My time at Standing Rock

In early November, I witnessed the lighting of the Seven Council Fire at the Oceti Sakowin Camp on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Around me, the shimmering sunshine bathed the land in gold, offering some much-needed heat to the hundreds of fierce water protectors gathered for the lighting ceremony. Surveillance planes buzzed overhead. Across the next ridge, pipeline construction equipment loomed ominously. 

By Ethan Buckner, Climate Campaigner, Stand.earth

In early November, I witnessed the lighting of the Seven Council Fire at the Oceti Sakowin Camp on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Around me, the shimmering sunshine bathed the land in gold, offering some much-needed heat to the hundreds of fierce water protectors gathered for the lighting ceremony. Surveillance planes buzzed overhead. Across the next ridge, pipeline construction equipment loomed ominously. 

My friend Aldo, a longtime pipeline fighter, came up to me towards the end of the ceremony. 

“You have to know,” he said. “What’s happening here hasn’t happened in over 150 years.”

What Aldo was referring to wasn’t the fact that Indigenous Peoples are standing up to protect their land and water. After all, this resistance is nothing new. Whether the aggressors are government or corporations – or often both in the case of fossil fuel infrastructure projects – Indigenous Peoples have been subjected to a nearly-continuous wave of violence, forced displacement, and exploitation since first contact. The struggle to stop oil companies from building dangerous and exploitive pipelines and oil train terminals is the latest chapter in a 400-year long struggle for sovereignty and self-determination. The history of colonization has a long and powerful history of resistance — a narrative still playing out in real time across continents.