Erin Schrode, a Jewish environmental activist, was standing on the bank of North Dakota’s Cannonball River last month, interviewing one of the thousands of people who had converged there to protest the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
“I felt a devastating blow to my lower back,” she recalled. “I whipped around and there were police, three militarized police on a boat, just offshore, and they had fired one rubber bullet at a completely nonviolent crowd. There was no provocation of any kind.”
Schrode, 25, who earlier this year ran in the California primary for a Bay Area congressional district, was among dozens of mostly liberal, mostly young Jews to come. She spoke with the Journal earlier this month by phone from Berlin, where she was traveling with the Anti-Defamation League, hours before news broke that the pipeline would be rerouted.
[MORE: A rabbi at Standing Rock]
On Dec. 4, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied a permit for what had been the working route of the pipeline, which the Standing Rock Sioux tribe claimed had already destroyed sacred sites and would threaten its water supply. The Army Corps’ action seemed to put an end to a standoff between the tribe and Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the pipeline, at least for the remaining six weeks of the Obama administration.
After the announcement, the tribe called to disband the thousands of protesters camped around the pipeline’s route, a makeshift town set up by Native American tribesmen from across the country, who worked alongside millennials from big cities, many drawn to the site by videos broadcast over social media. Yet the camps have already left a lasting impression on some occupants.
Schrode had been documenting the protest on video for NowThis and Glamour Magazine in November. She was filming the interview when she was shot. The next day, she found the video. “It sent me into shivers,” she said.
“Let me tell you what’s happening there: It’s a militarized police force using excessive force against unarmed, peaceful, prayerful people. It’s reprehensible and it needs to stop.”
So-called “water protectors” at the site report scenes of community and prayer where violent clashes with police were the anomaly. But since September, two Jewish activists got national attention as targets of police violence: Schrode, because of the lucidity of her footage (her interviewee was in the middle of a sentence when the rubber bullet was fired), and Sophia Wilansky, 21, of the Bronx, because of the severity of an injury she sustained.
Wilansky, during Thanksgiving week, had her forearm lacerated when police threw a concussion grenade at her, according to her father. Police, however, say the injury resulted from protestors igniting propane tanks.
For Wilansky, as for Schrode, her presence there fits her pattern of activism. Wilansky was arrested in June while protesting a natural gas pipeline in Boston, her fellow activists have said. She had planned to spend the winter in Cannon Ball, N.D.
“She just wants to have a future where people have clean water and clean air and clean soil,” her father, Wayne Wilansky, told Minneapolis TV station KMSP.
Other activists were treated for hypothermia after police turned water hoses on them as temperatures dropped into the 20s. Yet, confrontations with police were the exception, according to reports from other Jewish millennials who made the trip to Cannon Ball.
“There is a really big and powerful message that one will get as soon as they walk into camp: This is a peaceful space,” said Itai Gal, 31. “We do our activism, we do our work by peaceful prayer. We’re not protesters, we’re protectors.”
Gal is an educator at Teva, a program that educates fifth- and sixth-graders about sustainability at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, Conn.
Along with five other Jewish professionals from the Connecticut retreat center, Gal made the 26-hour drive to the site of the protest in September, along with two friends from Boston. They stayed more than a month before leaving on “the day that many call Thanksgiving,” Gal said.
“We’ve all been spending a lot of time at Isabella Freedman educating kids about the environment and Jewish connections to the environment,” he said. “And it was just like, ‘All right, put your money where your mouth is.’ ”
Arriving at the encampments, the group encountered a mix of prayer and protest that was somehow familiar.
“Even though [Native American prayer] is a sort of spirituality that’s very foreign to me, the aspect of spirituality being combined with tangible political action was really familiar,” said Isabel Snodgrass, 20, a medic from Teva who made the trip.
For the most part, conditions at the camp were calm, if austere, Gal said. Firewood was in short supply, but there was always enough to keep a sacred fire burning. No weapons, drugs or alcohol were allowed. Residents of the camp were even asked to refrain from cursing.
From the moment they arrived, the group found ways to keep busy.
Gal worked in the kitchen and helped to prepare the camp for winter. The one time he saw activists face off with police, officers aimed a water hose down a hill to prevent the crowd from occupying it. But tribal leaders had asked the activists not to engage with police, and despite a few rowdy protesters, the confrontation disbanded largely without incident.
Michael Tintner also had a post as an environmental educator when he began seeing videos of other clashes posted on social media from North Dakota. He was working as a survival specialist at Eden Village, a Jewish summer camp an hour’s drive north of New York City, when he began seeing videos of energy company officials siccing dogs on Standing Rock protestors.
The videos got him reading about the protest and its origins, he told the Journal. The more he read, the more he felt compelled to be there.
“I started piecing together how Judaism and indigenous culture, if you will, have a lot in common,” he said. “And respect for the land and earth is both a Jewish value and, I guess, an indigenous value.”
Tintner, 24, soon logged onto Craigslist and found someone else who was heading to North Dakota. About a week later, in mid-September, he was in the car on a headlong dash toward North Dakota, stopping only to sleep.
As he and his travel companion neared the protest site, he said, “all of a sudden, I see tents on the side of the road.” They pulled over and got out of the car. With only the barest introductions, they found themselves swept up in a prayer circle.
“It was very much a peaceful song. We danced in a circle holding hands, which very much looked like the horah,” he said, referring to the Jewish dance.
Tintner stayed for about 2 1/2 weeks, working odd jobs such as building compost bins and teaching in the middle school that had been set up to accommodate indigenous families.
Tintner spoke with the Journal on the phone about a week before news broke that the 1,172-mile pipeline would be rerouted — an announcement that sent the camps into celebration. The victory was tinged with the knowledge that President-elect Donald Trump could reverse the decision. But for the moment, Reuters reported the energy company would likely look north, closer to the state capital of Bismarck, for an alternative pipeline route.
In any case, the incident has left indelible marks. Schrode said she is still carrying her experience with her: “Honestly, I see police armed and I shake,” she said.
In the article she wrote for Glamour on Nov. 3, she featured Floris White Bull, a Standing Rock Sioux who said Morton County police had put her in a dog kennel and marked her with a number — #151 — after pulling her from a prayer circle on her ancestral land.
Her own story can’t compare with “the compounded historic trauma” experienced by the Standing Rock Sioux, Schrode said. But it still set her to thinking:
“I’ve never feared the police,” she said. “I recognize that it’s white privilege, but I’ve never been on the receiving end” of police violence. “It made me question everything I’d come to expect about the police, who are supposed to protect and serve.”
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