Northland_A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border

by Porter Fox

  Helena researched the issue and found that seven aquifers beneath the reservation had been contaminated by hormones and bacteria from manure runoff. She had never been an environmentalist or activist. She was simply tired of watching her town waste away. She worked for the tribal council at the time and brought the issue to their attention. She said the council dismissed her, and she now runs a riding camp at her house. She doesn’t charge children to attend. She invites them to her home to learn to ride. She has to be stern with some of the bad actors, she said. One girl walks eighteen miles, once a week, to go to the camp. “She does it to get away from the meth at home,” Helena said.

  One of the kids’ favorite activities is swimming with the horses. Helena had brought their favorite horse to Standing Rock, a dappled gray named Silver. She called him “dirty white boy.” At home, the kids hang on to his mane as he walks into the ruddy water of Lake Traverse. Then he swims in wide circles with the children dragging behind. When his front hooves touch the beach again, he lurches forward, and the kids scream and cling to his neck as he drags them out of the water.

  I LEFT THE CAMP at noon to continue my journey across the northland. I followed Route 1806 past the pipeline access road that protestors had been blocking. It was barricaded and papered with Lakota banners, ribbons, and feathers. A quarter mile farther, plywood signs read, “No More Stolen Sisters” and “Law: 1851.” Just beyond that, over a small hill, a herd of fifty buffalo grazed in a rolling green pasture.

  There were no excavators, no houses or people in sight. Just buffalo grass bending in the wind, the pale-blue Missouri sliding around an oxbow, and the furry, brown beasts wandering in circles. It was a perfect system, all of the parts moving in synchronicity. In two hundred years, a scheme that took millions of years to evolve was methodically being taken apart.

  I pulled over and watched for a moment. A white sedan that had been following me parked a hundred yards back. When I drove away ten minutes later, the sedan made a U-turn and drove toward the encampment. I passed a police barricade near Bismarck. Lights flashed on an SUV, and a deputy directed traffic between several beige and white tents. A state trooper with a flat-brimmed campaign hat inspected cars and passengers as they drove by. The troopers wore bulletproof vests and holstered their pistols where a belt buckle would normally be.

  I passed piles of pipe meant for the Dakota Access line stacked along Interstate 94. Two trucks driving the opposite direction had Frac Shack logos painted on their sides. Ten miles later I was in the plains of southwestern North Dakota. The land buckled into small hills and ravines until Sully Springs, where the red-and-white-striped Badlands filled the horizon.

  Route 47 veered to the south, drawing a clean line through a sea of cornfields. The nine-hole Fort Custer Golf Course was bright green with weeping willows dividing the fairways. Giant hay bales leaned against a silo next door to a KOA campground. Hawarden, Montana, was straight ahead; Sheridan, Wyoming, to the south. Light broke through a rain shower thirty miles away and painted the Little Bighorn River silver.

  The entrance to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument is marked by a concrete gatepost. The road runs southwest through a coulee to a cluster of brown National Park Service buildings. Rows of white tombstones welcome retirees driving massive RVs, families crammed into minivans, motorcyclists, and tourists to the park. The graves continue from the parking lot over the hills to the southwest. Most of the headstones are blank. Several dozen lay on the ground, surrounded by orange construction barricades. Veterans and their spouses are allowed to request a grave site at Little Bighorn. The soldiers buried here fought in the Indian Wars, Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Korean War, Vietnam War, and Gulf Wars.

  Concrete pathways lead away from the visitor center to various battle sites. A conference room with panoramic windows hosts interpretive talks three times a day. An attached stone courtyard looks out on battle sites like Greasy Grass Ridge, Medicine Tail Coulee, and the site of Custer’s last stand. At the bottom of the hill a run of cottonwood trees hides the river and much of the terrain where an Indian encampment had been set before Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer attacked it on June 25, 1876.

  Eight thousand Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and others had gathered there. They came together to discuss how to survive in an increasingly white world. It was a stroke of luck that Custer and General Alfred Terry found them at all. The US Army had a miserable record of locating Indian camps. Custer’s orders had been to flank the group from the east with 475 men of the Seventh Regiment of the US Cavalry. Terry would march from the north with 400 soldiers to stop anyone trying to escape. After Custer’s movements were detected on Wolf Mountain, twelve miles from the camp, he decided to continue anyway.

  The first to die in the Seventh Cavalry’s charge were two Lakota women and a young girl. A sentry had warned the tribes a few minutes before the attack, and warriors quickly returned fire. Major Marcus Reno, the same man who had escorted the Northern Boundary Commission, retreated into the woods, then back over the river. Lakota fighters inflicted heavy casualties as Reno’s company sought cover up a line of steep bluffs, then fell back into a stand of trees. In the distance, Reno saw gun smoke and chaos around the site of Custer’s charge. Exactly what happened is still a mystery, but most accounts suggest that Custer rode north and descended the Medicine Tail Coulee leading to the encampment. Custer’s men then retreated to Calhoun Hill and Battle Ridge, where they were surrounded.

  Only 50 of the original 210 men with Custer made it to the site of the last stand. Hundreds of whooping Lakota and Cheyenne warriors surrounded them, picking them off one by one with old British muskets, arrows, spears, and a few modern Spencer rifles. Several soldiers tried to break through Indian lines. All were pulled from their horses and killed. By the time the sun set on June 25, all five companies under Custer, plus the colonel himself, were dead.

  Braves hacked apart the soldiers’ bodies and collected their weapons. They did not scalp Custer. They stripped and washed his body instead. Historians postulate that they did this out of respect. Since Custer usually wore buckskins for battle and not a uniform, they more likely mistook him for a civilian.

  I followed one of the paths up the hill toward a concrete memorial for those who had stood with the colonel. Tombstones on the western face of the hillock are set wherever a soldier’s remains were found. The battlefield is a rolling tan carpet with a few trees and squares of soy and cornfields beyond the river. There is a small cluster of graves on each hilltop. The first officers to visit the battle site after the slaughter were not sure what they were looking at. They found Custer’s Indian scouts in tears and didn’t believe them when they described the bloodbath. Most of the bodies were so mutilated that it was impossible to identify them.

  The air was hot and humid. A stiff wind preceded a line of thunderheads in the west. Two gray-haired couples gazed at a placard near the last stand. A young family marched dutifully up the hill toward Reno’s entrenchment, and a sparrow hawk flitted through the breeze and landed on a tombstone. A guide in the visitor center announced over a PA system that the Battle of the Little Bighorn video was about to start. There were no gravestones for Indians. A single monument to them had been installed 120 years after the battle.

  13

  A FEW DAYS AFTER I LEFT STANDING ROCK, THE FEDERAL JUDGE hearing the pipeline case denied an injunction, allowing construction to continue. On the same day, the Justice Department, the Department of the Army, and the Interior Department asked ETP to voluntarily pause while they reevaluated permits that the Army Corps had issued. ETP did not stop and announced that the pipeline would be online in early 2017.

  Over the next three months, encounters with security and police grew increasingly violent. The media reported that a private security firm working for ETP, with experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, unleashed attack dogs on unarmed men, women, and children from Oceti Sakowin. According to press reports, the firm filed briefs with ETP f
or dealing with “jihadist-like uprisings” and infiltrated the protest camp to gather intelligence. Cell phone signals at the camp were jammed to inhibit communication and stop photos and video from getting out, and surveillance flights continued. The police reportedly worked in conjunction with the firm and ETP, fired tear gas canisters and rubber bullets at protestors, and arrested hundreds. On a twenty-degree November evening, water protectors were beaten back from Highway 1806 with water cannons, concussion grenades, and tear gas. More than three hundred were injured, including twenty-one-year-old Sophia Wilansky, who nearly lost her arm when, she said, a concussion grenade hit her and exploded.

  The first snow fell, and temperatures dropped to minus twenty. The Standing Rock Sioux Indians are a northland tribe that knows how to survive in the cold. They built new lodges and installed wood and pellet stoves. Locals in Cannon Ball and the reservation’s casino made rooms available on especially cold nights. Days after reportedly promising to protect the tribe’s First Amendment rights, Army Corps colonel John Henderson signed over jurisdiction of the camp to the state. Governor Dalrymple followed by ordering everyone off the site. Protestors didn’t leave. Two thousand US veterans arrived December 4 to back up the water protectors, and the following day, on the brink of another clash with authorities, the unthinkable happened. The Army Corps rejected ETP’s final permit to tunnel under the Missouri River. Overnight, the project was stopped.

  Protestors danced and chanted to workers and security guards: “Don’t ever come back!” They sang and made proclamations about freedom, history, and the rights of a sovereign nation. It was the biggest and most publicized American Indian victory in modern history. The awakening they spoke of reverberated across the country. There were other pipelines, other issues on Indian land that they could stand up against: the Diamond Pipeline between Oklahoma and Tennessee; the Rover in Ohio; the Sabal Trail between Alabama and Florida; the Trans-Pecos in Texas; the Atlantic Sunrise in Pennsylvania and Virginia; the Pilgrim in New York and New Jersey; the Bayou Bridge in Louisiana; the Downeast pipeline in Passamaquoddy Bay, Maine.

  Tribal leaders reminded everyone that the fight wasn’t over. They were right. ETP reportedly continued its work without the permit. The chairman of the Cheyenne River Reservation, Harold Frazier, asked the government who was monitoring the construction site. He was told that ETP’s private security team was acting as observers. On January 20, a new administration moved into the White House, and a familiar scenario played out. A memorandum from the Oval Office ordered the secretary of the army to expedite approval of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

  Familiar names surfaced. Former ETP board member Rick Perry was sworn in as secretary of energy. Former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson was named secretary of state. Big Oil champion Scott Pruitt took control of the EPA and immediately began to disassemble the agency. The Corps had little choice but to comply. Two months later, the embattled Keystone XL Pipeline was revived as well.

  In February, ETP announced that the Dakota Access Pipeline was complete, and in mid-May it was filled with Bakken sweet crude. The line suffered several leaks in the first few months, spilling more than a hundred gallons of oil. The same month that the pipeline started flowing, ETP spilled two million gallons of drilling fluid into an Ohio wetlands area while installing the Rover Pipeline. ETP’s response, according to the Ohio EPA director, was “dismissive” and unlike anything he had seen in the twenty-seven years he’d worked there.

  I HEADED BACK TO North Dakota’s northland in the spring of 2017 to see what had become of the movement. There were no roadblocks or police on Highway 1806. To anyone driving through, it looked like it always had. The Missouri ran wide and fast past Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park. The grass was bright green, and delicate spring leaves were just unfurling from elms on the riverbank.

  Traces of the protest were hard to find. I spotted a fluttering shred of banner material on a barbed wire fence a few miles north of the camp and a duct-taped wooden pole that had once held a sign. Roads that construction crews had made across the prairie were covered with new grass. Gates to neighboring ranches had been replaced with new red ones. I almost drove past the Oceti Sakowin site a few miles later. There was nothing there. Less than nothing. All of the structures were gone. The horse corrals, council tents, fire circles, and teepees had all vanished. The field looked like every other field along 1806.

  Barbed wire and a sign that read “No Trespassing: Government Property” blocked the entrance. I stepped over the wire and walked into the field. Dozens of hand-warmer packets stuck out of the mud. A pair of black winter gloves was half buried, and a gray wool scarf fluttered on the driveway. It must have been cold in the final days, unbelievably cold. I found the remnants of a woodpile and a few smashed Pepsi cans. The sacred fire circle where I had listened to Jewell James was the only patch of earth the grass had not overtaken. It was as if too much had happened there for nature to reclaim it just yet.

  I wondered whether there were security cameras or motion detectors on the property, some kind of defense that ETP had installed. But there was nothing left to defend. ETP got what it wanted, covered its tracks, and moved on. Cell phone signals were no longer being jammed. The summer before, I couldn’t send a text message; now, I had three bars of high-speed service. I saw the Missouri from a hilltop near the road, a green-brown strip of spring floodwater rushing downhill. The sky was like it always is in North Dakota’s northland: six layers of varying clouds, capped by a misty blue circle around the sun.

  I drove south and found four teepees and a few tents at a roadside camp. A familiar sign hung from the entrance: “Media Must Check In.” I parked next to four stretched buffalo skins drying in the wind. A kid with tattoos on his face and scruff on his chin approached. He held a small drum he had just made. “He’s in the teepee,” he said. “By the white truck.” I followed his gaze to a plywood enclosure attached to a teepee and knocked on the door.

  Leon Red Dog moved a Styrofoam plate holding his dinner so that I could sit in a chair. “Been here since February,” he said. “A church gave me the pellet stove.” Leon was sixty-seven and a member of the Itazipco band of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe. He had kids on the Cheyenne River Reservation and “enough grandkids for a basketball team.” He looked like he hadn’t showered in a while: brown long-sleeve T-shirt, gray sweatpants tucked into cowboy boots. There was some gray in his hair, and the way he moved made it seem like his joints could use a night in a real bed. Leon fiddled with his hands as he spoke: “I first came to Oceti Sakowin with some veterans last August. The headmen asked me to join their meetings. We met every morning, mostly deciding where to send the young people. Young people never do what you tell them.”

  After the camp was cleared in February, Cheyenne River chairman Harold Frazier asked Leon to set up a surrogate site nearby. Frazier, who was instrumental in the protest and was one of the last to leave, wanted to keep the Oceti Sakowin spirit alive and teach young Sioux activists how to camp and pray. He got a lease for twenty-five acres and helped Leon set up the first few teepees. Then Leon and some volunteers built a kitchen, made a fire circle, and got down to the business of surviving a northland winter. “We mostly clean the camp and keep the kitchen running,” Leon said. “We had eighteen people here for a while.”

  Leon’s camp didn’t have a website or a fund-raising scheme. Most guests were water protectors on their way to court to fight federal charges relating to the protests. Nearly eight hundred had been arrested over the course of six months. Some faced mandatory sentences of ten to fourteen years if convicted. “They come for healing,” Leon said. “They come and pray and go to Oceti Sakowin. A lot of them cry when they go there.”

  I DROVE TO JOYE BRAUN’S hometown the next day. She was away at a speaking engagement, so I spoke with Harold Frazier instead. He is fifty-one years old and barrel-chested, with short-cropped black hair. Like Joye, he laughs after he makes a good point. Harold sat behind a cluttered boardroom table in the center
of the tribal office. Secretaries and officials working in cubicles sat in orbit around him. A young man with a tight ponytail and a three-piece suit fried fresh walleye fillets on an electric grill at the other end of the table while we spoke.

  Harold had been busy helping water protectors who were facing jail time. “We were told our First Amendment right to protest would be protected, and these guys are going to jail,” he said. “North Dakota spent $15 million fighting unarmed protestors at the Standing Rock camps. They asked Congress to pay them back. That money will come from taxpayers. So we’re paying them guys to hurt us? It’s a vicious cycle.”

  The Cheyenne River tribe gets its water from the Missouri as well, and Harold had discussed the pipeline at a private roundtable meeting with President Barack Obama the previous fall—along with Barbra Streisand and “a few rich guys from California.” Harold has a way of saying exactly what’s on his mind, and he told the group about the recent violence that police had brought to Oceti Sakowin. “The president said he would send federal observers to keep an eye on things,” Harold said. “They never came. They wanted that pipeline. That’s the only answer.”

  The man with the ponytail said the fish was finished, and Harold sent me on my way with a golden fillet. I drove along the Missouri for the rest of the day, past sprawling ranches, hay fields, and tiny compounds surrounded by rusting machinery. Chain-link fences wrapped around gas terminals, and high-tension power lines swooped across the prairie.