Julian Rauter

1. Water

I find a good first view of the Missouri right where it joins the Heart River in Mandan, North Dakota. It is a thick and deep river, fit for long travels and heavy irrigation, but what sticks out the most is its sheer weight. It is hard to believe that so much water is daily pulled in one direction by the crude gravity of the water cycle. To my left, a father teaches his sons to dangle fishing lines in the shallows of the Big Muddy. My own father, who is sitting beside me on the green banks, congratulates them on a catch. He makes a note of our location, Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park, as a great camp site for the North Dakota leg of his upcoming bike ride across the country. The sun is shining hard on the green banks, illuminating even the modest skyline of Bismarck, the boxy column of the State Capitol like a drab lighthouse in the prairie.

It is June of 2018, almost two years after consultation broke down (or, quite frankly, never happened) over the routing of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) under Lake Oahe, a long reservoir starting about twenty miles south of Fort Abraham Lincoln which serves as the main water supply for the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribes. After a well-publicized standoff extending into the frozen December of 2016, President Obama instructed the lake’s federal stewards, the Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), to prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Unlike the more perfunctory Environmental Assessment, an EIS can take years to prepare, so this decision was a win for the #NoDAPL movement.

However, this victory would be short-lived, as Donald Trump reversed the decision in February 2017, ordering the pipeline to go forward unheeded. The day after this announcement, construction crews were met by the teepees of the Last Child Camp, a group of water protectors making a final stand against the pipeline. Among them was Chase Iron Eyes, a Standing Rock attorney and the 2016 Democratic candidate for North Dakota’s single Congressional seat. Because of his high profile, law enforcement informed Chase that he would be responsible for any damage committed by the group. Despite his insistence that he was not the leader of the camp, they still turned their belief that he was the leader into charges of felony trespass and inciting a riot.

Iron Eyes and his colleagues at the Lakota People’s Law Office (LPLO) crafted a defense that they hoped would both clear his charges and challenge the pipeline’s right to cross the territory of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate (the Seven Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation). They prepared a “necessity defense,” arguing that the threat the pipeline posed to Chase, his family, and his tribe was so great that he had no choice but civil disobedience. While novel, a necessity defense does not have the same power as direct litigation. Unfortunately, litigation was not an option for LPLO or any other ally of the cause, as Standing Rock and Cheyenne River had already sued USACE for approving an insufficient environmental review by the pipeline company, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP). In 2017, they received a decision saying that, though the review was lacking, the claims against the pipeline were not egregious enough to stop it from flowing and it runs to this day, transporting massive amounts of crude oil from Stanley, North Dakota all the way to Patoka, Illinois.

The Iron Eyes Case ultimately ended in a plea deal with the state dropping felony charges in exchange for Chase pleading to a minor misdemeanor. There were a lot of reasons for both sides not to want it to go to trial. On the side of the defense, there were concerns about Chase’s ability to receive a fair judgment from Morton County jurors, a large majority of whom admitted prejudice against #NoDAPL demonstrators when surveyed. The prosecuting State’s Attorneys were clearly also aware that they were already being painted as the “bad guys” by LPLO’s media and likely wanted to avoid further controversy affecting the lives of the citizens they represented. Given the slim chances of a fair trial, it was a relief that Chase’s children kept their father and his community kept an important leader. However, because it precluded public presentation of the necessity defense, it also kept the issue of DAPL from being meaningfully reopened. Oil flows under Lake Oahe to this day, and we can only hope it will not spill.

I know this story because I spent the summer of 2018 working on preparation for the Iron Eyes trial. In ten short weeks, I was privy to a unique view of how the maintenance of environmental inequalities like DAPL often depends on an erasure of the stories in the landscape. Though I still hold a fond memory of my time exploring the banks of the Missouri, I have learned too much to see it with the same unadulterated awe as in that first encounter. Long before it hosted family camping trips, the junction of the Missouri and Heart was the terminus of the territory guaranteed to the Oceti Sakowin Oyate in the 1851 Treaty of Ft. Laramie. Though it does not directly cross the reservation, the pipeline corridor falls within that original treaty boundary. Conscious of how colonial erosion of their original landholdings has weakened awareness of treaty rights, the Standing Rock Tribal Council opened its first meeting with ETP by pointing out its standing resolution opposing any pipeline within the 1851 boundary. However, ETP had no legal obligation to recognize these boundaries as only current reservation lands are officially acknowledged by the federal government. Because they were required only to engage in “consultation,” ETP kept silent about their knowledge of this opposition until it brewed into what some have called the largest social movement of indigenous peoples in modern history.

In my role at LPLO, I reviewed permits and declassified emails to investigate the oft-cited claim that the pipeline had been rerouted from the city of Bismarck to Standing Rock when Bismarck’s mostly white residents rejected the threat it posed. Though we did prove the rerouting had occurred, we did not uncover any “smoking gun” of racial animus to the decision. However, it had a vagueness that seemed to be covering up a lack of due diligence, if not foul play. Under federal guidelines for environmental review, a developer can be asked to demonstrate that a proposed project does not violate environmental justice, the principle that environmental benefits and harms should not be unevenly distributed in ways that hurt low-income and minority populations. When asked to justify their decision in environmental justice terms, ETP produced a report whose geographical scope conveniently missed the boundary of the reservation by about 250 feet, excluding a census tract where 84% of the residents are people of color. Though Dr. Robert Bullard, the father of environmental justice, called this analysis “gerrymandered,” it still failed to constitute a legal demonstration of prejudice because United States civil rights law largely sees discrimination in terms of intent rather than outcome. Because of this legal quirk, it is hard to make the legal argument that an environmental decision was racially animated unless one can provide direct evidence of prejudice. As long as a company can claim there were other economic reasons to site the project where they did, such as cheaper land and zoning, it is hard to pin them down with an accusation of racism. The problem with this standard is that it ignores how the cheapest option is often the one that affects minorities the most severely, as these communities are more likely to live in areas where land is zoned for industrial projects and there is not enough local political power to block projects.

Their dissatisfaction with the USACE-approved review prompted Standing Rock’s tribal government to complete their own report detailing how an oil spill constitutes an existential threat to the tribe. Broadly addressing tribal health, culture, and economic survival, it also details how a spill would harm traditional subsistence practices. They couch this discussion of subsistence in testimony of elders who remember the flooding of Lake Oahe. Despite the name, Lake Oahe is actually a section of the Missouri River dammed up in the 1950s to provide hydroelectricity for the Great Plains. The Oahe dam brought the loss of the best river-bottom land for hunting, fishing, and gathering plants. Given the existing conditions of poverty enforced by the reservation system, this weakening of traditional subsistence rights was a huge blow to tribal food security and health. Despite this, their guaranteed treaty water rights to the lake provided partial restoration of what had been lost in the flooding of their land, providing a source of irrigation for tribal agriculture and reliable water supply to tribal residences and businesses.

The tribe’s report therefore makes the odd argument that Lake Oahe is both evidence of colonial dispossession and an important resource under threat. This paradoxical defense questions the seeming ease with which environmental advocates ally themselves with Indigenous struggles in the defense of land and water. Advocacy rhetoric classifying environmental resources like the Missouri River as commonly-held resources under threat obscures the way in which these resources are still haunted by complex histories of dispossession. Lake Oahe is an especially important example because it is largely federal public land, so its defense in 2016 foreshadowed what would become a moral imperative of environmentalism in the Trump era: protecting the commons from fossil fuel development.

The issue of public lands under attack has made strange alliances between environmental and Indige-nous groups, highlighting the complexity inherent to public lands themselves. Broadly speaking, America’s public lands were established on land taken from indigenous peoples through broken treaties and often entailed direct expulsion of indigenous peoples. However, case studies including Native hunting rights on Alaskan public lands and joint management by four tribes at Bears Ears National Monument have indicated that land protection can serve the needs of indigenous peoples. Both of these issues have made allies of environmentalists and tribal coalitions, as, like Standing Rock, both areas are being threatened by U.S. energy development. The Trump administration used both areas to est a b l i s h itself as a proponent of oil and gas exploration in public land, slashing Bears Ears by 85% and opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling in a 2017 tax bill.

Though it highlights the shameful undersides of our public lands, this article is not a list of historical traumas, both because the topic is well-trodden by historians and because simply pointing out the presence of damage is not the best way to bring about positive outcomes for disenfranchised groups. In this article, I seek to probe how we might answer the call to defend public lands from extraction while maintaining consciousness of their fraught histories. I wish to ask how American environmentalism might begin overcoming what literary scholar Rob Nixon calls its “spatial amnesia,” its veneration of landscapes in ways that ignore their human histories. If there was ever a time to remember the stories of the lands we defend, it is now.

It is hard to find a better case study in the interconnection of colonial dispossession, public lands, and extractive industry than the Black Hills of South Dakota. Though originally included in the 1851 treaty boundary, they were forcefully taken from the Sioux in 1868 after the discovery of gold by General George Custer. After the longest legal battle in U.S. history, the Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that the government had no right to take the Black Hills from the Lakota. However, the U.S. plays for keeps and deals in cash, so the only remedy they offered was a check for $106 million, representing the value of the Hills at their taking plus interest. Discord within Lakota communities prevented this deal’s acceptance, as many wanted the return of the Hills themselves due to their central role in Lakota cosmology. Some proposed using the money to purchase as much Black Hills land as possible, but consensus was never reached. Though they were extensively mined and settled in the 19th century, most of the area is now public land, in the various forms of Black Hills National Forest, Custer State Park, Wind Cave National Park, Mount Rushmore National Memorial, and Devil’s Tower and Jewel Cave National Monuments. I visited the Hills on my way home from North Dakota to see what I could learn about the place of public lands in the 21st century, focusing on two sites that exemplify the contested nature of alliances to protect them.

2. Rock

Devil’s Tower National Monument, whose Indigenous names include Bear Lodge, Aloft-on-a-Rock, and Brown Buffalo Horn, was the country’s first National Monument, established by the hero of white American conservationism, President Theodore Roosevelt. Even those who do not know it by name will likely recognize its iconic shape from postcards or film, a thick granite pillar towering over the prairie. It is distinctively marked by vertical columns, which several myths from the Lakota, Kiowa, and Cheyenne attribute to the claw marks of a giant bear trying to climb the face to get to a group of children at the top.

Approaching from the east, the first inkling of the Black Hills is Custer National Forest, a ponderosa ridge that rises up and diminishes in the span of five minutes, leaving me wondering if it even happened. Once I cross the Wyoming border, things get a bit more interesting. The highway becomes an adventure through steep hill passes blanketed in thick forest. Soon Devil’s Tower/Bear Lodge rears its head from the horizon. Though the postcard view is always head-on, from the east the Monument first appears sideways, like a looming vampire framed into shadow by the diminishing sun. The sublime power is palpable. I would say it is indescribable if I hadn’t read so many good descriptions. One of my favorites comes from Kiowa novelist N. Scott Momaday, who wrote that the tower was “upthrust against the gray sky as if in the birth of time the core of the earth had broken through its crust and the motion of the world was begun. There are things in nature that engender an awful quiet in the heart of man; Devil’s Tower is one of them.” More plainly, the famous Sioux leader Vine Deloria, Jr. said “you come to the place and it does send a chill up your spine, whether you’re Indian or Anglo or whatever.”

Once I secure a campsite, I hike the Red Beds trail, which takes you through every landscape the area has to offer in just over two miles, from the ponderosa forest to a grassy plain to a cliff where exposed rusty rock shows the land’s guts in stark relief. Throughout the hike, the Tower looms, sometimes over my shoulder, sometimes in the corner of my eye, and, in the last ankle-breaking ascent, right in front of me. It exudes the complacent majesty of geological features, the same mystical ambivalence you find in mountains. Being part of nature, it cannot resist change, but it also does not incorporate change at the furious pace of its ecological surroundings.

At the start of the trail, there is a sign reading “The Tower is held sacred by many American Indians and highly regarded by other peoples. Respect this place by staying on trails.” I overhear an interpretive ranger tell a group of tourists that climbing is forbidden on the Tower. Though I knew this to be untrue, I understood why she might tell a white lie about it to skirt controversy. In fact, climbing is fully allowed; there is an entire page on the Monument’s website detailing how to apply for a permit. However, it also asks climbers to refrain from climbing the Monument in June, when many ceremonies occur.

The voluntary nature of the climbing ban highlights a kink in the legal recognition of American Indian spirituality. In general U.S. law has been an uneasy ally of Native religious rights, but there are few trickier legal terrains than the concept of sacred space. Devil’s Tower/Bear Lodge is a case in point; it was protected from development because it was considered of sufficient scientific interest to be designated a National Monument, not because of its sacredness to Native tribes. Indigenous practitioners have no more privilege to its access or control than any other citizen. Though that principle seems consistent with the foundations of American democracy, it also enabled a coalition of mountain climbers to challenge the June climbing ban, arguing that their connection to the mountain was equally spiritual and that preventing them from climbing violated their religious liberty. Because the First Amendment forbids preferential treatment of one religious group over another, these climbers are still allowed to climb the Monument despite the fact that this climbing is seen as disrespectful by many Native groups.

In the case of Devil’s Tower/Bear Lodge, equality of religious rights erases how one side holds a connection which has historical priority and a basis in traditional culture. This is not to say that the distinction is always easy; all traditions are in a constant state of flux and we do not evaluate the validity of a belief system exclusively based on how long it has been practiced. However, one could reasonably argue that of the two conflicting position in this issue, one relies much more on a post-hoc rationale to receive religious recognition. We should also not make the mistake of thinking that historical priority means non-Natives should be excluded entirely. Some certainly believe that, but I personally think Vine Deloria, Jr. had the last word on the issue, as he did on many things. In a 1997 interview, he said “It’s not that Indians should have exclusive rights there, it’s that that location is sacred enough that it should have time of its own, and once it has time of its own, then the people who know how to do ceremonies should come and minister to it.” The idea of giving a place “time of its own” is complex and hard to get across, especially in the legalistic realm of federal policy. For now, it seems the best anyone can hope for is to give the Monument “time of its own” and respect those who likely know more about what it has meant to humanity in the long span of North American history.

There is no doubt that Devil’s tower is a site of pilgrimage for more than just those who remember ceremonies. The whole time I was in the Black Hills, I felt that I myself was on a pilgrimage, honoring a secular American religion based on the sublime power of wide-open spaces. In a broad sense, it is the same reverence that draws people to climb Devil’s Tower/Bear Lodge, or to climb any mountain for that matter. You might think this religion is only practiced by liberal or environmentally-minded Americans but tell that to the gas-guzzling RVs filling our national parks or the anti-Obama bumper sticker on the motorcycle pannier of the man I camped beside at Devil’s Tower. It stuck out like a sore thumb among his many pannier stickers because it was the only one not from a national park or monument he’d visited. Certainly, land stewardship is currently a liberal practice more than a conservative one; Barack Obama established twenty-six National Monuments in two terms, beating Bill Clinton’s previous record of nineteen. George W. Bush’s number, in contrast, was six. Trump’s will likely be somewhere around negative two. However, public lands themselves exist on a level of American culture far deeper than political divides.

I should clarify that by “American culture,” I mean mostly (but not exclusively) white American culture. As several sources have noted, attendance at our national parks and monuments is overwhelmingly white. This can be attributed to a variety of factors, but probably the biggest is accessibility. The gatekeepers of our public lands are primarily the free time, money, and vehicles needed to access them. The fact of their historical exclusivity can only intensify our understanding of public lands as an American secular religion. The centrality of iconic landscapes to our national identity, combined with the fact that these landscapes exist primarily for the groups often considered “default American,” reveals something critical about the unnaturalness of natural spaces.

As a lover of public lands with a commitment to questioning the power dynamics of environmental governance, I have often wondered if these two worlds are reconcilable. The book that has provided the most hope in this struggle is The Hour of Land by Terry Tempest-Williams, specifically a section addressing the famous quote by Wallace Stegner, that “National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” Tempest-Williams suggests that perhaps the national parks are not our best idea, but they are certainly a developing idea, one with which we must engage in all its complexity. If we ever want to truly recognize the value of the national parks, we will need to focus not just on protecting the land but stewarding the historical and emergent human stories of that land. This call to action is important now more than ever, as unfolding political and environmental crises are calling into question the ways in which we value our environment. If we have truly entered the Anthropocene, the era of human consequences, there are few intellectual endeavors more important than examining the stories we tell ourselves about the lands where we live and play and worship.

3. Forest

I finished listening to the audiobook of The Hour of Land on my drive through Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway, a winding corridor into Black Hills National Forest hemmed in by green-andgray cliffs. I was on my way to explore a place whose overlapping histories are central to the issues I spent the entire summer thinking about. My first night in the Black Hills, I witnessed a quintessential sight of the American public land experience. After setting up my tent at a National Forest campground, I drove to a mountaintop overlook to use the cell service. It was one of those turnarounds you see on steep mountain roads, with an information kiosk and enough space to turn in the absence of a shoulder. I am certain I had left enough passing distance for any car or RV to get around, but not both at once. I learned this when a RV pulled into the turnaround with a car attached to its rear. The car added just enough length that its turning radius could not overcome the adjustment around my vehicle without knocking me over the cliff that lay to my right. Even a smaller RV could have made the turn with a car in tow, but this was a behemoth, the size of a bus. I suppose I was lucky the driver saw me parked there, but by the time he realized it would be impossible to get around the whole rig was already jackknifed across the road, blocking traffic from both sides. As I watched the RV’s repeated attempts to right itself, I found myself wondering one thing: why did they need a car? I thought the whole point of an RV was that it was both car and lodging. I wondered when we decided that the only way to be comfortable around wide-open spaces was bringing along every shred of convenience we could put on wheels. As the cars lined up ten deep in either direction, I began to think that we humans are the only animal that attempts to create so much convenience for ourselves that we sometimes end up creating twice the inconvenience for everyone.

Soon enough, one of the passengers got out, unhooked the car, and everyone managed to get going. Most of them were heading towards Mount Rushmore, but my only sighting of the famous monument would be a glance over the shoulder as I drove home a few days later. Part of my ambivalence rose from a sense of justice, of not honoring what many consider the ultimate affront to sacred land: carving a bunch of white faces into a stolen mountain. Another part came from a desire to avoid its three-story parking garage and long lines, but more than anything, I doubted I’d learn much from seeing it in person. The image is so saturated into American culture that the in-person view doesn’t teach you anything new. However, that first night in the Hills I visited Crazy Horse Memorial, a work-in-progress on private land (the foundation that controls it won’t let the federal government provide financial assistance). When complete, it will depict the famous warrior’s entire torso and his horse’s head. In about sixty years, they’ve finished the face and a hint of arm. It’s impressive in the same way, its sheer size a testament to the power of human technology. Like Mount Rushmore it’s not exactly the most subtle of attractions, especially if you go after dark to see the laser light show.

The next day, I woke up in a rain-soaked tent and drove back to that same overlook to check the weather. I was hoping the Hills would see fit to let me climb their highest peak without being struck down by lightning or rain. My phone told me to wait it out, so I sat for a while parked in a turnaround on the road to Mount Rushmore. I grew increasingly thankful that I wasn’t piloting an RV as I made the drive to Custer State Park, where I would pick up the trailhead for Black Elk Peak, the highest point in South Dakota. The road to the trailhead is full of switchbacks and at one point is carved straight through the cliff, its two lanes narrowing to one precarious tunnel. Even my two-wheel-drive pickup felt unwieldy in the misty aftermath of the morning’s rain. By the time I made it to the top I was driving through clouds, seeing just far enough ahead to be sure I was still on the road. The mist slowly lifted as I parked and set out on Black Elk Peak, a mountain which only recently came to bear that name.

Before it was Black Elk Peak it was called Harney Peak, after a general who commanded a massacre of Sioux warriors, women, and children at the Battle of Blue Water Creek. In 2016, after a long debate, the U.S. Board of Geographic Names re-christened it to Black Elk Peak, after the Lakota holy man who gained international fame for his oral memoir Black Elk Speaks. The protected federal Wilderness area in which the mountain and much of its trail sits was already named after Black Elk. The trail most people take is long but not strenuous, with a good amount of elevation gain but not much treacherous terrain. On my hike, I saw hikers as young as five and as old as seventy-five. We had all made a commitment to getting our views as honestly as we good, through the sweat of our brows. Though I tempered it with an understanding of accessibility, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of derision at the helicopters that flew overhead every half hour or so, part of a chartered flight taking luxury sightseers to Mount Rushmore. I had to wonder if it was right to make the scenery such easy game. It always struck me that one of the special things about places like these is that they were somewhat hard to see.

The hike up Black Elk Peak takes you through thick forests with the occasional open stretch where the sunlight breaks through to the granite muscles of the mountain. These spots sometimes have benches where you can sit and look across the ridge to get a sense of how far you’ve come. The highest point is the Fire Tower, a castle-like structure that grows closer and closer as you ascend. Though most of the ascent is leisurely, the last pitch to the fire tower is a series of climbs up what amount to spiral stone staircases. Near the top, by the turnoff to the last ascent, there is an old sign reading HARNEY PEAK, but HARNEY has been scratched out and replaced by BLACK ELK. The top of Black Elk Peak melds many worlds in one fairly small space. It is constructed and natural, recreational and practical, memorial and timeless. People are spread out in every direction, resting their legs and taking photos. We are a legion of strangers, unified in our separation, our journeys different branches with the same root. Beyond us the landscape stretches out, dark ponderosas blanketing the land until it disappears into the clouds.

The fire tower, with its 30- inch thick stone walls, is almost Medieval in the way it sits atop the granite peak. According to some reliable sources of mine, it’s not unheard of for hormonal South Dakotan teens to sneak away from field trips for all sorts of inadvisable mischief in the nooks and crannies of that ancient structure. Outside the fire tower, the muscles of the mountain are exposed in every direction, with almost no plant growth and seemingly no rules about climbing. The sparse trees and signposts sticking out of the cracks in this stone floor are covered in colorful cloth. Some appear to be prayer bundles, while others just look like hiker bandanas, but I do not know enough to know the difference. There are plaques all over, one of them reading “Harney Peak Lookout” (made of metal, so no one has managed to scratch it out) and another commemorating Valentine McGillicuddy, a white surgeon and South Dakota statesman controversial for his efforts to build relationships between settlers and Natives. A friend of Crazy Horse, he is entombed at the top of Black Elk Peak with a plaque bearing his Lakota nickname: Wasicu Wakan, or Holy White Man.

If the Black Hills are anything, they are a site of contested memorialization, pivoting around the question of who the landscape ought to honor. While it seems important to revisit our place names, I do think there is something telling about how the toponymic struggle is concerned only with great men. At some point it became apparent that the Black Hills only memorialized presidents and generals, so we changed some names and carved some mountains to also honor Native warriors and holy men, too. This is not to criticize those who push for the renaming of land features to reflect their Indigenous history; more to point out that scratching out the names of white men and replacing them with the names of Lakota men, while certainly a revolutionary act given the hegemony of whiteness in America, is on some level an act of recognition that fails to address the enduring social and economic oppression of Indigenous people, the brunt of which is borne by Indigenous women and youth. Without any concrete change in the conditions under which Native people live on reservations like Standing Rock and Pine Ridge, or urban areas like Bismarck and Rapid City, changing the names of public lands is a similar move to replacing the racial slurs of the past with politically correct terms. It is certainly a necessary move towards justice, but I worry we often conflate words with actions in ways that make things seem more settled than they are.

4. Alliance

Though Black Elk Wilderness seems pristine, my drive through the area revealed many of its extractive histories. Aside from the gold mines of the past and ongoing logging and ranching, the area was the site of intensive uranium mining during the 1950s, causing significant irradiation of local communities. Several energy companies attempted to revive this boom in the 1970s and expand it to include coal and slurry pipelines. This effort occurred at a flashpoint in Native-white relations, following quickly on the heels of the Wounded Knee occupation of 1973, in which several of my colleagues at LPLO were involved as American Indian Movement members and defense attorneys.

Because of the strained political climate following this well-publicized standoff and the broader distrust between white and Native South Dakotans, many environmental groups refrained from allying themselves with the local Indigenous communities for fear of alienating white residents. However, a small group of Lakota and white ranchers came together to hold meetings based on their shared stake in a healthy environment for the Black Hills. Though those early meetings were tense, they eventually blossomed into a coalition called the Black Hills Alliance, whose organization was instrumental in bringing about the courtroom defeat of corporate mining plans. A more thorough telling of the story of the Black Hills Alliance can be found in Zoltan Grossman’s book Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands. Of the many activists Grossman cites on both sides of the Alliance, the one that sticks out to me comes from organizer Madonna Thunder Hawk: “They realized how helpless they were in the face of eminent domain. But Indian people had treaty rights– they could stop things!”

I was lucky enough to meet Madonna Thunder Hawk during my time in North Dakota, as she is still a full-time grassroots organizer affiliated with the Lakota People’s Law Project. I recently called her to ask her thoughts on how the success of the Black Hills Alliance relates to the present moment. My first question was what she felt was the hardest thing to reconcile between the groups of the Black Hills Alliance, to which she responded that she didn’t feel there was ever anything to reconcile, because there was never a sufficiently positive relationship between the Lakota and any settler group in the first place. More importantly, she told me that her commitment to organizing stems from a sense not of advancement but of maintenance. Her efforts have aimed to maintain what is left in a post-frontier world, to maintain the experience that constitutes being Lakota.

Madonna talked of the renaming of Black Elk Peak in different terms than I had thought of before, emphasizing how remarkable the change was given the context of South Dakotan politics. For her, the renaming of Black Elk Peak was revolutionary, not because it was a victory but because it helped maintain what was left and helped create a world in which the next generation will continue to learn how to be Lakota without being taught. She seeks to maintain traditional connections between land and community so that the culture remains as natural and familiar as the air Lakota children breathe. As she puts it, Madonna’s vocation is identifying what is worth fighting for and making a stand for it, honoring the spirit of resistance that has kept her people alive into the 21st century. She emphasized that the Lakota spirit of resistance was never conquered, only weakened by various diseases. While in the 19th century it was smallpox and physical violence, in the 20th and 21st it has manifested through the more sinister effects of living in the industrialized United States: bad air, bad water, bad diets. The struggle for protecting land is about more than protecting a pretty view, or even defending the kind of abstract sacredness expressed in European Romantic ideas of nature. It is an effort at maintaining the health and strength of living nations, the same strength that has carried them into the 21st century despite some of the most directly targeted assaults on life and land experienced in human history.

The other critical lesson from my talk with Madonna was that taking a stand doesn’t necessarily mean convincing anyone of anything. She sees the Black Hills Alliance as an entity that sprung up based on literal common ground, between people with a shared stake in the well-being of the land. When I asked her how that common ground extended into the relationship between Indigenous groups and those who see places like the Black Hills as a place of recreation, she expressed a cautious understanding of the nature-loving mindset, rooted in the idea that she felt the view of rolling hills from her Cheyenne River home was worth fighting for. Still, given the fact that a good portion of her time is spent trying to ensure the basics of clean air and water for her community (or scrounging for gas money to even get to the meetings where those decisions happen), she pointed out that it seems like a luxury when others demand something so grand as pristine nature.

There is nothing incompatible between mainstream efforts at environmental protection and Madonna’s mentality of “maintain what you have and don’t expect more.” It may be a bit less utopian than most environmentalists like to think, but it is ultimately an important attitude to adopt in some measure if mainstream environmentalism ever wants to forge effective allies out of the people who experience threats to public lands as a matter of daily life. Without making too big a strawman out of “mainstream environmentalism,” there is a reason why Grossman’s extensive survey of Native-white alliances in defense of public lands found very few alliances with professional environmentalists. Most tribes had more in common with the white farmers and ranchers living near their reservations than with experts from the Sierra Club or Greenpeace. This commonality undoubtedly stems from a greater shared experience of these lands as the basis of daily life rather than an object of scientific study or a vacation playground.

In closing, I return to the original question of this essay, which was “what can we do to more effectively engage with our public lands and modern environmental struggles in ways that more fully acknowledge the histories of these lands?” From my limited perspective and reading of case studies, the most effective movements for land protection are those that foreground mutual respect, common ground, and understanding of local realities. I cannot prescribe a clear toolbox for dealing with these issues, as I have not fully worked them out myself. Given the inherent complexity of these issues I doubt I ever will, neither will anyone, but the time for action in the defense of public lands is yesterday. In that spirit, here are a few takeaways I have gleaned from my limited experience that I hope will encourage other self-identifying environmentalists to reflect on our discourses and practices.

There is no doubt that the present moment will be looked back on by historians as a period in which the citizens of what is now the United States was confronted with complex, multi-layered questions about how to treat the land on which their country was founded. I can only hope it will also be remembered as a time when they started to rekindle an awareness of the stories hidden in that land.

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