Lessons for protesters from Standing Rock
The events following the 2016 protest are urgently relevant to our current political moment.
During the high-profile demonstrations against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016, the FBI sent several informants disguised as protesters to infiltrate activist communities.
The FBI wasn’t alone. The pipeline company, Energy Transfer Partners, hired a private mercenary and security firm called TigerSwan to conduct a sweeping protester surveillance operation. Part of that operation included sending undercover operatives “to collect information on the protesters, explicitly targeting those who were down on their luck,“ according to a 2018 investigation published by the Intercept.
The information collected by these surveillance operations was not only used to set up individual protesters during the demonstrations, which were led by the Standing Rock Sioux. It was eventually used to justify a massive conspiracy lawsuit against the environmental group Greenpeace. The lawsuit accused the group of inciting the protests in a bid to increase donations.
Though the initial lawsuit was unsuccessful, Energy Transfer wound up repackaging the evidence into a second lawsuit—this time, accusing Greenpeace of defamation, and providing financial and other support to people who vandalized the pipeline and delayed its construction. A North Dakota jury made up of most fossil fuel-connected jurors was sympathetic to the claims. They ordered Greenpeace liable for a whopping $660 million in damages—a verdict that advocacy groups and First Amendments experts say “could deter free speech far beyond the environmental movement.” (Greenpeace is appealing the verdict).
The story of how Energy Transfer achieved this stunning verdict is urgently relevant to our current political moment. And yet very few people know about it—in part because only two reporters were actually present for the trial, which took place in a small North Dakota courtroom and was not allowed to be live-streamed or recorded in any way.
Fortunately, one of the two reporters was Alleen Brown—the same reporter who helped reveal TigerSwan’s surveillance operation at Standing Rock. She is telling the story in season 12 of the Drilled podcast, which started releasing episodes on June 3. I highly recommend giving it a listen.
There are several parallels between the Dakota Access pipeline protests and the current protest movements sweeping the United States, Brown told me in a recent phone call.
“One of the most obvious aspects is the militarized escalation—the disproportionate escalation to combat a movement that is largely nonviolent,” she said.
Just as President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles last week in response to largely nonviolent immigration protests, North Dakota’s Republican governor called in the state National Guard to Standing Rock in 2016. “You had snipers at the ready. And all of this military grade equipment just kind of aimed at this nonviolent movement,” Brown said. In perhaps the most infamous incident at Standing Rock, state law enforcement officers trained water cannons, teargas, and other “less-than-lethal” weapons on protesters, injuring more than 300.
However, just like in Los Angeles last week, there were incidents at Standing Rock where protesters were not peaceful. Some pipeline protestors set things on fire—namely, pieces of pipeline equipment—and committed acts of vandalism. Incidents like these were ultimately what led jurors to find Greenpeace liable for defamation, because the group had characterized the protests as peaceful.
The government-led militarization of the Standing Rock protests served an important purpose: It helped convince a jury that the protest movement was primarily violent. This is the same false narrative Trump and Republicans are attempting to create with the anti-ICE protests sweeping the country.
Energy Transfer’s lawsuit also relied on another false narrative: that the Standing Rock protest movement was inorganic. The pipeline company argued that the protests were not primarily orchestrated by Indigenous tribes, but by Greenpeace, a powerful and moneyed environmental group. “It was very successfully spun from a grassroots movement that was really wide-ranging … into a movement that was actually being driven by this white-lead outside nonprofit,” Brown said.
The reality, however, was much different. “This was a very wide-ranging movement,” Brown said, noting that only six people from Greenpeace ever attended the months-long protest. “A lot of people were coming out [to Standing Rock] for a lot of different reasons. I think there is some level of disbelief that that could be true. There’s certainly an effort to spin that into something that is easier to criminalize and control.”
Indeed, Trump is now spinning the same narrative for the largely peaceful immigration protests sweeping the country. “These are paid insurrectionists. These are paid troublemakers. They get money,” the president said of the anti-ICE protests last week.
Using this narrative, the Trump administration appears to be pursuing a legal strategy similar to Energy Transfer’s. Last week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the agency is working with the IRS to “track how these violent protesters are funded." At the same time, the FBI said it will investigate non-profit funding of the Los Angeles protests. And Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, is threatening a criminal investigation into the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles for allegedly providing “logistical support and financial resources to individuals engaged in these disruptive actions."
Another parallel between the Dakota Access protests and today: The desire to paint protesters as domestic terrorists. After the Standing Rock demonstrations, the Trump administration directed agents from the FBI’s terrorism taskforce to investigative individual pipeline protesters, diverting resources from other anti-terrorism efforts. Similarly, Republicans today are increasingly characterizing pro-Palestinian protesters as terrorists; and the Department of Justice is investigating bringing terrorism charges against pro-Palestinian protestors at Columbia University.
The similarities are a clear indication that the movements for climate justice, immigrant justice, and Palestinian justice are connected by a common threat—one which seeks to silence nonviolent protest through criminalization. And yet, Brown notes, the targeted attacks on individual movements may be causing them to move more cautiously, potentially driving them apart.
“I think we're in a moment where solidarity is being threatened,” she said. “We can see this Greenpeace case as that. They want to send a message that non-profits shouldn’t show up and support grassroots movements.”
But solidarity is only threatened because of its massive potential to drive change, Brown said, which makes it all the more important to resist the temptation to isolate.
”Whatever tactics you’re seeing used against current protest movements are going to be used against the environmental movement,” she said. “So it’s important to pay attention.”
You can find season 12 of the Drilled podcast by searching “Drilled” on your favorite podcast app.
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Thank you, Emily. For those of us long involved (on climate and other issues), what you have described here is all too often ignored, to our detriment.
Excellent work. It’s critical to note the parallel patterns at work here.