American Quarterly

From early 2016, when construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline began, through February 2017, when the last protectors were forcibly removed by law enforcement officials, the eyes of Americans (and the world) were riveted on a spectacle of energy politics that played directly into established cultural narratives about extraction and its victims. On one side: Energy Transfer Partners, the pipeline construction and management corporation (and its financial backers in the US and Canadian oil and banking industries), who were eager to connect the shale oil freed by fracking from the Bakken formation in North Dakota to existing distribution infrastructure in Illinois, through which it would enter the energy networks of the continent and beyond. On the other: the Standing Rock Sioux and over three hundred other Native nations concerned about threats to their land, water supplies, and cultural heritage sites (including ceremonial sites and burial grounds) along the thousand-plus milelong route of the pipeline, and allies concerned with the global climate crisis. Harking back to the native resistance to settler land theft during the Black Hills gold rush more than a century before, the Dakota Access protests allowed a new generation to see in vivid detail the ongoing violence against native people and lands that are more often hidden from public view.

But the Mni Wiconi (Water Is Life) and #NoDAPL movements did more than reopen the painful genre of settler extractive depredation: they also stimulated a broader sort of energy education, one that would illuminate the less familiar and more dauntingly complex historical realities of the nation's energy infrastructure. As Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux) details in Our History Is the Future, the protests were rooted in earlier mobilizations against another pipeline, the Keystone XL, and connected to a long tradition of Native resistance to infrastructure and energy projects built in the service of distant populations by corporations and governments indifferent to their impacts on indigenous lands affected by centuries of colonial aggression. The scope and scale of the issues raised could not be limited to a single pipeline but traversed time and space, encompassing people and places widely separated by geography and history. [End Page 543] For outsiders inclined to connect what was happening in the Dakotas to their own daily existence, a new set of technical tools was available to help them. Accompanying the protests were maps of the existing and planned pipelines that make up the nearly half-million miles of large oil and gas pipelines that sit three to six feet below the surface in every state in the union; some of these included a link to the National Pipeline Mapping System database and mobile app (pvnpms.phmsa.dot.gov/PublicViewer/), which allows the public to see a county-by-county map of the oil, gas, and liquid propane pipelines moving fossil fuels through their neighborhoods. Cartographic data sets help visualize the otherwise concealed energy infrastructure that undergirds the alliances and complicities of social life in the contemporary United States, its global networks, and the counterpublics ranged against it.¹ Ubiquitous but not evenly spread across the landscape, complex in both their technical details and the affective responses they engender, these routes of literal and figurative power demand careful investigation and debate from scholars in American studies.