This story is part of ICT’s series on the 10th anniversary of the Standing Rock movement.
Amelia Schafer
ICT
Every morning at the crack of dawn, Candi Brings Plenty would climb up a small hill near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, to pray and post news directly from the camps of water protectors gathered on the shores of the Missouri River.
This hill in the Oceti Sakowin camp was one of the only locations near the #NoDAPL camps in rural southern North Dakota with cell phone reception.
Brings Plenty found herself on that hill, “Facebook Hill,” daily through the summer, fall and winter of 2016 leading into 2017.
Sometimes the hill was crowded with media, camp leaders and water protectors trying to get a shred of cell service. One grassroots organization, the Indigenous Environmental Network, even set up its own yurt directly on top of the hill for optimal service, recalled Brings Plenty, who is Oglala Lakota.
For many, social media was the perfect tool to share their experiences, stories and messages from the historic protests against the more than 1,000-mile long Dakota Access Pipeline and its crossing under the Missouri River just 0.6 miles from the northern tip of the Standing Rock Reservation.
At one point “Facebook Hill” was so crowded with people trying to get service that elected leaders began approving who could use the hill to spread their messages. They wanted to ensure that accurate information was disseminated and the hill was used for good. Brings Plenty, who led the Two Spirit camp for roughly 11 months, was one of those approved camp messengers.
Brings Plenty had already built a following online from her advocacy work in Portland, Oregon, where she’d lived previously. Now, as a camp leader, she planned to use that existing platform to spread news and intel about the resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Facebook and other platforms like Twitter quickly became a way for community members to connect and share live footage of life inside of the camps in Cannon Ball.
More than 1 million people “checked-in” to the Standing Rock Reservation through Facebook in 2016, but only 10,000 actually attended the protests, according to former Standing Rock tribal chairwoman Janet Alkire.
Indian Country was already in the midst of its largest organized movement since the 1970s, but now, they had social media and planned to use it to propel news of the movement further than ever before.
“I’ve been on social media for a long time, and I had not really seen a push like that [before],” said Melissa Stoner, Diné and the Native American studies librarian at the University of California at Berkeley. “Natives [were] really speaking their mind and going out there and saying, ‘This is what’s happening’ and just exposing that truth.”
Standing Rock 10 years later: ‘We still have a lot of unknowns’
In the fall of 2016, roughly six months after protests first broke out against the pipeline and its crossing through unceded Oceti Sakowin territory, water protectors were brainstorming how to catch the nation’s attention.
The movement was driven and founded by young activists from Standing Rock and the neighboring Cheyenne River Reservation.
These youth had an idea: to use social media in a way it hadn’t been used before and push raw information directly from the Standing Rock camps.
Eventually, a viral post emerged, claiming that if mass amounts of Facebook users clicked on the Standing Rock Reservation’s page claiming to have checked it, it would serve as a tool to not only raise awareness for the movement but distract and disorient federal investigators monitoring protestors.
The idea worked.
Brings Plenty said she participated in and encouraged others to join in the mass check ins.
“You could be anywhere and check in and make an impact on the movement,” she told ICT.
Shortly after check-ins hit the 1-million mark in October 2016, international news outlets were running their own stories on what was happening in North Dakota.
While the Morton County Sheriff’s Department has said it was not monitoring social media usage of protesters, the viral post did accomplish its goal of breaking free of the bubble water protectors felt they’d been stuck in, a bubble where people on the ground worried that news wasn’t spreading far out of rural North Dakota, let alone out of Indigenous circles.
“We started to see people being targeted, people who were making videos and posting [online] they were being shot at and arrested,” said Brings Plenty, who participated in the mass check-in effort. “Having people who had no intention of actually going to Standing Rock check-in, it was actually a great organized use of Facebook in that moment.”
The mass check-ins helped to flood user’s feeds with information about Standing Rock and help protect those who were consistently posting from being targeted, she said.
Brings Plenty said her posts had been targeted. On numerous occasions she couldn’t go live or if she was able to go live no one would be able to view her video. Other times her posts glitched or wouldn’t allow her to upload anything. She’d even been injured a couple times while protesting, her elbow was dislocated and she sustained several burns across her body. She also got her teeth kicked out on one occasion, she said. She’s since developed Post-Trumatic Stress Disorder from these experiences.
By having 1 million people checking in online at the camps, many of which would never set foot there, some of the pressure was alleviated from herself and others even if it was for a short while, she said.
The mass-check in movement marked a significant point in which participants began to realize how impactful social media could be, Brings Plenty said.
“I think it was kind of like a wake-up call for our generation, this digital generation, to see how far we can push technology to get our message out there,” said Stoner, who leads the University of California at Berkeley’s digital Standing Rock library.
For some, the #NoDAPL movement is what got them to engage with social media.
Betty Archambault said she finally downloaded Facebook in 2016 in an effort to stay in touch with water protectors on Standing Rock, where her son Dave Jr. Archambault was serving as chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
“I know there was a lot of hope that we could fight this,” Betty Archambault said. “I think that it woke up America.”
Aside from the check ins, social media provided a way for water protectors on the ground to document what was happening at the camps. It helped attract the attention of celebrities like Mark Ruffalo and Shailene Woodley and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson.
Posting from the camps was a way to expose the public to what was happening at the camps and provide an angle they wouldn’t have gotten from traditional, non-Native news outlets, Brings Plenty said.
A lot of outlets were specifically focusing on the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe itself, not necessarily on the movement as a whole or the greater implications of the pipeline.
Brings Plenty said she felt traditional outlets were only speaking to members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe as well, rather than Indigenous people from more than 250 federally recognized tribes who’d come out in solidarity.
FILE – In this Nov. 11, 2016, file photo, more than 500 clergy from across the country gather for a “Clergy for Standing Rock” march on N.D. Highway 1806 near Cannon Ball, N. D. A federal judge on Wednesday, Dec. 29, 2021, has sided with local law enforcement in a case brought by Dakota Access Pipeline demonstrators alleging excessive use of force by police at a protest site in North Dakota in 2016. (Mike McCleary/The Bismarck Tribune via AP, File)
“We were called there by our ancestors,” Brings Plenty said. “We knew we had unspoken lineal obligations [to Standing Rock]. I come from Crazy Horse’s Band, and my great-great grandfather was the Whip Man of Crazy Horse’s Band.”
Oglala, Brings Plenty’s tribe, and Standing Rock are both part of the Oceti Sakowin – which is a confederacy of Lakota, Dakota and Nakoda tribes. There are more than 140,000 Oceti Sakowin people across the United States and Canada today.
“We have always been and will always be organized,” she said. “We’re spiritually organized, and we’re organized beyond generations in a way that no movement will ever be.”
In November of 2016, social media once again became a prime method for sharing news from the camps.
On Nov. 20, 2016, North Dakota police deployed water cannons, tear gas and sound weapons against 400 water protectors. Brings Plenty said she felt police waited until a majority of reporters had left the scene to do so, perhaps hoping news of the incident wouldn’t spread.
The violence happened four days before Thanksgiving, and that itself was a perfect example of the harsh realities faced by Indigenous communities today while others prepared to celebrate a holiday aimed at celebrating the myth of Wampanoag people and Pilgrims gathering for a celebratory meal, Brings Plenty said.
“We wanted to put [something different] on the plates of folks during Thanksgiving,” Brings Plenty said. “We knew it needed to be a part of how we used social media.”
So they prayed, with elders and youth, and planned how to best use social media to spread their messages widely. They would show the public, through social media, what they’d just experienced, linking it all back to Thanksgiving on Nov. 24, 2016. The following week, mass amounts of press, allies and protestors came out in solidarity.
“This was really one of those big moments in history that we were actually able to see police brutality on Native lands against Native people,” Stoner said. “I think it was really kind of like a wake-up call.”
Aside from Facebook, Twitter, now X, was a platform where Native people could connect with each other like never before.
Lovingly called #NativeTwitter, the platform provided space for Indigenous people to discuss their experiences, cultures, communities, research, stories, and life.
During the protests, #NativeTwitter served as a critical platform for spreading news of the protests.
Many people used Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to figure out carpooling situations to and from the camp from their community to help or drop off donations.
Social media has emerged as a useful tool in building traction and spreading awareness for social movements and political uprising.
“I feel like a lot of other movements have since been able to replicate [what we had online] through their keyboard warriors,” Brings Plenty said. “I feel like Standing Rock is kind of where that [concept] originated.”
Six years before #NoDAPL, social media played a role in bringing international attention to the Arab Spring, which was a tidal wave of revolutionary protests in the Middle East in the early 2010s.
Historians identified the Arab Spring as one of the first instances of social media being used as a tool in organizing. Facebook and YouTube served as platforms for people from Tunisia, to Egypt, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia to document what was happening in their communities during the protests and helped propel the movement into international headlines.
For the first time, footage shot by water protectors on their cell phones was aired on television screens across the world. Social media helped catch the attention of people who had never heard of the Arab Spring movement before, much like it would for Standing Rock.
Stoner first began curating the Standing Rock digital library in 2017 when students and staff alike began requesting information on the movement. Stoner herself had spent a majority of time researching the movement online through the NoDAPL hashtag, something that was new to her as a historian.
So she began saving critical posts regarding the movement: Tweets from within the Sacred Stone Camp and from Native news outlets covering the movement on the ground.
Many of the accounts active at that time, such as an account directly from the Sacred Stone camp, are now deactivated, suspended or otherwise removed from the platform, a problem Stoner said she’s run into when cataloging for the digital library.
The digital library has an entire page dedicated to social media presence during the protests.
The internet, in many ways, is forever, but in many ways it’s also temporary. Links to critical on the ground coverage through social media are now broken.
The Sacred Stone camp’s Twitter page is suspended, now regarded as lost media – something created digitally and intended for public consumption but no longer readily available anywhere on the internet.
The links may be broken, and posts may have been deleted, but the Berkley digital library remains. Ten years later, Stoner’s library still educates her campus community about what happened in Standing Rock and about Native people today.
Entrance to Oceti Sakowin camp of the Standing Rock movement near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, on October 9, 2016. (Jourdan Bennett-Begaye/ICT, file)
Highlighting a lack of knowledge
Standing Rock pushed back against propagandized narratives pushed by the United States government that Native people had been fully assimilated or even eradicated, Stoner said. Students and faculty alike expressed to her they had no idea Native people still lived in the Great Plains.
“I don’t think people had seen what it looks like for Indigenous people or Indigenous nations to show up in the present day and protect their lands,” Brings Plenty said. “Ever since then, we’ve absolutely led the way.”
For Stoner, the library helped expose her community to the realities Native people faced when fighting for clean water, tribal sovereignty and to protect their inherent rights. She spent a significant amount of time curating the digital library, something accessible to anyone regardless of where they’re located. It’s a free online resource filled with articles, artwork and narratives from the ground in Cannon Ball.
“We have to keep our narratives alive and we have to keep ourselves on the record in some ways,” Stoner said. “Native peoples have been erased in terms of archival silences.”
Growing up on the Arizona side of the Navajo Nation, Stoner said the movement showed her how Indigenous people were ignored by the rest of the nation. She’d grown up surrounded by other Navajo people, not realizing many Americans don’t attend a class with a single Native American classmate as Native people only make up roughly 1 percent of the student population nationwide. Further, many school districts don’t actually teach authentic history as it pertains to Native people. Only 13 states require their k-12 public education programs to teach Native American history, according to the American Indian College Fund.
To this day, Stoner said she still receives positive feedback about the digital library. Community members ask her to keep it going and to continue highlighting Native stories.
On the 10th anniversary of the beginnings of the movement, Stoner said she plans to continue the library and to begin incorporating more oral history from those who attended the protests.
The post How social media amplified the Standing Rock movement appeared first on ICT.
From ICT via This RSS Feed.