Sometime in January of 2017, during a relative lull in the ongoing struggle between the police forces allied to the Energy Transfer Partners company and the multitude of protesters resisting in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe against the passage of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) across the Missouri River, some new additions to the police arsenal were quietly added. These additions, photographed by resisters at the camps, were Humvees mounted with surface-to-air missile launcher systems known as the Avenger Air Defense System. The presence of this weapon is something previously unseen in a domestic setting outside of military training exercises. Since the protestors at the camps are armed with few weapons other than their bodies, voices and willpower, the question arises as to why specifically the security forces of the Dakota Access Pipeline (which includes members of seventy-six separate police departments from eight different states), would have need of such a weapon to contain or disperse a mass public protest.
Avenger missile system (center of photo) documented at the camps in January of 2017. This photo was taken by one of the resident protestors at the camps.
The Avenger system is armed with a small, infrared homing surface-to-air missile called the FIM-92 Stinger, and carries eight of these missiles total which can be fired in rapid succession if needed. The Stinger missile is manufactured for the US Armed Forces by the Raytheon Company, and can be deployed with a variety of different weapons, including hand-held portable missile launchers. The Avenger system was designed to utilize this ammunition to target incoming cruise missiles, helicopters and low-flying aircraft, and unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly referred to as drones.
A Stinger missile is fired from an Avenger system during a US Armed Forces training exercise.
It is this last category that provides the most likely explanation for the Avenger’s presence at the Standing Rock Protests. Drones have had a constant presence at the camps, most frequently used by the police for surveillance of citizens at the protests, but also by activists and independent media who have used small quadcoptors mounted with cameras to try and provide the kind of immediate and comprehensive coverage of the camps that has largely been lacking on the part of mainstream media outlets in the United States. The use of private drones in this manner have lead to instances of them being targeted by the police, including the recorded documentation of police damaging a private drone with gunfire on October 23rd, 2016. Military sources consulted by the author have suggested that the Avenger’s presence may also be to utilize the tracking radar that is integrated into the unit, to digitally map out the location of all civilian aircraft that may be in the area.
As is characteristic of many of the actions and tactics pursued by the police at the Standing Rock protests, the technical legality of shooting a civilian drone out of the sky is very likely to be illegal when considering that private drones are legally defined by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as “civilian aircraft”, making it a Federal offense to damage or destroy them. However, the enforcement of this law has been selectively applied. Instances of drones being shot out of the sky by property owners who felt that the aircraft were threatening or invasive have gone un-litigated in some notable cases. The absence of consistent enforcement of FAA code in this context places the legality of armed take-down of civilian drones in a conspicuous sort of “grey area”, where legal enforcement is only pursued on a case-by-case basis with no clearly-articulated standard to determine when, and why these kinds of cases will be engaged with by the courts.
Screenshot from a drone-video featuring police firing on the drone. This footage was taken by activist Prolific the Rapper at the camps on October 22nd, 2016.
While the appearance of military vehicles carrying surface-to-air missile launchers at a civil protest may come as a surprise to many Americans, the police at Standing Rock have maintained a heavily militarized presence since the protests began in earnest during the Summer of 2016. Armored Humvees and Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles of various designs have been regularly present at the front-lines of the protests. These vehicles were originally manufactured for, and deployed by the United States Armed Forces for use in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s. These vehicles were designed to meet the Coalition’s need for an armored vehicle that could resist the deadliest weapon directed against Coalition forces by insurgents during the war, the Improvised Explosive Device (IED).
Photo taken by Democracy Now! of police line at Standing Rock, 2016. The beige vehicle center-left is a MaxxPro Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle.
The US military has been selling surplus vehicles to domestic law enforcement agencies through the US Defense Logistics Agency’s 1033 program, through which police departments are able to purchase vehicles from the military such as MRAPs. Although the 1033 program was established in 1997 by the Clinton Administration, the volume of military hardware sold to police departments increased dramatically following the withdrawal of US military forces from Iraq during the presidency of Barack Obama. The Department of Homeland Security has facilitated this process by offering grants to qualifying law enforcement agencies to help cover the price tag of vehicles designed for combat zones. In late November of 2016, there was an organized “deployment” of over 2,000 US Military veterans who arrived at the camps to support the protests. These veterans, many of whom had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, found themselves in the strange position of possibly facing the same armored vehicles that they had used during their wartime service.
On the night of November 20th, police sprayed water from fire hoses on people who had entered the “no-mans-land” to remove debris. The nighttime temperatures were below freezing. No deaths were reported.
Besides the legality of targeting civilian aircraft and heavy use of force against demonstrators, there has been substantial evidence of mass electronic surveillance used by police forces at the camps, which has been ample enough to warrant the opening of investigations by the Federal Communications Commission, the National Lawyers Guild, the American Civil Liberites Union, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to determine whether the 4th Amendment rights of demonstrators were constitutionally violated by the use by devices known as “IMSI catchers”. These devices simulate the signal of cell-phone towers to trick individual cell phones into routing their signal through the device, enabling the operator of the device to listen in on conversations or siphon off data that is being transmitted. These devices are compact enough that they can fit inside of a police squad car, helicopter or other vehicle. Federal law currently stipulates that the sale of every IMSI catcher must be approved and registered by the FCC, but further information is difficult to come by on these devices. Journalists and investigators seeking details about these devices and their use have had to file public document requests and fight uphill through a legal bureaucracy that is reluctant to release information about them.
Leaked photos published by Vice Motherboard of Harris IMSI Catchers used by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
The appearance of all of the elements described in this article, from surface-to-air missile launchers and war-tested armored vehicles to secretive and constitutionally-suspect electronic-surveillance devices — all of these could be said to be the most openly-displayed and massive demonstration of the militarization of domestic law enforcement agencies which has gradually been taking place for at least two decades. In this sense the militarized force at the Standing Rock camps is the most compact and visible representation of what can usually only be directly identified by tracking data and following legal processes, with the notable exception of their recent deployment at the numerous protests against police brutality and use of lethal force against unarmed (and predominantly Black American) citizens that have swept the United States in the last several years.
Graphic identifying the location of crude oil pipeline accidents between 2010 and 2015. Over 7 million gallons of crude oil are estimated to have been spilled within this period. (Graphic by the Center for Effective Government)
The presence and resilience of the camps themselves are also produced and sustained by a wide-ranging set of interconnected influences. On the surface, the main focus of protest could appear to be the deep concern for the community well-being of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe; that the Dakota Access Pipeline’s trajectory across the Missouri River will endanger the health of both the land and the people who reside on it in the advent of a pipeline rupture that is expected to spill devastating volumes of crude oil into the waters downstream. An accompanying level of influence is a general protest of national environmental policy — the apparent State reluctance to seriously drive national energy infrastructure into an alternative-energy focused direction, while also running a multitude of oil pipelines (which frequently rupture with disastrous consequences) from distant points of extraction to refineries, as well as points of importation for overseas markets such as China. The popular desperation and anger over these projects exists alongside widespread resistance to the method used to extract natural gas known as “fracking”, which contaminates underground freshwater reserves with chemicals used to split apart layers of shale to free up the gas for extraction. Both of the factors described above are also the primary attractors of solidarity for allies outside of the tribes, drawing environmental activists and advocates for social justice from a broad spectrum of backgrounds, while also establishing the ethical foundation referenced by the way the protestors and tribes alike refer to themselves as “water protectors.”
Solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe demonstrated by ethnic Mongolians in 2016, wearing traditional dress and displaying traditional Mongolian cultural sympols.
The great unifying factor for the Native Americans at the core of the resistance is essentially the lived experience of being Native in the United States. The struggle at the Dakota Access Pipeline is taking place on territory that was originally designated as tribal land by the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, but is currently not legally recognized as being part of the Standing Rock reservation, since the different branches of the Sioux tribe named in the treaty were later forced onto reservations whose borders did not line up with the territories originally agreed upon. This is also the result of a re-directing of the pipeline’s route that took place after residents of the city of Bismark voiced their concerns about the potential danger posed by the pipeline The members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe who first stepped in to blockade the Dakota Access Pipeline have cited this treaty as legal grounds for their resistance of the pipeline, and this has been a tremendous point of solidarity between the thousands of people from numerous Native tribes across America who have traveled to the camps to support the protest, coming from communities who have all experienced a historical legacy of legal agreements with United States Government being reneged on by the State. Members from two-hundred and eighty separate Native American tribes are said to be represented at the camps, the largest gathering of this kind in over a century. The intersection of ecological defense and indigenous justice at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests have also drawn international expressions of solidarity from native communities in far away locations as diverse as Mongolia, Palestine, and New Zealand.
A map depicting the original planned route of DAPL with the re-directed route, with the original territories outlined in the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, and the present-day borders of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. (Map by Northlandia blog).
The Dakota Access Pipeline itself is the manifestation of a broader US energy policy and economic trend that, according to its proponents, creates employments opportunities for American workers and will help create national self-reliance by lessening dependence on foreign oil. Closer examination reveals a massive transnational element to this infrastructure. Oil extracted from the Tar Sands in Alberta is transported down the TransCanada Keystone pipeline across US soil to a refinery on the banks of the Gulf of Mexico in Port Arthur, Texas, that is owned and operated in part by the national Saudi Arabian oil company Aramco. Natural gas extracted in North Dakota is shipped to joint Chinese-American refineries in Washington State for conversion into methanol, which is then shipped across the Pacific Ocean to China for use in the production of plastics.
The Port Arthur Refinery in Port Arthur, Texas is the largest crude oil refinery in the United States. It is joint-owned by Shell and Saudi Aramco, and is one of the destinations for crude oil extracted from the Alberta Tar Sands in Canada.
On January 24th, in the first week following his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive memorandum approving the planned extensions to the TransCanada Keystone that President Obama had refused to sign on to, despite his approval of other pipelines. In that same month, military vehicles carrying Avenger missile systems quietly arrived at the Standing Rock camps. On February 6th, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade released a report which gave the statistics for 35 pipeline accidents filed by Energy Transfer Partners and their subsidiary Sunoco, that between 2015 and 2017 resulted in 544,784 gallons total of spilled substances. On February 15th, a drone operated by Native media activist group Digital Smoke Signals was destroyed by police near the Dakota Access Pipeline while filming the construction of barricades on nearby roads. On February 16th, an eviction notice was served by Bureau of Indian Affairs officers to the residents of the Sacred Stone Camp. When considering the deeply-entrenched interests of Energy Transfer Partners in opposition to the conviction of the Native people at the camps, it is unlikely that the camps will be dispersed without a tremendous struggle.
Notice of trespass delivered by BIA agents to the residents of the Sacred Stones camp on February 15th, 2017. Photo taken by Media Smoke Signals.
Author’s note: I would like to express my gratitude to those at the camp who have updated me and granted permission to use photos taken at the site.
