Protest in Progress/Progress in Protest

The Meaning of Standing RockOn Imperialism, Indigeneity, Industrialization, and Imagination Sebastian Felix Braun (bio) Our History Is Our Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. By Nick Estes. London: Verso, 2019. 310 pp. Maps, photographs, notes, index. $26.95 hardcover. Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice. By Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. x + 311 pp. Map, photographs, notes, index. $24.95 paper. Standoff: Standing Rock, the Bundy Movement, and the Story of Occupation, Sovereignty, and the Fight for Sacred Lands. By Jacqueline Keeler. Salt Lake City: Torrey House Press, 2021. 236 pp. $19.95 paper. Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement. Edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. i + 420 pp. Maps, photographs, notes, references, index. $100.00 hardcover; $24.95 paper. "Standing Rock" became a trope in 2016. People stood with Standing Rock, went to Standing Rock, talked about Standing Rock, watched Standing Rock, fought for Standing Rock, wept for Standing Rock, and collected money for Standing Rock. Before that, Standing Rock was a place: the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, home to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Interrupting the border between North and South Dakota, its communities are mostly Lakota (Hunkpapa) and Dakota (Yanktonai) speakers. One of the Ihanktowanna communities is Cannon Ball, the northernmost community. It is not far from there that "Standing Rock" originated in 2016. Apart from its real presence in camps on and off the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, "Standing Rock" existed mostly, however, in cyberspace. This community reached out through social media and the internet, and eventually spanned the globe. As it expanded, it also changed. Many people who stood with Standing Rock had never heard of the actual place. Standing Rock became a feeling, a statement in its own right, a symbol, a manifesto. The reason for all the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at this point was the Corps of Engineers' responsibility to issue a permit for the pipeline to cross the Missouri River, now Lake Oahe. Since 2016, articles and books have been written, documentaries screened, and lawsuits filed over the meaning of Standing Rock. Here, I will discuss four of these books. Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys's Black Snake depicts the events surrounding the protests [End Page 147] from the perspective and through the experiences of four women, all involved in leadership roles. It sees Standing Rock as a fight for environmental justice and includes sections on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, further north on the Missouri River. Fort Berthold was, in 2016, reaping rewards and negative consequences from the Bakken oil boom. Jaqueline Keeler's Standoff compares Standing Rock to another occupation, the takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Both spoke out against the federal government, although one was inspired by Native connections with the land and the other by antigovernmental militia philosophy. Nick Estes's Our History Is Our Future attempts to put Standing Rock into a continuous line of Indigenous resistance. From this perspective, it is simply the latest incident in an ongoing conflict between two incompatible societies—the Oceti Sakowin on one side, standing for Indigeneity, and the United States on the other, standing for settler colonialism. Finally, Standing with Standing Rock is an edited volume combining thoughts about and surrounding Standing Rock. It reflects a variety of different perspectives about "Standing Rock," its contributors allowed to speak for themselves. The trope of Standing Rock becomes perhaps most obvious with the realization that none of the books are truly about the protests at the Cannonball River. While some of them go into some detail about the actual events—Black Snake most fully—they all use the protests as an example for larger issues and in turn engage in meaning making for the protests from these different perspectives. This is not a coincidence. Like the events at the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, which most commentators about Standing Rock use for comparison, after the camps were dismantled there seems to be no real lasting consequence. To prevent the hardships and violence people endured from being meaningless, they...

Animal activists sometimes engage in vigils and acts of witnessing as forms of political protest. For example, the Animal Save Movement, a global activist network, regards witnessing the suffering of non-human animals as a moral duty of veganism. The act of witnessing is intended to non-violently communicate both attitudes and principles. These forms of activism are unlike other forms of protest, relying for much of their force upon passive, non-confrontational actions. This article explores the ethical character of vigils and witnessing in order to evaluate their role in animal rights activism. It argues that the love-based ethic behind the Animal Save Movement's form of witnessing is overly demanding, overly expansive and overly deferential towards wrongdoers. In its place, this article offers a narrower account of witnessing, detached from controversial spiritual elements. Vigils and conscious acts of witnessing, it is claimed, are political acts aimed at fulfilling duties to seek justice for non-human animals.

This guide accompanies the following article : The Animal Rights Movement in Theory and Practice: A Review of the Sociological Literature, Compass 6/2 (2012): pp. 166–181, 10.1111/j.1751‐9020.2011.00440.x Author’s introduction The animal rights movement has been described as one of the most neglected and misunderstood social movements of our era. However, social movement scholars are beginning to realise the political and moral significance of the world wide animal protection movement at a time when nature itself has been included in the specialist field of environmental sociology. Just as people are beginning to see that nature matters and is not separate from society, nonhuman animals (hereafter animals) too are increasingly perceived as worthy of our respect and consideration. The long‐running animal protection movement which began in England in the 18th century is today better known as the animal rights movement. It is the men and women of this movement who, atypically for a social movement, are campaigning for a species that is not their own. The movement’s theories and practices are important for what they do for animals and also because of what the animal rights controversy reveals about human beings. Author recommends Garner, Robert. 1998. Political Animals: Animal Protection Policies in Britain and the United States. London: Macmillan Press Ltd. The book describes the progress made by the animal protection movement in the two countries where animal rights protests have been most prominent. The author presents a comprehensive examination of animal welfare policies in Britain and the US thus providing an informative comparative study of the movement’s relationship with the state in these two countries. Garner’s focus on policy networks corresponds to the sociologist’s concept of social movement organizations. More than fifty such organizations balanced evenly between animal protectionists and animal‐user industries are discussed in the book. Political Animals provides an excellent introduction to the politics of animal rights, although missing in the accounts are the voices of the animal activists and their opponents. In the final analysis, it is the meaning activists attribute to their cause that drives the movement, a fact which Garner tacitly acknowledges. Imhoff, Daniel (ed) 2010. The CAFO Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories. Published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology with Watershed Media, Berkeley, LA: University of California Press. The Reader’s subject – concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO) – covers most of the topics relevant to factory farmed animals and is divided into seven parts: (1) The pathological mindset of the CAFO; (2) Myths of the CAFO; (3) Inside the CAFO; (4) The loss of diversity; (5) Hidden costs of CAFO; (6) Technological takeover; (7) Putting the CAFO out to pasture. The acronym CAFO suggests a bland, mundane practice and is therefore a name which the editor believes should be replaced by the more accurate label “animal concentration camps”. The chapter titles indicate what is in store for the reader but the content is perhaps less confronting than the book’s companion photo‐format volume of the same name. The reader is a very comprehensive survey of how living creatures are subjected to inhumane practices for their body parts by “corporate food purveyors” and is essential reading for anyone who cares about the future survival of all of the earth’s species. Kean, Hilda. 1998. Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. In this attractive book, the historian Hilda Kean provides one of the most comprehensive and interesting surveys of the early animal protection movement in England, the birthplace of animal rights. Kean tells a compelling story of how and why people’s attitudes and practices involving animals changed over the past two centuries. She attributes these changes largely to the seemingly simple idea of “sight”, or how people were influenced by seeing for themselves how animals such as horses and dogs were ill treated in public spaces such as in streets and markets. Animals “out of sight” in vivisection laboratories and in abattoirs also came to the attention of the early animal protectionists, most of whom were women. The sight and spectacle of animal abuse turned hearts and stomachs once a light was shone on these everyday cruelties by the pioneers of animal rights in England. Kean’s book is nicely illustrated in keeping with the theme of seeing animals in their various relationships with humans. Munro, Lyle. 2005. Confronting Cruelty: Moral Orthodoxy and the Challenge of the Animal Rights Movement. Leiden & Boston: Brill. For most people animal cruelty is understood as unspeakable acts perpetrated by warped individuals mostly against dogs, cats, birds and sometimes horses. The animal rights movement seeks to broaden the issue of animal cruelty to include the vast numbers of animals that suffer and die in “the animal industrial complex” of intensive farming, recreational hunting and animal research and experimentation. The book draws on social movement theory to explain how and why an increasing number of people in the UK, US and Australia have taken up the cause of animals in campaigning against the exploitative practices of the animal‐user industries. Essentially, the thesis is that animal abuse is constructed by the animal rights movement as a social problem (speciesism) on a par with sexism and racism. This is the first book in the Human and Animal Studies Series which currently lists about a dozen monographs published by Brill under the editorship of Kenneth Shapiro of the Society & Animals Institute in the US. Noske, Barbara. 1989. Humans and Other Animals: Beyond the Boundaries of Anthropology. London: Pluto Press. As an anthropologist, Noske brings a different perspective to our relationship with nature, especially in the long process of animal domestication. Her chapter on “the animal industrial complex” shows how both human and nonhuman animals suffer within this structure of domination; for example, slaughterhouse work takes a heavy toll on the meat workers while the animals experience atrocious pain and misery on the assembly line of mass execution. Noske’s book is valuable for its broad treatment of animal‐human relations in which she describes cultural, historical, structural and sociological aspects of these relations particularly in America and Australia. Wilkie, Rhoda and Inglis David (eds.) 2007. The Social Scientific Study of Nonhuman Animals: A Five‐volume Collection – Animals and Society: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences. (Vols 1–5), London: Routledge. This is a collection of 90 previously published articles and book chapters in approximately 2,000 pages on the social‐scientific study of animals. The papers range from the earliest in 1928 on “the culture of canines” to the latest in 2006 on “religion and animals.” Three quarters of the papers were published in the last two decades and are derived from anthropology, sociology, psychology, geography, philosophy and feminist studies. Because Animals and Society is based mostly on work derived from more than 12 different specialist journals, it has a claim to comprehensiveness; however, the editors mention topics that are not covered in the collection:

The Dakota Access Pipeline did not gain widespread attention until it was nearly complete, despite extensive opposition from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. It was not until images depicting repression circulated on social media that mainstream media and public attention spiked. We use shale gas exploration in New Brunswick, Canada and the Dakota Access Pipeline, as case studies of social media agenda-setting. We consider disruptive public participation to involve constituents who perceive themselves as outsiders to decision-making. In both cases protest was ongoing for significant periods of time before receiving mainstream media and public attention. Using mixed methods, we show that law enforcement and company crackdown on indigenous communities, and the circulation of dramatic visuals via Twitter, is associated with spikes in social media, as well as media and public attention.

This article asks what scholars of climate justice politics and activists in the climate justice movement can learn from the Standing Rock Sioux’s fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in North Dakota. It reviews Patricia Hill Collins’ insights on intersectionality and the matrix of domination and suggests that the matrix of domination for which fossil fuel companies are responsible establishes the conditions for the possible emergence of what I call a matrix of resistance, rooted in intersectionality, collective liberation, and negotiating tensions between universalism and particularism. I go on to demonstrate how Gramsci’s theory of hegemony has been applied to understanding the fossil fuel industry’s power. Rereading Gramsci, I suggest that hegemony must combine three relations of power: consent, compliance, and coercion. Applying this to the fossil fuel industry, I introduce the term petro-hegemony. Drawing on preliminary field research, I show how petro-hegemony revealed itself during the struggle against the DAPL and argue that the Indigenous-led uprising provides clues into how the construction of a matrix of resistance might be used to strategically counter petro-hegemony.

Indigenous Rights of Standing Rock: Federal Courts and Beyond

Field Notes from Standing Rock: Non‐Extraction as Spiritual Practice Lily Oster As more and more non‐native visitors joined the Standing Rock Sioux and allies at the Dakota Access Pipeline resistance camps in 2016, spiritual practice proved a particularly fraught area of decolonial negotiation. The camp guidelines published by the main camp, Oceti Sakowin, began by stating, “This is a ceremonial camp. Act accordingly,” and closed with “We are in a constant state of prayer and ceremony.” Non‐native visitors were asked to uphold the spirit of prayerful resistance and to abide by protocols of Lakota spiritual practice, but also—especially if we were white, as made explicit by the camp orientation staff—to refrain from taking charge, taking up too much space, taking native language or ritual objects, and taking photographs, recordings, or other souvenirs. In short, the camp guidelines read, “we ask that you give more than you take.” Certainly, some non‐native visitors were attuned to the camps’ core decolonizing effort and attempted to give more than they took. As numbers of non‐native arrivals swelled in fall 2016, however, native campers tempered earlier invitations for in‐person support with condemnations via social media and word‐of‐mouth of, as one woman put it, “the spiritual journey white folks who have been showing up to camp.” In a mid‐November 2016 Facebook post, a native long‐term camper named Alicia Smith wrote: White people are colonizing the camps. I mean that seriously. Plymouth Rock seriously. They are coming in, taking food, clothing, etc and occupying space without any desire to participate in camp maintenance and without respect of tribal protocols. These people are treating it like it is Burning Man or The Rainbow Gathering… I listened to a man on the phone with his friends telling them to all come because he thinks it's such a great ‘cultural experience.’ Smith here describes dynamics that I observed during my time at Standing Rock: white people disrespecting ceremony spaces with unconscious behavior; white people taking over ceremony spaces with their own leadership or by making demands on or complaints to native elders; and, indeed, some “spiritual journey white folks” using the camps as temporary residences, taking advantage of food, shelter, and community without attending the mandatory orientation sessions, volunteering to help keep the camps running, or participating in resistance actions. In the midst of resisting the pipeline project's extractive bid on their lands and sacred sites, native leaders at Standing Rock had to ask white supporters to counter the urge to appropriate—meaning, at root, to make one's own, to take possession of—sacred lifeways that were not theirs for the taking. To be sure, the spiritual frameworks embodied and articulated by Lakota and other native peoples at the camps are compelling at a time when many cultures live out of connection with wider earth life. Lakota spiritual leaders at Standing Rock expressed a sense of kinship between life‐kinds, prayer as resistance to corrupt and desecrating forces, and active relationships with guiding ancestors and with an inspirited world—including the Missouri River, endangered by the pipeline route, spoken of as a relative. However, indigenous thinkers have been stating for decades that it is a problem for white settlers to make claim to native spiritual teachings, having already made claim to everything else. This refusal of appropriative spirituality is about much more than correctness: this country's and this planet's past, present, and immediate future are full of calamities created by a colonial orientation to life and land as minable, possessable, exploitable, and expendable. Moreover, the taking of Lakota spiritual resources does not make one an ally of the Lakota; as indigenous scholars have long observed, white settler harvesting of the wisdom of native traditions for personal self‐actualization only undermines native communities. In a 2015 joint statement on what they term “cultural exploitation,” Nick Estes and a group of other indigenous scholars write: “The appropriation of our sacred spaces, practices, and our very identities violates us as a people, a nation, and it violates our sovereign right to determine for ourselves who we are in this world and this universe… Appropriating our practices...

Rewriting and Rerighting Indigenous Histories Andrew H. Fisher (bio) Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. London and New York: Verso, 2019. x + 310 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $26.95. David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019. 512 pp. Notes and index. $28.00. In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (second edition 2012), Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith posed a provocative question: “Is History Important for Indigenous Peoples?” Her answer was ambivalent but affirmed the need for “a critique of how we, as the Other, have been represented or excluded from various accounts. Every issue has been approached by indigenous peoples with a view to rewriting and rerighting our position in history. Indigenous peoples want to tell our own stories, write our own versions, in our own ways, for our own purposes” (p. 29). Over the past twenty years, dozens of Native American authors and scholars have turned to that task, yet the process of decolonizing the academy and the larger society has only just begun. The books considered in this review strike two more blows against the intellectual structure of settler colonialism and its logic of elimination, which seeks to destroy Indigenous cultures in order to replace them. Although they differ considerably in style and tone, Our History Is the Future and The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee share Smith’s commitment to “rewriting and rerighting” the position of Indigenous peoples in both the past and the present. Nick Estes (Kul Wicasa/Lower Brule) and David Treuer (Ojibwe) write to counter a historical tradition that Estes calls “distorted” and “deeply disempowering” (p. 16). Their interest in doing so is not historiographical but unabashedly presentist, as they seek to change the terms under which Native communities live today. “There is no separation between past and present,” argues Estes, “meaning that an alternative future is also determined by our understanding of our past. Our history is the future” (pp. 10–11). The history of Indigenous peoples is also, they insist, integral to the history of modern America and the world. [End Page 63] Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance emerged directly from the confrontation noted in its subtitle. Estes, a professor of American Studies and a Lakota citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (People of the Seven Council Fires, or Sioux Nation), was among the “Water Protectors” who stood up against Energy Transfer Partners and its government backers in 2016–17. For more than six months, a coalition of tribal members, environmental activists, and Indigenous allies from around the world staged peaceful protests to prevent the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from carrying crude oil beneath the Missouri River (Mni Sose) just upstream from the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota. Their movement drew both international media attention and militarized police, dispatched from multiple agencies and jurisdictions to clear the pipeline’s path by force. In the ugly crackdown that followed, law enforcement deployed anti-riot gear, armored vehicles, pepper spray, tear gas, water cannons, LRAD acoustic weapons, and counterinsurgency techniques against people armed only with drums and prayer feathers. Ultimately, the Water Protectors failed to stop the “Black Snake” (Zuzeca Sapa) from crossing the Missouri, but Estes found hope in the “meaningful solidarities” (p. 7) that had formed among activists from many walks of life. He also found inspiration for a book. Less than two years later, he published Our History Is the Future in order to “chart a historical road map for collective liberation” (p. 22). Estes’s book places the #NoDAPL movement in the larger context of Oceti Sakowin resistance to the entwined powers of settler colonialism and corporate capitalism. Since the early nineteenth century, when Lewis and Clark described the Sioux as the “vilest miscreants of the savage race” (p. 74), the tribes have generally been regarded as obstacles to American expansion and economic development on the Great Plains. Their heroic defiance of U.S. hegemony has made the Lakotas especially a favored subject among scholars...

In August 2016 Standing Rock Sioux activists began to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline; by the end of the year, thousands of Native and non-Native activists had joined Sioux tribal members to create one of the largest and most sustained protests in recent memory. Throughout the many images that circulated from Standing Rock, a constant form of embodied rhetoric used by activists was the graphic T-shirt. One of these tees, the Homeland Security shirt, has the words "Homeland Security" emblazoned above an image of Geronimo with three fellow Apache warriors and the words "Fighting Terrorism since 1492" located below the photograph. The Homeland Security shirt is a site of understanding the way irony and confrontation—specifically, a wearable, visual form of rhetoric—may be used as a form of critique and resistance. Through a textual analysis of the T-shirt and the discourse surrounding it, this essay demonstrates how the shirt ironically appropriates the dominant discourse and critiques the status quo using a confrontational tone.

Energy production is, without doubt, a subject of enormous economic importance and interest in North America. Consequently, energy topics are widely reported in American and Canadian news media. This article provides a comparison and analysis of Canadian and American newspaper reporting about one North American energy megaproject: the proposed Mackenzie Gas Project. The central feature of this project, if it goes ahead, will be a 1,220 kilometer natural gas pipeline to move natural gas from the sparsely populated Mackenzie River Delta of Canada's Northwest Territories to market. The Mackenzie Gas Project is currently under simultaneous regulatory review by Canada's National Energy Board (NEB) and a specially convened Joint Review Panel (JRP). The latter is charged with considering the environmental and social effects of the project for the communities along the proposed pipeline route. Because the affected communities are largely indigenous, so are five of seven members of the panel. The review process has taken longer than initially anticipated, but is expected to wrap up by the end of 2007 and result in governmental approval for the energy project. This will clear a major hurdle in the decades-long drive by energy companies to develop these natural gas reserves. The Mackenzie Gas Project story concerns a diverse set of issues, including environmental protection and regulation, economic and social health of northern indigenous communities, North American energy security, financial and commodity markets, corporate investments and profits, economic integration of the United States and Canada, international relations, and consumer issues, among others. Yet the reporting about the proposed pipeline has been framed narrowly as a struggle between the proponents and opponents of economic development. Significantly, reporters have been both puzzled by and at pains to explain to readers the positions of the several indigenous communities that appear at times to both support and oppose the development. There are two key points of this coverage. First, the indigenous communities are not recognized as part of the public and thus do not hold a interest in whether or not the pipeline is built. Rather, indigenous communities are presented as either obstructions or economic opportunists or both. Second, the economic interests of the multinational corporations that aim to build and profit from the pipeline development are rarely mentioned. I became interested in reporting about the Mackenzie Gas Project generally, and about indigenous peoples specifically, after reading feature stories in two U.S. papers: the Christian Science Monitor (Walker 2001) and the New York Times (Krauss 2003a). The focus of both stories was the supposed incongruity of aboriginal participation in the development project. In Krauss's New York Times account, northern aboriginal communities have been driven into an unholy alliance with pipeline developers as a result of animal rights campaigns by environmental activists. Using language intended to remind readers that northern indigenous peoples are hunters, Krauss describes the animal rights campaigns as snared the native populations in sanctions and labels their accusations against the environmentalists as having hit like harpoons to the soul. He completes the image of indigenous peoples as primordial hunters in a modern world with a visual metaphor, a photograph of a dog sled moving across the tundra; in the background looms an oil or gas derrick. The photo caption reads: A symbolic scene in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Their livelihoods in danger, Native Canadians are welcoming oil, gas and mining interests. Walker's Christian Science Monitor story, which is far more positive, concerns the ways that northerners are learning to work with the oil and gas industry. It, too, cannot avoid the allusion to hunting: an accompanying photograph shows an Inuk (singular of Inuit) standing beside a snowmobile. …

Erratum for the article: Hoover, Elizabeth. “Fires were lit inside them”. Review of International American Studies, 12 (1/2019), 11-44. https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.7391
 The article "The Fires Were Lit Inside Them: The Pyropolitics of Water Protector Camps at Standing Rock" by Elizabeth Hoover, published in the Spring/Summer issue of Volume 12 of RIAS is regretfully missing a citation. Much of the history of the NoDAPL movement on pages 18-19 was drawn from a presentation compiled by Jennifer Weston, a Standing Rock Sioux Tribal member, educator, and language advocate who has been working tirelessly to inform the public about the Standing Rock Dakota Access Pipeline Opposition movement.

Among the determinants of social movement success, the characteristics and responses of nonstate organizations under attack by protestors have been overlooked. We examine three campaigns by animal rights groups against experimentation, in 1976–1977, 1987–1988, and 1988–1989. The first two campaigns stopped the research, while the third did not. One influential set of factors was the preexisting vulnerabilities—e.g., unpopular practices, internal factions—on the part of targeted organizations. Another was the strategic responses of these organizations, especially the avoidance of “blunders.” A growing countermovement, thirdly, affected the organizations' ability to respond effectively and avoid blunders. As a social movement expands and strengthens, it encourages counterorganizing and a hardening of resistance, so that many social movements may actually be less successful as they become larger and more visible.

This article discusses the social and ecological impacts of fracking for oil on religious communities in Western North Dakota. Attention is furthermore given to racial tensions between the settler and indigenous communities that have become pronounced within churches in relation to the repudiation of the discovery doctrine and the protests at the Standing Rock Reservation against the North Dakota Access Pipeline in the fall of 2016.

Animal splits

Research organisations in the United Kingdom expressed concern about the future of neuroscience research requiring primate experimentation after the University of Cambridge announced last week that it had decided not...