Making It Home: Solidarity and Belonging in the #NoDAPL Encampments PDF

Making It Home Solidarity and Belonging in the #NoDAPL/Standing Rock Encampments...

Making It Home Solidarity and Belonging in the #NoDAPL/Standing Rock Encampments Dana E. Powell, Appalachian State University Ricki Draper, Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network Abstract: The movement to defend tribal sovereignty and resist construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) in Standing Rock, North Dakota, was a fleeting [173.178.215.221] Project MUSE (2024-06-27 18:34 GMT) Concordia University Library yet deeply significant site of experimentation in collaboration and solidarity. We ar- gue, through the paired concepts of kinship and home, that central to #NoDAPL’s lasting significance is the way that allies in the resistance camps worked across var- ious registers of difference to align interests in such a manner that Indigenous ter- ritorial sovereignty emerged as the shared matter of concern, and thus achieving a powerful relationality and sense of collaborative possibility. We offer an ethnograph- ic lens on the #NoDAPL encampments to show how solidarity was achieved and places where it wavered. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, activist research, and digital ethnography, we show how the linchpin of moral alignment across difference (the element that made solidarity hold) was the induction of allies into an Indigenous-led critique of settler colonialism, exposing tensions in the diffi- cult process of collaboration, and generating a strong vein of reflexivity on the part of non-Native activists. Keywords: Alliances, collaborative tensions, social movements, #NoDAPL, indige- neity, belonging, treaty rights, colonialism, solidarity Beyond Occupation Entering the Occupy Wall Street movement, Michael Taussig explores the “surprise and magic” of a moment of political struggle, through a careful reading of activist signs in Zuccotti Park, New York (Taussig  2012, 57). The affective power of such events poses a challenge to an- thropology: their momentousness seems to exceed the capacities of eth- nographic description, and their enunciative authority—or authorship in history—is explicitly collective and collaborative. The stakes of the writer’s task are especially high when the moment feels self-consciously, historically pivotal to those creating it, lived at least partly as “a circum- stance of dissolving norms” and a rupture beyond the “fake and boring” of everyday life (Taussig 2012, 57).1 Moreover, with Johannes Fabian, when ethnography is taken up not merely as description but is a mode of theoretical critique and praxis, embedded in entities like Occupy or the No Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) movement, ethnography it- self can become a mode of intersubjective relationship-making—a kind of relationality—and thus is sympathetically critical and intrinsically political (Fabian 1983, 164–65). Our work in this article departs from this recognition of the inherently political and collaborative nature of ethnographic engagement with or alongside social movements and the inherent tensions in such endeavors. The Occupy movement of 2011 came under critique by Native American activists, especially those embedded in the #NoDAPL encampments in Standing Rock, North Dakota, in 2016. Though the media made sweeping comparisons between Occupy and #NoDAPL, critics argued that the lack of awareness of the implications of “occupy” and “occupation” exposed the settler colonial logic of the anti-capitalist movement. The “occupation” of Wall Street overshadows other, more foundational occupations of Indigenous territories—on Manhattan Island (its name derived from the Lenape word, Manahatta; with Lenape people still residing in the region and throughout the world). Moreover, as #NoDAPL activists were quick to point out, the encampments at Standing Rock, North Dakota, were no “occupation,” despite reporters’ comparisons. The camps were in Sioux lands, ensured by treaties, and the movement was about resisting the occupation of these territories by a federal agency (US Army Corps of Engineers) in collusion with transnational energy capital (oil pipeline company, Energy Transfer Partners). We begin with critical reflection on occupation to juxtapose the implicit assumptions about relationality and territory in leftist, anarchic social movements (like Occupy Wall Street) with possibilities for rethinking territory and relationality kindled by the #NoDAPL movement. If 2 collaborative anthropologies 13:1 fall 2020 occupation entails making claims to land and infrastructure, enacted by squatting or takeovers, it is a kind of claim to possession. Occupation says: what is yours is ours now; it is the assertion of a collective’s right to reclaim space. This was powerful social practice in the financial district of New York City, in September 2011, and in many of the subsequent Occupy actions that it inspired. In North Dakota, #NoDAPL water protectors were not squatters; they did not make claims to foreign property. Rather, the movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline exemplified the social production of space,2 where a territory—unflinchingly Indigenous and unceded—became legible and reorganized through the work of a diverse collective that defined its aims through the core value and organizing principle Mni Wiconi! (Water Is Life!) This assertion was not a discursive occupation, but a statement of kinship with place, humans, and more than humans, and as the movement swelled, with millions across North America and worldwide. And despite the wider public’s surprise at the scope and depth of this demonstration, #NoDAPL did not come out of “nowhere.” As Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon assert, the movement must be understood in historical and relational terms: “#NoDAPL is a product of a collective history of struggle and should be placed within the larger context of Indigenous resistance, treaties, and relationality to the land and water” (Estes and Dhillon 2019, 8). Extending this, Dina Gilio-Whitaker suggests that Native resistance is not only context, but is theory and method, as an expression of relationality, reciprocity, and responsibility (2019, 13). Movements that aim not solely to occupy or refuse but to “bring forth a world” (Escobar 2018), like the Zapatistas of Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas in 1994 and the transnational alter-globalization movements of the early 2000s that Zapatismo ignited, aim for an ontological rupture in the current political order and way of being in the world.3 This was cer- tainly the case in Standing Rock, from April 2016 until February 2017, and became the physical basis of a global social media movement. Despite the stark differences from Occupy, being within the camps at Standing Rock was an experience of rupture: the moment felt fleeting, hard to pin down, constantly moving, and history-making. Brilliant wind banners reading Mni Wiconi marked a claim not only to territory, history, and the future but a claim to relationality derived from Indigenous philosophies of human-to-human and human-to-nonhuman obligations, reciproci- ties, and responsibilities that endure across space, time, and species— Powell and Draper: Making It Home 3  what Kyle Powys Whyte calls “collective continuance” (Whyte 2018a) and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson terms “Indigenous internationalisms” (Simpson 2017). The movement’s goal was to stop the Dakota Access oil pipeline, owned by Energy Transfer Partners and enabled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, on its $3.8 billion, 1,172-mile serpentine route from Fort Berthold territory in northern North Dakota through Lakota Sioux ter- ritory, as it transported crude oil from the Bakken Shale oilfields to infra- structure in Illinois and eventually to the Gulf Coast. The goal was also to create a profound shift in Indigenous presence in the settler state, to affirm that as seemingly new as the #NoDAPL movement was, in many ways it was also part of “a long tradition of Indigenous resistance” (Estes 2019)—a tradition largely disavowed by settler society. The mainstream media missed this altogether, focusing instead on divisive identity poli- tics and the threat of violence between nonviolent, unarmed Native peo- ples and increasingly militarized law enforcement.4 Within the camps, the work of resistance demanded negotiating sometimes difficult but often thoughtful collaborations among people from very different back- grounds. Nick Estes, in his generative book on #NoDAPL, Our History Is the Future, concurs: Politicians and media attempted to play up divisions in the camps, de- picting white Water Protectors as “hippies” who treated the movement like “Burning Man.” Those elements existed, and some Native people played along. But such portrayals gloss over meaningful solidarities. (Estes 2019, 6–7, my emphasis) Following Estes, this article is intended to illuminate some of what got “glossed over” in mainstream media portrayals, in an effort to underscore the significance of the “meaningful solidarities” that emerged—however imperfect. The future of a critical, decolonial collaborative anthropol- ogy seems to hinge upon our willingness to engage, head on and eyes open, with the imperfections and possibilities of meaningful solidarities, in the face of “capitalist sorcery” (Pignarre and Stengers 2007). We draw on insights gleaned from more than forty open-ended interviews with movement participants, conducted by the authors between October 2016 and November 2017, as well as short-term ethnographic fieldwork and activist-research by the authors within the main camp, Oceti Sakowin, in the fall of 2016. By activist-research we mean the kind of investigative 4 collaborative anthropologies 13:1 fall 2020 practice that recognizes the inherent biases and politics of all research agendas (whether those are made explicit or not) and that is committed to advancing social and environmental justice. In this instance we were invited, as non-Native (and white) guests in Sioux territory, with explicit expectations and obligations: we were there to support and advance the work to block construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.5 As activist- scholars of environmental justice, we extended the collaboration between #NoDAPL supporters in Appalachia (where we live) and water protectors at the front lines of the movement.6 Much of what has been written thus far on #NoDAPL focuses on the Indigenous-led resistance to settler colonial racial capitalism and envi- ronmental injustice, and we fall in step with this direction. Books pub- lished in 2019 by Nick Estes, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, and Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon, as well as the earlier Standing Rock Syllabus, curated by the NYC Stands With Standing Rock collective, remain the essential reading on the detailed unfolding of events from late 2016 to early 2017. This article draws on these scholars’ important projects, yet takes a the- oretical and methodological sidestep by offering a perspective anchored in anthropological theory, ethnography, and collaborative or activist re- search. We peer inside the practices and affective registers of resistance work, looking at the tensions of collaboration as those played out on the ground. The labor (physical, spiritual, intellectual, and more) that #NoDAPL demanded made the camps a grand and difficult experiment in coordination. Such a perspective may have significance for future and ongoing mobilizations and collaborative decolonial projects, as the question of working across difference without diminishing or evading that difference is increasingly urgent in collaborative anthropology and beyond. We argue that central to #NoDAPL’s lasting significance is the way al- lies worked across various registers of difference to align interests in such a manner that Indigenous territorial sovereignty emerged as the shared matter of concern, and thus achieving a powerful relationality, without downplaying risks in building trust across difference. We take up this ar- gument through the paired concepts of kinship and home—concepts that emerged, empirically, from within the camp’s own epistemology. That is, as water protectors spoke with one another, and with us, about the camp as “home,” and the new kinds of kin relations this space enabled, we took note that the sense of connection, albeit fraught, uneasy, and Powell and Draper: Making It Home 5  without guarantees, was of imaginative and practical importance to the movement’s strategy. The #NoDAPL movement in Standing Rock emerged as an event that pushed the question of the present and future of Indigenous treaty rights, energy infrastructure, and colonialism to new heights in national de- bates. To say “water is life” was a material-decolonial claim, and not a metaphor: the actual repatriation of Indigenous territory was at stake (Tuck and Yang 2012). It was also a relational claim, as Estes notes, assert- ing the responsibilities of humans to nonhuman relatives and the water, in particular (Estes 2019). In this essay we argue that what took place at Standing Rock offers not just another “case study” of Indigenous society, or leftist spectacle, but a site of knowledge production for rethinking the politics of relationship-making in twenty-first-century movements. We show, through ethnographic description of the camps and representative testimonials from activists, how Indigenous territorial politics are chang- ing the ways that solidarity is interpreted and enacted. As an encounter across various registers of difference, #NoDAPL activated a reflexive vein within the movement that may yet contribute to future organizing in the face of militarized capital. In the broadest sense, to go into the camps of- fers a contemporary ethnography of the settler colonial encounter. Alliances, imperfect and messy as they were, and continue to be, are crucial to how the story of Standing Rock is told, as an act of writing against the interests (of militarized capital as resource extraction) that would say the camps “failed” in the end. Within the camps, solidarity was never taken for granted, but was worked out in practice, and this kind of labor was a central political act of the movement. This social practice of solidarity crucially involved reimagining relations, home, and the future: it was work to halt a pipeline, but also to bring forth another kind of social and political order. We recognize, of course, that other worlds already exist in Indigenous territories, where centuries of settlement have worked to efface, displace, and dispossess Indigenous relations to lands, waters, beings, and selves (De la Cadena 2015). Importantly, the national “threat” posed by Standing Rock (Estes 2019) exposed the precarity of settler colonialism: although a “structure and ongoing process,” as Patrick Wolfe makes clear (2006), settler colonialism is also an incomplete project, leaving open possibilities for resistance, as well as resurgence and resilience—especially in contexts of environmental injustice within settler states (see Whyte 2016). If we take seriously the imaginative 6 collaborative anthropologies 13:1 fall 2020 work of envisioning and designing as political practice, and understand through testimonials from within the camp how this imaginative labor was at work on the ground in the everyday practices of relationship- making, we find that this work produces promising forms of solidarity. From Protestors to Protectors Jared Downs is from upstate New York, a veteran, and someone who grew up knowing the racism in his area, but “not ever being involved [in anti-racism work].”7 In early November 2016, after following the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline on Facebook, Jared drove his pickup more than fifteen hundred miles to Standing Rock, North Dakota, to bring construction supplies into the Sacred Stone Camp (one of the three camps, along with Rosebud and Oceti Sakowin). He had never done anything like this before. A day later he ended up in an action that was intercepted by a police blockage and had his truck and building materials confiscated. Energized by the action, and thinking of his toddler son back at home, who would “inherit the outcomes” of twenty-first-century environmental and social struggles, Jared decided to become one of the “high risk of arrest” water protectors, drawing internally—he realized later—on his training in the United States Army. On November 21 he went to the front line of the pipeline construction site, the boundary line between the camp and the law enforcement charged with protecting the pipeline construction as it encroached many feet per day closer to its ultimate crossing beneath the Missouri River (Mni Sose). This day became the highest profile clash of the standoff between water protectors and police—named “Blackwater Sunday”—when water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets rained down on activists facing off with riot-gear-clad officers on the bridge over the Cannonball River, a tributary of the Missouri. Jared described yelling across the barricade to one of the officers: I told them we all took an oath to defend the constitution from foreign or domestic enemies. Then they said, “what you’re doing here is not defending the constitution,” and I forgot exactly what I said but that’s when they turned the water cannons on me. I was up there for about a half hour or so getting sprayed down. Then I came back, got my rain suit and some dry clothes on, and I went back up and that’s when they Powell and Draper: Making It Home 7  started firing tear gas canisters... some of the tear gas canisters were lighting fires in the grass, so I was putting those out. They were trying to actively hit people with the tear gas.8 Jared emerged from jail with a broken rib, no trace of his truck or wallet, and an uncanny sense that he had “been changed forever” by his participation. As a veteran of the Iraq War, he said he attempted “to con- nect with the officers” (of the Sheriff ’s Department of Morton County, North Dakota) at the time of his arrest, by reminding them of the oaths they shared, with him, to defend “from foreign or domestic enemies.” When Jared shared this story, he laughed bitterly, and went on to describe the broken oaths that clearly pained him. He felt no alliance with the of- ficers, he said, because he understood his promise to defend very differ- ently. Jared’s was one of many conversion stories we heard in the camps, where allies to the #NoDAPL movement arrived at pivotal realizations that seemed to realign their sensibilities about responsibility, relations, and protection. Settlement, under capitalism, understands territory in relation to property in a “logic of possession,” the referent of which is whiteness, following Aileen Moreton-Robinson. In this analysis some (white) bod- [173.178.215.221] Project MUSE (2024-06-27 18:34 GMT) Concordia University Library ies own land, some (black) bodies are landless and owned by others, and some (red) bodies are dispossessed of land (Moreton-Robinson 2015). Indigenous dispossession and the erasure of Indigenous title—followed by the necessary erasure of the collective settler memory of Indige- nous title—is of course foundational to the reigning black-white racial binary that has dominated US discourse since the nineteenth century. This erasure of Indigenous presence, as Malinda Maynor Lowery has shown, is accomplished through a racialized rubric organized around a black:white dualism (Lowery 2010; 2018). In other words, the domination of the black-white binary in US public thought has been instrumental in erasing Native presence, as has the racialization of Native identity (Byrd 2011). Resistance to settler logics of possession and racial binaries were enacted in the events that unfolded in the movement in Standing Rock, even as people often had to navigate the durable scripts of Native politics within the camp, as they worked out their own whiteness or indigeneity vis-à-vis others. The camp was a laboratory for the tensions of collaboration. Identifi- cations as Native and non-Native (and the vast diversity contained within 8 collaborative anthropologies 13:1 fall 2020 that designator) were both discursively potent and sometimes difficult to read within the camp. As a socially salient yet unreliable indicator of indigeneity, phenotype was not the basis on which people established connections within the larger context of an intertribal and multieth- nic assemblage. This ambiguity opened the ground for non-Natives, in particular, to reflect upon their status as settlers, an identification many found uncomfortable in their aspirations to establish common ground. Difference was asserted through various signs, amplified in certain cas- es by the presence of dozens of Indigenous languages throughout the camps, and by indicators of certain “Indigenous only” spaces. The camps called forth this kind of critical reflection: one Native woman, with whom we spoke extensively, described “becoming more Indigenous” by her ex- perience within the camp, growing up as she had in a largely non-Native, urban environment. One self-proclaimed “New Ager,” in his mid-thirties, shared how influential certain Native philosophies had been on his life choices (he had lived with the “Rainbow Tribe” for many years), but was quick to establish his identity as a “not a Native person, but a white man.” This did not feel like the multicultural tendency to occlude difference, in “melting pot” metaphors, for instance, but a space in which people were acutely sensitive to, and reflective upon, the lived experience and iden- tification they embodied (see Holland and Lave 2001). If collaboration and solidarity were required to stop the pipeline—and implicitly, this agreement was the modus operandi of the camp—they would have to be constructed from the ground up, tensions exposed, assumptions of harmony and commonality suspended. Enclaves within Oceti Sakowin,9 the largest of the three camps, raised tribal flags to mark specificity; and interior zones, such as the “decolo- nization meetings” held in the geodesic dome, were semi-structured en- counters of address by locals (Standing Rock tribal members and other Sioux Nation peoples) to visitors, Native and non-Native, in the politics of support and action, within the camps. The “decolonization tent” was a site of possible transformation: indeed, of many difficult conversations, as our interviewees and we ourselves experienced. But as one of the larg- est structures and centrally located, the geodesic dome produced a space where real-time lessons on broken treaties, environmental injustice, set- tler colonialism, and white supremacy took place—the harsh teachings required for honest collaborations to begin. The decolonization tent an- ticipated these strained relations and the dearth of education around Powell and Draper: Making It Home 9  Sioux and Indigenous history, responding by situating these tensions in the context of legacies of colonialism and resistance. The community of thousands that emerged in Oceti Sakowin, Rosebud, and Sacred Stone camps had a complicated genealogy. This complexity was part of the camps’ strength: they were an Indigenous-led and “culturally sovereign” (Gilio-Whitaker 2019) space, yet were highly diverse, with a range of ideas and motivations evident within the camps. This included Indigenous movements, anarchist movements, anti- globalization movements, New Age movements, feminist, anti-racist, pagan, and LGBTQ/two spirits movements, among others. Mobilizations like Idle No More in Canada and site-specific actions led by Native Nations resisting the Keystone XL pipeline and tar sands in Canada and the northern United States were the prologue to (and concurrent with) #NoDAPL, as were movements resisting expanded energy infrastructure in other Native communities, such as allied resistance to the Atlantic Coast Pipeline’s terminus in Lumbee homelands in rural North Carolina. Many #NoDAPL participants had developed encampment skills during earlier anti-capitalist global justice movements, most recently the Occupy movement, to which #NoDAPL was frequently—though problematically—compared. Anthropologists of the Occupy movement argue for understanding Occupy in a global rather than national framework, calling Occupy a “rel- ative latecomer” to anti-capitalist and pro-democracy movements that sprang up at least as early as the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and certainly since the surge of the 2011 Arab Spring (Juris and Razsa 2012). Likewise, #NoDAPL must be understood in a global frame- work, given its emphasis on Indigenous rights and transnational energy regimes, as well as its ability to enlist supporters from all of the world, largely through its social media reach. However, the specific stakes of #NoDAPL, as Estes details at length (2019), were highly specific to the settler-colonial context of United States policy in Indian Country. There is a long history of the exploitation of Indigenous customary lands and reservation lands for fossil fuel and nuclear development, from extraction to transportation, from detonation to storage. As such, the complicated politics of energy, such as the construction of oil pipelines through sacred lands, is a global story with the particularities of Indigenous sovereignty at stake. This yields a second crucial difference from Occupy: #NoDAPL explicitly took up a position of “protection” rather than “protest” or “oc- 10 collaborative anthropologies 13:1 fall 2020 cupation.” This indicates the central importance of territoriality and re- lationality: the peoples of Oceti Sakowin were not “occupying” land or infrastructure to resist the state or its particular political classes, as with Occupy (see Graeber 2013). Accompanied by allies, they were asserting their sovereign claim to unceded territory. With #NoDAPL, the economy could not be separated from territory. That territory, in turn, is not the empty frontier that capital produces, but is homeland, animated by histor- ically particular sets of relations among humans, other than humans, and stories of dwelling that continue to tell a people who they are (Estes 2019). The #NoDAPL movement asserted Indigenous treaty rights to land and water as the basis of what was at stake in the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, invoking the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 between the Great Sioux Nation and the United States government, which ensured 25 million acres and continued water rights, further ensured by the 1908 Winter’s Doctrine/U.S. Supreme Court decision on Indigenous water rights (Estes 2016). Thus protection was the immediate protection of land and life (rendered by some as “environmental justice”) but was also the protection of treaty rights, a turn that, as Brian Noble reminds us, reorients relationality toward the historical particularity of treaty relations and the many negations and violations of these agreements by settler states (Noble 2015). The Dakota Access Pipeline, a corporate energy project administratively managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, cut through Sioux treaty territory in southern North Dakota, after being routed away from the city of Bismarck due to the former governor’s concerns over safety issues posed by the oil pipeline (and its possible rupture) to urban residents. The pipeline was fast-tracked under the Obama Administration without a full Environmental Impact Statement process, despite lack of meaningful consultation with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the Tribe’s stalwart rejection of the pipeline’s incursion into its treaty lands. On December 4, 2016, in response to public outcry, Obama denied the necessary easement and #NoDAPL water protectors felt a sense of temporary victory; however, with Donald Trump’s election a month earlier, theirs was an uneasy celebration. Ultimately the pipeline was pushed through by President Trump in January 2017 as one of his first executive orders, and the resistance camps launched in April 2016 by Standing Rock Sioux tribal members—and eventually joined by thousands of others—were raided and demolished in February 2017. By 2018, oil flowed and the pipeline leaked at least five times, with the largest Powell and Draper: Making It Home 11  spill near its endpoint in Patoka, Illinois.10 #NoDPAL water protectors became active in other sites of struggle around North America and the world, taking skills honed at Standing Rock to energy infrastructure battles in other unceded Indigenous territories. Litigation brought by the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes against the U.S. Army Corps as well as lawsuits involving individual arrests and charges are ongoing.11 Importantly, the Sioux assertion of territorial sovereignty countered settler logics of Indigeneity as primarily a racial difference,12 and likewise countered dispossession of Native land as a requisite for development, through capitalism (Byrd 2011; Yazzie 2018). Instead, as scholars have made abundantly clear, Indigenous difference is political and not racial (see Simpson 2014, among others). This insight, articulated by organizers within the Indigenous-led movement at Standing Rock, challenged the way many non-Native activists considered Indigenous difference. Standing Rock was about land, indeed, but also “brought the crucial role of water as a site of Indigenous determination to the forefront” (Pasternak 2016). This shift toward a wider understanding of Indigenous treaty rights, through land and water, was part of the sociocultural work that Standing Rock achieved and which ought to be further reflected upon as one of the unsung cultural political achievements of the movement. This insight was worked out on the ground, in trainings in decoloni- zation and direct action, and in encounters among and between Native and non-Native allies. Often the specificity of the settler colonial context posed an ideological challenge to well-seasoned, non-Native anarchists who imported a politics of refusal of the state and an anarchist “mor- al imagination” (Graeber 2004) that did not include an understanding of Indigenous sovereignty or territorial integrity. We witnessed several exchanges and challenges within the camps and heard accounts by in- terviewees that laid bare this ideological dissonance. For example, the struggle on the ground to educate left-leaning, non-Native protectors in a politics of decolonization—a different register of anti-statist or anti- capitalist critique—was one of the most meaningful practices of solidar- ity work within the camp. The testimonies we include in the following section illustrate this hard work to align different moral imaginations. Guests to Sioux territory were pushed to rethink indigeneity, treaty, wa- ter, and the other possible futures, or “elsewheres,” that decolonization might yet bring forth (Tuck and Yang 2012).13 12 collaborative anthropologies 13:1 fall 2020  Of course, these realizations were uneven within the camp. At least half a dozen times we overhead people remark, “This is like Woodstock meets Wounded Knee!” Yet Standing Rock hardly resembled the three- day, counterculture music event in 1969 in New York state, unless one read the Standing Rock encampment as a de-territorialized festival of a subculture, on fire with sonic and sexual revolution. Woodstock, culturally pivotal as it was, both resists and enacts the settler imagination, as the event in which radical politics are inscribed in bodies—but in largely non-Native and heteronormative bodies that appropriate Native style, and “played Indian” as anti-establishment spectacle (Deloria 1998; Niman 1997; Smith 2009). One man in Oceti Sakowin, who identified himself as “an old-school Rainbow head,” shared that his faith as a born- again Christian was his primary motivation for coming to Standing Rock to assist with clean water distribution. He explained that the Rainbow Tribe, in the years since Hurricane Katrina, has become “an emergency response unit,” operative wherever crisis strikes.14 More commonly, however, the Rainbow Tribe, with its festival-driven lifestyle, has conjured indigeneity symbolically, often professing a spirituality of “Indianism” (the born-again Christian we met was certainly an anomaly). In 1993 such professions prompted several of the Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota Nations to ratify a “Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality” for the “mockery and abuse” of Lakota ceremonies (Niman 1997, 146). Such appropriations appear to know little of the hard-won struggles for Indigenous religious freedom and territorial integrity in the Dakotas, evidenced by Indigenous resistance to white climbers on Devil’s Tower (Mato Tipila) and the longstanding struggle to reclaim, and not sell, the sacred Black Hills (He Sapa). As we heard and as Dina Gilio-Whitaker also notes, people within the camps frequently compared Standing Rock with Wounded Knee in 1973, in the sense of threat and urgency (Gilio- Whitaker 2019, 7). However, #NoDAPL was also not at all like that event, which—following Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior (1996)— was an armed occupation led by American Indian Movement leaders who traveled to the Pine Ridge Reservation in explicit critique of corrupt tribal leadership. It was in the interest of capital that alliances across difference within #NoDAPL were dismissed by journalists and others. As Estes writes: “Po- litical elites and corporate media have frequently depicted poor whites and poor Natives as irreconcilable enemies, without common ground, Powell and Draper: Making It Home 13  competing for scarce resources in economically depressed rural areas” (Estes 2019, 7).15 This perceived impasse of interests between rural whites and rural Natives has indeed often been bridged through issue-specific activism, when white, rural neighbors of Native Nations align with In- digenous interests in the face of outside threats. As Zoltán Grossman makes clear in his important body of work, Native treaty rights in the US have sometimes become the basis for “unlikely alliances” to form, when white land managers find their interests in resisting energy extraction or territorial encroachment align with Indigenous interests in land protec- tion (Grossman 2005, 2018). Yet in the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock, most of the non-Native allies were not geographic neighbors of the Lakota at Standing Rock. As Grossman notes, North Dakota cowboys “were nowhere to be seen” in the camps, despite (or perhaps precisely because of?) the vivid display of Indigenous intertribal unity within the camps (Grossman 2016). Perhaps unsurprisingly, most white allies in the encampments hailed from much more distant locations, with more dis- tant territorial stakes. And yet, if white cowboys were absent, white anar- chists were present, as were non-Native military veterans, school teach- ers, writers, union workers, students, lawyers, and artists. Standing Rock conjured Indigenous worldmaking movements of the nineteenth century. As Mark Rifkin details, the prophetic temporality of the period was shaped by the “ghost dances” that were part of a “broader set of sociospiritual dynamics that were prevalent throughout the region,” and included the resistance movement at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in 1890, a movement to activate forces that would pre- clude settler futurity (Rifkin 2017). For water protectors who sustained life within the encampments and risked arrest at the front lines, the point of reference was not the past, but the future: the Black Snake of Lakota Sioux prophecy was the dangerous apparition, being played out in the present as the pipeline itself (Estes 2019, 14; Estes and Dhillon 2019, 1–2). In our conversations within the camp, people spoke repeatedly about the Black Snake, depicted it in visual motifs, and organized around it in on- line forums, generating new subjectivities and new media, like the Black Snake Killaz.16 In North Dakota the Snake took the form of industrial oil pipelines flanked by private and public security forces, because at the end of the day it was weaponized capitalism that threatened Indigenous territory. 14 collaborative anthropologies 13:1 fall 2020  Self-consciously full of a sense of momentousness, the #NoDAPL movement attracted the usual suspects of left-leaning celebrity allies: Jane Fonda sponsored Thanksgiving dinner for thousands at the Standing Rock Tribe’s high school gym in Fort Yates during a weekend when the population of the camps swelled to 10,000; musicians Bonnie Raitt, Indigo Girls, Taboo of the Black-Eyed Peas, and other artists played benefit concerts for #NoDAPL in Standing Rock’s Prairie Nights Casino. Perhaps less likely alignments included the arrival into Oceti Sakowin of thousands of war veterans on the first weekend in December 2016, an event highlighting a cultural rupture in understandings of patriotism and protection, as the veterans were clearly positioned against the show of military force on display by the state of North Dakota and federal agencies, who continued to defend the pipeline. We too, as non-Natives entering Standing Rock, were entangled in the object of our study. Such entanglement challenges the relational posture of “applied” dimensions of anthropology, by understanding ethnography as a practice of relational knowledge production (Casas-Cortés et al. 2013) rather than professionalizing frameworks that would “apply” expert theory among “practitioners.” This shift in our position as epistemic subjects—a shift that sees our collaborators as epistemic subjects and sources of [173.178.215.221] Project MUSE (2024-06-27 18:34 GMT) Concordia University Library knowledge, with knowledge itself often the object of colonial control— suggests that the theory is not unidirectional: theory does flow from the academy to the field. Rather, knowledge as it emerges through social practice is a critical conversation, always unfinished, mostly difficult, and largely unwritten. We see this approach as kindred to the “ethnographies of encounter” described by Lieba Faier and Lisa Rofel, as a response to the “calls to decolonize anthropology,” inasmuch as we are part of the “relational dynamics of... engagement across difference” involved in the study and making of culture (Faier and Rofel 2014; Harrison 1991; Smith 1999). We suggest that beyond the ethnographic perspective within the camp, the hard work of relating and imagining otherwise that everyone undertook, to some degree, was a significant and largely unexamined part of what ensued in the ten-month encampments at Standing Rock. Relations of Estrangement and Belonging Members of over two hundred Native Nations, as well as non-Native allies, both white and non-Native people of color,17 drove, flew, hitch- Powell and Draper: Making It Home 15  hiked, ran, bused, and caravanned to Oceti Sakowin, to join the move- ment to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. At the main entry, camp-appointed security guards peered into each arriving car, studying the driver, passengers, and cargo. Some came to camp to join the front lines, where the pipeline was rapidly being laid by Energy Transfer Partners in an alliance with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, snaking ever-closer to Sioux treaty land and its subterranean crossing of the Missouri River; others arrived prepared to cook, clean, chop wood, haul water, screen print, sort donations, build shelters, tend fires, treat wounds, strip trees for tipi poles, and attend otherwise to the everyday life of the camp; others said they were “called to come,” as a kind of spir- itual mandate, a pilgrimage to a remote plain where ecumenical prayer combined with skillful direct action could overcome an oil pipeline backed by military force. The guards looked us over, in our sporty rental car heavily loaded with boxes of food bought at the Sam’s Club in Bismarck with funds from students in Boone, North Carolina; there was an expectant pause, which eventually broke with a warm “Welcome home!” Each car was thus screened and greeted, across many months of the direct action. This entry, or re-entry, offered the camp as “home” to activists, transmitting a sense of the obligations, reciprocities, and protocols of respect implicit in that place where one’s relations (biological, political, cultural, fictive, or otherwise) reside. As such, Oceti Sakowin, the largest of the three en- campments along the Cannonball River, offered itself as a site of return, belonging, kinship, and responsibility. What ethical and relational imperatives were deployed, in this wel- coming home of thousands of non-locals? What kinds of expectations were implicit in this invitation, itself highly contested,18 and what poli- tics of solidarity and decolonization emerged in the construction of new forms of relationships, within the temporary autonomous zone of the camp? How do non-Sioux peoples, especially non-Natives, fathom to “come home” to unceded Sioux territory? We begin with this complicat- ed concept of “home” as an analytic and ethical imperative to help illu- minate a portion of the very complex practices of enacting imaginations as political action through the alliance-making that the Standing Rock movement instigated. Put more directly, reimagining “home” was a polit- ical and relational act: welcoming strangers, Native and non-Native, into Sioux territory (thus not an “occupation” of foreign land, as discussed in 16 collaborative anthropologies 13:1 fall 2020 our introduction to this essay, but a reinhabiting of treaty or homeland, by different means) made explicit a politics of belonging and solidarity that said, you are (probably) welcome here. A conditional welcome, skep- tical, but willing to leap to that fragile place of faith in another’s human- ity, opening the possibility for collaboration—but with no guarantees.19 And yet, that welcome was highly structured: no weapons, no alcohol, no masks, no “-isms,” a commitment to nonviolence and decolonization, and a commitment to participate through prayer. This was a kinship sys- tem, with specific rules, obligations, and reciprocities. Notions of Indigenous kinship are, of course, quite different than European derivatives of relationality. As many have noted, the species- limitations of European notions of relationality mean that (European- descended) humans have largely not viewed animals, plants, bodies of water, deities, or other entities as part of their network. Importantly, these connections are moral relationships: they carry responsibilities and obligations with practical implications for environmental justice and the health of wider ecologies (Ranco et al. 2011; Whyte 2018b). Not only do Indigenous ideas of kinship challenge such anthropocentrism, by instead emphasizing relations with more-than-humans, but Indigenous ideas of kinship also tend to incorporate ancestral relations in a manner unfamiliar to European thought. Ancestors are as much present as past and often command certain offerings or obligations that, in most European ancestry, would be traced as (patri)lineage but not necessarily as a contemporary social and moral presence. As Eric Cheyfitz has argued, Indigenous kinship and consensual governance offer modes for rethinking relations through anti-capitalist social life (Cheyfitz 2011; 2017). And as Diné thinking makes clear, one’s kin by clan is both imaginative and practical: clans were formed by the deities to establish and extend kin connections and, later, adapted to specific historical pressures under settler colonialism. The community was strengthened by the ability to incorporate “outsiders,” while remaining distinctively Diné. And the clan, historically, is the basis of social reproduction and security, in a traditionally agrarian lifeway. Moreover, to be related in Diné and other forms of Indigenous epistemology is to be called upon, at certain moments, to provide care, defense, provisions, or other forms of mutual aid, as part of a collective that both changes and is sustained over time (rather than as an individual with “rights” ensured by the self- contained, Kantian solo actor, as in the dominant European tradition). It Powell and Draper: Making It Home 17  is this spirit of kinship that we take up—a broader sense of relationality and reciprocity than the strictly anthropological mappings of biological and cultural relations or than the rugged individualists whose birthright is to themselves alone, without owing anyone. A seasoned activist and tribal member of Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians reflected on her time in Oceti Sakowin from her living room in western North Carolina. We asked her what it felt like in the camp. She responded: “Like home. There was no stranger, like I told you, the first time you walked into camp, you weren’t a stranger. It was real open, peo- ple were always friendly. Somebody was always talking to you to find out what your needs were.”20 Other water protectors echoed this sense of welcome and belonging, based on recognition as a “protector.” One Gulf War veteran at the camp said: When they realized I was a veteran and a water protector, the veteran’s camp embraced me.... We have seventeen veterans right now. Many of them Vietnam veterans. One of them is a chief here. And so, I found a home. I found purpose and I found place. I was warmly welcomed and received well. My efforts have really been appreciated so it made me feel welcomed. It really goes to show, it’s like an example that this movement is not just a Native movement, that this movement, it tran- scends any race, creed, religion or boundaries. Like, this is about life, about water, about, about protecting our natural resources, being con- servative with our natural resources. So much so that we can preserve them for future generations’ prosperity.21 A Standing Rock Sioux educator who assisted in the camp’s autono- mous elementary school described this politics of welcoming outsiders, whom she witnessed arriving by dozens, month after month: “Because this is our land and because this is our home, and our traditional ways, we believe that when relatives come to your home, you know, this is our home, and when relatives come to your home, you treat them as rela- tives.”22 As a Sioux woman, she exercised the right to extend notions of home and kinship to newcomers. These invitations, of course, carried responsibilities and consequences. In this water protector’s reflection and more widely across the camp, this act of welcoming, of creating the conditions for becoming relations, was a core part of the camp’s politi- cal practice. And while certainly not a new trope, the idea of claiming and policing the boundaries of home and kinship, the very politics of 18 collaborative anthropologies 13:1 fall 2020 welcoming, took on a sense of strategic urgency within the camps. On multiple occasions, we overhead talk of “narcs or spies” who surely had infiltrated, posing more of a threat to camp security, mission, and rela- tionality than, for example, adherents of the Rainbow Tribe or New Age. Discerning allies, Native and non-Native, was central to the work of the camp. The use of kinship across boundaries of political difference was not only imaginative or figurative, but highly practical, as it imposed a set of responsibilities on newcomers. This kinship was not a move to erase Native and non-Native difference—but to amplify the sense of that difference, through making explicit the Sioux territorial claim and the logics of possession underpinning settler capitalism. This imaginative move to make the autonomous zone into “home” was a political act to build a base for a collective recognition of the reactiva- tion of Sioux prophecy: defeating the Black Snake infrastructure from passing beneath the sacred treaty waters of the Missouri River, on its route to transport Bakken Shale fracked oil to other pipelines for global export. In practice, the camp was transformed into home for thousands, by creating the conditions to sustain everyday life through food, shelter, warmth, and a collective sense of community, purpose, and protection. As the director of construction for Oceti Sakowin told us, many people sought shelter there: housing conditions within the camp were often safer and more secure than what some families had left behind.23 Food, fire, clothing, medical care, and child care were all available within, free of charge, creating an experimental society based in an alternative econo- my and a common commitment to nonviolent direct action. Children, bicycles, dogs, and solar panels made it feel like home for many; we spoke with quite a few people who had “quit a job and sold everything” in order to move into the camps. Making the camp home, through new solidari- ties, was also an imaginative, future-oriented political act, imagining the defeat of the pipeline and, in doing so, the fulfillment of prophecy (Estes 2019, 14) and the redefinition of terms of engagement between Native Nations and federal agencies (in this case, mediated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) through upholding treaties. We suggest that water protectors and other activists, care-laborers, and allies had complex rela- tionships with this idea of home—ranging from cathartic, even redemp- tive senses of belonging and return to unsettling feelings of estrangement and ongoing discomfort—producing a collective experience of tentative, yet powerful kinship ties. Powell and Draper: Making It Home 19  To speak of solidarity is to speak of a kind of kinship.24 It is to speak of a certain set of fictive, affinal, or sanguine relations: it is a question of how people relate across socially constructed understandings of hu- man difference. Solidarity, then, and its practice, is therefore not always self-evident, nor is it divisible only by an us-them binary. It is a shifting field of belonging, a set of historical practices grounded in a certain un- derstanding of justice and ethical action, and a sense of right relations with its own set of rules, commands, and behaviors. Solidarity, as Tuck and Yang remind us, is always “an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflicts” (2012, 3). Certainly, solidarity was all of this in the camp. Of concern to us was how non-locals, especially non-Native advocates of social and environmental justice, made sense of this possible but unstable and tem- porary home and the network of relationships that constituted the camp. Making it home, however, was conditional: if “making kin,” as Donna Haraway (2016) urges, is a political-ecological act in the present moment, especially when we make kin across species differences toward a new mode of relationality—the very act of striving to collaborate and connect, though shot through with difficulty, pushes a rethinking of solidarity. For one Diné water protector from the Southwest, a seasoned activist in Navajo energy and water rights at home, the conditions of making kin in foreign territory hinged upon recognizing certain struggles that could not be owned but indeed could be translated and shared: “You know I had heard one time that if you come to take away the struggles of the people whom you will be visiting, you know, you’re not welcome. Because this is their struggle. But if you come to learn of their struggles and you take their struggles and you share that with others when you get back to your homeland, then you’re doing a great deal of good.”25 Struggling-with, without appropriating. One of the movement’s leading strategists described the camp as spe- cific to the historical gathering of tribes: it was an effort “to re-create traditional governance,” and the camp was a strong “tactical strategy.” The same week that the camp was finally dismantled, in February 2017, with many of the remaining wooden buildings set afire by water protec- tors in a final act of defiance, this strategist reflected on what made this moment unique: 20 collaborative anthropologies 13:1 fall 2020  The idea of a Native-led prayer camp, an intertribal camp, that is what made this so different. It wasn’t a protest or a march, or all the tac- tics that have been used before. And it was never an occupation like Wounded Knee was.26... So you take this ancient concept of different bands and tribes coming together into Council, into camp, and the word “camp” has such a charged and historical meaning for so many nations. The idea of experiencing something that was severed and lost and then reclaiming [the camp].... The idea of the camp was an effort to re-create traditional governance in the camp (with the headman and a women’s society) and look at environmentally sound practices there (with solar and with buildings—tipis, yurts)... so in the camp, the idea was of re-creating some of that. Which still lives in many Native communities (reciprocity, generosity, belonging, different ways of decision making that really recognize women, etc.). It was a re- creating and reclaiming of a different way of governance.27 It was not meant to be home in any permanent or even literal sense, but was an enactment of other modes of autonomy and alliance-making, following the Seven Council Fires of Oceti Sakowin self-governance, to halt the pipeline. The political project of this gathering was paramount, as she notes, on the level of challenging the United States claim to the land, and the Dakota Access Pipeline’s potential contamination of the Missouri River, but ultimately on creating a sense of belonging and relation that enacted another form of governance. She named one painful regret in the overall strategy: “I wish we hadn’t wavered on telling people to come. I wish we had put out the call for more people to come, and to come quickly.”28 Other organizers within and beyond the camp challenged this leader’s sentiment outright, questioning who held and exercised authority to invite non-locals to the camp. There was no single organization or body authorizing people to come to Standing Rock. The calls were varied and contradictory. LaDonna Brave Bull Allard and the One Mind Youth Movement of Standing Rock issued some of the first invitations in April 2016, via social media, to join an established “spirit camp.” The Global Solidarity Campaign (GSC) maintained an active call for people to come to Standing Rock at least until December 3, 2016. On December 9, 2016, after the Army Corps’ December 4 decision to suspend the Missouri River crossing easement until they completed a new Environmental Impact Statement, the GSC Powell and Draper: Making It Home 21  posted on Facebook that they were no longer asking people to come to camp but were focusing their efforts on supporting the water protectors already at camp, and escalating divestment solidarity actions targeting Wells Fargo and other shareholder banks. On November 21, 2016, the GSC Facebook page shared a post from Sacred Stone Camp of what appears to be a handful of police and water protectors standing in a field at night, separated by barbed wire. Smoke billows over the fence. Across the photograph, in bold yellow and white lettering: “Dear Allies/Standing Rock/is NOT a: photo op/resume build- er/business opportunity/festival. This is a sacred struggle/for the water/ led by indigenous people.” The accompanying text asserted a disciplinary tone: Dear allies: we have asked this before, and we will ask it again. Please do not set up crowdfunding pages to simply bring yourself to Stand- ing Rock if you are not coordinating with indigenous people on the ground. It is very hard to organize on the ground, it is very difficult to gauge needs, navigate the camps, navigate power dynamics, commu- nicate etc. We are here, and we have been working hard on this cam- paign, and we need your support. We do not need you to come and [173.178.215.221] Project MUSE (2024-06-27 18:34 GMT) Concordia University Library save us, we need your prayers and your resources and your actions.29 On November 23, 2016, the GSC shared a post from a private Facebook profile that read, Before you arrive, please ensure that you will not become a victim of circumstance. Please make absolutely certain of your finances and that they are in order and that you will be able to sustain yourself for the duration of your stay. GoFundMes have been totally instrumental in keeping folks supported and sustained here.30 The calls to come were multiple, varied, even contradictory, produc- ing a sense of ambiguous invitation, left open to interpretation depend- ing upon a person’s individual position vis-à-vis the broader movement. Some non-Native allies shared that they went to Standing Rock because they had a personal, direct invitation from an Indigenous organization or water protector, active in one of the three camps. This was indeed true for us. Alliances forged at other environmental and social justice struggles in years past became reactivated by Standing Rock, bringing together peo- ple who had worked together in struggle but had not seen one another 22 collaborative anthropologies 13:1 fall 2020 in years. At Fonda’s Thanksgiving dinner in Standing Rock High School, Diné activist Earl Tulley found a longtime movement friend from south- ern Arizona, a man he with whom had collaborated in solidarity work in Arizona several decades earlier. As they reached to hug each other across the cafeteria table laden with a locally prepared feast of turkey, stuffing, and gravy, they experienced a sense of homecoming, in new territory. “This is the movement that doesn’t end,” Earl said later, reflecting on his unexpected reconnection. But the majority of allies with whom we spoke did not have a longstanding or direct connection to anyone in Oceti Sakowin, but rather felt drawn to the encampments spiritually or politically, following calls that had gone out on social media. Some arrived from overseas (we met individuals from Japan, Scotland, Canada, and throughout Latin America); others arrived from parts of the rural US (Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia, Minnesota, Montana, and Washington) where large-scale oil pipelines and other forms of energy extraction threatened lands and waters in their region. For example, as their inspiration for showing up at Standing Rock, several North Carolina participants referenced the Atlantic Coast Pipeline proposed for the southeastern US, which would terminate in Robeson County, where the population is predominantly Lumbee. Brian Malden, traveling from Edinburgh, Scotland, took a flight from New York City to Bismarck, North Dakota, where he happened to be assigned a seat next to LaDonna Brave Bull Allard. Allard, Lakota historian and activist, was one of the founders of the #NoDAPL resistance camps and was widely known due to her leadership in the movement and her interviews, which had gone viral on social media. Reading her attire and seeming to recognize her face, Malden ventured into conversation, asking if she was going to Standing Rock. “She looked right at me, in the eye,” Malden recalled, “and then she replied, ‘I am Standing Rock.’” Allard, assisted by scores of allies, maintained the Sacred Stone Camp on the Standing Rock reservation, the first of the three resistance camps, and the one with the lowest risk of being raided or razed by law enforcement, given its location on tribal land. As in any movement, leadership and strategy were contested; those details are beyond the scope of this article. And while Allard’s claim to “be” Standing Rock is itself an interesting “black-boxing” (Latour 1987) of the hard work and expertise of thousands of others, her prominence as a global spokesperson for #NoDAPL makes Malden’s accidental airplane Powell and Draper: Making It Home 23  encounter notable. Through social media Malden had seen the call go out to allies in Europe to come to Standing Rock, so in his first-ever trip to the Americas, he spent three months deep in Oceti Sakowin building oil drum woodstoves, participating in various trainings, chopping and distributing firewood, shoveling snow, and in his words, “learning a different way to be.”31 As the months wore on and the standoff with the Morton County Sheriff ’s Department (and very quickly, a whole assemblage of milita- rized law enforcement) intensified, calls to allies to show up became increasingly qualified and curated. The Standing Rock Solidarity Net- work put together several documents to advise non-Natives about best practices for supporting the movement, asserting an authoritative posi- tion in managing why, how, and when people arrived. Their invitation to come and lend support to water protectors was structured around a set of contingencies: their first document, “If You’re Thinking about Going to Standing Rock,” released in late October 2016, identified “Good reasons to go,” including “to commit civil disobedience, to do physical labor, and to provide media coverage.” Yet “Not good enough reasons” to go in- cluded “To experience indigenous culture and wisdom, because it seems cool, or curiosity.”32 Consistent with the politics of engagement in Native movements of the past few decades, there were rigorous rules regulating non-Native participation. However, curiosity takes various forms and was a powerful motiva- tor for many; some arrived at Standing Rock because they had “had a dream” or “seen a sign” or were otherwise “called” to go. This sense of prophetic urgency occurred again and again, in Native and non-Native people’s recollections of why they went. One artist, a red-headed Texan in her mid-fifties, who confessed she had “once been rich and married to a dentist and even voted for Bush,” showed up solo in her RV, because she had painted an image “out of intuition” that, in the end, was recognizable to her as the pipeline itself.33 People came to Standing Rock for reasons that were diverse and often deeply personal. Many, indeed, were curi- ous: interested and driven to experience the historical moment and affect of an intertribal gathering and to do something that felt meaningful— effective or not—as a physical response to the zeitgeist of the moment, following Trump’s election. In time, due to the decolonization workshops on site, strongly suggested for all new arrivals into camp, and public dis- 24 collaborative anthropologies 13:1 fall 2020 cussions about Indigenous treaty rights, many learned the deeper stakes of resisting the incursion of the pipeline. The overwhelming majority of our interviews with allies (Native and non-Native) indicate that being in Oceti Sakowin was an experience of personal transformation, through “learning a new way to be,” through the emotional and physical work the camps demanded, and through learning the history of Indigenous dispossession. Labors of Decolonial Care The much-needed public education was targeted, direct, and began long before people landed in North Dakota. For instance, the Medic and Healer Council (MHC) established a formalized application process in late December 2016 for people who wanted to come to Standing Rock to serve in some capacity as a medic. The MHC’s clear and public position, shared here with permission through interviews with leading medics, illustrates the ways in which home was never to be taken for granted, and solidarity was to be, by definition, unsettled and always created in practice. Volunteers for the MHC applied online and then underwent a series of vetting processes. Priority was given to “Indigenous volunteers, Advanced Life Support skills and above, those who have been to camp before (and are welcome back), those who can stay long term, and those with cold weather wilderness camping experience.”34 Each volunteer applicant had a phone interview with a member of the MHC, to vet the volunteer’s preparedness to come and serve within one of the three medics tents. The interview was framed as a conversa- tion and guided by the specific modality of healing of the applicant. The MHC instructed their interviewers to begin with a general discussion of decolonization, decision-making processes, and experience, to get a sense of the person applying and to look for any “red flags,” such as, “non- Natives describing their practice as ‘Shamanic Healing,’” or any signs of an applicant’s intentions toward “cultural appropriation” or to be a “white savior.” These are, of course, well-established discourses in Native politics, operative at gatherings across North America at least since the 1960s. The notable difference at Standing Rock appeared to be the explicitly decolo- nial and anarchist turn; and yet these newer frameworks required work to become aligned with one another. For instance, an MHC internal doc- Powell and Draper: Making It Home 25  ument that guided MHC volunteers in the application process asserted the ethics and politics of their work in these terms: Decolonizing medicine: Especially for non-Native applicants, this in- cludes assessing prior experience working with indigenous commu- nities, being an ally/accomplice, deferring to matriarchy, willingness to refer to other healing modalities, understanding historical and political context of Standing Rock. Need to come humble. White sav- iors will not be tolerated. Assess if they have experience working in other resource-limited settings (e.g. refugee camps) or rural health. Must know your own limits in skills and scope of practice. Non-hierarchical decision making and collective process: We work as a collective and use consensus and we defer to local matriarchs. Assess past experience with consensus models of decision making, collective process, non-violent communication, recognition that this is not a clinic/hospital and bottom liners are not support staff. Need to have patience, flexibility and grace and understand that unilateral decisions are part of colonial structures we aim to dismantle. Need to be willing to engage in work that is not always related to direct patient care, e.g. boiling water, getting firewood.35 A medic with the MHC said of the application process: There were too many people showing up and we had to create some mechanism [for bringing people in]. We needed volunteers but we on the ground didn’t have the capacity to vet folks, so we started to implement [the application process] to get some vetting on folks.... [It] didn’t matter if you were a physician or body worker or if you just brought a big fancy donation, if you’re not being respectful to the patients or if you’re not being respectful to the kind of culture around that medic camp. [We] had a lot of folks around who [just] came and we checked in with, or checked in with us.... Folks would be controlling about the resources or controlling about the space or have these preconceived notions because that’s what they learned in medical school or that’s how it’s done in the hospital. That did not fly [in the camp]. We didn’t have time: a frontline space is not a space in which people have the time to be catered to, and be like: ‘Okay sweetie, your feelings are hurt? Let’s go to our safe space over by the Blackwa- 26 collaborative anthropologies 13:1 fall 2020  ter Bridge and process that.’ We’re under constant surveillance, you’re here for a week and you got your feelings hurt? I don’t care.36 This medic arrived in camp in November 2016, after being invited by Lakota people with whom he had worked for several years. He described his first entry into camp: We drove in in a two-car caravan and immediately, came across a car- load of Oglalas that we were good homies with. So, we were warmly greeted at the gate, got yelled at by gate security because we blocked the entrance because friends got out of the car, hugs are going on.... I checked in with a homie of mine with AIM [American Indian Move- ment] Grassroots, who had a medical station set up and she was about to leave because she had to bring kids back to enroll in school and so she left me some supplies and took the tent. So the first thing we had to do was find a tent for our medic pile. I was under the wrong impression that there was a tent I would have been able to work in. So we scavenged, hunted a tent and... set up our tent, put up a medic sign, checked in with Red Warrior [camp] and kind of just started getting the lay of the land.... Just kind of from that moment on, it was just responding to any other number of crazy things that just... there wasn’t much planning. From that point it was just responding: responding in ways like, reaching out to more medics to come and support, and checking in with folks planning the direct actions, trying to make connections with local matriarchal leadership so we could act in a good way.37 A member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians who traveled from western North Carolina to Standing Rock multiple times over the ten-month standoff articulated a similar idea of a meaningful way to ar- rive and create solidarities in the camp: Standing Rock was a moment of unity for the Native community not just with each other, but with our white allies. We had to humble our- selves and see... and white allies had to humble themselves too and understand like we’re not trying to be mean to them, you have a role and a place and whenever we come to your community and we’re go- ing to protect you, you get to lead that. Because that’s your home, that’s your land. So they had to humble themselves in a way.38 Powell and Draper: Making It Home 27  A public health nurse from the Navajo Nation served in the med- ic tent in Sacred Stone Camp in November 2016, working very closely with non-Native nurses, doctors, and other volunteers. She was taking a break at the Standing Rock casino down the highway (“warming up in that freezing weather, over a coffee with friends”)39 when the news broke through Facebook of the escalation at the bridge. It was Sunday, November 20, 2016, and police in riot gear—backed by tanks and a heli- copter—had turned water cannons, tear gas, mace canisters, and rubber bullets onto water protectors at the front line. “We jumped up from our table and raced back down there [to camp] in our vehicles, arriving in time to start treating patients,” she recalled. She worked quickly all night alongside other medical staff, unaware of who was Native and who was non-Native (“we were all wrapped up in our heaviest winter coats, hats, and face coverings against the cold”) to treat early signs of hypothermia in patients being brought into the medics’ tents from the front lines.40 Incommensurability, Solidarity, and the Politics of Home The #NoDAPL encampment at Standing Rock was about tribal sovereignty and material decolonization: the fundamental recognition and respect of treaty rights. This moved the needle in national debates on Indigenous rights, even as the camps became increasingly under threat, following Donald Trump’s election. Central to this recognition is territorial integrity—making visible the prior right of the Great Sioux Nation to the lands and waters through which the Dakota Access Pipeline was built. Arguing that “decolonization is not a metaphor,” Tuck and Yang (2012) aim to unsettle decolonization from its domestication and identify what is unique about its mission. “Settler colonialism and its decolonization implicates and unsettles everyone” (2012, 7), and this unsettling includes a material process of repatriation by both the individual and the settler society as a whole, processes that Noble locates in the individual “encounter” and in the structural “milieu” (2015). Tuck and Yang reject acts that they refer to as “settler moves to innocence,” which “problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity” (2012, 3). Did allies show up as a move to innocence? We reject this cynical reading, by and large, though we recognize, with our informants, certain “performances” of solidarity that threatened to destabilize the already fragile kinship networks 28 collaborative anthropologies 13:1 fall 2020  required to maintain the provisional, yet powerful, sense of belonging and home within the camp. With these scholars, we argue that the call of Water Is Life (Mni Wiconi) is a material claim, and not a metaphor. Mni Wiconi is an ex- istential claim that moves beyond standard environmental politics that would seek to protect a river through frameworks of conservation or preservation. Andrew Curley examines the #NoDAPL movement as en- acting a new form of sovereignty, one that “works in partnership with large environmental organizations and thousands of Native and non- Native organizers and activists who are there to stop DAPL, protect wa- ter, and help restore the traditional land base of the Great Sioux Nation” (Curley 2016). But this is a case of Indigenous dispossession, incommen- surable with modes of environmentalism that would approach the river as a “natural resource” (Carroll 2015). Rather, Mni Wiconi is a claim to Native futurity, while also making a strong critique of the conditions of the present. Water protectors called for material decolonization as they built homes and community on unceded Sioux territory, land claimed for the pipeline by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The encampment was not an occupation; rather it was an assertion of sovereignty and a reassertion [173.178.215.221] Project MUSE (2024-06-27 18:34 GMT) Concordia University Library of counter epistemologies and ontologies, where the struggle to defeat the Black Snake was grounded in prayer and action, and settlers were asked to follow the Indigenous lead, maintaining an ethic of reflexivity. At times this ethic meant that white allies were asked to use their bodies as shields for the Indigenous water protectors who held prayer at the front lines, encircling Native bodies strategically, so that the largely white law enforcement had to stand, face to face, with “faces that look like theirs,” as one direct action trainer put it. At other times, non-Natives at the decol- onization meetings were asked to step back and to leave the tent, to allow an Indigenous-only space for discussion. Native futurity was centered in these acts of solidarity, which were—by design—unfinished and often unsettling for those on the margins. This mode of solidarity is ground- ed in an ethic of incommensurability, which recognizes what is distinct and sovereign in decolonization projects, resisting the “melting pot” of multiculturalist approaches to alliance-making. “The opportunities for solidarity lie in what is incommensurable rather than what is common across these efforts” (Tuck and Yang 2012, 27). This position suggests that Powell and Draper: Making It Home 29  solidarity does not entail a politics translation that annuls difference. Fol- lowing Eric Cheyfitz, this work across difference foregrounds a “difficult politics of translation,” and is not an exercise in repressing the struggle inherent in interactions between cultures and histories (Cheyfitz 1991, 5). This is a theory of difference that takes incommensurability, and its discomforts, as a productive ethical and methodological foundation for collaborative action and allows for the historical particularities in the ways that difference itself is understood. While on a visit home from North Dakota in December 2016, one jail support organizer who had not been at the front lines at Standing Rock, but rather supported those arrested in North Dakota, went to a solidarity action targeting SunTrust Bank, one of the major financial investors in the Dakota Access Pipeline. At the action in her home town, she reflected on the uncomfortable difference she felt in participating in a demonstra- tion, as a kind of performance of solidarity, from a distance: It was funny because at Standing Rock if you were going out to an action people would get up and get ready and get dressed for an ac- tion. And I kind of had this weird social thing [back at home] where I was like, oh, I’m going to an action and it’s a Standing Rock action, and I never got to go to Standing Rock actions at Standing Rock, even though I’d been there for months (laughs). And I got up and I got my ‘occupation skirt’ out and I wore this big long skirt which I would never probably wear [at home]. And that’s a form of solidarity in cer- emony, also, and I got this skirt, and you now, put on my sweater and didn’t know what was happening. I hadn’t been to any of the planning meetings and stuff, I just knew that people were going to gather down- town, I thought that there would be a little bit of a rally and little bit of a march, and not much and I didn’t know what was going on. And it’s funny to get there and I felt kind of... I don’t think I was appropri- ating, I was wearing a lumberjack color skirt (laughs) but it felt really weird all of a sudden to be around hometown people and be like, I’m not at this kind of action [like at Standing Rock], I’m not in this kind of space, like ceremony is not being held in the same kind of way. I was like, I never get to the actions [at Standing Rock], and today I am go- ing to the action. I realized this was a very different kind of action and I sort of feel like I’m wearing a costume and that feels a little weird.41 30 collaborative anthropologies 13:1 fall 2020  The incommensurability was embodied for this activist, heightened by the distance from Standing Rock and the expectation to dress in a certain manner, visibly performing alignment with the struggle. Simi- larly, Dina Gilio-Whitaker notes the controversial artifact that the skirt became within the camp, with women expected to wear long skirts, given the camp’s ceremonial context (Gilio-Whitaker 2019, 123–24). Clearly, the power of the skirt—and the ceremonial context it signified—could travel, from rural North Dakota to urban Tennessee (where the solidarity action described took place). Yet what Gilio-Whitaker interprets as a binary division, or “cultural clash” between Lakota and Euro-American values within the camp, some Indigenous women leaders within the camp in- terpreted as the work of the allied patriarchy, which insisted on skirts as emblematic of a certain interpretation of “tradition.” Certainly, as much as the embrace of skirts, we heard reports of their rejection among in- terviewees and witnessed women’s self-conscious refusal to wear skirts, among the diverse range of water protectors. In a similar fashion, the Standing Rock Solidarity Network (SRSN) put together several documents to advise non-Natives about best practices for supporting the #NoDAPL movement, in actions that were springing up across the US from September 2016 onward. One of the SRSN docu- ments, “When You Return Home,” addresses the question of represen- tation and the necessary uneasiness of solidarity work, expressed here through the idea of “voice”: Those of us who are not from Standing Rock cannot actually speak for those in the struggle or represent the struggle. As we push for vis- ibility of Indigenous-led struggles, which are too often invisibilized in the movements for human rights, environmental justice and climate justice struggle, it is crucial that we are responsible in how we help in making it visible. Our goal as non-Native supporters should be to am- plify the Indigenous voices from camp—not to speak for Indigenous people or replace their voice. Yet for others, feeling uncertain of one’s place in the camp created a sense of estrangement and the inability to be at home, or fully relate, or find that elusive “voice.” Oceti Sakowin, by almost all accounts, was not a place to relax or settle in: as the medics’ reflections remind us, this was a space of exception where normal social protocols, including concern Powell and Draper: Making It Home 31  for white allies’ feelings, were recalibrated under the ev