Since late August, Indigenous people and their allies descended on camps along Cannonball River at the northern boundary of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota, to decry the construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. The pipeline, if built, would stretch one thousand one hundred and seventy-two miles (1,172) miles and carry half a million barrels of crude oil per day from the Bakken oilfields — right through lands held sacred by Native groups.
While the movement at Standing Rock has reinvigorated the larger climate change movement, it’s also indicative of a emerging Indigenous movement of resistance and restoration of their lands, waters and other natural resources that’s sweeping across North America. Show host and Earth Island Journal editor, Maureen Nandini Mitra, talks about what this growing movement means with award-winning filmmaker, journalist and photographer, Christopher (Toby) McLeod, director of Sacred Land Film Project, who has been working with Indigenous communities for more than 35 years.