Ten years ago, something unprecedented happened on the plains of North Dakota.

More than 300 federally recognized tribes sent delegations to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. First Nations from Canada. Indigenous peoples from New Zealand and the Ecuadoran Amazon. By some accounts, it was the largest single gathering of Native Americans in over a century. They came to stand between a pipeline and a river. “It felt like every Indigenous person was there,” one participant told ICT.

Mni Wiconi. Water is Life. You know the slogan. You shared it. Maybe you still have the bumper sticker.

That’s the verse they teach.

Here are the verses they don’t sing.

The Dakota Access Pipeline has been operational since June 2017. It currently moves 750,000 barrels of crude oil per day — up from 500,000 at launch. Energy Transfer Partners has approval to push it to 1.1 million. In 2025, Energy Transfer and Enbridge told shareholders they’re working on a plan to run 250,000 barrels per day of Alberta tar sands crude through the same pipe, targeting operations by 2028.

The Army Corps of Engineers took nine years to complete the environmental impact statement on the Lake Oahe crossing. They released it in December 2025. It concluded the chance of a leak was “remote.” The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe formally rejected it in January 2026. The pipeline did not pause for the rejection. It has not paused for anything.

While the camps were still standing, Energy Transfer Partners hired TigerSwan — a private military contractor forged in the global war on terror — to manage the response. Internal TigerSwan communications described the water protectors as “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component” and compared them to jihadist fighters. They conducted aerial surveillance with infrared cameras. They built intelligence dossiers on individuals. They surveilled a church in Chicago, a 17-year-old girl in Iowa, and an AmeriCorps volunteer in Ohio. They infiltrated the camps using false identities.

On November 20, 2016, police turned water cannons on unarmed water protectors in 23-degree weather. The standoff lasted five hours. Rubber bullets, tear gas, flash-bang grenades, and Long Range Acoustic Devices. A 13-year-old girl was shot in the face with a rubber bullet. An elder went into cardiac arrest at the frontlines and was resuscitated by camp medics. Approximately 300 people were treated for injuries. Authorities called it a riot.

More than 800 water protectors were arrested. Over 500 were still facing charges a year later. Seven faced federal felonies carrying mandatory minimum sentences of 15 years. Red Fawn Fallis received four years and nine months in federal prison. Many of the arrested lived in poverty. Their bonds were set at $1,500 each.

That was the cost of standing between a pipeline and a river.

And here is where the decade lands: the pipeline runs. The capacity doubled. The tar sands are coming. The environmental review is complete and rejected and irrelevant because the oil never stopped flowing while the paperwork was being done. The gathering that felt like every Indigenous person in the world is now an exhibit at the Smithsonian and a handful of signs carried at protests across the nation and a tribe still fighting quietly in courtrooms that don’t make the news.

I am not saying Standing Rock didn’t matter. Three hundred tribes in one place is not nothing. The bonds formed in those camps are real. The political education of a generation of Indigenous activists is real. The water protectors who found their purpose on that river and carried it home to their own nations — that is real and continuing and important.

But the pipeline pumps 750,000 barrels a day. Every day. It has pumped every day since June 2017. It pumped on the day the Smithsonian exhibit opened. It will pump on the anniversary. It pumps while you read this.

The system’s answer to 300 tribes and the largest Indigenous gathering in a century was: noted. Now here’s a mercenary firm, a water cannon, 800 arrests, and a capacity upgrade.

Standing Rock proved that Indigenous nations could unify at a scale the modern world had never seen. It also proved that unity, at that scale, against an operational pipeline backed by a private military contractor and a compliant federal permitting process, produces a Smithsonian exhibit and a bumper sticker and 750,000 barrels a day.

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe is still in court. They filed a brief in November 2025 arguing that operating the pipeline without a valid easement constitutes ongoing harm. The case continues. The oil continues faster.

“We still have a lot of unknowns,” a tribal source told ICT this year.

The pipeline has none.

Sources: ICT News, ICT News, The Intercept, ACLU, National Lawyers Guild, Global Energy Monitor, KFYR-TV, Defending Rights & Dissent, Ricochet Media.

// NEON BLOOD