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The Youth Group That

Launched a Movement
at Standing Rock
In the fight over the Dakota Access Pipeline, Native American
activists achieved one of the most galvanizing environmental
victories in years and it all began with a group of teenagers.
By SAUL ELBEIN JAN. 31, 2017

Jasilyn Charger was 19 when she learned her best friend had killed herself. Charger
was Lakota Sioux, and she had left the Cheyenne River Reservation in South
Dakota for Portland, Ore., just a few months earlier. But in the summer of 2015,
she flew home for her friends funeral. Then, two days later, while she was still in
Eagle Butte the largest town on the Cheyenne River Reservation with a
population of 1,300 another friend killed herself. Charger was shocked. It hurt
all of us because these were people who we thought we knew but really we had no
idea what they were going through, she said. It really woke us up.

In the weeks that followed, more teenagers on the reservation killed

themselves with belts, knives and handfuls of Benadryl. Native American teenagers
and young adults are 1.5 times as likely to kill themselves as the national average,
with suicides often clustering in epidemics that hit and fade. Suicide is so common
on the reservation that Lakota youth dont bother to say committed suicide or
attempted suicide. They just say attempted or completed. By the end of that
summer, Jasilyn told me, 30 Cheyenne River kids attempted and eight completed.

We said, They committed suicide for a reason, Charger told me. In Eagle
Butte, reasons werent hard to find. Their elders liked to talk about them as the
future, but no one seemed to pay much attention to how their lives were hard,
bordering on hopeless. Cheyenne River kids had families struggling with poverty
and parents and relatives with serious drug-abuse problems. Often there was
violence at home, to the point that many youths had nowhere safe to go at night.
And amid all this, there was a hard-edged social pressure to drink or use drugs.

Charger had seen all of this. Her father died before she was born; her mother,
she said, paid the bills and drank. She and her twin sister, Jasilea, were
incredibly close even if, by 13, they were also perfect foils: Jasilea, willowy and
bookish, a good student; Jasilyn, chubby and wild, cutting school and running
away on the weekends to do odd jobs mowing lawns, babysitting, breaking
horses, selling weed that helped put food on the table. But her mother called her
in as a runaway one too many times, and the South Dakota Division of Child
Protection Services took both girls, sending them to group homes on opposite sides
of the state.

It felt like something had been sawed off, Charger said about her separation from
Jasilea. She got so depressed she was moved to a psychiatric unit, where she often
got into fights. She aged out of the system at 17, but when she returned to the ranch
developments and trailer parks of Eagle Butte, she struggled with depression. She
and Jasilea had gone from knowing everything about each other to being
strangers. She fell into a monthslong cocaine binge, crashing in abandoned cars
with other homeless kids. Her weight had dropped to 80 pounds by the time that
her cousin, Joseph White Eyes, intervened. He would say, Youre killing yourself,
and we need you, Charger recalled. Dont get high, lets go to a sweat. He got
me off drugs and into our culture. She eventually found a job in Rapid City on the
production team of the local Fox News affiliate but quit, she said, after her boss
made one too many cowboys and Indians jokes in response to Native Americans
being shot by the police. In early 2015 she moved to Portland, as far away as she
could get. She hadnt intended to return.
 But now she was home, amid a new plague of suicides, and she wanted to do
whatever she could to help other teenagers on the reservation. Together with White
Eyes and their friend, Trenton Casillas-Bakeberg, she formed a youth group. They
raised money for basketball tournaments and for a youth trip to the Red Nation
Film Festival in California, where the kids were able to see the ocean for the first
time in their landlocked lives. They went to the tribal council, demanding and
getting funds for a safe house for young people. Most of all they counseled young
people, urging them to look out for one another and get involved. Yeah, it looks all
pretty on Facebook, Charger remembered saying, but really, whats going on in
real life? You can be busy getting on Snapchat while someones getting bullied.

As the suicide wave crested and broke, the youth group, now called the One
Mind Youth Movement, turned to something more political. They spent that fall as
part of the local campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline, whose route would cut
under the Cheyenne River just upstream from the reservation that bears its name.
And after the Obama State Department denied the Keystone XL permission to
cross the U.S.-Canadian border in November 2015, they moved their focus to the
neighboring Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, where the company Energy
Transfer Partners was trying to build the Dakota Access Pipeline. That pipeline
would move half a million barrels of oil a day beneath the Missouri River, the main
source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux, which is one of the cousin
bands to Cheyenne River, as well as for other downstream Sioux reservations. The
youths came to believe that the Dakota pipeline was not only a threat to their
drinking water but also a harbinger of the larger environmental crisis their
generation was set to inherit.

Last April, Charger, White Eyes and a few One Mind teenagers and mentors
helped establish a tiny prayer camp just off the Dakota Access route, on the north
end of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Over the next six months that camp
grew into an improbable movement that united conservative farmers with the old
radicals of the American Indian Movement; urban environmentalists with the
traditional chiefs of hundreds of tribes. As Donald Trump pushes forward with the
Keystone XL and Dakota Access, he will face a movement emboldened by a victory
on Dec. 4, 2016, when the Department of the Army denied an easement for the
Dakota Access Pipeline and directed the Army Corps to consider an alternate route.
It was a rare triumph for both the environmental and land rights movements, as
well as for the American left in an otherwise dark moment. But little remarked
upon at the time was the unlikely seed from which the movement had grown: an
anti-suicide campaign among a tight-knit group of youths, most younger than 25,
impelled by tragedy and guided by prophecy.

At the start, the camp seemed like a quixotic undertaking. Lakota culture is
effectively run by the old traditionally young people are supposed to apologize
before they even speak in front of elders so for the youths to take it upon
themselves to lead a movement was a radical act. In March, concerned citizens of
the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, frustrated with the lack of action from their tribal
council, the body that functions as the tribes official, U.S.-recognized government,
put out a call for help to the other Sioux reservations. One Mind Youth made the
two-hour drive north to propose setting up a prayer camp modeled on the ones
raised against the Keystone XL. The tribal council agreed to set up the camp but
offered little other support, pessimistic about the effort. The youths were
undeterred. In early April, a handful, joined by a few former Keystone activists,
moved into tepees in a protected ravine beside the Cannonball River, on the
extreme north end of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

Those days, the temperatures were in the 30s and there was still snow on the
ground. The youths dubbed the camp Sacred Stone and lit the sacred fire. At first,
they lived on little more than bologna sandwiches, potato chips and water. But
then residents from the small reservation town of Cannon Ball, up the hill from
Sacred Stone, began to bring donations: leftovers from dinner, cut-up wooden
corrals for the campfires, a chain saw. Life in the prayer camp was supposed to be
lived in ceremony, a sort of mindfulness or religious retreat in which all things
are done with the intention of maintaining purity. Days began with a water
ceremony; the sacred fire had to be regularly fed; meals began with prayer and a
spirit plate served for the ancestors; alcohol and drugs were strictly forbidden.

It was, in other words, the sort of safe place that the youths had been insisting
was necessary for them. They needed a haven, Charger explained, to regroup,
figure out what youre going to do and not worry about where youre gonna sleep.
The previous fall, they rented a hotel room in Eagle Butte as an informal crash
house for Cheyenne River youth, where sometimes as many as 20 teenagers stayed,
sleeping and showering, safe from bullying or the lure of alcohol or drugs. The
prayer camp at Standing Rock provided something similar. Members of One Mind
would drive home every week to resupply and pick up youths who wanted to
experience the camp.

For Charger and other leaders, as important as the idea of the safe space was
the idea that activism would teach children the skills to survive more immediate
threats, like bullying and drug abuse. They hoped to pass on skills at the camp that
they themselves had been taught by Keystone activists in their community. During
the long campaign against the Keystone XL, groups like the Indigenous
Environmental Network (I.E.N.) helped set up a spirit camp on the Cheyenne
River Reservation, about 50 miles southwest of Eagle Butte, where activists prayed
and taught the surrounding communities about civil disobedience. The I.E.N. paid
for One Mind members to be trained as organizers they sent Charger to
Washington and White Eyes to network with aboriginal climate activists in
Australia and the teenagers and young adults were exposed to ideas and training
that linked the pipeline fight to larger struggles in their society. Every direct-action
training against the Keystone XL, for example, referenced the prophecy of the
black snake, a figure out of Lakota myth that in recent times has been identified
with pipelines. But it has a more general meaning: It symbolizes a darkness, a
sickness, whose only intention is to sow dysfunction and loss of life in our
communities, said Dallas Goldtooth, an I.E.N. organizer who worked with Charger
and other One Mind members. The message was clear: The struggle against the
pipeline was part of the same struggle against alcoholism, suicide and abuse.

After weeks at the Standing Rock camp with minimal tribal support, the young
people decided that they needed to carry out some sort of public action. It was
important to make the adults see that if youre going to sit there and argue, were
gonna go wake up our brothers and sisters, Charger said. Bobbi Jean Three Legs,
a young mother and long-distance runner from Standing Rock who had become
active in the camp, had a vision. Her daughter woke her one night to ask for water,
and she suddenly saw a day when, thanks to water pollution, there would be no
water to give. Soon after that, she and White Eyes proposed a 500-mile relay run
from the Sacred Stone Camp to Omaha to deliver a letter to the Army Corps of
Engineers, asking it to deny the Dakota Access Pipeline permission to cross the
Missouri River. The I.E.N. began a social-media campaign announcing the run and
organized a blitz of calls and letters from tribal members on various reservations.

Within days, far sooner than expected, an Army Corps representative from the
Omaha district agreed to meet with members of the tribe. To some, this meant the
youths could call off the run. But they insisted on going ahead. Not only did they
still want support from the tribal council; they had also begun to believe that this
run could bring together young people from all the Sioux reservations. The seven
bands of the people commonly known as the Sioux had organized themselves in the
Oceti Sakowin, or the Seven Council Fires, a tribal republic that spread out over a
vast area, including the Dakotas, Minnesota, Kansas and Nebraska, until federal
campaigns forced its members onto the scattered, tiny reservations they occupy
now. One Mind saw water as an issue that could unify all Oceti Sakowin youth. And
their run had rich cultural resonance: Before Europeans brought horses, long-
distance messenger runners held the scattered tribes of Oceti Sakowin together.
Three Legs, White Eyes and Charger mapped a route to pass through as many
reservations as possible. The run would use a traditional method in which a
messenger ran a short distance, about a mile, and then rested while another runner
took his or her place. It allowed people who were not very good runners, like
Charger, to go on a long-distance run.

Three Legs insisted on bringing someone from each of the nine Oceti Sakowin
bands, and the run quickly brought in people from reservations that hadnt been
involved with the Standing Rock camp. Daniel Grassrope, now 25, came from the
Lower Brule, a band whose reservation lay down the Missouri from Cheyenne
River. Grassrope, the second-youngest boy of 13 children, grew up disgusted by the
abuse and dysfunction around him, racist, he said, toward my own people. As a
child, he dreamed of being taken away from his family and adopted by whites,
something he associated, vaguely, with having his own bedroom and a mother who
came to his basketball games. He was getting wasted every night when he saw
Three Legss Facebook posting asking someone to represent the Lower Brule on the
run.

The run immediately gave him what Standing Rock would later give many
other youths: a sense of purpose he had been lacking. It also inspired something
more radical, in a way, than antipipeline activism: the belief that a group of lost
people from scattered nations could still find kinship. Grassrope wrote to Three
Legs immediately. I had been praying for something like this, he said.

On April 24, the runners set off south from the Sacred Stone Camp. They ran
along the Cannonball River to Highway 1806, then down toward Cheyenne River,
their first stop. Grassrope ran next to Charger, who was carrying a heavy staff that
represented their ancestors. When she got too tired, Grassrope carried it. In doing
so, according to Lakota belief, they were literally carrying all those who had come
before. They stayed in churches and community centers and womens lodges and
private homes. At every reservation, they met not only with tribal leaders but also
with reservation youths, whom they talked to just as they had in Cheyenne River,
telling them about the old ways and the camp upriver where those ways were being
revived. It really caught them off guard, Charger said, that they saw youth like
them doing it. Because the Native American community has become heavily
networked on social media as a modern means to keep the bands united, word
spread far beyond the communities they visited. When the youths arrived in
Omaha on May 3, a representative of the Army Corps of Engineers met with them
on the steps of the office. They still felt motivated as they went back to Standing
Rock. Grassrope quit his job in Lower Brule and settled into the camp with them.

By then time seemed to be running out: The Army Corps of Engineers was still
considering the Dakota Access Pipelines permit, and the Tribal Council still wasnt
offering much support. On July 9, through a video released on YouTube, Bobbi
Jean Three Legs and several other runners announced an even more ambitious
action: a run that would cover 2,000 miles to Washington, where they would
deliver a petition to the Army Corps headquarters. We need your help, a young
woman says in the video. Another woman, with glasses and a long black braid,
says, Were going to be traveling through many of your towns. On July 15, 30
runners set out from Sacred Stone, adding more as they made their way along their
route. Jasilyn Chargers estranged twin sister, Jasilea, was one. She was in bed
asleep when Jasilyn, passing through Cheyenne River, ran into their house, threw
her clothes into a bag and urged her onto their support van. Over the course of the
next week or so, a dozen more joined.

But on July 26, the runners learned the Army Corps of Engineers had
approved the Dakota Access pipeline easements. The black snake was on its way.
The runners decided to carry on to Washington, but the focus shifted back to the
camp, as I.E.N. activists at Standing Rock urged people via Facebook messages to
rise to the standard set by the youths. Across the great archipelago of North
Americas Indian reservations and urban communities, people took notice. They
loaded cars and buses and camper vans with donations and headed for Standing
Rock.

Twenty-six-year-old Eryn Wise moved to the camp in late August, at the

beginning of what organizers called the big boom, when the population spiked
from dozens to thousands. A native of Minneapolis, Wise was raised by her
grandmother on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation after a suicide attempt at 11. On
the reservation, she was picked on for excelling at school but was surrounded by
her siblings, with whom she formed a close bond. But she returned to Minneapolis
when she was 16 to care for her mother. When she read an article about the youth
run she felt a pull and quit her job. She found her twin siblings, Alex and Lauren
Howland, already at the camp.

Wise arrived just as the elders began to claim more control over the movement
the youths had started. The run, Goldtooth told me, had forced their support by
transforming the Dakota Access pipeline from a regional Lakota issue into an
international one. Standing Rock council members began to visit the camps and
pay for emergency services, propane and portable toilets. The camp had expanded
onto the floodplain across the river, and grass-roots activists and members of the
unelected traditional leadership, which serves as a sort of parallel Oceti Sakowin
government, erected a Council Lodge, a large tepee from the tribes past that the
young people had only heard about. The Council Lodge was the traditional meeting
place of the Oceti Sakowin in the 19th century, when the bands would gather on the
Plains. The Council Lodge tepee at Standing Rock was a sign of a new political
awakening, as the traditional chiefs and medicine men collaborated with grass-
roots organizers the youth and other Native American factions that had joined
to restore the old, unified tribal republic. It was part of a larger move toward
formalizing the prayer camps under a council government. By then, the protests
against the pipeline had, for the traditional leadership, become about far more:
They had become a long-prophesied end to history.

The black-snake, prophesy said, would only be overcome by the Seventh

Generation, which would rise up and, as Charger explained, bring balance to the
Earth. Not just to its people. To the Earth. Many of the youths that I spoke with
took this to mean the Seventh Generation had a sort of messianic role to help
restore order, on behalf of all beings, to a world thrown out of balance by
modernity and greed.

The Seventh Generation is almost clich in Indian communities, Goldtooth,

the I.E.N. organizer told me. Anyone born between 1980 and the 2000s, he said,
hears about it constantly. The hope that our generation will see a significant shift
toward community renewal and nation building and the reminder that our
communities expect big things of us. The Seventh Generation tracks roughly with
millennials of all races, but they share their own unique history. The generation
between Goldtooth, 34, and Charger, now 20, is the first to have grown up free to
be Indian. They are familiar with their ancestors scars but also fluent in
mainstream American culture.

At Standing Rock, the elders, once resistant to their movement, now insisted
that the youths accept the responsibility that the prophecy had foretold. In early
September, the Seven Council Fires and Chief Arvol Looking Horse, who, for the
Lakota Sioux, is something like their head of religion, gave the youths a gift: a
chanupa, the ceremonial pipe that is the most sacred element of the Plains
religion, a symbol of the knitting together of the human community and nature,
ancestors with the living. In a ceremony under the blazing sun, the council
deputized the youths as akicita, a Lakota term that means something like warriors
for the people or police. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this gesture.
The youths, Looking Horse explained to me, werent really ready for it, but we told
them that theyre going to accept it and learn the traditions. We said they had to be
of pure mind. They said, Well try.

After the ceremony, the youths, who had begun to call themselves the
International Indigenous Youth Council, or I.I.Y.C., to symbolize their desire to
unite all nations behind a traditional way of life, moved together into a tepee by the
Cannonball River. A lot of our first month or two living together, Wise said, was
just having someone break down crying. In her short time at the camp, Wise had
become a sort of surrogate mother to the other young people her nickname even
became Ina, or mother and she found herself in charge of a group of about 25
who were barely holding it together, despite the leadership they had assumed. The
I.I.Y.C. was the first experience of family for many members. A lot of them never
had the opportunity to be kids, because they were always trying to take care of
themselves or take care of their parents. This process, one of the youth leaders
told me, was terribly beautiful, an unburdening of the historical trauma that
had defined their lives. No one realizes what the repercussions of colonization
have been, the repercussions of forced removal, Wise said. It was hard, she
stressed, to explain to people that these were things that had happened recently, to
her generations parents and grandparents.

I dont blame my mom, Charger told me. Her mother was murdered. She
shrugged. The abuse lives in our blood.

Charger was referring to Native American history, not just what happened on
the frontier but also in more recent decades. After federal campaigns reduced the
Oceti Sakowin in the late 1800s, there were nearly 100 years of calculated assault
as the state tried to force Native Americans to assimilate. The unified nation of
Oceti Sakowin was broken into widely separated reservations, and after Congress
privatized reservation land, many starving Lakota families had to sell off their
property to white farmers, further cutting the size of reservations. The U.S.
Government banned the Sundance, the Plains religions most sacred ceremony,
with its days of fasting and ritual bloodletting; Native Americans could no longer
openly practice their religions. But perhaps most devastating to their psychological
health were the boarding schools, in which generations of Indians were sent to
schools to be taught white culture. This system reached its nadir in the forced
assimilation campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s, when the grandparents of many of
the I.I.Y.C. youths were taught English literally under the lash.

At Standing Rock, the youths felt they were developing the means to overcome
that trauma. The key, as Charger explained it, was to let their history go, which
they took as an almost holy responsibility: Forgive, and then take action to spare
those who are coming in the future. We dont want our children to inherit this
depression, she said. The remarkable thing about this philosophy was that it was
deeply practical: not just forgiving the white man but also the parent who beat
you. For many, this provided a means to re-establish difficult relationships with
parents or siblings. But it also helped bind them together into their own sort of
family.

In the final months of 2016, the camps at Standing Rock grew to more than
10,000, filling with indigenous peoples from hundreds of nations, climate-change
activists, members of the Rainbow Family and Burning Man communities and
those who simply felt a call. By that point, the role of the I.I.Y.C. had become a sort
of advance guard, taking risks and pushing actions forward and winning new
young converts to the cause.

Thomas Tonatiuh Lopez Jr. was one. A 24-year-old Lakota and Latino from
Denver, Lopez grew up the child of AIM and Chicano activists, and as the adopted
grandson of the powerful medicine man Leonard Crowdog. He came to Standing
Rock in September on a supply run and hadnt intended to stay. Once he found
himself at the camp, Lopez was touched by the message of activism and
reconciliation. One afternoon, he was sitting with I.I.Y.C. members, rolling
cigarettes for everyone in front of a fire, as Charger talked about the role of youth.
She said one thing that stuck with me: Who better to speak for the past than the
voice of the future? He thought about it as he drove home to Denver, and when he
got there, he helped establish a local I.I.Y.C. chapter, drawing from local
indigenous and Latino youths. In mid-November, the group took hundreds of
Denver high-school students for a march through downtown to protest the Dakota
Access Pipeline. Another new chapter, in Chicago, galvanized hundreds for
Thanksgiving events that drew in members of other activist groups, including
Black Lives Matter, which resulted in black community medics going to serve in
Standing Rocks volunteer medical corps.

One factor that helped recruitment into the regional chapters and Standing Rock
was the increasing violence by the police at the camps. The images of campers
being maced or attacked by dogs spread anger across the country, and many
brought that anger to Standing Rock. For traditional leadership, any violence was
deeply concerning. Part of the matrix of prophecy that underlies their movement is
the idea that should the Oceti Sakowin or their allies resort to violence, they could
be wiped out. Among the Native Americans there were strict rules that the protest
would have to be done in peace and prayer.

The youths took this seriously, even as they found themselves under physical
threat. Wise, the camp mom, remembers, for instance, watching on Facebook Live
as her sister was maced. Furious, she raced to the scene and threw herself at the
police. Suddenly there were six hands on her shoulders: I.I.Y.C. members, pulling
her back. She saw her brother Alex, his face white with what appeared to be war
paint. He was pointing over my shoulder and shouting, Well pray for you, well
pray for you! His face, she realized, was covered in tear gas, and he was still
praying for them. That brought me back.

The youths also tried to reach out to the Morton County Sheriffs Department,
which in the larger camp had come to be seen as the enemy. After the Army Corps
of Engineers withdrew permission for the camp in late November, protesters
expected the sheriffs department to violently clear campers off the land. But on
Dec. 2, when the department posted on Facebook soliciting donations of granola
bars, fruit soda and socks, the I.I.Y.C. showed up with large plastic containers filled
with granola bars, warm clothing and water. Lopez, who had returned to the camp
to stay in October, made a speech: Though you have brutalized us, we will not
brutalize you. The station was on lockdown; after a while, an officer looking
sheepish in his helmet, faceplate and full body armor, opened the door and
accepted the containers. From the crowd, someone yelled for Lopez to explain to
the officer why they hadnt brought soda. Lopez half turned. We want you to be
healthy! he yelled. Mni wichoni! Water is life!

It was a small gesture, but one that prompted thanks from the officers and
anger from some in the camps. Why are you supporting them? Wise remembers
people asking. But prophecy was important to the youths; they worried that if the
movement became too violent, it would ruin everything they had been trying to
build.

On Dec. 4, 2016, as thousands of military veterans from across the country

crowded the camp in solidarity, the Department of the Army announced its
decision to deny an easement for the Dakota Access Pipeline route. The decision
was a shock and an unexpected triumph. That night, as a blizzard descended on the
camp, David Archambault II, the chairman of the Standing Rock reservations
official tribal government, presided over a ceremony around the main fire to thank
the youths. When the youth ran to D.C., thats when this really got started,
Archambault told the crowd, as people lined up to shake the hands of the gathered
runners. We all came here to stand for something greater than whatever we did at
home. Now, with winter bearing down, he said, everyone could begin to go home.

But the youths didnt want to go home. For them, leaving was more
complicated. They thought that the victory was too tentative. Energy Transfer
Partners had announced it would ignore the Armys decision, and the election of
Donald J. Trump had put into office a president who vocally supported both the
Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines. Dave Archambault doesnt speak for our
entire generation, Jasilyn Charger said. When he dies, my grandchildren are
going to be here, and nobody can speak for them but me.

There was also a more personal problem. Many of them had nowhere else to
go. They had become dependent on the I.I.Y.C. for a support network and a place
to live. Over their months spent in close quarters, the members of the youth
council had bound themselves together not only as friends but as family. The
stakes of dissolving the group had become obvious in a more immediate way, too:
One of the youth runners had already attempted suicide and been rushed to the
hospital in Bismarck. Its not safe for them to stay here, Wise told me in mid-
December, as temperatures remained below zero and the ground was covered with
ice. But I also dont want that to happen to any of these kids.

As the camps emptied out, though, there were not enough resources for
everyone to stay, and most of the young people dispersed for the winter, leaving
behind a skeleton crew of 10. Wise went home to Minneapolis to begin a job as an
organizer for Honor the Earth, an indigenous environmental activist group.
Grassrope went back to Lower Brule. Charger was couch-surfing with friends in
Eagle Butte. Tribal leaders of the Cheyenne River had found a property for the
youth safe house that One Mind had fought for, but progress had stalled, and life
for the reservations youths was as hard as it had been before. But the I.I.Y.C. were
in the process of setting up a 501(c)(3), a nonprofit organization that would allow
them to establish some formal order to what had been an ad hoc group.

And in January, after a month apart, the I.I.Y.C. youths reunited in

Washington for the mass protests against Donald Trump. They were still in
Washington when the news came that he had signed executive orders allowing the
Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines to proceed. After that, Jasilyn Charger made
 the trip back to Standing Rock. She planned to spend a couple of days there before
heading south to Eagle Butte, where she would organize against the Keystone. My
sole purpose, she said, is to create for the youth what we did in Standing Rock at
my home in Cheyenne River. To really challenge the youth in my community to
follow in the lead of Standing Rock to fight for their own people, because if they
dont, this black snake will not die again.

All believed their work had to spread, not because they necessarily believed
they could stop the pipeline but because the movement had connected, as Lopez
told me, youths who would otherwise never have had much interaction. He
offered a practical reason as well: In December, back home in Denver, he got a call
from a young person on the verge of suicide. He felt helpless, but he stayed on the
phone, listening to hear, not listening to respond. All I could do was say: You are
loved, someone cares about you, not necessarily right where you are, but in your
community at Standing Rock. Even if you feel no one loves you, no one cares about
you, I love you, I care about you. I want to pray with you again. And if you kill
yourself now, I wont be able to do that.

He paused. And my brother is still alive today.

Saul Elbein is a journalist who has covered land use and energy in Southeast Asia, Latin
America and the United States. He last wrote about the environmental organizer Jane
Kleeb.

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A version of this article appears in print on February 5, 2017, on Page MM24 of the Sunday Magazine with
the headline: The Seventh Generation.

2017 The New York Times Company