Last Stand for the Mississippi: A Report from the Mississippi Stand Day of Action

Submitted to It’s Going Down

The Mississippi Stand encampment is located on the side of a road across from the Mississippi river, between the towns of Montrose and Keokuk in Iowa. The drilling company, Precision Pipeline, is drilling underneath the Mississippi river (using a process similar to fracking) to complete a segment for the Dakota Access Pipeline. The hole is already drilled from the Illinois side, and they plan to be finished with this end by October 31.

The strategic relevance of this encampment is clear: first, it is one of the last remaining sections of the pipeline to be built, and a site where the construction company has to spend an extended time in one place; second, it is an expansion of the resistance that began at Standing Rock and has succeeded in both physically halting construction and generating widespread public support for the NoDAPL movement. There is a surprising amount of local support for the NoDAPL movement. The pipeline company pissed a lot of people off by using eminent domain to seize land.

The water protectors up there want help. But the strategic terrain is shifting on them: what had worked to stop construction during the last month seems like it will no longer be effective, and they want more creative and daring people to help them shut it down.

The encampment began at the end of August when one activist began a sit-in, and was repeatedly arrested for interfering with workers. During the past month, more people have joined, and have created a full time encampment which has daily attempted to, and many times succeeded in, halting construction for a few hours at a time. There are about 15 people there full time and weekend demonstrations have attracted from 150 to 300. The camp has a small pallet-framed kitchen and about a dozen tents – not bad for a ditch on the side of the road! The construction site is located about a quarter mile away up a hill, on the property of a woman who is generally supportive of the protesters (while she doesn’t officially permit them to be on her property, she has repeatedly expressed her unwillingness to press charges for their being there). Directly next to the camp is the access road to the construction site, with a 24 hour security guard stationed there. Protesters access the camp through trails in the woods, where there are also a few tents set up (and room for many more!).

The group of occupiers is a mix of young and old, with a strong presence of Jill Stein buttons. Some of the younger folks were die-hard Sandernistas turned Steinians, but are basically just about shutting shit down and not so attached to the highly choreographed NVDA actions that one might expect. They’ve been really into running and jumping all over the machines.

Mississippi Stand put out a call for an action on Saturday, October 1st in attempt to stop construction for the day. This was to be a planned action of nonviolent civil disobedience, which included a water prayer, an NVDA training, and a legal Q&A. About 150 people showed up, 40 of whom volunteered as arrestables.

From their experience over the last month, they had every reason to believe that this style of action would work to stop construction. According to OSHA (Occupational Safety and Hazard Association) regulations, no one can be on the construction site without a hardhat, so merely walking on the site had been enough to immediately stop construction until the local cops arrived – which had been taking up to 2 hours. Combine that with the fact that people were only getting misdemeanor charges and Lee County, Iowa doesn’t charge bail for misdemeanors (!?) and was releasing people within a few hours, the situation seemed pretty good for the water protectors. Some particularly dedicated folks were hopping back on the equipment as soon as they were released, going in and out of county like a revolving door.

Unfortunately, on Saturday, that situation changed. Perhaps the presence of a dozen sheriff’s vehicles inside the construction site to immediately arrest civil disobeyers provided a legal basis to keep the machines going. Perhaps Precision Pipeline just decided it was more cost-effective to eat the potential OSHA fines. For whatever reason, they weren’t playing the same game that those coordinating the action had planned for.

After the “arrestables” entered the site and were arrested without the equipment stopping, some people got a little more rowdy, pulling up the fence and creating an opening for more people to go through, or perhaps just hoping that this unexpected act would cause them to stop the machines. This didn’t work either: hired private security goons played tug-of-war with the fence, and the drilling went on. When the fence was successfully taken down, no one seemed interested in running into the swarm of hired goons and cops. The “arrestables” had already been taken away, so the rest of us opened a window no one wanted to jump through.

On the bright side, despite the encouragement of orderly civil disobedience that the day began with, there was no hint of peace-policing or property defense from those opposed to the pipeline. There was a genuine sense of support for the more aggressive moments on the fence. Also, while only a small minority of people were masked up, there was general support for this too. It didn’t hurt that the legal support guy who came down from Standing Rock noted that in North Dakota the forces of order are using facial recognition technology. In short, some of the standard lines of tension that one might expect in such a camp or at such an action felt blurred. People are supportive of an escalation of resistance, but also wanted to maintain Saturdays for this civil-disobedience kind of action as a way of remaining accessible.

What is building there on the Mississippi is an important part of the struggle, and the folks that have thrown their lives into it deserve a lot of credit for what they’ve done. But in the coming weeks, Mississippi Stand will have to navigate the difficult terrain between the concrete desire to shut it down, and the fact that the actions required to do so might not fit into the “legitimate” forms of protest that civil disobedience typifies.

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