I'm sitting in the courtroom in Morton County, North Dakota. Jury selection wrapped up yesterday and today the Energy Transfer versus Greenpeace trial has officially begun. Energy Transfer's lawyer, Trey Cox delivers his opening statement. Energy Transfer did everything bright as it prepared to build the Dakota Access Pipeline. Trey assures the jury there were protests, they were small, they were quiet. He says, now enter green Peace. Several photos
pop up on screens throughout the courtroom. Here they are, Trey explains, these are the Green Piece six. Not a single one of them lives in this community. These people are professionals. They embed in a location, then they escalate. They are trained in how to teach people how to protest. Trey says he's going to prove that the environmental nonprofit secretly planned, organized, and funded a game plan to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Greenpeace attempted to make
Energy Transfer look like Satan himself, he says. Shame on them. He exclaims, they thought they could do it in secret. They thought that we wouldn't be smart enough to figure out what they did. He concludes. Today starts the day of reckoning. I'll admit it. The vibes are fiery, and I say let's go. If Energy Transfer is finally about to show us the dirt they say they have on
this huge nonprofit, my pen and notebook are ready. This season of Drilled, we bring you Slapped, the story of an indigenous nation fighting for its water, an environmental nonprofit facing extinction, and an energy giant using the courts to punish protesters. I'm Ellen Brown. The idea of Greenpeace as a radical boogeyman is something oil companies and their lawyers trot out a lot.
If I were an evil corporate lawyer, I too would go after green Peace.
Frank Zelko is a historian at the University of Hawaii. He wrote a big book on green Peace. It's called Make It a Green Peace. He says Greenpeace has a very particular history. It was founded just as the contemporary environmental movement was taking off in the nineteen seventies. They started out finding nuclear testing and then moved on to protecting marine life. But what set them apart from any other environmental organization at the time were these dramatic protest actions at sea.
They were discussing what they would do. Once they found some wiling ships in the Pacific, they decided they needed to put their bodies on the line in some way. That evolved into well, let's like, you know, put ourselves between the whales and the harpoon boat.
They started off conducted a series of very grueling zodiac exercises.
Sensational direct action became green Piece's brand, and green Peace was media savvy. In fact, the original group included journalists. These were people that knew how to tell a story. Also, they weren't just a North American organization, they were international.
They became, probably by the eighties, the most well known environmental organization in the world. Not the richest or the biggest, but certainly the one that grew the most headlines.
For the purposes of our story, it's also helpful to know that green pieces relationships with Indigenous people were spotty. Green Piece's efforts to save sea cretures sometimes took aim at indigenous practices. For example, an anti seal hunting campaign Greenpeace launched in the nineteen seventies destroyed a major income stream for Indigenous nations.
First of all, harvest is the only economic source that we have here on Saint Paul, it's the way that people earn their money. But I'm not sure that's good enough argument anymore with all the environmental that's attacking the differicueal harvest.
But in recent years the nonprofit has really tried to make amends. They made working closely with indigenous people a big part of their strategy. But one thing Greenpeace has done all along is commit to avoiding violence or property damage.
Early on in Greenpeace's history they made it very clear that, you know, nonviolence was key, and they've you know, drown the line ever since that we will never endanger people in our protests and we won't deliberately destroy property.
Still, companies and governments began to label their actions as eco terrorism.
I don't think there's any credible examples of anything remotely like something you could describe as eco terrorism in green peaces past, unless you know, you reframe eco terrorism as a bunch of people just blocking bulldozers or hanging a banner between you know, a couple of chimneys or under a bridge or something like that.
But criminalizing environmental activism has long been a corporate strategy to get critics off companies backs, so have lawsuits can you kind of just take me back to when you first heard about, you know, the federal RICO suit that Energy Transfer filed.
Yeah, I remember it well.
Deepa Padmanaba is a senior legal advisor for Greenpeace. I talked with her before the trial began.
I was about six and a half months pregnant with my first child, so my memory is a little hazy from that point. This one came at a very big surprise, just because the Greenpeace entities had such little involvement with anything associated with Standing Rock, from communications to on the ground presence. So this one perplexed us.
But as DIPA tried to figure out why Energy Transfer had targeted them, one thing stood out.
At that time, we were already dealing with another massive slapsuit filed in federal court.
Against slap stance for strategic lawsuit against public participation. Slapsuits are about using the court system to silence powerful people's critics. Just before the Standing Rock movement took off in twenty sixteen, a law firm called casswitzpenceon Torres had filed a separate RICO suit against Greenpeace. It's a firm that Donald Trump is higher. Repeatedly this RICO suit was on behalf of
a timber company called Resolute Forest Products. They claimed that green Peace Canada's anti logging campaign, which targeted Resolute, amounted to racketeering, defamation, and tortuous interference, which is just what Energy Transfer would accuse Greenpeace of. About a year later, and.
As we forward to August of twenty seventeen, the complaints looked very similar. It was the same attorneys, it was the same allegations of a RICO conspiracy, and it was the same attempt to just scare us into silence and bankrupt.
Us energy transfers. Arguments seemed to be cut from a pattern created by Cassowits. The Gibson dun firm was involved in developing the lawsuit early on and then took over the suit again years later. These two firms, with histories of using RICO to go after environmental defenders, apparently tag teamed the lawsuit against green Peace. Cassowitz spokesperson Email Drilled
a statement. It read, the firm spearheaded energy transfer suits against those who wrongfully targeted these projects, and we are gratified that energy Transfer ultimately achieved such a successful result. I tried to get energy Transfer in their lawyers at Gibson done on the phone to talk me through their legal fight. They all said no to multiple interview requests.
So deepa walk me through the claims in detail. Remember, Energy Transfer's initial federal RICO suit against Greenpeace was dismissed in twenty nineteen because the pipeline company didn't have the evidence to prove racketeering. The case was refiled in North Dakota State court. This new case alleged a conspiracy rather
than RICO. North Dakota is a major oil and gas state, experienced some of the Standing Rock protests firsthand, and happens to be one of the fifteen states in the country that does not have an anti slap law on the books.
The claims in that lawsuit fall into three what I called three major buckets. So one is a set of defamation claims, you know, claims that they said, we spread these false statements that cause them harm.
Energy transfers as green Peace committed defamation by accusing them of deliberately desecrating sacred sites, by accusing them of putting the pipeline on the Standing Rocks tribe's land, and by accusing police and private security of being violent toward nonviolent protesters. I can tell you these statements have been repeated far and wide over the past decade, and no evidence I've
seen indicates they originated with green Peace. But Energy Transfer is saying that green Peace used these statements to convince people to go to Standing Rock and protest the pipeline.
The second big bucket are tortious interference claims.
This is a money thing. The Standing Rock movement included a big effort to get banks that were funding the Dakota Access Pipeline to divest.
So they claimed we made all these statements to banks, and those statements cause banks to either pull out of the decode Access pipeline project, cause them you know, refine it huge refinancing costs, things like that. And then the third bucket of claims are on the ground claim So those are things like conversion and trespass where they allege huge amounts of damages for delays and for you know, direct damages related to construction equipment and things like that.
The Standing Rock movement is best known for protests that attempted to physically block construction. Energy Transfer is arguing in that those actions were orchestrated by Greenpeace. The conspiracy charges tiele this together. To prove a conspiracy, you need people or groups to be plotting together to do something unlawful. It's boring but important to understand that Green Piece is actually a network of independently run organizations based around the world.
I'm going to spare you all the details, but you should know that the green Peace organizations and Transfer is targeting are green Peace International, which coordinates some of the things green Peace national and regional organizations do, green Peace Inc. Which does activism in the US, and green Peace Fund, also based in the US, but exists to fund certain green Peace activities. Energy Transfer by now already dropped half of the supposed conspirators from the case. That's Cody Hall,
Crystal Tubles, and Red Warrior Society. The conspiracy theory they're going with at this point involved just the different green Peace organizations conspiring with each other. Energy Transfer calls their first witness and Lucky me. He is a celebrity of my imagination, Mike Futch. This dude's name has come up about a bazillion times as I've investigated the pipeline company's activities during the Standing Rock movement. He's a towering bald man with broad shoulders and an American flag pin on
the lapel of his suit. Mike was the project manager for the north the CODA section of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Remember that incident where the private security dogs attacked water protectors.
Man protester.
Protesters.
Are you telling the dogs to bite the protester?
Mike says it was the protesters, not private security in their dogs, that were violent. The only violence was when protesters came on to private property and attacked us. We were always in retreat, he says. He counts property damage as part of that violence. He talks about how the pipeline opponents cut hydraulicoses, booby trapped equipment, filled gas tanks with sand and gravel, spray painted cabin windows, and busted
up equipment gages. And in the trial days that follow five law enforcement officers take the stand and back him up. All of them seemed to agree that the protesters were the violent ones. But some of the things that they're describing don't totally seem like violence to me. Here's Jason's google Meyer, Deputy chief of the Bismarck Police Department.
It's not peaceful when you block a Highway whenever you want and without warning, and they did that all the time.
Jason declined my request for an interview, but he spoke with Rob Rice, that propaganda guy hired by Energy Transfers private security contractor Tiger Swan. The interview was included in a documentary they posted on Facebook back when the protests were still going on.
We didn't even want to rest anybody that day. We just got in a line and systematically just pushed forward and tried to be as nice as we could about it. Then it turned into they started burning vehicles in our way. They started throwing all top cocktails at us, that were throwing logs, rocks, whatever they could at us. We had no option other than to move forward, and we did have to use some amount of force, but opinion there was a minimum mode of force.
Jason and the other police officers did share some first hand accounts of what I think falls under a more typical definition of violence. Jason testifies that he and his family received threats from pipeline opponents. They feared for their lives and left their home for a few days at the FBI's suggestion. Another officer, Lieutenant Brian Steele, says that during one protest he got hit in the back with a big rock. Cy Wagner was one of the Greenpeace
staffers who went to Standing Rock. He was called to testify too, and her testimony from Energy Transfers public relations executive who said she also dealt with threats during the protests and.
It was powerful that they received threats. It's a real thing. There were harm in this way.
He was sympathetic, but he felt the testimony was missing a big part of the story, the tactics and tools used against water Protectors, like rubber bullets.
We didn't even talk about the the dog bites, the bullets that people took to the face. People all started hearing from all the equipment that was brought, the military equipment that was brought to there, and people were sprayed in freezing temperatures, Like the trauma that people felt in that space. We didn't talk about that. We didn't talk about the harm that was done on people who were there on the front line non violently.
After that night where police sprayed water hoses, at least twenty six people were hospitalized, with dozens more injured. According to the Water Protectors Medic Group. Multiple journalists were hit with rubber bullets throughout the protests, and on a lot of days police had guns loaded and ready to fire on demonstrators.
They're all holding batons and guns, as you can tell.
And they started they stopped us up at the top up there and started spraying and beating everybody on the front line.
And that's what I remember. Energy Transfer says they're going to prove that it was defamation for Greenpeace to say that police in privates ccurity used violence against nonviolent protesters. But I'm not seeing proof that no nonviolent people got hurt by dogs, rubber bullets, or water hoses. Another Gibson dun lawyer, whose name also happens to be Cox, comes up to question Mike Footge and Cox number two carries to the stand stack after stack of brown accordion folders.
Mike Fuotch confirms that each of these stacks are invoices from a different security contractor. At one point, Cox number two struggles to carry over one of the teetering piles. Energy Transfer wants Greenpeace to pay them back for all these invoices. When they tally it up later, it will be over fifty million dollars. Some of the date to early August, before Greenpeace employees arrived at Standing Rock, and others date to twenty eighteen, literally years after they left.
With all this paper stacking up, There's something I'm wondering. I'd looked through Energy transfers daily private security reports from Standing Rock, where they were gathering intel on the movement's leaders. Green Peace was hardly mentioned in those at all.
What you'll see, your honor, is those situational reports, which were done every single day, do not reference green Peace involved in any activity at or around the protest sites at all.
This is Greenpeace's lawyer, Everett Jack.
No.
I didn't secretly record him in the trial, but he did say basically the same thing during a pre trial hearing that I was actually allowed to record.
The only place where those reports reference green Peace is that they also tracked what was happening online and traffic online.
Here in the courtroom, none of the people on the stands seem to know much about Greenpeace being involved at Standing Rock, which seems like a huge problem for Energy Transfer's case against them. Everett Jack brings that up again when he cross examines Energy Transfer's project manager Mike Butch. He says, for any of the security reports that you saw or had access to. None of them had any reference to any of the Greenpeace entities being on the ground in North Dakota and running the show in the
main camp. Do they? I don't recall seeing that, Mike replies, and if I told you that none of those reports from any of those contractors said that, you wouldn't have any reason to dispute that, would you? Everrett Jack asks, as I sit here right now today.
No.
He also says that it wasn't his job to keep up with the daily reports. If Greenpeace was actually the mastermind of Standing Rock, wouldn't security have been tracking them. Here's Everett Jack again from the pre trial hearing.
They were filming and reporting, taking pictures of everything that was going on, if there was something going on there the tastimony of their witness They looked at web postings, they looked at movements of people activities in the camp, and that was doable in part because people were infiltrating the camp to find out what was going on.
None of the police officers who testify seem to remember much about Greenpeace either. Energy Transfer's lawyer Cox number two is able to point to a single police record that describes a group from Greenpeace headed to stage of protest with gas masks, but Sheriff Kyle Kirkmeyer says he doesn't remember it. Sheriff Kirkmeyer does remember the reasons he believed
thousands of people were showing up to protest. He says it was because the Standing Rocks two Tribes chairman invited them there, and because of the dog attacks and the explosion of social media at the time. The sheriff says people came because of the controversial nature of the pipeline itself, and because they believed the area was the tribe's unseated territory. It's part of the treaty, the sheriff says, makes no
mention of a green Peace campaign. The next witnesses energy transfers lawyers call up are Greenpieace people who couldn't be at the trial in person. They're pre taped video depositions. It's from them that we finally hear what Greenpeace actually did do it. Standing Rock first is a green Peace employee named Davy Cory. He's thin, with whitish hair and icy blue eyes. Davey drove a trailer called the Rolling
Sunlight from Greenpiece's headquarters to Standing Rock. The Rolling Sunlight was equipped with solar panels to provide electricity for media and legal people. Davy says he spent many hours on back roads in the country following the right of way of the pipeline. He was scouting, he says, collecting information about what was happening with construction and passing it along to indigenous activists in the camp.
He then sent all of that information the diagram of exactly along with a plan of how we could blockade.
That's energy transfers lawyer tray Cox. Again not a recording from the trial, just the pre trial.
How we could blockade and attack and vandalize these toys, airplanes, bulldozers, equipment to disrupt and prevent energy transfer from conducting the Dapple pipeline.
He was referencing emails Davi sent, including one that now flashes on the screen. It's from Davy to another Green Pieace employee, dated October twenty sixteen. The company has a place where all their toys are stored near the Bismarck area, he writes. He suggests a protest strategy. If the entrances were blocked, it would be very hard for them to
get to the job sites. Another Green Piace employee replies, I just sent thirty straight boxes down, meaning lock boxes plumbing pipes that protesters can use to lock themselves to each other. As the video deposition plays, the jurors are watching intently. Two of them have a hand to their mouths. I imagine what they must be thinking. That this is the guy, this is the outside agitator, the professional protester. Trey Cox again from the pre trial hearing.
He was paid by green Peace to travel to Standing Rock. He was not on vacation. He received his salary, green Peace reimbursed him for all of his expenses.
Greenpeace lawyers point out that there's no evidence that this protest Davy suggested ever, even happened, and Davy later told me of her text that he did not supply a diagram of how water protectors could do a blockade. He also denied sharing ideas about how to attack and vandalize equipment. He said doing so would not fit into a nonviolent campaign. We learned that in total, six Green Piace employees visited Standing Rock, some for a few days, others for a
few weeks. These are the guys trey Cox calls the Green p.
Six.
For what it's worth, they all worked for Greenpeace, Inc. No one from Greenfeace's fund or Greenpeace International visited Standing Rock. Greenpeace Inc. Also donated some supplies. They provided about fifteen thousand dollars to a group called Indigenous People's Power Project or IP three, and some of the six Greenpeace employees helped IP three run nonviolent direct action trainings. Nonviolent direct action is basically civil disobedience protest actions meant to disrupt
an activity that the demonstrators view as unjust. At times, those actions involved trespassing or disregarding police orders. But Energy Transfer is saying that those training supported actions that caused expensive construction delays and property damage. They're basing this in part on internal emails where Greenpeace employees congratulate each other
for their role in the movement. Here's one of Energy Transfer's lawyers at a pre trial hearing describing a green Piece email also displayed during the trial.
So, then, what Miss Lambert says is these trainings reached thousands of people and the peaceful and prayerful direct actions that resulted in them were crucial for.
The Army Corps of Engineers to reach.
To deny the permit to cod access to cross the Missouri at Lagwai.
Green Pieces Everet Jack said in the pre trial hearings and in the trial that emails like this are not solid evidence.
If I put on my game Jersey and my team wins, and I said, geez, I put on my game Jersey.
And my team won, that must be why they won. That is not the reason why they won.
Energy Transfer lawyers say that Green pieces total funding for Standing Rock amounted to fifty five thousand dollars, though it isn't clear how they got that number. They also show that Green Pieces executive director at the time convinced several foundations to donate a total of ninety thousand dollars to the Standing Rock movement. It's not nothing, but the Tiger Swan spreadsheets I'd previously reviewed showed that over eight million
dollars had come into the camps from crowdfunding alone. So yeah, Greenpeace definitely contributed money to Standing Rock, but not much compared to all the cash flowing it. And yes, they sent six employees, but that's compared to a movement that included tens of thousands of people. But let's put money and people aside. Energy Transfer is also saying that Greenpeace launched a communications campaign that was full of lies, and those lies got people to show up and also got
banks to back away from the pipeline company. Except that the very first infammatory statement Energy Transfer claims Greenpeace made didn't happen until two months after those dog attacks went viral. Honestly, green Piece's post about Standing Rock never crossed my radar. There were just so many other social media posts from people who were there. The thing that is blowing my mind is the scale of what Energy Transfer wants green
Peace to pay for. Here's green Piece's ever at Jack from a pre trial hearing.
What planeifs want to do is attribute the actions of every single one of them to green Piece. That is not supportive by the law.
Energy Transfer doesn't just want green Peace to pay for its security expenses. Trey Cox sells the jurors that the pipeline company had to spend seven million dollars on pr firms to deal with the protests. They spent eight and a half million on the ranch that the most controversial part of the pipeline passed through. They paid contractors fourteen and a half million extra due to changes in construction plans, and they lost almost one hundred million when they had
to delay the refinancing of their loan. They want green Peace to pay back what looks like nearly every penny they spent to respond to the protests, as if green Piece was alone in making all of this happen. As the days tick by and we get into weeks two of the trial, I'm still sort of waiting for the
smoking gun. It's clear that some of the Greenpeace people participated in a few protests, but Energy Transfer hasn't shown evidence connecting green Peace trainings or funding to the waves of protests that were happening almost every day, nor has it really tied green Peace to any major property destruction. The math is not adding up for me, and I start to wonder if energy Transfer actually might lose. But then something happens that makes me question my sense of reality.
I've started to figure out who all the people in the room are, especially those of us working in media. The first few days I meet reporters from national outlets like The Guardian and the New York Times, and even an international reporter from the Financial Times. But by week two it's down to me and a local reporter from the North Dakota Monitor. And then there are the people that I thought were reporters but aren't. There's Will Fewer. He's young and very formally dressed in a blue suit.
When I chat him up, he's a little vague about what he's actually doing here. I google him later and realize that he works for DCI, a notorious public relations firm and one that has worked for Energy Transfer for a long time. And then there's another DCI guy, Craig Stevens. He's been sitting in a corner of the courtroom reading a copy of the Age of Innocence when things get dull.
He serves as a spokesperson for a group called Grow American Infrastructure Now, which advertises itself as a coalition of businesses and labor leaders who want pipelines to be built. But it's been paid for by Energy Transfer. Legal filings I reviewed before coming here confirmed that as of twenty twenty three, Energy Transfer was paying the pr firm around one hundred thousand dollars per month to keep Grow American Infrastructure Now going. And then there's Evan Herman. He's nondescript.
He wears fitted sweaters, sometimes over a button up shirt, and he's here every day scribbling down notes. Evan tells me he is working for journalists with an outlet called Legal Newsline, and at first I don't think anything of it, but when I look up Legal news Line, I realize it's connected to Central North Dakota News, those weird newspapers that showed up with the homes of Morton County residents.
Central North Dakota News and Legal News Line are part of a murky network of news like outlets that are really fueled by right wing interests. Seriously, a New York Times investigation found that some outlets in this network were allowing corporate executives and Republican political operatives to order up articles. The Times called it a pay to play network. Sites like the Central North Dakota News are replacing serious journalism in a lot of communities, and that seems to be
playing out in this courtroom. I figure i'd better invite Evan to lunch and see what he'll tell me. And at a certain point I start recording our conversation on my phone. Evan calls himself a freelance investigative journalist on his LinkedIn page, but at lunch, he admits to me that he's not really here doing journalism.
I hardly call what I do journalism that facilitating articles.
He tells me. His first job for the network involved talking to regular people from cities in the organization's coverage area. He got them to comment on political topics of the day. In one case, he says, that meant interviewing a local person from Mandan about their experience with the Standing Rock protests.
The stories I heard of like, right, like, nothing to do with greenbes, but the yeah, my daughter was traumatized and they brought a pig's head and work they Yeah.
Evan is talking about this Thanksgiving protest in Mandan where someone decided to carry around a pig's head on a stick. It comes up all the time when I talk to local residents about how they feel about the protests. Evan says. One of his interviews was published in the Central North Dakota News.
Yeah, I think one went in there.
Oh right, nothing to do with that, Evan says. For this trial, he's simply sitting in the courtroom and taking notes. He hands them over to his bosses and they turn the notes into articles for Legal Newsline, which run without a byeline. Sometimes I notice Central North Dakota news cross posts, the legal news line pieces. Hevin acknowledges that the outlets he works for are backed by Dick U Line, the billionaire behind the box company.
He is very privately the biggest conservative and Republican causes in the country.
Oh interesting, so he's kind of guided by his politics.
Yeah, in funding the.
It's definitely true that you Line is a big political donor, and past reporters have connected the dots between him and these weird media outs. But I think what was most fascinating about talking with Evan was realizing that his sense of how this trial was going was totally different from mine.
No, they're making a great case, cos I think is really.
Like look forget everything else, like to make it real self for you look at their emails and that's what made it hit, Like the openings.
Hey, he's kind of delivering on that.
So what I suggested the title for the next article is a nexus is started coming again.
To me, this case is a mess, but for Evan, the story is becoming clear, so that like, here's the nexus.
It's always been violence, physical damage, defamation.
So now but after a second lunch with Evan a few days later, our conversation takes a turn. You're you don't totally believe that human's God's high a change. No, he tells me that the earth, like our bodies, has a self healing mechanism, and I can't help but start to argue with him.
Just like our.
Bodies, like we take you an alcohol, I believe the earth is kind of like an organism and just like you know, hey, we drink too much, and like we have our liver and little talks and it's straighted out. I think, I think, I think there is an earth by self healing records.
But what about people who die of alcohol?
Right?
No, well exactly.
But it's not just that he's wrong that bothers me. It's that he feels so comfortable saying this to me, like it's normal to not believe in the climate crisis, and hearing this come from someone who's positioning himself as a journalist feels dangerous. When I keeps trying to fight with him, Evan starts to get suspicious. He asks if I'm working for green Peace.
I'm not talking to Greenpeace, all right, green piece.
No, I'm here as a reporter. But what I should have said is, of course, I'm talking to green Peace because I'm a reporter. Regardless, Evan helps me realize that my understanding of this trial is not shared by everyone in that court room, and those jurors might be closer in perspective to Evan Herman, the right wing article facilitator, than to me. It's becoming clear that Energy Transfer is about to wind down their side of the case. A few days early, one of the last video depositions they
pull up is Nick Tilson. Nick runs an organization called Indian Collective. He's a citizen of the Oglalla Lakota Nation. In fact, he's the first Oceti shit Cooin person that we hear from since this trial began. He's a founding member of the group that Greenpeace worked with at Standing Rock, Indigenous People's Power Project. Up until this point, it's felt like we're talking around what really happened at Standing Rock. But when Greenpeace presents its cross examination of Nick, the
dots start to connect for me. I talked to Nick on the phone afterward.
The story of Standing Rock and what happened at Standing Rock is a thousand times more compelled then the bullshit lawsuit.
He says during his testimony that The first nonviolent direct action training he ever participated in was when he was nine years old, and it came from the American Indian Movement. He received another forty or fifty nonviolent direct action training since then. He adds none from Greenpeace, and he was involved with establishing protest strategies at Standing Rock.
We made a conscious, deliberate decision and prayed on those decisions that this was going to be non violent, and I'll say we maintained that throughout this entire process, and the ones who had the guns on the front line was the police and the military, not us.
Nick and the Indigenous People's Power Project worked with the Standing Rock Zuo Tribal Council to develop nonviolent direct action principles. They were handwritten on a big sign and hung in the middle of camp. Among them, we are not violent. Also, property damage does not get us closer to our goal.
The only reason green Peace and any allies are there is that they're there upon invitation. Why some of us even and felt comfortable inviting Greenpeace in the first place is that some of our comrades and relatives worked in that organization, and we trusted those individual people.
Nick was one of the people who invited Greenpeace to come to Standing Rock. He was close with that green Peace guy, Cy Wagner, who was also an Indigenous People's Power Project member. Another Greenpeace employee was also a member.
We asked them to help us with scouting. We asked them to train people.
I asked him why would nonviolent direct action training be important.
The training that we're talking about is not some crazy trainings. Some people think that martinather King and Rosa Parks just one day sat on a bus and launched a movement with the reality is they went through training, you know, and that training helped them be disciplined and help them be effective and help them change the course of history.
It's true. Rosa Parks attended a two week workshop on putting desegregation into action at the high Lander Research and Education Center soon before she refused to get up from her bus seat. Nick sees the protest to stop pipeline construction as an extension of the civil rights tradition. What really strikes me about next deposition as it's playing in
the courtroom is how frank and direct he is. He tells the lawyers that the Indigenous People's Power Project trained five to ten thousand people at Standing Rock and says he himself participated in dozens of actions to stop construction.
I was arrested in Standing Rock for you know, running in front of machinery and locking down to machinery. And on those days we want we chased off those pipeline workers. They went, they were running away from us. Those were days of a victory for our people because on those days, you know, we were able to stop destruction happening at the point of construction.
I asked Nick about his decision to be so straightforward in his testimony.
We don't regret anything we didn't standing wrong. We don't regret resisting to fight for Mother Earth, to fight for sacred water, to fight for human rights and indigenous rights, to fight a corporation that was contributing to climate change that will, you know, has the potential to impact all human beings in the world, like we know what we were doing there.
Ultimately, he sees energy transfers attempt to frame Greenpeace as the orchestrators of the movement as part of a racist legacy.
I'll be honest, like when I read more into the lawsuit and the bullshit that was written into there, in all of that was like this continued pattern of erasure and this continued treatment of Indigenous people actually that that we're not capable, that we don't come from these sophisticated nations that have the unique relationships with the federal government.
It had to have been this NGO. If anybody knows anything about the Indigenous resistance movement, the last thing we need is in Whte Ngo to come into our into our movement to quote unquote save us, you know, because those days of you know, quote unquote saving the Indian are over.
On day ten of the trial, Energy Transfer plays its last video deposition and Green Peace begins to present its defense. We begin to hear from actual people on the stand who worked at Greenpeace during Standing Rock. Cy Wagner is denay In, an artist, and he worked for green Peace for seven years. He wears his shoulder length hair swept back. He has a turquoise necklace in earrings, and wears black rimmed glasses. I talk with him after he takes the stand.
He said he went to Standing Rock because other Indigenous leaders invited him there. It wasn't because of his employer, Green Piece, which SI sometimes refers to as GP.
Regardless if GP is going to pay for it or not. I was going to find a way. He wasn't find resources and make my way there.
CI put together a proposal and a budget request, and Green Peace did approve it. Fifteen thousand dollars would pay for five people from the Indigenous People's Power Project to go to Standing Rock. This is where Energy Transfer gets their idea of the paid protesters. This amount came to about one hundred and twenty five dollars per day per Indigenous People's Power Project member, less expenses. It was a stipend because people had to be away from their jobs
to be there. CI was there on his usual Green salary.
When I first arrived. Our goals was to set up trainings in the intro to a nonviolent direct action where we talk a little about history theory, we talk about safety de escalation, and we met with a complete unorganized situation. No one was talking, people had their own agendas.
It was chaotic. There were various groups planning protests and even some others holding trainings. For example, SI said he met folks from Red Warrior Camp, but they never worked together. What's I really looked forward to was the Knights.
It was so peaceful. It was Tea Schert whether still you could go out in the night and see the stars and see the moon come up, and you would just go to your neighbor and there there would be a circle around a fire, and they're most likely singing the song in their language. And some of them I knew are familiar with, and then some I just never heard.
Four in my life. I can't remember the last time that indigenous people in the US have converged like that and shared shared knowledge and wisdom and songs, unorganized, unannounced. You could smell like the wood that they brought from their regions. It was just overwhelming physical, emotional, spiritual experience.
In court, he tells the jury that he mostly worked to set up an area for building art for protests. He did help support two protests on the ground. One was an action where members of Indigenous People's Power Project lockdown to machinery. Another was a march in downtown Bismarck. I asked him about the nickname Energy Transfer gave him and his colleagues. I don't know if you even heard this.
Maybe you did, but they're like throwing around this term the Green Peace six, and.
You're one of them.
So I guess I'm just curious how it feels to be one of the green Peace six.
Who's the other five? I guess, you know, like I mean, I mean, call them any things, but I don't think that's a bad thing.
S I says Greenpeace hasn't always been good at following the lead of Indigenous people, but he's seen things shift.
Since Greenpeace has been around in since the seventies. They have burned some bridges and rebuild some bridges with some Indigenous communities. I think they've been learning a lot in that process of how to show up in those spaces because they made those mistakes. Within my seven years of employment, I saw some changes. I saw the massive green Piece ship make those turns.
Greenpeace calls their former executive director, Annie Leonard to testify. She says that green Pieces past missteps where it came to Indigenous people led them to establish a detailed Indigenous people's policy, and that policy means that they would never come to an indigenous nation and struggle and take over.
Greenpeace's policy is that we don't engage in indigenous led campaigns from indigenous territories unless we're asked.
We chat outside after she's done.
These various documents we've seen say that Greenpeace supported training, you know, maybe a few thousand people in nonviolent direct action. Why shouldn't Greenpeace have to pay damages for that?
So a big part of Greenpeace's nonviolent direct action training is in embodying nonviolence. It's de escalation. And I've gone through these trainings, and boy do I find it helpful. I found it helpful on that stand today.
As a matter of fact, in her testimony, Annie repeated a version of Nick Tilson's argument that civil disobedience is a crucial tactic for American democracy. Trey Cox challenges her, Rosa Parks didn't trespass on other people's property, did she? Annie replies, Rosa Parks was trespassing because she was order to vacate that seat, and the law in Montgomery at
the time said she must vacate that seat. Trey hits back again, Rosa Parks didn't send a whole work crew home for a day when she sat in that seat, did she? Annie replies? She kickstarted the Montgomery bus boycott, where for over a year people boycotted buses. A lot of bus people were put out of work because hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people chose to walk every single day to boycott the segregated bus line. Tray seems to have hit his limits. I don't want to fuss
with you on that anymore, Miss Leonard. The more of this trial I see, the more I realize there's a lot of really important information that's not going to make it into the court room. Early every morning, the lawyers show up before the jurors get there to argue over what information can and can't be mentioned in the upcoming court sessions. And in the middle of Greenpeace presenting its defense,
Judge Gian makes a big decision. He rules that key details of a pipeline's safety report will be kept out of the trial, even though the possibility of a leak is at the heart of why the organization got involved at Standing Rock in the first place. Also, we still haven't heard anything from any member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, and it dawns on me that maybe we won't. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has its own litigation still
going against the pipeline company. I could imagine all kinds of reasons tribal leaders wouldn't want to be on that stand and if green Peace is serious about their Indigenous people's policy, then they'd abide by what the tribe wanted. But the funny thing about a lawsuit like this is that sometimes it shakes loose information that isn't part of
the plaintiff's plan. You see. I started monitoring this lawsuit months ago, and as Energy Transfer in Greenpeace exchanged legal filings are over what this trial would look like, new details began to bubble up about what happened behind closed doors as energy Transfer built this pipeline. Some of those details aren't going to be allowed in the courtroom, and some of the people who really know the truth behind Energy Transfer's claims aren't going to be called to testify.
But I'm not a lawyer, and I don't have to stay inside the Morton County courthouse. The judge in this case might have kept pollution out of the courtroom, But by following this lawsuit, I'm finding myself pulled back into the heart of what this story was originally about. The Water Drilled is an original Critical Frequency production. This season was reported and written by me Allen Brown. Our senior editor is Audrey Quinn. Additional editing by Tristan Attone Eckrist.
Our producer and sound designer is Ray Pang. Mix and mastering by Martin Saltz, Austwick and Peter Duff. Fact checking by Shilpa Jindia. Our First Amendment Attorney is James Wheaton. Our Impact producer is Lindsay Crowder. Marketing by Maggie Taylor. Original artwork for this season was created by Victor Puskwal of Digital Navajo. Our theme music is by Dear Lady. The show was created and executive produced by Amy Westervelt. The Center for Media and Democracy supported document review for
the season. For related stories and to support our work, check out drilled dot Media. To follow my work, check out my newsletter eco files at Allen Brown Dot ghost dot Io.
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