% of allotted lands on the reservation, including the smallest aliquot parcels. This GIS technique can be used to map any tribal lands or reservation with allotment data available, and currently it can be used to map over 120 individual reservations using publicly available data from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

Haub Award for Environmental Law and Diplomacy: We Must Defend the Defenders

On October 12, Indigenous Peoples' Day, the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University conferred the joint Elisabeth Haub Awards for Environmental Law and Diplomacy, in memoriam, upon all environmental defenders who have lost their lives defending their land and the environment from destructive industries. According to Global Witness, the highest number of killings of environmental defenders on record occurred in 2019.1 The award ceremony was preceded by a panel discussion featuring environmental advocates from Colombia and the Philippines (two countries which together account for half of such deaths that were recorded in that year) and from the US, where environmental activism is increasingly being criminalised. The next presentation was by Krystal Two Bulls, an Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne organiser from Lame Deer, Montana, who led the global solidarity movement calling for banks and financial institutions to divest from the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016.