We're continuing our series today on the increasing global criminalization of protest with a look at what's happening now with the protest that the fossil fuel industry, politicians, and police often cite as the reason that we need new laws against protest in the United States. Standing Rock. The protests on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation in North and South Dakota took place from April twenty sixteen to February
twenty seventeen. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and thousands of allies protested against a project called the Dakota Access Pipeline or DAPPLE, a one thousand, one hundred and seventy two mile long pipeline running from the back and oil fields in western North Dakota to southern Illinois, crossing the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Members of the Standing Rock Tribe and surrounding communities said the pipeline was a serious threat to
the region's drinking water. The construction also directly threatened burial
grounds and cultural sites of historic importance. Although you'll hear in this episode that both the company in charge of the project, Energy Transfer, and the US government, have at various times claimed otherwise, the Dapple fight has been a real roller coaster, and it might surprise some of you to hear that despite the fact that construction on the pipeline was completed in April twenty seventeen, the Army Corps of Engineers only just this year, in September twenty twenty three,
six years later, released its Environmental Impact Statement or EIS on the project. You might remember that back in twenty sixteen. December twenty sixteen, to be exact, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that they would deny the easement to drill
under the Missouri River and would conduct an EIS. Energy Transfer criticized the Obama administration when that came out, calling it political interference and saying that further delay in the consideration of this case would add millions of dollars more each month in costs that could not be recovered. When former President Trump took office just a month later in January twenty seventeen, he issued an executive order overturning everything that the Army Corps had said and lifting all blocks
to pipeline construction. The tribe sued, and in twenty twenty a US federal judge ruled with them. They said the government had not studied the pipeline's effects on the quality of the human environment enough. They ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to go ahead with its environmental impact review. There was a lot of legal back and forth after that, but ultimately all the courts agreed on the need for
an environmental review that includes the Supreme Court. Despite all of those rulings, the pipeline has remained operational this whole time, transporting over five hundred thousand barrels per day. After it released the draft EIS in September this year, the Army Corps of Engineers scheduled a public hearing on it in Bismarck,
North Dakota in November. Our senior editor for this series, Alane Brown, who's been reporting on Standing Rock and Dapple since twenty sixteen, was there to hear what everyone had to say. Today she brings us that story and also a look at the impact that anti protest tactics used to shut down what was happening at Standing Rock and lots of other protests since then have had on communities.
Whether we should start to think about those impacts as part of an environmental impact as well, particularly when we're looking at Indigenous communities for whom these tactics really trigger historical generational trauma. The public comment period for this Environmental Impact Statement closes next week December thirteenth, twenty twenty three. Welcome back to Drilled, the real free speech Threat. I'm Abe Westervelt. After the break, Alan Brown takes us to North Dakota.
I know I'm just gonna say the thing true.
I'm in North Dakota on a hill overlooking the Cannonball River. I'm surrounded by rolling land dusted with snow under a gray sky. This land is unseeded treaty territory, meaning it was never given up or seated by the Ocheti Shakoen people that have lived here for generations. I'm standing with a handful of water protectors from the tribal nation of standing Rock over a small fire.
The Army Corps of Engineers is doing what they call corraling. So is it going to be a single line in and they're going to corral us in. There's going to be booths with curtains and a sonographer and it, Mike, It's not going to be like your typical hearing that we're used.
To Today, water protectors are being invited by the US Army Corps of Engineers to a public hearing to share their comments on the draft environmental impact Statement for the Dakota Access Pipeline known as DAPPLE. The pipeline has been operating since twenty seventeen, and then.
You make it as personal as possible. You talk about how or where you grew up and how the Missouri River is connected to you.
For over seven years, some people gathered here have been fighting to stop the pipeline. Some of them camped on this very spot in twenty sixteen in a resistance camp that was a jumping off point for direct action protests meant to stop construction. Police and private security responded with dogs, tear gas, water hoses, aerial surveillance, infiltration of their movement spaces, radio eavesdropping, and mass arrests.
Like we do know and we did confirm that private security is there along with North Dakota law enforcement.
After the pipeline was complete, the camps shut down and the cameras left, but Standing Rock and other tribes continued to fight in court. In twenty twenty, a judge agreed with the tribes. He revoked the permit that allowed the pipeline to cross the Missouri River, and he ordered an environmental impact state men. That report is seven years late, but it also represents one of the few pathways left to stop the pipeline.
I can't I can't speak for any other elder, but I'm kind of getting up there, and i just want to say I'm really proud.
Of all of you, really proud of all of you.
And that's all I can say.
I'm always proud of all of you.
Okay, car count.
And we're off.
I'm in a line of about one, two, three, four, five, six cars. We've got our blinkers on and we're headed to the public hearings. Right now, our cars are crossing over the precise site where the Dakota Access pipeline is buried. At a certain point, there were encampments all the way up to that spot where the pipeline route is. Eventually that was pushed back, but the place where you know over ten thousand people were camped at one point is
right where folks set a fire and were praying. I had a chance to read the EIS before I came out here. After years of researching the environmental harms associated with pipelines like this one. I was pretty surprised to hear the Army Corps suggest that removing the pipeline would be more environmentally harmful than allowing the oil to continue pumping under one of Standing Rock's primary drinking water sources. The EIS says that a major spill under the Missouri
River is remote to unlikely. As for climate change, this document claims that allowing the pipeline to continue operating as it is would quote not generate any direct greenhouse gas emissions, with the exception of a minor amount of emissions associated with pipeline maintenance activities. That's because the Army Corps is only taking into account the emissions generated by the pipeline itself,
not by the activity it enables burning fossil fuels. Finally, it claims there are simply no historic properties like sacred sites, for example, in the area being studied. A couple of nights before the hearing, I sat down with Honorata Defender and Jonathan Edwards to talk about the EIS. Honorata is a journalist for the local Corson Sioux County News Messenger,
and Jonathan is a former paramedic. Their siblings and both members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, and they organized some of the first grassroots meetings about the pipeline, held in an unheated movie theater here in the reservation town of McLoughlin, South Dakota. We ate pizza at a Senex gas station with a small table in the back. Have you guys had a chance to look at the draft environmental impact statement.
You have?
What do you think about it?
I think it's bull duty. It's severely lacking in everything. It is not a real environmental impact statement.
Be honest.
I haven't read it, so but I would imagine it's just something that's copied and pasted from another EI S if they did somewhere else in another part of the country. I don't think it'll adequately address our treaty rights, our sovereignty, the effect to the water when when the thing breaks. I think I'm on the spill response team. We had a it's some asthma classes a couple of years ago, and.
Yeah, we're screwed.
Here if there's an oil spilled.
I was curious about another kind of impact that I knew the pipeline had had. I've spent years digging into reams of public records and leak documents describing the way the pipeline company and its private security contractor, Tiger Swan, worked with police to repress the movement. The EIS didn't mention the emotional and physical trauma of police repression. It didn't mention the long running community divisions that a project
like this can inflict. Those kinds of long term impacts are common around the world when corporations and governments forced through large polluting projects, and they typically go unacknowledged by regulatory processes. I wondered, like, what kind of impact all that law enforcement presence and private security presence, like in a way that that is an extension of the pipe line, So what impact has that had on continued impact has that had on people who were subject to it.
I know a number of people that you know they have PTSD still that suffered from PTSD still from what they went through because of how Tigers Want and the police handle everything.
For Jonathan, fighting the pipeline deepened his distrust of public agencies that are supposed to keep people safe. For him, this was an intensified version of the everyday criminalization that he faced as a Lakota man in white communities bordering the reservation.
I'm in a group that's most likely to be killed by police, Native American males, you know, more so than African American males. So I think it's just something that expect to personally, that I expected, and it's just normal, I guess. Unfortunately, the gassed US shot at US beat people, you know, pointing loaded weapons at unarmed women and children.
A lot of tear gas.
Asthma.
Now they have never.
Had any breathing problems before before I went out there, but but yeah, there's just a lot of tear gas and mind you for standing.
On our own land. Oh well, I guess what you know, I'm kind of thinking about is like, if resistance to a pipeline under the conditions that were in the reality that we're living in, with climate change, with leaks, with all these things, if resistance is inevitable, and if resistance means like this kind of police repression, then like, isn't PTSD and the trauma that comes with those kinds of police confrontations also like an impact of the pipeline.
Yeah, most definitely they are. Yeah, I've never thought of it that way, but now that you bring it up. Yeah, it most definitely is, because unfortunately, I mean, these people, I mean they're gonna be haunted for the rest of their days. We're all going to be haunted for the rest of our days on the travesties that were committed there.
Anarata is clear on what she'd like to see happen.
I would love to see them remove it. They say that there's gonna be it would be worse. That's what they say throughout the whole environmental impact statement, basically is that it'd be worse for the wildlife, it'd be worse for the habitat, it'd be worse for the fish for us to remove the pipeline. And I believe that's so false. It's the unstruethening I've ever heard. I mean, they already disrupted all of this by putting it in, so why is it now a big deal to remove it?
She's describing one of the strangest things about the document. Since the pipeline is already built, the eis is backward. It describes the severe environmental harms that would come from removing the pipeline, which one has to assume are basically the same harms that would have come from putting the thing in. I figured Honorata and Jonathan would be at the EIS hearing, but Bismarck is an hour and a half away from the town where they helped start this movement.
Honorata wasn't sure if she'd have gas money, and her van's heat was broken. It was twenty five degrees outside back on the road, our caravan eventually arrived at the Ratisin, where two days of public hearing were about to begin. I catch up with Standing Rock Tribal chair Janet al Qayr in the lobby. The Standing Rock Zoo Tribe has already dropped out as a cooperating agency on the EIS, and I want to understand why.
When this pre draft came out, it showed on the cover of this book that we were a cooperating agency with our logo, and when.
We opened it up, you're like, hey.
Don't you're not giving us anything, You're redacting everything. How was this cooperating I don't want our logo on this document. I'm not supporting this document.
The pages on spill response are heavily redacted. Janet and others suspect it has to do with the independent contractor that drafted much of the EIS.
You know, when this came down in twenty twenty, the tribes asked that can we since we're in a cooperating agency, are you going to allow us to have some kind of say in who this independent company is going to be.
Months later, with little fanfare, Army Corps announced that they'd hired Environmental Resources Management. Environmental Resources Management has been accused of conflicts of interest before, including when it was hired by the State Department to help draft the EIS for the controversial Keystone exceled Tarsan Soil pipeline in twenty twelve.
Reporters and environmental organizations uncovered a whole tangle of red flags, including that some of the Environmental Resources Management experts who worked on the EIS had previously worked for the pipeline's parent company, Trans Canada and for other companies with a stake in kxl's construction. So many red flags in fact, that the State Department's Office of Inspector General investigated. Ultimately, they concluded that none of it amounted to a violation
of the Department's conflict of interest policy. To many critics, that was just an indication of how truly broken the system was. Environmental Resources Management again came under fire in twenty eighteen when another government agency, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, hired the company to monitor construction of Enbridge's Atlantic Bridge natural Gas project. Records obtained by DSMOG showed the agency was aware that Environmental Resources Management had a business relationship
with Enbridge, but hired them anyway. Environmental Resources Management is a member of the American Petroleum Institute, which has long been an ardent supporter of the pipeline. It's also a member of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, an industry association that helped draft new anti protest laws which swept the nation in the wake of the pipeline protests near the Standing Rock Reservation in twenty sixteen and twenty seventeen.
Environmental Resources Management did not respond to a request for comment.
We knew there was a conflict of interest. We all know what a conflict of interest is, you know, and so but it we were just disregarded in that decision. Yeah, And just like we said today, everything is box has been checked off already.
So and so it sounds like the option that the tribe prefers is sealing it off and leaving it in the riverbed.
Okay, right, sealing it off. We chose that option basically not to destroy the river bed.
You know.
As the hearing kicked off, the Army Corps laid out the possible outcomes this EIS process could have. At the end of the day, after the comment period closes on December thirteenth, the agency will have to decide again whether it's going to sign off on the pipeline's route, known as an easement under the Missouri River.
Within the EIS, there are five alternatives analyzed. The first alternative is to not grant the Eastment and would result in the restoration, meaning that the existing pipeline would be stopped and.
Dug up.
The second alternative would be to not grant the Eastment, but leave that pipeline in place so that the oil would stop. However, there would be no excavation of the pipeline. The third alternative, which is the applicants to go to access LLC's identified alternative, is to reissue the east with the existing conditions the same as they were under the previous environmental assessment. The fourth alternative would be to grant
the East Mint with additional mitigation measures. The last alternative, as a result of public scopey commas, was to look at an alternative that re routes the pipeline.
In the room is a microcosm of the movement. The space is dominated by water protectors from Standing Rock and other neighboring tribes. There's also a duel of police officers. Water protectors already recognized one of them as an officer who was behind the razor wire at the front line. There are a few burly men who later tell me they are pipeliners, there to advocate in favor of the pipeline for their union. And there's a handful of white guys who don't quite look like they fit in. I
figure they must be police or private security. Of course, it's hard to learn exactly who anyone is because this is not the public hearing we were all expecting. Public comments are to be submitted privately to stenographers sitting behind curtained boots. Water Protectors had hoped to deliver their remarks in front of the pipeline executives who built the project with no microphone, provided they took to the bullhorn.
Apply the perpetrators aren't going to be here to listen to us because they don't have a backbone.
So my comments.
Right here.
Because I'm not afraid to.
Say no, we're not being given a mic bush.
That's okay, We'll bring them on.
And when you're able to push people behind curtains, there's no accountability and our voices lose their power when we're here at numbers. There's people here and where you're wanting to pop.
The Army Corp attempted to respond to the complaints the next day. Commenters had the option to either go into the booths or deliver their testimony by microphone. I catch up with Tim Donagy, the research manager for Greenpeace USA, after he speaks at the mic. Green Peace and a handful of water protectors are still fighting a lawsuit from Energy Transfer, which claims that Greenpeace orchestrated the movement as
a way to encourage donations. The company has used the lawsuit to go after all kinds of indigenous people and environmental justice advocates via subpoenas. It's what some critics call judicial harassment. But Tim isn't here today to talk about that. He's focused on the eis's shortcomings where it comes to the climate crisis.
Oftentimes, in environmental impact statements, they'll say, well, if we essentially, if we're not going to drill oil here, it'll come from somewhere else, so it'll just be perfectly substituted. And because of that assumption, they say, well, there's no climate impact from approving this project or disapproving it, because it's
going to be the same no matter what. And I think that kind of flies in the face of basically what the science has shown about oil markets, which is that there's not going to be one hundred percent new oil coming on but it's not going to be zero percent either. It's going to be kind of somewhere in the middle, and a lot of the studies have kind of shown that it's roughlye around fifty percent of the
oil will be replaced. But that means that building a pipeline like decode acxis is going to boost the oil supply, It's going to boost oil consumption, and as a result, is going to increase global greenhouse gas emissions. And obviously we're at in a climate crisis and we simply just can't do this anymore. We can't continue to be facilitating more and more oil and gas extraction at a time when we need to be using less of it. So it's just like slamming on the brakes and the gas pedal.
At the same time, the courts in the last couple of years have said that's not a good analysis, and any way, NEPA requires that you do more than that. And then the other flaw I would say in this particular analysis is they're kind of implicitly assuming a business as usual baseline scenario where they're saying, oh, for decades to come, we're going to be using lots of oil. And I think, you know, there's already like countries are pledging to do better on climate, there's a continuing conversation
about how we're going to reduce emissions. I think it's just not credible to say that nothing is going to happen over the next coupley Obviously we need to go faster, but neither we shouldn't also just be assuming that oil demand is going to stay high all the way out for you know, decades to come.
Across the room. I see Julie Fedorchak, a member of the North Dakota Public Service Commission, which issued another key permit for the pipeline, she's a reliable advocate for the oil and gas industry, and I was curious what she'd say about the process, including how it handled the question of climate impacts.
We had three public hearings, actually four if you consider the one for optimization, and you know, had a very exhausted review looking at all of the impacts to the environmental impacts, all the river crossings, all the water bodies, wetlands, cultural resources, unstable areas like the whole Gamut. So I think that, you know, all of those reviews were done effectively, and that's what the law requires, and so we need to support the law.
So I'm just curious about how that review process that you're talking about addressed the climate crisis and the impact of the fuel that this pipeline is carrying on the climate.
Actually, that's not part of the law in North Dakota. We don't have to review that. It's in fact, we're but inhibited from including that in our review of these kinds of infrastructure projects. So the company wasn't required to provide any data of that nature.
Although federal agencies like the Army Corps are required by law to consider climate impacts, state laws very significantly as far as I could tell, the environmental regulatory process has not fully accounted for the climate impacts of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The hearing was winding down, and when Nia Locke got up to speak, she's the standing Rock tribal member who had given us the logistical rundown as we prepared to caravan out here right now.
But one of the things that hurt me personally, that affects me to this day is when I saw the announcement from the local media here from Kwyr that the Army Corps engineers hired on private security, according to the Tiger Swan documents in twenty sixteen, were elicted as a Jihattis terrorist. They used aero to monitor us. There was chemicals that were sprayed upon us, and they activated specific propaganda that was put out on a national level. We're
brutalized out there, and that we were light about. And then I watched friends family, I even watched are then tribal chairman gay York Shovel.
Get arrested.
Whenia and I talked more about it in the hallway.
I just find it really interesting that people now have a criminal record for standing up and speaking the truth. Prior to twenty sixteen, I was a very innocent law Quota language teacher, and I only had historical trauma from congressional decisions that were made from boarding schools to militarization in the eighteen hundreds.
The Dakota Wars have all.
Impacted my life, but it was all historical trauma, meaning it wasn't my lived experience. It was my ancestors, it was my grandparents, it was my aunt and my uncle's that has experienced the historical trauma brought on by the
United States government. And so in twenty sixteen, I actually got to live through warfare because North Dakota, the Army Corps engineers, the Obama administration, Trump administration, Biden administration continue to allow Dakota Access Pipeline to be built and operating illegally right now. And how it was built was by using warfare tactics on innocent people that were telling the truth. And so the impact, you know, there was PTSD, there's triggers, there's a lot of emotional trauma.
Whenia's experience aligns with what psychologists predicted, what happened in October twenty seventeen, the Society of Indians Psychologists, which exists to support the psychological well being of American Indians, put out a statement about police and private securities actions at Standing Rock. The statement said civilians in the movement would likely have developed normative paranoia and fear relative to these
increasing stressors placed on them over time. It would be likely that those who remained at the camps over long periods of time could begin to question who could be trusted or communicated with, and develop ruminations and recurring thoughts
regarding their safety. They also noted, given that we know a great number of Native American people participated in the movement, and that multi generational trauma and the ongoing effects of colonialism have left their mark, it is likely to have triggered normative fear and recurrence of traumatic themes from history. I asked the Army Corps press guy, Steve Wolf about what Winnia said. I had read a piece about how Army Corps brought in some extra security for this hearing.
Was it private security?
No private security.
That I'm aware of.
We've hired no.
Private security, okay, and so what I mean?
You see uniformed police officers here?
So and not all else to say about that?
Okay, so the news reports about Army Corps bringing in security was law enforcement.
So this is a private property.
I think people have seen what has happened in the past with this project, and I would certainly imagine they're a bit concerned.
If you had a private enterprise, would you be concerned. I asked one of the out of police white guys if he was security, and he replied that no, he worked for law enforcement. I also called the Ratican to see if they'd hired security, but they didn't return my calls and messages. Finally, I sent Steve an email just to clarify. His reply was pretty vague. He said, when we approach private sector organizations such as a hotel to conduct a public meeting, we cannot simply dictate to them
how their facility might be used for this purpose. He continued, Ultimately, the US Army Corps of Engineers must agree to and pay for the requirements of a given facility to host a public function for our environmental analysis process. He added, what you witnessed firsthand is that no law enforcement action was taken against anyone expressing their views or attendance at these two public meetings. Freedom of assembly and freedom of expression were alive and well at these meetings. I did
end up seeing Honorata at the hearing. Her uncle, who is an elder, gave her a ride, and I watched the two of them go into the booth and submit their testimony. At nine o'clock PM, they prepared to travel the hour and a half back home on the Dark Country Highway. Regardless of the outcome of the EIS process, she and Jonathan and other water protectors who are on the ground will continue to carry the weight of what happened at Standing Rock.
It was really upsetting to stand there and watch the people that are in uniform, whom some of whom I used to work alongside up in Bismarck, and they're they're shooting at you, and they're shooting tear gas and robber bullets, and it's upsetting and Baptists, that's upsetting, very upsetting. Yeah, there's a lot of respect for people like that anymore, and if I ever did, but I don't necessarily want to focus on that too much on a daily basis
because they can't walk around pistoff. Yeah, totally, So I just kind of had to let some of that go. I'm still working on that assume that'll be a lifelong process for me because they heard a lot of people out there. I don't really follow what the government does anymore. I just don't have any faith in them at all. And yeah, that's where I'm at. That's probably where I'll always be.
Unfortunately, Honorata did point out that the impacts are not all bad.
It was a very big boom and the sound waves can still be felt all across the world because people realize that, you know, they matter, their voice matters, and with that voice they can do things and remarkable things, extraordinary things.
Drilled is an original Critical Frequency production. Our senior editor for this series is Alan Brown, who also reported, wrote, and hosted this episode. Our senior producer is Martin Zaltz Bostwick.
Martin also did the sound design.
Who composed much of the music in this episode.
Peter Duff is our audio engineer.
Fact checking by Rudan Jan.
Our outwork is by Matt Fleming.
Our first amendment attorney is James Wheaton.
Our theme song is but in the Hand by four Known.
The show was created by Amy Westervelt.
You can see more stories from this series, as well as background reporting on Drilled Dot media.
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