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A Few Dakota Pipeline Protesters Remain, Despite Deadline to Leave
North Dakota Arrests 9 as Pipeline Protest Camp Empties
(about 4 hours later)
CANNON BALL, N.D. — A dwindling band of activists protesting the Dakota Access oil pipeline remained camped along the banks of the Missouri River here as a Wednesday afternoon deadline for them to leave had passed.
CANNON BALL, N.D. — The fires burned for hours on the flat, muddy landscape, their thick smoke rising through snowflakes that tumbled to the ground. Someone rode a snowmobile across the dirt, and others moved their belongings to the side of a rural highway. The police gathered, prepared to follow the governor’s order to clear people from this rural part of the state.
Most demonstrators, who believe the almost completed 1,172-mile pipeline would imperil the drinking water supply on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, abandoned their largest encampment before a 2 p.m. deadline set by this state’s governor. But a handful remained and seemed likely to be arrested. The protesters have spent months demanding a halt to construction and a full environmental review of the project, which became central to national debates about energy, the environment and the rights of Native Americans.
But the Wednesday afternoon deadline for protesters of the Dakota Access oil pipeline to empty their largest encampment passed with far more uncertainty than unrest. In the hours after the deadline, the authorities made nine arrests but said they would not fully empty the camp on Wednesday night. No more than 100 demonstrators were believed to remain in the mandatory evacuation zone.
“There’s two sides of it: They’re either very calm or they’re scared,” Vanessa Red Bull said of the protesters. She said she was a medic who had provided assistance to the protesters for about six months. “You can kill this plant, but you can’t kill the root. And the root is, it’s strong here, and much of that root has already moved on to other places,” she said.
The scene here, about an hour’s drive south of Bismarck, the state capital, seemed to represent a muffled end to a specific and passionate protest that drew thousands of demonstrators and became central to the national debate about energy, the environment and the rights of Native Americans. Protesters argued that the nearly completed pipeline, now moving ahead with the support of President Trump’s administration, could imperil the drinking water supply on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
Lt. Tom Iverson, of the North Dakota Highway Patrol, said the authorities believed as many as 100 demonstrators remained at the encampment. Officials, he said, did not mount an immediate raid and hoped to negotiate peaceful arrests.
“We won,” said Vanessa Red Bull, 54, who has spent months here. “We slowed that pipeline down months and months and months. We cost them who knows how much money. And we slowed them down.”
The deadline on Wednesday was the latest event in months of contentiousness that drew thousands of people to this rural patch of land about an hour’s drive south of Bismarck, N.D., the state capital.
She added, “This has been a multilayered event that has brought attention to glaring issues.”
Although the project’s critics scored a victory in the waning days of the Obama administration, pipeline construction resumed this month with President Trump’s backing. The Army Corps of Engineers and North Dakota’s governor had ordered that the largest protest camp — which sits on federal land — be cleared by Wednesday afternoon because of concern the Missouri River would flood.
Ms. Red Bull and her allies won a brief victory last year, when the Army Corps of Engineers said in the waning days of the Obama administration that it would conduct an environmental impact study before allowing the 1,172-mile pipeline to cross Lake Oahe, the Missouri River reservoir near the encampment. But the beginning of the Trump administration brought a swift and substantial defeat: an instruction that the Army abort its study, a decision that allowed construction to resume.
“It’s time for protesters to either go home, or move to a legal site where they can peaceably continue their activities without risk of further harm to the environment,” the North Dakota attorney general, Wayne Stenehjem, said in a statement. Officials said that the trash at the protest camps posed an ecological risk if it were washed downstream by flooding and that urgent cleanup was needed because of that possibility.
Barring court intervention, oil from the Bakken fields in western North Dakota could flow through the pipeline this spring. But on Wednesday, the matter at hand was what to do with the encampment, which had become an abiding and, for some, spiritual symbol of activism. State authorities cited fears of flooding for the governor’s decision last week to order a mandatory evacuation of the site.
Rain turned to large snowflakes in the somber hours before the deadline, which Gov. Doug Burgum set in an executive order he signed last week. Much of the camp appeared empty and calm Wednesday morning as law enforcement officials gathered nearby.
“It’s time for protesters to either go home, or move to a legal site where they can peaceably continue their activities without risk of further harm to the environment,” the North Dakota attorney general, Wayne Stenehjem, said in a statement. Officials said that trash at the protest camps posed an ecological risk if it were washed downstream by flooding, and that urgent cleanup was necessary.
One man used a four-wheeler to help get a car out of the deep mud, and another person rode a snowmobile through the dirt. Some semipermanent structures had been burned, apparently to demolish them ahead of the deadline. Black smoke from the fires rose in the cold air while some people roamed the area.
Both sides have accused the other of escalating tension and engaging in violence since the protest started last year as a decidedly local affair. The camps ultimately swelled to thousands in the summer and fall, with Native Americans and supporters from across the country gathering in spirited opposition and setting up a makeshift society in the camps, complete with cooking tents and supply areas.
Nick Cowan, 25, who has lived in the camp for more than two months, watched a dwelling burn Wednesday morning.
But on Wednesday, months of tension mostly gave way to a somber calm as demonstrators left and a cold rain turned to snow. Some protesters set fire to semipermanent structures ahead of the 2 p.m. deadline.
“It’s an act of defiance,” said Mr. Cowan, who said he did not set the fire. “It’s saying: ‘If you are going to make us leave our home, you cannot take our space. We’ll burn it to the ground and let the earth take it back before you take it from us.’”
“It’s an act of defiance,” Nick Cowan, 25, said as he watched a fire burn on Wednesday after living here for more than two months. “It’s saying: ‘If you are going to make us leave our home, you cannot take our space. We’ll burn it to the ground and let the earth take it back before you take it from us.’”
Mr. Cowan, a restaurant manager from Britain who had most recently been living in New Zealand, said he left his job and girlfriend to join the protests after seeing video footage of clashes with law enforcement. He said that he did not believe protesters should have to evacuate and did not know what he would do when the deadline to leave came.
North Dakota officials offered meals, lodging, a medical exam and a bus ticket to anywhere in the 48 contiguous states for protesters who left by Wednesday afternoon but needed help getting home.
“The people are incredible,” said Mr. Cowan, who was wearing a jacket with an antipipeline logo. “This is a place unlike any other I’ve ever lived before. The lessons I’ve learned I’ll never forget.”
That approach was at odds with events of recent months, when the demonstrators sporadically clashed with the police, leading to the activation of the North Dakota National Guard and hundreds of arrests. The police sometimes used tear gas and rubber bullets. The North Dakota Guard said on Wednesday that it had spent more than $8 million responding to the protest since August.
But many people left the site before the governor’s deadline, uncertain how the authorities would respond to a new round of defiance.
Despite the lingering frustrations, tensions seemed to have eased in recent weeks as the ranks of demonstrators declined during the harsh winter. Dave Archambault II, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which has sued seeking to block the pipeline construction, urged protesters to go home.
North Dakota officials have offered meals, lodging, a medical exam and a bus ticket to anywhere in the 48 contiguous states for protesters who left by Wednesday afternoon but needed help getting home.
On Wednesday, many of them did.
That approach was at odds with events of recent months, when the demonstrators sporadically clashed with the police, leading to the activation of the North Dakota National Guard and hundreds of arrests. The police sometimes used tear gas and rubber bullets. The North Dakota guard said on Wednesday that it had spent more than $8 million responding to the protest since last August.
“I think people are saying goodbye,” said Ms. Red Bull, who spent about six months here. “I think that’s why people are setting things on fire as a way of a last homage to what had become many people’s homes. A community was here.”
Both sides have accused the other of escalating tension and engaging in violence since the protests started last year as a local affair. The camps ultimately swelled to thousands in the summer and fall, with Native Americans and supporters from across the country gathering in spirited opposition and setting up a makeshift society in the camps, complete with cooking tents, supply areas and semipermanent structures.
Despite the lingering tensions and frustrations, the scene had calmed somewhat in recent weeks as the number of demonstrators declined during the harsh winter. Dave Archambault II, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which has sued seeking to block the pipeline construction, urged protesters to go home.
The dispute about the pipeline resurfaced soon after the inauguration of Mr. Trump, who instructed the Army to drop its study, and construction resumed. Barring court intervention, oil from the Bakken fields in western North Dakota could be flowing by this spring through the pipeline to its end point in Illinois.
Chase Iron Eyes, a well-known protester, said the demonstrators were “feeling a bit of despair, but it’s not overwhelming.”
