Material Nature, Visual Sovereignty, and Water Rights: Unpacking the Standing Rock Movement

Abstract

The 11-foot-tall mile-marker made by activists at the Oceti Sakowin Camp in 2016 is one of the most emblematic visual icons of the Standing Rock movement. Hand-carved from wood and pointing to Native American reservations, nature sites, cities, and foreign countries, among others, the mile-marker post bears witness to the multilayered preoccupations and collective strategies of the protestors against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The post highlights the value of overlapping places, Native territories, epistemologies, and concerns, while intertribal coalition building, solidarity, and the urgent vindication of sovereignty through visual resignification gain center stage.1 In line with this land-based, Indigenous-centered, and multivocal milemarker, in this essay I explore Native American environmentalism through a historical and visual analysis of the 2016–2017 Standing Rock/#NoDAPL movement. I give a brief overview of the history of the movement and then focus on a specific set of the group’s decolonizing strategies, which are articulated around three core issues: 1. A reassertion of Traditional Environmental Knowledge (TEK), human rights, and place-based solidarity—all of which are central to ongoing Native American struggles for self-government (Coulthard, “Land”); 2. A critical revision of historical imaginaries and decolonizing practices; and 3. The struggle for visual sovereignty (Raheja, “Reading” 1163). These practices aim to subvert shifting media portrayals of Native Americans that continue to feed from symbolic spatial settings and (neo)colonialist stereotypes. Significantly, the set of photographs examined in this essay (which are taken from social media sites managed by the #NoDAPL movement: Indigenous Rising and Indigenous Rising Media) rarely attempt to capture or represent water, even though this other-than-human person, a sacred but also material/physical being in Native American epistemologies, is key to understanding the plight of Standing Rock and of other Indigenous com-