For the majority of the 1300 mile journey from Los Angeles to North Dakota, you don’t see much besides devastating, inhuman moonscapes illuminated by startling sunsets or sunrises. If you came – as we did – from a densely populated, warm city suffocated by endless lines of traffic and hopeless dreams, that ride becomes almost ritualistic, meditative – preparing one for the arrival at Standing Rock, North Dakota, as if it were a world unlike any we might have known before it.
I was one of only four civilians on a bus full of veterans, and I was there not as a protestor, but to document the journey of a group of 24 former members of the armed forces, just a small group from an estimated 4.5k who had heeded the call put out by Michael J. Woods and Wesley Clark Jr. to stand alongside them at the front lines of the Dakota Access Pipeline Project (DAPL), a billion dollar enterprise to pump oil across country in a thin pipe constructed on a relatively shallow pipeline which would rip right through Native American tribal land and nearby areas. DAPL had stopped mid-construction, the earth broken, gaping, gasping like a gutted fish, as First People and their supporters across the nation had joined the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in their attempts to halt the pipeline, arguing that it desecrates sacred land as well as posing a massive risk to their water source. Standing Rock was the largest gathering of tribes across the country since the Battle of Little Big Horn.
I’d…