A Murky Legal Mess at Standing Rock

In early September, Allisha LaBarge, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, travelled from Hibbing, Minnesota, to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, in North Dakota, where she began living in a tepee and taking part in protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which is meant to transport oil eleven hundred and seventy miles to Illinois. LaBarge, who is thirty-four, joined the protest camps, she said, because she believed that the pipeline, which some Native Americans call “the black snake,” would pollute the Missouri River, violate treaty rights, and harm lands and burial grounds sacred to the Sioux.

In October, LaBarge was arrested during a protest, becoming one of the nearly six hundred people who were taken into custody and charged during the months of prayer ceremonies, marches, and clashes with law enforcement that took place before the Department of the Army announced, in December, that it would not grant an easement that the pipeline needed to cross beneath Lake Oahe, about half a mile from the reservation. The announcement halted the project, at least until the next President

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