Alongside the state's mass prosecutions, federal prosecutors selected a handful of water protectors for felony civil-disorder and arson-related charges arising from the October 27 raid — among them Michael "Little Feather" Giron, a Chumash man, and Michael "Rattler" Markus, a Lakota Marine Corps veteran, accused in connection with barricade fires set as police advanced on the Treaty Camp. Held without bail and facing fifteen-year maximums with the government signaling terrorism-adjacent theories, both accepted non-cooperating plea agreements — refusing to testify about anyone else — and received thirty-six months each in 2018.
The water-protector legal collective treated the two men, along with Red Fawn Fallis and fellow federal defendants, as prisoners of the movement, organizing commissary support and letter-writing through their releases in 2020. Their cases defined the federal strategy at Standing Rock: pick a few Indigenous defendants for exemplary punishment, price the risk of trial beyond reach, and let plea agreements write the official history of a day the government itself had turned violent.