Leslie Peterson (CC BY-NC 2.0)
A Standing Rock protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, November 2016.
If you remember the Standing Rock protest encampment against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which lasted from 2016 into 2017 and was met with a harsh winter of political suppression, you might also remember that the movement was visibly and powerfully led by Indigenous water protectors from the Sioux tribe.
These protests—which remained largely non-violent in the face of hostile local law enforcement and corporate-hired “private security”—were led by the Standing Rock Sioux, whose lands and treaty rights were endangered by the pipeline. The federal government approved the pipeline route without adequately consulting tribal members, in violation of the tribe’s treaty rights.
The protests drew thousands of Native Americans, inspired Indigenous youth and other supporters (including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) and set off a revival of Indigenous empowerment in the United States that has carried through the COVID-19 pandemic—when many reservations closed access to outsiders as a protective measure—and on to today. We’re now in the midst of increased visibility for Indigenous art, films, culture, television shows, reclamation, as well as a push for emerging political leadership and co-management of lands and waters within the Native American community. This included, under the Biden Administration, the first Indigenous Secretary of Interior, Deb Haaland, and the first Alaska Native elected to Congress, Mary Peltola.
But in spite of this groundswell of Indigenous activism, a North Dakota jury decided on March 19 that the environmental and climate action group Greenpeace should pay more than $660 million for damages and defamation to Energy Transfer LP, a Texas-based pipeline company that completed the Dakota Access Pipeline pipeline in 2017. Energy Transfer, whose CEO was a major supporter of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, claims that Greenpeace agitated against the completion of the crude oil pipeline by paying and training protestors, as well as providing them supplies to form a blockade.
It’s hard to believe that, in the midst of the global climate emergency and decades-long disinformation campaign surrounding it, anyone can actually defame the fossil fuel industry. It would be like Vladimir Putin suing Alexei Navalny’s family for defaming him by saying Navalny was murdered in prison.
Greenpeace, of course, does not have hundreds of millions in spare cash to pay out. But the aim of this successful legal action, known as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) suit, has less to do with enriching the nation’s largest pipeline company, which generated more than $82 billion in revenue last year, than with suppressing voices of dissent.
“They want our silence, not our money,” said Sushma Raman, interim director of Greenpeace, whose lawyers plan to appeal the decision. Unfortunately, they’ll be appealing to the North Dakota Supreme Court, which previously rejected Greenpeace’s appeal for a change of venue to Fargo and away from Morton County that is close to the site of the protests with almost half the prospective jury members having said they’d been directly impacted by them. Oil drilling and gas extraction is North Dakota’s largest industry, and Donald Trump won nearly 67 percent of the state’s vote in 2024 (and 77% in Morton County), after campaigning on “Energy Dominance” and insisting that climate change was “a hoax.”
While Greenpeace is sometimes perceived as a radical organization in the United States, it has a global reputation as a valued resource by governments and companies. The group often provides scientific advisers to government delegations at U.N. climate summits, ocean conferences, and similar events. The perception of Greenpeace as radical, even as it promotes common sense solutions like a rapid transition to clean energy, may reflect its history of coordinating banner drops and other dramatic nonviolent actions as early as its Save the Whales campaigns of the 1970s, when its advocates would venture out in Zodiac rafts to place themselves between the harpoon guns of Russian whalers and the whales being hunted.
The organization also has a commitment to equity and fairness, which is why, back in 2016, Greenpeace acknowledged the Indigenous leadership at Standing Rock, whose claims to the land and stewardship of its waters and other resources the oil industry would rather ignore.
As for Greenpeace itself, Raman said, “This is the end of a chapter, but not the end of our fight.” And of course, that fight, especially in a time when the President is suing and threatening to imprison journalists and anyone else who dares to criticize him, is really a fight for our First Amendment freedoms that assures us that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press: or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” There are now certainly many grievances in need of redress.