This Movement of Movements PDF

on e This Movement of Movements The 2016 address by Robert Warrior (Osage) to the American Studies Association, delivered just after the U.S. presidential election, embodied American Studies scholarship and its rela- tionship to activism.1 He asked, “Is American studies really a ‘home’ for Na...

on e This Movement of Movements The 2016 address by Robert Warrior (Osage) to the American Studies Association, delivered just after the U.S. presidential election, embodied American Studies scholarship and its rela- tionship to activism.1 He asked, “Is American studies really a ‘home’ for Native American studies?” at the precise moment that public knowledge about the standoff at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation around the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) was at its height. Warrior channeled the concern and anger about DAPL and the election into a cultural expression of soli- darity. He ended with a Round Dance to link the audience with Standing Rock in “a big circle of solidarity and hope” that con- nected “the animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman.”2 The battles at Standing Rock are exemplary of environmental justice struggles writ large. This observation may seem obvious, but it is not a simple proposition, given the particular Native and tribal issues involved. An estimated fifteen thousand people con- vened at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation under the auspices of the #NoDAPL campaign. (The name for the people known as 25  26 / This Movement of Movements the Sioux is Oceti Sakowin, meaning Seven Council Fires.)3 Thousands planted their flags and camped in solidarity against the pipeline.4 Indigenous struggles are at the core of climate change and environmental injustice fights, both against DAPL and in other pipeline struggles. The direct actions at Standing Rock included people from almost three hundred Native nations, the largest such gathering in history.5 Protesters temporarily blocked the construction of the United States’ longest crude oil pipeline. The protests made national news when private security guards set dogs on protestors and the police used water cannons, chemical agents, and rubber bullets.6 Hundreds were arrested. Policing and violence are central features of the political authori- tarianism that attacks indigenous movements with ferocity. In January 2017, one of President Trump’s first executive orders expedited completion of DAPL and Keystone XL, another enor- mous pipeline. The Standing Rock camps were forced to disband in February. And in June, crude oil began pumping from North Dakota’s Bakken Formation to Illinois, under the Mississippi River near sacred Lakota sites.7 Despite DAPL’s construction, the fight continues. Activists have traveled or started camps across the United States, against pipeline construction and fracking opera- tions in Nebraska, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.8 Standing Rock stands for the Sioux nations and for broader struggles on Native lands against land-based violence. The fight at Standing Rock has great significance in our moment. In the context of (seemingly) ascendant capitalism, militarized vio- lence, and environmental death, #NoDAPL signifies resistance. To argue that it represents environmental justice is to engage with and answer Warrior’s question. American Studies is one ideal intellectual, albeit uncomfortable, home for environmental  This Movement of Movements / 27 justice. This dynamic, what Warrior calls home/not home, is one that we need to engage with in order to meaningfully enact solidarity between Natives and non-Natives. His invitation to encircle and embody solidarity is a task fraught with meaning, since home is not always a stable ground but can mean displace- ment, expulsion, or a space of violence and trauma. Solidarity thus depends on understanding history, power, and difference derived from settler colonialism. Environmental justice and environmental racism are limited yet essential frames for Indigenous land-based social move- ments. Native activists and Indigenous Studies have had both a foundational and contested relationship to the “people of color” frame that undergirds environmental justice movements. Native peoples and nations are not just people of color facing environ- mental racism. This distinction stems from their political and historical relationships to the United States vis-à-vis land rights and treaties. For Native peoples in settler colonial nations like the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and Israel, their dispossession from the land is the fundamental starting point for injustice. Native nations must be at the root of serious engagement with environmental justice. As Native environmen- tal justice scholar Elizabeth Hoover writes, “Indigenous com- munities have a unique stake in the history of environmental racism.” 9 #NoDAPL was primarily a youth- and women-led Native movement. Indigenous youth are at the forefront in climate jus- tice activism. Their activism is focused on connecting the present with the past and future in historically and culturally distinct ways. This chapter reappraises the histories and theories of environmental racism and the role of Native struggles as fun- damental to environmental justice, particularly in Indigenous  28 / This Movement of Movements conceptions of nature and of human and more-than-human life based on interconnection. This worldview is radically anti- capitalist. In assessing the significance of Indigenous resistance to pipelines, Julian Brave NoiseCat (Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen) and Anne Spice (Tlingit) write, “Indigenous peoples are more than cameo extras. They are central protagonists in the fight against the forces of capitalist expansion, who would destroy the land and water, and trample indigenous sovereignty, all for the purposes of resource extraction.”10 Indigenous peoples are cen- tral in this fight because of their legal status and because large reserves of natural resources are located on Native lands. Native reservations cover 2 percent of the United States, but they may contain about 20 percent of the nation’s oil and gas, along with vast coal reserves.11 Indigenous peoples represent 5 percent of the world’s population, but their lands are home to 80 percent of worldwide biodiversity and are rich with natural resources.12 Thus, Indigenous lands hold economic “value” to outsiders and are prime targets for extraction and top-down economic development.13 This chapter provides an overview of Standing Rock, drawing from activists, scholars, and allies who foreground Indigenous land rights and sovereignty claims. The chapter examines dis- possession, production, extraction, and violence to understand climate justice, war and militarism, and police violence. Standing Rock and #NoDAPL represent the possibilities and perils of sol- idarity in a moment of great disruption in the lives and lands of Native peoples. To adapt a question from Indigenous scholar Candis Callison (Tahltan), how does Standing Rock come to matter as an iconic battle for environmental justice?14 The pains wrought by the pipelines cannot be separated from Indigenous histories exacerbated and put into sharp relief by the  This Movement of Movements / 29 violent response of militarized police in the service of govern- ment and capital. Standing Rock also illustrates the psychic and cultural imaginary of environmental justice movements that provides a blueprint for cultural survival, resurgence, and soli- darity. It is an Indigenous struggle that generates solidarities between different communities of affiliation, and it is also an Oil War in which policing and violence draw poisonous breath from the War on Terror. Counterhegemony at Standing Rock and beyond is enabled through understanding history and making transformative community through art. #NoDAPL remains important for the Sioux nations, for Native nations throughout the United States and around the world, and for others who affiliate through solidarity. The protests and com- munities it created (both actual and virtual) enacted a renewed sense of possibility and purpose, in which media, arts, and cul- tural associations held special significance. Media, arts, and cul- tural associations “expand common-sense understandings and inspire a belief in collective agency, if only they have a popular connection.”15 #NoDAPL, like the Chicano movement, Zapatis- tas, Wobblies, and many others, successfully used the printed word and image in radical and open-ended ways to “imagine a more radical, non capitalist non colonial world.”16 Another world is possible. It existed, however briefly, at Standing Rock. the (many) principles of environmental justice movements In From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Envi- ronmental Justice Movement, lawyer Luke Cole and legal scholar Sheila Foster describe the “tributaries” that laid the foundation  30 / This Movement of Movements for the environmental justice movement: civil rights movements, anti-toxics campaigns, academics, the labor movement, main- stream environmentalists, and Native American struggles. They suggest that these converged to become the river that was the environmental justice movement in the 1980s.17 Reappraisals of decades of policy change, however, point to major limitations in the efficacy of the environmental justice movement, which are painfully clear in the context of federal environmental policy weighted almost entirely on the side of industry.18 To reclaim the radical heart of environmental justice, defanged by two decades of state incorporation and eviscerated at the federal level, I start where Cole and Foster leave off, their “last tributary,” the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) and transformative politics. The notion of a single environmen- tal justice movement is not accurate now (if indeed it ever was). Environmental justice movements have grown larger, diverse, and global in ways that were not readily visible in the 1980s and 1990s. The notion of Indigenous perspectives as “tributaries” to environmental justice downplays the centrality of these struggles in the United States and globally. NoiseCat and Spice write, “Indigenous worldviews, at Standing Rock, and else- where, disrupt the capitalist conception of ‘natural resources’ that sees ‘environment’ to be extracted for profit.”19 They echo the argument of political scientist Glen Coulthard (Yellow- knives/Weledeh Dene) that “For Our Nations to Live, Capital- ism Must Die.”20 Standing Rock is especially significant for the centrality of youth, who called for rejection of patriarchy, sexual violence, and corporate capitalism on what Native peoples call Turtle Island or Mother Earth. Native perspectives are central to the environmental justice movement, evidenced in the 1991 “Principles of Environmental  This Movement of Movements / 31 Justice.” In Critical Environmental Justice, sociologist David Pel- low argues that the 1991 principles are radical in that they oppose racism, patriarchy, the excesses of the state and market forces, speciesism, imperialism, and ecological harm while recognizing the inherent worth of nonhumans.21 The principles begin: we, the people of color, gathered together at this multinational People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities, do hereby re-establish our spiritual interdependence to the sacred- ness of our Mother Earth; to respect and celebrate each of our cul- tures, languages and beliefs about the natural world and our roles in healing ourselves; to ensure environmental justice; to promote economic alternatives which would contribute to the development of environmentally safe livelihoods; and, to secure our political, economic and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression, resulting in the poisoning of our communities and land and the genocide of our peoples, do affirm and adopt these Principles of Environmental Justice.22 These principles collectively ask the questions: What and where is justice for people of color and colonized peoples? What are the sources of environmental racism and injustice and what can be done to promote environmental justice? Movement activists focus on a more capacious timeline than policy-makers and scholars, arguing that the historical and cultural roots of envi- ronmental problems stem from five hundred years of coloniza- tion and racism. Environmental justice movements ideologically center agency, voice, and recognition to reject practices based on exclusion, hierarchy, and domination. Agency, voice, and recognition of history are core precepts for a more just future. This belief runs through environmental justice movement manifestos, which  32 / This Movement of Movements foreground the notion that “we speak for ourselves” and that the environment is “where we live, work, play.”23 These manifestos demonstrate the worldviews of environmental justice move- ments: the 1996 “Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing,” the 2002 “Principles of Working Together” and “Principles of the Youth Environmental Justice Movement,” the 2002 “Bali Princi- ples of Climate Justice,” and the 2008 “Principles of Climate Justice.”24 The Indigenous Environmental Network was a key player at all the historical gatherings where the various principles were hammered out.25 IEN is, in the group’s words, “an alliance of Indigenous Peoples whose Shared Mission is to Protect the Sacredness of Earth Mother from contamination and exploitation by Respecting and Adhering to Indigenous Knowledge and Nat- ural Law.”26 IEN members have a broad regional and global view of how their problems are linked to global Indigenous struggles. Indigenous communities, their lands, food sources, ways of know- ing and being in the world, and bodies—including animals, land, air and water—are at the front lines of pollution and develop- ment. Indigenous nations are oftentimes the proverbial canaries in the mine, particularly vulnerable at the first sign of danger that signals the negative health impacts of pollution to other, non- Native peoples. Environmental justice scholars have traced the environmen- tal, health, and justice implications on Native bodies and com- munities: Superfund sites and other contamination on Awke- sasne land, elevated breast-milk contamination in Arctic Native nations, nuclear dimensions (Native Navajo uranium miners, testing on Shoshone land, and burying of uranium at Yucca Mountain), cross-border (Native/non-Native and U.S./Mexico) air and water pollution, the effects of dam construction, and  This Movement of Movements / 33 other consequences. Indigenous worldviews contrast with notions of land, air, and water as environmental resources, or with capi- talist and neoliberal notions of ecosystem services based on economistic use value.27 #NoDAPL is part and parcel of these struggles. indigenous/environmental politics: standing rock in contexts In January 2016, Dakota Access LLC, owned by the Texas com- pany Energy Transfer Partners, announced approval for its application from the North Dakota Public Service Commission to transport 450,000 barrels of oil a day. That amount is more than half of the Bakken oil field’s daily crude oil production.28 DAPL transports hydraulically fractured (fracked) crude oil from North Dakota to pipelines in Illinois. Fracking is a highly contentious method of oil production because of higher risks of earthquakes, in addition to oil spills and water contamination.29 DAPL was originally planned upriver from the predomi- nantly white city of Bismarck, but the route was revised to pass upstream of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, crossing Lake Oahe, tributaries of Lake Sakakawea, the Missouri River twice, and the Mississippi River once.30 Initially, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved DAPL without a comprehensive environmental review, drawing opposition from three federal agencies, the Standing Rock Sioux, and other tribes.31 Lake Oahe is the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation’s water supply.32 Because of public attention and political pressure, on December 4, 2016, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would not approve a permit for the pipeline to run beneath Lake Oahe (reversed by President Trump’s executive order after the  34 / This Movement of Movements inauguration), but it was built and opened in early 2017.33 The legal fights continue, even as oil flows through the pipeline.34 Many concepts are critical to understanding DAPL and #NoDAPL. These include capitalism, the doctrine of discovery, Indian Wars, Manifest Destiny, neoliberalism, repatriation, and sovereignty, as identified in the #Standing Rock Syllabus, com- piled by Indigenous scholars and non-Native allies. Dispossession, production/extraction, and violence are useful starting points for understanding environmental justice at Standing Rock.35 dispossession and historical memory What does dispossession mean at Standing Rock? As NoiseCat and Spice explain, The fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline is part of a centuries- long indigenous struggle against dispossession and capitalist expansionism.... As indigenous people put their bodies on the line to resist the Dakota Access Pipeline, they are fighting for their sov- ereignty while offering an alternative relationship to land, water, and each other.”36 Scholar-activists Jaskiran Dhillon and Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux) situate DAPL as an extension of nineteenth-century Indian Wars.37 DAPL and #NoDAPL are a conflict over territorial sover- eignty and the settler colonial imperative to further dispossess Native peoples, on lands for which they have historical claims and treaty rights. Dhillon and Estes recount the histories of the region beginning from the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, through the nineteenth century, up to the 1970s and the present.38 After the buffalo were slaughtered, and the white settlers and miners came en masse, the United States turned to legislation to fur-  This Movement of Movements / 35 ther Indigenous dispossession. Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act of 1876, which abolished treaty-making, and the Black Hills Act of 1877, which illegally ceded the Black Hills and created the present-day reservation system.39 Further, in 1890, South and North Dakota exacerbated anti-Indian senti- ment in order to break up and open reservation lands for expanded settlement.40 Federal troops intervened to protect white property and killed military and political leaders such as Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, as well as more than two hundred mostly unarmed women, children, and elders at Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Wounded Knee remains the largest mass shooting in the United States. In the early 1900s, Missouri River basin states began to usurp Native water rights for large-scale irrigation projects, and they built a dam system that flooded Native lands. However, in 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court held that tribes maintained access and control of water within original treaty territory, even if that territory was diminished (known as the Winters Doctrine). The Oceti Sakowin possessed the prior claim to both the river and its shorelines, as spelled out in the Fort Lar- amie Treaties. Despite these legally recognized claims, the Flood Control Act of 1944 (also known as the Pick-Sloan Plan) authorized the Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Recla- mation to erect five dams on the main stem of the river, which targeted and disproportionately destroyed Native lands and lives, and four of which flooded the lands of the Oceti Sakowin. Inundation forced more than a thousand Native families to relo- cate in violation of treaties and without their consent. The Army Corps of Engineers claimed sole jurisdiction over the river and its shoreline. In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the United States was wrong in breaking the terms of the Fort Laramie  36 / This Movement of Movements Treaty of 1868. The court awarded eight Sioux tribes $106 million in compensation. They have refused to accept the settlement, because they want their land returned (as of 2011, the accounts were valued at $1 billion).41 The region has also been a central site of Indigenous resur- gence and resistance to the U.S. settler state.42 Estes recounts the 1973 American Indian Movement (AIM) occupation at Wounded Knee in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The occupation was the catalyst for a mass gathering at Standing Rock in 1974, which resulted in the founding of the International Indian Treaty Council. More than ninety Native nations from around the world built the foundations of what would become four dec- ades of work at the United Nations and the basis for the 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.43 standing rock as environmental justice Standing Rock aligns with environmental justice movement framing around siting or moving polluting facilities to poorer, nonwhite, and politically weaker communities. The environ- mental justice movement began organizing in response to the realities that poor communities, often with more people of color, are particularly vulnerable to polluting facilities. Jan Hasselman of Earthjustice and lead attorney for the Standing Rock Sioux says, “Environmental justice is at the heart of this issue, and it’s at the heart of our litigation.” 44 Civil rights icon and politician Rev. Jesse Jackson joined DAPL protesters in North Dakota, calling the pipeline reroute “the ripest case of environmental racism I’ve seen in a long time.” 45 In April 2016, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard (Standing Rock Sioux) cofounded the Sacred Stone Camp on her land and invited  This Movement of Movements / 37 people to defend it through direct action.46 The Sacred Stone Camp zine announced the formation of a group of tribal citizens of the Standing Rock Lakota Nation and ally Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota citizens under the group name Chante tin’sa kinanzi Po! (People, Stand with a Strong Heart!). Their mission state- ment quotes Chief Sitting Bull: “They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.” It continues: His way of life is our way of life—standing in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline is our duty.... The Dakota Access threat- ens everything from farming and drinking water to entire ecosys- tems, wildlife and food sources surrounding the Missouri. The nesting of bald eagles and piping plovers as well as the quality of wild rice and medicinal plants like sweet grass are just a few of the species at stake here. We ask that everyone stands with us against this threat to our health, our culture, and our sovereignty. We ask that everyone who live on or near the Missouri River and its tribu- taries, everyone who farms or ranches in the local area, and every- one who cares about clean air and clean drinking water stand with us against the Dakota Access Pipeline!47 Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota conceptions of way of life includes health, culture, and sovereignty. There is no separation between the land and what happened and happens in and on it. Elizabeth Hoover, in her study of Akwesasne activism against toxics contamination, explains how interconnection works materially. Industrial environmental contamination, histories of settler colo- nialism, and food are linked because “rural and Indigenous com- munities often rely on the immediate environment as their main source of food.” 48 Interconnection is also linked to Indigenous origin stories, worldviews, bodies, and practices.  38 / This Movement of Movements Flooding represents a destruction of sacred sites and burial grounds not just to the Sioux, but also the Arikara, the Mandan, and the Northern Cheyenne.49 The Standing Rock Sioux sued the Army Corps of Engineers in July 2016, charging that the Corps violated the Clean Water Act, the National Historic Pres- ervation Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. More than 380 archeological sites face desecration along the DAPL route. As Allard explains, the pipeline was going to be next to where her son is buried.50 She says: I was a young girl when the floods came and desecrated our burial sites and Sundance grounds. Our people are in that water. This river holds the story of my entire life.... Look north and east now, toward the construction sites where they plan to drill under the Missouri River any day now, and you can see the old Sundance grounds, burial grounds, and Arikara vil- lage sites that the pipeline would destroy. Below the cliffs you can see the remnants of the place that made our sacred stones.51 For Allard, there is no separation between the past and the present, between the living and the dead, and between environ- ment, home, and place. The core precepts of the environmental justice movement that “we speak for ourselves” and the “envi- ronment is where we live, work, play, and pray” are violated by DAPL and are central to Standing Rock activism. Native youth were key to making Standing Rock matter to non-Natives. The first public action came from a group of youth who, in May 2016, ran a five-hundred-mile spiritual relay. They ran from Cannonball, North Dakota, to the Army Corps of Engineers office in Omaha, Nebraska. According to Jasilyn Charger (Cheyenne River Sioux), “I run for every man, woman and child that was, that is, and for those who will come to be.... I run for my life, because I want to live.”52 After the pipeline was  This Movement of Movements / 39 approved, the youth followed with a two-thousand-mile run in August 2016 from North Dakota to Washington, D.C., where they rallied on the steps of the Supreme Court.53 Using school- based presentations, legal challenges,54 eco hip-hop, and public talks, Indigenous youth highlight their voices emerging from the rural and urban front lines.55 mni wiconi (water is life) and gender/ environment Standing Rock can be understood through the phrase Mni Wiconi—Water Is Life. Standing Rock is about a relatively new way to extract oil from the land (hydraulic fracking) for the pur- pose of profit for oil corporations. Discourses and policies that use the notions of environmental resources and ecosystem services base the environment’s worth on utilitarian conceptions of market and exchange value. The conflict between Native peoples and corporations also matter, both historically and in the present.56 Indigenous worldviews toward nature are not based on extraction to the point of no repair. The natural world is not seen as a “service” for humans, in part because peoples are part of the landscape. Craig Howe (Lakota), Tyler Young, Edward Valandra (Lakota), and Kim TallBear (Dakota) explain the ori- gins of Mni Wiconi—Water Is Life: Mni Sose [the Missouri River] is not a thing that is quantifiable according to possessive logics. Mni Sose is a relative: the Mni Oyate, the Water Nation. She is alive. Nothing owns her. Thus, the popular Lakotayapi assertion “Mni Wiconi”—water is life or, more accurately, water is alive. You do not sell your relative.57 LaDonna Allard says, “We are the river and the river is us.”58 According to poet Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota),  40 / This Movement of Movements People from around the world, from the Pacific Islands to the Mid- dle East to Europe, called out in the Lakota language, “Mni- Wiconi!” It is this sensibility that is important to the present: water is not a “resource,” it’s not a ”utility,” it’s not negotiable. Rather, it is sacred.... Without water, there is no life. Simple. True. Resonant, down to our very cells.59 Standing Rock was framed explicitly not as a message about environmentalism but framed by Native peoples as water protectors. Water protectors stand within a particular historical and cultural tradition, specifically a Lakota prophecy about a black snake that slithers across the land, desecrating sacred sites and poisoning the water before destroying the Earth. DAPL is that black snake. According to Dave Archambault, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, “There was a prophecy saying that there is a black snake above ground. And what do we see? We see black highways across the nation. There’s also a prophecy that when that black snake goes underground, it’s going to be devastating to the Earth.” 60 Native relations to the land are founded on an explicitly gen- dered relationship. The relationship between the interconnected land and body is central to environmental justice and Native activ- ism. Feminist scholar Traci Voyles suggests that the relationship between environment and gender exists because of social roles and histories of settler colonialism.61 Joe Amik Syrette (Anishinaabe) says, “The water that comes from Mother Earth is like her blood, which gives life.” He continues, “A lot of our teaching is to respect all women,” which is connected to the ability to bear children in water. This respect is why “for myself to be here, it’s a representa- tion of all of the women in my life. Starting with my ancestors, to my grandmother, my mother, my wife, my sister, my daughters.”62 According to Jackie Fielder (Lakota/Mandan/Hidatsa), a divestment organizer with Mazaska Talks (Money Talks, which  This Movement of Movements / 41 works to defund oil pipelines), women have been the backbone of #NoDAPL: “We are only as strong as our indigenous women, and when they don’t feel safe, the whole community is in danger.... Mother Earth is feminine and it’s definitely our duty to make that heard and do what we can to bring the elements back into balance.” 63 Several Standing Rock activists highlight the relationship between environmental abuse and domestic violence. According to Siera Siera Begaye (Diné), The first time I was given a platform to speak on sexual assault and abuse was at Standing Rock. I was a part of a march called Kik Ta! Wake Up, a project led by Rebecca Nagle and other Native women. It was another step of healing for me, my sisters, and our Nahas- dzáán (Mother Earth). The parallels between the abuse that our Mother Earth goes through and the abuse our Native women go through is heartbreaking. She is our life-giver. She is who we turn to, to pray. Praying, surviving, being with all of our indigenous peoples is a step on our continuous journey to healing.64 Analytically and experientially, these activists link how the abuse of the Earth and of women are connected.65 By linking sexual, reproductive, environmental health, and intergenerational jus- tice, Native women and youth activists build upon Indigenous land-based activism and take it in generative directions.66 standing rock as violence and policing The violent responses to #NoDAPL and the prosecutions of protestors are emblematic of punishment and policing under the expanding security-settler state. On November 20, 2016, North Dakota police officers used water cannons on hundreds of pro- testers, sending twenty-six people to hospitals.67 Police used  42 / This Movement of Movements sponge rounds, beanbag rounds, stinger rounds, tear gas gre- nades (banned in some states), pepper spray, mace, Tasers, and a sound weapon, and private security forces set dogs on activists. More than three hundred people were injured.68 In addition to physical violence, intimidation persisted. State authoritarian tactics included arresting protestors for attempted murder and threatening to prosecute journalists reporting the story.69 Six Native activists faced federal civil disorder charges that could have led to a maximum fifteen years in prison (they settled, but the longest sentence was almost five years).70 Hundreds of charges were brought by state prosecutors, some of which remain unresolved in early 2019.71 A proposed North Dakota bill sought to protect drivers from any legal consequences if they hit, injure, or kill pedestrians who are obstructing traffic. This was one of eight- een state bills proposed after Standing Rock, to criminalize dis- sent, including bans on face masks, seizing assets of protestors, and expelling students.72 Energy Transfer Partners filed a suit that claims that Greenpeace and its partners are engaged in a criminal network of fraud and misinformation. The complaint, with refer- ences to “wolfpacks of corrupt” environmental organizations, uses the anti-mafia RICO Act and anti-defamation laws to wage a “scorched-earth campaign” against #NoDAPL.73 Like the animal rights movement and Black Lives Matter (classified as an “identity extremist group”), Indigenous movements are painted as high- security risks in the United States and other nations.74 standing rock as transformative politics and solidarities Standing Rock represents transformative politics for non-Native allies. Standing Rock became a temporary home for fellow (lit-  This Movement of Movements / 43 eral and ideological) travelers who reject the economics, poli- tics, and ideologies of DAPL. Joining the fight at Standing Rock and #NoDAPL solidarity meant offering bodies as a form of material support and as a witness to police and state violence. In September 2016, Black Lives Matter (BLM) issued a statement that there is “no Black liberation without Indigenous Solidarity.” The statement reads, Environmental racism is not limited to pipelines on Indigenous land because we know that the chemicals used for fracking and the materials used to build pipelines are also used in water contain- ment and sanitation plants in black communities like Flint, Michi- gan. These same companies that build pipelines are the same companies that build factories that emit carcinogenic chemicals into Black communities.75 Struggles for BLM and Standing Rock are linked in their defense against ideologies that refuse, as scholar-writer-artist Leanne Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishaabeg) writes, “to see indigenous and black people as fully human.” This inability to see black peo- ple as human, known as anti-blackness, is “intrinsically linked to the genocide, white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, and colonial- ism used to maintain the dispossession of indigenous people from our homelands on Turtle Island and to erase our bodies from society.”76 LaDonna Allard’s call to come to Sacred Stone Camp is an example of a transformative call to make a temporary home, whose inhabitants intentionally live their solidarity and com- munity. Journalist-artist Sarain Fox (Anishinaabe) describes the power of embodied solidarity: For me, it was one of the first times in my life that I could look around and say, “Oh, this is the living, breathing example of exactly what Indigenous people have been fighting for: the right to be and  44 / This Movement of Movements live off the land.... You could show up at Standing Rock with noth- ing, just the shirt on your back, and you would be provided with food and shelter. That’s really, really beautiful. So many people must have felt a longing for a place they maybe never had.77 Robin Kelley, speaking of black freedom movement histories, explains how solidarity is made: Comradeship is not built on some metaphysics of race or some shared experience of oppression. Comrades are made in struggle, and they are never numerous and they don’t necessarily look like us.... Yes, we’re real with real desires and cultures and (contested) beliefs and histories, but we are forced to always remake ourselves in rela- tion to Others, to whiteness, to racism/sexism/homophobia. People of Color is not an identity but a relationship defined by racism, dis- possession and imperialism. I’m not saying we’re just “people” or making some claim to universalism, but rather we need to recog- nize that as long as “difference” is structured in dominance, we are not free and we are not “made.” Making revolution requires mak- ing new identities, and that means new relationships and learning from each other.78 Making new identities was central to Standing Rock. According to Lewis Grasshope (Standing Rock Sioux), “You felt the power of this place, the romanticism most people came here to fulfill. A lot of people came to protect Mother Earth, to give their lives selflessly for it. And that’s what will happen.”79 That sense of community and optimism, the making of a temporary home in the face of violence and destruction, is why the details of how to live, eat, and shelter became a large part of media and activist accounts of Standing Rock. However, dominant ideologies—such as racism and charges of cultural appropriation—did not disappear magically. To expect otherwise is naïve.80 Conflicts over cultural appropria-  This Movement of Movements / 45 tion in the inability to center Native perspectives and empty romanticism were certainly part of Standing Rock.81 Regardless, moments of transformation and solidarity are worth recounting. Palestinian youth and Indigenous leaders from Ecuador came to Standing Rock. Thousands of military veterans convened.82 Sol- idarity actions and events continued throughout the summer and fall of 2016, including hundreds on November 15, when activ- ists in three hundred cities around the world participated in a #NoDAPL Day of Action. transnational visions for a just transition The ideological visions offered at Standing Rock are among the most important legacies of #NoDAPL. Transformative politics, nonviolent direction action, and the solidarities—however fraught and temporary—offer a vision counterposed against the extractive one embodied by DAPL.83 The visions and actions at Standing Rock answer, both explicitly and implicitly, the ques- tion often leveled at social justice movements: what are you fighting for? Standing Rock activism was explicitly multinational, against transnational oil and gas corporations. It was the Lakota nation standing up for Indigenous rights worldwide. Standing Rock lies on the front lines of a climate justice movement, one that seeks to “Keep it (oil, coal and gas) in the ground.”84 The Indigenous Environmental Network is a key player in the Keep It in the Ground coalition as a component of its environmental justice, just transition, and climate justice organizing.85 Just transition means moving to a “lower carbon economy that recognizes the trade-offs between... competing needs and priorities (such as  46 / This Movement of Movements energy poverty in the developing world) and seeks to address them in an equitable manner.”86 The central idea of a just transi- tion is that a lower-carbon future takes politics and justice seri- ously, including (but not limited to) energy access, historical patterns of development, and violence.87 Environmental justice organizations have been at the forefront of just transition theo- rizing, legal actions, and policy-making.88 IEN’s “Indigenous Principles of Just Transition” are worth highlighting. Developed around the same time as the protests at Standing Rock, the twenty-five principles detail the Indigenous values essential to the just transition, climate, and environmen- tal justice movements. The opening principle reads, A Just Transition affirms the need for restoring indigenous life ways of responsibility and respect to the sacred Creation Principles and Natural Laws of Mother Earth and Father Sky, to live in peace with each other and to ensure harmony with nature, the Circle of Life, and within all Creation.89 This is an Indigenous-led vision, one that many non-Natives can connect to as intuitively powerful in defending worlds and worldviews that are under active and vicious attack. making art, making community Six weeks after the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines resumed construction, the Whitney Museum held an event called “Words for Water.” It was a gathering of Native women artists (Natalie Diaz, Heid Erdrich, Louise Erdrich, Jennifer Elise Foer- ster, Joy Harjo, Toni Jensen, Deborah A. Miranda, Laura Ortman, and Layli Long Soldier) who presented written and musical pieces in honor of the land, water, and people working to protect them.90 During moments of heightened violence, as well as intergenera-  This Movement of Movements / 47 tional trauma, including the physical destruction of cultures, lan- guages, ways of life, and land itself, art is a indispensable feature of creative sustenance and renewal. Sarain Fox describes the vitality of the arts and how art was made and distributed at Stand- ing Rock, including the Art Action camp.91 Many examples can be found online and are part of a long tradition of environmental justice art and activism. For example, Justseeds, a collective of artists that makes and distributes images for social movement purposes, created and widely distributed important visual work focused on anti-extraction and anti-pipeline imagery.92 Standing Rock matters because of how activists made mean- ing there and continue to connect their struggles together. Gen- ova Ariel (Mexica) lays out the stakes in terms of connection and solidarities for urban youth of color: A win here [at Standing Rock] will set a strong foundation for BLM [Black Lives Matter], [against] gentrification, and anti-deportation struggles in America.... Youth [from Chicago] represented strong at the front lines and continue to support the movement at the No Line 3 Makwa Initiative in Minnesota, against uranium mining at the Wind Caves in South Dakota, and the Keystone XL pipeline in ND.93 The structural ties between climate justice, gentrification, and solidarities between communities that seem different from one another (urban/rural, African American/Native) are made by activists who draw connections for outsiders or others who see things in terms of single issues. The connections circle back to Robert Warrior’s question of home/not home and the relationship of American Studies to Indigenous Studies. What is home? To whom? What can be done about displacement and destruction? Who is displacing whom—why and how? Is gentrification similar to and/or  48 / This Movement of Movements different from pipeline struggles or climate change? For poor people and people of color, their precarity threatens their abil- ity to continue to live in the places they made home after his- torical traumas such as post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow in the South, the destruction of countries due to U.S. foreign pol- icy (Southeast Asia or Central America), or economic develop- ment (Operation Bootstrap in Puerto Rico). This problem is an important one, especially as gentrification in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Oakland, Boston, and San Francisco accelerates and contributes to displacement and wid- ening economic inequalities. In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, real- estate developers took over what was historically known as the Bush Terminal, a group of seven massive buildings on the water- front that was the iconic site of a Brooklyn industrial develop- ment. The new developers called it Jamestown (colonial ironies unremarked) and partnered with other investors to buy a con- trolling interest in the site from the previous owners, who had defaulted in the wake of the severe damage from Superstorm Sandy.94 The community group UPROSE objects to the corporate developers’ plans on gentrification grounds. UPROSE has devel- oped a community-based climate resiliency plan grounded in social, ethical, and nonextractive relationships.95 Environmental justice for UPROSE takes climate, capitalism, and racial justice seriously and together.96 UPROSE is at the forefront of culture, education, and activism around climate justice, anti-gentrification, and just transition struggles, most recently as host of a Climate Justice Youth Summit, billed as “the largest gathering of young people of color discussing the future of climate change in the country.” 97 Hundreds of young people watched a “Culture Not  This Movement of Movements / 49 Consumption” fashion show that received national attention. They ran discussion groups tracing out the linkages between policing, climate refugees, and gentrification. They connected youth justice movements, which bring together issues seen as separate but that the youth activists argue are fused through existing political and economic institutions that devalue the lives of the poor, people of color and young people around the world.98 What are the impacts and continuing legacies of Standing Rock? #NoDAPL’s successes can be understood in the realm of coun- terhegemonic ideologies, specifically in community transforma- tion, just transition, and solidarities. According to Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip), Standing Rock lit a fire in so many of us. Maybe it was because we finally got the opportunity to tangibly feel an entirely indigenous reality. Camp did that for us. And when we left, we were able to take that feeling back into our communities and plant seeds of hope for a better future.99 Naelyn Pike (Chiricahua Apache/San Carlos Apache) said, We are fighting the invisible, and that is greed and power. In this time of chaos, it will be the youth who will give us energy to carry the fight and the wisdom given to us by our ancestors that will hold us to our roots. This is only the beginning. LaDonna Allard, who started Sacred Stone Camp, echoes Wilbur and Pike: “That’s where I have difficulty with things. People say, ‘oh, the movement’s over.’ But it’s still my home. I’m not going anywhere. I’m still fighting. I’m only done when that pipeline is dug out of that ground. I’ve only just begun.” And IEN’s Dallas Goldtooth explains,  50 / This Movement of Movements Standing Rock is not only a milestone on the road toward indige- nous rights, recognition, and self-determination, it is a beacon for all our collective struggles in this country that are engaging in resistance. It inspired us to stand up to protect our communities, to not falter in the face of militarized police brutality, to reject the status quo of white supremacy, and to continue to build this move- ment of movements. The Black Lives Matter statement of solidarity reminds us of the significance of #NoDAPL as a “movement of movements.” It reads: “Water protectors who are protesting DAPL are engaged in a crucial fight against big oil for our collective human rights.... This is a fight for all of us and we must stand with our family at Standing Rock.”100 BLM urges us to see how the fight to stop pipelines at Standing Rock is tied to the lead-contaminated pipes in Flint, Michigan. The victims of greed and power in the United States are not just Indigenous and black communities, but the agents of greed and power are particularly merciless when it comes to those bodies at risk. And everyone suffers as a result, as we see in the next chapter on water injustice.