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Standing Rock is Everywhere: The Indigenous Heart of the Climate Change Fight

September 10, 2021

Standing Rock is Everywhere: The Indigenous Heart of the Climate Change Fight

This is a story of victory for the earth and of the end of the Keystone XL pipeline. It also involves the Dakota Access pipeline and the Standing Rock Lakota reservation, indeed the entire world, all of which is threatened by our desperate last burst of fossil fuel exploitation. It is a story of what the dogged persistence and creativity of indigenous people and their allies can do against the kind of power we’ve been told is impossible to resist. But it’s a story without a guaranteed ending. The ending depends on us.

In 2004, small indigenous nations living near the Alberta Tar Sands project, the largest unconventional oil extraction effort in the world, began reaching out for help. Not only was the project interfering with their water, fishing, and hunting infrastructure, but rare and unusual cancers were appearing. They contacted policy experts at the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) in Washington, D.C., who met with them in 2005 and saw photographic documentation of the devastation. These experts began to gather data and to raise awareness in the United States, on whose special refineries the project relied. Experts focused on the unique risks posed by tar sands at every stage of production, including extraction, transportation, and refinement. It wasn’t enough, but without the testimony and photographs supplied by indigenous people, experts would not have noticed for some time.

In 2008, approximately two dozen people from indigenous nations and environmental activist groups met to develop an overall strategy. The groups decided that the most promising activist target was the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline, proposed by the giant TransCanada (now TC Energy) corporation to move the tar sands to refineries on the Texas Gulf Coast. Stopping the pipeline would rob the Tar Sands project of financial justification…

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Paying Politicians to Criminalize Protests

December 5, 2020

Paying Politicians to Criminalize Protests

A few years ago, massive protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock changed the popular narrative about what climate activism looked like. The protests made clear that ramming dangerous pipelines through vulnerable communities wasn’t going to be easy anymore.

But since then, rather than scaling back their attacks on these communities, the fossil fuel industry decided to attack them even more fiercely.

Indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock were subject to a violent law enforcement response. They were blasted with water cannons in the freezing cold and faced down by heavily armed police in military vehicles.

Now the industry wants to criminalize anti-fossil fuel protests altogether, pushing new laws that turn routine acts of civil disobedience into serious felonies. They’ve found willing partners in the American Legislative Action Council (ALEC). Industry and ALEC efforts have passed such laws in 13 states.

My colleague Gabrielle Colchete and I studied these anti-protest laws in our recent report, “Muzzling Dissent: How Corporate Influence Over Politics Has Fueled Anti-Protest Laws.”

We focused on three states: Louisiana and West Virginia, where these laws have been passed, and Minnesota, where bills have been introduced numerous times (one even passed the legislature, but was vetoed by the governor).

In all three states, controversial fossil fuel infrastructure has faced significant resistance from affected communities. And in every case, the fossil fuel industry has been a major source of campaign money for the legislators who introduced these bills.

For example, in Louisiana, the lead sponsor of the anti-protest bill received $6,600 from oil and gas interests, the third highest of 40 industry sectors he received campaign contributions from. And in West Virginia, the lead sponsor of the anti-protest bill received substantial contributions from Dominion Energy, owner of the failed Atlantic Coast Pipeline project that passed through the state.

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The Infiltrator

December 30, 2018

THE INFILTRATOR

How an Undercover Oil Industry Mercenary Tricked Pipeline Opponents Into Believing He Was One of Them

A former Marine working for the private security firm TigerSwan infiltrated an array of anti-Dakota Access pipeline groups at Standing Rock and beyond.

JESSE HORNE STILL struggles to talk about the day he was kicked out of the anti-Dakota Access pipeline movement. It had been an intense week. Searching for direction and ideological fulfillment ever since Iowa’s stand against the pipeline wound down, the 20-year-old had reconnected with some of the state’s more radical pipeline opponents, and the group was now taking on drone warfare. After a protest outside a drone base in Des Moines in which Horne and several others were arrested, two of his fellow activists, Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya, sat him down and told him to stay away.

“They were asking me if I was an infiltrator,” Horne told The Intercept. “My response was absolutely not.”

There was a lot Horne says he didn’t know at the time — for one, that Reznicek and Montoya had recently been involved in a series of acts of pipeline sabotage. Between March and May 2017, above-ground valves along the Dakota Access pipeline in Iowa and South Dakota were pierced with welding torches, creating new costs for the pipeline company, Energy Transfer, and sending its security personnel into a frenzy. A few weeks after their conversation with Horne, the two women would claim responsibility for the sabotage.

Another thing Horne says he didn’t know: that someone he considered a “brother in the cause” was indeed an infiltrator. For months, a man calling himself Joel Edwards had posed as a pipeline opponent, attending protests, befriending water protectors, and paying for hotel rooms, supplies, and booze.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Lessons from the front lines of anti-colonial pipeline resistance

October 18, 2017

Lessons from the front lines of anti-colonial pipeline resistance

A bridge leads to the entrance of the Unist’ot’en territory in British Columbia, Canada. (WNV/Jeff Nicholls)

The Standing Rock standoff over the Dakota Access Pipeline was a reminder that colonization, and resistance to it, both exist in the present tense. Fossil fuel pipelines that despoil indigenous lands and waters have become key flashpoints in long-standing anti-colonial resistance.

An important precursor and inspiration for the Standing Rock camp is an indigenous occupation in northern British Columbia, Canada. For the past eight years, the Unist’ot’en clan have reoccupied their traditional territory. When the camp began in 2009, seven pipelines had been proposed to cross their territory, as well as their water source, the salmon-bearing Morice River. But thanks to Unist’ot’en resistance, oil and gas companies have been blocked from building new fossil fuel infrastructure. The lesser known but wildly successful Unist’ot’en encampment holds crucial lessons for anti-pipeline and anti-colonial organizers across North America, or Turtle Island, as many indigenous nations call it.

We visited the occupation this summer. Upon arriving, visitors must undergo a border-crossing protocol. There is only one way in and out of Unist’ot’en territory – a bridge that crosses the Morice River. Before being allowed to cross, we were asked where we came from, whether we worked for the government or the fossil fuel industry, and how our visit could benefit the Unist’ot’en.

We explained that we are both settlers, people living on and benefiting from indigenous lands. We also expressed our willingness to help in whatever ways were needed during our stay, such as kitchen duty, gardening and construction. Finally, we shared our commitment to decolonization and climate justice, and our appreciation for how Unist’ot’en land defense accomplishes both; it returns indigenous lands to indigenous peoples while blocking fossil fuel infrastructure that threatens the entire human estate. After a short consultation, clan members welcomed us to leave Canada and cross into Unist’ot’en territory.

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