Making It Home: Solidarity and Belonging in the #NoDAPL/Standing Rock Encampments

Abstract:The movement to defend tribal sovereignty and resist construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) in Standing Rock, North Dakota, was a fleeting yet deeply significant site of experimentation in collaboration and solidarity. We argue, through the paired concepts of kinship and home, that central to #NoDAPL’s lasting significance is the way that allies in the resistance camps worked across various registers of difference to align interests in such a manner that Indigenous territorial sovereignty emerged as the shared matter of concern, and thus achieving a powerful relationality and sense of collaborative possibility. We offer an ethnographic lens on the #NoDAPL encampments to show how solidarity was achieved and places where it wavered. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, activist research, and digital ethnography, we show how the linchpin of moral alignment across difference (the element that made solidarity hold) was the induction of allies into an Indigenous-led critique of settler colonialism, exposing tensions in the difficult process of collaboration, and generating a strong vein of reflexivity on the part of non-Native activists.