In 2014 Republican South Dakota then-Representative Kristi Noem enjoyed a $2500 face lift from ETP, the Texas company that gave nearly $321,000 to Republicans that cycle hoping to buy permits for an ecocidal 1,100-mile pipeline intended to move 450,000 barrels of North Dakota crude daily to Illinois. After the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed for an injunction against the US Army Corps of Engineers to stop the disastrous project in 2016, American Indian activists launched an international wave of resistance to the Texas grab on water crossings and trust lands in northern plains states.
After National Guard troops and other mercenaries brutalized many of the thousands of demonstrators camped on federal land near Cannon Ball, North Dakota over 800 people were arrested or charged between early August, 2016 and late February, 2017. Trump apparatchiks even referred to the Indigenous Americans and their compatriots as jihadists or insurgents. In August, 2017 attorneys for Greenpeace and other water protectors called on a judge to dismiss as an attack on free speech the predictable frivolous lawsuit filed by ETP in the aftermath of the civil protest.
In 2020 in a major victory for the Native American tribes and environmental groups fighting against the project a federal judge ordered the Corps to conduct a full environmental review. Then in 2024 the Biden administration and Congress affirmed tribal sovereignty and told the Corps that their Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for the Dakota Excess pipeline underestimated its climate impacts.
Energy Transfer, the Big Oil corporation behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, is seeking $300 million in damages from Greenpeace USA and Greenpeace International, accusing these organizations of playing a central role in organizing the Indigenous-led resistance to the pipeline back in 2016. The lawsuit is one of the largest Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP) cases ever filed, and one of the biggest cases to go to court in North Dakota. Trial begins on February 24, 2025. These types of cases masquerade as ordinary civil lawsuits, but their true purpose is to retaliate against those who speak out against harms. Such meritless lawsuits are meant to silence or bankrupt opponents by dragging defendants through a long, lengthy, expensive legal process. [Greenpeace organizations go to trial on high-stakes SLAPP lawsuit that could redefine protest rights]Learn more at the North Dakota Monitor.
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"We’re going to appeal. And we’re prepared to fight this all the way to victory. We believe in what we did at Standing Rock, and that ultimately we will prevail against this meritless lawsuit. More than seven years later, we remain deeply proud of what we did to support that Indigenous-led resistance. We own everything we did, because what we did was simply living our values." press release
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