Greenpeace went on trial this week in North Dakota in a lawsuit brought by the pipeline company Energy Transfer, which accuses the environmental group of masterminding protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline almost a decade ago.
Greenpeace denies the allegations, calling them baseless, and says the $300 million lawsuit is an intimidation tactic aimed at bankrupting the organization and stifling protest groups more broadly.
But the group and its allies also call the case a racist attempt to erase the story of the Native American activism that led to the huge protests around the Standing Rock Reservation.
“When you look back at history, they always try to wipe us out,” said Waniya Locke, an activist who lives on Standing Rock, at a recent media briefing.
The lawyers made their opening statements on Wednesday and each side now has two weeks to argue its case. As the case proceeds, it’s worth looking back on what we know about the origins of the Standing Rock protests and what the activists at its center say about what drove them.
‘Great historical and cultural significance’
The protests began in early 2016, when the 1,172-mile pipeline, which carries crude oil from North Dakota across several states to a transfer point in Illinois, was still under construction. Its planned route had raised alarm about damage to sacred sites and water supplies.
Members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe set up encampments near Lake Oahe, a reservoir on the Missouri River. The pipeline route was close to the reservation at that spot and the pipeline was slated to run underneath the lake.
For many of the activists, the concerns about the pipeline’s location evoked a painful history. “Since time immemorial, the Tribe’s ancestors lived on the landscape to be crossed by the DAPL,” the tribe said in a lawsuit it filed against the Army Corps of Engineers in July 2016. “The pipeline crosses areas of great historical and cultural significance to the Tribe, the potential damage or destruction of which greatly injures the Tribe and its members. The pipeline also crosses waters of utmost cultural, spiritual, ecological, and economic significance to the Tribe and its members.”
Young people were prominent in the nascent protest movement, and Montgomery Brown, who is now 33, was among them. He’s an educator in Grand Forks, N.D. and a graduate student in Indigenous language and pedagogy. There was nobody “telling us what to do,” he recalled about the protests. “It was just something that we saw that we needed to do in order to protect our community, protect our environment, protect our water, our resources.”
During the summer of 2016, he took part in a nearly 2,000-mile relay run all the way from Standing Rock Reservation to Washington to raise awareness about their pipeline campaign. Distance running is a cultural tradition for many Native Americans. Even with frequent breaks, his group of about 35 people covered around 100 miles a day, he said in an interview this week.
“I guess when you have a purpose and you have a passion for something in your life, a lot of the doubts and the little voices in the back of your head, they don’t really account for much,” he said.
By the time he returned from his run, the protests were swelling with people who had traveled to join them, buoyed by celebrity appearances and social media. But conflicts had also started to develop with law enforcement and private security. He volunteered as a medic at the camps.
Other legal battles
At the courthouse this week, the lead lawyer for Energy Transfer, Trey Cox of the firm Gibson Dunn, said the company had sought to be a “good citizen” of North Dakota and had taken pains to meet with the community and survey the proposed pipeline route to make sure it wouldn’t damage culturally sensitive sites.
He said Greenpeace had exploited small, unorganized protests and paid outside agitators to come in and cause unrest that escalated into millions of dollars in damage and delays.
The lead lawyer for Greenpeace, Everett Jack Jr. of the firm Davis Wright Tremaine, said there was no evidence for those allegations and that the group had played only a small role in the protests in response to requests for assistance from Indigenous activists.
He said the protests ultimately attracted some 100,000 people and became the largest gathering of Native tribes in over 100 years, with stark tensions between nonviolent protesters and people who “just wanted to burn stuff down.” He stressed that Greenpeace comes from a Quaker tradition of nonviolence and said the group trains protesters to “de-escalate.”
Jack also pointed to ongoing litigation that Standing Rock Sioux and other tribes have filed to stop the pipeline. The project was stopped under President Barack Obama but resumed under President Trump; it’s been operating since 2017, though final approvals are still pending. Brown likened that long legal fight to an ultramarathon.
Brown sees a grave danger in the Greenpeace case: the risk of creating a precedent where any group present at a protest could be held responsible for everything that might happen there. “I feel like this fight is bigger than Greenpeace,” he said. “It’s about protecting the free speech and democracy.”
Trump said E.P.A. would lose 65 percent of staff. Then, a correction.
During his cabinet meeting on Wednesday, President Trump casually mentioned that Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, intended to fire 65 percent of employees, an incision so deep that officials said it would hobble the E.P.A.
Trump said Mr. Zeldin “thinks he’s going to be cutting 65 or so percent of the people from environmental. And we’re going to speed up the process, too, at the same time.”
Within minutes, managers at the agency said they received a White House memo telling them to prepare for mass layoffs.
Hours later, an E.P.A. official said Mr. Trump was referring to overall agency budget cuts and not a 65 percent reduction in personnel. — Lisa Friedman
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