Standing with Standing Rock in the Classroom: How to Historicize DAPL while Centering Indigenous Voices

• In Event: Decolonial Pedagogies: From the Reservation to the Street

Abstract

The international attention to resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous protectors at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation offers a unique opportunity in the classroom to interrogate the ongoing force of U.S. settler colonialism and competing efforts at decolonization. Inherent in the U.S. settler state is the constant work of colonizing and the constant work of resisting colonization. There is, and historically has been, always colonization and always resistance. However, rarely do examples of Indigenous resistance gather the recognition that protests at Standing Rock have from settler society. Resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline, therefore, presents an opportunity to bring Indigenous voices into the classroom—a necessary challenge for non-Indigenous scholars. Along with the ongoing resistance at Standing Rock comes the much longer histories of the marginalization of Indigenous voices in academia, the complex relationship between the Lakota and the federal and North Dakota governments, the advent of Pan-Indian activism, and the appropriation of imagined notions of Native culture by the counterculture movement of the 1960s. The convergence of these narratives at Standing Rock presents a distinct challenge in the classroom. How can academics—in particular non-Indigenous academics—promote decolonizing discussions about Standing Rock?
This paper addresses this question by first historicizing Standing Rock protests and presenting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline as a threat to Native sovereignty. A brief look at the Treaty of Fort Laramie and the history surrounding it will establish the land where the pipeline is planned to be built as stolen. Next, the paper historicizes Indigenous protest and the ways Indigenous activism and environmental activism became linked in popular understandings of Native America. Finally, the paper will turn to the story of Standing Rock, and tell it within the context of the aforementioned knowledge. Within this story are competing narratives of colonization and decolonization, including the marginalization of Indigenous voices in favor of settlers offering solidarity, and of government oppression and Indigenous resistance. Central to this discussion will be an assessment of why this act of Indigenous resistance has attracted so much attention, support, and backlash. The paper will argue that the Dakota Access Pipeline, while foundationally an infringement on Native sovereignty, also represents a blow to environmental and climate change activism. This has resulted in more widespread interest in halting the construction of the pipeline, and a more multifaceted message from protesters. This paper aims to open discussion of how the dual goals of protecting Native sovereignty and fighting climate change should be addressed in the classroom. It is paramount that such discussions do not undermine the voices from Standing Rock’s community and instead privilege Indigenous perspectives on both the problems with the Dakota Access Pipeline and the methods and goals of protests. However, it is also important to address the colonial legacies latent in past attempts by members of settler society who insert themselves in Indigenous resistance. This paper will explore how to best combine these two discussions without reproducing colonial attitudes in the classroom.

Author

• Tyler N Taylor, College of William and Mary