Drone Warriors: The Art of Surveillance and Resistance at Standing Rock. Exhibit at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. Providence, RI: Brown University. May 11, 2018–April 30, 2019.

Abstract

Between April 2016 and February 2017, indelible images of police violence against protestors on tribal reservation and unceded lands in Standing Rock, North Dakota, circulated on the national news and social media. The American public bore witness to law enforcement using tear gas, rubber bullets, concussion grenades, and water cannons against protestors as winter temperatures in the region plunged below freezing. These images generated widespread public interest in Energy Transfer Partners’ proposed Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), a $3.8 billion, 1,172-mile-long pipe intended to carry 500,000 barrels of oil per day across the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois. In North Dakota, the construction plans aimed to extend the pipeline upriver from Lake Oahe, the Standing Rock Sioux Nation’s only source of drinking water. The DAPL proposal thus sparked serious concerns about the contemporary state of Indigenous sovereignty, settler colonialism, and environmental racism. Drone Warriors: The Art of Surveillance and Resistance at Standing Rock takes up these concerns by revisiting the actions of the Water Protectors, the Native and non-Native protestors who opposed the proposed DAPL. This informative exhibit highlights how photographic drone operators Myron Dewey, Sean Turgent, Dean Dedman Jr., Brooke Johnson Waukau, and dozens of others turned to drone technology as an innovative response to the pipeline and its defenders. They produced videos and photographs of the pipeline construction and the militarized encampments housing Morton County police, National Guard, and DAPL security forces to document political and environmental transgressions. At the same time, they created powerful images of the landscape and the #NoDAPL Movement to tell their own narrative of the events. Entering the gallery space through the museum’s glass doors, museumgoers are met with tracking shots of theMni Sose, or theMissouri River, on a flat screen televisionmounted on the wall at eye level. To the left, a series of Dewey’s aerial photographs lines the walls, capturing the beauty of “Lakota ancestral lands, herds of bison grazing in the prairie, and the linkages of waterways,” according to a nearby panel. These opening images establish the landscape’s relationship to Indigenous culture as well as its natural beauty. As one moves through the exhibit, a visual story unfolds of this natural world under threat. For example, on other televisions mounted nearby, museumgoers seated on stools can take in aerial video of the buffalo “surrounded by twenty foot deep trenches and razor wire.” To be sure, the narrative of the endangered Lakota lands is a deeply moving one. At the same time, opening the exhibit with images of unpopulated land risks re-inscribing a colonial perspective that ignores the Indigenous communities who inhabit it, seeing it instead as empty and ripe for resource extraction. Perhaps in an effort to dampen this effect, a glass case nearby showcases the rich variety of cultural artifacts born out of the DAPL resistance. These include several posters by Lakota visual artist Gilbert Kills Pretty Enemy III and graphic screen-printed fabric featuring a young Indigenous woman standing with a line of Protectors, her right arm raised in resistance, by Jesus Barraza and Melanie Cervantes. A second case features dreamcatchers crafted by Water Protectors at the Standing Rock Pueblo Camp who cleverly repurposed the concertina wire used by law enforcement to hem in Protectors as the hoop that holds the dreamcatcher webbing taut. Perhaps the most arresting portion of the exhibit is its visual documentation of the #NoDAPL Movement. While the perspective of Elizabeth Hoover’s now iconic photograph of Protectors silhouetted against clouds of illuminated tear gas during the standoff at the Backwater Bridge barricade places the viewer on the ground (Figure 1), the majority of the exhibit’s images use the drone’s aerial perspective to tell the story of the actions from above. One striking photograph captures the standoff between Protectors and Morton County police officers at Turtle Island as a complex interplay of surveillance and countersurveillance: while law enforcement officers clad in museum anthropology