CANNON BALL, North Dakota – From across the country, they have come to this place called Cannon Ball.
Thousands of them.
Native Americans and military veterans. Environmentalists. Police from nine states. Movie stars. Cattle ranchers and lumberjacks, college students and nurses, landscapers, investment bankers and a waitress from a Florida restaurant called Smokey Bones.
All have been drawn by a 30-inch steel pipe that, in the unlikely setting of a desolate North Dakota prairie, has become a powerful symbol of heritage and history, progress and oppression, indigenous rights and corporate might.
In America’s unsettled and angry winter of 2016, people on all sides of a fractious issue are here to make a stand and have their voices heard.
The Dakota Access Pipeline is a 1,170-mile, $3.8 billion project to carry oil extracted from rock through four states to refineries and pipeline networks in Illinois. It is more than 90 percent complete.
To its fans, the pipeline represents America’s energy independence, jobs and a common-sense boost for the economy. What happens next also may offer an early glimpse of the presidency of Donald Trump, an outspoken advocate for removing environmental barriers to U.S. energy production – and an investor in an oil company that owns a 25 percent stake in the pipeline project.
To its opponents, the pipeline represents the latest chapter in the nation’s long history of disrespect and abuse of Native Americans. It runs within a half-mile of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, and tribal leaders argue that it threatens the drinking water for thousands of Native Americans and has caused the destruction of sacred artifacts and burial sites.
Since early 2016, protesters have occupied a federally owned site near the pipeline’s proposed crossing under the Missouri River. Now, nearly 2,000 are living in tents, tepees, yurts, RVs and cars. They are native and non-native, elderly and newborns. The camp has become so large and permanent that it has a book-swap library and a medical center.
More than 560 people have been arrested in protests that have spread 40 miles north to the capital, Bismarck. Each side blames the other for the increasing violence. Protesters claim police have brutalized them with tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and water cannons. Police say they don’t possess many of those weapons and that protesters have instigated violence, pelting officers with rocks, bottles, burning logs and bags of urine and feces.
North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple and the Army Corps of Engineers have ordered protesters out of the camp, but they vow to remain.
The Washington Post visited the area to record the personal accounts of people on different sides of an issue that is tearing at the American heartland.
The way Tom Goldtooth tells the story, somewhere on the North Dakota prairie a Lakota woman had a dream that a “black snake was coming to devour our people.”
In Native American culture, dreams can be prophetic. The black snake in this case, he said, is a pipeline filled with oil.
“The world is watching,” said Goldtooth, 63, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, who has been living at the camp since summer. “We’re going to stay here and confront this black snake. ... We’re going to cut off the head.”
On a cold November morning, Goldtooth sat next to a warm wood stove in a canvas tent and described the struggle in flowing indigenous imagery: the four cycles of life, the sacred hoop and the importance of circles in nature, the spiritual power of eagles and grizzly bears.
Then his words turned sledgehammer blunt.
“This isn’t our first rodeo with the forces of genocide,” said Goldtooth, a great-grandfather with long black braids sticking out from under the hooded sweatshirt he wore beneath a canvas Carhartt jacket.
Goldtooth sees the pipeline as a threat to the drinking water of thousands downstream. And he sees it as another effort by corporation – backed by the power of the government and expected support of Trump – to trample indigenous people as they have for “hundreds of years of colonial oppression.”
“This pipeline represents something deeper,” Goldtooth said. “We have to start worrying about the rights of our future generations. We have to start looking at making a just transition as a society away from a fossil fuel economy.”
Goldtooth was raised on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, the grandson of a tribal medicine man and the son of a pioneering Navajo woman who earned a college degree in microbiology.
“They gave me a strong spiritual foundation and a love for the land,” said Goldtooth, who spent a couple of years in the Army in the 1970s, working on programs to combat discrimination against Native Americans, and later as a social worker helping indigenous families.
Goldtooth said that he has long seen “environmental racism” in energy projects forced on Native Americans and began turning his anger into activism starting in the early 1990s. Now, he travels the world speaking about climate change, energy, pollution and sustainable resources.
Cory Bryson watched as 200 demonstrators marched through his hometown of Bismarck, protesting the project being built by his union workers.
Businesses had locked their doors, and people watched warily from second-floor windows as the marchers passed a line of sheriff’s deputies in riot gear and headed toward Wells Fargo bank, a major source of project financing.
Most were peaceful and shouted, “Water is life.” But one young man suddenly tried to push his way through the line of riot police, who threw him to the ground and cuffed him. The man screamed “Help!” and “I’m being kidnapped!” over and over and spat at the officers.
Bryson shook his head. To him, it was obvious the man had provoked arrest for the benefit of the news cameras.
“This is what the community is tired of,” Bryson said. “We are one pin-drop away from this escalating to a really violent situation.”
Bryson, 32, is business manager for Local 563 of the Laborers International Union, a second-generation union member and a North Dakotan.
“My father has been a pipeline laborer for 32 years,” said Bryson, a big guy who wears his blond hair in a military-style buzz cut. “It all comes down to energy security.”
Moving the Bakken field shale oil to market by pipeline is safer and more efficient than moving it by rail, he said. It has created at least 3,000 good-paying jobs in the past couple of years and will provide maintenance work well into the future.
From the beginning, Bryson has gone to observe the protests in this capital city of 67,000. “We don’t see eye to eye,” he said of the marchers, “but at the same time, they have every right to do it.”
Recently, the protest has been “hijacked by extremist environmentalists” from out of state who harass workers, one of whom was beaten up at a gas station because he was wearing a safety vest with the company logo, Bryson said. People have put dirt into gas tanks of heavy machinery, smashed windshields and committed other acts of vandalism, reports confirmed by local police.
Bryson said Native American culture has always been “a big part of the community” in North Dakota. He said that he went to school with Native Americans who were “like brothers” to him: “We slept at each other’s houses, ate dinner together all the time as children.”
He is sympathetic to concerns about burial grounds and water purity but said that he thinks the project still can be completed safely and sensitively.
“To say that we’re doing this because we don’t care about them is totally not what it’s about at all,” he said.
Bryson said about 15 of his union members working on the pipeline were Standing Rock Sioux from the reservation. But nearly half of them have asked to be taken off pipeline work because “they were getting a lot of heat” from family members and others in their community.
Kendra Obom arrived here in early November, driving 25 hours in her Dodge minivan from Olympia, Washington, to join a movement she had been monitoring on social media, which was making her increasingly upset.
“It’s important to recognize the long history of colonialism that our country has,” said Obom, the daughter of two U.S. Marines and the founder of a school back home that provides outdoor education for urban youths.
“We often don’t hear about indigenous issues,” she said. “And so when I saw what was happening here at Standing Rock and how much attention it was getting, I saw that it was an opportunity to amplify indigenous voices all over the country.”
She is among thousands of other non-indigenous people from around the country and world who have been drawn to Standing Rock.
They chop firewood, build tepees, pick up trash, paint protest banners, help with recycling and composting and attend training sessions on indigenous rights. Sometimes, they join “direct action” protests that have led to clashes with authorities and scores of arrests. Some who have been arrested and bailed out attend daily “arrestee meetings” to get advice from volunteer lawyers.
Obom stays away from the protests. She has found her niche helping to coordinate out-of-town volunteers as a way of “showing solidarity” with a minority that has historically been “disenfranchised and marginalized.”
“I think it’s important to not see other people as being so different from you that they deserve different human rights,” Obom said.
