State and county police quickly arrived, blocked the highway, and began trying to extract the men. Dale American Horse Jr., 26, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, who went by the excellent nickname of Happy, was perched seven feet off the ground, his arms chained to a hydraulic rod that towered high above him. He was a big handsome guy, clean-shaven, with a thick red bandanna tied just above his eyes, covering his black braid. He said little as the firemen attempted to remove him or as a crowd of about 50 supporters sang and drummed and taunted the baby-faced cops.
“Did you ever wear a uniform to defend that Constitution?” jeered an older Indian man, a long gray braid beneath a headband. He sucked a cigarette and blew smoke into the wind, and when the police prevented supporters from smudging American Horse with burning sage, his voice rose. “That’s a religious right we paid for with blood, with the red stripe on the flag! We all wore uniforms! We won wars for you!”
Happy American Horse was extracted and arrested after being locked to the excavator for six hours. Red Warrior spokesperson Clay Hall called the action a success, halting construction for a day and costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in delays. “In the Lakota way, we call that counting coup,” he told me. “We took them with an action when they weren’t expecting it.” It’s too soon to say how it will affect the eventual outcome, the relationship between Red Warrior Camp and the Standing Rock tribal government, or what penalty American Horse will pay. Hall said that his group wasn’t merely interested in rerouting the project; they wanted to kill the Black Snake altogether.
But in the short term, the Red Warriors had staged a stunning bit of guerilla theater. Thirteen thousand people watched the action live on Facebook. The picture of Happy American Horse bear-hugging that steel boom went viral. Locked to the pole with a free country behind him, arms bound, eyes cast down serenely, a brown man being handled by white guards: the image that was beamed from America to the world looked all too much like a condemned warrior being led to the gallows. Or to the cross.
Outside correspondent Mark Sundeen is the author of The Man Who Quit Money. His next book, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today’s America, will be published by Riverhead Books in January 2017.
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Stories about the indigenous leaders protecting land and water, building fair economies, and standing up for racial justice in North America and beyond.
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