“Fires were lit inside them”

The Pyropolitics of Water Protector Camps at Standing Rock


Abstract

The language of fire has sometimes been used in illustrative ways to describe how social movements spark, flare, and sometimes sputter out. Building on recent scholarship about protest camps, as well as borrowing language from environmental historians about fire behavior, this article draws from ethnographic research to describe the pyropolitics of the Indigenous-led anti-pipeline movement at Standing Rock—examining how fire was used as analogy and in material ways to support and drive the movement to protect water from industrial capitalism. Describing ceremonial fires, social fires, home fires, cooking fires, and fires lit in protest on the front line, this article details how fire was put to work in myriad ways in order to support the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), and ensure social order and physical survival at the camps built to house supporters of the movement. This article concludes with descriptions of how these sparks ignited at Standing Rock followed activists home to their own communities, to other struggles that have been taken up to resist pipelines, the contamination of water, and the appropriation of Indigenous land.


Keywords

pyropolitics; Dakota Access Pipeline protests; Water Protector Camps; social movements; Native American; American Indian; fire; #noDAPL; Standing Rock; Indigenous

Beatrice. Personal interview, Gun Lake Potawatomi Tribal Territory, 23 April 2017.

Bengal, Rebecca. “Standing Rock Rising: Inside the Movement to Stop the Dakota Access Pipeline.” Vogue, 22 Nov. 2016, www.vogue.com/projects/13505511/standing-rock-movement-dakota-access-pipeline.

Biggs, Michael. “Strikes as Forest Fires: Chicago and Paris in the Late Nineteenth Century.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 110, no. 6, May 2005, pp. 1684–714.

Biggs, Michael. “Dying Without Killing; Self-Immolations 1963–2002.” Making Sense of Suicide Missions, edited by Diego Gambetta, Oxford University Press, pp. 173–208, 2005.

Charlie. Facebook post 23 February 2017.

Clark, Nigel. “Pyropolitics for a Planet of Fire.” Territory Beyond Terra, edited by K. Peters, P. Steinberg and E. Stratford, Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018, pp 69–86.

Clark, Nigel and Kathryn Yusoff. “Combustion and Society: A Fire-Centred History of Energy Use.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 31, no. 5, 2014, pp. 203–226.

Cronon, William. “Foreword”. Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire. edited by Stephen J Pyne, University of Washington Press, 1982, pp. xii.

Diné woman. Personal interview, Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Territory, 18 January 2017.

Dustin. Personal interview, Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Territory. 19 January 2017.

Estes, Nick. Our History is the Future. Verso, 2019.

Feigenbaum, Anna; Patrick McCurdy & Fabian Frenzel. “Towards a Method for Studying Affect in (micro)Politics: The Campfire Chats Project and the Occupy Movement.” Parallax, vol. 19, no. 2, 2013, pp. 21–37.

Ferguson, Gary. Land On Fire. Timber Press, 2017.

Fowler, Cynthia. Ignition Stories; Indigenous Fire Ecology in the Indo-Australian Monsoon Zone. Carolina Academic Press, 2013.

Frenzel, Fabian, Anna Feigenbaum and Patrick McCurdy. “Protest Camps: An emerging Field of Social Movement Research.” The Sociological Review. vol 62, 2014, pp. 457–474.

Goldtooth, Dallas. Facebook post, 22 February 2017.

Grassrope, Lewis. Facebook post. 20 January 2017.

Indigenous Media Rising. Facebook post, 22 February 2017.

Iron Eyes, Chase. Facebook post. 11 December 2016.

Jamarkis. Facebook post, 25 December 25, 2016.

Kennedy, Merrit. “More Than 1 Million ‘Check In’ On Facebook To Support The Standing Rock Sioux.” NPR, 2 Nov. 2016. www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/01/500268879/more-than-a-million-check-in-on-facebook-to-support-the-standing-rock-sioux.

Kusnetz, Nicholas. “Harsh New Anti-Protest Laws Restrict Freedom of Speech, Advocates Say.” Washington Post, 22 Aug. 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/08/22/environmentalists-say-new-pipeline-protest-laws-restrict-their-freedom-speech/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.211b867eeb54.

LaDuke, Winona. “Of Seeds and Roots.” Indigenous Food Sovereignty in the United States: Restoring Cultural Knowledge, Protecting Environments, and Regaining Health, edited by Devon Mihesuah and Elizabeth Hoover, University of Oklahoma Press, 2019.

Lawson, Michael. Damned Indians Revisited: The Continuing History of the Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux. South Dakota State Historical Society Press, 2009.

Lewis. Personal interview, Standing Rock Sioux Tribal territory, 18 January 2017.

Macauley, David. Elemental Philosophy: Earth, Air, Fire and Water as Elemental Ideas. State U of New York P, 2010.

Marder, Michael. Pyropolitics: When the World is Ablaze. Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015.

Marissa. Facebook post. 8 March 2017.

McCarthy, Theresa In Divided Unity: Haudenosaunee Reclamation at Grand River. University of Arizona Press, 2016

Mohawk, John C. Utopian Legacies; A History of Conquest and Oppression in the Western World. Clear Light Press, 2000.

Murphy, Amanda. “A Tale of Three Sovereigns: The Nebulous Boundaries of the Federal Government, New York State, and the Seneca Nation of Indians Concerning State Taxation of Indian Reservation Cigarette Sales to Non-Indians.” Fordham Law Review, vol 79, no. 5, 2011, pp. 2301–2346.

Oceti camp resident. Personal interview, on Standing Rock Sioux Tribal territory, January 2017. Details withheld to protect the interviewee.

Pacheco, Agatha. “Seattle’s Contribution to Standing Rock: A New Twist on the Teepee.” The Seattle Globalist, 30 Nov. 2016, www.seattleglobalist.com/2016/11/30/standing-rock-seattle-tarpees-winter/59706.

Perry, Mark. “A Fire in the Mind of Arabs: The Arab Spring in Revolutionary History.” Insignt Turkey Vol 16 no 1m p 27-34. 2014.

Poletta, Francesca. “‘It Was like a Fever ...’. Narrative and Identity in Social Protest.” Social Problems, vol. 45, no. 2, May 1998, pp. 137–159.

Pueblo man. Personal interview. 18 January 2017

Pyne, Stephen. Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire. University of Washington Press, 1982 (1999 second printing).

Pyne, Stephen. “Maintaining Focus: An Introduction to Anthropogenic Fire.” Chemosphere, vol. 29, no. 5, 1994, pp. 889–911.

Pyne, Stephen. World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth. University of Washington Press, 1995.

Pyne, Stephen. Fire: A Brief History. University of Washington Press, 2001.

Pyne, Stephen. Fire: Nature and Culture. Reaction Books, 2012.

Ruelle, Morgan L. “Ecological Relations and Indigenous Food Sovereignty in Standing Rock.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 41, no. 3, 2017, pp. 113–125.

Seone, Aldo. Facebook post. 5 December 2016

Shatekaronhiase. Personal interview on Akwesasne Mohawk tribal territory, 13 May 2017.

Simpson, Leanne. “Osjkimaadiziig, the New People.” Lighting the Eighth Fire; the Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations. edited by Leanne Simpson, ARP Books, 2008, pp. 13–22.

Stephen. Personal phone interview, 18 May, 2017.

United States of America v Michael Markus aka Rattler Case 1:17-mj-21 United States District Court for District of North Dakota Filed 1/23/17

Vanessa. Personal interview, White Earth Ojibway tribal territory, 17 April 2017.

Waniya. Personal interview, Standing Rock Sioux Tribal territory, 10 January 2017

Worland, Justin. “How Activists Are Using Facebook Check-In to Help Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters”, Time, 31 Oct. 2016, www.time.com/4551866/facebook-dakota-access-pipeline-check-in.

Wrangham, Richard. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Basic Books, 2009.


Published : 2019-09-08


HooverE. (2019). “Fires were lit inside them”. Review of International American Studies, 12(1), 11-44. https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.7391

Elizabeth Hoover  elizabeth_m_hoover@brown.edu




Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The Copyright Holder of the submitted text is the Author. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the RIAS websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Any commercial use requires separate written agreement with the Author and a proper credit line indicating the source of the original publication in RIAS.

  1. License

The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY 4.0 license.

  1. Author’s Warranties

The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.

If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution - By the same conditions 4.0 International".

ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).

  1. User Rights

Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

  1. Co-Authorship

If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.

I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.