This story is part of ICT’s series on the 10th anniversary of the Standing Rock movement.
CANNON BALL, N.D. – The field is serene. The blades of brown grass, not yet awakened by spring rains, sway gently. In the distance, the Missouri River cuts a blue streak across the unbroken plains. The silence is punctuated only by the sound of passing cars and the low hum of rushing water in nearby Cannonball River.
But if you listen carefully, you can hear defiant voices shouting and then screaming.
For nearly a year, from April 2016 to February 2017, thousands of people stood strong against militarized police, federal troops and private security forces hired to protect the 1,176-mile Dakota Access Pipeline. They gathered to resist a private corporation’s efforts to build a pipeline less than a mile from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation near the North Dakota-South Dakota border.
In the end, they were forced to evacuate their camps as authorities quieted, but never fully extinguished, the uprising. Some would say the fire that ignited at Standing Rock was lit decades earlier by Native activists who fought oppression and violence in the 1960s and 1970s.
While Native people have resisted colonization and its impacts since 1492, the rise of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s marked a turning point in the efforts of Native people to join together and speak in one voice. That torch of resistance was carried all the way from places like Alcatraz Island and Wounded Knee to a field near the Missouri River in 2016.
The #NoDAPL movement reached its height on Nov. 20, 2016, when hundreds of water protectors gathered on a bridge to clear two burned-out trucks that impeded a public roadway that provided access to the pipeline drill site and to the camp. The confrontation was the most violent clash between water protectors and authorities during the protest and led to nearly 200 people being injured, some seriously.
Sitting in her car atop what was known as “Facebook Hill” that night, Tonya Marie Heart-Olsen heard a camp leader, Myron Dewey, Walker River Paiute Tribe and founder of Digital Smoke Signals, shout: “All the warriors to the front lines!” The water protectors had gathered at Backwater Bridge. They faced militarized police, National Guard troops and private security forces who attacked the water protectors after they succeeded in removing one of the burned-out trucks with a semi-tractor. For several hours, police rained tear gas, rubber bullets, percussion grenades, and high-pressure water from fire hoses in temperatures that dipped well below freezing. Water protectors stood their ground, shouting “Mni wiconi!” Water is life.
As the night wore on, many water protectors had to be moved from the frontlines to medical facilities back at camp. Many suffered from hypothermia and cuts and bruises from non-lethal weapons used against them. One woman, Sophia Wilansky, nearly lost her arm after being hit by a concussion grenade, and another, Vanessa “Sioux Z” Dundon, lost eyesight in her right eye after being struck by a tear gas canister.
“There were just people screaming because you could hear those bullets. You could hear the beanbag bullets,” Heart-Olsen recalled for ICT. “The minute they hit somebody you knew because … they’d start cussing.”
The water protectors slowly lost ground to authorities, and as the crowd retreated the 44-year-old Ihanktonwan Dakota woman got struck in the back of the leg by a beanbag.
“I just screamed as loud as I could because it hurt,” Heart-Olsen said.
She jumped into a truck taking people to a yurt that was being used by medics to treat the wounded. Inside, she saw dozens of injured people.
“It was almost like a war … but not as bad because, you know, we weren’t getting shot and killed, but we were getting hurt,” she said.
The decade that has passed since Standing Rock has offered those who took part in it and those who watched from afar, including an aging and recently imprisoned Native activist, plenty of time to consider its impact and its place on the long timeline of Indigenous activism.
Sitting in his home in Belcourt, North Dakota, more than 200 miles north of Standing Rock, Turtle Mountain Chippewa activist Leonard Peltier recently offered his thoughts to ICT about the Standing Rock movement. The 81-year-old was imprisoned in the Coleman Federal Penitentiary in Florida when Standing Rock began. When he learned about the uprising, he said, he felt elated.
“‘Well, right on. Get down.’ Those were the statements I read,” he said. “Cool. That was my thoughts on it, to be blunt. I like to see stuff like that. I like to see us fighting back. I like to see us stopping them from doing stuff like that. We got to do something.”
Peltier was granted clemency by former President Joe Biden in January 2025 after 49 years in prison, having been convicted of aiding and abetting in the deaths of two FBI agents during the infamous Jumping Bull Ranch 1975 shootout in Oglala, South Dakota. The incident capped a nearly seven-year movement by Native activists to garner support for Indigenous rights.
Ojibwe activists Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt founded AIM in 1968 in Minneapolis to fight police brutality and racial profiling. It expanded quickly as its members joined with other Native activists to occupy Alcatraz Island in 1969, which Peltier joined.
On Thanksgiving Day in 1970, AIM members seized a replica of the Mayflower in Boston Harbor, declaring a national day of mourning. A year later, AIM occupied Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota for two months to demand federal recognition of the Fort Laramie Treaty – which had granted the area to the “Great Sioux Nation,” which refers to the Lakota, Dakota and Nakoda people – but was broken as soon as gold was discovered nearby.
