Standing Rock: Foreshadowing Minneapolis?

On the day after Trump was first elected president in November 2016, I left home to drive the 1400 miles to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. Nonviolent protests had been ongoing since summer. The protests were over a fracked-oil pipeline being rammed through unceded Tribal land just upstream of their Missouri River water source, in complete violation of the law and of civil rights. Only months after it would begin operations, that pipeline would spill 407,000 gallons of oil.

In my car I carried supplies paid for by generous donations—blankets and a large boxed tipi tent. I hid them under a nondescript army blanket because police were reported to be stopping cars to seize such supplies. Instead of taking the usual interstate route through North Dakota, I drove back roads.

The reason I went to Standing Rock was to offer help in the legal tent. Though I’m not an attorney, I am a retired federal employee who has a reasonable command of environmental law. I thought that might be useful, but I was wrong. Things had progressed so far beyond environmental concerns that instead I became an observer, reporting back what I was seeing to people in Jefferson and Island Counties whom I knew were soon heading there. Here is one of the first things I wrote. It echoes eerily the current ICE onslaught against immigrants in Minnesota:

“If you go: Understand that you are entering a war zone, in which electronic, physical, psychological, and sadly, as of last week, chemical warfare is being waged against American citizens. This is not an exaggeration. Prepare yourself emotionally as well as physically. Be aware that aggressive military-style tactics and a blind eye by police to corporate bullying are intended to intimidate people into not coming, and to isolate Standing Rock. Be prepared to be inspired by the courage, joy and determination of these people. The oil pipeline company is calling them “paid protestors,” but there’s not enough money to get everyone through a minus 35° Dakota winter, let alone pay anyone.”

Two months prior, the Governor of North Dakota had declared an emergency that allowed the heavily militarized Morton County police to deploy tactics akin to military occupation. But it more closely resembled the paramilitary thuggery we’re seeing in Minneapolis today and not the avowed claims to “keep people safe.” Tactics escalated to the use of water cannons shooting across coiled barbed wire barriers on a blocked bridge in 26-degree weather with a wind chill of 17. In addition to fostering hypothermia in such weather, military-style water cannons have the power to “deglove” the skin off human hands, and did so in some cases reported by medics—Morton County police called it “misting.” They then shot the water cannon through clouds of teargas to carry the gas up to where legal observers were standing at a distance. They used an armored acoustic warfare vehicle called an LRAD that’s designed to cause enough pain to be fatal, and they used flashbang grenades and rubber bullets. Sometimes they aimed at faces, just as ICE is doing now, causing severe, life-altering injuries.

A gang of angry oil workers with baseball bats menaced an elderly Apache woman who later told me she managed to calm them with quiet prayer. I was humbled by her courage. As I was attending direct action nonviolent training in a meadow, a grass fire suddenly sprang up out of nowhere, threatening the entire camp. Everyone stomped it out with their feet.

The oil pipeline company aimed bright stadium spotlights on the camp at night. Helicopters circled frequently, and drones flew. Someone said they’d spotted a crop duster. I was sleeping in my car that night and heard an airplane slowly circling overhead, repeatedly. The air grew unbreathable and I had to put on a mask while inside my sleeping bag. The next morning everyone awoke coughing. My car was covered in a fine grey-white powder. The incident was attributed to wood ash from the many campfires, which it could have been, but a lot of people had their doubts.

However, in what limited night darkness we were allowed, there were stories told over the PA system by indigenous voices from around the world. I would lay in my sleeping bag in the car and listen, and fall asleep to singing and drumbeats like a mother’s heartbeat. I heard those guarding the perimeters of the camp drumming softly to one another in series. The use of soft drumming to communicate was remarkable. I have rarely felt such a sense of belonging. Each morning, we women would gather at the river’s edge and sing in Lakota, as if it was our native tongue. I don’t know how that happened so easily, it just did. And if you were hungry, someone would feed you. Upset or scared? You would be comforted by new friends. The talks with perfect strangers who were no longer strangers, but relatives—well, there was magic in that camp that no oil company could ever destroy.

At no time did I witness or even hear about violence by protesters—or as everyone preferred to be called, water protectors. Weapons and drugs were prohibited. The rules were strict: stay peaceful or leave.

I always thought that the violence that happened at Standing Rock was an anomaly, that it would never happen again inside the United States. I was wrong about that, too. Ten years later, I see it as a foreshadowing of the institutional violence in Minneapolis, but this time, how it could vastly expand if the Trump administration continues to escalate. In 2016, I wrote:

“Remember that police are targeting people of color, because they know that many don’t have the money to deal with court costs, so if you are white and reasonably well-off, be prepared to surround and protect people of color with your bodies. Know also that there are many support jobs in camp that do not require you to be on front lines.”

Trump has signed 11 of the 48 national emergencies currently active in the U.S., and he has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, which falls short of declaring martial law in that it authorizes the military to assist civilian authorities rather than take over the functions of civilian government. Neither the Constitution nor current law gives the president the authority to declare martial law, though several presidents and multiple state governors have done so throughout history. Trump used an obscure law (10 USC § 12406) to federalize National Guard forces and deploy them in Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago, but the Portland and Chicago deployments are currently blocked by the courts.

If video and other documentation is any indicator, ICE, a civilian force, seems to have a Proud Boys militia-style imprimatur writ large and granted immunity by Stephen Miller to do what they please. That is certainly what evidence shows. According to a recent report, “ICE agents ate lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Minnesota, enjoyed their meal, then came back later that night as the restaurant was closing and arrested the people who had served them.”

There are no conditions under which this could be called law enforcement; it’s thuggery with a side of cruelty.

With the help of billionaire Peter Thiel’s secretive ai software company called Palantir, to which Elon Musk’s DOGE gave the data it took from multiple agency databases, ICE agents are now using a specially-built targeting app to plan their immigration raids. According to news reports, “…the app gives them a digital map filled with pins of real people, each one tied to a detailed dossier, name, photo, date of birth, immigration ID number, and even a confidence score rating how likely it is that that person actually lives at that address.” Agents don’t just search for one person at a time. They can instantly draw a line around a neighborhood and search for multiple targets. ICE officers have admitted under oath that they use this tool to find target-rich areas, meaning places with the highest concentration of people they can detain.

This system pulls data from multiple federal agencies, immigration records, and private databases. “The goal isn’t accuracy, it’s efficiency,” said the report. “If the app says there’s only a ten percent chance that someone lives at that house, they won’t bother. They go where the numbers are. And it doesn’t stop there. ICE has built teams to monitor social media 24/7, watching Instagram, X, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit. It’s everywhere at once. So when people ask why ICE keeps showing up and neighborhoods feel under siege, this is why.”

They also use a technology called Stingray, a mobile van-based cell tower simulator that routes nearby cellphone traffic through itself before sending it on to real cell towers. In this way they can intercept texts, calls and other real-time messaging. At Standing Rock and on Interstate 94 leading to Bismarck, ND in 2016, Stingray was also in use; that’s why I drove the back roads.

Was I afraid? Of course. There were some scary incidents on the way to and from Standing Rock, and while there I felt the communal fear of a threatened mass police attack looming. But I also felt the love that flowed so easily and naturally from person to person, carried on smiles. Skin color or accents didn’t matter; open hearts did.

Stephen Miller’s current ethnic reengineering agenda for America is to “remove” 3,000 of the “right” people per day, regardless of the disruption it causes. He is far short of that quota, which explains why he’s ramping up ICE recruitment, which means this administration sees more chaos as a necessity. Intimidation and terror are part of Miller’s plan. That’s why everyone needs to be thinking about what each of us can do to resist this power grab.

What does one do, then? It’s easier to list what not to do: succumb to despair, give up, let fear win, assume someone else will take care of it. Everyone is needed, if not on the protest line, then on the phone to state and federal legislators. Here are some things you can do right now, today: urge federal representatives to not approve the Department of Homeland Security appropriations spending bill unless ICE is disarmed. That bill is caught in tough negotiations with a January 30 deadline. Tell Congress to ensure that provisions are included saying ICE may not target people on the basis of race, ethnicity, or accent, and that ICE agents do not have total immunity from civil or criminal prosecution if they harm people. Urge your state legislators to pass laws prohibiting ICE agents from wearing masks and using tactics that are banned, like chokeholds.

Next, learn your rights. Read the Constitution. Remember also that to Native Americans and Black people, this is not new. Follow groups like Indivisible and 50501 to find out about protests, walkouts, boycotts, and other direct actions. Follow ICEout dot org to learn where they are. Several protests are scheduled in January, including this week.

Follow knowledgeable people like former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, historians Heather Cox Richardson and Tad Stoermer, former DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer, and others; learn from them and share information with your own contacts. Pay attention to new developments and interact with your circle. Carry your phone and film or live-stream ICE interactions. Carry a whistle. If you’re not in your car you can still set off your car alarm if ICE is on your street. Show up for each other. None of this may feel like enough individually, but collectively it can be massive.

The sleeping bear is awakening; let’s make it roar.

Photo by Karen Sullivan All Rights Reserved.