‘People Are Still Putting Their Bodies on the Line to Stop this Pipeline’

Meanwhile, Markus remains in prison — an increasingly dangerous place to be as the pandemic rages on. Covid-19 outbreaks have already swept through many prisons and detention centers and a recent report revealed that U.S. Marshalls are shipping Covid-positive inmates all over the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) system. As of this writing, Sandstone prison had three confirmed cases.

According to Olive Bias, a member of the NoDAPL Political Prisoner Support Committee, Markus has filed a request for release to home confinement, as provided for in the CARES Act in response to Covid-19, but has so far been denied release. A group called Loved Ones of Indigenous Federal Prisoners, which grew out of an effort by the Bismarck-Mandan Unitarian Universalist Church to support incarcerated water protectors, has petitioned for the immediate release of all federal prisoners with less than one year remaining in their sentences regardless of their offense, among other demands.

Bias, who uses they pronouns, says the BOP’s response to Covid-19 has ​“pretty much been to be punitive.” When the pandemic hit, Bias says, the BOP started putting prisons on lockdown. They read me Markus’s account of what that means on the inside: ​“Prisoners cannot leave their bunks. Guards designate shower time and potentially even bathroom breaks. No ceremony, no rec time … no TV room, no exercise.” Bias also read me a later report from Markus: ​“While being on lockdown we have no social distancing…. There are 62 men sharing three toilets, one urinal, three showers and five sinks…. We are a tinder box waiting for a spark and the guards are the spark.”

Bias works on Markus’s case as a paralegal but, like him, has little faith in the courts — in either their ability to keep prisoners safe from Covid-19 or to stop the pipeline.

“He’s going to stay in lock up for a pipeline we’ve been saying for over four years is illegal,” Bias says. ​“It’s a prime example of how deadly bureaucracy can be.”

When they first heard that the court had ruled the pipeline’s construction unlawful, Bias says, ​“I was happy, but it was like ​‘What else is new?’ This is some more paper-pushing stuff.”

To Bias, ​“paper-pushing” was never going to be enough to stop the pipeline. ​“That’s why we went out and put our bodies on the line,” Bias says. ​“We didn’t need the courts to tell us that what we were doing was right.”

Bias grew up in Chemical Valley, West Virginia, where they learned that there is no guarantee of clean rivers or safe drinking water — a truth to which many of us in the West are dangerously naive. In 2014, as Evan Osnos recounts in his New Yorker article ​“Chemical Valley,” a storage tank spilled industrial coal mining chemicals into the Elk River upstream from the largest water-treatment plant in the state, poisoning the drinking water of some 300,000 people. That one plant served 16% of West Virginia’s population, Osnos writes, in part ​“because coal mining has reduced the availability and quality of other water sources, prompting West Virginians to board up their wells and tap into the public system.”

These lessons brought Bias, in 2016, to North Dakota to join the Lakota-led water protectors fighting DAPL.

“It’s what I do with my life because I had to grow up with family members who were sick because of extractive industry,” Bias says.

Bias lived in the anti-pipeline camps for five months and got seven state misdemeanor charges of their own. Bias has been dealing with the general legal aftermath of Standing Rock ever since, fighting their own charges and supporting the federal felony defendants.

As people celebrate the court ruling against the pipeline, Bias wants to remind them that the physical part of the struggle is not over.

“We’re still fighting this pipeline, because we still have people incarcerated for the work we did in camp,” Bias says. ​“People have got to recognize that people are still putting their bodies on the line in prison to stop this pipeline.”

All the federal felony charges stem from Oct. 27, 2016.

In late October, as pipeline construction approached the Missouri River from the west, many pipeline opponents moved a mile north from the main Oceti Sakowin and Sacred Stone camps and set up a frontline camp, where they erected teepees and tents directly in the pipeline’s path.

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

In the 1860s, Markus’s ancestor, the Oglala chief Red Cloud, led the Lakota in a war to stop white miners and settlers from moving through their land as reserved by the 1851 treaty. In 1868 the U.S. government capitulated and agreed to remove the forts along the Bozeman Trail. Only then did Red Cloud ride into Fort Laramie and sign the 1868 treaty, which closed the trail to white settlers and established the Great Sioux Reservation, a vast tract of land that comprised the entire western half of present-day South Dakota. The treaty also defined a massive ​“unceded Indian Territory,” which ​“no white person … shall be permitted to settle upon” or ​“without the con­sent of the Indians … to pass through….” The unceded territory contained large swaths of present-day Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota — including the land south of the Heart River and north of the Cannonball River where, in October 2016, the water protectors were camped in the path of the DAPL.