They call themselves water
protectors, land defenders. Their numbers are major; they are record; they are
inspiring. At its peak, the population at the occupation’s North Dakota base,
known as Sacred Stone camp, is said to have reached 3,500, including members of
nearly 300 tribes and Native nations that have joined forces with the Standing
Rock Sioux, whose tribal lands are most immediately imperiled by the pipeline,
as well as environmental activists and other sympathizers.
They traveled from Duluth,
Minnesota, and Spokane, Washington; from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South
Dakota and the Navajo Nation capital in Window Rock, Arizona; and from many,
many other places, for historically displaced indigenous peoples are spread
across the country, many of them geographically distant from their homelands.
Some came on horseback, some in cars and trucks and vans crammed full of
donated blankets, sleeping bags, down jackets, batteries, canned food, cell
phones: supplies for laying in a true siege.
They set up a village of
teepees, tents, and trailers, a sort of protesters’ powwow. Some, like Catcher
Cuts the Road, triumphant in a feathered headdress on the front page of The New York Times, wore traditional native clothing;
others demonstrated in camouflage or caps embroidered with Vietnam-veteran
emblems, bearing signs and banners that read Water Is Life and Defend
the Sacred. There were teenagers in sundresses and tank tops, and little
kids trailing after their parents in the deep dirt gullies blazed by bulldozers
making way for the highly contested Dakota Access Pipeline. Together, they
mobilized in solidarity against it.
The Standing Rock standoff, or
#NoDAPL, as it is often hashtagged, quickly attracted media and popular
attention. It has become the subject of numerous articles and radio and TV
segments; it has made headlines throughout the country, the world. The Department
of Justice issued a statement requesting a halt to construction,
signaling not an outright victory, perhaps, but certainly a landmark. Here was
a movement of the people, by the people, so successful it had actually yielded
change—or, at least, as Standing Rock Sioux tribe chairman David Archambault II
put it, “a crack in the door.” (Construction continues elsewhere
along the nearly 2,000-mile route.)
Why, then, has an arrest
warrant been issued for the acclaimed journalist Amy Goodman, host of the
long-running news program Democracy Now!, for her coverage of the
standoff? Why was it not issued until two days after she broadcast video footage of
protesters apparently being attacked by security guards brandishing pepper
spray and dogs? And what does the arrest warrant mean, not just for the future
of the land, the water, the Standing Rock Sioux people, and for all indigenous
Americans, but for our fundamental right to freedom of the press?
Since the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers announced it had approved construction of a $3.8 billion pipeline to
transport nearly a half million gallons of crude oil fracked from the Bakken
oil fields in North Dakota to a hub in Illinois, a coalition led by the local
Standing Rock Sioux arose in strong opposition, gathering strong momentum by
late July. It has since swelled to include a second encampment, as protesters prepare for winter. Not only, they argue, could
the pipeline potentially contaminate the Missouri River and pollute water the
largely impoverished Sioux population depends on, but the projected path of the
pipeline cuts directly into archaeologically and historically significant and
culturally sacred ground. And on neither issue, they say, were they properly
consulted.
Amy Goodman reporting from
Standing Rock for Democracy Now!
Photo: Courtesy of Democracy
Now Productions
On September 8, local
authorities issued a warrant for Goodman’s arrest, alleging that she trespassed
on private lands. Goodman claims she was acting as a reporter, exercising the
right of freedom of the press. In the video, which is billed as an exclusive, a
fedora-wearing Goodman, holding a Democracy Now! microphone, reports
from the front lines of that day’s demonstration, in which protesters
approached a wire fence cordoning off a construction site where a half dozen
bulldozers dug deep into the contested land. “Criminals! You guys are
criminals!” one water protector shouts over the fence to hard hat–wearing
workers on the other side.
It was September 3, a Saturday.
The day before, Goodman explains in the video, lawyers for the Standing Rock
Sioux had filed documents showing that the land being bulldozed is in fact a
tribal burial site. And yet, when members of the tribe and their fellow
protesters jump the fence, one of them is immediately thrown to the ground by
what appears to be a private security guard. Several other people in hard hats
emerge, with trained German shepherds, riled up and lunging, in tow. “Sir,
reporter from New York,” Goodman says to one of them, and asks what he is
spraying. “I didn’t spray anything, ma’am,” the guard replies. But the camera
then shows a Native American man who tells Goodman he has pepper spray running
down the insides of his sunglasses. Another man, colorful bandanas around his
neck and head, points out the bright blood and fresh teeth marks on his
tattooed arms—a dog bite, he says.
“Are you telling the dogs to
bite the protestors?” Goodman asks another guard. The guard turns her face away
from the camera, which then zooms in on the nose and mouth of her dog, covered
in fresh blood. Moments later, we see the same guard urging the dog
forward into the crowd. Goodman shifts between narrating the events viewers can
plainly see (“Security unleashes one of the dogs, which attacks two of the
Native Americans’ horses”) and questioning the people around her (“Do you feel
like you won today?”). “I hope we’ve accomplished letting Enbridge know that
the people of this nation and the people of this world, tribal or otherwise,
have withdrawn their social license to pollute water, and that they need to
find an honest, nonviolent way to make a living,” answers a woman named Reyna
Crow.
As Crow speaks on camera, two
fellow protesters pour water from a plastic bottle to flush the sting of pepper
spray from her eyes. At one point, protesters resort to using a flagpole and
sticks to defend themselves against the guards and the dogs. “The photos [of
the attacks] are dead ringers for Birmingham, 1963,” wrote environmental
journalist Bill McKibben in the Los Angeles Times. (McKibben led the massive and
successful protest against the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline in
2011, for which he spent three days in jail.)
Photo: Courtesy of
@suunuxtaniino
Goodman was not broadcasting
live, as Diamond Reynolds was earlier this summer when she uploaded to Facebook
Live footage of a Minneapolis-area police officer fatally shooting her
boyfriend, Philando Castile. But Goodman’s news coverage of the dog and pepper
spray attacks went viral in the same way that Reynolds’s video did—and
bystanders’ videos of the police killing of Alton Sterling had. And it aroused
a similar outcry. The Democracy Now! video has so far amassed some 13
million views on Facebook alone. It was rebroadcast by CNN, NPR, CBS, and NBC,
among others. The New York Times also reported in a front-page story
that dogs had allegedly been employed by private guards, but no
arrest warrant has been issued for the reporter of that story.
If a picture is worth a
thousand words, a video is apparently worth far more to the North Dakota
authorities, whose grounds for attempting to arrest Goodman are suspect and
false and set an alarming precedent that cannot be ignored.
Freedom of speech, and threats
to its well-being, is not only a subject Democracy Now! covers
frequently; it is perhaps the subject most frequently covered by the show,
which bills itself as “the war and peace report” and concentrates on in-depth,
ad-free reporting on fights for justice, on social movements, and on the effects
of American policy on the rest of the world. It has devoted, over the years,
significant coverage to the death of Eric Garner, to the Occupy Wall Street
movement, and to the execution of Georgia inmate Troy Davis. And since
mid-August, Democracy Now! has been covering the resistance to the Dakota
Access Pipeline on and off the front lines. It reported on water protectors
who chained themselves to the workers’ machinery. It published the names of the
companies who have invested in the construction of the pipeline. It interviewed
noted activists at the camp known as Sacred Stone: Winona LaDuke of the
organization Honor the Earth, and Lakota land rights activist Debra White Plume.
A warrant for the arrest of its host, issued at a time when the boundaries of
journalism are growing increasingly murky, poses a distinct threat to fully and
freely telling this story, or any story.
Goodman travels the country and
the world with the zeal of a political candidate, raising awareness and
fundraising for the independently produced show. In her reporting, she often
covers the persecution of journalists in other countries, but she is also no
stranger to putting herself in the line of fire in service of a story. While
reporting on the massacre in East Timor, she was severely beaten. After she was
arrested while attempting to cover protests at the Republican National
Convention in 2008, Goodman was asked by a news producer why she, and not he, had
been arrested. “Were you out on the streets?” she replied.
Journalists, when they cannot
get out in the streets to cover the sieges of the world, are themselves under
siege. The warrant issued for Goodman’s arrest is not a story of an oppressed
journalist in another country; it is the story of a journalist oppressed in her
own country, and more important, in our own country, in a country built
on the very concept of freedom of speech. As Center for Constitutional Rights
legal director Baher Azmy said in response to the warrant, “This is clearly a
violation of the First Amendment . . . an attempt to repress this important
political movement by silencing media coverage.”
In recent days, reports have
surfaced that the National Guard has been activated in the Dakota Access Pipeline case and that police in riot gear
had begun arresting protesters at the construction site. To infringe on the
freedom to tell those stories is the most dangerous weapon of all: It strikes
all of us. It sends out the dogs. As one protester, who described being bitten
and pepper sprayed, told Goodman that day, “I wish they’d open their eyes and
have a heart, to realize, you know, if this happens, we’re not going to be the
only ones who are going to suffer. They’re going to suffer, too.”
Within the space of a year—an
election year—the issue of water has emerged as one of the most contentious and
divisive in the United States: The polluted, undrinkable water in Flint,
Michigan; unprecedented drought in California and Nevada; widespread fracking
in West Virginia, Colorado, and elsewhere; the worst flooding in Louisiana
since Hurricane Sandy; the severe lack of access to potable water in the Navajo
Nation. Wherever we are talking about water, there is a clear-cut connection
with freedom. The Standing Rock Sioux know this. The power of their protest
depends as much on numbers as it does on their ability to get their story told.
If hundreds of Native tribes
and nations can join together in solidarity to resist a dangerous threat to
their identity, to their existence, to their freedom, so must members of the
press everywhere in condemning attacks on a fellow journalist. This is no time
for silence. One standoff leads to another.
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