At Standing Rock, 'the world is watching'

CANNON BALL, N.D. — 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 Florida.

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.

The Dakota Access pipeline is a 1,170-mile, $3.8 billion project to carry oil through four states including Iowa to refineries and networks in Illinois. It is more than 90 percent complete.

To its fans, the pipeline represents America's energy independence, jobs and a 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 drinking water and has caused the destruction of sacred lands.

Since early 2016, protesters have occupied a federally owned site near the pipeline's proposed crossing under the Missouri River. Nearly 2,000 live in tents, tepees, yurts, RVs and cars. They are native and non-native, old and young.

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.

North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple and the Army Corps of Engineers have ordered protesters out as of this Monday, but they vow to remain.

With the first snows of a bleak North Dakota winter threatening, the Post visited the area to record accounts of people on all sides of the issue.

Tom Goldtooth, Tribal leader

The way Tom Goldtooth tells the story, somewhere on the 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 the pipeline.

'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 morning, Goldtooth sat next to a warm wood stove in a 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 an effort by a corporation — backed by the government and expected support of Trump — to trample indigenous people as they have for 'hundreds of years of colonial oppression.'

Goldtooth was raised on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, the grandson of a medicine man and the son of a pioneering Navajo woman who earned a college degree in microbiology.

Goldtooth said 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.

'Capitalism feeds on unlimited growth,' he said. 'It's like this monster that's always hungry and thirsty and devouring the earth. That's what our message is here: We have to live in balance; otherwise we're going to perish.'

Goldtooth lives in Minnesota but has been coming to Standing Rock to visit relatives since he was a young man.

One recent morning, Goldtooth stood in an empty field amid a circle of volunteer architects, engineers and builders who had come from as far as Spokane, Wash., and Santa Fe, N.M., to help build a more permanent camp to ride out the bone-cracking winter.

'You have been brought here as part of a prayer,' he told them. 'This is going to be a place that provides safety and sustains us in our fight. ... We're going to stay here however long it takes.'

Cory Bryson, Union official

Cory Bryson watched as 200 demonstrators marched in his hometown of Bismarck, protesting a project built by his union workers.

Businesses locked their doors and people watched from windows as marchers passed deputies in riot gear and headed toward Wells Fargo, a major source of project financing.

Most were peaceful and shouted 'Water is life.' But one young man tried to push his way through police, who threw him to the ground. The man screamed and spat at 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.

'My father has been a pipeline laborer for 32 years,' said Bryson, a big guy with a blond 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 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.

Recently, the protest has been 'hijacked by extremist environmentalists' from out of state who harass workers, Bryson said. People have put dirt into gas tanks of heavy machinery and smashed windshields.

He received an anonymous email that included a photo of himself, his wife and his three children taken from his Facebook page. It said: 'We hope you enjoy burning in your home with your children.' He turned it over to police.

He is sympathetic to concerns about Native American 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.

Kendra Obom, Washington state activist

A young woman in a bright red 'I Stand with Standing Rock' T-shirt walked up to Kendra Obom, who was staffing the volunteer tent in the huge camp on the banks of the Missouri River.

'We just arrived, and we're looking for anything you need us to do,' the woman said.

'Great! We need a lot of help in kitchens and in construction,' said Obom, 31, a cheerful woman with wind-burned cheeks and big glasses who fields hundreds of such questions.

The young woman, a waitress from Florida, chose kitchen duty. Obom sent her to a tent to help prepare meals.

Obom arrived here in early November, driving 25 hours in her Dodge minivan from Olympia, Wash., to join a movement she had been monitoring on social media.

'It's important to recognize the long history of colonialism that our country has,' said Obom, the daughter of two Marines and the founder of a school back home that provides outdoor education for urban youth.

'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 protests that have led to clashes with authorities and scores of arrests.

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 been 'disenfranchised and marginalized.'

Obom was raised in North Carolina and Washington state, and both of her parents deployed to the Middle East in Operation Desert Storm. She said she was deeply influenced by her mother, an ardent environmentalist.

'I was the kid who used to take a bath with just a bucket of water to help save the salmon,' she said with a laugh.

She soon found a gift for organizing. Now she was sleeping on the ground in her small tent, pitched next to the tepee and campfire of an indigenous family that had taken her in. She hadn't had a shower in two weeks — and craved one.

'This movement at Standing Rock has had incredible ripple effects,' she said. 'People who could previously ignore it now have to see it and recognize the threat of these things.'

Jon Moll, Morton County sheriff's deputy

Night after night, Deputy Jon Moll pulls on his helmet, face shield and body armor to face off against hundreds of angry protesters.

He hasn't had a day off in more than a month. He said that he has been hit with rocks fired from slingshots and chunks of firewood, and he has seen protesters pelting officers with bags of urine and feces.

'They're constantly spewing 'We're peaceful, we're peaceful, we're peaceful' as they're throwing stuff at you,' he said. 'If you're going to be violent, just say it. Own it. But don't spit your propaganda at me and then try to blame me because I'm doing my job protecting my community.'

Moll, 38, a Lutheran minister's son who grew up on a strawberry farm in Minnesota, is one of 34 deputies in Morton County. The 6-foot-3 deputy works the overnight shift, which until August usually meant handling bar fights and traffic cashes. Now, the department is consumed with confronting pipeline protests, helped by police reinforcements from as far away as Louisiana.

A particularly rough encounter Nov. 20 epitomizes the escalating tension. That night, police used fire hoses to douse protesters in subfreezing temperatures, sending several to the hospital.

A 21-year-old woman suffered severe damage to her left arm. Protesters said she was hit with a concussion grenade, a weapon that creates a loud sound to disorient people. Police said they do not use those devices, that the woman was probably hurt by a propane tank protesters were trying to use as an explosive device.

Moll, who said he was hit on the helmet by a rock that night, defended the measures as justified.

'I think utilizing water is essentially a soft method to try to keep people away,' he said. 'Everything that I saw happen was absolutely correct.'

Adrian Brown, Excavating company foreman

Adrian Brown woke at 4:30 a.m. and pulled on his blaze-orange hoodie. Deer season was winding down and he was itching to get his buck. But after five hours of tromping through the blustery prairie, he was ready for a mushroom and Swiss burger and a pile of fries.

To get to the only restaurant out here, in St. Anthony, he and a buddy drove 15 miles down a gravel road, crossing over a 30-foot wide gash in the vast plains running straight as a ruler for as far as the eye could see. Buried 10 feet below the freshly turned dirt was the pipeline tearing apart the communities where Brown's family has lived for generations.

'The great thing about living in the United States is that we're all able to have a voice. What I disagree with is the way they're going about it,' Brown said.

Brown, a burly, bearded 30-year-old in a black ball cap, said the increasing protests are costing local people money. He is a foreman for an excavating company and said the day before, protesters tried to burn a truck to block the road to a gravel pit where he needed to pick up a load of rock.

'I had to move jobs, which isn't the end of the world because we have other things to do, but it's an inconvenience,' he said. 'I have friends who are owner-operator truck drivers, and this time of year is our 'go time.' This is how these people support their families. Owner-operators who couldn't get in and out of the pit went home. They didn't make any money yesterday.'

Brown said shipping shale oil by rail has overloaded lines and made it harder for farmers to get their wheat and other crops to market.

'Am I for alternative energy? Do it. Are we ever going to live without fossil fuel? Absolutely not,' Brown said. 'This pipe will go in the ground. It's the world we live in. Oil makes the world go 'round.'

He, too, blamed the escalating conflict on 'out-of-staters.' Police say about 93 percent of those arrested have been from outside North Dakota.

Brown also suspects — as many here do — that the protesters are being funded by out-of-state sources, possibly by people invested in the railroad and trying to scuttle competition.

Brown said half-jokingly that a fierce North Dakota winter might end the standoff naturally: 'I hope it gets really, really, really cold and all the out-of-staters go home.'