07/06/2020
Today, US District Judge James Boasberg ordered the Dakota Access Pipeline to be emptied and shut down by August 5th. It was found that the US Army Corps of Engineers, the body governing construction in harbors, canals, and rivers, violated the National Environmental Policy Act in issuing a permit to build under Lake Oahe with only an environment assessment. Instead, an environmental impact statement, a much more rigorous review of the impact of the pipeline that typically takes ~13 months to complete, should have been required. Thus, the pipeline is ordered to shut down at least until the environmental impact statement is completed. The fight over the pipeline remains, as Energy Transfer Partners, the parent company of the project, said in a statement they will immediately file to stay the judge's decision and pursue an expedited appeal with the DC Court of Appeals.
These photos are from November 20-21, 2016, during a short visit to Oceti Sakowin Camp at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, a protest camp to block the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. At the time, I was running a student group, the UMN Energy Club, at the University of Minnesota, and visited the camp to assess the possibility of organizing students to assist; I wouldn't have organized students without understanding the needs of the camp and guaranteeing that we could be useful. I ultimately decided against it, given the rapid drop in temperature with the onset of the harsh North Dakota winter.
During my day-and-a-half stay, my goal was to try as many tasks as possible to get an idea for how/where students could help out in the camp. I chopped firewood, helped construct shelters, assisted in the kitchen, washed dirty dishes, and received those returning from the frontlines. I'll never forget chopping wood in a T-shirt and sweating in 22F weather and the nourishment of hot beef stew afterwards (which I was offered; I came prepared with my own meals).
Having been an environmentalist all my life, I knew how far Big Oil, with the backing of our imperialist US government, would go to make its profits. I knew that stories of toxic spills, corruption, assassinations of indigenous people and environmental activists were and still are regular occurrences around the world. However, my visit to Standing Rock marked the first time I really saw, up close and personal, how vicious and cruel this country's system of domination and exploitation was. It was perhaps the first moment that would later inspire me to study photography as a means to highlight the injustices inflicted by capitalistic greed and the bravery of those fighting back. I had always hated history class growing up since it always seemed like memorizing a collection of arbitrary facts and dates. That night at Standing Rock, I witnessed the centuries-long stories of colonialism and Indigenous genocide play out before my very eyes.
This was two years before I got my first camera, and I had zero interest in photography. At the time, I didn't even care for having a decent phone camera. You can barely tell what's happening in Frame 1, which shows the water cannon used by police to spray water protectors when it was 22F at night, sending dozens to the hospital and injuring hundreds with hypothermia. You can see the icicles that formed on razor wire from the spray in the following morning in frames 2 and 3. I remembered many more things from that night which unfortunately mirror what I've seen in Minneapolis, another place of stolen Indigenous land: the detonation of concussion grenades, launched teargas grenades arcing across the sky. Hennepin County Sheriff's Office sent deputies to Standing Rock at the time, so the same uniforms that terrorize Black lives in the Twin Cities terrorized Indigenous lives at Standing Rock. Time and again, police continue to defend what is indefensible and often illegal. They are more often projections of power of the owning class rather than keepers of peace or enforcers of laws. I've included a few reposts of police protecting illegal pipeyards for the Line 3 Pipeline in Minnesota from December 30, 2018, a week after I bought my first camera (see my very first posts for details on this).
Injustice still pervades this land. Line 3 Pipeline Project is still in the works in Minnesota. The killers of Breonna Taylor and Philando Castille, among too many others, are still at large. Flint, Michigan still doesn't have clean water. Even the fight against Dakota Access Pipeline remains, but I am grateful for today's victory.
