This story is part of ICT’s series on the 10th anniversary of the Standing Rock movement.
Kevin Abourezk
ICT
CANNON BALL, N.D. – The field is serene. The blades of brown grass, not yet awakened by spring rains, sway gently. In the distance, the Missouri River cuts a blue streak across the unbroken plains. The silence is punctuated only by the sound of passing cars and the low hum of rushing water in nearby Cannonball River.
But if you listen carefully, you can hear defiant voices shouting and then screaming.
Ten years ago, this land exploded.
For nearly a year, from April 2016 to February 2017, thousands of people stood strong against militarized police, federal troops and private security forces hired to protect the 1,176-mile Dakota Access Pipeline. They gathered to resist a private corporation’s efforts to build a pipeline less than a mile from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation near the North Dakota-South Dakota border.
In the end, they were forced to evacuate their camps as authorities quieted, but never fully extinguished, the uprising. Some would say the fire that ignited at Standing Rock was lit decades earlier by Native activists who fought oppression and violence in the 1960s and 1970s.
While Native people have resisted colonization and its impacts since 1492, the rise of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s marked a turning point in the efforts of Native people to join together and speak in one voice. That torch of resistance was carried all the way from places like Alcatraz Island and Wounded Knee to a field near the Missouri River in 2016.
The #NoDAPL movement reached its height on Nov. 20, 2016, when hundreds of water protectors gathered on a bridge to clear two burned-out trucks that impeded a public roadway that provided access to the pipeline drill site and to the camp. The confrontation was the most violent clash between water protectors and authorities during the protest and led to nearly 200 people being injured, some seriously.
Sitting in her car atop what was known as “Facebook Hill” that night, Tonya Marie Heart-Olsen heard a camp leader, Myron Dewey, Walker River Paiute Tribe and founder of Digital Smoke Signals, shout: “All the warriors to the front lines!” The water protectors had gathered at Backwater Bridge. They faced militarized police, National Guard troops and private security forces who attacked the water protectors after they succeeded in removing one of the burned-out trucks with a semi-tractor. For several hours, police rained tear gas, rubber bullets, percussion grenades, and high-pressure water from fire hoses in temperatures that dipped well below freezing. Water protectors stood their ground, shouting “Mni wiconi!” Water is life.
As the night wore on, many water protectors had to be moved from the frontlines to medical facilities back at camp. Many suffered from hypothermia and cuts and bruises from non-lethal weapons used against them. One woman, Sophia Wilansky, nearly lost her arm after being hit by a concussion grenade, and another, Vanessa “Sioux Z” Dundon, lost eyesight in her right eye after being struck by a tear gas canister.
“There were just people screaming because you could hear those bullets. You could hear the beanbag bullets,” Heart-Olsen recalled for ICT. “The minute they hit somebody you knew because … they’d start cussing.”
The water protectors slowly lost ground to authorities, and as the crowd retreated the 44-year-old Ihanktonwan Dakota woman got struck in the back of the leg by a beanbag.
“I just screamed as loud as I could because it hurt,” Heart-Olsen said.
She jumped into a truck taking people to a yurt that was being used by medics to treat the wounded. Inside, she saw dozens of injured people.
“It was almost like a war … but not as bad because, you know, we weren’t getting shot and killed, but we were getting hurt,” she said.
‘Right on. Get down’
The decade that has passed since Standing Rock has offered those who took part in it and those who watched from afar, including an aging and recently imprisoned Native activist, plenty of time to consider its impact and its place on the long timeline of Indigenous activism.
Sitting in his home in Belcourt, North Dakota, more than 200 miles north of Standing Rock, Turtle Mountain Chippewa activist Leonard Peltier recently offered his thoughts to ICT about the Standing Rock movement. The 81-year-old was imprisoned in the Coleman Federal Penitentiary in Florida when Standing Rock began. When he learned about the uprising, he said, he felt elated.
“‘Well, right on. Get down.’ Those were the statements I read,” he said. “Cool. That was my thoughts on it, to be blunt. I like to see stuff like that. I like to see us fighting back. I like to see us stopping them from doing stuff like that. We got to do something.”
Peltier was granted clemency by former President Joe Biden in January 2025 after 49 years in prison, having been convicted of aiding and abetting in the deaths of two FBI agents during the infamous Jumping Bull Ranch 1975 shootout in Oglala, South Dakota. The incident capped a nearly seven-year movement by Native activists to garner support for Indigenous rights.
Ojibwe activists Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt founded AIM in 1968 in Minneapolis to fight police brutality and racial profiling. It expanded quickly as its members joined with other Native activists to occupy Alcatraz Island in 1969, which Peltier joined.
On Thanksgiving Day in 1970, AIM members seized a replica of the Mayflower in Boston Harbor, declaring a national day of mourning. A year later, AIM occupied Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota for two months to demand federal recognition of the Fort Laramie Treaty – which had granted the area to the “Great Sioux Nation,” which refers to the Lakota, Dakota and Nakoda people – but was broken as soon as gold was discovered nearby.
In 1972, AIM occupied the Department of the Interior headquarters in Washington, D.C., demanding the federal government end its termination policy. The policy deprived tribes of federal recognition in order to force Native people to assimilate.
“Back in my days, we didn’t put in any request to get land back or anything else like that,” Peltier said. “We just went and took it back.”
AIM’s efforts culminated in the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee, where activists occupied the site of the 1890 massacre for 71 days. Federal marshals, FBI agents,Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribal police exchanged gunfire with Native activists, leading to the deaths of two Native men.
Peltier said AIM’s efforts gave Native people a voice, which they’ve used to resist ongoing oppression and environmental injustice. He said AIM also fought the efforts of corporations and the federal government to seize Native lands for mineral extraction and power generation.
Since being released, he said it’s been overwhelming to see with his own eyes the myriad efforts Native people have undertaken to revitalize their cultures, languages and communities.
“They would tell me what’s going on in Indian Country and how some of our goals of teaching, passing on the history to a new generation, is taking place,” he said. “It was a good feeling, of course, but it was even a better feeling after I got out here and found out how much has really happened in that area.”
He said in his day Native people controlled little more than a handful of newspapers and radio stations. He said Native people have found their voice – through films, by establishing their own news media organizations, and engaging in politics.
“We’re doing pretty good, I would think, but I’d like to see it better,” he said.
And he said it’s been good to see so many Native people practicing their traditional spiritual practices.
“Everybody’s practicing inipi (sweat lodge),” he said. “Powwows are getting very, very big. Of course, they went pretty commercial with them. Well, when you use it to continue saving our people, I don’t see nothing wrong with it.”
Peltier said he would like to see at least one more milestone before he dies: America electing its first Native American president.
“I was looking for a candidate while I was in prison,” he said. “We need a good, clean candidate. We need one that’s good looking, looks Indian. We need one well educated, speaks real good. If not, we’ll teach him how to be a good speaker. Got a good family, wife and kids, and I’ll bet you we can get him in the White House, or her, could be female.”
He said AIM’s efforts paved a direct path to Standing Rock, and if he and the countless others who took part in that movement hadn’t taken a stand, life for Indigenous people today would look much different.
“We would have been terminated, for sure. There’s no doubt about it,” he said. “We would not have been recognized as Indigenous people today.”
A challenge to future Native activists
Another famed Native activist who stood alongside Peltier and others in occupations and other Indigenous rights movements also shared her thoughts on the evolution of Native activism.
Sitting in her home on the Cheyenne River Reservation south of the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota recently, Madonna Thunder Hawk, 85, Cheyenne River Lakota, shared her story with ICT. She said she was raised by her mother, a boarding school survivor, and didn’t learn much about her Native culture as a child, but she did learn how to take care of herself.
“We also learned to stand up, stand up and stand strong because when you’re young, you just have that courage and that feeling that you could do anything,” she said.
After the federal government dammed the Missouri River, leading to the flooding of her Cheyenne River Reservation community and other Native communities, her family was relocated to San Francisco. On the West Coast, she began learning about Indigenous history and connected to budding Indigenous activist movements.
Eventually, she joined the occupations of Alcatraz Island, Wounded Knee and Mount Rushmore and later joined the Standing Rock uprising. She co-founded Women of All Red Nations.
She said it was the women of the American Indian Movement who ensured its members had what they needed to fight, though it was the men who became the most notorious, in large part because of the media’s obsession with them.
“It became male dominated, not because of us, but because of the press and because the society was male dominated, and that’s all they wanted,” she said. “But we were effective because that was okay, you know, go chase the men over there with the cameras and leave us alone so we can do the work.”
She said young Native activists realized their issues were different from those of Black and other minority people who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Tribes’ treaty status as sovereign nations separated them from other populations, a fact that Native activists based much of their arguments on, but first they had to educate themselves.
“We had treaty rights,” she said. “That means they’re ratified by Congress, which makes them the law of the land. We didn’t know that, but we found out and we came home and we shook this whole system because we knew what we were talking about.”
Next, they had to educate their own people, but they found the tribal councils that now governed tribes were reluctant to fight the federal government, Thunder Hawk said. But they were able to gain an audience with international audiences, who seemed to be more willing to recognize the sovereign rights of tribes.
Thunder Hawk said activist organizing among women at that time was different than among men. Women didn’t choose leaders. Rather, they just did the work.
“If you’re a leader, you don’t need to say it,” she said. “You’re with your people, and if the people are with you, they decide if you can be a spokesperson. You don’t decide that.”
Thunder Hawk also took issue with calling Standing Rock a protest.
“It wasn’t a protest,” she said. “I just get disgusted with that. It’s resistance. We’re not protesting, you know, we’re not protesting. We want a better life to live like the next White man down the road. We’re land-based resisters.”
She said she hopes young Indigenous people will continue to stand up and fight when Indigenous rights are being threatened.
“Each generation has an obligation to pick up that resistance and pick up that protection,” she said. “And if they don’t, if we get too colonized, we’ll just cease to exist. We’ll just be among the rest of the poor people in this country. Regardless, we won’t have an identity because once the land goes, we go. Simple as that.”
She said Standing Rock took Indigenous activism to a new level as tribal governments got involved in the struggle, unlike most earlier Native rights movements. She recalled seeing semi-tractors carrying massive logs donated by Northwest Pacific tribes and bags of wild rice donated by Great Lakes tribes.
“Standing Rock happened on the scale it did because the tribal governments got involved,” she said. “It wasn’t just movement-type people. It wasn’t just a handful of people that were concerned. It was tribal governments.”
However, she also encouraged people to focus on local issues when considering taking social justice-minded actions, rather than focus on trying to get involved in national movements.
“You don’t need a big nationwide issue or a big regional issue,” she said. “You don’t need some issue to jump on. Check around your own community. … As far as an issue goes, you always take your lead from the community.”
While she has no plans to step away from activism, Thunder Hawk expressed satisfaction in having spent much of her life fighting for her people in the best way she knew how to do so. And she issued a challenge to Indigenous youth.
“We have to fight for it, but I don’t know if the next generation’s doing that,” she said. “That’s okay too because I’m done. I did my duty, my responsibility. So when I go with the Great Spirit, when I cross over to the spirit world, hopefully they’re going to welcome me and say, ‘You know, good job. You did good.’”
‘The right to to live on our own terms’
On the Standing Rock Reservation, tribal leaders have continued the fight to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, despite seeing the tipis, horses and relatives from near and far that once filled their prairies now gone.
The pipeline today carries nearly 750,000 gallons of crude oil per day, and its owner, Energy Transfer, formerly Energy Transfer Partners, plans to double that rate.
During an interview with ICT in his office in the tribe’s administrative building recently, Doug Crow Ghost, water resources director for the tribe, talked about the tribe’s continuing efforts to protect itself from the pipeline and any potential spill that could occur.
He said he first learned about the pipeline in 2014 when he received a letter from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers informing the tribe about a potential high-capacity pipeline north of Bismarck. Around that time, the late LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a matriarch of the water protector movement, began informing people about the pipeline and working to organize resistance.
In 2015, the Army Corps of Engineers rejected a route for the pipeline about 10 miles north of Bismarck as it was considered too close to the city’s water systems and rerouted the project downstream to just north of the Standing Rock Reservation on unceded Oceti Sakowin territory, sparking claims of environmental racism.
“Then we knew this is environmental injustice to a community of Native people, the first inhabitants that are protectors of this soil and the water and the environment prior to this government, prior to 1492, prior to colonialism,” Crow Ghost said.
In April 2016, Brave Bull Allard helped establish the first resistance camp, the Sacred Stone Camp, on her family’s land at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri rivers. Once established, Brave Bull Allard and others began calling people to come and take part in the resistance. As others arrived, protectors established the Oceti Sakowin Camp, the largest of the camps, and other camps.
The tribe has continued its legal battle against the federal government, a fight that began in July 2016 when it sued the Army Corps, claiming the pipeline threatens the tribe’s environmental and economic well-being. Those legal efforts have focused on potential violations of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Water Act and Rivers and Harbors Act; and the potential for construction to threaten sacred historic sites, namely burial grounds.
In September 2016, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the Army Corps of Engineers and the pipeline, ruling that no environmental impact statement was necessary.
In December 2016, the Army Corps denied the easement required for the pipeline’s crossing under Lake Oahe, citing concerns over potential violations of treaty and tribal trust rights. Just a month later, newly inaugurated President Donald J. Trump reversed this order and the pipeline’s construction continued.
Despite this loss, the tribe has continued to take to the courts to fight against the pipeline.
In 2020, the courts revoked the Lake Oahe easement issued in 2017. However, the pipeline was already constructed and in operation. Revoking the easement meant that the pipeline is now illegally operating on federal property, but that hasn’t stopped it from operating.
The tribe has continued to file numerous lawsuits to stop the pipeline since then, the most recent being on Oct. 14, 2024, when it sued the Army Corps of Engineers seeking an immediate shutdown of the pipeline.
“We are living in a state of trauma here on Standing Rock, of not knowing if the pipeline is leaking because we don’t have the resources or the capacity to to identify it, and so we live in that trauma every day and we still live in it,” Crow Ghost said.
But he offered his gratitude to the thousands of supporters who stood beside his tribe on the frontlines during the Standing Rock uprising.
“I do want to say wopilatanka, thank you very much to all the people that came to Standing Rock, to all the people that came to the camp for those 18 months, that prayed with us, that cried with us, that sang with us,” he said.
He said Standing Rock was more than a protest. It was a ceremony, and it demonstrated just how powerful Indigenous people can be when they stand together.
“There were 20 people there when it first started. Then it grew to 100 people, and then it grew to 1,000,” he said. “Pretty soon, we had our own zip code where mail was coming down there. We were actually getting mail. And then it was a school that was started, an accredited school, elementary school, where they were teaching kids in this camp. At one point, the Oceti Sakowin Camp was the third largest town right in North Dakota.”
But he said Standing Rock still needs help. The fight isn’t over.
“We’re not over. DAPL isn’t over,” he said. “We’re still here, and the pipeline is still moving, and we don’t know if the oil has been leaking or not because we’re trying to do the best we can in my department with our tribe to sample the water, but we can only sample so much because it’s really expensive.”
The tribe needs help with funding its legal efforts to stop the pipeline, he said.
Standing Rock Tribal Councilman Charles Walker said while the tribe hasn’t been able to stop the pipeline, the uprising showed him that when one tribe is forced to face the full might of the federal government and corporate greed alone, other tribes will step up.
He told the story of the day the Crow Nation came to camp.
In August 2016, Crow tribal leaders visited the camp, bringing hundreds of pounds of buffalo meat, camping supplies and money to support the water protectors. Their visit was especially meaningful considering the historical animosity between the Lakota and the Crow – nations that often stood on opposite sides of the battlefield, including at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, known by tribal nations as the Battle of the Greasy Grass.
Growing up, Walker’s parents had always told him that the Crow “were not good,” he said.
But that day in camp, he saw something entirely different as Crow leaders, including a very tall man wearing a large vest and gloves that had long fringe, stepped from a bus and asked for permission from the Standing Rock tribal leaders present for permission to step onto their lands and join the encampment.
“To witness that myself, it was literally a feeling of disbelief because my whole life I’d been told that these people are bad. They’re your enemies,” Walker said. “That showed me that we can get past anything. It showed me that people can change. Nations can change. We can come together to fight everything that we deal with here today.”
He said people have joked about what they might want to see on a winter count related to the Standing Rock uprising. A winter count is a record of significant events that have occurred in a community that would typically be painted in symbols on a buffalo hide. Because the hide was only big enough to record one or two events each year, anything painted on the hide signified something truly meaningful.
Some have suggested that a #NoDAPL sign would be appropriate to include on a winter count, but for Walker, the Crow leader stepping off the bus would be the most important event of the Standing Rock uprising.
He thanked those who came to support Standing Rock, including the Crow.
“I’m forever grateful for them coming here because standing together, we were able to open the world’s eyes to who we are, that we do have the right to say no, the right to consultation, the right to to live on our own terms,” he said.
Standing Rock frontlines: ‘The cavalry’s coming!’
For some who stood on the frontline, however, Standing Rock’s legacy carries with it pain, and trauma.
Trenton Casillas-Bakeberg, a 30-year-old Cheyenne River Lakota citizen, was among the first Indigenous youth to join the Standing Rock movement. Co-founder of the One Mind Youth Movement – a Cheyenne River Lakota youth group focused on addressing mental health, suicide and social justice issues that became a key organizing force behind the Standing Rock uprising – Casillas-Bakeberg was arrested on a particularly tumultuous day during the encampment.
Early on the morning of Oct. 27, 2016, Casillas-Bakeberg awoke to someone yelling, “The cavalry’s coming! The cavalry’s coming!”
Those in the camp arose to face whatever or whoever was coming, but no one came … at least not immediately. But later that morning, police, soldiers and security forces took up position on the hillside. They stood by Humvees, and several snipers also took positions, Casillas-Bakeberg said. They began making their way down the hill as water protectors rallied to face them.
Casillas-Bakeberg joined a circle of about 40 people locking arms and praying. But then a man tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to join him in a ceremony. He followed the man to a makeshift sweat lodge that some people had constructed in the path of the route that authorities were traveling toward the camp.
The man called Casillas-Bakeberg into the lodge and asked him to run the ceremony.
“I was kind of shocked because the protocol in our way of life is you don’t pour the water until you sundance for four years, and at that time I’d only sundanced like three,” he said. “So it didn’t feel right to me.”
But he also knew that someone needed to lead the prayer, so I ran the ceremony. Shortly after beginning their prayers, Casillas-Bakeberg began to hear people screaming outside the lodge. He feared the worst, and he prayed harder. He would learn later people were reacting to getting struck by rubber bullets and concussion grenades.
“I thought people were dying,” he said. “It was really, really scary.”
He prayed not only for the water protectors gathered around him, but also for the men who were attacking them.
“I was praying for the police officers, too, that had been deceived by the system that we live in that places money and profits over the lives of people,” he said. “I was praying for everybody there. I didn’t want anybody to get hurt or to die.”
During the ceremony’s fourth round, Casillas-Bakeberg began hearing police surrounding the lodge and demanding that those inside step outside. They continued the ceremony and eventually an officer shined a flashlight inside the lodge and officers began pulling people from the ceremony.
“I saw a hand come in. It had like a black leather glove on it,” he said. “He grabbed me by my arm and pulled me out aggressively.”
Outside the lodge, officers zip-tied his hands behind his back and forced him to sit for more than two hours in a ditch in frigid temperatures wearing only swimming trunks. Around him, dozens of water protectors sat beside him, also bound. While his eyes struggled to readjust to the light, the image felt like a vision, or a dream, he said.
“I was half in the spirit world, half in the real world,” Casillas-Bakeberg said. “I felt panicked, but I felt like everything’s going to be okay.”
Some of the officers taunted the water protectors. One said, “This is oil land now.” Eventually, the pipeline workers began bulldozing land in front of the water protectors, likely to frustrate them, Casillas-Bakeberg said.
“That was like a psychological warfare tactic, like trying to make sure that we knew that we were defeated,” he said.
Eventually, an officer gave him a pair of corduroy pants to wear and helped him get dressed before loading him and nearly 170 other water protectors in buses, vans and police vehicles. Casillas-Bakeberg remembers hearing “The Sound of Silence” by Simon and Garfunkel playing on the radio on the way to a Bismarck jail.
When he got to the jail, he was placed in a dog cage as officers struggled to find space for all of the water protectors. An officer wrote the number 162 on his arm. Eventually, he was moved to a jail in Stanton, North Dakota, where he remained for more than four days before his mother was able to find him and pay his bond to get him released.
He was charged with misdemeanor charges of engaging in a riot and causing a public nuisance and a felony charge of conspiracy to endanger an officer with fire or explosion based on the decision of some of the water protectors to light tires on fire during the incident.
When he got out, his mom was waiting for him along with the Cheyenne River Lakota Tribal Chairman Harold Frazier, who thanked him for his sacrifice.
After nearly 10 years, he’s had a lot of time to think about Standing Rock.
While he’s grateful to have been able to take part in the uprising, he also warns people about the need to address the lingering effects of psychological trauma caused by activist events.
“As long as you let it, your mind will relive those memories,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been struggling with, with my addictions for the past 10 years. You know, because I wasn’t an alcoholic before that.”
He said he began using alcohol to dullen the trauma of his experiences at Standing Rock, including crippling anxiety that he feels when he’s around police officers or any law enforcement. He also has endured nightmares in which he is still in the sweat lodge and hearing people screaming, but in his dreams the people outside the lodge are being killed.
“I would have bad dreams where people did die that day, like when I got out of the sweat lodge … I looked around and there’s people on the ground, dead all around me,” he said.
He also has struggled with feelings of impending doom stoked by fears of the pipeline rupturing and contaminating his peoples’ drinking water, thoughts that sometimes make him feel like he’s suffocating.
“It was like an underlying feeling of despair, you know, just the desolate feeling, like there’s nothing we can do,” he said. “Our water was going to be poisoned at some time, and then I’d have dreams about turning on the faucet in my home and the water would run out black, you know?”
When he was drunk, those fears would dissipate, he said, so he began drinking heavily. He said he’s currently undergoing alcohol treatment, including therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder.
“It’s been like 10 years. So yeah, I figured it’s time to put that down and stick to a healthy way of living,” he said. “I’m not the only one that’s kind of gone down this path of self-medicating and not healing the trauma, just running from it. I know several people that either drank themselves to death or took their own life because they couldn’t handle that trauma.
“So my prayers are still with them to this day.”