The camps that grew along the Cannonball River in 2016 — called by the Standing Rock Sioux to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline's crossing upstream of their water supply — drew thousands from hundreds of Indigenous nations, the largest such gathering in a century. North Dakota's response produced more than 800 criminal cases. The largest single day came on October 27, 2016, when police and National Guard in armored vehicles cleared the 1851 Treaty Camp erected in the pipeline's path, arresting 141 people; arrestees were numbered on their forearms in marker and held in chain-link enclosures they compared to dog kennels.
The prosecutions strained a rural court system for years: the state charged riot and conspiracy offenses wholesale, judges dismissed cases by the score for lack of evidence, and the acquittal rate at trial ran high. Water protectors with felony convictions — and those who traveled home with open cases across state lines — carried the campaign's legal weight long after the camps were cleared in February 2017 and oil began to flow.