Issue 018 · September 6, 2026
High Country News has obtained exclusive documents showing that Enbridge and its contractors hired digital mercenaries to run a coordinated propaganda campaign against Standing Rock protesters, targeting local communities with disinformation designed to stir anti-protest sentiment. The investigation is published on the tenth anniversary of the standoff, and it draws a direct line from the tactics used at Standing Rock to the playbook now being deployed against pipeline opponents elsewhere, including in Wisconsin. For Patty, the Line 5 connection is not abstract: the same corporate infrastructure that ran information operations at Standing Rock has interests in the Bad River watershed. The piece also raises the 5th R, Reflection, hard: what does it mean to have covered Standing Rock without knowing this was happening underneath? High Country News does the journalism here that the mainstream press did not do in 2016.
Issue 017 · August 30, 2026
High Country News obtained internal documents showing that a coordinated digital influence operation, run by private contractors on behalf of pipeline interests, targeted Standing Rock Sioux tribal members and surrounding communities during the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline standoff, seeding social media with disinformation designed to erode public support for the water protectors. The piece is not a retrospective; it is a forensic account of how propaganda infrastructure was deployed against a sovereign nation, and it has direct implications for how we read the current Line 5 fight and any future pipeline dispute involving tribal land. Ten years on, the story is bigger and darker than it looked in real time, and the tactics documented here did not disappear after 2016. Read it with the Seventh Generation lens: what was done to Standing Rock's information environment is a template, and understanding it is part of being prepared.
Issue 005 · June 7, 2026
The Army Corps of Engineers has approved the long-disputed segment of the Dakota Access Pipeline that runs beneath Lake Oahe, bringing a formal end to the regulatory saga that began with the 2016 Standing Rock protests, though further litigation remains likely. ICT covered this with the context it deserves: the announcement lands as communities prepare for the tenth anniversary of the #NoDAPL encampment, and tribal leaders are clear that the legal fight is not over. For Patty, the Dakota Access decision is a useful frame for the Bad River/Line 5 fight: federal regulatory approval has never meant the end of a pipeline dispute.
Issue 003 · May 24, 2026
The Army Corps of Engineers has approved the long-disputed segment of the Dakota Access pipeline that was at the center of the 2016-2017 Standing Rock protests, bringing a decade-long regulatory and legal saga to at least a provisional close. ICT notes that further litigation is likely, and tribal opponents have not conceded the fight. The approval arrives as the broader pattern of pipeline approvals over tribal objections continues to accelerate under the current administration.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
Native Sun News Today flags that South Dakota Congressman Dusty Johnson's federal bills to expand Missouri River water use for the state do not address the question of who actually holds water rights in that river system, a question that implicates multiple Oceti Sakowin nations whose treaty territories the Missouri runs through. The piece is a good example of the kind of story that only a Native publication is likely to frame this way: the mainstream coverage of the same bills would almost certainly not lead with tribal water rights.
Issue 001 · May 10, 2026
Native Sun News Today reports that Faith Spotted Eagle, one of the most respected culture carriers in the Oceti Sakowin and a longtime leader in the movement against the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from South Dakota State University at its 140th commencement. The recognition is overdue and meaningful. Spotted Eagle has spent decades doing the patient, unglamorous work of cultural transmission and political resistance that honorary degrees are supposed to honor.