Red Fawn Fallis, an Oglala Lakota organizer known in the camps as a medic and peacemaker, was tackled by officers during the October 27, 2016 Treaty Camp raid; prosecutors alleged a revolver fired twice into the dirt during the struggle. The gun belonged to Heath Harmon — a paid FBI informant who had infiltrated the camps, become Fallis's boyfriend, and by his own account kept the weapon in their shared trailer. The federal case built on that foundation made her the campaign's central political prisoner.
Facing charges carrying decades and barred from a jury instruction on the informant's role, Fallis pleaded guilty in 2018 to civil disorder and firearm possession and was sentenced to fifty-seven months. Her case traveled internationally — raised by Indigenous delegations at the UN — as the distillation of Standing Rock's policing: an FBI informant's gun, an Indigenous woman's body under a pile of officers, and the only long federal sentence of the movement landing on a medic while the pipeline's private security force, whose dogs had bitten protectors on camera, faced nothing.