In a surprise development, a convoy of more than two thousand military veterans had also come to Standing Rock to stand with the Sioux, prepared to face off against their fellow uniformed officers if need be. The veterans said they had taken an oath “to serve and protect” the Constitution. And after seeing footage of peaceful Indigenous water protectors being brutally attacked by security dogs, blasted with water cannons in subzero temperatures, and fired on with rubber bullets, pepper spray, and bean-bag rounds, these vets had decided that the duty to protect now required that they stand up to the government which had once sent them to war.
By the time I arrived, the network of camps had swelled to roughly ten thousand people, living in hundreds upon hundreds of tents, tepees, and yurts. Dozens of kids were sledding down a snowy hill. The main camp was a hive of calm, nonstop activity. Volunteer cooks served meals to thousands, trucks arriving with fresh ingredients all day. Young media-makers, world-famous musicians, and Hollywood actors were filing continuous dispatches about the latest developments, exposing their huge followings to the drama of the standoff. Seminars on decolonization and nonviolence were happening in the larger tents and a geodesic dome. A group of drummers was gathered around the sacred fire, tending to the flames so they were never extinguished.
Down the road, the newly arrived vets were setting up camp with impressive speed, employing skills honed on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, for a few, Vietnam. It struck me that the last time I had spent this much time with US military personnel was in Baghdad, where young men and women in these same uniforms were sent in to occupy a country that just so happened to have one of the world’s largest reserves of crude oil. After all the times American soldiers have been called upon to protect oil and gas wealth and to wage war on Indigenous people at home and abroad, it was unbearably moving to see these soldiers show up, voluntarily and unarmed, to join an Indigenous-led fight to stop yet another water-poisoning, climate-destabilizing fossil fuel project.
One of my first conversations at Standing Rock was with legendary Lakota elder LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, who in many ways had got all this resistance going when she opened the first camp on her land, the Sacred Stone Camp. That was in April 2016. Eight months later, here she was, eyes still sparkling, betraying not a bit of fatigue despite playing den mother to thousands of people who had come from across the world to be part of this historic movement.
She told me that the camp had become a home and a community to hundreds and then thousands. It had also become a field hospital—for those injured by the police attacks, and also those psychically frightened by what Trump’s rise was already unleashing.
Learning by Living
Brave Bull Allard, who is the official historian of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, said that, most of all, the encampment had become a school—for Indigenous youth seeking to connect more deeply with their own culture, to live on the land and in ceremony, and also for non-Indigenous people who realized that the moment called for skills and knowledge most of us don’t have.
“My grandkids can’t believe how little some of the white people know,” she told me, laughing, but without judgment. “They come running: ‘Grandma! The white people don’t know how to chop wood! Can we teach them?’ I say, ‘Yes, teach them.’?” Brave Bull Allard herself patiently taught hundreds of visitors what she considered basic survival skills: how to use sage as a natural disinfectant, how to stay warm and dry in North Dakota’s vicious storms (“everyone needs at least six tarps,” she declared sternly).
She told me she had come to understand that, although stopping the pipeline was crucial, there was something greater at work in this convergence. She said the camps were now a place where Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike were learning to live in relationship and community with the land. And for her, it was not just the hard skills that mattered. This moment was also about exposing visitors to the traditions and ceremonies that had been kept alive despite hundreds of years of genocidal attacks on Indigenous people and culture. This, she told me, is why the traditions survived the onslaught. “We knew this day was coming—the unification of all the tribes….We are here to protect the earth and the water. This is why we are still alive. To do this very thing we are doing. To help humanity answer its most pressing question: how do we live with the earth again, not against it?”
And this teaching needs to happen fast, she said—climate disruption is kicking in. If non-Indigenous people don’t start to learn how to take care of earth’s life-sustaining systems, then we are all cooked. With this in mind, Brave Bull Allard saw the camps as just the beginning. After the pipeline was defeated, she said, the Standing Rock Sioux needed to turn themselves into a model for green energy and sustainable living.
This vision of a movement not just resisting but modeling and teaching the way forward is shared by many of the movement’s key figures, including Standing Rock Sioux tribal council member Cody Two Bears. Dressed in a red sweatshirt with the word Warrior emblazoned in black letters, he talked about the early days of European presence on these lands, when his ancestors educated the visitors on how to survive in a harsh and unfamiliar climate. “We taught them how to grow food, keep warm, build longhouses.” But the taking never ended, from the earth and from Indigenous people. And now, Two Bears says, “things are getting worse. So the first people of this land have to teach this country how to live again. By going green, by going renewable, by using the blessings the Creator has given us: the sun and the wind. We are going to start in Native country. And we’re going to show the rest of the country how to live.”
Age of the Protectors
At Standing Rock, I found myself thinking a lot about what it means to be a protector. Leaders of the movement here had insisted from day one that they were not “protesters” out to make trouble, but “water protectors” determined to stop a whole other order of trouble. And then there were all the vets in tshirts that said To Serve and Protect, deciding that living up to that oath meant putting themselves on the front line to protect the rights of the continent’s First Peoples. And I thought about my own duty to be a protector—of my son, and his friends, and the kids yet to come, in the face of the rocky future we’ve locked in for all of them.