A Dakota Access Pipeline Water Protector Is Sentenced to Prison in North Dakota

by

On May 30, Michael “Little Feather” Giron was sentenced to thirty-six months in federal prison, becoming the first person to face serious prison time for his role in the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Giron was one of thousands who gathered in camps on and near the Standing Rock Reservation in 2016 and 2017 to oppose the pipeline.

He will be credited for the fifteen months he has already spent incarcerated, and his legal team hopes he will be released to a halfway house in as little as eleven months. 

There were no TV cameras waiting outside the federal courthouse in Bismarck, North Dakota, when the sentence came down. Gathered, instead, was a small but close-knit group of supporters and lawyers from across the country—part of the unlikely coalition forged around the campfires and in the mass-arrest jail cells of the water protector movement.

In the fifteen months since the last camps were raided and the movement crushed by police, most media outlets have turned their attention elsewhere. But for participants in the uprising at Standing Rock, and for targets of the legal aftermath in particular, the story is far from over.

Little Feather is one of seven Native American water protectors indicted with the harshest charges so far.

Little Feather, forty-five years old and a member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, was one of seven Native Americans indicted for federal felony crimes—the harshest charges so far filed against participants in the monthslong fight to stop the pipeline from crossing the Missouri River north of the Standing Rock Reservation.

Like Little Feather, defendants Red Fawn Fallis and Michael “Rattler” Markus, both Oglala Lakota, took non-cooperating plea deals and await sentencing on June 25 and August 6, respectively. Two other defendants, Dion Ortiz and James “Angry Bird” White, are preparing for trial. In addition to the federal felony cases, North Dakota has prosecuted 835 state criminal cases, of which 352 have been dismissed or acquitted at trial and 235 are ongoing.

All the federal charges against the seven defendants stem from October 27, 2016, a decisive turning point in the battle over the pipeline.

Despite persistent work-slowing direct actions, by late October pipeline construction was bearing down on the Missouri River from the west. Pipeline opponents moved a mile north from the main camps to a front line camp built directly in the pipeline’s path.

What followed on October 27 was the latest flashpoint in a 150-year history of repression and resistance that runs from the Power River War of the mid-1860s through the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.

On “myth vs. fact” webpages, the pipeline company and state police assert that the pipeline is not actually located on tribal land. This is a deceitful oversimplification. The camp, and the pipeline easement it obstructed, was sited on land that the company behind the pipeline project purchased in September 2016. As the water protectors pointed out, however, this land had been reserved for the Lakota under the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie treaties.

In the 1860s, the Lakota, led by the Oglala chief Red Cloud, fought a bitter war to stop white miners and settlers from moving through the rich buffalo hunting grounds of the Powder River country. In 1868, the U.S. government agreed to remove its forts along the Bozeman Trail in what writer Peter Matthiessen calls “the only recognition of unconditional defeat ever signed by the U.S. government.”

Red Cloud signed the 1868 treaty, which closed the trail and established the Great Sioux Reservation, a tract of land that comprised the entire half of present-day South Dakota west of the Missouri. The treaty also defined vast stretches of present-day North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska as land on which “no white person . . . shall be permitted to settle . . . or without the consent of the Indians . . . pass through.” That “unceded Indian territory” includes the land between the Heart and Cannonball Rivers, where the water protectors were camped in the path of the pipeline.

On October 27, hundreds of federal, state, local, and private police advanced on the camp along Highway 1806 to evict the Lakota and their allies—for trespassing. They wore body armor and carried batons, beanbag shotguns, pepper spray, and assault rifles. They were supported by military humvees, snipers, armored personnel carriers, and a surveillance helicopter. Dakota Access construction equipment could be seen to the west, at work on the pipeline route and ready to move on toward the river once police cleared the camp. 

North of the camp, pipeline opponents had constructed barricades from logs, tires, pallets, and disabled vehicles. As police advanced, the barricades were set on fire. Miles away to the west, police traveling on County Road 134 also met a water protector roadblock. That barricade, too, was set ablaze in an attempt to stop police from flanking the frontline camp.

But by night time, the camp had fallen and many people had been injured. Police had arrested more than 140 people and driven the others south along Highway 1806 as far as Backwater Bridge. There, using the narrow bridge as a strategic chokepoint, they established a roadblock. Security forces set up a line of floodlights, razor wire, and surveillance points that stretched for miles along the pipeline route—a militarized buffer zone that, for months afterward, made it nearly impossible for water protectors to reach the construction site.

At the hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Hagler told the court,“many of the individuals [who set the fires] were never identified, but Mr. Giron was one of those identified setting fires that obstructed law enforcement.” He added that “it’s lucky no one was hurt”—a claim that must have sounded strange to those who spent October 27 on the other end of the guns.

This past February, eleven months after he was arrested and imprisoned, Little Feather accepted a non-cooperating plea deal rather than stand trial in North Dakota. He agreed to take responsibility for aiding a “civil disorder,” and in exchange the prosecution agreed to drop the charge of Use of Fire to Commit a Federal Felony, which carries a ten-year minimum sentence.

The Water Protector Legal Collective (WPLC) explained the decision in a statement: “Little Feather and his legal team were facing monumental challenges including the prospect of a trial with a hostile jury pool, limited discovery, and the risk of a long prison sentence.” After a defense-commissioned study filed in October, 2017 by the National Jury Project found that 77 percent of potential jurors in Morton County and 85 percent in Burleigh County had already decided that the Standing Rock defendants were guilty, the defense motioned for a change of venue out of the Bismarck area. The motion was denied.

As part of Little Feather’s plea agreement, the defense and prosecution agreed to jointly recommend a sentence of thirty-six months. But presiding Judge Daniel Hovland had the power to impose up to five years, and, because of Little Feather’s criminal record, federal sentencing guidelines recommended a maximum sentence. At the hearing the defense worked to convince Hovland to diverge from this guideline.

Born Michael Giron, he was raised in Santa Barbara, California, by a drug-addicted mother. When he was ten, his younger brother died due to parental neglect. His mother was sent to prison for eight years, and Little Feather landed in foster care. In his adult life, he struggled with drug addiction and was in and out of jail. Then, in 2016, Little Feather left California and detoxed on the four-day trip to Standing Rock.

“Coming to camp for him felt like being thrown in a bucket of ice water,” said Andrea Carter, one of his attorneys and legal director at the WPLC. Growing up, his family had mostly denied their Indian heritage, but at the camp he gained a powerful sense of his own native identity and was given the name Little Feather. He found camaraderie and friendship and a sense of belonging. He was given work and responsibility, and was even entrusted with the role of akicita. In Lakota culture, akicita are defenders of the people, warriors who live in service of the community, protectors of the camp.

“Finally,” said Carter, “he found this substitution, this spiritual path, which allowed him to make that leap to leave substance abuse.”

Phyllis Young, a Standing Rock elder and former tribal council member, was the first of six witnesses called to testify on Little Feather’s behalf. “He exemplified the highest meaning of akicita—the warrior, the veteran, the men’s role to protect,” she said. “I’m very grateful that he came to join us in our protection of the water.” Young said she believed Little Feather had gone through a “healing process, a cleansing process.” 

Also taking the stand was Little Feather’s wife, Leoyla Cowboy, a Diné woman whose family runs a ranch in New Mexico. The couple met and married in camp at Standing Rock. She described Little Feather as “a strong indigenous man,” adored by her whole family—her mother, aunts, daughters, horses, geese. “He’s everything I dream about, everything I pray for,” she said in court. But native men, she explained to the court, are too often absent from their communities. “He’s missed every day.”

Cowboy then turned to Little Feather, who sat shackled hand and foot, and said, “I can’t wait ‘til you come home!”

Joseph Bullington grew up in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, spent nearly two months living in and reporting on the anti-pipeline camps at Standing Rock, and is currently on the loose in the West.