Above Photo: A view of the camp from Route 1806. Xian Chiang-Waren
At sundown, Montgomery Brown meets me by the information tent. He has a paper plate piled with brownies in one hand and a toothbrush in the other. The 25-year-old youth organizer and Navy-trained combat medic from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe has been up since daybreak.
Brown and I walk past hand-painted “NO MEDIA” signs. We wander through a kitchen, where volunteers are chopping vegetables and boiling pots of soup over an open fire, past kids chasing each other in a game of tag. Clusters of towering white teepees and neon, synthetic tents hug the ground. They are grouped into small encampments for a half mile in every direction, around central fires that burn day and night and send plumes of smoke into the sky.
“Every time I walk around this camp,” Brown says, “… I hear those kids laughing and playing — it just reaffirms that I’m not just fighting for myself or my family. I’m fighting for everybody.”
Welcome to the camp that is ground zero for the pushback against America’s new mega-pipeline. Less than a mile upstream on both sides of the Missouri River, Dakota Access LLC, a subsidiary of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners, has broken ground on a new 1,172-mile pipeline that would transport more than 500,000 barrels of Bakken crude oil per day across the heartland. Called the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL for short) or the Bakken Pipeline, it is the largest crude pipeline proposed in the American West since the defeat of Keystone XL, and it is on track to be operational this winter.
The pipeline, the tribe and its lawyers say, endangers Standing Rock’s only source of drinking water by cutting across the Missouri. Construction, according to tribal historians, has also unearthed sacred burial sites and artifacts across swaths of land near the reservation’s borders. On Sept. 9, a federal judge denied the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s motion for an injunction against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but, within an hour, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Interior, and the Army stepped in to urge Dakota Access LLC to halt pipeline construction in the area within a 20-mile radius of Lake Oahe. On Sept. 12, Standing Rock appealed the court’s decision and added additional claims to their suit against the Army Corps. (Follow Grist’s coverage of the pipeline here.)
What began in April as a small group of about 20 members of the Standing Rock Sioux gathering in prayer and keeping constant vigil on the riverbank has swelled to a sprawling encampment of more than a thousand. The outpouring of support — and people — into the camp has grown into a bona fide movement that’s rallying to protect both native treaty rights and the integrity of our planet’s resources. The inhabitants promise to defend the Missouri River from the pipeline no matter what.
Here’s a glimpse of what life on the camp is like.