Nicky Woolf in Cannon Ball, North Dakota

Monday 29 August 2016

The Cannonball river flows into the mighty Missouri about 50 miles due south of Bismarck, North Dakota.

At its confluence, a protest encampment – really a series of camps, on both sides of the Cannonball, strewn with kitchens and canteens, portable toilets, stabling for horses, sweat lodges and tall teepees, and stands selling indigenous art – has sprung up.

The inhabitants are there to block the planned $3.7bn Dakota Access Pipeline, which would transport fracked crude from the Bakken oil field in North Dakota to a refinery near Chicago.

Many at the encampment speak of two prophecies, dating back to the 1890s. A leader called Black Elk foretold that in seven generations, the Native American nations will unite to save the Earth; another legend predicted that a zuzeca snake – a black snake – would threaten the world. For many of the protesters here, the pipeline is that black snake. They are the seventh generation: their moment of destiny has come.

The pipeline’s planned route takes it close to the northern boundary of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation and the town of Cannon Ball within it, which means it would cross the Missouri immediately upstream, endangering, protesters say, the reservation’s drinking water and threatening sacred sites. At Standing Rock, they have put their bodies between the water and the oil.

A few days earlier, on 24 August, a federal judge in Washington DC delayed a ruling over whether indigenous rights were violated by the approval of the project. Tribal members say they were not sufficiently consulted about the route and are suing for an injunction.

The population of the camp ebbs and flows. Many have given up jobs and brought their families here, and a core of between 500 and 1,000 people live here semi-permanently. Some, such as Wiyaca Eagleman, a member of the Sicangu Lakota from Rosebud, South Dakota, have been here since the beginning of April. He plans to be here, he said, “as long as it takes”.

Hundreds more join when they can, swelling the camp’s numbers on weekends. Others come when they get time and bring what supplies they can.

It is an unprecedented gathering. Members of more than 90 Native American nations and tribes have a presence here, according to Eagleman, who has become a sort of unofficial spokesman for the protest camp. Up the road, where the building site was besieged, the flags of many of those nations now fly together. The unity on display here is a dream come true for Eagleman. “There has been no moment like this in history,” he said.

On Saturday, a delegation from the Crow nation arrived from Montana, bearing offerings of firewood and 700lb of buffalo meat. That’s truly historic: the Crow and the Lakota have been enemies for more than a century. They were at war once; the Crow acted as scouts for Gen George Custer. Buffalo meat has powerful symbolic value: a gesture of solidarity and friendship from longtime former foes.

Dennis Banks, a member of the Chippewa nation of Minnesota and one of the founders of the civil rights group the American Indian Movement in the 1960s, who met the Crow delegation, recounted the meeting. “The main speaker said, ‘I know you think of Crow as working with the enemy – but we too struggled for water rights, treaty rights’,” Banks said.

Then he paused. “The Missouri river starts up there,” he added, to indicate that the Crow and the Lakota share more, now, than just food and firewood. The river connects them, too.

Ladonna Allard is a member of the Dakota Sioux. The first protest camp, named Sacred Stone for the perfectly round stones that were formed by a whirlpool where the two rivers met, was erected in April on Allard’s land. The whirlpool is gone now, its eddies quieted by a dam built by the army corps of engineers in 1948, which also flooded the lush forest that abutted Allard’s birthplace.

“This is sacred land,” Allard told the Guardian, speaking by a campfire on which burritos cooked in aluminum foil. Children and dogs played; a brilliant sunset had just turned to dusk. “This is not about trying to be a protester,” she said. “I am a mother. My son is buried at the top of that hill. I can’t let them build a pipeline by my son’s grave.”

Looking across the Missouri from the camp, you can see the route of the pipeline on the east bank. Diggers and bulldozers began digging out the turf on the west bank, a mile north of the camp, churning the green prairie to brown clod, in August – accompanied by armed security guards.

They were ordered to stop when protesters, some on horseback, broke on to the site and surrounded the machines on 10 August. Eighteen were arrested, including Standing Rock tribal chairman David Archambault II.

Madonna Antoine Eagle Hawk, a member of the Sicango Rosebud Sioux, arrived last Friday and quickly assumed the role of head chef of the Rosebud camp. The children, she said, call her “Unci”, the Lakota word for grandmother. “I’m proud to be here,” she said. “It’s a powerful feeling.”

“Right now, all these different tribes – this will never happen again in our lifetime,” she said. “If we don’t make a stand, who else will?”

Richard Leading Fighter Jr – another member of the Rosebud tribe, a biology student and a distance runner – joined Eagle Hawk in the kitchen tent. He has assumed the role of lifeguard in the camp, keeping an eye on the children who frolic and splash in the Cannonball. He’s been here two weeks now and is preparing to return to university, but like many in the camp, is planning on coming back when he can.

“This feeling is history, right here,” he said. He hunkered down on his shins to grab a handful of soil, grey from the ash of the cooking fire. “We’re doing something that will be in stories told for our grandchildren,” he said, as the earth streamed through his fingers.

“I know we can defeat this,” he said. “I’m hoping the world is with us.”