One Year After Standing Rock, Women Remain at the Front of Indigenous Fights Against Big Oil
One Year After Standing Rock, Women Remain at the Front of Indigenous Fights Against Big Oil
A little over a year ago in North Dakota, as many as 4,000 activists were hunkered down in Sacred Stone Camp during a harsh winter. They were part of a grassroots movement rallying to combat the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was designed to run directly under the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers and near the Standing Rock Reservation. Indigenous activists, called water protectors, and their allies endured police brutality and the more unforgiving elements of a Northern landscape to speak truth to power that winter; they soldiered on until December 4, 2016, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers shut down the pipeline construction. This victory for the water protectors was one that President Trump would reverse within his first month in office. The pipeline was completed in April of this year; oil has been flowing through it since May.
To some observers, the #NoDAPL movement seemed like an anomaly, a flash in the pan for Native-led activism—but nothing could be further from the truth. What happened in Standing Rock launched an explosive year for Native American activism, and it was built on an ancestral history of resistance. A new crop of leaders has risen in the fight for environmental justice, inspired by the events of last winter and dedicated to changing their communities and protecting the land we inhabit. They have created youth organizations and staged demonstrations from Washington, D.C. to North Dakota.
Many of them are women.
Molly Adams / Argot Magazine
One of the young leaders in this community is activist Eryn Wise—the Next Generations Coordinator for Honor the Earth, an organizer for the on-the-ground efforts of water protectors in Minnesota and the official Iná (or “Mom”) to the International Indigenous Youth Council (IIYC).“We still had so much hope that we were going to effectively stop the Dakota Access Pipeline before the drill got under the water,” Wise told Ms. “It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that we were politicized in Standing Rock, but the waves of PTSD that have come since leaving camp feel unending.” But despite the immense mental taxation that affected those who stood at Standing Rock, it sparked something in the water protectors. “The fires that were lit in Standing Rock still burn,” she said, “just in different home communities.”
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That women of every generation have become leaders in the Indigenous community should come as no surprise—to those looking in or those speaking out. “Women are the sacred life givers,” Wise explained, “protectors, innovators, caretakers and inherent leaders. If we understand that this earth is our mother, we recognize the need for women in our life. It’s no secret that we can’t live without our earth, so how do we anticipate living without our women. Female leadership is an imperative facet to success in any effort, not just anti-fossil fuels work.”
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http://msmagazine.com/blog/2017/12/12/leaders-arise-one-year-after-standing-rock/