Standing Rock, 2016: Water, Dogs, and Treaty Law

In April of twenty sixteen, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe began organized resistance to a proposed crude oil pipeline, and that July filed a lawsuit in federal court. The Dakota Access Pipeline, built by Energy Transfer Partners, would cross beneath the Missouri River at a point roughly half a mile upstream of the reservation's water intake. The argument was direct: the pipeline route crossed territory guaranteed to the Lakota and Dakota peoples under the Fort Laramie treaties of eighteen fifty-one and eighteen sixty-eight. That treaty language had never been legally extinguished. It was still operative federal law.

By the summer, people had begun arriving at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers, at a camp called Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires, named for the political confederacy of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota nations. By November, the camp held an estimated seven thousand people. It was the largest gathering of Indigenous nations in North America in more than a century.

On September third, the pipeline company's private security contractors used dogs and pepper spray against a group of water protectors who had moved to protect a burial site. The encounter was filmed. It was broadcast nationally.

By winter, militarized law enforcement had deployed water cannons in temperatures below freezing, rubber bullets, and concussion grenades against the camp. On December fourth, thousands of United States military veterans arrived as a declared human shield, and the Obama administration halted the permit.

In February of twenty seventeen, the Trump administration reissued the permit. Construction resumed. The pipeline began carrying oil on June first, twenty seventeen. The treaty argument that had drawn ten thousand people to the Missouri River bank was not adjudicated; the courts declined to rule on the merits before the oil started flowing.