DAPL is owned by Dakota Access, LCC a subsidiary of the Dallas based company Energy Transfer Partners, which owns and operates more than 62,500 miles of natural gas and liquids pipelines. There are huge gaps in our knowledge of how spilled tar sands oil behaves in water but in March 2016,
officials at the EPA and other two federal agencies, raised serious objections to the North Dakota section of the pipeline warning that "crossings of the Missouri River have the potential to affect the primary source of drinking water for much of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Tribal nations," but Dakota Access and the Army Corps declined any comment citing that the pipeline is "in accordance with applicable laws, and the local, state and federal permits and approvals we have received." The landscape, including the rivers and peoples within it, in this sense, is rendered a wasteland.
Pulido theorized that through the racialized production of differential value, racial capitalism “illuminates not only the inevitability of environmental injustice, but the structural challenges facing activists” (5:2017). The differential value has been reproduced in struggles over appropriation and access to land as well as labor systems and capital and “incorporates this uneven geography of value into its calculus” (6:2017). This is achieved when industry and manufactures create sinks, places where pollution can be disposed of: this can be in the form of air, water and land but also racially de-valuated bodies and the neighborhoods where they reside. It is here that environmental pollution, disasters and race meet; the racialized places where 'bodies of expendability' reside, in Marquez words (in Pulido), or in the site of organized abandonment by the state in the words of
Ruth Wilson Gilmore (quoting Harvey, 1989).
Clearly the landscape here also functions as the site for the production of exchange value through money
\citep{Mitchell}. Once the pipeline is completed (85% is already in place) and oil starts flowing property tax revenues will start to flow in, at at rate of $55 Million per annum, which will be distributed across four states. North and South Dakota are expected to receive 13$ Million each (
Thompson, 2016), which is peanuts if one compares it to $4.5 billion that is the personal wealth of the largest stakeholder of Energy Transfer Equity, Kelcy Warren. Energy Transfer Equity is parent to Energy Transfer Partners and its
shares have almost tripled since February 2016. They rose another 17% after Trump's election, and more than 30% since November 2017.
The Standing Rock spirit camp is as much a grassroots resistance movement on the ground, as a online resistance. According to
Streeby's new book on world making and climate change through activism and science fiction (2018), it was the tribes' historic preservation officer who co-founded the Sacred Stone Camp in 2016, who when "she heard the construction was going ahead near her water well and her son's grave, she posted a message on Facebook asking for help. The post went viral and soon many people showed up that an overflow camp had to be established across the river" (38). The Lakota saying
Mni Wiconi or "Water is life" spread across social media platforms despite the media blackout. Streeby narrates of the skillful use of social media not only to mobilize people around a common threat but also to "imagine a future connected to the past beyond the fossil fuel economy" (40).
Nations came together
nationally and internationally, also with
at least 2000 U.S. veterans, to protect the waters and sacred land from fracking pollution. The 'water protectors' as they preferred to be called, are the subject of the artwork by
Onaman Collective's Isaac Murdoc where the mythological figure of the thunderbird woman takes center stage. Popular among North American Indigenous peoples', thunderbird woman is a symbol of strength and power, which is represented in the artwork, as her vigorously colored heart, her wings wide spread facing the storm and her feet strongly rooted on a fecund earth, whose sprouts take root in us and not around us (see the detail of the woman's leg and feet). Water is sacred! yells the poster and as the co-founder of the Sacred Stone Camp echoed "we are the river, and the river is us" (Streeby, 2018:38). Here we have a view of the world inseparable from the particularity of place - a vision of place lived 'in' rather than 'on'
\cite{Ingold_2002}. This cosmo-vision warrants a landscape as the mirror of a different social justice where space is not used "to separate ourselves from the poverty that our wealth so efficiently produces." (Mitchell, 45). The poster speaks of the world that the water protectors enacted during the 10 months they camped out in the all weather conditions; a world where schooling, food, medical care and other necessities were made available to everyone from professionals coming from as far as Cuba, to express their solidarity with the unfolding ecological crisis. Also members of the
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) came out to support after the organization argued for suppressing the water protectors.