Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil 151791387X, 9781517913878

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SETTLING THE BOOM THE SITES AND SUBJECTS OF BAKKEN OIL Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun, Editors

Settling the Boom

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Settling the Boom The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil

M a r y E . T h o m a s and B r u c e B r a u n Editors

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London

Portions of chapter 3 are adapted from Morgan Adamson, “Anthropocene Realism,” The New Inquiry, November 30, 2015. Copyright 2023 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-­1-­5179-­1386-­1 (hc) ISBN 978-­1-­5179-­1387-­8 (pb) A Cataloging-­in-­Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. UMP BmB 2023

Contents

Preface

vii

Introduction: (Un)settling the Boom Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

1. The Settler Heteropatriarchy of Boomtown, USA

Mary E. Thomas

95

4. Crisis Ordinariness: The Bakken Boom in Late Capitalism

Bruce Braun

69

3. Anthropocene Realism: Genres of “Energy Independence”

Morgan Adamson

39

2. Bakken Aesthetics: Art and Attachment in the Era of Tough Oil

Thomas S. Davis

1

119

5. On the Dark Side of the Boom: Narratives of Social Crisis and Liberal Arts of Governance

Jessica Lehman and Bruce Braun

143



6. The Dakota Access Pipeline Struggle: Vulnerability, Security, and Settler Colonialism in the Oil Assemblage

Kai Bosworth

173

Beyond Settler Infrastructures: A Conclusion Bruce Braun and Mary E. Thomas

205

Contributors 217 Index 219

Preface

Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil is a collection of essays that examine efforts to contain the lively and disruptive petrocultures of an oil boom and its aftermath in a remote northwestern corner of North Dakota and to expose their underlying settler colonial frameworks. Rather than simply charting a course through the boom–­ bust extraction cycle, our book analyzes what Mark Rifkin (2017) calls the privileged background epistemologies that establish a “condition of possibility” in settler colonialism’s violent and ongoing extension in time and space. Our goal in assembling this edited book is to illustrate the work that goes into settlerist orderings of time and place, as a practice of critique and disruption of the all-­too-­familiar logics and practices of settler colonialism and racialized heteropatriarchy in the oil fields of North Dakota. We ask: How does a frenetic boomtown and its region come to be ordered through familiar settler affective infrastructures, aesthetics, and narratives? How do the forces of the settler state, petrocapital, and heteropaternal urban messaging and planning in the Bakken work to congeal the boom within certain social and spatial forms and not others? How do these orderings fold and refold time and space in their attempts to ensure that futures remain imagined through and tethered to settler colonialism and white patriarchies? We and the other contributors to the book answer these questions through analysis of the powerful settler colonial–­cisgendered–­heterosexual sentimentalities vii

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operating to calm the region’s anxieties after what had been assumed to be a certain future built on fossil fuel extraction. Many of the themes across the chapters in Settling the Boom found their first iteration in a workshop hosted by us, Mat Coleman, and Kathryn Yusoff in the summer of 2015. The Antipode Foundation sponsored this field-­based gathering of fourteen scholars through an International Workshop Award, and a reporting of the workshop’s culminating conversation, titled “Grounding the Anthropocene: Sites, Subjects, Struggles in the Bakken Oil Fields,” can be found on Antipode Online (Braun et al. 2015). Five of the contributors to this book (the two of us and Morgan Adamson, Thomas S. Davis, and Jessica Lehman) attended the workshop (and the author Kai Bosworth has a mention in the Antipode posting from Bruce). In the report of the “Grounding the Anthropocene” workshop, several participants note the ways that boomtown narratives inhabit a cruel optimism in which the promise of a better future seems forever out of reach, an expanding horizon of hopeful possibility fueling a horrific present of dangerous work, exhaustion, transient lives longing for the promise of “the good life,” and, as participant Mario Blaser notes, treacherous land relations that overshadow other beliefs. He asks, “What kinds of infrastructures [material-­semiotic assemblages] of attachment and detachment to this place (and others) are there? What kinds of attachments and detachments do they foster?” These questions and the enduring prompt from Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism remain at the heart of this volume. Indeed, Mario’s questions are as relevant today as in 2015. Finalizing this project now, in 2022, offers a different perspective from that of 2015. Today we situate our arguments not just around the boom’s temporal unfolding and from the moment just after the commodity price fell in the autumn of 2014, but, more important, we also attend to the boom’s social–­spatial reconciliations. While booms disrupt, displace, and replace, the socioecological forms that congeal in their wake require considerable aesthetic, narrative, and political work. Indeed, the very fabrication of the “Bakken Boom” stories told and retold ensure in their familiar repetition an all too easy alignment of “what happened” and what is yet “to come.” Yet that rote telling and representation of settlement, we argue in the introduction, is not sturdy, inevitable, or

Preface ix

final—­or even, for that matter, accurate. Settling is processual, complex, provisional, contingent. The predominant versions of how calm “returned” to western North Dakota indicate the normative forces fueling those versions more than they reflect a reality of what happened. The very notions of settlement, of catching up after the chaos of the boom and a “calm return to normal,” are not objective accounts of next stages in time, as all of the essays in this book demonstrate. Further, these notions of settlement assert an oil boom as an aberration, rather than assemblages and continuations of forces that propel, encourage, and precede/exceed it. Their precise resolutions over time in specific locations are impossible to predict from within the boom or even from generalized theories of petrocultures. In fact, the moment of resolution is an open one, without end in time-­space. In this book, we resist the pull to provide a timeline of our own for Bakken geographies and geologies, which would merely resubmit an authoritative settler perspective through the back door as an academic account of what happened. As this project’s editors, we understand our roles as white settler-­scholars in more modest terms, as ones that can work to lay bare the geographic and temporal propulsion of settler colonialism’s linearities, its machinations of white supremacist heteropatriarchy, and its material hierarchies and violences, including those experienced by workers drawn to the region by the promises of economic security and personal redemption. Even as we refuse settlerist spatial and temporal accounts as fully representative of what happened in the Bakken, in this book we elevate attention on how settler colonialism’s entrenched commitments to futurity operate linear-­time-­as-­ progress, particularly through heteronormative family formation and social reproduction, frontier spaces of masculine labor, and mineral extraction understood as economic and U.S. national expansion. As white settler-­scholars, we take our roles to be aptly focused on bringing background epistemologies to the foreground of Bakken petrocultures and geographies in order to understand and challenge colonial infrastructures of attachment. By parsing these formations, we show their ad hoc nature, how they provisionally hold together yet also contain the contradictions, possibilities, and elements of other stories and truths. These forces and

x Preface

formations are specific to the sites and subjects of the Bakken. Attending to their qualities exposes how settlement works in Williston, North Dakota, and questions what and who gets removed or erased in service to the settler temporalities fabricated. We resolutely do not take it as our role, as white settlers, to represent Indigenous interests or subjects, though about one quarter of Bakken oil is produced on the lands of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) Nation on the Fort Berthold Reservation. Our perspective refuses what Audra Simpson labels as settlerist “good intentions” (2017), which would merely add alternative accounts to the boom to provide a supposedly more inclusive picture—­which merely maintains a lie that settler states and societies can diversify and not have to fundamentally decolonize and revolutionize (also Byrd 2011; Coulthard 2014; Simpson 2014). These divergent temporalities can be seen in the controversial slogan used by supporters of oil development in the MHA Nation. The tribal chairman in 2011, Tex Hall, proclaimed “sovereignty by the barrel” as a direct challenge to the linear trajectory of settler time and its background assumption of the spacetime of the nation-­state, its institutions, and its interests (see Estes 2019, 32). Although not uncontested within the community, oil development on MHA land from this perspective is not just about economic development, achieved through royalties and production taxes, oilfield jobs, and direct oil production controlled by a tribal corporation. It also points to—­and potentially facilitates—­an Indigenous temporality that is different from settler time, shaped by the land and the relationships and responsibilities it entails. While understood variously, these relationships and responsibilities open to diverse Indigenous futures, even within the slow accretion of settler violence (the breaking of treaties, flooding of tribal lands to secure downstream white communities and their agricultural economies, displacement of whole communities to new sites, water governance, residential schools, the exposure of Native people to settler policing, and Native women and children in particular to settler violence) that has produced an affective world that diverges radically from white settler subjectivities and imaginaries (Estes 2019; Whyte 2018; Deer 2015).

Preface xi

We do not attempt to describe or represent the complex and heterogeneous Indigenous temporalities in the region (or arbitrate different positions held by MHA members in relation to fossil fuel extraction). Our goal is not to fracture settler frameworks and temporalities in order to elevate Native sites and subjects. We have not been invited to undertake these tasks. The land and its futures are not ours, or that of any settlers. We do take as our task the practice of undermining settler white-­supremacist beliefs, especially as they work to reassert racialized heteropatriarchies as the legible formations of life and place in the region now and into the perpetual horizon of settler time. We do insist that there is nothing inevitable about settler colonial heteropatriarchies, despite their widespread iterations in Bakken boomtown stories and visualities. As Mark Rifkin writes, “Exploring what constitutes the background for marking and experiencing time, then, draws attention not only to the milieu, at whatever scale, that serves as the context for thinking and feeling time’s unfolding but also to the taken-­for-­granted process through which temporal dynamics are figured” (2017, 11). What white settlers violently take for granted does not equate to what is or will be. We thus understand settler backgrounds as unresolved and unsettling questions, questions without answers and that we should not resolve by merely adjudicating other, better settler renditions. Yet politics and resistance do not begin and end with making settler colonialism visible. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang warn, doing so can merely be a gesture to ensure its future (2012, 1). Our work in this volume, especially in the introduction, is therefore to unsettle what settler colonial forces assume is resolved, to show that the disruptive boom has not settled down into a resolved future or into “as usual” accounts of oil’s political economies. There are other inheritances besides settler colonial heteropatriarchies. The research that informs our work as editors was collaborative and spanned a number of years. Bruce has been a longer interlocutor with the region, with many years of passing through Williston. His witnessing the curious changes to the region over time led to this project in the first place. We visited the region together over the course of three

xii Preface

summers (2014–­16) with a larger team, including Mat Coleman, Max Woodworth, and Kathryn Yusoff, interviewing a range of oilfield workers, city officials, local historians and curators, workforce trainers and job-­placement advisors, journalists, land and water protectors, and even a Lutheran pastor who explained how he led a community funeral to provide closure for his Williston congregation who had lost their (settler!) prairie idyll to widespread drilling and disruption. These interviews and our conversations profoundly shape the ideas in this book, as does the feedback received on earlier chapter drafts. We owe the origins of this idea-­making to the larger research group: thank you. We also send gratitude to all of our interviewees, especially Donald Kress of the Williston planning office for his hospitality and patient explanations about a huge range of urban and regional issues and geographies. Artist Jessica Christy provided cover art for Settling the Boom from her collection Through the Window. We saw the collection when we visited the exhibition Bakken Boom! Artists Respond to the North Dakota Oil Rush in 2015 at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo. Jessica, originally from eastern North Dakota, lived in Minot at the eastern edge of the Bakken at the beginning and at the height of the boom. Her installation in Fargo included 150 shadow boxes containing what she calls relics, or found objects, that were all assembled in a very small space. The installation visitor experienced the claustrophobia of the boom’s imprint on everyday life—­especially for women—­through the boxes’ contents and arrangement. The Plains Art Museum’s exhibition was a steady source of inspiration as we conducted research and as we continue to teach about the boom, so we are delighted and honored to have Jessica Christy’s art frame this collection. Thank you, Jess. We gratefully acknowledge our graduate advisee research assistants (especially Jessica Lehman and Mary Everest, who worked with Bruce, who also thanks the Grant-­in-­Aid of Research, Artistry, and Scholarship program at the University of Minnesota for funding; and Krista Benson, Anthony Tenney, and Mary Byrne, who worked with Mary, who thanks the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University for funding), our colleagues and friends (and reviewers) for their many comments and incisive feedback on drafts



Preface xiii

and presentations, and research funding from Humanities Without Walls, the University of Minnesota, and the Division of Arts and Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University (which provided funding for Thomas S. Davis and Mary E. Thomas). Most important, we thank the chapter authors for their patience during the long pandemic year(s), which slowed completion, and editor Jason Weidemann and the staff at the University of Minnesota Press for their steady and incisive stewardship. References Braun, Bruce, Mat Coleman, Mary Thomas, and Kathryn Yusoff. 2015. “Grounding the Anthropocene: Sites, Subjects, Struggles in the Bakken Oil Fields.” Antipode Online, November 3. https://antipodeonline.org/2015/11/03/ grounding-the-anthropocene/. Byrd, Jodi. 2011. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deer, Sarah. 2015. The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. New York: Verso Books. Rifkin, Mark. 2017. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-­Determination. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Simpson, Audra. 2017. “The Ruse of Consent and the Anatomy of ‘Refusal’: Cases from Indigenous North America and Australia.” Postcolonial Studies 20, no. 1: 18–­33. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 1, no. 1: 1–­40. Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2018. “Indigeneity in Geoengineering Discourses: Some Considerations.” Ethics, Policy, and Environment 21, no. 3: 289–­307.

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Introduction

(Un)settling the Boom Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

Bakken Booyah! Rockin’ the Bakken. Bakken Goes Boom! These exuberant marketing slogans greeted us when we entered the Williston Economic Development Office in the summer of 2014 (see Figure I.1). Though not evident at the time, North Dakota was just about to hit the end of an oil boom after several years of rapid growth. The region’s population had increased dramatically as workers poured in to fuel the seemingly insatiable demand for labor. The local housing shortage was acute, with hundreds of people sleeping in their vehicles on the city’s streets and in parking lots every night. Construction projects spread across the landscape, adding hotels, restaurants, single-­family homes, schools, new roads, water and sewage lines, and apartment, retail, and office complexes at every turn. The price per barrel was high, the number of rigs drilling was high, wages were high, food and services prices were high, revenue was high, the mood was high. Only a few years removed from the Great Recession, national media was still fixated on the region’s wild ride as it soared along with record-­setting commodity prices. The executive director of the Economic Development Office showed us chart after chart that day, predicting the steady growth of 1

2 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

Figure I.1. The registered trademark for the Williston Economic Development Office’s “Rockin’ the Bakken” campaign, from its website. The campaign began in May 2008.

oil production, jobs, and population until at least 2050. One chart he shared, made by the Western North Dakota Energy Project, predicted that Williston’s regional population would hit between 100,000 and 120,000 by 2020 and slowly increase from there for at least another two decades, the ascending line at the right margin hinting at growth in perpetuity. As the director put it earlier that year in a public presentation, “It is going to last for a very long time!”1 It is 2021 as we finalize this introduction, and the city of Williston’s population hovers around 29,000, with another 8,600 in the rest of Williams County; adding neighboring McKenzie and Divide counties contributes another 17,000 to the population for the Williston region. Williston has a speculative bond rating lower than junk, and the Economic Development Office is not high anymore. Its current slogan somewhat pleadingly proclaims that the city is “Open for Business.” The Williston Community Guide tries to sell the city’s appeal for young “millennial” families, its quality of life, ample employment opportunities, and wholesome recreational offerings.2 The guide invites the reader to “Settle In” (see Figure I.2). The boomtown high has evaporated, replaced with empty hotel rooms, unfinished development projects, a new international airport that is largely unused, and crushing municipal debt. A past (produced prepandemic, in early 2020) “Economy at a Glance” document for the city quotes the current director’s caution:

Figure I.2. The table of contents of a recent edition of the Williston Community Guide’s “Life in Williston” section shows corresponding images of recreation, an aerial view of town, and the new airport under construction.

4 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

“I am sorry to say these numbers will continue to get worse before they get better.”3 Commodity reliance can be cruel to towns like Williston, but optimism girds the assurance that better comes after worse. Like the right margin of perpetual growth, the messaging remains primed for the future’s possibilities. This book considers specific boomtown stories, aesthetics, and relations in northwestern North Dakota in order to “contend with settlement” (Rowe and Tuck 2017, 7). We and the other chapter authors place keen attention on “Bakken Booyah” storytelling, textual and visual, precisely to examine how it engages with and enacts the lively and potentially disruptive petrocultures of the “Bakken boom” and, with varying degrees of success, attempt to contain this storytelling within normative affective infrastructures and understandings. Rather than evaluating the right margin through a correction of its predictive failures and a revised account of its data, we interrogate the temporality of that margin and what it insinuates about the temporal imaginings and affective attachments that run through North Dakota’s oil cultures. We contend with settlement, in other words, by situating the oil play as an iterative process, through its myriad attempts to order the sites and subjects of the Bakken. Central to this process are settler colonial temporalities and tenses and the privileged settler background epistemologies that Mark Rifkin (2017) argues establish a “condition of possibility” in settler colonialism’s violent and ongoing supremacy. As an iterative process, settling the Bakken boom uses the power of settler colonial narratives and aesthetics to repeat beliefs about time as unfolding into a waiting future. The margin is therefore no ending of a process but its perpetual extension (especially, as we will show throughout the book, through heteronormative patriarchies and fossil fuel extraction). The margin can merely gesture into that waiting future, however, because the accomplishment of any optimistic settled form is, as Lauren Berlant so astutely argued, fantasy. They write, “Fantasy is the means by which people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux about how they and the world ‘add up to something’” (2011, 2). Berlant famously points to the “cruel optimism” of affect in the present, as a

Introduction 5

relation that “exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (1). We take the right margin of perpetual growth to be an “affective structure” (Berlant 2011, 2) that attempts to translate the energies and flows of an oil play into an apparent, if spectral, order that will appear at some point in the future (supposedly). The waiting for boomtown settlement thus enacts a wide range of violence and land dispossession and justifies these through assurances that something better is coming, in time. Yet Settling the Boom as a project is centrally motivated by our belief that we should work against the affective structures of settlerism and, importantly, also against an academic provision of post hoc, alternative political imaginaries in response to them. Each imagines a settled form, as if settlement is achieved and final and that which we should reactively address in our scholarship. As if alternatives are not always in creative existence and tension all along, or as if alternatives are not themselves potentially more banal in their own attempts at transformation. After all, as Berlant suggests, most often nothing actually occurs that is all that different (6). In fact, the promise of something else—­a break, like a boom or its bust—­might even be the very route into further normative colonial settlement. Across this volume, the chapters pay special attention to the specificity of the Bakken as a site, as we situate the predominant “affective structures” seeking to settle the boom in the region. By delving into the geographies and aesthetics of the region’s settler colonial formations and examining its site-­specific iterations, our analyses seek to relay the ways that foreclosures and erasures in time and place actually operate not as effects that necessarily follow from resource extraction but as enacted and provisional relations, temporalities, and materialities specific to this place at this time. As we wrote with collaborators in 2015 (Braun et al. 2015), without keen attention to the site the “oil boom” becomes so generalized that its specific spatial, geological, and temporal aspects go unexamined, and as a narrative form, the boom–­bust cycle remains intact as a future-­oriented threshold pointing to “what comes next.” The chapters in this book, in contrast, push against a temporal

6 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

fetish of the Bakken’s right margin through the authors’ grounding analyses of the place, its geology and land, and the reiterative settler geographies of its subjects. Central to our collective task is to expose the affective structures of settler time. Following Audra Simpson, we situate settler time and its place in the Bakken region as fiction. Simpson writes that settler time is “the fiction of the presumed neutrality of time itself, demonstrating the dominance of the present by some over others, and the unequal power to define what matters, who matters, what pasts are alive and when they die” (2017, 5). Like the ever-­expanding carbon capitalism and settler colonialism that the right margin fantasizes, settler time represents events and conditions in place as they may be rendered into a waiting future always already imagined as a settler future (Rifkin 2017). In the Bakken, settler time establishes land not as relation but as that which is perpetually extractable, objectified, and passive, waiting only for the right time for commodification and improvement. We argue that tense is a vital component of settlement, especially the “future anterior” (or “future perfect,” per Elizabeth Povinelli 2011). This verb tense indicates something that is expected to happen before a specific time in the future (“it will have . . .”). The concept of “development,” for instance, assumes an accomplished event that will have been completed in the future: it is the promise toward which the present labors and for which the labors of the present are justified and endured (Hetherington 2016). As we and other authors explain, the future anterior fuels the cruel optimisms (Berlant 2011) that pervade the petrocultures of North Dakota and help sustain its normative forms. Indeed, as we explore in the book’s conclusion, nowhere is the play of tense more evident than in the promises attached to infrastructure (roads, pipelines, airports, housing) as that which will finally translate the volatility of an oil boom into a settled—­and settler—­future of prosperity and uninterrupted progress. As the spectral promises of infrastructure illustrate, boomtown narratives and aesthetics often fail to fully accomplish what they seek to represent, visualize, and form. We and the other authors argue that the boom is not yet, and will never be, settled. Settlement is never accomplished per se, for indeed the sites and subjects of the Bakken

Introduction 7

boom are always open for contention, change, and protest, despite the tidy reconciliations and renderings that suggest a final version of what happened or that project a normative vision of what is to come. This is at heart why we titled the volume Settling the Boom, as a reminder of the open, contested, and contentious nature of settlement. Almost a decade after oil’s price collapse halted most drilling in the heart of the Williston Basin (in late 2021 there are fewer than two dozen rigs in the six-­county region)4 that settling continues—­as does the need to unsettle the forceful narratives and visualities that propose to represent and respond to what happened. Settler Aesthetics and Settler Time What allowed for predominant agreements about what happened in the Bakken to settle? Or to ask this slightly differently through Elizabeth Povinelli’s provocation, “what happens when we ask the question of how can various modes of existence establish or maintain their normative force in a world?” (2016, 95). These agreements foreclose and contain normative settling of Williston and the region, including heteropatriarchy, settler colonial military and police forces, the desire for capital growth, petrocultures, and more (all of which align to make alternatives—­an otherwise as Povinelli puts it—­invisible in predominant narrated formations). More insidious than an aligned and overt conspiracy to reestablish settler family life in present-­day North Dakotan “America,” boomtown narratives and aesthetics mapped onto and reestablished these normative infrastructures iteratively as they extended their trajectory into the ever-­expanding future. As the chapters in the book illustrate, close analyses of Bakken social-­aesthetic formations expose the routes through which normative foreclosure occurs, and as such, can suggest or strengthen other temporalities, subjectivities, and places to current predominant formations. Of course, it is not our role to liberate these alternatives from subjugation, nor is liberation possible, as Povinelli cautions. She notes that such adjudications merely bind us more tightly to the frameworks that govern thought. Instead, drawing on her words, we seek “to understand [an alternative] as a way station for the emergence of something else” (15).

8 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

In white North Dakota, deep cultural and political commitments to settler colonial and heteronormative paternalism reside in heroic storytelling and familial legacies of European migration and land occupation. These stories assemble narratives and aesthetics of “the good life” in North Dakota around white supremacist, settlerist, capitalist, nationalist, and heteropaternal priorities and are socio-­spatial-­geologic in that they build structures and infrastructures around them. The settler colonial timeline seamlessly stitches U.S. frontier exploration to farming and resource extraction over multiple temporalities in the region (as Mary E. Thomas also shows in her chapter). Settler colonial stories from frontier days, for example, invariably sit side by side with contemporary energy displays in the region’s museums. Museums offer sedimented and sentimental spaces of and for local and regional celebration and embed in their stories and displays familiar affective structures through which presumed audiences (white, settler, straight, and cisgender) can relate their experiences to the region’s. For example, the Missouri–­Yellowstone Confluence Interpretive Center in the heart of the Bakken displays bottled oil as historical, geographic, and geological artifact in service to settlerist extraction (see Figure I.3). The website of the center boasts: “Permanent exhibits . . . explore the geography and geology of the area, its prehistoric life, and the impact of people arriving by Trails, Tracks, Rivers, and Roads, which is also the name of the exhibits area. Featured in [this exhibit] will be the Lewis and Clark journey, the fur trade era, Fort Buford, and the development of the modern-­day irrigation and energy industries.”5 Stories about the site and its subjects may claim to represent a history, but they repeat the settler myths of the land and earth as a frontier for its ever-­expanding settler temporalities. Settler time creates its frontier places through settler land grabs, militarization, sexual and gender violence, commodification of land and matter—­for extraction, whiteness, and settlerist familial formations. This “extractive view,” Macarena Gómez-­Barris writes, “sees territories as commodities, rendering land as for the taking, while also devalorizing the hidden worlds that form the nexus of human and nonhuman multiplicity” (2017, 5). Seeing is a perception that is learned through settler logics and values such as

Figure I.3. A museum display of bottled 1981 and 1951 oil at the Missouri–­ Yellowstone Confluence Interpretive Center in western North Dakota. Photograph by Mary E. Thomas.

10 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

these.6 Indigeneity is erased and made past—­“prehistoric” in the language of the interpretive center—­and the complexities of past–­present–­ future Indigenous temporalities and spatialities occluded (see TallBear 2019 as one guide to this complexity). Frontier stories beat within the “Bakken Booyah!,” a marketing theme used by the Williston Economic Development Office, to provide the aspirational pulse of its unfolding in settler time. Settler colonial tropes of strong and able-­bodied white men served as constant references in the region’s politics, workforce management, urban and regional planning, extraction practices, and media coverage, as several chapters of this book show. “Bakken Booyah!” engages the violent nationalist and masculinist infrastructures of oil and celebrates gleefully the profit in each. “Booyah” is a term of triumph, with an affective tone of masculine domination in your face. The term is often used in competitive sports and aligns closely with U.S. military cries like the Marines’ “ooh-­rah.” The saturation of U.S. military infrastructures in the region’s petroleum economies (see Figure I.4, which illustrates Halliburton’s presence) is no recent event, as the army’s role in settler colonization attests. Kai Bosworth’s chapter in this book examines the policing tactics of oil assemblages as North Dakota’s police and sheriff departments, and their national allies, brutally sought to repress and criminalize water protectors at Standing Rock. He astutely shows how the police drew on a long-­standing trope of settler “vulnerability” in the face of Indigenous threat to justify this militarized violence. As an aesthetic of economic development, “Bakken Booyah!” also iterates a renewed celebratory and gloating sensibility of the Bakken’s unique position as a frontier, as one of the few places in the United States at the time of the Great Recession to have jobs and sites for capital investment, both of prime interest for the Economic Development Office as it recruited new businesses to the city of Williston. Morgan Adamson interrogates in her chapter how these sentiments played into the aesthetics of “the last great place for opportunity” urban messaging in Williston. As Adamson and Thomas both insist in their chapters, the resource frontier and its urban aspirations are firmly grounded in hopes that

Introduction 11

Figure I.4. A Halliburton corporate housing structure built from containers in the city of Williston. Photograph by Mary E. Thomas.

the patriarchal family formation’s enduring anchoring will assure a growing city. Boomtown depictions across an array of media centered on conservative and modest white male farmers, whose weathered faces showed the years of hard work “taming” the prairie and tied them to the next generation of North Dakota patriarchs who were both their children as well as newcomers like roughneck oil workers, with their oil-­and dirt-­smeared faces. Chapters by Jessica Lehman and Bruce Braun and by Thomas S. Davis consider the figure of the masculine oil worker whose apparent determination to find his own fortunes and party hard while doing so was often glorified, yet a constant source of anxiety for civic leaders. The boomtown’s emphasis on turning oil workers into family men who will build a settled town shows that the constant, central reference point for affective structures of the Bakken oil boom steadily remained heteromasculine and white settlerist,

12 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

encompassing nationalist and capitalist commitments (themes that find further analysis in chapters by Adamson and Thomas). Thus, at a time of financial upheaval during the Great Recession, after years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, settler colonial icons from the American prairie and its “oil frontier” framed past, present, and future events, arranging existence and subjugating other possibilities along the way. Settler time also rests squarely on the artifacts of extraction technology in the region. The common story of the most recent oil play begins with two key technological innovations—­horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”)—­that catapulted the Bakken into prominence as a major global oil and gas producer after decades playing a very minor role. As we discuss, horizontal drilling allowed oil companies to maneuver along the strata, dramatically increasing the pay zone of the play. In turn, fracking enabled the oil previously trapped in the poorly connected pores of the petroleum system to migrate to the well.7 In a fashion similar to the population graphs discussed earlier, fracking technology and its potential to unlock tight oil also extends time at the right margin, as horizons for future extraction are projected ever deeper into the stratigraphy (see Figure I.5). Represented in ubiquitous diagrams of the region’s stratigraphy—­massive simplifications of the Earth’s geological complexity—­the Bakken formation presented to investors and civic leaders the fantasy of an ever-­expanding horizon for capital, not limited just to a thin stratum buried almost two miles underground but ever more oil trapped further below. As Bruce Braun argues in his chapter, the extension and deepening of settler and capitalist time in the Bakken was often cruel and violent to workers who migrated to the region. The combination of a stubborn geological formation, new technologies, and the demand to speed up production by highly leveraged oil companies resulted in a deadly expenditure of labor as workers displaced by the Great Recession were thrown into largely unregulated workspaces.8 Rather than understand workplace injuries and deaths as extraordinary, “out of time” aberrations, Braun instead reveals its continuity with the corporeal violences of waged labor in advanced capitalism, even as the oil industry naturalized and effaced worker deaths through a rhetoric of oilfield work as

Figure I.5. A partial stratigraphy of North Dakota exhibited at the Pioneer Museum of McKenzie County, in Watford City, North Dakota. The section of the stratigraphy, including the Lodgepole, Bakken, and Three Forks Formations, lies at the division between the Mississippian and Devonian eras. Photograph by Mary E. Thomas.

14 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

“inherently” dangerous, sheltering the violence of oilfield work in the Bakken—­and wage labor in general—­from critique. Earlier, more modest efforts to extract fossil fuels in the region thus also frame “Bakken Booyah!” settler infrastructures and extractive views. Indeed, the story of an extraordinary event unfolding in staid, remote northwestern North Dakota hides the fact that oil exploration is at least a century old in North Dakota. Success in drilling only came in the 1950s, however. A small plaque near Tioga, in Williams County, now marks the location where, in 1951, the Clarence Iverson No. 1 well was sunk and hit a profitable reserve (it produced 585,000 barrels between 1951 and 1980). At the time, the recovered oil and gas source was Madison Limestone (early–­middle Mississippian) at a depth of around 8,400 feet. But the region’s productivity in the 1950s and 1960s was limited; as these conventional wells lost productivity, and as about half of all new wells came up dry, the cost of new discovery and development efforts did not match the prospects of a profitable return (see Shemorry 1991 for an early oil and gas history of the Williston Basin; also Bluemle 2001). Until the early 1980s, the steady influence of oil in the northwestern corner of the state took a backseat to agriculture. Small derrick pumps sparsely spotted the prairie landscape, pumping steadfastly, but slowly, around the grain and lentil fields. That scenario changed when high oil prices spurred by OPEC’s price inflation in the 1970s and early 1980s made oil exploration profitable again, and new discoveries led to increased production. Williams County and its neighbors again became flush with oil investment. In a few short years, the number of rigs operating in the Williston Basin more than quadrupled, peaking in 1980 at 119. That year, the State of North Dakota brought in $68.5 million on oil and gas leases on public land—­an increase of 1,000 percent over four years. While the production peak in 1984 was modest by today’s standards, 150,000 barrels per day in the state marked the height of a pronounced, through brief, oil boom.9 These earlier oil plays established not only regional narratives and aesthetics for the Bakken boom but literally landscaped expectations through temporality and tense. The mapped oil appears just waiting to be freed sometime at

Introduction 15

the right margin; note how Figure I.5 illustrates the aspirational settler time of production (also Yusoff 2017). (Un)grounding the Bakken’s Settlement To U.S. settlers, nothing seems less murky and more timeless than the ground beneath their feet, understood as property, territory, and resource. Yet the firmness of this ground is itself a settler fiction. In this section we seek to explain how the boom writes settler colonial temporalities and territorialities into the land and earth, materializing a specific settler geosocial arrangement from within the multiplicity of geological life (also Yusoff 2018). The idea of a “geosocial formation” as imagined by Nigel Clark and Kathryn Yusoff helps us to think about how social-­geographic arrangements are materialized in and through the land (air, water, and earth) and its subtending strata. Geosocial formations, they write, are “richly layered”: they include prior manifestations and, despite their fixed appearance, wrap “unactualized” possibilities within them (Clark and Yusoff 2017, 6). What is known as the “Bakken Formation” is such a geosocial formation. It carries the name of a settler (after Henry Bakken) and is narrated within petroleum geology—­ a powerful but partial way of sensing, knowing, and simplifying the earth’s forces and affordances—­as a relatively narrow rock layer holding billions of barrels of oil in deep, impermeable shale.10 The layer is mostly located two miles below the surface of northwestern North Dakota, extending into what settlers have territorialized as eastern Montana, southwestern Manitoba, and southeastern Saskatchewan.11 Stratigraphically, it lies near the bottom of the Williston Basin (Figure I.6), a circular depression of sedimentary rock that began its subsidence almost five hundred million years ago (the Bakken is not contiguous within the entire Williston Basin, but is a layer within part of its center area). As told by geologists, the Bakken Formation began at the turn of the late Devonian and early Mississippian periods, about 350–­400 million years ago, when the region was much closer to the equator and covered with shallow seas. This warm, lively ecosystem is understood to have been the site for the slow accumulation of silt, clay, sand, limestone, and organic matter that would, after immense heat and

Figure I.6. The Williston Basin, in a map from the North Dakota Museum in Bismarck, North Dakota. Photograph by Mary E. Thomas.

Introduction 17

pressure from the weight of subsequent deposition, structure the Bakken’s shale layer between two limestone layers. The shale encased the rich organic matter of the day—­that is, the life that eventually became fossilized as oil and natural gas—­into small pockets within it. Over hundreds of millions of years, tectonic processes would carry the submerged material to the northern latitudes. The very notion of fossilized matter as resource reaches into these sedimented spatiotemporalities to build settler-­nationalist “hopeful futures”: an oil resource is, after all, fossilized life imagined and remade as present and future value. Moreover, settling the boom through an “extractive view” is a process intent on situating and fixing the dynamic movements of rock, fossil, and land as “American” (or Canadian) through its settler colonial territorialization. Today, mineral rights and liberal recognition politics (Coulthard 2014) refuse to situate claims to land and resources except through settler colonial law, property, and ownership. Not to mention that a settler farmer’s name identifies the strata, familiarizing the geosocial formation and rendering the settler “indigenous” to the region (also Tuck and Yang 2012). Arrangements of life and subjectivity in the Bakken, we argue, are contingent on the particulars of rock (Yusoff 2017; also Thomas and Yusoff 2017) and the extraction technologies developed for it (Braun 2019). Indeed, at the outset of the boom, fracking provided powerful messaging around the availability of a geotechnological fix for an anxious settler nation wondering if fantasies of a promised, assured future could be believed and realized during the Great Recession. Despite the volume of oil in the Bakken reserves, prior to surveying and predictive capacities to locate the oil and technological advancements to extract it, they remained out of reach for extensive production, too expensive to extract given the formation’s depth and impermeability and the region’s remote location distant from pipelines, ports, and refineries—­ that is, until surging crude oil prices attracted investment beginning in 2007–­8.12 The Bakken became profitable to exploit only after numerous conditions were met: the land was fabricated by the settler state as unburdened by Indigenous claims; rapidly rising oil prices approached or surpassed the high costs of extraction and transportation to market;

18 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

improved oilfield technologies, developed in part through Department of Energy research, increased the productivity of individual wells or promised to do so; ample labor power was “freed” by the Great Recession to meet the demanding requirements of extractive industries, their supply chains, and the provision of local service and housing; and finally, surplus capital frozen during the Great Recession could see the Bakken as a safe place to land. As these geographic–­geologic–­social–­economic conditions consolidated, the boom was on, and North Dakota rapidly ascended to the status of one of the leading oil-­producing states in the country, second only to Texas. Today, more than fifteen thousand wells pump 1.25 million barrels of oil every day.13 Yet, despite the certainty and simplicity of stratigraphical representation (again, see Figure I.5), freeing oil is neither easy nor reliable. And settler petrofutures are not assured. Oil extraction in the Bakken involves multiple stages to achieve the monumental feat of releasing oil from the tight shale formation and bringing it two miles to the surface. Workers must level the ground, then transport tons of clinker (another regionally sourced rock) to provide a firm pad on which the rigs, and eventually pumps, will be set.14 Given the plentiful regional supply of clinker, a ubiquitous red color mats the landscape in the oil region in square and rectangular patches (it is also used on roads). Only after the red clinker is mined, made into roads, transported to the extraction site, and leveled into pads can the massive drilling rig be transported and set up. Hundreds of workers, including truck drivers, assemblers, roughneck workers, and technicians, are required to prep, dig, and frack each well and then to service it and haul the oil throughout production. A crucial aspect to the geosocial formation of the Bakken is the massive influx of a migrant workforce and its extractive relation to the land and earth through laboring. After drilling down to the oil-­bearing layer, workers use horizontal drilling technologies to extend the well’s vertical bore hole laterally for an additional distance, sometimes adding a further two miles to the well. Horizontal drilling, achieved by moving the motor driving the drill directly behind the drill head, dramatically increased the pay zone for each well from a few dozen feet (the maximum vertical thickness of

Introduction 19

the middle rock layer) to as much as two miles. After drilling is complete, an oil service company arrives to frack, a process that involves lowering charges into the well to create small fractures in the oil-­bearing rock. High pressure water filled by proppants (e.g., frack sand, ceramic pellets) and potentially containing hundreds of chemicals extend and widen the cracks made by the charges.15 Between one and five million gallons of “high-­quality” water is required to frack each well in the Bakken (see Figure I.7 and the snaking water hoses transporting water).16 In a semiarid climate where the agricultural demand for water is high in summer months, the delivery of water is no small feat, for the local ecology or for production. The water must be relatively clean, without mud or high levels of salt, for the chemicals to react effectively in the fracking process. After the water carries the proppants to the fractures, the proppants remain behind as the water is pumped out, creating an issue of wastewater disposal. Highly saline water that is naturally present in the rock is also released from the strata, while naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM) in the flowback and toxic metals released from the fracked formation add additional expense and danger to the long-­term health of the land and its creatures, including people. Although filter socks are used to collect these materials, wastewater must be collected and evaporated in ponds to separate out the impurities or injected into deep wastewater disposal wells. Wastewater spills have resulted in some of the most devastating long-­term environmental damage in the region.17 The high cost of properly disposing of contaminated materials (the only disposal sites for socks with NORM were out of state) led to illegal dumping (it’s impossible to know how much). In a vast area with a small population and little oversight, it is all too easy to toss the frack socks without notice, and the fines are pittance in a boom (according to Dawson 2014, the MacKenzie landfill in Watford City charged one thousand dollars when a hauler tried to sneak a sock in with other refuse).18 Socks turned up in city trash cans, the landfill, dumped on Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) Nation lands at the heart of the Williston Basin, and in roadside ditches. That the boom came to take its unique geosocial form is thus in part a result of regulatory capture, which allowed oil companies to operate with relative impunity.

20 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

Figure I.7. Drilling and fracking materials with trucks loading these materials to transport to fracking sites. Large hoses in the foreground and to the left of the structures carry water from the foreground, and the clinker grounds the pad. Each well requires around two thousand trucking events to prepare the pad, carry out the fracking operations, and begin production. Photograph by Mary E. Thomas.

As should now be evident, shale oil plays give rise to unique spatiotemporal and environmental dynamics not seen in conventional oil wells, and these dynamics play out differently between places and jurisdictions. These unique dynamics extend to the time of production. Despite popular representations, oil does not simply exist in a pool below ground, a large reserve to pump up to the surface; it is found in the pores of rock. If the oil is under pressure and the rock is permeable (i.e., the pores are connected), oil will flow relatively freely to a bore hole. But shale is notoriously impermeable and its oil expensive to extract; it must be made permeable and kept permeable to maintain production, a tremendous, ongoing challenge. Fracked oil plays are remarkably short-­lived, unless the shale is fracked again. Wells in the Bakken, and indeed in other shale plays like the Permian Basin in Texas, typically show steep drops in productivity after just three years, sometimes falling after only one year or less. In the early years of the boom, this led

Introduction 21

to a drilling treadmill and an imperative to speed up the drilling process, with its aforementioned deadly effects. More recently, the petroleum industry has developed new strategies to counterbalance these drops, so that production levels and revenue can be sustained, including designing new drilling rigs that crawl on hydraulic tentacles, allowing denser well spacing and vastly reducing the time spent dismantling and moving drilling rigs from one pad to another. With this so-­called Octopus technology, the drilling, fracking, and refracking can be completed much more quickly, on less land, and with fewer costs. Pads have been reduced in size from more than three acres for one well to just one acre per well. However, while the Octopus reduces production time, and thus production costs, the stubbornness of the shale still results in declining output in a short time frame. And “reserves” are rarely what they appear to be. An “estimated ultimate recovery,” or EUR, projects the quality of oil and gas that will result from a well, including rates of decline. The amount of oil predicted in shale is not the same as the amount that can be extracted, nor are predictions all that reliable. As one oil executive stated in a 2019 Wall Street Journal report (Olson, Elliott, and Matthews 2019), “It’s not a science.” Rather, he said, “It’s more of an art.” The art seems to be more financial than geologic. EURs are used for raising capital, especially after oil prices fell in 2014, as a way to maintain investor interest in shale. Often oil and fracking companies choose wells that are atypically productive for promotion and extrapolate from there to entice investment to a regional play (Olson, Elliott, and Matthews 2019). Shale oil is literally fabricated as profitable, yet often fails in time to yield promised returns on investment. The petroleum industry’s investment in and production of shale oil requires both the temporal fictions and cruel optimisms of settler colonialism and a spatial-­geologic simplification of what lies beneath our feet. Settler fantasies about time and temporality—­about what could be extracted in the future—­propel financial, geologic, and social infrastructures to assemble now. Anxious Settler Time We understand settlerist anxiety around the city of Williston’s future as a symptom of the right margin—­and embedded in that anxiety is the

22 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

multitemporal and ragged circumstance of uneven and turbulent resource development and a declining agricultural economy under conditions of settler fantasies where progress should be ensured but is rarely actualized as imagined. This volume foregrounds the argument that much of the anxiety condensed on perceived social and cultural change as threats to settler colonial affective structures. As Williston frequently made the national headlines starting around 2010, stories about boomtown chaos, fast money, and moral decline stoked public fascination—­and local fears—­about something sensational happening, made especially stunning since the stories were situated in what the rest of the country largely considered to be staid, remote, and climatically extreme North Dakota. At the time of the Great Recession, when the country was awash in debt, unemployment, and anxiety, the Bakken came to represent hope for national energy independence, mass employment, and technology innovation that would fix panics about peak oil and more. At the height of the boom, especially between 2011 and 2014, national and global media and its consumers were enthralled by tales from the wild Bakken oil frontier. “Double Your Salary in the Middle of Nowhere, North Dakota,” CNN promised in September 2011. One jobs services placement manager in Williston told us that the day after that story was published, people started arriving by the hundreds, some by the Amtrak train, people who had no local contacts, and no transportation or lodging plans before they arrived at the station. A temporary jobs agency opened a storefront just next door. Many men and women who arrived at the Bakken in the morning could indeed be employed by day’s end, in a wide range of jobs. Finding housing was another matter: exorbitant rents and housing shortages forced many to sleep in their cars and pickups, if they had one. Luckier ones had driven into the state with an RV and just had to find a place to park—­no easy feat as towns and their outlying areas were quickly filled with migrants’ vehicles. The best jobs, like working on a rig or laying pipe, often came with housing—­a room or trailer in a labor camp (often called a “man camp”), an assemblage of fast housing provided by companies specializing in rapid movement of people and infrastructures, like Halliburton (as seen in Figure I.4),

Introduction 23

but these were often rudimentary and at times unsafe. Some housing came to Williston from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other housing was repurposed Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers, previously used in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, carrying with them toxins like formaldehyde from their substandard construction (Science History Institute 2015). The ubiquity of men sleeping in vehicles on the small city’s streets fueled anxiety about unsettled migrants. “I Worked in a Strip Club in a North Dakota Fracking Boomtown,” Laura Gottesdiener (2014) wrote, and “when I arrived for my first shift as a cocktail waitress, . . . I didn’t expect a 25-­year-­old man to get beaten to death outside the joint.” Media coverage frequently portrayed boomtowns through alarmist, apocalyptic, and even lurid terms: murder and corruption, out-­of-­control development, inadequate infrastructure, gas flaring lighting up the night sky for miles in every direction and spewing wasted carbon and pollutants into the atmosphere, inadequate and expensive housing, sprawling man camps and trailers parked on city streets, bar fights and strip clubs, explosive tankers and deadly rigs, and the disruption of a rural idyll.19 The media also drew sharp focus on the social “ills” of the boom as atypical to the “prior” Williston (though one club, Whispers, preexisted the boom years), highlighting the isolation and loneliness of workers, the prevalence of drug use to manage outrageous demands on labor, subsequent addiction struggles and inadequate mental health services in overwhelmed towns, alarming rates of violence against Native women in particular, efforts of good Samaritans to serve so many unmet needs of care, and fears of disruption and random violence held by longtime white residents of the region (see Simpson 2016 on how concern for violence against Native women connects to whiteness; also Simpson 2017, Deer 2015). Media fascination with the Bakken was often organized around frontier aesthetics and petrocultures on wild display, a topic taken up in the chapter by Lehman and Braun. With constant references to histories of gold mining in South Dakota’s Black Hills, more than three hundred miles to the south, the Bakken was frequently portrayed as a “modern day gold rush,” with a rough and tumble masculine nature directly

24 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

linked to the resource, oil, and to the violence of its extraction. These representations were not wrong, but they weren’t exactly right either. Scholars note that resource frontiers often involve the suspension of social, political, and moral norms, and that this suspension is in part what creates conditions of possibility for the creation and capture of resource rents. Yet, as Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts note, “It is one thing to take account of the association between oil and violence, but quite another to chart the complex traffic between the two. The challenge is to acknowledge the violence . . . and yet to not presume that violence inheres in the commodity (a sort of commodity determinism)” (2015, 16). As Watts (2015) explains further, if frontiers are unruly, violent spaces, it may not be due to the nature of the commodity or, for that matter, the character of individuals drawn to extractive frontiers, but instead related to processes of speculation, financialization, and extractive forms of enclosure and dispossession that disrupt and displace, and in which the state plays a crucial role. In other words, frontiers are not discrete places but part of larger assemblages, including media landscapes that in the case of the Bakken, performatively reinforce frontier stereotypes. Davis provides an excellent reading of one image of an iconic frontier oilman in his chapter, and what is required to sustain its visual and narrative heft. We also align with Watts and others who refuse to understand frontiers either through romantic tropes of regeneration (à la Frederick Turner) or as extraordinary spaces of spectacularized violence separate from the violences of everyday life. Bosworth’s understanding of the police response to Standing Rock in his chapter likewise disturbs the notion of anything unusual going on in how the oil security apparatus attacked Indigenous water protectors, since settler colonialism has always situated settler subjectivity as vulnerable in order to justify horrific state and corporate violence. The boom’s compounding stories—­the hundreds of accounts published and disseminated regionally, nationally, and worldwide—­silenced many other perspectives and subjects (Davis in his chapter provides examples from artist Cannupa Hanska Luger and the Winter Count Collective). But equally as important, in constructing a “before,” they

Introduction 25

buttressed an idealized prior-­to-­the-­boom settler existence in North Dakota as “common sense.” As a recent retelling put it, the boom “swept through like a twisting dust devil, shattering the rural innocence of a region known for inhospitable winters and long summer days perfect for growing crops” (Brown 2021). Against the language of “aberration,” we argue that while oil plays like the Bakken certainly introduce numerous novel elements, they do so within contexts that are already suffused with history and politics, becoming yet another occasion within settler colonial sites in which settlement and its form are anxiously placed in question. Boomtime stories were remarkable for their construction of an idyllic past: it was as if violence against women and girls (especially Native women and girls), treaty infractions, drug and alcohol addiction, poverty, homelessness, loneliness, and the like never existed before the boom introduced them at a specific moment in time. As if the region was not named by settlers after Indigenous peoples, marking the violent dispossession required for ongoing colonization and the indigenization of white settlers as “North Dakotans” (see Tuck and Gaztambide-­ Fernández, 2013), or as if the Dakotas have not been the site of ongoing political struggles by its Indigenous nations, from the historical and current struggles of the Oceti Sakowin, to the Three Affiliated Tribes of the MHA Nation (see Estes 2019). And as if the region had not seen waves of investment and disinvestment and countless promises of future prosperity that never arrived as advertised, whether based on agrarian development or on oil, as during the 1950s and 1980s.20 Even same-­sex and queer desire was depicted as imported, or as incited by an unsettled situation and chaotic opportunism, as indicated in the documentary film The Overnighters. The enduring settlerist and heteropaternal myths of North Dakota “culture” held steady the division between before and after, from a perspective that silences the violent structures propagating the culture itself (see Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013 on settler colonialism’s heteropaternalism). While normative accounts of oil booms speculate that a no-­return, one-­way march into a future world is unfolding, these stories ride on the temporal and spatial arrangements of heterosexist settler colonialism. That Williston saw the prevalence

26 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

of white hypermasculinity, the widely operating trade in sex and drugs, the use of stimulants by workers to fuel their twenty-­hour shifts, the ecological impacts of fracking on prairie landscapes, and thousands of trucks kicking up tons of dust around the region, we argue, is consistent with the longue durée of settler, carbon capitalism rather than an aberration in time and place. Striking about boomtown narratives of petrocultures out of control was what was left out of such stories. Few accounts bothered to explore the West African migrants who came to North Dakota from Seattle and found work stocking grocery shelves or working as flaggers on highway construction sites,21 the quotidian queer life and love persistently connecting amid the exaggerated performance of hyperheteromasculinity, the boredom of most workers who did not visit the strip clubs and who were far removed from their familiar lives and homes, or the Indigenous resistance movements demanding accountability for increases in violence against Native women and girls and toxic dumping on the lands of the MHA Nation. Again, our point is not to correct these accounts, to provide the “true” story of the boom in its aftermath. Indeed, even the most mundane facts of the boom are not as transparent as they appear. Perhaps most infamously, population estimates during the boom were wildly divergent, due in part to the temporary and mobile nature of the migrant workforce and the infrastructure that housed them, leading Williston planners to use sewage flows to produce rough estimates of the city’s population, despite many housing units (RVs, cars) not being hooked up to municipal services and many workers spending more than sixteen hours per day at drill sites or on the road. Boomtown stories require and are built on an abiding epistemic murk. The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil By resisting the grander scale of petrocultures writ large, or the idea that this remote corner of North Dakota should be read as merely symptomatic of larger forces shaping carbon capitalism, we can work against the settler logics of temporality that guide assumptions about boom–­ bust/disruption–­settled cycles of resource extraction. The persistence

Introduction 27

of the normative is not inevitable or pure, after all, and its reconsolidation over time does not happen through an uncontested unfolding or unchallenged triumph. How and why exactly do normative accounts foreclose or prohibit these other possibilities? By focusing on this question, and the specificities of a site, we remain committed to placing a wedge in the inevitabilities of carbon capitalism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. Our project differs in its approach from that of the emerging field of “resource aesthetics,” which seeks to attend to the “repertoire of aesthetic figuration indispensable to the generation and deployment of energy as hegemonic resource” (Bellamy, O’Driscoll, and Simpson 2016, n.p.). While we agree that the centrality of oil in everyday life is maintained in part through aesthetic ideologies in which oil-­as-­form recedes from view—­an important and urgent argument in an age of accelerating climate change—­our interest is to explore, within the context of one resource boom, how aesthetics plays a key role in efforts to settle the social and economic formations that congeal in and through oil development, even as the disparate energies that settlement seeks to contain always exceed the narrative and normative forms proffered and where the final arrival of a settled future is always deferred. In these stories oil does not recede to the background; it is, rather, foregrounded and celebrated. We and the other chapter authors in this volume insist that amid these protean worlds other arrangements of existence are already present, even if efforts to settle Williston’s oil cultures push them into the shadows. These arrangements exist, extinguish, thrive, persevere (Povinelli 2011). While oil certainly saturates society, as the petrocultures literature rightly insists, we argue that the form that petrocultures take, even at the site of extraction, is neither determined by the resource nor a fait accompli. Any specific attempt to settle is the result of aesthetic and political work that must be continuously performed and that must continuously contend with, rather than abstract from, specific sites, subjects, and lands. The following chapters all suggest that the Bakken boom exists as such only within the confines of its ongoing staging, by the bracketing of what can and should “belong” to it. Questions guiding the authors’

28 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

approaches include who and what spin boomtown visual and narrative stories, for whose benefit, through whose suffering, and how these positionalities and priorities silence and even deaden other threads, lives, struggles, and politics. What prior sentiments, aesthetics, infrastructures, and relations necessarily gird an oil boom’s telling? What geosocial subjects and natures can possibly exist or be legible within the confines of the boom’s telling, and which endure beyond those epistemologies and ontologies? And most important, what is at stake in bringing another way of “seeing” the “acoustic mess” of settlement (Simpson 2016, para 3)—­those subjects, temporalities, and spatialities that persist despite the lack of normative heft or political expediency to tamp them into settlement? What relations might be opened up that are not tied to the deathly embrace of fossil fuels, that enable an understanding of land, subjects, and sites as relational and not resource, that explore and elaborate possibilities for other arrangements of existence from within these cramped spaces of extractive zones and their geologic, anti-­Indigenous, racist, and sexist violences? Charting and questioning the stories we all gathered around the boom builds on a growing energy humanities literature that emphasizes these intimate relations between energy and culture, although the chapters take this in different directions. Recent work explores the ways that fossil fuels shape sensibilities, institutions, visuality, and subjectivity in the wider culture (e.g., Wilson, Carlson, and Szeman 2017) and examines how fossil fuels constitute particular ways of life in late liberalism at the scale of both the individual and the nation (see Huber 2015). In contrast, we focus on how settler colonial ways of life in a particular place are shaped and ordered during an oil boom. The ordering of geosocial formations in the Bakken draws on settler and capitalist temporalities promising that the future holds great potential for growth, happiness, and national comfort. Any present disorder or discomfort, in contrast, represents the bootstrap efforts so pervasively required in liberalism and late liberalism. As this introduction has argued, we are not very interested in how resource frontiers disrupt normal life per se; rather, we ask how resource frontiers come to be settled through all-­too-­ familiar narratives and affective structures of the normal.



Introduction 29

In chapter 1, “The Settler Heteropatriarchy of Boomtown, USA,” Mary E. Thomas illustrates how the city of Williston utilized and reiterated layered sexual–­social sentimentalities within the white settler colonial formations of resource extraction. She presents examples of the pervasive heteropaternal, white family formations at the heart of tourism, city planning, and economic development. Thomas also claims that the region’s nineteenth-­century military forts are predominantly placed throughout city signage and tourist materials to establish the contemporary relevance of frontier logics to city expansion. The forts, she argues, violently “secured” the future for settlers and continue to consolidate settlerist identity as rightful to the land now. City development officers can then relay the “past” into the groundwork for the “present” oil boom—­in effect, Thomas suggests, perpetually quelling Indigeneity in service to expansive settlement. As the boom years brought a rapid influx of primarily male labor, Thomas shows that the city also worked to entice white, straight women to town, to settle the men into family life and to stabilize uncertain urban futures. Through suburban development, Williston expanded its boundaries and domain, and as such extended settler colonial governance. At the same time, the city prioritizes growth through “her” economies like retail to ensure that women/mothers would relocate to Williston and ensure permanence. Thomas’s emphasis throughout the chapter is to highlight the undergirding anxieties driving these settler colonial structures: homosexual and homosocial men without women. Her goal is to expose the aesthetics and narratives of heteropatriarchy as it propels settler colonialism (and vice versa) into an ever-­opening future. In his chapter, “Bakken Aesthetics: Art and Attachment in the Era of Tough Oil,” Thomas S. Davis focuses on the aesthetic forms that connect extraction techniques, oil’s materiality, and masculine white oil workers to enduring ideas of freedom and settler colonial American futures. He examines critical realist documentary films about the Bakken, in particular those representing oil worker-­migrants through “typical” character narrative arcs (after Georg Lukács). Through his analysis of two films, Sweet Crude Man Camp and White Earth, Davis explores this arc from present hardship to future redemption. With Sweet Crude

30 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

Man Camp, Davis traces the hardships of migrants in the Bakken (especially those living in cars or cramped trailers) through the narratives that working through the boom would lead to eventual consolidation of good living: permanence, economic stability, success. The characters’ narratives lean on the promises of oil extraction and settler colonialism to ensure these arcs’ accomplished endings—­in the future. Similar to Povinelli’s social tense, “that which will have been” includes the necessary struggles that, in hindsight, will have been worth it. As Davis points out, however, that future never arrives. In White Earth, the film’s protagonists are children, and Davis argues that their youth is considered viable because of the boom itself; they have a future because of oil. The significance of the boom’s disruption of childhood is beside the point in Davis’s argument, because the pervasive reality of oil presented by the film conditions, establishes, and ensures the ever-­present “horizon of oil.” Davis provides us with other imaginaries than these, through the activism and artwork of the Winter Count Collective and Cannupa Hanska Luger (especially his installation This Is Not a Snake). Davis turns to the Winter Count’s documentary We Are in Crisis, which uses drone camera work by its filmmakers to tell a different story of oil. With a voiceover by Luger, who was raised on Standing Rock Reservation, Davis argues that the film orients the place and time of oil away from failures to provide settled futures; We Are in Crisis refuses attachments to oil and instead places those with/in the land. Morgan Adamson similarly attends to the cultural attachments to oil extraction in chapter 3, “Anthropocene Realism: Genres of ‘Energy Independence,’” drawing out how the city of Williston established affective attachments to oil’s future through its campaign “Williston, the last great place for opportunity!” She argues that a genre of the “good life” structures an affective experience that fossil fuel extraction is literally the last hope for sustaining an American well-­being and prosperity. She refers to this genre as “Anthropocene realism.” Fracking technologies offer the hope that energy independence in the United States will ensure this good life’s enduring promise. At the time of the Great Recession, Adamson shows, oil reestablishes its domain as real wealth

Introduction 31

even at the same time as climate change becomes irrefutable. Adamson departs from understanding fossil fuel attachments as climate change denial and insists that Anthropocene realism indicates a significant shift in how petrocultures have been understood previously: despite what we “know” of oil’s deadly affects, the only way to a viable future is through oil. The temporal contradictions inherent in these alternative futures (fossil fuels are killing us / the only way to ensure future life is through fossil fuels) are obvious. Adamson skillfully explores the routes through which Williston navigates this contradiction in its campaign. Through a persistent focus on “reproductive futurity,” a concept she borrows from Lee Edelman (2004), she emphasizes Williston’s rendition of the good life as what she refers to as the “embalmed culture” referenced throughout the campaign: white babies, suburban structures, and the renewal of white settler colonial America. Any other future would be unimaginable to Williston’s marketers, Adamson claims—­even the end of the world itself. In chapter 4, “Crisis Ordinariness: The Bakken Boom in Late Capitalism,” Bruce Braun examines how framing of the boom as “extraordinary” hides everyday processes of neoliberal capitalism that shape life in the oil fields. Using the example of exceptionally high rates of worker death and injury in the Bakken as a point of departure, he shows that the violences enacted on worker bodies are consistent with, rather than a departure from, the experience of laborers across the country. What makes the Bakken unique—­singular, in his language—­is that while elsewhere precarity gives rise to what Lauren Berlant terms “slow death,” in the oil fields worker precarity, understood here as the self-­ management of risk, meets up with the contradictions of oilfield finance and the unique geology of shale oil to tip what is elsewhere a biopolitics of managed abandonment that keeps the worker “alive, if just barely,” into a necropolitics of rapid and often gruesome death. The latter, Braun insists, is merely the far end of the spectrum of neoliberal biopolitics in the United States today, such that there is a fundamental indistinction between biopolitics and necropolitics. It is precisely the failure to recognize this indistinction, enabled by the language of the “extraordinary,”

32 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

that allows the underlying conditions of neoliberal capitalism to remain unchallenged, despite the physical toll enacted on many of its participants. Notably, in making his argument, Braun insists on the need to take the materiality of the geological formation and the technological apparatuses required to extract oil seriously as a key part of the story, without falling into a geological or technological determinism. Equally as important, his chapter reveals the extension and deepening of settler society in North Dakota to be predicated not only on white supremacy and heteropatriarchy but also on the expendability of the worker. In chapter 5, “On the Dark Side of the Boom: Narratives of Social Crisis and Liberal Arts of Governance,” Jessica Lehman and Bruce Braun turn to the proliferation of “dark side” narratives about the boom, as found in media reports and among local residents, in order to examine how violence and “moral disorder” were rendered legible and governable in the Bakken. As they explain, these narratives often achieved their force through juxtaposition with an assumed “rural idyll” that preceded the boom, naturalizing a “moral” agrarian settler society threatened by the immorality of the oil boom. Equally as important, in their focus on certain practices (i.e., sex work, bar fights), “dark side” narratives often rendered other forms of violence illegible, including violence against Indigenous women and violence enacted on worker bodies. These narratives, they argue, were important for how bodies, practices, and social relations came to be known and governed in particular ways. They conclude that the strategies of liberal government that defined, acknowledged, and addressed the dark side of the boom in North Dakota were thus not merely responses to the arrival of oil culture in North Dakota but were constitutive of the form that oil culture took in the state, shaping its forms of sociality and imaginaries of life, labor, and energy, including visions for the future for Williston and its surrounds, albeit in ways that were ambivalent, provisional, and open to contestation. The geosocial and aesthetic formations of the Bakken are frequently violent and constraining, especially for those who are marked inadmissible to that which protects and secures normative settler subjects and lives. Indeed, to refuse the story of the Bakken as a narrative of disorder

Introduction 33

and order is precisely to attend to violences of normative orderings, to attend to what gets closed down and how this occurs. In chapter 6, “The Dakota Access Pipeline Struggle: Vulnerability, Security, and Settler Colonialism in the Oil Assemblage,” Kai Bosworth examines the police response at Standing Rock as water protectors sought to stop construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Bosworth explains how security forces (including local police and sheriffs) were positioned as vulnerable to the so-­called violence of water protectors, who were horrifically abused, beaten, and jailed as they fought for land, treaty rights, and sovereignty. The futures held out as respectable, profitable, and settled in the Bakken boom pivoted on the protection not just of the state police forces but of white families, children, and women (with resonance to similar arguments in all of the chapters). Bosworth shows that the settler police force response at Standing Rock is another aspect of the oil assemblage; securitizing oil is a massive, ongoing enterprise of the petroleum industry. The vulnerability of the oil infrastructure is a rationale behind the security forces’ actions. Bosworth’s contribution hinges on the aesthetics of vulnerability (rather than the pipeline infrastructure) to emphasize how the oil industry monopolizes risk: for capital, for whiteness. State and white vulnerability precludes the water protectors and Native people who come to be represented uniformly by security forces and the oil industry as threats. Bosworth’s argument suggests that resistant claims to be vulnerable in the face of this monopoly may backfire from within a state and corporate system than cannot recognize vulnerability except through whiteness and colonial control. Settling the Boom concludes with a brief discussion of infrastructure and the role it plays in tensing settler colonialism. At a moment when the infrastructures of oil—­material, aesthetic, affective—­set up conditions for an expanding future for the settler nation, we call into doubt the stability of infrastructure to deliver on any steady promises. By bringing settler time and tense to the imaginaries of infrastructure, we end close to where we begin the volume, with the cruel optimisms framing the Bakken Booyah.

34 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun

Notes 1. The director put this phrase, including the emphasized words and the exclamation point, on a PowerPoint presentation he used for an investment presentation in Scottsdale, Arizona, on April 10, 2014, that was downloaded from the Williston Economic Development Office website on April 29, 2014, by Mary E. Thomas. The Williston “region” is defined as Williams, McKenzie, and Divide counties, North Dakota. 2. https://www.willistonnd.com/DigitalCommunityGuide/DigitalCom munityGuide.html#page=1, accessed September 9, 2021. 3. https://cms3.revize.com/revize/williston/MARCH%202020%20Econ omy%20at%20a%20Glance%202.pdf, accessed June 6, 2020. The document is no longer available. 4. North Dakota General Statistics, https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/stats/ statisticsvw.asp, accessed October 5, 2021. This link will lead to up-­to-­date reports for the state. 5. https://www.history.nd.gov/historicsites/mycic/mycicexhibits.html, accessed July 14, 2020. 6. See Davis (2019), a review of Gómez-­Barris that brings North Dakota together with Gómez-­Barris’s “perceptual method.” 7. In geology, a petroleum system refers to the geologic components and processes necessary to generate and store hydrocarbons, usually including a mature source rock, migration pathways, a reservoir rock (from which oil and gas are extracted), a trap (such as a fold), and a seal. The seal is a layer of impermeable rock that limits the upward migration of the hydrocarbons. 8. Despite a dramatic increase in industrial and nonindustrial workplaces during the boom, the number of Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors in North Dakota, already woefully insufficient for adequate workplace safety regulation, remained unchanged. 9. The brief 1980 boom played an important role in Williston’s more recent Bakken boom, since the cautionary tale from the earlier moment found new relevance. Shoddy housing and legacy debt, for example, left lasting and painful imprints on the city. Despite the lessons learned from 1980, the realization that a similar outcome could outlive the Booyah mood was no match for the power of capital influx when prices aligned to encourage hundreds of digging and fracking operations in the region. 10. Permeability refers to the connectivity of pores within rock. The Bakken formation is porous but relatively impermeable, which is to say that the pores where oil, gas, and water are found are poorly connected. 11. For a map of Bakken producing wells, see https://www.eia.gov/oil_gas/ rpd/shaleoil1.pdf, accessed July 17, 2019.

Introduction 35 12. For an animation of Bakken extraction between 1985 and 2010 pro�duced by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, see https://www.eia .gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=3750. 13. Monthly production reports are at the Official Portal for North Dakota State Government, https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/mprindex.asp, accessed June 29, 2020. 14. Bluemle (2015) provides a brief account of this “Pumice Stone” by the explorers William Clark and Meriwether Lewis in their journals as they passed through the region in the very early nineteenth century. Murphy writes that the absorbency of clinker makes it appealing for well pads “because it can help to soak up and contain minor diesel and crude oil spills” (2013, 4). 15. Many of these chemicals are proprietary and thus not reported publicly. 16. The University of North Dakota Energy and Environmental Research Center offers a précis on regional water usage in fracking. See https://undeerc .org/bakken/Water-Consumption-in-the-Bakken.aspx, accessed July 20, 2020. 17. The environmental effects of wastewater spills tend to be far more exten�sive and long lasting than oil spills, although the latter receive the most public attention. 18. Also McMahon 2013. 19. A sampling of stories includes Sontag and McDonald 2014. 20. There is an entire genre of ruination in Bakken aesthetics that we do not explore in depth in this volume, which in its portrayal of decaying agricultural infrastructure and the rusting remains of earlier oil booms, seeks to differentiate the modernity of the present, even as it reveals settlement as precarious and never finished. 21. See Halperin 2014.

References Appel, Hannah, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts. 2015. “Introduction: Oil Talk.” In Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas, edited by Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts, 1–­26. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Arvin, Maile, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill. 2013. “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy.” Feminist Formations 25, no. 1: 8–­34. Bellamy, Brent Ryan, Michael O’Driscoll, and Mark Simpson. 2016. “Introduction: Toward a Theory of Resource Aesthetics.” Postmodern Culture 26, no. 2: http://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2016.0010. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

36 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun Bluemle, John P. 2001. The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Discovery of Oil in North Dakota. Miscellaneous Series No. 89. Bismarck: North Dakota Geological Survey. Bluemle, John P. 2015. “North Dakota’s Fire-­formed Rocks.” North Dakota Geology (blog), May 20. http://johnbluemle.com/2-clinker-in-western-north -dakota/#:~:text=These%20baked%20materials%2C%20known%20 as,beds%20in%20Wyoming%20and%20Montana. Braun, Bruce. 2019. “Fracking.” In Keywords in Radical Geographical Thought, 128–­33. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Braun, Bruce, Mat Coleman, Mary Thomas, and Kathryn Yusoff. 2015. “Grounding the Anthropocene: Sites, Subjects, Struggles in the Bakken Oil Fields.” Antipode Online, November 3. https://antipodeonline.org/2015/11/03/ground ing-the-anthropocene/. Brown, Matthew. 2021. “Oil Boom Remakes N. Dakota County with Fastest Growth in US.” AP News, September 5. https://apnews.com/article/census -fastest-growing-county-mckenzie-north-dakota-f85f7f9dc0c6ce9b412a1cd 213dc0096. Clark, Nigel, and Kathryn Yusoff. 2017. “Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene.” Theory, Culture, and Society 34, nos. 2–­3: 3–­23. Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Davis, Thomas S. 2019. “Perceptual Methods.” Cultural Dynamics 31, nos. 1–­2: 144–­50. Dawson, Chester. 2014. “Radioactive Waste Is North Dakota’s New Shale Problem; Local Officials Find Improper Dumping of Used ‘Oil Socks.’” Wall Street Journal, April 15. https://www.wsj.com/articles/radioactive-waste-is-north -dakotas-new-shale-problem-1397582455. Deer, Sarah. 2015. The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. New York: Verso Books. Gómez-­Barris, Macarena. 2017. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Gottesdiener, Laura. 2014. “I Worked in a Strip Club in a North Dakota Fracking Boomtown.” Mother Jones, October 14. https://www.motherjones.com/ environment/2014/10/inside-north-dakotas-crazy-oil-boom/. Halperin, Alex. 2014. “From the Wars of West Africa to the Oil Boom of North Dakota.” Al Jazeera America, November 7. http://america.aljazeera.com/multi

Introduction 37 media/2014/11/north-dakota-s-oilboomeconomydrawsafricanimmigrants .html. Hetherington, Kregg. 2016. “Surveying the Future Perfect: Anthropology, Development, and the Promise of Infrastructure.” In Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion, edited by Penny Harvey, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Atsuro Morita, 40–­50. London: Routledge. Huber, Matt. 2015. “Oil for Life: The Bureau of Mines and the Biopolitics of the Petroleum Market.” In Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas, edited by Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts, 31–­44. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. McMahon, Jeff. 2013. “Strange Byproduct of Fracking Boom: Radioactive Socks.” Forbes, July 24. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2013/ 07/24/strange-byproduct-of-fracking-boom-radioactive-socks/#4dbdb24 84fa7. Murphy, Edward C. 2013. “Clinker (‘Soria’) as Road Surfacing Material in Western North Dakota.” Geo News 40, no. 1. https://www.dmr.nd.gov/ndgs/ documents/newsletter/2013Winter/Clinker.pdf. Olson, Bradley, Rebecca Elliott, and Christopher M. Matthews. 2019. “Fracking’s Secret Problem—­Oil Wells Aren’t Producing as Much as Forecast.” Wall Street Journal, January 2. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Rifkin, Mark. 2017. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-­determination. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Rowe, Aimee Carrillo, and Eve Tuck. 2017. “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settlement, Cultural Production, and Resistance.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 17, no 1: 3–­13. Science History Institute. 2015. “Where Have All the FEMA Trailers Gone?” Distillations, episode 202, September 2. https://www.sciencehistory.org/dis tillations/podcast/where-have-all-the-fema-trailers-gone. Shemorry, Bill. 1991. Mud, Sweat and Oil: The Early Years of the Williston Basin. Williston: William E. Shemorry. Simpson, Audra. 2016. “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders, and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty.” Theory and Event 19, no. 4: 1–­19. Simpson, Audra. 2017. “The Ruse of Consent and the Anatomy of ‘Refusal’: Cases from Indigenous North America and Australia.” Postcolonial Studies 20, no. 1: 18–­33. Sontag, Deborah, and Brent McDonald. 2014. “In North Dakota, a Tale of Oil, Corruption and Death.” New York Times, December 28. https://www.nytimes

38 Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun .com/2014/12/29/us/in-north-dakota-where-oil-corruption-and-bodies -surface.html?_r=0. TallBear, Kim. 2019. “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming.” Kalfou 6, no. 1: 24–­41. Thomas, Mary, and Kathryn Yusoff. 2017. “Geology.” In Macmillian Interdisciplinary Handbooks, Gender: Matter, edited by Stacy Alaimo, 123–­37. New York: Macmillan. Tuck, Eve, and Ruben Gaztambide-­Fernández. 2013. “Curriculum, Replacement, and Settler Futurity.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 29, no. 1: 72–­89. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 1, no. 1: 1–­40. Watts, Michael. 2015. “Securing Oil: Frontiers, Risk, and Spaces of Accumulated Insecurity.” In Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas, edited by Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts, 211–­36. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Wilson, Sheena, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman, eds. 2017. Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture. Montreal: McGill–­Queen’s University Press. Yusoff, Kathryn. 2017. “Geosocial Strata.” Theory, Culture, and Society 34, nos. 2–­3: 105–­27. Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

1 The Settler Heteropatriarchy of Boomtown, USA Mary E. Thomas

There is one essential reason why Indigenous people resist, refuse, and contest US rule: land. In fact, US history is all about land and the transformation of space, fundamentally driven by territorial expansion, the elimination of Indigenous people, and white settlement. —­Lower Brule Sioux Tribe citizen Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future

This essay examines contemporary settler colonial narratives in the city of Williston that lean on myths about white “American” accomplishment in taming the frontier, soil, and land in western North Dakota. I argue that a key component of settling the Bakken boom through Williston’s urban geographies is the ongoing fantasy that settler colonial frontier heterosexual and heteropaternalist families rightfully belong to the region. Such narratives perpetually relegate Indigeneity to the past, which justifies ongoing settler land occupation and the degradation of Native life and sovereignty, and proclaim the settler family as the heir to land and its resources. Private property, recreational activities, and civic life are all referenced in city planning, in regional tourism brochures, and by urban leaders, in service to the extension of the 39

40 Mary E. Thomas

settler colonial city. The aesthetics of the settler colonial frontier are frequent tools in this extension, and familial histories of “settling the prairie” serve as narratives to justify contemporary resource extraction on land now framed as indigenous to those white patriarchies. Take as one example the billboard façade welcoming visitors to Williston. Long a faded and plain sign without an image that merely read “Welcome to Williston ND—­Boomtown USA,” by the summer of 2015 the new billboard boasted a photograph of a young white boy’s proud salute, a late nineteenth-­century U.S. Army soldier’s hat on his head. The boy stood at the rear of a staged military formation within the reconstructed Fort Buford barracks. Fort Buford, just twenty miles from Williston, is now a State Historic Site described by North Dakota’s Historical Society as “one of a number of military posts established to protect overland and river routes used by immigrants settling the West.”1 A broader framed image of the fort scene is perennially featured in the Williston Visitors Guide as representative of a “top three” local attraction.2 In this image, the boy’s smile and proud salute highlight the marketing priorities of the town’s future through an overt celebration of settler colonialism. By 2017 the billboard had been changed again, with a photograph of a young white girl enjoying a reenactment at Fort Union Trading Post, with a second image of the National Historic Site’s Bourgeois House Visitor Center and a tipi likely modeled after the Assiniboine, who were the major trading partners at Fort Union in its early days after its establishment in 1828 (see Figure 1.1). The “established to protect” clause on the State Historical Society’s Fort Buford site does not spell out the source of threat to settlers, but it refers to Indigenous people struggling and fighting to retain the right to occupy their land. Built in 1866, Fort Buford is most famous for being the location of the surrender of Tatanka Iyotake (the Dakota leader Sitting Bull) in 1881. The tourism brochure communicates fort histories as the unfolding of an American settler nation, opening up the land for settlement by European and white migrants to the Plains. Indigenous people and nations, I show in this chapter, also continue to be cited by urban and economic policy-­makers in Williston, as well as in the tourism materials,



The Settler Heteropatriarchy

41

Figure 1.1. The “Welcome to Williston” billboard in 2017. Photograph by Bruce Braun.

as only past inhabitants of the region—­unless they live on the sovereign lands within the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA) Nation Fort Berthold Reservation.3 Examples in the chapter show how ongoing efforts to place settler families in the region still rely on situating Native people in the past or historicizing them through frameworks stuck in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with Indigenous claims to land restricted to the MHA Nation’s territories and only in present geographies. New claims to land through urban expansion and growth in Williston, I suggest, are legitimized by the settler state through city and regional policies and priorities through heterosexual family reproduction with male oil workers at the helm. In Williston, economic and urban policy and marketing makers place the predominantly male oil workers as heirs to settler colonialism in the region’s history of trade and agriculture, with women to follow men into settlement as wives,

42 Mary E. Thomas

mothers, and workers only in lower-­paid service professions—­in other words, in service to men. In these accounts, I therefore argue that the health of the city is predominantly legible through heteropatriarchies of settler nuclear families, and the whiteness of these settler families is presumed and normatively reinscribed by city officials.4 In the next section, I introduce key concepts guiding the chapter’s arguments. I also consider in more depth Williston’s tourism materials to evidence how the city works to salve the rapid adjustment between high to low commodity prices through an emphasis on the family’s current enjoyment of regional colonial history. Williston’s urban and economic planning activities, I then show, utilize established settler colonial logics to emphasize steps toward contemporary domestic settlement in the Bakken. These steps include the development of retail for women consumers and housing development in suburban neighborhoods. I argue that the newly constructed frontier suburbanization of Williston represents the outward growth of familiar forms of settlerism, though now made feasible through fracking technologies of gas and oil extraction and pipeline construction. The by-­now infamous slogan “Drill, Baby, Drill” was even mapped directly onto the town’s economic development schema through its appropriative slogan from 2012, “Build, Baby, Build” (see chapter 3 in this volume by Morgan Adamson). What I suggest here is that settler colonial power relations structure the city’s attempts to encourage women to move to Williston, so that households headed by heterosexual male petroleum workers will relocate there—­permanently. Frontier Patriarchy in North Dakota The Mandan and Hidatsa people lived in what is now referred to as the Upper Missouri River Basin for at least several centuries before Meriwether Lewis and William Clark ventured into their villages at the beginning of the nineteenth century,5 and their ancestors lived on that land for thousands of years before them. The Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota nations—­whose political confederacy is the Oceti Sakowin Oyate (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires, different nations that settlers



The Settler Heteropatriarchy

43

problematically came to reference collectively as the “Sioux”)—­also lived throughout the region on both banks of the Missouri River (see Estes 2019). The Arikara people came to the westernmost region of present-­ day North Dakota through displacement and warfare in the nineteenth century but are also indigenous to the Upper Missouri and the Great Plains.6 The Missouri River cuts through the Fort Berthold Reservation of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the MHA Nation where more than 250,000 barrels of oil were produced per day in June 2018, out of a total 1.2 million barrels per day in the state of North Dakota. A significant portion of oil (about one fifth) in the Bakken is thus extracted on MHA land, a majority of which is sovereign land,7 and the dispossessed land of the entire Bakken region has a history of settler colonialism from the nineteenth century to today. In Williston, countless examples illustrate steady attempts to maintain the lie that the event of settler colonialism is past, by refusing it in the present. Narratives and visualities of past heroic white settlerism in the region are especially standard fare, from displays in county and town museums to the heritage materials produced by the state for educational purposes. The local museums assemble through family donations and settlers’ priorities to continually establish their own lineages as what is worth remembering, cataloguing, and celebrating. The depictions of settler life on the frontier rely on a history of the nineteenth century’s geographic manifest destiny and a prophetic testament to the fortitude of white men’s capacity that literally fabricated the idea and space of wilderness and then tamed it into U.S. nation-­state territory. Settlerist representations of Native communities and people rarely exceed those that show them in nineteenth-­century contexts, though some museums depict Native Americans in Western dress in the early twentieth century. Rather, images and descriptions of Native life largely follow scripts about Lewis and Clark’s westward exploration and the freeze-­frame of Native life and community in the nineteenth century upon colonialization. The State Historical Society of North Dakota’s logo features an image of the Shoshone woman Sacagawea (see Figure 1.2) with her baby bound to her back—­a baby born through forced

44 Mary E. Thomas

Figure 1.2. This logo of the State Historical Society of North Dakota depicts the Shoshone woman Sacagawea with her baby wrapped on her back. Screenshot from the brochure at https://www.history.nd.gov; accessed July 18, 2020.

“marriage” to a French Canadian fur trapper known even in his own day for his brutal gender and sexual violence against Indigenous women (Estes 2019, 81). The nineteenth century brought sustained settler attempts to erase Native life and to achieve legal hollowing of Native sovereignty. The Northern Plains were rescripted into “open” frontier by the U.S. government as a landholding resource for settler trade and then agriculture, rather than as already materially and epistemologically sculpted through Native communities and cosmologies. Settler colonial control proceeded through genocide, removal, allotment, and ubiquitous treaty infraction—­ all tragically familiar throughout North America. The masculine and nationalist conquering of so-­called uncivilized and uncultivated territory thus cleared paths for frontier settlement into heteropatriarchal domestic formations. The U.S. federal government’s policies following the Homestead Act of 1862 required the construction of structures on 160-­acre plots



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and set the stage for the privatization of prairie land for agriculture, ranching, and eventually oil and gas extraction. The usurpation of women’s sexual and reproductive labors was central to this colonial settlement on the land. Evelyn Nakano Glenn writes: Masculine whiteness thus became central to settler identity, a status closely tied to ownership of property and political sovereignty. The latter in turn articulated with heteropatriarchy, which rendered white manhood supreme with respect to control over property and self-­rule. This entailed settler wives being denied an independent legal identity; instead, her identity was merged into that of her husband, and her property and labor were under his control. (2015, 58)

Glenn notes that an “American” identity was forged through these shared gender roles and the privileging of manhood, which allowed the settlers, most recent immigrants to North America and therefore divided linguistically and culturally, to bridge their ethnic differences and forge a shared racialization of whiteness. The Dakota prairie “opened” by traders and then the U.S. Army was thus made ready to receive the large-­scale influx of settlers and their plows, in service to the reauthoring of the land as naturally theirs. Scholars refer to this process as the indigenization of settler colonialists (Veracini 2010; Tuck and Gaztambide-­Fernández 2013). Today, the culmination of that settler identity in western North Dakota is virtually synonymous with Norwegian American. About 450,000 European settlers (again, mainly Norwegian but with a smattering of German, Russian, and Irish) arrived in the state during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The migrants came on the fantastical wake of frontier masculinity’s triumph in order to farm the arid land that had been murderously vacated by the U.S. Army and the pathogens of colonialism before them (Gurr 2015, 32). Whiteness was forged through opposition to “Indians,” and as Mark Rifkin (2006) argues, family life lived on remote and isolated farms became an ideal representation of manhood’s supreme achievements: freedom, economic productivity, civilization.

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The settler aesthetics of the state’s western canola, wheat, lentil, and flax fields reproduce ideals of the timeless so-­called American landscape formation dotted with farmhouses and dusty county roads. Regional museums provide sites of reproduction of these ideals, as they situate the linear temporality of settler colonial homestead to contemporary small-­town life. Accordingly, these museums also set the economic structure to the social-­familial progress story, from the old plows sitting side by side with old wedding dresses to the oilfield descriptions of modern local economies. Now the landscape of oil wells, gas flares, and miles of pipeline contemporaneously signal “American first” energy priorities, with intense local pride a galvanizing force of new settler logics claiming the carbon for the good of the nation. The vast wealth generated from oil and gas goes to carbon capitalists, with revenue streams for the settler families who were fortuitous enough to maintain mineral rights on “their land.” Today’s settler representations of the land wrap oil infrastructures into histories that have worked over time and space to install whiteness as indigenous to the region. The current cycle of oil production in North Dakota through the shale oil boom brought the twenty-­first-­ century petroeconomy and its workers to Williston, and the city has strived to communicate a sensibility of unwavering optimism for enduring growth and investment opportunities no matter the price per barrel. The city’s tourism materials illustrate the method of marketing optimism through the well-­established colonial logics of combining place, settler family formation, and land as resource, in other words, by narrating a geographic-­based resource economy that produces a natural history of settlerism (see also Gahman 2016). This exemplary strategy ties a boomtown trajectory in Williston’s 2017 Visitors Center tourism brochure to the region’s land and the earth’s geology, the place of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers’ confluence and the Bakken formation: This place where the Yellowstone and the Missouri rivers meet has been a booming crossroads for centuries. It was a gathering place for the earliest people of the plains. It was a rendezvous point for fur traders and explorers, and later for the frontier army. It has drawn together generations of



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agricultural producers. Today with the Bakken oil formation, Williston is home to hardworking folks making North Dakota the nation’s second largest oil-­producing state.8

The marketing of Williston as a boomtown “place” relies on a tidy narrative of continuous dynamism and growth over the “centuries.” That is, by placing its regional history in the same aesthetic framework with the uneven performance of its commodity, the city attempts to integrate boom–­bust cycles into an enduring geography. The Visitors Center manages to co-opt Indigenous histories and territory into its boomtown trajectory, a progress tale with a settler present and future. Despite the lip service to Indigenous “people of the plains,” the “Visit Willison” website stakes its claim that the boomtown “started in 1828 and we’re still here. And still booming.”9 The people of the plains are therefore restrictively represented in the distant past, before the fur traders, soldiers, farmers, and oil workers. Notably, these tradesmen identities resound of frontier masculine labor, despite the gender-­neutral “folks” of “today” and the generic “earliest people.” The earliest people merely “gather[ed]” while the settlers to the region had a purposeful “rendezvous point” with exchange and economy to accomplish and protect. The shift in time to today proceeds with oil, with the “Bakken oil formation” claimed by North Dakota even though the land was located in Pangea near the Earth’s equator when the organic matter was laid on shallow seabeds that would, only three hundred million years later, be identifiable as an American “tight oil” shale resource. In Watford City, North Dakota, in neighboring McKenzie County, the Pioneer Museum describes its mission in a similar way, illustrating the ubiquity of settlerist narratives in the region: The Pioneer Museum depicts the history and economic development of McKenzie County from the earliest times beginning with the largest petrified tree stump in North Dakota (60 million years old) to today’s history. Discover how and why the pioneers chose to settle in this area of North Dakota. Experience the trials and jubilation of these determined people through the many artifacts and exhibits on display.10

48 Mary E. Thomas

Such a discourse naturalizes settler colonialism in the land itself, and indeed miles into the strata and millions of years ago, which displaces Indigenous claims to territory and jumps completely over their existence. The land of “North Dakota” is naturalized as pioneer from its surface soil to its deep shale. “Pioneers” means Scandinavian men and women, on family farms and in small towns, raising children and crops and the American dream. Settler Time in Western North Dakota The same page of the Williston Visitors Guide with the child in military formation highlights another child’s posture within the settler militarism of the region, at the foot of a cannon. The celebration of white settler heritage through the child’s pleasure at playing soldier and education about the settler history of the region is clear in these materials. Settlers are represented as the past, present, and future of the land. The children’s bodies and happy placements within their settler heritage bluntly communicates the reproductive force of an ongoing genealogy of the prairie’s domestication through settler family progeny. The child’s enjoyment next to the cannon also insinuates that the military presence in the region is long past, and the violence of settler colonialism is likewise as obsolete as the old iron weapon. The secured future, embodied in the small child and her soft pastel fleece and cute playful hat, seems just outside the window in the bright sunshine. The cannon faces the threat outside the fort’s walls that is no longer a threat, because as a weapon of imperialism, it already accomplished the creation of settler domination through whiteness; the cannon, in that sense, created the future as the child’s as much as it also consolidated whiteness. The guide’s depiction of settler tourism through the images of children relies on an unnamed but assumed family structure. A diversity of family life to include those with same-­gender parents has not enjoyed wide play in the Bakken region’s representations. Adults depicted are young or early middle age, and the only elderly person in it is Santa Claus. Further, the guide only represents people of color in Williston in two photographs; one shows an Asian American woman working as a waitress and serving a white couple, and the other shows Native



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Americans dancing in traditional dress at the fort (once again reiterating the settlerist perspective that Native Americans belong to the past). Heterosexual nuclear families—­a mother, a father, child or children—­ frame both the city’s desired consumer and the represented heritage of the region. Therefore, the child dominating Williston’s billboard references not just frontier/military/settler past, present, and future, but the heteropatriarchal family reproduction at the heart of the place’s time and spatialization. Even more, the child’s mother is whom the city of Williston wants to show you again and again in its visual matter. Indeed, the cover of the 2017 Visitors Guide (Figure 1.3) has a foregrounded photograph of a woman/mother and child/son sharing a strawberry milkshake. The temporal continuum of “womanhood” is even marked on the cover, with a second, backgrounded image of a young woman choosing a bottle of wine at a shop. The wine bottles, lined up in front of her, out of focus in the foreground and drawing the eye to the sharp image of her smiling face, imply the time distance between her and her future motherhood represented in the top image. Everyone is blond. The 2019 guide (Figure 1.4), on the other hand, shows an older white man teaching youngsters about the past at Fort Buford. This man represents settler heritage, with the knowledge to pass down to the younger generation, and thus to pass down settler colonialism. The white woman feeds and mothers the boy child, whereas the older white man serves as patriarchal wisdom. Barbara Gurr, in her work examining the ways that cowboy masculinity and imaginations of the U.S. frontier currently surface in postapocalyptic science fiction television, spells out one lesson for us to take away from narratives and images like these, especially those depicting the fort. The fort’s enduring importance to the region’s identity references the past’s imprint on the meaning of the frontier, which, she writes, “relies on the constant displacement of its original inhabitants so that white men can tame the wilderness and make it safe for white women” (Gurr 2015, 35). Thus, it is “white men, followed eventually by white women, who will bring domesticity and the arts of civilization” (35). She also notes another lesson, that frontier masculinity’s past shapes the future:

Figure 1.3. The cover of the 2017 Visitors Guide to Williston features two images: the image at right shows a young mother sharing a pink milkshake with a blond, male toddler, and the image at left shows a young blonde woman in a wine shop, choosing a bottle.

Figure 1.4. An image on the cover of the 2019 Williston Visitors Guide shows a middle-­aged white man dressed as a late nineteenth-­century U.S. soldier teaching three white children fort history.

52 Mary E. Thomas [Frontier] masculinity provides the hope (and shape) of the future, echoing, reproducing, and validating the mytho-­history of nineteenth-­century manifest destiny doctrine. These narratives thus open the frontier once again for white, heterosexual, able-­bodied men to carve out the future of the human race in a political, social, and military reiteration of nineteenth-­ century desire. (31)11

Gurr’s analysis of science fiction’s return to the cowboy in the West—­ and the ways that cowboy masculinity imbues the “final frontier” beyond Earthly contexts—­insists on white patriarchy’s placement as the durable “master narrative” for humanity’s survival and triumph (32). Similarly in Williston and the Bakken, the oil worker now imbues the final frontier—­the last great place for opportunity—­with the hopeful futurity of a heteropatriarchal settlement. Local politics in Williston are not too concerned with global warming and its attendant catastrophes or threats to planetary survival that the release of fossil fuel harkens; the hegemony of oil and gas production is too entrenched and celebrated.12 The city worries, however, about the size of its population. With the decline of oil and gas prices after 2014, worries about sustained growth through permanent settlement were recognized in drops in the numbers of people living in the region. As the drilling and oil-­related job opportunities began to shrink, the flow of people through the by-­now significant infrastructure of hotels and restaurants also correspondingly slowed (the hotel occupancy rate in 2016 was 36.1 percent, and 33.7 percent in 2018).13 The billboard’s image change, from Boomtown script to a child’s settler smile, is no coincidence in the city’s marketing strategies. Childhood and its youthful exuberance in the photographs do not allow the viewer and tourist consumer to capitulate to pessimistic forecasts. The Williston Visitors Center’s task became encouragement for other regional business opportunities, like destination tourism along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, which lies just to the south. In this remote northwestern corner of North Dakota, more than a hundred miles and two hours by car from the nearest interstate highway, it is hard to attract traffic otherwise. As I show in the next section, urban



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growth machines attempt to pave another path, by promoting the city’s magnetism for women. Settling Men, Settling Town: From Fears of Male Homosociality to Planning “Her” Retail The “I’d frack that” Facebook page was launched in March 2013, when there were 184 rigs drilling for tight oil in North Dakota. The page was a project of the online enterprise CafePress, which sells products like stickers, mugs, and T-­shirts emblazoned with images and catchy phrases such as the logo for the page (see Figure 1.5). There is not much unique about this image. Visual and verbal innuendos abound of oil drilling and masculine phallic virility, and the female figure atop the ejaculatory rig is about as common as they come (Parson and Ray 2020). “I love it when you talk crude to me, baby,” “tap that well,” “leave no well untapped,” “tap her ’til she blows,” “drill here/drill now,” and even Sarah Palin’s “Drill, Baby, Drill” all euphemize the roughneck phallic

Figure 1.5. CafePress mug with the outline of the state of North Dakota, a line representing a horizontal well, and a woman’s body positioned with a leg on top of a spewing oil rig. The mug’s caption reads, “North Dakota: I’d frack That.” Photograph by Mary E. Thomas.

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prowess and the feminized receptor well as intercourse. The iterability of gender-­sexual discourse, however, reminds us that despite the joking, “there is no purifying language of its traumatic residue” (Butler 1997, 38). The joke about fracking “that” is a clear objectification of “her.” The “I” is the dominant man who fracks/fucks “that,” while the reciprocal sexual agency or desire of the feminine body is beside the point. This image’s message conveys a hyper-­heteropatriarchy. Instead, the priority remains the masculine vantage points on the landscapes of sex, heteronormative gender binary, and the assumption that women will sexually welcome masculinity. The power of these images and phrases is derivative of compulsory heterosexuality, a compulsion that embeds within it a resounding fear of homosexuality and same-­sex desires, particularly, in this case, of men. Compulsory heterosexuality, feminist theorists have argued for decades after Adrienne Rich (1980), is the assumption that gendered binaries naturally reflect heterosexuality and vice versa, each normalizing the other, meaning that queer sexualities, desires, and genders are foreclosed and repudiated as unnatural. In Williston, as I show in this section, the overt and loud performances of masculine heterosexuality and the companion representations of feminine subjectivities and sexualities are tightly bound to the fear and abjection of what might happen with so many men in one place, that is, without enough women in place. The city of Williston tasked itself with countering the dominant roughneck sexual subjectivity represented in myriad and alarmist ways at the boom’s high points in national and international media. By drawing on its settler imaginary as small prairie town, with strong family values and as a great, wholesome place to raise kids, Williston advertises itself as quintessential (that is, white, heteronormative) America. In the tourist brochure, as I showed in the previous two sections, this sentiment is exemplified as “folks” who make Williston “home” today. Placing city residents in folksy settler progress tales not only performatively indigenizes white residents to the land but also settles the baldly violent “I’d frack that” discourse. In this section I consider how urban economic officers use these two strategies, both to accommodate the settler patriarchy of the region’s past and to push toward a larger role



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for women in settlement, given the precarity of settling male labor in the region in the face of fluctuating commodity prices.14 Quelling sexual discourse into family formations obviously does not mean displacing the priorities of a settlerist patriarchy. The city’s urban and economic planning departments assemble heterosexualized gender binaries into city form, investment incentives, and a range of infrastructure. While the economic and urban development of the city prioritizes primary economic investment, masculine labor, and support of household heads, a secondary, supportive emphasis goes to women-­ as-­consumers. “Women” actually means girlfriends/wives/mothers (in a required heteronormative and binary gendered pairing with men) who bring their regenerative economic and reproductive feminine potentials to town in order to ensure stability and hopefully even ongoing growth. Virtually every activity of urban and economic development projects addresses what planners referred to as “catching up” activities after the fracking boom. As the director for economic development put it in an interview in 2016: When you’re based on a commodity, it’s tremendously hard [to maintain steady growth]. I always say, we wish we had about two more years of the craziness. Because it would have bent the fulcrum a little bit. We wouldn’t have been so heavily dependent on oil. And you see that the town started to get bigger in population—­they started to sustain themselves a little bit. It didn’t happen, so obviously we’re just riding through this thing.

With enough population, a local economy can supposedly maintain itself and not have to ride the rough bumps of oil’s price per barrel. There is vastly more to the story than this, of course, including credit ratings, finance for new businesses, corporate investment in the local and regional economy, infrastructure, and the like. But the bottom line to all of these things is a population to work, live, and spend, and thus to generate revenue and taxes. Thus, city planning and economic development policies and programs prophesize Williston’s ongoing settler growth beyond commodity reliance (whether lentils or Bakken crude) through a “build it and

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they will come” infrastructure of suburban neighborhood, retail, consumption, daycare, and educational expansion. The director of economic development explained (in 2014) that “her” retail was necessary “for Mom to move.”15 Simply put, in order for the town to settle into its new oil and gas economy and stabilize its population, women needed to move to town—­and stay. As the director noted, with “her” retail, you also lure different female workers to town, such as retail workers, educators, health care workers, and the like, not just male roughneck oil workers and the female sex and entertainment workers who temporarily follow them. In other words, marriage material, the kind of women with whom men want to settle. Along with women come better housing developments, because as he put it in an interview, “Man camps can only work for so long. You don’t feel like you’re living.” The “you” in his comment is obviously masculine, and self-­ referential, and “living” has the connotation of family living. As an older white man who had raised his own family in Williston (he retired just after this interview), the director had a stock history of the town from years of reciting it to investors that reflected his own embeddedness in the town’s identity. It began with a description of Native settlement along the Knife River where it meets the Missouri. He told our group of non-­Indigenous researchers that “ten thousand Indians” lived in earth lodgings made of cottonwood, which they burned down and rebuilt over many centuries so that there existed what he called “layers of lodges.” He was sure to explain the range of trade and agriculture that village life entailed over two thousand years, while he also maintained the settler perspective of the unlivability of it at the same time: the place, he said, stank. Western explorers could smell it “miles away” as he put it. Animals and “Indians” lived communally in the lodges, and to the director the smell indicated a foulness to “living” this way. However, once “Custer kept the peace in the neighborhood,” he told us, the settlers stayed in earnest as homesteaders, traveling “from Norway to Ellis Island to North Dakota” with only “a small trunk.” The family farm established a new way of living in North Dakota and provided a “breadbasket for the U.S.” In his grossly racist and settlerist history, the director provided a relatively routine narrative of progress within



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the frontier aesthetic. By replacing “Indians,” the migrants used the land more appropriately, and through their hard work and determination served the nation and become “Americans.” Penelope Edmonds writes that this is a familiar refrain of settlerist urban narratives: using land better than Indigenous people did. In such narratives, in her words, “the settler city has pride of place: it is the space of progress and commerce, predicated importantly on the absence of Indigenous peoples . . . the city represented the space of modernity and was indeed progress itself” (2010, 8). The reference to “man camps” offers a similar benchmark for the regional progress narrative. In time the phrase “man camp” segued to work or labor camps as a phrase more capable of reflecting corporate spaces and invoking a professionalism in counternarrative to the media’s fetishistic attachment to the idea of so many men living together in close quarters. Like the unlivability of the “Indians,” the men in homosocial living formations had to shift to an emphasis on necessity or corporate service provision for workers. Such language reiterated the homophobic sensibility that inadequate affordable housing kept men in tight formation, not their desire for one another’s company or for sex. Like the colonial indictment of Indigenous sexuality (Driskill 2010, Morgensen 2010), the settler colonial paranoia around roughneck sexuality shows through with this worry about the “man camp” that is “not living.” Thus, the man of the camp retains a strict heterosexual longing for family housing in these narratives, with planners and economic actors strongly on his side working to bring the women to Williston (the family farm of past frontier life, however, has now been replaced in local fantasies of the good life with the suburban tract house, as I will show in the next section). Further, the overt and over-­the-­top “I’d frack that” heteromasculinity retains a bookended symbolic to contain the vulnerability of man camp living. Proclaiming sexual and gender dominance over women quells homosexual undertones or threats and the vulnerability of loneliness, exhaustion, and dangerous labor. That has to be abhorred and cast away in order for the narratives of heteropatriarchy to continue unchallenged. In the director’s account, Native life “stank” as lived through feral animality, and man camps don’t feel

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like living without domestic femininity to nurture life and settle masculine sexuality. In both scenarios, settler logics allow the land to remain white and patriarchal—­and sexuality is spatially expressed as (hetero) domestic rather than communal, and gender is binary. Maintaining the settlement of a small remote city like Williston with a fluctuating population means a steady public relations campaign to steady the nerves of capital investors. In the summer of 2016, the new economic development director, contending with the challenges of a collapsed oil price and population depletion, said that representations of Williston in the national media hindered his ability to attract retail and other business investments to town (rather than the plummeting bond rating of the city or the failing businesses that were closing). Central to his concerns was a wavering of the family aesthetic through the transgressive sexuality of women sex workers and the men who frequent the “South Main” strip clubs: Our number one problem is media sensationalism. I think it does us a tremendous amount of injustice when we’re trying to build a city for the future here. . . . When we get a story from Bloomberg that there’s no jobs out here and the stores are boarded up, they, the subjects they choose to interview are probably somebody that’s down on South Main that just left the strip club or something, [who] couldn’t get a job when we had 1% unemployment. But make sure you talk to the family that moved here that has their kids in school, they just started a business, and they didn’t have the opportunity anywhere else, regardless of where the oil price is. But for some reason that segment always gets left out.

He makes sure to mark the men frequenting the bars as unemployable—­ disposable, in other words. These men are “subjects” not people, while the pronoun “they” refers to a family unit. A household unit, mom-­ dad-­kids, who work hard, study hard, and thus “build a city for the future.” “Kids in school” are figures that stand in for reproduction, prosperity, and the American dream. In Scott Morgensen’s words, “the normative function of settlement is to appear inevitable and final” (2010, 117). The sex workers, in the account by the director, represent the initial



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sexual outlet for male laborers when the price for oil was booming; at the time of the interview with low commodity prices, according to him, the sex workers only draw the losers. These two formations are bookends, containing within them compulsory heterosexuality and settlement, in effect both working to erase queerness. In Williston, hoped-­for permanent populations are all assimilated to settler heteronormativity. As the city marches to its future and proper formation, the nuclear heterosexual family settles into its opportunities. Yet, the director laments, “the number one thing is retail.” No matter the opportunities present in Williston for the wholesome life, “if you don’t have things that families want to come here and live, we’re not going to grow.” Suburban Settlements In dozens of ways, the governance of settlerism in Williston emphasizes permanency through expansion: in town size, housing, and population growth. Williston city limits have crept outward with multiple annexations, taking county land into the city. Development of suburban neighborhoods has eaten into nearby farmland, and new highway construction routes the steady truck traffic around town now, rather than straight through it. Housing is key to Williston’s strategy to “Build, Baby, Build.” As a small city with limited housing stock available when nonconventional drilling expanded wildly in the Bakken, boom architecture meant fast construction processes. The city planners insisted, however, that zoning requirements regulate the quality of housing style. Lessons learned from a short oil boom in 1980 still mar the city’s housing stock; ugly and slipshod construction showing its quick fabrication reminds the city not to allow a repeat. This go around, labor camps provided fast housing options for some, though often these beds were tied to company employment. Meant to be a temporary fix for supplying housing for the quick flow of workers to the region, temporary ended up not being that brief and remains in the region today, though no longer within city limits. Hotel construction was quick, and many workers also resorted to sleeping in cars and campers until more housing options came online. As apartment buildings and houses were constructed,

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the city began to enforce restrictions on sleeping in vehicles and on camper placement within city limits, though rural areas lacked zoning restrictions and camper living and labor camps persisted for years across the Bakken. Zoning requirements and permits for construction allowed the city to exert some control over the design and quality of new construction. Multiple-­unit complexes, for example, had to have two types of building materials on their facades. That requirement resulted in apartment buildings with some siding and some stone (or other mixed materials), rather than bland and uniform fronts of low-­cost vinyl siding. Landscaping was similarly regulated to ensure the appearance of care, permanence, and livability of complexes. Along with apartment and hotel construction, the first houses to be built during the boom were of two sorts. The first included high-­end homes on larger lots (many on the hills above town) for those who either worked in the top echelons of the local petroeconomy or had mineral rights on bigger landholdings outside town. The second represented the gold standard for many workers’ longer-­ term plans: suburban tract housing that represents the (white middle-­ class) ideal of homeownership, investment, stability, and family. While many residents of the suburban houses were single men, renters, or men sharing houses, suburban homes promised a way for workers to relocate their families to Williston, or to bring a partner to town and start a family there. Lorenzo Veracini reminds us that suburban and settler moves reassert patriarchal orders, and this reassertion is premised, among other things, on the re-­constitution of distinct separate gender spheres. The homesteader and the homeowner are male; they represent their family. They don’t merely own: they reproduce in the house and the house is surrounded by a lot—­the symbolic representation at once of their independence and of their capacity to isolate their women. (2012, 345)

He compares the settler move to Indigenous lands—­in the case of Williston this is the move to the Dakota Territory in the nineteenth



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century—­to suburban settlement. Both are racialized via the spatial consolidation of whiteness, and both ensure the land becomes scripted by heteropatriarchal family units. In contemporary Williston at the height of the boom, the suburbs offered migrating workers a new location for the dream of homeownership at a time when the mortgage crisis forced millions to lose homes and face foreclosure in most other American locations. Williston’s suburban expansion at a time of national housing collapse also mirrored the urban escapism forged in white flight in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. Oil workers and their families could escape social and economic crisis in the U.S. economy elsewhere toward enthusiastic suburbanization in Williston—­ and a soft landing in so-­called “family ideal life” through the reproduction of small-­town America at a time when it seemed impossible (Veracini 2012, 346). The crisis of capital and the challenge to white urban supremacy both led to new settlements that consolidated heteropatriarchal formations. Both moves thus indicate a consolidation of settler colonialism. The city’s expansion through annexation of surrounding land into its boundaries for the development of new neighborhoods, business districts, and retail expansion increases its jurisdictional control over economic development, taxation, housing construction, zoning, service provision, etc. Wrapped into these activities are what Native feminist theorists Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill call the “relentless structures” of heteropaternalism (2013, 13). Heteropaternalism, they argue, presumes “that heteropatriarchal nuclear-­domestic arrangements, in which the father is both center and leader/boss, should serve as the model for social arrangements of the state and its institutions” (13). Thus, settler frontier logics remain at play in the boomtown infrastructures of Williston: men (and their business interests) make Williston safe and welcoming for women by eating up land and claiming it as rightfully theirs. In turn, building a family town ensures that the threat of homosociality not be reflected in the town’s infrastructure. Mark Rifkin writes: Heteronormativity legitimizes the liberal settler state by presenting the political economy of privatization as simply an expression of the natural

62 Mary E. Thomas conditions for human intimacy, reproduction, and resource distribution; thus, the critique of heteronormativity offers a potent means for challenging the ideological process by which settler governance comes to appear (or at least to narrate itself as) self-­evident. (2011, 25)

“Self-­evident” has obvious cracks more recently, as suburban development stalled in the wake of the oil price drop. New “single family housing permits” fell dramatically to around two dozen after being in the hundreds annually from 2011 through 2014.16 Overgrown and abandoned plots sitting empty on Williston’s streets with only curbs poured are evidence of the aspirational nature of heteronormative suburban settlement (see Figure C.2 in the concluding chapter of this volume; also see Berlant 2011, 167 on aspirational normativity). The Bakken boomtown rhetoric of “Build, Baby, Build,” and of the babies gesturing toward that aspirational settlement of the city, hits its limit with the commodity price flux. The suburban formation offers newcomers a “last great opportunity” to reap the racialized and heterosexual privileges of settler colonialism for white transplants, but their supremacy remains tethered to national oil policy, international price wars, and corporate capital all the same. The women and babies who are tethered to the men, posited as the city’s way to growth and permanent infrastructure, brings me to Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism: The desire for a less-­bad life involves finding resting places; the reproduction of normativity occurs when rest is imagined nostalgically—­that is, in the places where rest is supposed to have happened. . . . One might read this repetition as nostalgia for nostalgia, a kind of desperate regression toward the desire to soon experience an imaginary security one knows without having ever had, and fair enough; but normativity where there is no foundation for the expectation of it beyond a lasting fantasy can also be read as a form of bargaining with what is overwhelming about the present, a bargaining against the fall between the cracks, the living death of repetition that’s just one step above the fall into death by drowning or by hitting the concrete at full speed. (2011, 180)



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Figure 1.6. A car sticker in a parking lot in western North Dakota in 2014 reads “Oilfield Honey Spending His Oilfield Money.” Photograph by Mary E. Thomas.

Suburban formations in Williston are enticements fueled by fantasies that middle-­class heteronormative lives with well-­remunerated men workers, stay-­at-­home moms, and educated and happy children in wholesome North Dakota are possible and will remain a stable force. Settlerism and the extensive growth of the imperial oil machine of the United States through fracking make these fantasies possible. “Oilfield honeys” (Figure 1.6) are oilfield wives, with the ultimate goal to be oilfield mothers. Oil and gas fuel the city’s settlement, and colonialism provides the narratives and aesthetics to naturalize the honeys and their families as indigenous and rightful to the land. Conclusion The gender and heterosexualized aesthetics of the Bakken oil play are thoroughly and mutually rendered with settler colonialism. Examples illustrating this point from the chapter included narratives about local history, contemporary “her” economies, permanent family settlement,

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and the “I’d frack that” merchandise. Without a settler colonial analysis of the gender and sexual aesthetics from the region, masculinity solely is understood as a phallic power over women and land, and not also as white supremacist and settler-­nationalist. Therefore, addressing the effects of that powerful masculinity without attending to its founding settlerist formations might further empower these very formations (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 2013). One way this is already happening in Williston, I have argued in this essay, includes local policy and planning operations, in efforts to attract women to town to pair with massive influxes of male labor, expanding the reach of the settler state. Not to mention the fact that the labor force growth fueling the oil and gas extraction resulted in a relatively massive importation of yet more settlers to this land that had experienced settler population declines in decades past. The impacts on Native communities in the region are widespread, though these have not been a part of my analysis. The increased size of the settler state in the region includes a massive growth in the police state (see chapter 6 in this volume by Kai Bosworth). Settler colonial sexism and violence against Native women also increased with fracking (Estes 2019). The male and settler population boom not only encroaches on sovereign claims to Native land, it also tragically increases the risk and occurrence of sexual violence for Native women and girls, whose bodies have long been held as available to white men especially in Indian Country (see Deer 2015). State and U.S. legislation meant to address the violence against Native women often grabs Native men into an expanding criminal justice system in the region that affects them more disproportionally than any other “racial” group in the Bakken states of North Dakota and Montana.17 Protecting women—­even targeted protection of Native women—­might have good intentions, but for Native communities this usually means increased challenges to their sovereignty (see Deer 2009 and Halldin 2008 for alternative tribal responses to sexual violence). Suburban development and retail expansion, both of which prioritize settler patriarchies and the economic growth machine of the settler state, are further examples of settler heteropaternalism in Williston



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that I illustrated in this chapter.18 Williston’s economic and suburban development naturalizes existing and oft-­performed settler histories from the Dakota frontier to counter their anxieties that fracked petroleum and gas economies will not lead to permanent settlement. Even feminist geographic analysis can buttress the region’s erasure of Indigenous life and land by prioritizing a restricted vantage onto the experiences of “women” and the heteronormativities that provide structure to gender categories without the interrogation of colonial formations of race, ethnicity, and nation. Notes 1. http://www.history.nd.gov/historicsites/buford/index.html, accessed May 28, 2019. 2. I use the 2017 guide for this analysis. In the 2018 and 2019 guides, the “top three” are the same destinations, though the images are slightly different. 3. Today, the Fort Berthold Reservation is divided into a patchwork of tribal, individual, and white lands, with white settlers owning the most agriculturally productive lands east of the Missouri River. According to the MHA Nation website: “The reservation consists of 988,000 acres, of which 457,837 acres are owned by Native Americans, either as individual allotments or communally by the tribe” (https://www.mhanation.com/, accessed May 28, 2019). 4. The U.S. Census estimates in July 2018 that 83.6 percent of Williston’s population is “White alone,” compared to 87.5 percent for the state of North Dakota. 5. “Huff Indian Village,” State Historical Society of North Dakota, http:// www.history.nd.gov/historicsites/huff/index.html. 6. The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara all had earth lodge settlements in the late nineteenth century, some several hundred years old. They were agriculturalists, with cultivated crops around their permanent settlements. 7. See the North Dakota State Industrial Commission’s July 2018 Oil and Gas Production Report (https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/mpr/2018_07.pdf ) and the Bismarck Tribune’s 2018 coverage of legal disputes (Dalrymple 2018). 8. http://www.visitwilliston.com/visit/, accessed September 26, 2017. 9. http://www.visitwilliston.com/, accessed September 26, 2017, for the 2017 guide; accessed July 13, 2018, for the 2018 guide. 10. https://www.ndtourism.com/watford-city/archaeology-paleontology/ pioneer-museum-mckenzie-county, accessed July 13, 2018. 11. Gurr specifically addresses two science fiction TV shows, Jericho and Falling Skies.

66 Mary E. Thomas 12. Voters in Williams County, North Dakota, cast 82 percent in support of Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection bid. The U.S. Congress Representative for the region, Kelly Armstrong, won 83 percent of the vote in 2020 and is a founding member of the Conservative Climate Caucus. See https://results .sos.nd.gov/ResultsSW.aspx?type=CTYALL&map=CTY&cty=53&name=Wil liams for 2020 election results, and https://curtis.house.gov/conservative-cli mate-caucus/ (both accessed October 10, 2021), which overviews the caucus beliefs in the role of fossil fuels as a “major part of the global solution” to climate change. 13. http://www.cityofwilliston.com/willistonseptember2017economyata glance.pdf, accessed September 26, 2017; and https://www.cityofwilliston.com/ williston2019economyataglanceforjanuary.pdf, accessed May 31, 2019. Occu�pancy rates are higher in summer months, around 50 percent, but annual averages are in the low to mid-­30s. 14. In this and the next section, I draw on interviews conducted in Willis�ton during the summers of 2014, 2015, and 2016. These interviews were part of collaborative research trips to Williston with Bruce Braun, Mathew Coleman, Max Woodworth, and Kathryn Yusoff. Also see Braun et al. 2015. 15. The interview was not recorded, but all quoted words are verbatim from my research notes. 16. http://infrastructure.willistondevelopment.com/, accessed May 31, 2019. 17. See U.S. state profiles of incarcerated populations at https://www.prison policy.org/profiles/, last accessed May 31, 2019. 18. Increasing the state’s environmental surveillance is yet another case. Considering the environment, even within logics of environmental justice, outside settler colonial structures that define the contours of land and earth risks solidifying the land-­as-­resource or land-­as-­property. Such a framework also does little to problematize or challenge settler colonial assumptions that Native people need help from the paternalist settler nation in managing their land.

References Arvin, Maile, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill. 2013. “Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy.” Feminist Formations 25, no. 1: 8–­34. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Braun, Bruce, Mat Coleman, Mary Thomas, and Kathryn Yusoff. 2015. “Grounding the Anthropocene: Sites, Subjects, Struggles in the Bakken Oil Fields.” Antipode Online, November 3. https://antipodeonline.org/2015/11/03/ground ing-the-anthropocene/.



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Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. London: Routledge. Dalrymple, Amy. 2018. “MHA Nation Continues Legal Fight over Oil Wells near Lake Sakakawea,” August 22. https://bismarcktribune.com/bakken/ mha-nation-continues-legal-fight-over-oil-wells-near-lake/article_10d819 bc-d48d-57c8-8e62-7d3e7260d447.html. Deer, Sarah. 2009. “Decolonizing Rape Law: A Native Feminist Synthesis of Safety and Sovereignty.” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2: 149–­67. Deer, Sarah. 2015. The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.  Driskill, Qwo-­Li. 2010. “Doubleweaving Two-­Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, nos. 1–­2: 69–­92. Edmonds, Penelope. 2010. Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in Nineteenth-­Century Pacific Rim Cities. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. New York: Verso. Gahman, Levi. 2016. “White Settler Society as Monster: Rural Southeast Kansas, Ancestral Osage (Wah-­Zha-­Zhi) Territories, and the Violence of Forgetting.” Antipode 48, no. 2: 314–­35. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. 2015. “Settler Colonialism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1: 52–­72. Gurr, Barbara. 2015. “Masculinity, Race, and the (Re?)Imagined American Frontier.” In Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Post-­Apocalyptic TV and Film, edited by Barbara Gurr, 31–­44. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Halldin, Amber. 2008. “Restoring the Victim and the Community: A Look at the Tribal Response to Sexual Violence Committed by Non-­Indians in Indian Country through Non-­Criminal Approaches.” North Dakota Law Review 84, no. 1: 1–­21. Morgensen, Scott. 2010. “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, nos. 1–­2: 105–­31. Parson, Sean, and Emily Ray. 2020. “Drill Baby Drill: Labor, Accumulation, and the Sexualization of Resource Extraction.” Theory and Event 23, no. 1: 248–­70. Rich, Adrienne. 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs 5, no. 4: 631–­60.

68 Mary E. Thomas Rifkin, Mark. 2006. “Romancing Kinship: A Queer Reading of Indian Education and Zitkala-­Sa’s American Indian Stories.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 1: 27–­59. Rifkin, Mark. 2011. When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tuck, Eve, and Ruben Gaztambide-­Fernández. 2013. “Curriculum, Replacement and Settler Futurity.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 29, no. 1: 72–­89. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2010. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2012. “Suburbia, Settler Colonialism, and the World Turned Inside Out.” Housing, Theory and Society 29, no. 4: 339–­57.

2 Bakken Aesthetics Art and Attachment in the Era of Tough Oil Thomas S. Davis

The feature story of the New York Times Magazine on January 13, 2013, “The Bakken Went Boom,” tells of odd things in the sleepy prairie: landmen setting their briefcases on the courthouse steps in the frigid predawn to secure a place in line; oil wells and frack pads creeping against farmland; methane flares and oil rigs so numerous they are registered in satellite photographs, rivaling the illuminations of major metropolises like Chicago, Minneapolis, and Denver.1 Accompanying these descriptions of transformed landscapes and the fracking energy revolution is a visceral black-­and-­white portrait of a male worker whose clothing is smeared with a dark substance (Figure 2.1). The context indicates that the photograph is from contemporary North Dakota, but it echoes photographs from oil booms from the early twentieth century. Photographer Alec Soth referred to this image as an answer to the “‘There Will Be Blood’ problem” (Soth 2013a)—­the expectation that stories of oil feature a certain kind of protagonist and appeal to what Stephanie LeMenager has called our love for oil. At first glance, Soth’s answer to the problem recycles familiar tropes of intensive labor, American individualism, and the conquest of nature; in this way, the photograph becomes a type, legible across time and place. 69

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In his accompanying dispatch to the photographs, Soth (2013b) lends the image more specificity. The man in the photograph is forty-­year-­ old Brian Coffey, an oilfield worker in North Dakota and Montana. The black substance smeared across his face is “slurry used in the drilling process” (Soth 2013a). Like other images of workers covered in oil and its by-products, Soth’s photograph echoes a longer tradition of petroaesthetics where, in LeMenager’s words, “what is literally depicted in such images of oil-­soaked men is industrial waste” (2014, 96), not evidence of sure wealth. Perhaps more revealing than Soth’s commentary is the formal composition of the photograph, which simultaneously presents and undoes the oil worker as a character type. Saturated in light, the figure of the laborer draws the viewer’s gaze to his body. The viewer’s eyes drift from his head to the slight downward tilt of his shoulder, across the smeared insignias stitched onto his uniform (Raven Drilling and the American flag) and downward to the snow-­dusted barrels,

Figure 2.1. Image of Brian Coffey, an oilfield worker covered in slurry. Photograph by Alec Soth. Reprinted with permission of Magnum Photos.



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his boots, and the stones below them. His eyes, cast away from the camera, emit signs of distraction and exhaustion. The immediate contrast to Coffey’s blinding visibility is the hazy background that enables his figure to emerge with such stunning and gripping effect. The bare hint of infrastructure, the monochromatic wash of the background, and Coffey’s own errant gaze lend the photograph its disquieting eloquence. I begin with Soth’s remarkable image because it invites us to think about the relationship between the material realities of extraction, the cultural attachments to a world powered by fossil fuels, and the aesthetic forms that mediate that relationship. Part of oil’s power has been to make certain forms of life appear inseparable from, even impossible without, oil itself. Scholars in the energy and environmental humanities have shown the multiple ways oil has become interchangeable with fundamental features of modern life.2 The authors of After Oil argue that we dwell in an inescapable petroculture “shaped by oil in physical and material ways, from the automobiles and highways we use to the plastics that permeate our food supply and built environments. Even more significantly, fossil fuels have shaped our values, practices, habits, beliefs, and feelings” (Petrocultures Research Group 2016, 9).3 The claim that fossil fuels reach into our subjective being is at once, oddly, striking and banal. Why would we not expect to be shaped by the energy systems that undergird virtually every facet of our lives? This essay asks how that formative power has shifted as fossil fuels appear not only as the engine of modernity but as responsible for imperiling the habitability of the planet. Our moment of what Michael Klare (2009) calls tough oil—­those processes of extreme extraction that include hydraulic fracking, offshore oil drilling, tar sands extraction—­ coincides with the growing alarm over climate change, environmental toxicity, and the increasingly apparent contradictions of endless capitalist growth on a finite planet. What is the fate of our attachment to fossil fuels in the era of tough oil? How are those attachments unmade and remade? And what is at stake in the endurance or transformation of those attachments? In what follows I unfold these questions alongside the cultural production of the Bakken boom and from Indigenous art from #NoDAPL. These works, I suggest, give expressive form to the

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cultural attachments to fossil fuels and their entanglement with ideas of freedom, mobility, and valuable labor. Yet, as I’ll show in the second half of this essay, the Indigenous artists understand those attachments as bound up with both fossil capitalism and settler colonialism. Those artists are also the ones who model nonextractive attachments and, by extension, refuse to let the future be circumscribed by capitalist and settler imaginations. Bakken Boom: The Last Future In the summer of 2015 I joined a group of scholars in the Bakken region for a workshop funded by an Antipode grant, which became the seeds for this book. After driving through western North Dakota and snapping photographs of towering rigs, sprawling Haliburton-­branded infrastructure, and seemingly endless, half-­finished construction projects, we stopped at the Pioneer Museum in Watford City, North Dakota. This small regional museum holds several artifacts from the town’s settler history of agriculture and oil and gas development. Next to the displays of the region’s settler colonial past was an exhibit on fracking, which featured full, miniaturized recreations of drilling sites by Mitchell Precision Replica (MPR) Models, a company that makes scaled down replicas of extraction technologies for use “in colleges, museums, historical societies, businesses, law firms, and private homes.”4 This particular exhibit was commissioned by the Pioneer Museum. These miniaturized replicas generally present fracking as a clean and harmless form of extraction. While there are slight discolorations around the machinery to indicate labor and use, the natural world surrounding these machines is preserved and untouched. In Figure 2.2, for example, the replica stands in front of a photo of the rugged landscape of North Dakota, suggesting a rather seamless transition between the frack site and the natural world, between new infrastructures of extraction and the timeless, natural frontier of the settler imagination. Paired with these replicas was a graphic, “The Life of a Well” (Figure 2.3). The graphic reiterates fracking as a clean operation. The subsurface appears as static, neatly contoured layers of earth unfazed by drilling activity. The life cycle of a well leaves the ground exactly as it was



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prior to drilling. In the language of the graphic, the final phase is to cap the finished well: “plug and abandon.” As an ensemble, the simple graphic and the miniaturized site marshal incredible detail to suggest that extraction can be simply understood and also marveled at. Viewers are invited to see how this technological sophistication and power can wrest oil from the Earth without compromising the landscape. The exhibit, then, not only models the microworkings of fracking; it also models attachments to extractive infrastructure. Placed alongside the history of agriculture and mineral extraction, this display seeds fracking into a longer developmental narrative, positioning it as consonant with and inseparable from the settler colonial imaginations of the place itself. Land, history, and place identity acquire aesthetic form, weaving together the individual objects into a coherent narrative totality within the museum.

Figure 2.2. A front view of a fracking rig by MPR Models set against a photograph of North Dakota’s landscape. Pioneer Museum, Watford City, North Dakota. Photograph by Thomas S. Davis.

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Figure 2.3. “The Life of a Well,” a graphic of the fracking process. Pioneer Museum, Watford City, North Dakota. Photograph by Thomas S. Davis.

The Pioneer Museum exhibit focuses on new drilling technology, but otherwise it fits neatly with a long history of industry-­funded and industry-­friendly petroaesthetics. Of course, it isn’t the only aesthetic activity emerging from the Bakken boom. Critical realist documentaries began appearing rather quickly and fetched numerous awards. Award-­ winning films such as The Overnighters, White Earth, and Sweet Crude Man Camp give voice to those laborers who migrated to the plains in search of economic rescue; the Smithsonian series Boomtowners and the more recent film The Bakken also foreground the complex human drama of the oil boom. In one way, these films all replay a version of what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism, or that relationship where “something you desire becomes an obstacle to your flourishing” (2011, 1). For Berlant, attachments are enduringly optimistic; those attachments are always directed at some version of “‘the good life,’ which is



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for so many a bad life that wears out the subjects who nonetheless, and at the same time, find their conditions of possibility within it” (27). Attachments keep us hoping and yearning for something that will not deliver its promise; the failure to deliver what is desired does little to break those attachments. This is what we might call contemporary capitalism’s affect structure; attachments to fantasies of the good life endure even when the material conditions for its realization remain out of reach. Most of the protagonists in these films are suffering from the Great Recession, one of the most violent hemorrhages in the global capitalist economy in nearly a century. Nearly all of them feature characters who see their economic rescue in a fossil fuel boom. As with other resource booms, there is money to be made. But the documentaries do not track the newly rich or the wealthy executives of energy and logistics companies. So what kind of people in these documentaries becomes representative of the Bakken boom? Or, in narrative terms, which characters emerge as typical? At least since Georg Lukács’s explorations in The Historical Novel and Studies in European Realism, we understand typical characters as illustrating “the indirect contact between individual lives and historical events” (1962, 285). For Lukács, the typical character’s narrative arc, her experience of historical processes, discloses general truths about the movement and contradictions of capitalist history. The analytic task is not to confirm that the characters presented in the films are in fact typical; rather, I want to show how the figurations of characters in the drama of the Bakken boom—­migrant laborers, white settlers named as “native” residents, heteronormative families, the poor, and midlevel bureaucrats—­become construed as typical. What might that typicality tell us about the endurance and elasticity of our attachment to fossil fueled modernity? To work through this question, I turn to two short documentaries: Sweet Crude Man Camp, a 2013 film produced by Alec Soth and directed by Isaac Gale, and J. Christian Jensen’s 2014 White Earth. I suggest that we read these documentaries not only as faithful representations or critiques of the boom. Even in their moments of critique and, perhaps because of their success as critical realist films, they imagine a world powered by oil as inevitable and a world without oil as unthinkable.

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Sweet Crude Man Camp focuses on a handful of characters to create a cross section of the new social realities engendered by the boom. In just under eleven minutes, Soth and Gale juxtapose stories of longtime North Dakota residents with those of new arrivals who are vying for economic rescue. This portrait of the Bakken takes shape primarily around Greg Hoeft, a laborer living in his truck, the Riley family, residing temporarily in a camper, and Chris Kittleson, a white man who is a self-­declared “native” and a principal at Williston High School. All of these interviews occur in small, intimate spaces: a car, a trailer, and a principal’s office. By inviting us into private (and quasi-­private) interiors, Soth and Gale render visible the migration of the oil boom into ordinary life. They also craft for us characters whose particular circumstances should illuminate broader and generalizable truths about the boom and its effects. Hoeft is a lone male worker in the oil fields. Huddled in his car, he fends off the bitter winters with thick clothing and his car’s heater (Figure 2.4). When Hoeft thinks of the conditions he endures in North Dakota, he imagines them as the background to a potentially momentous story of overcoming debt accumulated since the Great Recession. Debt emerges here not only as a struggle, but as an impersonal antagonist whose defeat will be a heroic overcoming. What is in fact a narrative of systemic dispossession gets refigured as a personal tale of struggle and endurance. The key to resolving debt, and to self-­realization for Hoeft, resides in the miraculous power of oil to redress the harms engendered by the capitalist economy. From an imagined future perspective, Hoeft conjures others who will admire his sacrifices: “Wow, good job for what you did, you know, back then” (Gale 2013, 00:01:12). Within this broader narrative frame, Hoeft can minimize his hardships. He recalls the settler histories of “our forefathers” who moved across the plains without the gifts of technology. Hoeft turns on his truck and tells us to think again of the warm comforts of the radio and heat. Even as the fruits of the boom appear ever out of reach, the attachment to petrocapitalism’s promises to create opportunities for individual success and absolution hold. In the narrow confines of his car, Hoeft reroutes an unfolding tragedy in the present into a near impossible narrative of future perfect emancipation.



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Figure 2.4. Video still of Greg Hoeft sheltering in his truck. Isaac Gale and Alec Soth, Sweet Crude Man Camp, 2013.

A similar narrative structure reappears in the Riley family’s story. David and Mickie Riley live with their two children in a camper parked on a dirt lot. Like Hoeft, Mickie Riley’s humility comes by way of comparison with those lacking even the basic necessities of “hot food . . . things we all take for granted.” The task, she says, is to “stay positive” in a “survival of the fittest” world (Gale 2013, 00:06:42). Their hope is to settle in North Dakota and become part of the industry for years to come. Their desire for permanent settlement and their status as a white heteronormative family make them the ideal candidates for what the urban planners and midlevel bureaucrats desire: a sustained oil industry with white families becoming a permanent part of the community. Like Soth’s photograph of the slurry-smeared worker, Hoeft and the Riley family become legible as types: these are individuals whose determination and labor will culminate in a redemptive story. Sweet Crude Man Camp is less sanguine about these redemptive futures. There is very little in the film to indicate that the boom rewards these liberal fantasies. Midway through the film we get the perspective of a longtime

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Williston resident, a self-­declared “native.” Kittleson, serving here as the skeptic with a longer view of history, offers a more sobering take on the boom, one that deflates Hoeft’s fantasies of economic rescue and the Rileys’ hopes for settling into a healthy, sustained petroeconomy. Kittleson recalls almost nostalgically the ever-­dwindling communal feel of Williston, which he casts as its prime attraction. He reminds us that the oil companies had promised a sustained boom in the recent past. That boom not only lasted a fraction of the projected time, but saddled the city with $26 million in debt, which was paid off only in 2005 (see Smith 2010). The behemoth-­like power of the boom, he suggests, is fragile; a proper environmental study or a slight shift in the regulatory apparatus (or, as was the case in 2015, a downturn in the price of oil) could suddenly make the energy-­and capital-­intensive extraction process unprofitable. Even at the height of the boom, the economics don’t add up for the average worker. An oilfield laborer netting $6,500 a month will watch living expenses soak up the lion’s share of his check. Man camps demanding $150 per night will absorb around $4,500 a month. As if to undercut the fantasies and hopes of the workers, Kittleson’s remarks indicate that the oil boom is not a source of economic rescue in the present or near future. When the film shuttles us back to Hoeft’s car and the Rileys’ trailer, these cramped spaces seem more permanent and less temporary, the inhabitants more delusional. This is part of the film’s critical power. The austere living conditions, the financial uncertainty, and the surge of problems accompanying the boom weigh down the airy dreams of economic rescue. If this version of Bakken realism gathers force by injecting the contradictions of everyday life into a story about exploding wealth and boundless opportunity, then Soth and Gale have not only shown us the Bakken “from below,” as it were; they have asked us, perhaps inadvertently, to think through the possibility that the attachments to oil and capitalism might endure when the material conditions that generated those attachments have passed. What would it mean to live in a world that reproduces attachments to things, but withholds those things from the people who work and sacrifice for them? What if typicality reveals the yawning gap between what individuals desire



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and what systems will deliver? And what do we derive from a brand of critical realism that discloses that gap but imagines no alternative? Jensen’s White Earth examines the potential futures opened by the oil boom. The film gives us the Bakken primarily through the eyes of children. Jensen reworks much of the same raw narrative material and character types as Sweet Crude Man Camp. The selection of narrators offers us another cross section of the boom: James McLellan is the young son of an oil worker who moved to North Dakota; Leevi Meyers is the daughter of ranchers who have lived in North Dakota for generations; Elena Guadalupe Loaiza and her mother Flor Loaiza give shape to the experience of a Latinx family from California. Like Sweet Crude Man Camp, Jensen’s film also focuses on the bewitching, transformed prairie. In an interview with Front Runner Magazine, Jensen remarked on the “otherworldly invasion with lights from oil rigs beaming in distant wheat fields and flames bursting out of the ground. . . . It was important that I capture the way that this unnatural light expressed itself in the landscape” (Symes 2014). The film’s opening minute presents the colorful enchantment of oil infrastructure against ink-­black night: the distant hazy lights of a fracking rig, the hellish orange glow of flares, the flickering red lights of railroad crossings, and the white gleam of a worker’s headlamp as he passes in front of a towering pumpjack. Where Sweet Crude Man Camp unfolds the boom in terms of space, Jensen’s real focus is on its multiple temporalities. The opening images of this alien landscape are juxtaposed with another scene of an approaching train. As the locomotive’s light passes our view, the film transitions from evening to day and opens with its first child narrator, James McLellan. These trains, McLellan tells us, come around hourly and are filled with oil. McLellan offers a short history lesson of White Earth. “Let’s go back sixty years,” he says (Jensen 2014, 00:01:26). He details White Earth’s population explosion from fifty to five hundred as the oil boom takes hold. A visual tour of White Earth accompanies McLellan’s narration: shuttered banks, empty auto-­repair shops, and vacant restaurants serve as physical signs of White Earth’s past. When the narrative shifts to the oil boom, the camera captures parking lots of Ford F-­150s, large campers, ramshackle man camps, and trailers. McLellan tells us

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that these people relocated for “the amount of money they’re supposed to be making, but the rent is too expensive is what they don’t know” (Jensen 2014, 00:02:01). The notes of skepticism in McLellan’s voice, echoing Kittleson in Sweet Crude Man Camp, attach to the visual evidence of the workers’ temporary homes. Jensen’s sequencing of sound and image suggests the wealth of oil is not materializing in the hands of the workers. There is no visual evidence to indicate that the desperate, hopeful people relocating to the Bakken are on an upward trajectory of wealth accumulation or debt reduction. The promises of the boom seem mismatched with the realities of daily life. The film imagines three potential futures for its youthful protagonists: McLellan’s perpetual now; Meyer’s hopeful return of the past; Loaiza, and I suspect Jensen’s, future prospects for personal uplift and social integration that occur within, and perhaps despite, the boom. McLellan’s own story is one of stalled development. He doesn’t attend school with the other kids in the film. Instead, he plays video games, wanders around the trailer park, and passes time by launching throwing stars into sheets of torn cardboard. When he tells us he is doing something “better than school” Jensen’s camera tracks a school bus ambling around an icy curve, emphasizing McLellan’s isolation (Jensen 2014, 00:04:15). McLellan will later reveal that his family has long worked in oil, but his aspirations are elsewhere: a pilot, a chef, and seemingly anything else but an oilfield worker. And yet he also seems aware that an oil future will be inevitable. “If I have to take a job in the oil fields, then I’m gonna have to say, oh yeah I do care about the oil. But if I don’t, I’ll say I don’t care about it” (Jensen 2014, 00:17:26). McLellan, who opens the film for us and introduces us to the recent past and present of life in White Earth, gives us these lines as the film closes with a shot of slow-­moving pumpjacks. The juxtaposition is striking. McLellan perceives his future in terms of whether or not he will be obligated to care about oil. And yet the cyclical motion of the pumpjacks suggests that oil production proceeds ahead whether or not we choose to care about it. The attachment to oil, then, appears to have very little to do with individual choice. Whether or not we work in the oil fields, whether or not we profess to care about oil, we remain attached,



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scarcely able to imagine a time when the pumpjacks cease and other futures begin. The somber future hinted at for McLellan is not the only one the film maps out. For Meyers, the transformation of North Dakota is viewed primarily in terms of loss. Jensen follows Meyers as she performs her daily farm chores. She lists the things she loves about North Dakota: the land, the farm, her family’s history, and the small population. The latter half of her story details the many ways the oil boom has cancelled this childhood idyll. The Meyerses have a few oil rigs on their farmland. Meyers also mentions the influx of new people who have made it less safe for girls like her to walk around. To make the source of that insecurity explicit Jensen’s film cuts to scenes of men at Heartbreakers and Whispers, two strip clubs in Williston. Meyers hopes North Dakota’s future will be a return to its preboom era, an arrival she envisions when she is “really old and . . . North Dakota will be back to normal” (Jensen 2014, 00:15:15). The future may yet revert to a more desirable past. Elena Loaiza’s mother frames the family’s relocation to North Dakota in terms of her children’s future pathways. To pay down their financial debts, Elena’s father works in the oil fields and her mother cooks and cleans. Elena, Flor tells us, has wanted to be a cardiologist since she was a little girl. Her parents hope that uprooting their family and yoking their fortunes to the oil boom will generate a better life for Elena. Like McLellan and Meyers, the Loaizas’ story performs figurative work. The film marshals the family’s labor and Elena’s friendships to explore forms of integration into the shifting cultural worlds of North Dakota’s boom. Flor expresses to her coworkers that she fears others believe she and her family are stealing “American” jobs. Her coworker dismisses her anxiety and tells her “We all come from other places like Mississippi or Montana. We’re all here for the work” (Jensen 2014, 00:13:16). The boom, this film suggests, generates social opportunities alongside economic ones. The antagonism between newcomers and residents that drives so many narratives of the boom would appear to miss the emergent communities of those working in and around the oil fields. When Jensen shows Elena and Meyers playing together in the snow,

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he signals another form of relation between newcomers and long-­ term residents that is not rooted in antagonism and suspicion. The futures invoked here exceed Flor’s dreams for Elena; the potential for economic rescue and social integration recasts the Loaizas’ situation as another type. The children in the boom, it seems to suggest, are the future because of the boom. Sweet Crude Man Camp and White Earth foreground the loneliness, desperation, and dwindling hopes of economic rescue that coexist with the much vaunted surge in employment, wealth, and the far less quantifiable “opportunity.” In this way, they fit firmly within a critical documentary tradition. By training the camera eye on those living through a resource boom, the individual characters typify, and attempt to generalize, stories of loss and disappointment. On one level, the suspicion of the boom’s promises and the display of its shortcomings would seem to enact what Nicholas Mirzoeff (2014) has called a countervisualization, or a way of seeing that exposes the violence of capital accumulation and resource extraction. It is true that viewers will be hard pressed to come away believing the boom is an economic miracle. Sweet Crude Man Camp suggests that the present is unlivable, the future unimaginable; White Earth casts the present as livable only when other futures, however tenuous, can be imagined. Yet these critical gestures of unmasking or demystifying the boom leave untouched the broader problem of the attachment to fossil capitalism. The closing scene of White Earth is emblematic in this regard (Figure 2.5). Somber music and dusk settle in as we watch pumpjacks wrest oil from the frozen ground. This admittedly melancholic and visually arresting scene can only serve as a silent acknowledgment that there is no way to think or imagine a world beyond the horizon of oil. The image of ongoing extraction, McLellan’s admission that his future may be in the oil patch, and the visual of one day fading into another suggests repetition without end. It would seem that the fossil fuel industry’s campaigns to make a world without oil unimaginable structure the very critiques of extractive capitalism. If a world powered by oil is no longer desirable, it still appears as inevitable.



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Figure 2.5. Video still of oil pumpjacks. J. Christian Jensen, White Earth, 2014.

Transformations: The Winter Count Collective and Standing Rock The resistance movements at Standing Rock demonstrated that nothing about extractive capitalism is inevitable. The story of #NoDAPL was not whether oil would rescue a desperate working class, but why the growth of capitalism was prioritized over Indigenous people’s lives and their land. Indigenous media and artworks from and about Standing Rock depart from the figurations of the Bakken boom in at least three significant ways: first, foregrounding Indigenous cosmologies and worldviews fundamentally changes the boom from an economic story to an environmental justice and anticolonial one; second, the dominant narrative of boom and bust is reframed as a settler narrative of wealth and resource capture, one that fits within a much longer history of dispossession and violence; finally, by connecting Indigenous histories, settler colonialism, and environmental justice, Indigenous artists like the Winter Count Collective and Cannupa Hanska Luger evoke other forms of attachment that preexisted capital and continue to haunt its near sovereign hold over our social and political imaginations. These artworks enact what Leanne Simpson calls “a critical reframing of the

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critique” (2017, 73) that both targets attachments to fossil capitalism and models other forms of attachment. From its very origins, the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) assumed Indigenous lives and rights were disposable. In 2014 the Army Corps of Engineers rerouted the proposed path of DAPL away from Bismarck, North Dakota. The risk to drinking water for the 92.4 percent white community was deemed too severe. In September of that year, Energy Transfer Partners met with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and outlined their plans for a new pathway that would traverse the Missouri River half a mile upstream from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. This change in the pipeline’s path did not result from an outcry from Bismarck’s residents; as a minister for the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Bismarck told Public Radio International, the Army Corps intervened to protect the predominantly white city without residents needing “to make an objection” (Ralph 2016). Nick Estes writes that the rerouted pipeline confirms that Energy Transfer Partners and the Army Corps of Engineers “imagined building a pipeline in a world where Native people do not exist. And they had to imagine us out of existence to justify trespassing on Indigenous territory and protected treaty lands” (2019a, 249). When LaDonna Bravebull Allard established Sacred Stone Camp in April 2016, Native peoples reasserted their claims to the land. From the beginning of the struggle that spring to the completion of DAPL in the winter of 2017, Indigenous resistance made visible the deep, intertwined histories of extractive capitalism and settler colonialism. But, as Allard explains, the resistance movement and everyday life in the camps manifested something else: “I remember I came down one day and walked into camp after work. There were all these people sitting around the fire. They were roasting deer meat on the grill. The women were cutting meat on the side to dry it. Kids were running and screaming. . . . Nobody was speaking English. They were all speaking Dakota. I looked at them and I thought, ‘This is how we’re supposed to live. This makes sense to me.’ Every day I came down to the camp and saw such blessings. I saw our culture and our way of life come alive” (Estes 2019b, 51). Allard’s account echoes many others from the camps:



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the resistance movements and the camps themselves imagined and actualized alternative attachments to land, to people, and to the future itself. Attachments can be unmade and remade in moments of crisis. Environmental justice and decolonization movements have long demonstrated that part of their work is to make other worlds seem possible. How might art and activism collaborate to model and enact other attachments? How can attachments be transformed? How can unmaking and remaking our attachments spur political and social transformation? Sara Ahmed’s thinking is helpful here. Where Berlant casts attachments as enduring and cruel, Ahmed thinks of attachments as the condition for critique and for transformation. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion she asks how people come to have feminist attachments, how and why they hold on to them, and how they might become more politically powerful by moving those objects of attachment and not letting them go. Ahmed outlines three dimensions of attachment formation: anger, wonder, and hope. The moment of anger captures an emotional and rational judgment of being wronged; it involves a “reading of the world in a particular way, and also involves a reading of the reading” (2015, 171). To understand anger as a justified response to a situation opens up a reorientation to the world. That reorientation can be profound as we come to see the most fundamental infrastructures of daily life as contingent. Seeing the world anew is what Ahmed calls wonder: “Wonder is about learning to see the world as something that does not have to be, and as something that came to be, over time, and with work” (180). For Ahmed, anger and wonder direct us toward some version of hope, but not one that is solely directed to the future nor the work of individual will or choice. Attachments, in her words, “open up different possibilities for living” (178), and they are foundational for constructing and sustaining collectives: they form a “we,” however tentative or provisional, that imagines and antagonizes for more just and livable worlds: “For the opening up of that which is possible does not just take place in time, in that loop between the present and future. The opening up also takes time. The time of opening is the time of collecting together” (188).

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What opens up in a moment of resistance? What possibilities take flight when ideas and practices are unmoored from the seeming inevitability of a world made by and for capital? #NoDAPL organized resistance around Indigenous histories, philosophies, and relations to time and nonhuman nature. Dina Gilio-­Whitaker summarizes the stark differences between settler colonial and Indigenous worldviews this way: “The very thing that distinguishes Indigenous peoples from settler societies is their unbroken connection to ancestral homelands. Their cultures and identities are linked to their original places in ways that define them: they are reflected in language, place names, and cosmology (origin stories). In Indigenous worldviews, there is no separation between people and land, between people and other life forms, or between people and their ancient ancestors whose bones are infused in the land they inhabit and whose spirits permeate place” (2019, 27). Mni Wiconi, “water is life,” became the rallying cry for Indigenous peoples and settler activists alike. Estes explains that Mni Wiconi is more than a protest slogan. It is a political theory that is decolonial and explicitly anticapitalist: “Mni Wiconi—­water is life—­exists outside the logic of capitalism. Whereas past revolutionary struggles have strived for the emancipation of labor from capital, we are challenged not just to imagine, but to demand the emancipation of the earth from capital. For the earth to live, capitalism must die” (2019a, 257). In a struggle over water, the primary opposite of capital is not labor, but the prospect of life. DAPL was quickly figured in activist discourse and media as Zuzeca Sapa, the black snake. In Lakota prophecy, the black snake will move across the land, destroying everything it touches. The snake’s arrival heralds the end of the world. In artworks and activist discourse, the pipelines and the extracted material they shuttle around the country were figured as inimical to life itself. Cannupa Hanska Luger’s installation This Is Not a Snake rethinks the Lakota prophecy in the context of Standing Rock. The work’s title will instantly invoke René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas un pipe (This is not a pipe) for those schooled first and most thoroughly in Western art history. Luger’s work is not intended to be merely allusive or to extend Magritte’s playful irony; rather, it rethinks the metaphor and materiality of the prophecy in the context



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of extraction. Luger’s fearsome snake is composed of debris from the extraction industry: oil barrels, shredded tires, and ammo cases evoke the violence of the state and corporate-­funded militias directed against the water protectors at Standing Rock (Figure 2.6). The snake is denaturalized, but the work retains the apocalyptic force of the Lakota prophecy. The terror of Earth’s end comes not from nature, but from the rapacious, wasteful practices of extractive capitalism. In a collaborative video project with the Winter Count Collective, Luger juxtaposes Native and settler stories of attachment formation. We Are in Crisis was made in the middle of the resistance. The stark differences with the Bakken documentaries are worth noting. Unlike White Earth and Sweet Crude Man Camp this film does not center on a small set of human subjects, nor does it foreground the daily realities of life in an extraction zone. What fades from view in We Are in Crisis—­the plight of individual workers, relocated families, institutional shortcomings—­opens out to another form of critique, one that escapes

Figure 2.6. Cannupa Hanska Luger, This Is Not a Snake / The One Who Checks & The One Who Balances, 2017–­20. Photograph by Craig Smith for Heard Museum, 2020. Reprinted by permission of the artist.

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oil’s hold of inevitability on aesthetic practice and political imagination. The Winter Count Collective narrates a longer, almost mythical history of fossil capitalism that has circumscribed the ways we imagine the present and the future. In this way, We Are in Crisis slots the current boom as yet another example of the violence of extractive capitalism and settler colonialism. More importantly, the film is not tied to the aesthetics of defamiliarization or critique; it models and enacts alternative attachments we might see as ecological and reciprocal. These conceptual and narrative differences find expression primarily through the film’s use of unmanned drones. The verticality of drone vision means that its camera work constitutes a different type of visual mediation. Nathan Hensley notes that drones are a “regime of figuration, a way of seeing, and, therefore, a modality of thought” (2016). Drone form, as he suggestively calls it, is inseparable from the American military’s deployment of drones to surveil and slaughter across the globe as part of the American war on terror. As a technology of imperial policing, drones visualize landscapes as war zones, humans as enemies and potential targets, and erase the physical risk of the drone pilot engaging in acts of killing and distant warfare. TigerSwan, the mercenary group hired by Energy Transfer Partners to surveil and target water protectors, deployed drones at Standing Rock to “gather intelligence.”5 In October 2016, the Federal Aviation Administration created a no-­fly zone over 154 miles of air space. The technology, the visual data, and the discursive figurations of nonviolent protestors as terrorists all attest to the political logics attached to drone vision. Yet this “new camera consciousness” (McCosker 2015, 15) was not solely deployed by the militias and police at Standing Rock. It became a critical part of what Sarah Tuck calls an “infrastructure of protest” (2018, 171). Myron Dewey used consumer drones to capture the police deploying tear gas, rubber bullets, and water cannons against water protectors during a frigid night on November 20, 2016. Dewey streamed the footage via Facebook Live, countering the police narrative that water cannons were used only to smother fires. For Tuck, the use of drone vision by water protectors is a “resignification of the aerial view as a counter-­ colonial perspective” (2018, 173). As an activist documentary technology,



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it is “a form of political action that challenges the state’s control over which images travel, and which do not” (173). The question now is how the capture of drone technology and the “resignification of the aerial view” shapes the aesthetic effects of We Are in Crisis. The film pairs aerial shots of fracking sites, energy infrastructure, the prairie landscape, and the Oceti Sakowin camp with Luger’s voice-­over narration. Luger tells two stories; the first narrative recounts the rise, domination, and crisis moment of fossil fueled capitalism. I want to tell you a story. A being was born out of the anxiety of separation. It is a fearful creature that we have nourished. We nursed it with oil and iron and blood. Let it feast upon our battlefields. It grew powerful in the shadows of our wars. And it learned to crawl aided by combustion engines. The beast became cunning and started a revolution of industry. Its arms grew and reached out of the killing fields where it’s belly remained and found refuge in all our homes. It brought us many wondrous gifts and promises of leisure. It had taught us to grow idle and complacent. It stripped us of our natural intelligence. It convinced us we were special. And separate. That the earth was here for our taking. It created the idea of a void in us all that could never be filled. It lied and said we were created in its image. And that we must consume as it consumed in order to survive. We are in crisis. (Winter Count Collective 2016, 00:00:07)

Separated from nature, capitalist civilization became a “fearful creature,” one nourished and strengthened by the violence of colonial expansion, extraction, and endless war. This story of mutual destruction, of diminished human life and exploited nature, has its origins in the ideological separation of nature and culture. Rendered in crisp, almost telegraphic prose, the narrative refigures the march of Western Civilization as high allegory. Ideas, histories, and systems take the shape of a “creature,” a persuasive “beast” who has made and remade attachments to nature, humans, and things. The drone footage offers visual evidence of Luger’s beast, but these visuals are more than illustrations. The aerial form of the video figures

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landscapes as material iterations of the two narratives—­settler and Native—­that Luger offers over the course of the video. The opening shot features a frack site next to a body of water, introducing us to vulnerable landscapes. As the drone ascends, we see the hard, vertical and diagonal lines of modern energy infrastructure: powerlines, highways, railroad tracks, and a cut in the earth for an as yet unfinished pipeline (Figure 2.7). Luger utters “we are in crisis” and concludes this first narrative of separation and attachment. The film pivots to another origin story and to other imagery. Here, the human is figured as relational with its primary attachments to its mother and to water. Humans are not born of a fearful creature, and they are not exceptional. We are “vessels,” with a duty to the water we carry and embody: to hold, to share, and to protect. The imagery shifts from tight linear forms of energy infrastructure to the curvature of bodies of water, the unruly plains and wandering animals, and, finally, the Oceti Sakowin encampment. We Are in Crisis imagines the Bakken, and the critique of fossil capitalism as such, in fundamentally different terms from Sweet Crude Man Camp or White Earth. The story we receive from the Winter Count

Figure 2.7. Video still of energy infrastructure. The Winter Count Collective, We Are in Crisis, 2016.



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Collective cuts in two ways: First, the actions at Standing Rock should be seen in a wider historical frame. This is yet another battle in the ongoing war of a settler colony against Indigenous peoples and, as Patrick Wolfe, Nick Estes, and Roxanne Dunbar-­Ortiz have demonstrated, those wars have always been about land.6 Second, while #NoDAPL is often discussed as an environmental justice struggle, it is also an anticolonial struggle centered on land rights and sovereignty. Sweet Crude Man Camp and White Earth push up to a limit of settler colonial knowledge; their pathos is still very much a settler pathos, one where the possession and use of the land for capital accumulation is unquestioned. Extractive capitalism’s material failure scarcely changes deeply felt attachments to the forms of life it produces and sustains. For Luger, dispossession, violence, and immiseration are dialectically bound to the luxuries and gifts of capitalism. The melancholy of Sweet Crude Man Camp and White Earth would lead us to think that capital needs to be more capable of delivering, to do more than sustain the illusions of rescue and fulfillment that have compelled people to orient their lives around extractive economies. We Are in Crisis observes those dynamics of freedom and unfreedom, hope and misery, from another vantage point, from another set of attachments to the land. The Winter Count Collective insists we see capitalist attachments themselves as the problem; more importantly, the film helps us imagine networked, reciprocal, and decolonial attachments as a viable and desirable alternative. Notes 1. National Public Radio was one of several media outlets to cover this story and feature the NASA photograph. https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/ 2013/01/16/169511949/a-mysterious-patch-of-light-shows-up-in-the-north -dakota-dark. 2. In addition to LeMenager (2014), see Huber (2013), Szeman and Diamanti (2019), and Wilson, Carlson, and Szeman (2017). 3. See also Barrett and Worden (2014), Wilson, Carlson, and Szeman (2017), and Szeman and Boyer (2017). 4. http://mprmodels.com. 5. The Intercept ran a fifteen-­part series between 2017 and 2018 titled “Oil and Water” that used leaked documents to narrate the cooperation between

92 Thomas S. Davis state and federal agencies and mercenary groups like TigerSwan to infiltrate and undermine the #NoDAPL movement. 6. In addition to Estes (2019a), see Dunbar-­Ortiz (2014) and Wolfe (2006).

References Ahmed, Sara. 2015. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. Barrett, Ross, and Daniel Worden. 2014. Oil Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Dunbar-­Ortiz, Roxanne. 2014. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press. Estes, Nick. 2019a. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. New York: Verso Books. Estes, Nick. 2019b. “‘They Took Our Footprint Out of the Ground’: An Interview with Ladonna Bravebull Allard.” In Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon, 43–­55. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gale, Isaac, dir. 2013. Sweet Crude Man Camp. Produced by Alec Soth. St. Paul, Minn.: Little Brown Mushroom. Gilio-­Whitaker, Dina. 2019. As Long as the Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. Boston: Beacon Press. Hensley, Nathan K. 2016. “Drone Form: Word and Image at the End of Empire.” e-­flux, no. 72. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/72/60482/drone -form-word-and-image-at-the-end-of-empire/. Huber, Matthew T. 2013. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jensen, J. Christian, dir. 2014b. White Earth. New Windsor, N.Y.: New Day Films. Klare, Michael. 2009. Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy. New York: Henry Holt. LeMenager, Stephanie. 2014. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Lukács, Georg. 1962. The Historical Novel. Translated by Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin Press. McCosker, Anthony. 2015. “Drone Media: Unruly Systems, Radical Empiricism, and Camera Consciousness.” Culture Machine 16. https://culturemachine .net/vol-16-drone-cultures/drone-media/. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2014. “Visualizing the Anthropocene.” Public Culture 26, no. 2: 213–­32.



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Petrocultures Research Group. 2016. After Oil. Edmonton: Petrocultures Research Group. Ralph, T. J. 2016. “Bismarck Residents Got the Dakota Access Pipeline Moved without a Fight.” Public Radio International. December. https://www.pri .org/stories/2016-12-01/bismarck-residents-got-dakota-access-pipeline -moved-without-fight. Simpson, Leanne. 2017. As We Have Always Done. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, Nick. 2010. “The Cycles of Boom and Busts.” Williston Herald, March 29. Soth, Alec. 2013a. Interview with Stacey Baker, “The Sixth Floor.” New York Times, February 1. Soth, Alec. 2013b. “The Luckiest Place on Earth.” New York Times Magazine, January 31. http://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/ 02/03/magazine/north-dakota-photos-audio.html#/?slide=0. Symes, Edward. 2014. “J. Christian Jensen: White Earth.” Front Runner Magazine. October 21. https://frontrunnermagazine.com/posts/j-christian-jensen/. Szeman, Imre, and Dominic Boyer, eds. 2017. Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Szeman, Imre, and Jeff Diamanti, eds. 2019. Energy Culture: Art and Theory on Oil and Beyond. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. Tuck, Sarah. 2018. “Drone Vision and Protest.” Photographies 11, nos. 2–­3: 169–­75. Wilson, Sheena, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman, eds. 2017. Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture. Montreal: McGill–­Queen’s University Press. Winter Count Collective. 2016. We Are in Crisis. https://vimeo.com/187762675. Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4: 387–­409.

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3 Anthropocene Realism Genres of “Energy Independence” Morgan Adamson

In the summer of 2015, Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the Bakken shale oil boom, launched a campaign branding itself “the last great place for opportunity!” (Figure 3.1). This slogan comes at the end of a promotional video that features hard-­working entrepreneurs testifying to the limitless opportunities that await you in western North Dakota. The radiating exclamation point punctuates the slogan by exploding over a spare grid, connoting a clean slate ready to be filled with a brighter future. If history leaves its traces in punctuation marks as Theodor Adorno (1990) argues, then the overzealousness of this red exclamation point, casting a warm glow over our future prospects, might also signal a menacing threat rather than an auspicious omen. Similarly, the “last” in “last great place for opportunity” seems to indicate that we have entered into an end-­times of sorts, having crossed over a threshold from which there is no return. But never mind these paranoid readings; for now let’s focus on the video’s upbeat message about possibility in this place of wholesome renewal. Deploying what had become a standard set of conventions for promotional videos (DSLR cinematography with shallow focus, staged interviews, illustrative B-­roll, upbeat pop music, flat gestures toward multiculturalism), the video attempts to counter the boomtown narrative perpetuated about Williston in the national media. In that narrative, 95

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Figure 3.1. Video still proclaiming “Williston, the last great place for opportunity!” Williston development video.

Williston was dangerous and full of male oil workers and prostitutes; the prosperity experienced in Williston is impermanent, subject to the same boom and bust cycles that have plagued the region since the late nineteenth century, and certainly since the first oil exploration in the 1950s. In doing so, however, the video crystalizes a generic form that asserts the regeneration of the good life through the indefinite expansion of petrocapitalism and the extractive economy that surrounds it. What does it feel like to live in the last great place for opportunity? “It’s almost like, whenever you think of the American dream, that’s what it’s like to be in Williston,” a young woman tells us as the video commences while B-­roll of an American flag flaps in the wind. In a world full of missed opportunities, dead ends, and foreclosed dreams, Williston is a place where hard work still translates into stability and security. It is simultaneously a place where the entrepreneurial spirit is allowed to flourish. “Anybody who has any potential who wants to work can make it here,” we are told by an elderly woman; “everybody’s here because they want to succeed, they want to change their life . . . they want to start over,” a middle-­aged man reiterates; “this town has given anybody



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who wants to try to open up their own business a great opportunity,” an owner of a Culver’s restaurant explains as he laughs with his employee. Williston is a place where everyone is invited to participate in abundance, and this abundance is shared among the town’s residents in an equitable manner. While the video’s subjects are mostly white, it also features a Black man, whose success story is elaborated in a separate video. In it, he explains that he had been broke before coming to Williston. Since arriving, he had turned his life around, a point the video underscores, rather crudely, with B-­roll of him withdrawing cash from an ATM. In its standard corporate form, the video draws on the conventions of documentary cinema to concretize its promotional message. By integrating documentary techniques into its branding campaign, Williston’s promotional videos work to generate the kind of truth-­effect that documentary cinema relies on. We are given visible evidence of Williston’s prosperity through the narratives of its residents, who testify to the opportunities awaiting in the town. These narratives are supported directly through B-­roll intended to confirm these testimonies, with footage that literalizes the video’s messages. This genre of promotional video is unique in its capacity to motivate what Brian Winston (1993) has described as documentary cinema’s underlying attachment to the camera as an instrument of scientific inscription, one that produces indexical data akin to other devices of scientific measurement, such as a thermometer. In other words, documentary video as a promotional strategy is unique in its capacity to unfold an argument about Williston in a time-­based, audiovisual medium that endeavors to generate an alternative common sense about the boom grounded in the impression of reality it ostensibly documents. Footage of good jobs and trips to the ATM help visualize the opportunities in Williston, but central to the video’s vision of the thriving American dream is the growth of the town and the development of housing stock to suit its utopian vision: suburban-­style tract homes. The video reaches its crescendo as it pans rows of identical houses under construction (Figure 3.2). The repetition in these images recalls Dan Graham’s 1965–­67 photo series “Homes for America,” a pointed

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visual study of postwar suburban developments that highlights the standardized rigidity of these alienating landscapes. However, in the wake of the subprime market crash and the decimation of the American middle class, these homes offer a nostalgic comfort, a promise to extend the suburban project, imagining Williston as a microcosm for the repetition of the post–­World War II boom. The video celebrates the measured symmetry of the landscape under construction as an index of the normalized family units that live within them. After sweeping footage of newly minted suburban sprawl, we are told by a housing developer that Williston residents “want to be a family structure, and that’s what the real dream is all about.” The fixation on the development of tracts of single-­family homes by Williston’s city planners is fed by the notion that they must establish permanence in a transient city by settling the population and promoting social reproduction. The single-­family home becomes a biopolitical measure that serves as the counterpoint to the instability and perceived danger of the man camp (Figure 3.3). “Williston, the last great place for opportunity!” thus replaces the Williston Economic Development Office’s previous slogan that celebrated the virility of frack drilling: “Rockin’ the Bakken!” Indeed, in the campaign to rebrand Williston as the last great place for opportunity, the conditions of possibility for the good life, namely the technology of hydraulic fracturing, were absent from view. Fracking, along with the social and ecological violence it has wrought across the landscape of western North Dakota and beyond, is the condition of possibility that can remain unstated precisely because its necessity had been established. In the lead-­up to the election of Donald Trump, the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords, and institutionalization of an “America First” energy policy, the fracking boom in Williston demonstrated that the U.S. drive for “energy independence” in the 2010s was and is far more than a geopolitical imagination favoring fossil fuel extraction within national borders. Instead, the alleged freedom afforded by the fracking industry in Williston brought together an imagination of reproductive futurity with petrocapitalism to give the impression that fossil fuels offered the only escape from the perpetual present of neoliberal capitalism, the exclusive option for renewal. Taking Williston’s promotional materials as a starting point, this essay

Figure 3.2. Video still showing a uniform row of houses. Williston Development Video.

Figure 3.3. A line of trailers at a worker camp outside Williston, North Dakota. Photograph by Morgan Adamson.

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considers the ways that the Bakken oil boom helped to crystalize a genre I will call Anthropocene realism, which hinges on organizing life around the unstated belief that there is no end or alternative to fossil fuels. As Matt Huber argues, “our dependence on oil is simultaneously material and discursive” (2015, 31). Taking this statement further, I would assert that our dependence on oil is fueled by a set of affective attachments that constitute a genre of the “good life.” This notion of genre is taken up at length by Lauren Berlant, who argues genre is that which organizes attachments and expectations as experience unfolds. As a “mode of recognition,” genre organizes subjective experience within social life by forming “sites of mutual collective recognition,” giving form to affective experience (Jackson 2015). Genre, for Berlant, signals a set of mutable, collectively authored forms that provide a structure to narrate both the present and future, and they show that the attachments organized by specific genres can be, and often are, perverse and destructive. In Cruel Optimism, Berlant examines the “improvisation of genre amid pervasive uncertainty” that arises in neoliberal capitalism, as genres of the good life are depleted and transfigured by expanding social and economic precarity (2011, 6). Attending to the ways that genres are established and transformed by economic precarity and petrocapitalism, this essay tracks the emergence of the genre of Anthropocene realism over the last decade through Williston’s self-­branding as “the last great place for opportunity!” Anthropocene realism comes into view as an “improvisation of genre amid pervasive uncertainty” in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis that establishes the necessity of oil in response to that crisis. In the promotional video discussed, we find the recycling of a set of generic conventions: documentary realism and branding techniques are put in the service of a narrative of the good life, the American dream. However, these generic conventions are also put to an aggressive new use, working to establish the common sense that expansion of fossil fuel extraction that forms the basis of Williston’s prosperity represents the “last” hope for the good life. Sustaining this genre of experience and expectation, along with perpetuating the version of the good life it describes, the video illuminates affective attachments to “energy independence”



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at a historical precipice where the catastrophic effects of climate change are already being felt. In order to untangle these affective attachments, I first consider the historical emergence of the discourse of “energy independence” in the 1970s and its virulent return in the past decade as a way to frame the genre of Anthropocene realism within the crisis and renewal of U.S. capitalism in the neoliberal era. I then turn my attention to how the genre of Anthropocene realism is articulated through what Lee Edelman (2004) has called “reproductive futurity,” working to unpack the ways that the genre is bound to a form of white supremacy that is at the same time preservative and suicidal. To this end, this essay explores how the boom instigated by hydraulic fracturing is settled within quotidian life, in Williston and beyond, by the establishment of a genre through which certain subjects come not only to recognize themselves as the present and future beneficiaries of fossil fuel extraction, but to experience any affront to that unbridled extraction as an assault on an entire way of life. Anthropocene Realism: Energy Independence and the Good Life Shortly after clinching the Republican nomination for president in March 2016, Donald Trump delivered the keynote address at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck, North Dakota. His speech, titled “An America First Energy Plan,” began by confirming the narrative that North Dakota is, indeed, the last great place for opportunity (Trump 2016). Praising North Dakota as a state at the “forefront of a new energy revolution,” Trump informs the audience that the United States is facing a simple choice: “wealth versus poverty.” Placed against the backdrop of what he casts as a pervasive economic precarity, Trump argues that “North Dakota shows how energy exploration creates shared prosperity. Better schools. More funding for infrastructure. Higher wages. Lower unemployment. Things we’ve been missing.” Trump’s speech, its strategic location and timing, along with his subsequent election to the presidency, mark the triumph of the rhetoric of energy independence, in which fossil fuel exploration and extraction are understood as the only viable path toward recapturing the “things we’ve been missing.”

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Trump, of course, is not the first U.S. politician to posit energy independence as a resolution to the ongoing crisis of American capitalism in the last decade; its association with populist responses to economic precarity in the immediate lead-­up and aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis was captured in Sarah Palin’s infamous “Drill, Baby, Drill” slogan. Nevertheless, Trump’s rhetoric, couched in the language of restoration, echoes and extends Williston’s claim that its economic model represents the sole alternative to collective poverty. Confirming Williston’s self-­image and expanding it to the national stage, Trump’s speech ties energy independence to the populist politics of resentment that fueled his rise to power.1 As I explore in this section, the wedding of domestic fossil-­fuel production to the idea of economic stability and the maintenance of an entire way of life is not a new phenomenon with Trump or his Democratic predecessor who embraced fracking but, as I explore later, was accomplished in an earlier moment of crisis of U.S. capitalism, the 1970s. Since that time, it has been the basis of a bipartisan consensus that has been baked into U.S. culture and has formed the common sense of U.S. energy policy in the past half century, experiencing a dramatic resurgence in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. In the lead-­up to Trump’s presidency, Barack Obama oversaw one of the greatest expansions of domestic fossil-­fuel production in the history of the United States, consistently advocating for, in Sica and Huber’s words, a “geographical worldview that constructs energy independence as a universal and unproblematic good” (2017, 338). A worldview that imagines discrete nation-­states with independent energy wealth, however, obfuscates the ways that fossil fuel extraction is embedded in circuits of capital that far exceed any particular country. In their analysis of the rhetoric of energy independence in the fracking industry of Pennsylvania, Sica and Huber rightly argue that “rather than simply securing energy for the benefits of their specific nations and citizenry, territorial states just as often facilitate energy production by multinational firms and a global network of investment” (338). To understand the Obama administration’s complicity in such activities, one need to look no further than



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Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state, during which she advocated for expansion of fracking technology globally at the same time Obama was championing domestic energy production (Blake 2014). In the past decade, the technology of fracking has been indispensable to the resurgence of the rhetoric of energy independence. Russell Gold (2014) gives an account of the implementation of fracking technologies since 2010, arguing that it has transformed the discursive practices and material politics around oil in the United States and globally. In the span of a few short years, the anxiety around peak oil has been erased and the geopolitics of U.S. oil consumption has been transformed into nominal energy independence. As fracking technologies open untapped fossil fuel reserves to extraction, U.S. oil production has soared to eleven million barrels per day, on par with Saudi Arabia. Today, oil production in the Bakken averages over 1.1 million barrels per day. Throughout the current oil boom, North Dakota has been exemplary of the ways in which fossil fuel extraction is sold to the population through the rhetoric of energy independence, imagining oil as a domestic resource and the profit from its extraction directly benefiting a local population. It is certainly true that the median income in Williston is well above the national average, a fact that bolsters the city’s claim to being a beacon of the good life. Williston is thus depicted as a microcosm for a shared national prosperity that comes from fossil fuel exploration and development, rather than a site that is in the process of being transformed by the logistics of resource extraction and multinational financial interests. While the Williston development video projects the fantasy of something akin to a socialized oil industry, the profits from oil extraction in North Dakota and the surrounding region have not been equitably distributed among its residents, while processes of extraction often more closely resemble a mode of primitive accumulation that serves, as many have argued, as a necessary and unremitting aspect of capital accumulation. Furthermore, the oil extracted from the Bakken formation is now being exported to Asia and elsewhere, contravening the idea that this oil is produced for domestic consumption (Fang 2016; Ngai, Hampton, and Tan 2017).

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Despite the global dimensions of the fossil fuel industry and the inequalities it engenders, how has the rhetoric of domestic energy independence managed to dominate the U.S. political landscape, in the process supplanting governmental action regarding climate change? In response to Trump’s announcement that the United States would be withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords, the New York Times published an article in June 2017 proffering an answer that largely blamed the decision on a decade-­long attack on climate science being waged from within the Republican party, with the aid of fossil fuel lobbies and figures like the Koch brothers (Davenport and Lipton 2017). The veracity of this line of argumentation notwithstanding, such explanations for the present state of affairs fail to sufficiently take into account the affective attachments to the good life that are tethered to the rhetoric of energy independence that continue to shape the horizon of possibility for politics. In order to situate Anthropocene realism as a genre through which these attachments are expressed, let us consider the birth and resurgence of the rhetoric of energy independence, which I will argue is also a genre of experience, as it relates to two specific political economic crises (the 1970s and 2008), examining the ways that fossil fuels became intimately, though differently, connected to both the material realities and cultural imagination of each. In both crises, the rhetoric of energy independence becomes synonymous with freedom and with the resolution of financial instability, a way to manage and ward off real and perceived threats to a way of life. This way of life must be reinscribed and reinforced within the quotidian domain and its attendant geographies, and the image of the good life the Williston development video cultivates is grounded in the single-­ family home (Figure 3.4). The homes in the video are simultaneously represented as the basis and reward for the entrepreneurial endeavors of its subjects. The suburban landscape, in the video, appears at the climax of its narrative, the reveal that substantiates Williston’s claim as the last great place for opportunity. This should be no surprise, as Matt Huber argues that beginning in the first half of the twentieth century, the version of social reproduction inherent to suburban development cannot be separated from the rise of petrocapitalism. Moreover,



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he insists that the entrepreneurial subjectivities we associate with neoliberalism are impossible without the material transformation of everyday life centered upon reproductive geographies of single-­family home ownership, automobility, and voracious energy consumption. The dense, versatile fuel of petroleum fuels a particular lived geography—­a “structure of feeling”—­that allows for an appearance of atomized command over the spaces of mobility, home, and even the body itself. (2013, 23)

Huber locates the emergence of neoliberal policies and practices in the suburbanization of the American landscape of the postwar era, claiming that the mobility fueled by petrocapitalism was also central to the capacity of the American subject to understand her life as capital. Moreover, the necessity of purchasing the implements of this “fractioned” subjectivity—­namely the car and the single-­family home—­“also immediately extends the mass of living labor into circuits of credit, debt, and financial markets” (23). In other words, neither the emergence of entrepreneurial subjectivities nor the related financialization of daily life

Figure 3.4. Video still showing a single-­family home. Williston development video.

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can be separated from the suburbanization of American life enabled by the abundance of cheap oil. The association of freedom and individual expression with fossil fuels is ingrained into a vision of social reproduction that has come to be understood as the good life by individuating and settling the U.S. middle class. The mode of social reproduction made possible by oil came under threat in the 1970s as the oil shocks of 1973–­74 and 1979 reverberated across the U.S. cultural landscape. Though the decline of U.S. hegemony and the rise of the revanchist neoliberal project throughout the 1970s was a multifaceted process, Huber illustrates how the oil shocks were considered a menace to an entire way of life: “oil shock discourse explained economic crisis as a naturalized product of commodity price increases and underemphasized the concurrent power shifts within the broader American political economy. Thus the focus on the oil shock stood in as an external explanation for the dramatic declines in living standards” (2013, 116). Foreign oil, government interference, and price controls came to stand in for a larger assault on postwar affluence—­ attacks on both free markets and free individuals. Furthermore, the “geographies of exclusion” enabled by oil congealed into a political force located in the decentralized suburbs, where a perceived association between energy independence, personal freedom, and quality of life motivated a rightward turn in U.S. politics. This suburban, rightward turn was also directly linked to a reactionary white supremacy that saw racial turmoil in urban centers and movements for racial justice as a threat to a whole way of life, and these anxieties became implicitly sutured to the availability of cheap fossil fuels. Discourses around peak oil, “limits to growth,” and a growing ecological crisis inherently also shaped neoliberal capitalism during its ascendance (Nelson 2015). Oil’s role in the crises of U.S. capitalism during this period, including the threat of foreign oil and the perceived connection between domestic energy production and the maintenance of a prosperous and independent life, help us to understand the historical roots of our present-­day cultural attachment to energy independence. Moreover, this era sets the stage for oil’s role in both the economic and cultural response to the 2008 financial crisis.



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Just as the politics of racial exclusion that defined the project of suburbanization are rendered invisible in Williston’s branding campaign, so are the ways that oil itself functions as the unspoken, yet ever-­present force behind the burgeoning entrepreneurial subjectivities in the video.2 Participating in these double erasures, the video does more than simply counter the boomtown narrative by repeating tropes of lily-­white suburban life. Instead, in the process of branding Williston as the “last great place for opportunity,” the video both participates in and furthers the genre of Anthropocene realism. Drawing on Mark Fisher’s (2009) diagnosis of the neoliberal era as the establishment of a dominant genre he calls “capitalist realism,” or the active production of the sense that in Margaret Thatcher’s words, “there is no alternative” to the neoliberal agenda, I suggest that Anthropocene realism is a genre that substantiated a similar sense that there is no alternative to the so-­called energy revolution in the United States that peaked in the last decade. Fisher’s designation of the genre of capitalist realism could be understood as tracking how a certain “mode of recognition” gets established and reinforced within neoliberal capitalism—­a form through which to narrate the present and the future and to locate oneself within that. While cruel optimism, for Berlant, examines the perpetuation of certain genres of the good life that mutate and persist within neoliberalism, capitalist realism is about the sense of foreclosure of alternatives, a genre that traffics in realism in order to delimit the present and the future to the inevitability of inequality and precarity. I see Anthropocene realism as the merging of these two notions of genre in neoliberal capitalism. On the one hand, the Williston development video recycles a vision of the “good life” tied to the single-­family home and the entrepreneurial subjectivities and forms of social reproduction it represents. On the other hand, its vision of renewal represents the restriction of options for both the present and the future. Instead of the perpetuation of neoliberal economic practices that Mark Fisher locates as the basis of capitalist realism, the perpetuation of fossil fuel extraction forms the basis of Anthropocene realism—­the “last” option for the good life. It is, in this sense, both an extension and escape from capitalist realism, while at the same time perpetuating a cruel optimism

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that feeds on unhealthy attachments (namely, to oil). This energy revolution, of which Williston is arguably the symbolic capital, stood to resolve not only the economic uncertainty that had been visited upon the population after decades of neoliberal policies, but it also promised to sooth fundamental anxieties about the preservation of a way of life that has shaped neoliberalism since its outset. As I have suggested, the genre of Anthropocene realism becomes legible when we consider the ways that the fracking boom coincided with the financial crisis, or what Duménil and Lévy (2013) call “the crisis of neoliberalism” and the widespread belief that the unbridled expansion of financial capitalism, deregulation, and union-­busting would lead to long-­term prosperity. In addition to supplying a stream of indebted laborers to the Bakken who had lost their homes and jobs, the financial crisis allowed the prosperity of the new fracking revolution to stand in stark contrast with the devastation of the rest of the country. This juxtaposition allowed the energy revolution to emerge as the beacon of hope for a beleaguered population, an alternative, perhaps the only alternative, to precarity and economic devastation. This is the perfect storm that allowed Williston to emerge as the last great place for opportunity. “We’ve moved from a boom town to a business model. Everyone is coming here to call Williston their home.” These words, from a Williston Economic Development representative, tell the story of an inevitable transition from instability to perpetuity. It is a perfect piece of Anthropocene realism: a home for “everyone” built by a vague “business model” predicated on the endless but invisible flow of oil. If the 1970s financial crises and oil shocks represented a threat to mobility, individual freedom, and standard of living, then the 2008 financial crisis signaled a threat to an even more fundamental aspect of the American dream: the single-­family home. As images of foreclosed homes and broken families circulated in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, Williston’s self-­fashioning as a site of prosperity and renewal is undergirded by the attachment to home as a stable entity, salvaging the promise of a model of social reproduction in crisis. In a world created and destroyed by the whims of a “fictitious” financial



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capital, oil’s materiality insures a stable source of “real” wealth and therefore stability. I use the phrase “Anthropocene realism,” rather than “petrorealism” or a related term, to point to a similar sense of resignation that Fisher attempts to capture with capitalist realism. Compelling work on petrorealism draws on the rich tradition of Marxist literary criticism and environmental humanities to think through problems of scale and representation of oil in a manner that “attempts to come to terms with petromodernity from within” (Bellamy 2017, 261). Anthropocene realism, as I am using it here, has a much more circumscribed meaning in that it works to name specific affective attachments that pervade everyday life in twenty-­first-­century cultures of energy independence. If the Anthropocene designates, among other things, the transformation of planetary systems (particularly climate systems) by humans, then Anthropocene realism in this instance signals an orientation to that process that behaves as if it were inevitable. How else do we account for the fact that the acceleration of fossil fuel extraction in the United States over the past decade coincides with the widespread acceptance of human-­driven climate change as irrefutable scientific fact? As partisan accounts such as the New York Times article mentioned above would suggest, the turn toward policies that favor intensive domestic fossil-­ fuel extraction are the result of a concerted effort by the oil industry and other special interests to fund and promote climate change denial. This narrative of denial, however, does little to explain how collective affective attachments, rather than the circulation of false information, are responsible for the continued quest for energy independence. Departing from the discourse of denial, how might we understand the acceleration of oil extraction at a moment when climate scientists insist that the only viable way to prevent catastrophic climate change is to leave the world’s oil reserves in the ground? I would contend that such actions require the same “structure of disavowal” that Fisher finds endemic to capitalist realism. Following Slavoj Žižek’s understanding of disavowal as central to ideology in postmodernity, Fisher writes: “so long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to

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participate in capitalist exchange” (2009, 13). In the structure of disavowal, belief and action are separated. By 2015 we had already come to accept, in large part, that climate change is a real and terrifying prospect, but we did not complain when, for instance, our 401(k)s rebounded, thanks in part to the fracking-­inspired gold rush in the U.S. fossil fuel industry. This is what distinguishes the genre of Anthropocene realism from the attachments to oil in the 1970s: we now know that fossil fuels are killing us, but we act as if the domestic extraction of oil is necessary, the only way to secure a viable future. It is this contradictory orientation to the future that I address in the next section. Reproductive Futurism, White Supremacy, and the Foreclosure of Alternatives One of the most striking things about the Williston video is the sheer abundance of children that populate its new vision of opportunity. “Thousands of babies are being born each year in the community,” a member of the Economic Development team tells us as a toddler is pushed on a swing (Figure 3.5). The cherub face embodies the central message of the video and its vision of renewal—­the promise of a collective destiny that will thrive in perpetuity. In its focus on the child the video participates in and furthers what Lee Edelman calls “reproductive futurism,” where the figure of the child imposes a heteronormative “limit on political discourse as such” (2004, 2). For Edelman, serving “as the repository of variously sentimentalized cultural identifications, the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust” (11). It is for the future of this child, the video tells us, that all of our efforts are being directed. Edelman reads the novel Children of Men as a fitting allegory for reproductive futurism. A dystopian, near-­future scenario, the story depicts a world in which humanity has become sterile, and the plot centers on protecting the last fertile woman and her newborn child. This narrative, for Edelman, “gives voice to the ideological truism that governs our investment in the Child as the obligatory token of futurity” as we witness “the renewal of our barren and dying race through the miracle of birth” (12). In branding Williston as the last



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Figure 3.5. Video still showing a white toddler in a park swing. Williston development video.

great place for opportunity and realizing that opportunity in the figure of the child, the video portrays a similarly hopeless world whose revitalization depends on not only social but biological reproduction. In describing the genre of capitalist realism, Mark Fisher also reads Children of Men as an allegory for our contemporary political impasse. For Fisher, however, the narrative’s portrayal of society’s infertility is metaphorically related to the culture of late capitalism in which we contend with “a deeper, far more pervasive sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility” than in earlier moments (2009, 7). Children of Men, for Fisher, is about the experience of living through the catastrophe of the perpetual present in which all hope and all alternatives have been depleted and we are left with only “reiteration and re-­permutation,” begging the question: “how long can culture persist without the new?” (3). If capitalist realism is marked by a “cultural and political sterility,” then Anthropocene realism is seen as a way out—­a revival and rebirth that is neither. Instead, these tropes function as the hollowed out preservation of culture modeled on the petroleum-­driven postwar boom. As Fisher reminds us, “a culture that is merely preserved is no culture at

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all” (3). Similarly, the future offered in the Williston development video is not one that breaks from the sterility of the present, but a vision of the future that carries forward an embalmed culture that undermines its own conditions of possibility. There is something more to say about what, precisely, is being preserved in Williston’s self-­fashioning as the last great place for opportunity. Of the “thousands” of babies being born in Williston, the only ones we see in the video are white. The promise of renewal in the last great place for opportunity is thus coded not only as the renewal of the middle class but as the renewal of white America itself, thus revealing the racial unconscious of fossil fuel extraction in the United States. This is not surprising, given that in the United States the promise of freedom and self-­determination through homeownership has historically been predicated on racial exclusion and the violent marking of suburban spaces of social reproduction as white. The video’s racial coding also parallels the tradition of homesteading by white settlers so central to the establishment of North Dakota as a frontier space that erased histories of racial injustice, genocide, and continued brutalization and expropriation of Native land and communities that have been accelerated by the boom. In its version of reproductive futurism, the video reveals an unstated assumption about the intended beneficiaries of energy independence. The preservation of the culture of petrocapitalism implicitly creates the conditions for the preservation of a reactive and regressive culture of whiteness. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” (Fisher 2009, 2). This oft-­cited slogan, attributed to both Žižek and Fredric Jameson, captures, for Fisher, the sense of hopelessness in capitalist realism that stems from a devastating incapacity to imagine alternatives. These thinkers read this lack of imagination in the genre of apocalyptic films, like Children of Men, where complete annihilation seems somehow more plausible than radical social transformation. More disturbing is that, in many instances, these apocalyptic films allow us to experience our own evisceration as a pleasurable, even sublime event. In Anthropocene realism, this impossibility of imagination leads to a literalization of the apocalyptic genre as we actively elect



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a course of action that will ensure species and planetary devastation. Meanwhile, this course of action is experienced as freedom, safety, and revitalization. The preservative impulse that undergirds energy independence and its vision of reproductive futurism might be summed up in the following statement: “It is easier to bring about the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of fossil capitalism.” Or, to put it bluntly, one might say: “It is easier to bring about the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of white supremacy as a way of life.” As has been well documented, the naming of the Anthropocene marks the moment in which human-­driven geological transformation becomes decisive for the future of the planet. Humans (or some humans), as agents of geological transformation, have the potential to determine whether or not life as we know it can and will persist. With mass extinction and climate change already underway, the Anthropocene signals the foreclosure of a certain future. Anthropocene realism, on the other hand, also names the foreclosure of the future, but in a different sense. It is predicated on the exclusion of contingency, which is replaced by what Mark Fisher called the “slow cancelation of the future” (2014, 2). This cancelation is achieved not only by materially extinguishing the possibility for future life, but through the exclusion of all alternatives for narrating the present and the future that are not tied to fossil fuels. In that sense, it is a genre of experience that collapses the future into the present by way of a disavowal, binding us to inevitable extinction by refusing to allow any alternative to emerge. In its preservative impulse, Williston’s self-­branding as the “last great place for opportunity!” seems to tacitly acknowledge this foreclosure of alternative futures. The incapacity to imagine alternatives that marked the 2015 branding campaign was, somewhat paradoxically, exemplified in Williston’s 2016 campaign slogan, “Williston Reimagined.” In another corporate branding documentary exploring this theme, a video highlights economic expansion in Williston, including a new airport. It ends, however, on the same note as the previous branding campaign: with images of white children and an expert asserting that “Williston is a great place to raise your family.” The “reimagination” of Williston is simply the extension of the petroleum-­fueled boom into the civic domain, rehearsing

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narratives of the good life that can only function by foreclosing all other orientations to the future. Following up on the “Williston Reimagined” campaign, the Williston development office’s 2017 video, entitled “The Good Life,” could not be more explicit in its execution of Anthropocene realism. Accompanied by stock footage of the town, more white children, and suburban developments under construction, the voice-­ over spells out the good life available in Williston: “Finishing a degree, buying a house, starting a family—­all difficult milestones in a tough economy—­but not in Williston!” Closing by insisting that Williston is the “perfect place to live the good life,” the video settles the boom by rehearsing a genre of the good life that is, as I have discussed throughout, associated with the model of social reproduction and whiteness made viable by oil. It activates a cruel optimism about the possibility of participating in that good life, while eliminating all other imaginaries of possible futures beyond Williston’s model. Naming the genre of Anthropocene realism, or the sense that there is no end and no alternative to petrocapitalism, requires more than disavowal of our “addiction” to oil, a point that Matt Huber (2013) makes very clear. It also refutes the idea that it is merely the powerful forces of “denial” that are driving a continued allegiance to energy independence. Instead, it requires identifying the ways that our attachments to certain versions of the good life are tied to geographies of racial exclusion and bound up in petrocapitalism. If the mood of capitalist realism is depression, as Mark Fisher argues, then the mood of Anthropocene realism might be read as anxious exuberance. This exuberance presents itself in comforting tropes that at the same time exude fragility. It is tempting to dismiss the pathos of Williston’s branding campaigns as the futile efforts of a culture in decline, but that would be too easy. We know there are other, less suicidal, visions for the future than those offered by Anthropocene realism; but to access them we must first assess the ways our sense of the good life is tethered to petrocapitalism. In other words, countering the genre of Anthropocene realism is a political project that cannot be undertaken through ideology critique alone. Looking back on the settling of the boom in Williston and the genre of Anthropocene realism that solidified around it as an artifact of recent



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history, we should note how strong its pull remains in struggles such as the fight over pipelines like Enbridge’s Line 3 in Minnesota. Despite widespread disapproval and a strong Indigenous-­led resistance to its construction—­lasting though its completion in fall 2021—­the pipeline was sold to local populations and state officials through the notion that it would bring jobs and revitalize local economies. Even as local, state, and federal governments pivot away from fossil fuel extraction in proposals for “clean” forms of energy, the discourse of “energy independence” and the energy-­intensive way of life it promises to sustain persist. Green energy as a form of energy independence promises economic renewal while perpetuating the same settler cultures of white supremacy that undergird Williston’s boom. Anthropocene realism, while casting itself as a reprieve from the stagnation of the present, in truth refuses to acknowledge alternatives to it. In contrast to the “reimagination” that Williston offers, a true rejection of Anthropocene realism entails accessing and cultivating what Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish call the “radical imagination,” a contested and collective space from which alternative genres might arise. For Haiven and Khasnabish, “the radical imagination is not just about dreaming of different futures. It’s about bringing those possible futures ‘back’ to work on the present, to inspire action and new forms of solidarity today” (2014, 4). Notes 1. For a discussion of neoliberal precarity and the rise of Trumpism as a populist backlash, see Connolly (2017). 2. For more on the consequences of oil’s invisibility, see Wilson, Szeman, and Carlson (2017).

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1990. “Punctuation Marks.” Translated by Sherry Weber Nicholson. Antioch Review 48, no. 3: 300–­305. Bellamy, Brent Ryan. 2017. “Petrorealism.” In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, edited by Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger, 259–­62. Bronx: Fordham University Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

116 Morgan Adamson Blake, Mariah. 2014. “How Hillary Clinton’s State Department Sold Fracking to the World.” Mother Jones, September/October. http://www.motherjones .com/politics/2014/09/hillary-clinton-fracking-shale-state-department -chevron/2/. Connolly, William E. 2017. Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Davenport, Coral, and Eric Lipton. 2017. “How GOP Leaders Came to View Climate Change as Fake Science.” New York Times, June 3. https://www.ny times.com/2017/06/03/us/politics/republican-leaders-climate-change .html?_r=0. Duménil, Gérard, and Dominique Lévy. 2013. The Crisis of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Fang, Lee. 2016. “Though Promised for Domestic Use, Dakota Pipeline May Fuel Oil Exports.” The Intercept, September 1. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zer0 Books. Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures. London: Zer0 Books. Gold, Russell. 2014. The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World. New York: Simon and Schuster. Haiven, Max, and Alex Khasnabish. 2014. The Radical Imagination. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Huber, Matthew. 2013. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Huber, Matthew. 2015. “Oil for Life: The Bureau of Mines and the Biopolitics of the Petroleum Market.” In Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas, edited by Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts, 31–­44. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Jackson, Virginia. 2015. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 12. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/func tion-criticism-present-time/#! Nelson, Sara Holiday. 2015. “Beyond The Limits to Growth: Ecology and the Neoliberal Counterrevolution.” Antipode 47, no. 2: 461–­80. Ngai, Catherine, Liza Hampton, and Florence Tan. 2017. “Maiden Bakken Oil Cargo to Asia Ships Out, with More to Come.” Reuters, April 26. http://www .reuters.com/article/us-oil-exports-bakken-idUSKBN17S2SX. Sica, Carlo E., and Matthew Huber. 2017. “‘We Can’t Be Dependent on Anybody’: The Rhetoric of ‘Energy Independence’ and the Legitimation of Fracking in Pennsylvania.” The Extractive Industries and Society 4, no. 2: 337–­43.



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Trump, Donald J. 2016. “An America First Energy Plan” (speech). Williston Basin Petroleum Conference, Bismarck, North Dakota, March 26. Wilson, Sheena, Imre Szeman, and Adam Carlson. 2017. “On Petrocultures: Or, Why We Need to Understand Oil to Understand Everything Else.” In Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, ed. Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman. Montreal: McGill–­Queen’s University Press. Winston, Brian. 1993. “Documentary Film as Scientific Inscription.” In Theorizing Documentary, edited by Michael Renov, 37–­57. New York: Routledge.

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4 Crisis Ordinariness The Bakken Boom in Late Capitalism Bruce Braun

The extraordinary always turns out to be an amplification of something “in the works,” a labile boundary at best, not a slammed-­door departure. —­Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism

In the United States, writing about resource booms follows well-­ established narrative forms. On a temporal register, resource booms are often presented in terms of what is expected to follow: a “bust,” leaving behind social, economic, and ecological ruin, as commodity prices crash and capital and workers flee the region. On a spatial register, resource booms—­and oil booms in particular—­are frequently framed in terms of “frontiers,” sites of enclosure where existing social, economic, and political forms are displaced to make way for a different regime of accumulation and where moral economies are suspended and violence, corruption, and deviance rule the day. Like all narratives, they hide as much as they reveal. The first, with its “boom–­bust” cycle, underplays the ways in which resource booms are not sites of pure repetition, but generative of new social and political identities, new technologies, new ecologies, and new modes of governance that exceed the 119

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bounded spaces and times of the boom. The problem with boom–­bust narratives is that in them the story is always known in advance: we assume to know the beginning, the middle, and the end, and thus are unable to see what is novel or new.1 Likewise, the reading of resource booms as spaces of exception assumes that what happens in these spaces is fundamentally different than what occurs elsewhere, a negative heterotopia of sorts. Both narratives divorce resource booms from larger social and political processes, the first through containing it in a localized and place-­bound boom–­bust narrative, the second by assuming its social and political exceptionality. Stories about the oil boom in western North Dakota and eastern Montana, from its beginning in 2007 through to the present, have often conformed to these narratives, spectacularizing the boom as a place and time outside the normal order of everyday social and political life. Nowhere was this more evident than in news reports, documentary films, and photography exhibits, many of which circled around common “oil boom” tropes, including the most familiar of all: the boom–­ bust cycle of resource development, often figured through images of the ruins of an earlier agricultural boom. Take, for example, the endless repetition of images of abandoned farm buildings and decaying small towns that proliferated as the boom gathered steam, as if to foreshadow an inevitable post-­oil future of decline and decay. Not only were these images misleading empirically—­the agricultural economy in North Dakota has not disappeared, despite decaying farm buildings from an earlier period before industrial agriculture—­but they also foreclosed the future as the mere repetition of a specific social and economic form, the resource boom, repeated without remainder, difference, or deviation. My focus in this essay rests on the second of these narratives, which understands the oil boom in North Dakota as extraordinary—­as a space of exception whose social, political, and economic dynamics are a product of the place itself and of the resource being extracted. The Bakken, we are told, was and still is an anomalous or exceptional space, socially and politically, and its story must be told as such. But is it? What is at stake in telling the story in this way? What might be lost when we



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render the Bakken extraordinary, and whose interest might it serve to do so? How might these stories contribute to how the boom took form, rather than merely reflect its realities? In what follows, I propose that the language of exceptionality works to ward off certain political readings of the boom, enabling the social and environmental violence of settler colonial and capitalist extraction to be seen as anomalous rather than structural. Ultimately, I argue that the challenge when writing about places like the Bakken is not to refuse the language of exceptionality and replace it with the ordinary or the everyday, but rather to question the ease by which we oppose one to the other. As I argue below, the Bakken was unique, even singular, but its singularity did not reside in it being outside an existing order or in the suspension of the rules governing social and political life there or elsewhere. Nor was it simply a property of the place or the resource extracted (“tight oil”) and the novel methods of extraction developed in relation to it (although as we will see, the affordances and qualities of shale oil are certainly part of the story).2 Rather, its singularity was due to the ways in which multiple processes—­from the geological to the political-­economic—­combined and congealed in the Bakken. What constitutes the singularity of the Bakken is thus as much extralocal as local and includes some very ordinary processes of late capitalism.3 In sum, it is in the conjunction of ordinary processes that singular events and novel spaces emerge, which means that the extraordinary is always already ordinary in important ways (and, conversely, that the ordinary already carries within it the exceptional).4 If we follow this line of thought, we can see that what appear as exceptional sites and events may open helpful windows onto larger political and economic processes, which in places like the Bakken are brought into particularly stark relief. I illustrate this through the example of worker deaths in the region, which throughout the boom were extraordinarily high and were frequently discussed as “out of the ordinary,” lending credence to an image of the Bakken as a space of exception. Yet, in the words of Lauren Berlant that open this essay, “the extraordinary always turns out to be an amplification of something ‘in the works,’ a labile boundary at best, not a slammed-­door departure” (2011, 10). It is the already “in the works”

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nature of the extraordinary that is lost in stories that ground social and economic life in place or geology, or that assume that in the Bakken “blood and oil” have an inherent rather than contingent relation.5 This labile boundary is important for understanding how the Bakken relates to larger political-­economic processes. And, as I argue at the end of this essay, it also illuminates an indistinction between biopolitics, the administration of life, and necropolitics, the exposure of life to death, in late capitalism, where the latter is hidden yet latent within the former. In North Dakota, There Will Be Blood Throughout the oil boom in North Dakota worker fatality rates in the state as a whole—­and in the state’s oil industry in particular—­were extraordinarily high. In 2012, at the height of the boom, workplace fatality rates in North Dakota were 17.7/100,000, more than five times the national average, and 45 percent higher than Wyoming, the state with the next highest fatality rate.6 In 2007, the year before drilling dramatically increased, the fatality rate was only 7/100,000: still relatively high, but not unusual for an agricultural economy in which farm labor and family farm labor in particular is insufficiently regulated.7 This was not a one-­year anomaly: in 2013 North Dakota again led the nation in workplace fatality rates, as it did in 2014 and 2015, before lowering to preboom levels in 2016 as oil exploration ground to a halt.8 These extraordinarily high death rates were almost entirely attributable to oilfield activity. While in 2012 the statewide fatality rate stood at 17.7/100,000—­the highest in the nation—­the rate in the oil and gas industry in the state was a shocking 104/100,000. Not only was this much higher than any other industry in North Dakota, but it was much higher than the fatality rates in the oil and gas sector nationally, or in any other oil-­producing state. The story of these deaths entered public discourse in 2014, well after the boom had begun.9 One of the first to focus on the topic was Todd Melby (2013, 2015), a Minneapolis-­based and North Dakota–­born photographer and filmmaker, whose excellent Black Gold Boom series, which was initiated in 2012 and included the interactive documentary Oil to Die For, is pervaded by a sense of lurking danger (Figure 4.1).



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This was followed shortly thereafter by stories in Al Jazeera America (Johnston 2014; Rushing 2016), which drew on much of the same material as Melby, and by the political satirist John Oliver, who on October 11, 2015, devoted an episode of his show Last Week Tonight to cover the story (Oliver 2015). The attention drawn to the deaths was welcome, even more so given the lack of concern over migrant workers and the privileging of the anxieties of local residents who feared the influx of outsiders.10 But it is the terms in which these deaths were discussed that is notable, beginning with the titles of articles and photo documentaries (“In North Dakota There Will Be Blood,” Oil to Die For, “In North Dakota, a Tale of Oil, Corruption and Death”). Almost all commentators presented the story in terms of the extraordinary nature of the Bakken. In his segment on Last Week Tonight, for instance, John Oliver is rightly horrified—­even angry—­at the deaths of workers and correctly points to important contributing factors, but he ultimately presents these deaths as a “made in North Dakota” problem, an impression reinforced by humorous asides as to how truly odd North Dakota is and the positioning of his metropolitan viewers as shocked and outraged onlookers watching a tragedy unfold in a comically backward place. Todd Melby, who is often credited with bringing the story of worker fatalities to light, provided far more empirical detail, including some of the ways in which oil companies were shielded from responsibility, lack of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) oversight, inadequate infrastructure prior to development, and the presence of indemnity clauses that restricted oil company liability. Yet, despite his attention to detail, Melby—­and the Al Jazeera journalists who drew on similar material—­also tended to tell the story as a local story, separating the Bakken from larger economic and political processes that put workers at risk in late capitalism. Only the haunting loneliness of worker deaths, combined with the grief of friends and family far from the oil fields, hinted that the Bakken was a national event and not solely a local one. It is this tendency to present the Bakken as a space of exception that I push against in this chapter. Instead of localizing these deaths in terms of the bounded space of a resource boom, I understand them

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Figure 4.1. Shadow of solitary worker ascending stairs at night to test gas levels. Video still from Oil to Die For, directed by Todd Melby, 2015.

conjuncturally, in terms of the meeting of a tight oil production assemblage with growing precarity among workers across the United States, the latter part of the “crisis ordinariness” that Lauren Berlant suggests is the experience for many in late capitalism. Borrowing the concept from Stuart Hall (1996, 2011), a conjunctural analysis allows us to understand the character of any moment—­the forces, tendencies, forms of power, and relations of domination and subordination that are articulated and condensed at a particular time and place—­and, at the same time, the moments of possible transformation inherent in the conjuncture, since the balance of forces and relations is open to change. In the Bakken, the conjuncture of tight oil and worker precarity turned deadly in spectacular and tragic ways. Speaking of these deaths as “extraordinary” or as “aberrations” thus risks effacing the larger forces that gave rise to them while restricting our ability to understand and transform our present political and economic conditions. This serves certain interests, including the oil industry, which is happy to point to the inherently dangerous nature of oil production, thereby naturalizing oilfield deaths as a regrettable but unavoidable part of the business of extracting oil and making of blood and oil an intrinsic rather than political



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relation. To insist on a conjunctural analysis of worker deaths, rather than merely relaying empirical evidence or quantitative data—­that is, to ask after the forces that come together to produce the empirical phenomena, rather than simply focus on the phenomena themselves—­is thus to ask how it is that blood and oil enter into relation, rather than assume that they are related by necessity. Likewise, to replace “locality” with “assemblage,” as I do throughout this chapter, retains the site-­specificity of the Bakken’s empirical phenomena, but enables us to recognize that the spatiotemporalities of the Bakken are topological, relating the near to the distant and folding together the deep time of geology, the affordance and temporalities of material bodies, the instantaneity of globalized markets, and the violence of the value form. Blood and Oil: On the Becoming Necessary of a Relation How do we tell the story of blood and oil as a contingent relation? What does it mean to talk about the “becoming necessary” of such a relation (Read 2003; Althusser 2006)? How does blood come to be conjoined with oil? I begin by exploring what I describe as a tight oil production assemblage—­a specific configuration of geology, technology, labor, and capital that in their unique articulation, give rise to certain imperatives to speed up production. After detailing how tight oil becomes fast oil, I further explore how this assemblage amplifies the crisis ordinariness of late capitalism. From “Tight Oil” to “Fast Oil” Oil extracted from the North Dakota oil fields is referred to as “tight oil” because the oil is trapped in a narrow layer of porous, but highly impermeable, rock. As noted in the introduction to this volume, the Bakken Petroleum System consists of three rock layers buried almost two miles underground:11 two layers of organically rich but relatively impermeable shale that serve as source rocks, and a middle oil-­producing layer between these layers composed primarily of siltstones and sandstones with low porosity (few pores) and low permeability (low connectivity between pores). The two shale layers function as highly effective seals, which combined with the unusually low permeability of the reservoir

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layer, restricts the movement of the oil. Due to the stubborn qualities of the petroleum system, tight oil from the Bakken is not easy to extract.12 This contrasts with conventional oil fields, where oil is found in permeable rock but trapped beneath an impermeable seal, and thus easily extracted by drilling into the pressurized reservoir. In tight oil formations, the permeability of the reservoir rock has to be introduced artificially. After years of tinkering with different methods—­research supported by the U.S. Department of Energy—­oil companies settled on hydraulic fracturing, a method that has become ubiquitous in almost all oil fields in North America, since it promises to enhance oil recovery rates even in conventional oil fields. What has come to be known as “fracking” involves multiple stages and technologies. To access the oil, workers drill down to the layer of shale where the oil is trapped. Then, using horizontal drilling technologies, they extend the bore hole laterally for an additional distance, adding as much as two miles to the well. The promise of horizontal drilling was that it dramatically increased the pay zone for each well from a few dozen feet (the maximum thickness of the middle rock layer) to as much as two miles. After drilling, an oil service company arrives to frack the well, a process that involves lowering charges into the well to create small fractures in the formation, after which high-­pressure water, filled by proppants, is pumped into the well to extend the cracks. When the water is removed, the proppants remain behind, propping the cracks open and allowing oil to flow to the bore hole and up the well. Fracking is often presented as a magic bullet that unlocks vast oil reserves. But it is better understood as a suite of technologies and practices through which oil companies struggle to extract oil from a stubborn geology that does not easily release the liquids and gases it contains. While in the Bakken this articulated geotechnical apparatus has allowed an oil reservoir that was economically marginal to become an active play, the stubborn nature of the rock and the specific qualities of the technologies deployed to solve it have given rise to unique spatiotemporal dynamics not seen in conventional oil wells. Most important, for my purposes, were the unique production decline curves and



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short production runs for fracked wells in the region, the significance of which will soon become apparent. Most conventional oil wells have production curves that decline at a steady rate of 5 to 8 percent annually.13 Since in conventional wells the reservoir rock is permeable, oil extracted from rock immediately next to the bore hole is quickly replaced by other oil that migrates through the rock. By contrast, for fracked wells in North Dakota, production rates decline by as much as 70 percent within the first year, since only oil that is proximate to fractures can be extracted; beyond the fractures the rock remains impermeable (Hughes 2015). In other words, despite the promise of fracking to overcome the problem of low permeability, the problem was not easily solved. Once oil proximate to the introduced fractures is removed, little additional oil can be produced. These steep decline curves meant that oil companies needed to drill more and more wells in order to maintain production levels, a phenomenon that some in the industry refer to as a “drilling treadmill,” a situation exacerbated by the structure of the oil industry in North Dakota, which included many small independent oil companies that held positions in the oil fields from earlier conventional oil booms, but which required additional financing to ramp up operations in the more extensive, highly technologized, boom that began around 2007. Faced with the need for revenue flows to service debt, these companies had an additional incentive to drill more and more wells, and to do so rapidly, resulting in a phenomenon I have elsewhere called “fast oil” (see Braun 2018).14 This drilling treadmill placed a heightened emphasis on speed: the faster that a well could be drilled, the more the costs of production could be lowered—­an industry-­wide condition—­but also the more rapidly oil could be put on the market and debts serviced.15 This stands in contrast to other unconventional oil plays, including the tar sands in Northern Alberta and deep-­water oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, where the temporal and spatial scale of the projects exclude small independent oil companies and where long-­term planning takes precedence over rapid, short-­term production.16 The imperative for speed in the Bakken

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was magnified by several additional factors, including a culture of subcontracting now ubiquitous in the oil industry, in which subcontractors compete for drilling and service contracts. This introduced its own amplifying effects. On the one hand, it meant that oil companies often had no workers of their own at drilling sites. Rather, a company man—­ usually a subcontractor or an employee of a subcontractor—­oversaw the drilling site. Besides lowering labor costs as subcontractors competed for contracts, this shielded oil companies from liability in the case of accident.17 On the other hand, the culture of subcontracting led to perverse incentives designed to speed up production. In a widely reported case, Oasis Petroleum, one of the largest drilling companies operating in the Bakken, offered its workers bonuses paid after each drilling job was completed: a $40/day safety bonus and a $150/day performance bonus (Gollan 2015). It is not hard to understand the calculation workers were forced to make: aim for the production bonus (essentially a speed bonus) and hope to collect the safety bonus along the way. Indeed, workers in North Dakota frequently contributed to, and participated in, the culture of speed in North Dakota, although not under conditions of their own making. Most jobs in the service sector that blossomed around the boom paid wages that were insufficient to cover the high rents charged to migrant workers. Hence, oilfield jobs were highly coveted. But these same jobs came with little job security. Employed in at-­will contracts and without the protections of unionized workplaces, workers were forced to compete with each other in a context in which the cost of living made the need to stay in employment essential. With no job security, workers found themselves making frequent tradeoffs between personal safety and economic security: if you balked at a request, or slowed your pace of work, you could lose your job, a situation most workers were eager to avoid. Add to this the long workdays in the oil patch—­up to sixteen hours—­coupled with long commutes from housing to work sites on inadequate highway infrastructure crowded with industry traffic, a theme that repeats across Todd Melby’s videos (see Figure 4.2), and it is not difficult to see the uniquely dangerous nature of the boom or the high levels of risk that workers were asked to carry.18



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Figure 4.2. Todd Melby’s documentary images return repeatedly to the hazards of travel in the Bakken. Here, a worker surveys passing traffic as dusk settles over a crowded two-­lane highway. Many of Melby’s images are nighttime images, in which the field of vision is defined solely by headlights and the viewer feels the exhaustion of those behind the wheel. Video still from Oil to Die For, directed by Todd Melby, 2015.

Living and Dying in Late Liberalism: When Precarity Meets “Fast Oil” The story of fast oil reveals the conjunction of geological, political, and economic forces generating cultures of speed in the North Dakota oil fields and the risks to workers that came with it. In important respects the oil assemblage of North Dakota, with its specific geological, economic, and geographical elements and relations, was different and more dangerous than other U.S. oil fields, reflected in the exceptional rate of worker deaths and injuries. But this is largely because of the forces that congeal to generate fast oil, not because tight oil demands it. Far from an isolated space of exception, the Bakken is a place where the everyday forces of neoliberal capitalism—­from the dismantling of social programs and labor protections to the increasing financialization of the economy—­came together to produce an extraordinary scene of violence and death. Indeed, the everyday nature of workplace fatalities in the Bakken becomes more evident when we turn to the workers themselves. When

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oil production started in the Bakken in 2005, a small but steady flow of workers began to migrate to the region. This migration was by no means assured: at first oil companies and associated businesses struggled to find workers, a result in part of the long process of rural depopulation that had occurred across the Great Plains since the 1920s, as farms mechanized and consolidated and as the children of farmers migrated to pursue livelihoods elsewhere in the United States. Few workers cared to travel to such a remote location. After the financial crisis of 2008, however, the trickle of workers became a flood, largely due to the crisis and the recession that followed, which increased U.S. unemployment to levels not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. What would lead workers to travel to such a remote place and assume such dangerous work? There is not, of course, only one reason. Some workers were attracted by the fly-­in/fly-­out work schedules, which opened opportunities for workers with partners and families elsewhere. Others liked the rugged work or were weary of nine-­to-­five jobs in the city. Still others, usually single men, combined fly-­in/fly-­out schedules with travel to places like Las Vegas or Alaska on their off weeks, pursuing a particular image of “freedom.” But the vast majority came for economic reasons, in search of ways to escape precarity elsewhere. In this context, the influx of workers was not surprising; it was common to hear stories in the media of salaries of $100,000 or more in the oil patch, and accounts of North Dakota’s low unemployment rate (only 4 percent in 2009 at the height of the recession) circulated widely across traditional and social media.19 If we follow this thread, we can begin to see the oil fields, and the high worker death rates in these oil fields, as consistent with or, better, as an extension of quite ordinary political and economic dynamics in late capitalism that shape how and why certain bodies (and not others) are put at risk to the point of crossing over into death (see also Tyner 2019). In this sense, the high fatality rates in the Bakken may tell us less about the Bakken as an exceptional space than about life in late capitalism and the specific conjuncture today in which many American workers live and work and too frequently die. As often occurs in a context in which permanence is privileged over mobility, these migrants were often blamed for social problems in the



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region, such as perceived increases in crime (itself a contested narrative; see chapter 5 in this volume by Jessica Lehman and Bruce Braun), increased lawlessness, moral decay, and physical and sexual violence. This pathologization of the migrant worker tended to follow two distinct narratives. On the one hand, migrant male workers were characterized as “misfits,” “down on their luck,” or “drifters” and thus seen to bring problems to the Bakken. On the other hand, migrant workers were seen to be susceptible to the (im)morality of the frontier, which was seen to bring out the worst in otherwise law-­abiding citizens, folks who elsewhere were assumed to lead normal lives but who became violent, deviant, or corrupt upon arrival and immersion in the exceptional space of the boom, echoing pervasive Hobbesian tropes about disorder in the absence of state, law, or family.20 While the first narrative deployed the rhetoric of the “dangerous classes” to describe and police migrant male workers, the other assumed that it is the place that changes the otherwise virtuous worker. However, both lead to the same conclusions: that the boom and its male migrant workers disrupted an existing and harmonious social landscape that was defined by close personal and family relations, and that the Bakken stands as an exceptional space that can be understood, and analyzed, as fundamentally different than everyday life elsewhere in the country.21 These narratives produced significant blind spots. On the one hand, larger processes in the U.S. economy and society were ignored as constitutive elements of the boom and the social formation that formed around it. On the other hand, the aspirations of workers—­and their everyday working conditions—­were also often ignored as less important than the problems that migrant workers were seen to bring to local communities. This was most evident in the long lag time between the beginning of the boom and when attention started to be paid to the fact that migrant workers were dying on the job at extraordinary rates.22 But it is the relation between the ordinary and the extraordinary, and how this relation is drawn, that most interests me here. For Lauren Berlant (2011), the extraordinary is not opposed to the ordinary; it is the amplification of something already “in the works.” What had been in the works in the United States since at least the 1970s, Berlant argues,

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was growing economic precarity among workers, something that came into view in the most spectacular fashion during the financial crisis in 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, as workers lost their jobs, families lost housing, and economic insecurity became commonplace. Berlant argues that the event of the financial crisis obscured something more structural, namely that since the 1970s economic precarity had been shifting up to the middle classes, yet had been hidden by the easy availability of credit, the housing bubble, cheap imported goods, and the subsidy provided to American workers by the hyperexploitation of labor in the global South.23 Berlant insists that in such a context, economic crises are not extraordinary or traumatic events, but part of everyday life, something they refer to as “crisis ordinariness,” a kind of extended crisis in which one happening is piled onto another, and in which life is lived as if in a holding pattern as workers grasp to stay in labor as such and struggle to negotiate the impasses of the present in which “good life” fantasies are fraying but still exist. Those living within crisis ordinariness are subject to what Berlant calls “slow death,” the slow attrition of bodies that occurs daily at the meeting point of two dynamics: the speeding up of production and reproduction, as traditional infrastructures for reproducing life crumble, and alongside this, the responsibilization of the individual who now must be an entrepreneur of oneself, or to put it slightly differently, the individual who is left exposed and must engage in the self-­management of risk (see Figure 4.3 for how companies planned ahead to delay or turn away OSHA inspectors in the unlikely event that they appeared). In important respects, slow death is accretive and mathematical: on a day-­to-­day basis stresses placed on worker bodies accumulate to the point where they exceed the resources and support available to maintain the body’s health and vitality. In a such a context, the wearing out of bodies is not a spectacular event, but a slow grind, consisting of the sort of quasi-­events—­the flat tire, delayed bus, sick child—­that Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) argues most workers can only endure rather than transcend, and that leave individuals one event away from catastrophe. In such a context, Berlant writes, “people



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Figure 4.3. Instructions to workers if OSHA inspectors should come to a drill site. Partially buried by other postings, the scene reveals tactics of delay even as it registers the unlikelihood of a visit. Photograph by Bruce Braun.

find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on” (2011, 8).24 On the surface, Berlant’s “slow death” appears to be the opposite of the fast, dramatic, and tragic deaths witnessed in the Bakken oil fields. But is it? Interviews with migrant workers revealed a population not unlike the precarious workers described by Berlant. Those who migrated to the Bakken, especially in the years after 2008, frequently did so as a means of negotiating the crisis ordinariness in their everyday lives: part-­time employment, mounting debt, loss of employment, dissolving families, the threat of default on mortgages. Many still believed in the good-­life fantasies that had been held out for them: economic security,

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stable families, a home of one’s own, good health. For Berlant, fantasies of the good life, the idea that the world indeed “adds up to something,” is both profoundly comforting and often deeply harmful. As they put it: The affective structure of an optimistic attachment involves a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables you to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way. (2011, 2)

The journey to the Bakken was often done to achieve this good-­life fantasy back home. Numerous workers explained that their stay was temporary—­they planned to work two years, save a certain amount of money, get themselves out of debt, pay off their mortgage, or retire while they still had their health and could enjoy not working.25 These workers differed from those who are subject to slow death elsewhere in late capitalism only in that they were willing to take on enhanced physical risk in order to achieve the phantasmatic good life that either they or society—­or both—­had seen fit to formulate. The optimistic hope that this time things would work out was commonly expressed by workers in the boom, a fantasy that enabled them to persist despite their precarity, and to assume heightened risk in the hope that it would pay off in the long run. Crucially, this willingness to assume risk—­to be responsible for one’s own suffering—­was not due to a lack of reason or foresight on the part of workers; it was, and is, a structural condition of late capitalism. As Berlant stresses, cruel optimisms are not a weakness, but a means of carrying on. But here we may need to revise and extend Berlant’s analysis. Although they use the provocative language of slow death, a concept that bears a family resemblance to Elizabeth Povinelli’s discussion of exhaustion, they stop short of actual death. For Berlant, capital has an enduring interest in keeping workers alive, if just barely, resulting in the slow attrition that they chart. What is notable in the North Dakota case, and that which simultaneously sets it apart from other sites while revealing its underlying continuity, is the routine extension of exhaustion into



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the terrain of death. In this sense, worker deaths in North Dakota may not be exceptional, despite their high numbers and violent nature, but merely a quicker, more dramatic manifestation of the slow attrition of bodies that occurs elsewhere, as precarity meets different assemblages of capitalist production. This also helps us locate a relation between biopolitics and necropolitics in late capitalism. While writers like Berlant and Povinelli resist the language of necropolitics (Mbembe 2003), preferring to focus on the everyday endurance of workers in late capitalism rather than the exceptional spaces of death that marked the United States’ war on terror or Israel’s extrajudicial killing of Palestinians, they risk obscuring what may be a hidden relation between biopolitics and necropolitics in late capitalism, namely that capital has an interest in keeping workers alive until it doesn’t—­at a certain point exhaustion flips over into death, not through the slow attrition of bodies wasting away under the grind of precarious life, but instantly, in the workplace “accident” or late-­night car wreck as the exhausted worker returns home. While Berlant stops short of actual death, and Povinelli emphasizes endurance and the durative present to emphasize how workers manage to survive, it is important to stress that within late capitalism endurance and death are proximate to each other, with many of the same dynamics underlying what appears to be a biopolitics of endurance at one site and a necropolitics of sudden and arbitrary death at another; what differs is merely the assemblage of production and the relative speed in which bodies are used up. To return to Berlant’s language, the labile boundary between the ordinary and the extraordinary may turn out to be the same labile boundary between life and death, biopolitics and necropolitics. Conclusion The tendency to understand resource booms as spaces of exception is by now commonplace, both in the media and in academic writing. The North Dakota oil boom has been subject to the same sort of spectacularization, as if the phenomena witnessed in the Williston Basin are somehow separate from larger processes of labor and life in late capitalism. The problem lies, I argue, in a kind of empiricism that reads

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phenomena only statistically, rather than understanding phenomena conjuncturally. The former allows for the impression that the oil fields are fundamentally different, a clear departure from phenomena elsewhere, most evident in the shocking rates of workplace fatalities in the North Dakota oil fields. Statistics provides us with the language of the “anomaly,” but it fails to grasp the forces that are amplified and congeal to cause an extraordinary event. In contrast, a conjunctural analysis reveals the meeting of forces—­many of them commonplace and ordinary—­that come together to produce what appears statistically to be exceptional, anomalous, or out of the ordinary. The danger of understanding the Bakken as extraordinary is that it limits critique and constrains political imagination. That is, it closes down political possibilities rather than opening them up. Understanding the Bakken as a space of exception, for instance, gives credence to the fiction that oil fields are inherently dangerous, that worker deaths are merely an unfortunate part of doing business. Failing to connect these deaths to the crisis ordinariness of late capitalism—­and to the financialization of extraction and its imperatives to speed up production in a stubborn geological formation—­likewise allows these deaths to be seen as they often are in coroner reports: as due to “worker error,” erasing the structural conditions that lead workers to assume heightened risk, and the cultures of speed that dominated the Bakken oil fields in the early years and that consistently put workers in harm’s way. These are stories that serve the interests of the oil industry, not workers.26 Emphasizing the ordinary nature of life and labor in the Bakken, as part of the crisis ordinariness of late capitalism, demands that we pay attention to the ways in which blood and oil come to meet rather than assuming that they have an intrinsic relation. In sum, a conjunctural analysis allows us to see that while life, labor, and energy are always already conjoined, the specific ways in which they come to be conjoined are unnecessary and open to other articulations. But reversing the lens is equally important. If we refuse to understand the Bakken as outside the everyday order of social and political life and instead a manifestation of these orderings, we may also begin to



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see how the oil boom opens a window onto more general processes—­ including those in the metropolitan center—­that are otherwise hidden. The slow death that is the fate of many workers in late capitalism is often invisible, revealed only in the slow attrition of bodies that otherwise appear normal. As workers struggle to carry on, the precarity of the worker is often easy to overlook. As Berlant puts it, “in the crisis, being treads water; mostly it does not drown” (2010, 10). Against this, the quick and often gruesome nature of oilfield deaths shocks us, but if we reject their exceptionality, they can make visible an underlying precarity that is increasingly a shared condition of workers everywhere and reveal a necropolitics hidden yet latent in the everyday biopolitics of capital. Writing worker deaths in the Bakken as ordinary rather than exceptional may also suggest the need to formulate a politics that moves beyond the bounds of the local to understand and intervene in the conditions under which labor is socially reproduced in the United States today. Such an analysis might reveal not just the generalized precarity of workers, but also the precarity of the oil industry itself, which in places like the Bakken depends on workers who have nothing to lose and relies on narratives that obfuscate—­or naturalize—­its injurious nature. Protecting workers, rather than naturalizing their deaths as an inescapable element of oil production, would mean very different protocols and practices oriented around worker safety rather than oilfield productivity; it would mean slowing down fast oil. Yet, in the Bakken, and in many other oil fields, profit margins are narrow, and it is not at all clear that the oil industry could survive if it paid the true costs of worker safety (or its externalized environmental costs) in an environment where alternative energy sources—­including wind and solar—­are increasingly competitive. Moreover, addressing the generalized precarity that has engulfed many American workers since the 1970s would not only require a different social and economic order, it might also starve the oil assemblage in places like the Bakken of the migrant labor that underlies the oil industry’s strategies of accumulation. Perhaps unexpectedly, addressing economic precarity and worker safety may be one among several pathways to the abolition of oil.

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Notes 1. One of the ironies of the literature on resource booms is its inherent teleological mode of narration, despite the widespread acceptance in the academy of nonlinear conceptions of spatiotemporality. For an effort to move beyond these sorts of nonlinear stories, see Appel, Mason, and Watts (2015). 2. For a more detailed account of how the geological formation contrib�utes to the social dynamics of the boom, see Braun (2018). 3. There are echoes here of the locality debates of the 1980s and 1990s that sought to understand both the uniqueness and connectedness of place. See Massey (1993) for a summary. 4. Elsewhere I explore how we might include the particular geological conditions of the Bakken in our accounts of worker deaths, without falling back into the language of exceptionality. See Braun (2019). 5. The link between oil and blood is commonplace in American culture, perhaps most famously in Paul Anderson’s film There Will Be Blood (2017). The phrase was used repeatedly in relation to the Bakken in the years after 2013 (see Johnston 2014; Melby 2013), including an (in)famous soap opera entitled Blood and Oil that screened on ABC for one season in 2015. 6. Worker fatality data obtained from AFL-­CIO (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018). The AFL-­CIO draws its information on workplace fatalities from the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, which is published annually. Data for specific years is found in reports released two years later. 7. Agricultural states in the United States tend to have higher worker-­ fatality rates than other states due to the prevalence of farm accidents and relatively few safety regulations governing farm labor, including the labor of family members. 8. The workplace-­fatality rate in North Dakota in 2015 was 12.2/100,000, almost four times the national average. For comparison, the neighboring state of Minnesota had a worker-­fatality rate of 2.7/100,000 (Hazzard, 2017). North Dakota had the fifth highest worker-­fatality rate in the United States in 2016, but then rose again in 2017 to the second highest fatality rate, only marginally behind Alaska. 9. This is in part due to the lag time in the reporting of worker fatalities by the Department of Labor. 10. This was underlined at a meeting of local leaders from western North Dakota and researchers from across the Upper Midwest, held at Dickinson State University in May 2015 and attended by the author. Enthusiastic support was given to research on the effects of migrant labor on existing local communities but almost no support could be found for research on the experiences of



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migrant laborers, both while they were in the Bakken or after they left the region. 11. A “petroleum system” consists of the geological layers (source rock, res�ervoir rock, seal, and overburden) and specific processes (i.e., trap formation) necessary for oil and gas to accumulate. 12. See EERC (2014a). EERC (2014b) outlines efforts to optimize the Bakken petroleum system. 13. The IEA (2010) estimated decline rates globally at 6.7 percent in 2007 and estimated these to rise to 8.6 percent by 2030. 14. In recent years improvements in drilling methods, including “walking” oil rigs and so-­called ecopads with up to sixteen wells per pad, have dramatically reduced drilling costs, relieving some of the drilling treadmill pressures. Likewise, consolidation in the oil industry in response to the collapse of oil prices in 2014 has resulted in more large, well-­resourced oil companies entering the field, transforming the oil play and worker death rates within it. 15. Bakken producers also faced the challenge of inadequate transportation infrastructure, which made oil produced in North Dakota more expensive than other oil fields. The push for pipelines—­and the need to police resistance to them (see chapter 6 in this volume by Kai Bosworth)—­was a direct effort to reduce costs of production. 16. Across the industry reducing the time of production is imperative, but the form this takes differs between oil fields and production assemblages. 17. Subcontractors were frequently required to sign indemnity clauses releasing oil companies of any responsibility in the event of accidents, injury, or death. Anti-­indemnity legislation was introduced to the North Dakota legislature in 2014 but defeated after intense lobbying by the North Dakota Petroleum Council (Gollan 2015). 18. That oil was being produced—­in great volumes—­before social and phys� ical infrastructure was built to support the lives of workers is not unusual in resource booms, but was particularly pronounced in the Bakken. Fast oil was not just about the speed of production, or the speed of work, but also the desire to extract the oil without the costly delays of building infrastructures for worker safety. Likewise, long working days were often mediated through the use of stimulants—­including methamphetamine and cocaine—­adding the risk of arrest and incarceration to the everyday risks of the workplace. 19. Exact migration figures are difficult to determine, in part because many workers were housed in temporary housing—­referred to colloquially as “man camps”—­and were often transient, moving throughout the region. 20. Paradigmatic of the latter is the figure of the predatory married male migrant, who is seen to change his behavior in the boom, hitting on other women while out of the gaze of family, friends, and spouse.

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21. Director Jesse Moss’s film The Overnighters (2014) exemplifies the complex narratives woven around migrant workers and the challenge of representing them. While on the one hand humanizing migrant workers and evoking sympathy for their struggles, its direct cinema style eventually allows fears about crime and sexual deviance among local residents and a local reporter to take over the story. 22. The invisibility of worker deaths can also be attributed to the geograph�ical separation from family and friends. While the deaths happened in the Bakken, few of those who died had family and friends in the region; mourning occurred far away from oilfield communities. 23. Here we need to distinguish between precarity as an ontological condi� tion (Butler 2006) and precarity as a historically, geographically, and socially differentiated experience, linked to specific transformations in the capitalist mode of production (for further discussion, see Strauss 2018). 24. Berlant writes explicitly against trauma theory: “In critical theory and mass society generally, ‘trauma’ has become the primary genre of the last eighty years for describing the historical present as the scene of an exception that has just shattered some ongoing, uneventful ordinary life that was supposed just to keep going on and with respect to which people felt solid and confident” (2011, 9). In contrast, Berlant “thinks about the ordinary as a zone of convergence of many histories, where people manage the incoherence of lives that proceed in the face of threats to the good life they imagine” (10). 25. When asked whether they were managing to meet their goals, many workers explained that they had saved only a fraction of what they had expected to save. 26. A National Research Council (2015) report reinforced the notion that workers bore responsibility for high death rates in North Dakota, noting that new workers were younger and less experienced and that the retirement of older workers reduced “worker to worker mentoring.” Such accounts assume that responsibility for workplace safety rests with workers, not employers.

References AFL-­CIO. Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018). Althusser, Louis. 2006. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–­1987. Edited by O. Corpet and F. Matheron. Translated by G. M. Goshgarian. London: Verso Books. Appel, Hannah, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts. 2015. “Introduction: Oil Talk.” In Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas, edited by Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts, 1–­26. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.



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Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Braun, Bruce. 2018. “Novos materialismos e economia política: Levando a sério as forças da terra.” In Perspectivas de Natureza: Geografia, formas de natureza e política, edited by M. I. M Marques et al., 43–­60. São Paulo: Annablume. Braun, Bruce. 2019. “Taking Earth Forces Seriously.” In Viscosities: Mobilizing Materialities, edited by O. Saloojee, E. Scott and K. Lutsky, 47–­62. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, Dept. of Architecture. Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso Books. EERC (Earth and Environmental Research Center). 2014a. “Geology.” https:// www.undeerc.org/bakken/geology.aspx. EERC (Earth and Environmental Research Center). 2014b. “Bakken Production Optimization Program.” https://www.undeerc.org/Bakken/Bakken-Produc tion-Optimization-Program.aspx. Gollan, Jennifer. 2015. “In North Dakota’s Bakken Oil Boom, There Will Be Blood.” Reveal. June 13. https://www.revealnews.org/article/in-north-dakotas -bakken-oil-boom-there-will-be-blood/. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-­Hsing Chen, 25–­46. London: Routledge. Hall, Stuart. 2011. “The Neoliberal Revolution.” Cultural Studies 25, no. 6: 705–­28. Hazzard, Andrew. 2017. “North Dakota Remains Most Dangerous State to Work.” Grand Forks Herald, June 9. http://www.grandforksherald.com/ news/4281346-north-dakota-remains-most-dangerous-state-work. Hughes, J. D. 2015. Bakken Reality Check: The Nation’s Number Two Tight Oil Play after a Year of Low Oil Prices. Santa Rose, Calif.: Post Carbon Institute. IEA (International Energy Agency). 2010. World Energy Outlook 2010. Paris: IEA. Johnston, David Cay. 2014. “In North Dakota, There Will Be Blood.” Al Jazeera America, May 15. http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/5/north -dakota-workerdeathsbakkenoilgas.html. Massey, Doreen. 1993. “Questions of Locality.” Geography 78, no. 2: 142–­49. Mbembe, Achille (trans. Libby Meintjes). 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1: 11–­40. Melby, Todd, dir. 2013. Rough Ride: The Oil Patch Tour. http://roughride.black goldboom.com/. Melby, Todd, dir. 2015. Oil to Die For. http://blackgoldboom.com/oil-to-die-for/ intro. Moss, Jesse, dir., 2014. The Overnighters. Austin: Drafthouse Films.

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National Research Council. 2015. Emerging Workforce Trends in the U.S. Energy and Mining Industries. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. Oliver, John. 2015. “North Dakota.” Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Aired October 11 on HBO. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYusNNldesc. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Read, Jason. 2003. “A Universal History of Contingency: Deleuze and Guattari on the History of Capitalism.” Borderlands 2, no. 3, archived at https://web archive.nla.gov.au/awa/20040821171057/http://www.borderlandsejournal .adelaide.edu.au/vol2no3_2003/read_contingency.htm. Rushing, Josh. 2016. “Fault Lines—­Death on the Bakken Shale.” Al Jazeera America, February 9; original airdate January 12, 2015. http://america.alja zeera.com/watch/shows/fault-lines/multimedia/2016/2/fault-lines-death -on-the-bakken-shale-full-episode.html. Sontag, Deborah, and Brent McDonald. 2014. “In North Dakota, a Tale of Oil, Corruption and Death.” New York Times, December 28. Strauss, Kendra. 2018. “Labour Geography 1: Towards a Geography of Precarity?” Progress in Human Geography 42, no. 4: 622–­30. Tyner, James. 2019. Dead Labor: Toward a Political Economy of Premature Death. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

5 On the Dark Side of the Boom Narratives of Social Crisis and Liberal Arts of Governance Jessica Lehman and Bruce Braun

The social inequalities that globalization has wrought are legitimate so long as the sexual boundaries of middle-­class family life can be maintained. —­Elizabeth Bernstein, “Carceral Politics as Gender Justice? The ‘Traffic in Women’ and Neoliberal Circuits of Crime, Sex, and Rights”

How do we refuse the way liberalism divides violence and nonviolence? How do we penetrate violence, acknowledging it outside of definitions of violence engendered by liberal arts of governance? —­Elizabeth Povinelli and Kim Turcot DiFruscia, “A Conversation with Elizabeth A. Povinelli”

On January 7, 2012, high school math teacher Sherry Arnold was jogging near her home in Sidney, Montana, on the western edge of the Bakken, when she was abducted and brutally killed by two men who had come from Colorado in search of work in the oil fields. For months afterward, the story of Arnold’s murder circulated widely in the local and 143

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national press, not simply due to its brutality but also because it seemed to indicate that something was seriously amiss in eastern Montana and western North Dakota, where an oil boom was in full swing. Arnold’s killing was not the only suggestion that the oil boom was disrupting a valued way of life in the Bakken. In the years following the Great Recession of 2008, the “Bakken boom” had captured media and public imaginations across the United States and beyond, as new fracking technologies unleashed millions of barrels of oil from shale formations and thousands of workers flocked to the remote plains, attracted by the promise of lucrative jobs and economic security. Amid celebratory narratives of plummeting unemployment, unprecedented urban growth, and lauded contributions to American energy independence, a second, equally powerful, narrative had emerged. Tales of sex work, bar fights, human trafficking, illicit drug use, and widespread physical and sexual violence constituted a conflictual narrative of a so-­called dark side to the boom, frequently contrasted with a presumed rural idyll that prevailed before the boom began and workers arrived. These national media narratives echoed across the Bakken, but other complexities emerged. Some residents were more open to newcomers and the varied life experiences they brought to the region; others counted strip club workers among their neighbors and friends. Nonetheless, countering these national narratives became an imperative for local politicians, regional developers, and other local leaders. How do we make sense of narratives of crisis and disorder and their circulation both within and beyond the Bakken? What was included or excluded in them? And what role did they play in ordering the apparent disorder of the boom? Drawing from interviews conducted with workers, residents, and public servants in the Bakken as well as numerous media accounts, this chapter explores the complex circulation of stories of violence and moral disorder—­centered on the figures of the migrant (male) worker and the female (migrant) sex worker—­ during the initial years of the Bakken boom. Borrowing language often used in media reports, we refer to these crisis chronicles as “dark side” narratives, with critical attention to the racialized implications of this



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term.1 We follow Elizabeth Povinelli (2006, 2011; Povinelli and DiFruscia 2012) in reading these accounts “diagonally,” working toward ways of acknowledging and analyzing them outside of the liberal-­governmental frameworks that often define them. A diagonal reading entails attending to lived experiences of violence and disorder and at the same time examining how violence and disorder are framed within liberal discourses—­ and what forms of harm are elided altogether. In other words, to read the dark side diagonally is not to argue that violence is not real, or that heteropatriarchy is not violently enforced, but to begin to understand what comes to be apprehended as “violence” and “moral disorder” and what does not and the forms of governance elaborated and justified in response (Povinelli and DiFruscia 2012). Similarly, alongside Stuart Hall and colleagues (1978), we are interested in reading discourses of crisis and moral panic for both the subjectivities they cohere and the responses they authorize. In short, a diagonal reading provides us with a way to understand complex linkages between gender, race, class, and sexuality in the Bakken, as well as how bodies, practices, and social relations have come to be ordered in particular ways. In this sense narratives of violence and disorder are performative, insofar as they call into existence both the objects and operations of governance (see, e.g., Butler 1988). A diagonal reading also calls attention to forms of injury that were often effaced or left unexamined: violence visited on the bodies of migrant workers, violence against Indigenous peoples and especially Indigenous women and girls, the pervasive physical and emotional violence of a compulsory heteronormative culture and the heteropatriarchal family, and the exploitative and often violent nature of waged labor in the oil fields. Drawing upon feminist sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein (2012, 2018), we suggest that the social relations of the oil boom came to be seen as particularly unruly and unwelcome—­giving rise to something akin to a moral panic—­when they were perceived as threatening the boundaries of a desired normative sexual and gendered order, characterized at its core by the white middle-­class nuclear family (see also chapter 3 in this volume by Morgan Adamson). For example, violence against

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Indigenous women did not always garner the same level of attention: it often followed and reiterated a logic of disposability that is consistent with how Indigenous peoples, lands, and political orders are constructed within the violent discursive frames of settler colonialism. Indeed, to the extent that there is a historic and political relationship between Indigenous women’s death and settler governance, as Audra Simpson (2016) argues, violence against Indigenous women did not threaten the boundaries of a normative white settler sexual and gendered order so much as help preserve it. Dark side narratives thus may tell us less about forms of social life found in extractive communities, and more about underlying struggles over particular arrangements of existence in them, namely how a social order is set in place, what is seen to threaten it, and how and why they are settled—­provisionally—­in one form and not others, with corresponding shifts in the sites and objects of care and concern and definitions and enactments of community. Finally, by understanding dark side narratives as performative, we seek to more robustly analyze the heterogeneity of life and labor in extractive communities. We do this in two ways: first, by responding to recent calls to pay more attention to the diversity of boomtowns and the intersectional subjectivity of workers and residents (Schafft, Brasier, and Hesse 2019); and second, by building on social sciences and humanistic scholarship that argues that Western culture and cultural production (including Western definitions of femininity and even Western feminisms) are predicated on oil (see, e.g., Barrett and Worden 2014; Huber 2013; LeMenager 2014; Wilson, Carlson, and Szeman 2017). We take these arguments in another direction; rather than arguing that oil runs through everything, we explore how a social formation congeals around a specific site of oil production (or an oil boom) and the role that discourses of violence and moral degeneracy play in the process (see also Clark and Yusoff 2017). Ultimately, we argue that the strategies of liberal government that defined, acknowledged, and addressed the “crisis” of the boom in North Dakota were not merely responses to the arrival of oil culture in North Dakota, but were constitutive of the form that oil culture took in the state, shaping its forms of sociality and imaginaries of life, labor, and energy, including visions



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for the future for Williston and its surrounds, albeit in ways that were ambivalent, provisional, and open to contestation. Imagined Histories, Imperiled Futures: Migrant Labor and the End of a Rural Idyll To undertake a diagonal reading is to attend to the ordering of a social formation as an ongoing process and thus as something achieved and provisional rather than presumed or natural. In North Dakota, accounts of violence, with their victims and villains, were particularly potent sites through which the Bakken was settled. Alongside the sex worker, the male migrant worker emerged as a figure that had to be literally and discursively “settled” to achieve a particular form of life valued by many residents and leaders in the region. When media outlets brought Sherry Arnold’s tragic murder to the attention of regional and national audiences, they often drew on and amplified the idea that an existing way of life in western North Dakota and eastern Montana was under attack. For example, a New York Times article that emphasized how crime had “poured in” to the Bakken foregrounded changes that the oil boom had brought to small-­town life: Mayor Bret Smelser, who attended the same Lutheran church that Ms. Arnold did, said his wife had bought a small handgun to help her feel safer when he was away. “Nobody knew anybody anymore,” he said. “We were a community that never locked our doors. That’s all changed.” (Healy 2013, paras. 22–­23).

These were not uncommon sentiments among area residents. Dark side narratives worked, in part, through a division in time, where the present was represented as a tensed moment in which an existing form of life hung in the balance, haunted by the specter of its imminent transformation. Yet it is not only the future that was spectral in these accounts; so too was the past. Dark side narratives achieved their force in part through the construction of an imagined history of the region as a peaceful agrarian community—­a rural idyll centered on

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the white, heteronormative, Christian family and characterized by hard work, family values, and a strong commitment to religious faith—­albeit one that was also buffeted by global commodity markets, the consolidation of farms, and increasing industrialization of agriculture. Visually, this was frequently achieved through pastoral images of small-­town, rural life, juxtaposed with “man camps,” bars, strip clubs, and the industrial landscapes of oil, which lent support to powerful “before” and “after” narratives in which the oil boom, championed for the economic prosperity it promised to an economically depressed region, was equally viewed as a threat to an existing way of life (see, e.g., Brown 2013; Wood 2014). This history gains its coherence through what it excludes, not least the violence of the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, which must be effaced for the settler community to collectively claim roots in the land and to simultaneously distinguish themselves from newcomers who are not seen to share the same history and values. If, within these narratives, western North Dakota and eastern Montana were seen to be at risk of losing their status as peaceful and tight-­ knit agrarian communities, the tacit or explicit threat was the influx of migrant workers to the region.2 Between 2008, when the boom took off, and 2014, when oil prices collapsed and drilling activity slowed, as many as eighty thousand workers migrated to the region, attracted by high wages—­or rumors of such wages—­in the oil patch (Scheyder 2016). While the majority of migrant workers were white and male, people occupying a diverse range of identities migrated to the Bakken, drawn from across the United States, as well as from Mexico, Central America, West Africa, and beyond.3 Moreover, at the height of the greatest economic recession in the United States since the Great Depression of the 1930s, workers came from all walks of life: manual laborers, students, engineers, chefs, veterans, and any number of others who had lost jobs, fallen into debt, or were simply looking for change or adventure. Many were older, with lives disrupted by economic recession and growing precarity (Angel 2014). These migrants were often celebrated as exemplifying the entrepreneurial subject (see, e.g., Carrns 2012). Portrayed as bootstrapping individuals who took their fate into their own hands, they joined the



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ranks of Dust Bowl farmers, Reconstruction migrants, and others who have sought a better life in the face of economic change. Indeed, many western North Dakota residents welcomed the new arrivals, valuing the vitality they brought to the region. Yet these migrants often found themselves at the center of dark side discourses as well. A small fraction patronized Whispers and Heartbreakers, Williston’s strip clubs, joining locals, some of whom had been patronizing at least one of the businesses for years. An even smaller fraction found employment in the clubs themselves, as bouncers, bartenders, and dancers. Occasionally fights occurred late at night on the streets outside the clubs, and in 2014 an altercation led to the death of a customer. The clubs, their workers and their customers, and fights between men at or near the clubs received outsized attention in local and national media, often standing in, metonymically, for all migrant workers in the Bakken (especially male workers) who were frequently portrayed as immoral, lawless, and violent. This perception was reinforced in stories that stitched together accounts of violence and other criminalized activities, frequently only tenuously linked in time and space, into an overarching account of migrant violence. The New York Times article mentioned earlier, for instance, drew together in a single story three different violent events: the rape of an elderly woman in Dickinson, North Dakota, the beating of a man in Culbertson, Montana, and the abduction and murder of Sherry Arnold (Healy 2013). A CNN article linked two murders outside the strip clubs to wider fears of violence, drug use, theft, and sex use brought about by “newcomers” to the region (Hargreaves 2015). And, perhaps most dramatically, a Huffington Post article extrapolated from an account of a series of linked murders to make the following claim: The Bakken oil patch is slowly turning into a killing field winding through 9,000 temporary housing projects called “man camps.” Fueled by drugs, alcohol and desperation, the innocent homeless and the guilty desperate dregs of humanity are forced to sleep in cars and under bridges as the workforce explodes, infrastructure implodes, and social mores collapse. (Nienaber 2014, para. 6)

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To read episodes of violence in the Bakken diagonally is not to deny their severity, nor to contest the notion that heteropatriarchal capitalism is violently enforced. Rather, it is to examine these events in tension with the neoliberal arts of governance in which they are framed and that consequently appear to delimit the only means of response. These accounts not only evidence the ways in which different behaviors that threaten the security of the white heterosexual family are linked together, but also achieve their persuasive power by separating these attacks from a wider national culture of male physical and sexual violence and identifying the male migrant worker as the common thread. Indeed, the idea that migrants brought crime to the Bakken was often repeated by local politicians and law enforcement and state officials. When the FBI opened a Williston office in 2015—­its first new field office in thirty years—­the media was quick to report that it was due to a “surge in criminal activity since the state’s oil boom began” (Valentine 2015, para. 2; see also “Heitkamp Hosts FBI Director,” 2016). North Dakota U.S. attorney Tim Purdon told reporters, “It’s not Mayberry anymore. . . . Our police and prosecutors are going to have to adapt to keep pace. We have organized criminal gangs selling drugs, sex trafficking, and out-­of-­state flimflam men coming in. And the cases have become more and more complicated” (Valentine 2015, para. 5). Ariston E. Johnson, the deputy state’s attorney in neighboring McKenzie County, explained: “There are people arriving in North Dakota every day from other places around the country who do not respect the people or laws of North Dakota” (Eligon 2013, para. 10). Even elected officials repeated these tropes. Williston mayor Howard Krug suggested that one of the benefits of the industry slowdown in 2014 was that “maybe the crime rate will stabilize, or even go down” (Hargreaves 2015, para. 16).4 Adding that “maybe this isn’t a pipeline for the Mexican cartel anymore,” Krug explicitly linked Williston’s drug trade with the arrival of migrant workers, ignoring substance use disorders already common in rural North Dakota (Fiedler et al. 2008) and, just as important, effacing the long hours and travel distances required of workers by drilling and service companies that fueled the consumption and sale of stimulants (Hargreaves 2015, para. 16). As inadvertently expressed



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by a local judge, the real issue was criminalization of the migrant, not criminality per se: “[Before the boom] I pretty much knew most of the defendants. I knew their parents, their kids, their grandparents, their next-­door neighbors. Now I can go weeks and see people I’ve never seen before. It’s amazing how many people are arrested within days of getting here” (Cohen 2014, para. 51). Repeated in numerous media reports, this narrative is not unfamiliar, even when it cannot be backed up with crime data (Ruddell and Ortiz 2015; Mrozla et al. 2018). It reiterates common tropes around the single male migrant from earlier historical periods in the United States, especially in the West and frontier regions. These historical echoes, while imperfect, are instructive, providing a comparative analytical frame for the North Dakota boom. In his book on global migrants in the American West during the first half of the twentieth century, for instance, Nayan Shah (2011, 6) outlines three “conceptual stabilizations” that constrict our responses to movement and change and that have historically led to the pathologization of the single male migrant: the privileging of permanence over transience; the nuclear family as the proper domain for intimacy; and polarized sexuality, which, in the context Shah examined, effaced nonconforming gender identities and sexualities among migrant (male) workers. As Shah notes, the stories he examined already reprised age-­old concerns about migrant male workers in the United States that date back to the nineteenth century, whether in reference to waves of southern and eastern European migrants that arrived in U.S. cities at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, or stories about migrant workers in the mining camps and rapidly growing cities in the U.S. West during its many resource booms. We argue that similar conceptual stabilizations were operative in North Dakota during the boom, reflecting and assuaging anxieties about the provisional nature of any existing (or desired) normative order and effacing its foundational violences. The irony of narratives of migrant violence went beyond the fact that many forms of violence preceded the boom, including the continuously effaced violence of colonial appropriation and the silenced violences of heteropatriarchal norms, or even

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that rates and types of violence in the Bakken were not unlike rates in other parts of the state or the country. Dark side narratives hid these realities. Rather, it was that they reinforced the ways in which the mobility of some people and things (white families, extractive capital) was privileged and often encouraged, while the mobility of others (single male migrants, stimulants) was simultaneously needed and feared. As Shah notes in the case of California: White urban and agrarian elites and settlers, in seeking to monopolize the advantages of mobility for themselves in the early twentieth century, cast transient male migrants as marginal and replaceable labor, disruptive to the social order and irritants to the political future of democratic nations. . . . The political yearning for a republic of settled families over transient male laborers contradicted the patterns of interstate and international migration that accounted for 80 percent of population growth decade after decade during the first third of the twentieth century. (2011, 2)

The issue was thus not just that the rich and diverse lives and aspirations of migrant workers were effaced, or that migrant workers were always already suspect in dark side narratives (even more so if they were poor, LGBTQ+, BIPOC, or could not easily blend in with the local population), or even that vilifying the migrant in terms of criminality occurred even when many of the same “ills”—­sex work or the use of methamphetamines, for instance—­were present long before the fracking boom began (Fiedler et al. 2008). Rather, it was that, positioned as an external threat, migrant workers became subject to surveillance and policing in a context in which they were frequently among the most vulnerable people in their new homes, often employed at jobs that were precarious and dangerous (chapter 4 in this volume by Bruce Braun; see also Angel 2014), while lacking material and financial resources, friends and community, and basic physical and mental health services. (Dis)ordering Gender and Sexuality If migrant workers were included in the emerging social order of the Bakken, it was as an external threat to be managed and domesticated.



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But it was not only the assumed violent and unruly nature of male migrants that was feared. Dark side narratives were also marked by a deep anxiety over nonconforming gender identities and sexual practices among migrant workers and the threat they posed to the sexual boundaries of white middle-­class family life. The female sex worker, often assumed to be a migrant to the region, emerged as a central figure in this discourse (Figure 5.1). This figure did double duty in boomtown accounts, on the one hand placed in the traditional role of providing sexual services to men, and on the other viewed as a threat to a normative feminine sexuality most properly contained within the sphere of the heteronormative family. Both accounts displaced attention from women’s working conditions and diverse workforce participation in favor of a paradoxical emphasis on women’s vulnerability and victimization on the one hand, and their interest in “taking advantage” of men and families for their own priorities to earn quick money on the other. There are many examples of the outsized attention that sex work in the Bakken received. A 2011 exposé in CNN Money, widely charged by

Figure 5.1. Outside Heartbreakers in Williston, North Dakota, July 2014. Photograph by Elizabeth Flores for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, via Getty Images.

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local officials for generating hype that drew sex workers looking for employment, reporters searching for a big story, and various parties—­ both local and national—­concerned with sexual morality in the Bakken, emphasized the astronomical sums that Williston strippers were purported to be making: up to two thousand dollars a night (Ellis 2011).5 In early 2012, Lucky Dog Films produced a pilot for a reality television show, called Boomtown Girls, that proposed to follow the daily lives of five sisters in the oil patch. One of the sisters, Kelsey, worked as a bartender in one of the clubs. While the show was never produced, and this was only a part-­time job for one of the five sisters, it was Kelsey’s story that was picked up most widely; for example, a Business Insider reporter solicited Kelsey to share photos of a typical day (Johnson 2012). The resulting article included a significant discussion of strippers in North Dakota while scarcely mentioning the diverse professions of the other women (always referred to as “girls”). Similarly, an episode of CNN’s show Life with Lisa Ling started by focusing on the ways in which women were “seizing oil patch opportunities,” an apparent effort to show the Bakken as something more than a “man’s world,” but spent much of its second half focusing on the sex industry and enacting a suspenseful ride along on an alleged sex-­trafficking intervention (see Bryan 2014). Even a brief analysis of mainstream media reveals deep anxieties about women’s agency and the roles women played in both the oil boom and its (un)settling of a normative ordering of gender and sexuality. Indeed, these narratives are actually best read for “what is going on with the bourgeois subject” (Berg 2021, 487). The portrayal of sex workers was exemplary in this regard. The figure of the sex worker that emerged in these narratives was divorced from growing calls nationally and internationally to understand sex work as labor, with the rights and protections that are accorded other forms of wage labor (see Grant 2014; Mgbako 2016). Instead, the figure of the boomtown sex worker was frequently depicted through a moral rather than political-­economic lens, as conniving and opportunistic, rather than as simply pursuing a livelihood like other residents of the region—­much less as pursuing the kind of antiwork politics sometimes discussed in progressive accounts of sex work (e.g., babylon and Berg 2021). As a prominent New York



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Times article exclaimed: “Some women have banked on the female shortages. Williston’s two strip clubs attract dancers from around the country. Prostitutes from out of state troll the bars” (Eligon 2013, para. 13, italics added). Despite abundant evidence of women’s agency in diverse aspects of the boom, women’s labor was frequently condensed into sex work, which in turn was collapsed into trafficking and dominated by narratives of victimization.6 A few firsthand accounts by women in the oil fields provided a more nuanced and perhaps progressive view of the role of women in the sex and entertainment industries, highlighting women’s strategies for profit and survival—­including in Williston’s notorious drive-­through Boomtown Babes coffee shop, staffed by “scantily clad” women, which became a disturbing obsession of out-­of-­town journalists and researchers (DeRuy and Sands 2014). Yet the same women were also presented as threats to the stability of the nuclear family. As one of the stories on the Boomtown Babes coffee shop put it, warning more broadly of the “temptations” of the oil fields while ignoring entirely the economic precarity driving workers away from their families in the first place, “many of the guys working on the oil fields have left their wives and children back home. Others are single, divorced, or—­perhaps—­soon to be. For many, Boomtown Babes apparently fills a void” (DeRuy and Sands 2014, para. 8). These accounts make clear not only that the lives of sex workers were “stripped for parts” (Berg 2021, 485) in narratives not of their own making but also the heterosexual masculinism that framed representations of work and life in Williston; women were represented chiefly in relation to men, whether as wives, victims, or willing agents. Indeed, media narratives about women may in fact reveal deep anxieties—­and a certain ambivalence—­about something else: changing definitions of American heteromasculinity. Here, sex work is “mined for evidence of special harm or titillating edge,” discursively put to work to sublimate anxieties about changing sexual and gender norms and the potential for the boom to bring these changes to the proudly isolated and conservative reaches of rural North Dakota (or, even more frightening, to expose tendencies already latent there) (Berg 2021, 485). The masculinity, and

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even hypermasculinity, of the boom appears in these accounts as a problem to be addressed, yet equally as a welcome return to the expression of a more authentic masculinity free of the restraints of political correctness (see Rao 2013; Hargreaves 2015). Indeed, that images of rough-­hewn, oil-­streaked workers—­a small percentage of all workers in the Bakken—­circulated widely in national media in the early 2010s may be viewed, in part, as a form of nostalgia for a working-­class masculinity that was seen to be under threat, as unionized labor in manufacturing and industry, the economic and political foundation for such a masculinity, had by the early 2000s dramatically declined in the face of transformations to workplaces and the nature of work wrought by right-­to-­work legislation, automation, and outsourcing (see chapter 2 in this volume by Thomas S. Davis for one such image). Accordingly, while women in the sex trade were depicted as victims or villains, men engaging in so-­called illicit activities—­drunkenness, physical violence (often against other men), solicitation of sex workers, and visits to strip clubs—­were often presented as simply indulging the inevitable outcomes of the nature of their physically taxing work. A CNN article quotes a strip club employee’s description of male oilfield workers: “They work like four days on, four days off, 24 hours, with no break, no alcohol. So when they have days off they’re gonna’ drink, and when they drink they want to play” (Ellis 2011, para. 15). There is no doubt that Williston and the oil fields were a heterosexist and masculinist social formation, reflected not only in the media but also in our interviews with residents and workers. A local dance teacher, for instance, kept her only male student a secret, giving him lessons in private; men reported that they were pressured to act tough on the job site and not complain of injury (although this may be linked to the precarity of employment and not only to the performance of masculinity); and women reported frequent and sometimes quite violent harassment in Williston and the surrounding region (see also Dembicki 2010). Yet tales of men who want to “play” in the oil fields, told in normative registers, and the concomitant celebration of a seemingly bygone red-­blooded American masculinity, at times belied a far more complex reality. In interviews, the intense loneliness and boredom of much



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oilfield work was often noted, and life in the man camps described to us as variously mundane, infantilizing, and uncomfortable (see Figure 5.2). Worker housing, which was featured in numerous photo essays on the oil boom, was notable for its prefab, uniform aesthetic, and even the food served in the cafeterias was frequently described as “bland” (Carrns 2012, para. 27).7 In interviews we conducted with oil workers, a typical description of leisure time in the region went like this: “I . . . I don’t know, I haven’t gone to the bars, because it’s like you know, so chaotic. But I guess we just walk around sometimes. . . . I guess just hanging out with friends, do stuff cheap . . . just simple, like I go to the park, just play guitar with a few friends. . . . Just whatever I can to just chill I guess.” Alongside the dullness of much of oilfield life lies the loneliness of transient livelihoods and the exhaustion of long workdays in grueling and often unstable environments. Even accounts that focused on Williston’s strip clubs revealed the banality and loneliness just below the surface of the hypermasculinity portrayed. As one woman’s account of working in the clubs explained:

Figure 5.2. Inside worker camp, Tiago, North Dakota. Photograph by Bruce Braun.

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Sometimes, though, I’d rub a guy’s shoulders during a dance and he’d ask me to just keep doing that for five songs. Tense bodies slackened in response to my touch, hard faces softened when confronted with smiles, groups laughed and sang along to cheesy rock at the rack. At times the customers were bafflingly delightful. The farmer who pulled a Leica out of his overalls and asked if he could take my picture. The shy, funny drilling contractor who would bring us surf and turf from the nearby steakhouse on slow nights. The tattoo artist who said the town was so small you could walk across it. The photographer on assignment to shoot one of the first boomtown articles written about the area. The local fortysomething lesbian smiling like a 21-­year-­old. The kid who was tickled that I recognized his Daniel Johnston T-­shirt. These people would make my day. (Shepard 2013, para. 11)

Anxieties about threats posed to and from masculinity seemed to be sharpened and illuminated in the context of the social relations of the boom. They also show the convergence of narratives of hypermasculinity and a potentially deviant sexuality: when a “boys will be boys” narrative slips into a threat to a social order that ties masculinity to work and to the (white) heteronormative family. This deviancy is perhaps rendered most acute in the case of Sherry Arnold’s murder, but it is also found in fears of broken marriages, in sadness and pity for forlorn men away from home, and in threats that homosocial and homoerotic spaces of the oil field presented to naturalizing discourses of innate heterosexuality among male laborers. The latter was evidenced in the drama surrounding the reinvention of one of the strip clubs, Heartbreakers, after a city ordinance designed to preserve Williston’s moral order forced it to close in 2016. The club was rumored in both local and national press to be reopening as a gay bar, making it the only LGBTQ bar in North Dakota (Lang 2016). Yet such a reinvention was short-­lived and believed by some to be “little more than a bluff [by the owner], a publicity stunt to try to get his way in a last-­ditch effort of ironic defiance” (Hickman 2016, para. 5). As a writer in Vox sardonically put it, “after all, what’s the only thing worse than a strip club in small-­town North Dakota?” (Lang 2016).



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Economies of Abandonment: Liberal Governance and the Bakken Local authorities in the Bakken found themselves in a particular bind: how to promote Williston as an area of growth after years of economic stagnation (especially multisectoral growth, which became a high priority after the collapse of oil prices in 2014) while at the same time preserving the identity of the region as America’s heartland? And how to attract workers and their families to the city—­and convince them to settle there—­when those same workers were perceived as violent or as threats to a valued way of life? In short, how to settle the boom so as to contain it and simultaneously sustain it? Many local leaders articulated tensions around change and stability through a preoccupation with countering stories of the boom’s dark side prevalent in national media and with containing threats to a desired social order articulated by long-­term residents of the city. Although tropes of “disorder” and “deviance” were frequently expressed in Williston itself, many in the city, including city leaders, were eager to counter this portrayal in the national media. As the managing editor of the Williston Herald decried in a 2013 editorial, after a visit from several journalists from Cyprus: “Not surprising to me, one of the first questions the Cyprus crew asked was about prostitutes in Williston. Are there prostitutes? Probably. But of all the things that could have been asked, these world travelers wanted to know about prostitutes” (Rupkalvis 2013, para. 7). As evidenced above, in the Bakken specific forms and representations of violence and moral disorder drew the attention of public officials, while other forms were cast to the shadows or viewed as part of the normal order of social and economic life. Domestic violence, workplace injuries, and the deep alienation experienced by nonconforming individuals did not centrally emerge in dark side narratives about the migrant worker. Yet these experiences may be far more frequent in North Dakota’s oil assemblage than the forms of violence and illicit behavior on which dark side narratives centered. Women, LGBTQ people, and migrant workers—­whether male or female—­often bore the burdens of the boom on their own, part of a neoliberal logic that shifted responsibility for care from the state to the individual.

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Here, Povinelli’s diagonal reading of violence and morality is particularly apt, attending to how violence and nonviolence are defined and divided within liberal arts of governance. As many have noted, in neoliberal governance the role of the state is not to provide care, but to police the disorder that results in its absence. This was evident in the Bakken. Mental health resources for migrant workers were scarce, especially in the early years of the boom. Likewise, the city’s LGBTQ community had few if any safe spaces and was often ignored entirely (Lang 2016). Within these economies of abandonment, when care was provided, it was often by individuals, by the city’s Christian churches, or, in one case, by an organization that provided shared housing to veterans—­ many suffering from trauma—­who followed military and oil contractors from foreign conflict zones in Iraq and Afghanistan to extractive zones in the United States. Likewise, rather than address the combination of dangerous work conditions and long hours as a workers’ rights issue, workers were frequently forced to manage the situation themselves, through the use of stimulants and forms of mutual aid. For example, a group of the aforementioned veterans told us that they preferred to work together in the oil fields because it was the safest way to navigate dangerous work environments. In the absence of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and labor protections, and in a context where workers bore the burden of managing risk on their own, mutual aid and collective forms of care were necessary responses to neoliberal forms of governance. These forms of governance do not just abandon the worker to ad hoc forms of care; they also proliferate particular expressions of state power. By focusing on illicit behaviors—­ bar fights, drug use, sex work—­dark side narratives underwrote and justified a carceral response to migrant workers, rather than one that addressed their abandonment and exhaustion. Moralizing and carceral responses in the Bakken were tightly linked to visions of a particular social order, set against a specific construction of risk. As U.S. congressman Kevin Cramer noted upon the announcement of Williston’s new FBI office: “We have worked hard to get to this point and look forward to an increased presence the outstanding men



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Figure 5.3. Expanded Williams County Correctional Center. Photograph by Melody Mileur, 2017. Source: Williams County, North Dakota.

and women of the FBI can bring to law enforcement and crime deterrence so critical to maintaining our quality of life in western ND” (“Cramer Statement” 2015, para. 2). Between 2008 and 2014, Williams County increased its sheriff’s budget by 254 percent and its corrections budget by 346 percent. Likewise, while the population of Williston doubled over this period, its police budget tripled (Killelea and Burnes 2014). A new larger county jail (Figure 5.3) was built in 2009 and was doubled in size again only six years later. While crime statistics are often unreliable, there is little evidence that crime rates in the region, measured per capita, increased during the period, and police officers themselves were divided on the question (Dahle 2016; see also note 4). As Ruddell and Ortiz note in relation to boomtowns, “with respect to perceptions of safety, the actual increase in the volume or severity of these crimes might not be as important as how it is portrayed by the media, political claims-­makers, law enforcement, and other community residents through rumor and hearsay” (2015, 133). Sex work was a particular target of local officials, with the city’s two strip clubs garnering a high level of attention. Efforts to eradicate sex

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work in the public eye eventually resulted in an ordinance limiting adult entertainment to Williston’s industrial zones, passed in January 2016 at a standing-­room-­only meeting of the city commission, which effectively banned both downtown strip clubs from employing dancers (Dalrymple 2016a). Additional ordinances passed at the same time barred adult-­ entertainment businesses from serving alcohol and required them to obtain a cabaret license. Declared the third most important event in Williston in 2016 by the Williston Herald (the first most important being the closure of worker housing camps in the city), the closings were closely tied to a particular vision of social and moral order. According to the Herald: While the oil boom brought optimism, and for many, the first feeling of not living paycheck to paycheck, it also brought a dark underbelly of drugs, prostitution and violence. Without a root to the community, some of the transient male population created hot spots for unruly behavior, like the adjacent adult entertainment establishments, Whispers and Heartbreakers, which were located on Main Street downtown. . . . When crude oil prices fell by 2014, most temporary workers dissipated, leaving behind a large population of young families set on riding out the commodity cycle. City officials believed that to retain the new permanent workforce and offer quality of life enhancements for families, the city’s former stigma would have to be shed. (Krause 2016, paras. 2 and 5)

Even the very limited social services available for sex workers were shot through with moral discourse. The most prominent organization, 4her, for instance, was explicitly a “rescue” organization that described itself on its now-­defunct website as “pioneering the fight to end sexual exploitation and trafficking induced by the unique dynamics of the ‘BOOM’” and “provid[ing] support and services to a number of young girls and women, several of whom have made the brave decision to exit the life of trafficking, prostitution, stripping.” In addition to conflating different kinds of sex work with trafficking, which effaces the agency that women might have, it explicitly approached the issue through Christian morality (see, e.g., Dalrymple 2016b). Rather than



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asking sex workers what they wanted or needed, or taking a nominally harm-­reductive approach, it aimed at “saving” them—­in more ways than one—­so that they might positively participate in the norms of the heterosexual nuclear family and/or legitimate waged labor (cf. Dewey 2014). Not everyone celebrated these efforts. At the standing-­room-­ only meeting of the city commission, opponents vociferously questioned crime statistics, argued on behalf of employees and independently contracted dancers whose employment was threatened, and pointed out that pushing adult entertainment to the city’s fringes would likely increase incidences of drunk driving and result in more work for the police, rather than less. The only person to speak in favor of the ordinances at the city commission’s meeting during which the ordinances were passed was Dennis Jensen, director for Youth for Christ in Williston, who commended the city commissioners: “I applaud you for taking this move and bringing good moral fiber to our community and to our families” (Dalrymple 2016b, para. 16). Settling a Social Formation Our diagonal reading of North Dakota’s social-­crisis narratives reveals three intersecting but not always congruous discourses. First, national media accounts portrayed the Bakken as a lawless place where sex work and hypermasculine violence were rampant and migrant workers posed a threat to an idyllic way of life. A second discourse circulated by local media and city officials focused on responses to perceived criminality and social disorder, where the emphasis was on not just the threats of violence, but threats of negative perceptions, which might jeopardize the settling of the boom into a stable white, Christian, heteronormative social formation. Here, carceral and moralistic responses to both experienced and discursive threats—­and the absence of social services and state regulation and oversight—­were symptomatic of state abandonment and neoliberal forms of government. Third, our diagonal reading picks up on a discourse among workers and local residents of the slow grind of everyday life, coupled with the normalization/invisibilization of certain kinds of violence—­violence against Indigenous women and girls, domestic violence, workplace injury, the oppression of LGBTQ+

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people, among others. Ultimately, and perhaps paradoxically, these discourses work together to settle the boom into a particular normative-­ yet-­anxiety-­ridden social formation. Social disordering (which always also implies reordering) might take many forms during an oil boom (Schafft, Borlu, and Glenna 2013). And while these new and changing forms of social order may be most keenly felt in the immediate region, they redound upon broader anxieties regarding the inequalities wrought by globalization and extractive capitalism. In the Bakken, social disordering and related anxieties were reflected in widely circulated narratives about the dark side of the oil boom. Frequently in the spotlight of dark side narratives, deviant masculinity, sex work, public violence, and migrant lifestyles are not especially severe forms of social disorder, but they do represent perceived threats to the white heteropatriarchal family that is at the center of the liberal settler-­state conceit even as it is threatened by the inequalities propagated by global capitalism (Bernstein 2012). Furthermore, a diagonal reading of dark side stories shows how responses to these concerns follow neoliberal and settler-­state logics that posit entire classes of people as alternately victims or villains and link carcerality with highly normative forms of social service provision and community activism. At the same time, certain forms of threat and violence are effaced by liberal frameworks even as they rely upon and/or exacerbate them, for instance both presuming and enforcing the foundational violence of Indigenous dispossession. These include structural threats to workers as well as violence toward Indigenous people, especially Indigenous women. While migrant workers—­male and female—­ were subject to policing, the oil industry operated with near impunity, as has been documented elsewhere. Environmental regulations were frequently flouted, and when companies were convicted of wrongdoing, fines were insignificant or waived entirely (see Kusnetz 2012). Likewise, workplaces were almost entirely unregulated and rarely inspected: while police forces rapidly expanded, the number of OSHA inspectors in the state remained at the same level as before the boom, leaving workers exposed and without protection (see Berzon 2015; Jones 2016). In an ironic twist that reflected the turn to carcerality as a solution to surplus



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populations and economic precarity across the country, highly vulnerable people seeking to negotiate the cramped spaces of neoliberal capitalism were policed, while many of the most powerful—­and often violent—­actors were celebrated and allowed to continue business as usual. It is common to argue that violence, crime, and lawlessness are attributes of oil booms, that oil booms bring these activities to places (see Ruddell 2017). Our diagonal reading of violence in the Bakken not only complicates this notion but compels us to make a different argument, namely that dark side stories, insofar as they shape how problems are defined and perceived and possible moral and political responses to them, help constitute and consolidate the oil boom and its aftermath. Thus, our diagonal reading gestures toward the provisional nature of the relations that constitute the social formations of the Bakken. That is, the particular social identities and relations, forms of protection and exposure, and modes of governance and relations of power that shape life in the Bakken are not given in advance or governed by necessity. They are the results of how various discourses and practices are brought together into a provisional totality. Indeed, for many theorists of hegemony, the key point is that neither subjects nor the cultural or social formations they inhabited have an “essence” (see Laclau and Mouffe 1985). Their ordering is always provisional, always done with difficulty, always requiring a great deal of work, the traces of which can never be fully eradicated. Something of this idea informs Elizabeth Povinelli’s argument that moral panics—­and sex panics in particular—­are occasions for political orderings (Povinelli 2011; Last 2016; see also Hall et al. 1978). The point is not to judge the truth of the dark side narratives that we have outlined in this chapter, but to see the work they do, the way in which they normalize and naturalize identities and relations, and the way they in turn govern what is possible within social, political, and economic life. Finally, reading violence in the Bakken diagonally leads us to conclude that dark side narratives not only helped settle the boom but, from a researcher’s perspective, effaced the most interesting and important dimensions of the boom. Rather than serving as a lens through which

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to understand sexual depravity and blue-­collar violence, the oil boom in western North Dakota can tell us much more about precarity: how people cobble together lives with limited resources, abbreviated safety nets, and high levels of uncertainty. Or, alternately, about Indigenous survivance in the face of ongoing settler colonial violence (Vizenor 1999; Simpson 2016). If the Bakken and its boom is exceptional, it is exceptional not for its dark side but for the way it puts into relief the strategies for survival and world-­making that emerge at the “cramped spaces,” to use Povinelli’s words, where liberal government and extreme resource extraction collide (Povinelli, Coleman, and Yusoff 2017). We might connect this work to recent scholarship by Povinelli and others that asks how people endure life under late liberalism, and how such endurance opens possibilities for things to be otherwise; how it channels a potentiality that “is the refuge not of the hopeful but of the concretely ordinary and pragmatically banal” (Povinelli et al. 2014, 1; see also Povinelli 2011). Here, the emphasis is not on how the bounds of the white heteropatriarchal nuclear family are maintained in a world of difference but how alternative forms of life manage to endure despite being seen as always already out of order. The stakes of understanding disorder and violence both within and without liberal frameworks thus extend to what kinds of life, what kinds of communities, and what forms of care might flourish in the (un)settling of an oil boom. Notes 1. The phrase “dark side” has been used countless times in the media to describe negative impacts of the Bakken oil boom since at least 2012 (see Farnham 2012). Our use of this term refers to these stories, as well as those that do not explicitly use this wording but draw on the same themes and tropes. 2. Although commonly held narratives about Williston emphasize demo�graphic continuity from the time of Norwegian and German settlement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the population of Williston grew most rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, during an earlier oil boom. 3. Between 2010 and 2020 the proportion of the population in Williston that identified as white declined from 90.5 to 85.7 percent (U.S. Census Bureau 2010; 2020).



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4. While the misuse of crime statistics was common during the boom, often confusing absolute increases in numbers of crimes with increases in crime rate (it is possible for the former to rise while the latter falls), some officials were careful to link the absolute increase in crime to increases in population, thus implicitly questioning the story of increasing crime rates. Richard Thorton, the special agent in charge of the FBI division that oversees the Williston office, for instance, noted that the new office was opened “in response to the unprecedented growth in population and economic activity associated with the oil exploration and production in the Bakken region and the corresponding increase in criminal activity” (Valentine 2015, para. 3). Likewise, Williston police detective Amber Dickerson noted that “while the number of crimes has surged in town over the last few years, so has the overall population, the actual crime rate is similar to like-­sized communities” (Hargreaves 2015, para. 11). North Dakota attorney general Wayne Stenehjem, seeking to reassure local residents, noted that “North Dakota’s violent crime rate remains among the lowest in the nation” (Burnes 2013, para. 2). 5. This claim was contested by many in the industry. 6. The conflation of sex work and sex trafficking—­and the assumption that all sex workers are trafficked—­has long effaced the agency of women and underwritten the criminalization of sex work rather than treating it as a form of wage work that includes rights and protections for workers (Bernstein 2012). Likewise, discourses that understand sex work as “exploitative” fail to recognize that this is the nature of all wage labor and have the effect of imagining other forms of labor as somehow nonexploitative. 7. Migrant oil industry workers hire out daily housekeeping needs to others (often women) who take care of everything from laundry to meals, inside or separate from crew camps. Bernstein points out that domestic care work of this sort is given “moral and political legitimacy” for women and others (2012, 248).

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news/former-stripper-will-lead-church-service-at-williston-club/article_24 14b1fc-b66c-11e5-b6c7-2bef9590c3ba.html. Dembicki, Geoff. 2010. “Oil Sands Workers Don’t Cry.” The Tyee, August 16. https://thetyee.ca/News/2010/08/16/OilWorkersDontCry/. DeRuy, Emily, and Geneva Sands. 2014. “Sex and Coffee Are a Perky Combo in North Dakota Oil Boom Town.” Splinter, August 12. https://splinternews .com/sex-and-coffee-are-a-perky-combo-in-north-dakota-oil-bo-1793842225. Dewey, S. C. 2014. “Recovery Narratives, War Stories, and Nostalgia: Street-­ Based Sex Workers’ Discursive Negotiations of the Exclusionary Regime.” Anthropological Quarterly 87, no. 4: 1137–­63. Eligon, John. 2013. “An Oil Town Where Men Are Many, and Women Are Hounded.” New York Times, January 15. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/ 16/us/16women.html. Ellis, Blake. 2011. “Earn $2,000 a Night as a Boomtown Stripper.” CNN Money, October 5. https://money.cnn.com/2011/10/25/pf/America_boomtown_strip pers/. Farnham, Alan. 2012. “North Dakota Oil Boom: The Dark Side.” ABC News, February 2. https://abcnews.go.com/Business/north-dakotas-oil-boom-dark -side/story?id=15458362. Fiedler, Alex, Roni Mayzer, Kevin Romig, and Douglas Munski. 2008. “Spatial Patterns of Methamphetamine in North Dakota.” Geographical Bulletin 43, no. 1: 33–­46. Gottesdiener, Laura. 2014. “I Worked in a Strip Club in a North Dakota Fracking Boomtown.” Mother Jones, October 14. https://www.motherjones.com/ environment/2014/10/inside-north-dakotas-crazy-oil-boom/. Grant, Melissa. 2014. Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work. New York: Verso Books. Hall, Stuart, Brian Roberts, John Clarke, Tony Jefferson, and Chas Critcher. 1978, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. New York: Macmillan. Hargreaves, Steve. 2015. “Sex, Drugs and Murder in Oil Country.” CNN Money, February 3. https://money.cnn.com/2015/02/03/news/economy/oil-boom -crime/. Healy, Jack. 2013. “As Oil Floods Plains Towns, Crime Pours In.” New York Times, November 30. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/us/as-oil-floods -plains-towns-crime-pours-in.html. “Heitkamp Hosts FBI Director at Williston Ribbon Cutting for New FBI Office.” 2016. https://www.heitkamp.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID =C777FE4C-7643-4911–8597-F87459E1C711. Hickman, Matt. 2016. “Dialogues: Williston Could Use a Good Gay Bar.” Williston Herald, May 7. https://www.willistonherald.com/opinion/dialogues-wil

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liston-could-use-a-good-gay-bar/article_affc6a24-1455-11e6-8ecf-0b32423 8844c.html. Huber, Mathew T. 2013. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Johnson, Robert. 2012. “A ‘Boomtown Girl’ Takes Us Inside the Famous Strip Club in Williston, North Dakota.” Business Insider, April 4. https://www.bus inessinsider.com/boomtown-girls-and-the-williston-strip-club-2012-4?r =US&IR=T. Jones, Fred. 2016. “Anomie in the Oil Patch? An Examination of Durkheim’s Anomie Theory through a Case Study of the Bakken Region.” PhD dissertation, University of North Dakota. Killelea, Eric, and Jerry Burnes. 2014. “Police Playing Catch Up to Oil Patch Crime Increases.” Williston Herald, February 23. http://www.willistonherald .com/news/police-playing-catch-up-to-oil-patch-crime-increases/article_76 268ae2-9698-11e3-a282-001a4bcf887a.html. Krause, Melissa. 2016. “2016’s top 10—­no. 3: City Closes Downtown Strip Clubs.” Williston Herald, December 30. http://www.willistonherald.com/ news/s-top-no-city-closes-downtown-strip-clubs/article_34d1859a-ce32-11e 6-8353-37b56ae90f59.html. Kusnetz, Nicholas. 2012. “North Dakota’s Oil Boom Brings Damage along with Prosperity.” ProPublica, June 7. https://www.propublica.org/article/the -other-fracking-north-dakotas-oil-boom-brings-damage-along-with-pros peri. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso Books. Lang, Nico. 2016. “The Boom and Bust of North Dakota’s Only Gay Bar.” Vox, August 25. https://www.vox.com/2016/8/25/12639490/north-dakota-gay-bar -heartbreakers-williston. Last, Angela. 2016. “Echoes of Cologne.” Society and Space. Retrieved from http://societyandspace.org/forums/echoes-of-cologne/. LeMenager, Stephanie. 2014. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mgbako, Chi. 2016. To Live Freely in this World: Sex Worker Activism in Africa. New York: New York University Press. Mrozla, Thomas, Thorvald O. Dahle, Carol Huynh, Chloe Robinson, Carol A. Archbold, and Alexandra Marcel. 2018. “Fear of Crime in an Oil Boomtown in Western North Dakota.” Journal of Crime and Justice 41, no. 4: 364–­81. Nienaber, Georgianne. 2014. “Murder, Mayhem, and the Mexican Mafia Stalk the Bakken Oil Fields.” Huffington Post, January 24. https://www.huffing tonpost.com/georgianne-nienaber/murder-mahem-and-mexican-_b_464 6552.html?guccounter=1.



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Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2006. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle. 2014. “Editorial: ‘Quasi-­events.’” e-­flux, no. 58: 1–­2. Povinelli, Elizabeth A., Mathew Coleman, and Kathryn Yusoff. 2017. “An Interview with Elizabeth Povinelli: Geontopower, Biopolitics and the Anthropocene.” Theory, Culture and Society 34, nos. 2–­3: 169–­85. Povinelli, Elizabeth, and Kim Turcot DiFruscia. 2012. A Conversation with Elizabeth A. Povinelli. Trans-­Scripts 2: 76–­90. Rao, Maya. 2013. “‘Hey Foxy!’ Inside the Oil Boom’s Amazing Bachelor Boom.” The Awl, April 23. https://www.theawl.com/2013/04/hey-foxy-inside-the-oil -booms-amazing-bachelor-boom/. Ruddell, Rick. 2017. Oil, Gas, and Crime: The Dark Side of the Boomtown. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ruddell, Rick, and Natalie R. Ortiz. 2015. “Boomtown Blues: Long-­Term Community Perceptions of Crime and Disorder.” American Journal of Criminal Justice 40, no. 1: 129–­46. Rupkalvis, David. 2013. “Fishing Up False Stories about Williston.” Williston Herald, July 13. https://www.willistonherald.com/opinion/columnists/fish ing-up-false-stories-about-williston/article_2dbb97a6-ebfe-11e2-b901–001a 4bcf887a.html. Schafft, Kai A., Yetkin Borlu, and Leland Glenna. 2013. “The Relationship between Marcellus Shale Gas Development in Pennsylvania and Local Perceptions of Risk and Opportunity.” Rural Sociology 78, no. 2: 143–­66. Schafft, Kai A., Kathryn Brasier, and Arielle Hesse. 2019. “Reconceptualizing Rapid Energy Resource Development and Its Impacts: Thinking Regionally, Spatially and Intersectionally.” Journal of Rural Studies 68: 296–­305. Scheyder, Ernest. 2016. “In North Dakota’s Oil Patch, a Humbling Comedown.” Reuters Investigates, May 15. https://www.reuters.com/investigates/ special-­report/usa-­northdakota-­bust/. Shah, Nayan. 2011. Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West. Oakland: University of California Press. Shepard, Susan Elizabeth. 2013. “Wildcatting: A Stripper’s Guide to the Modern American Boomtown.” Buzzfeed, September 1. https://www.buzzfeed .com/susanelizabethshepard/wildcatting-a-strippers-guide-to-the-modern -american-boomtow?utm_term=.xqjBDRDVy#.xpjN2726O. Simpson, Audra. 2016. “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders, and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty.” Theory and Event 19, no. 4: 1–­19.

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6 The Dakota Access Pipeline Struggle Vulnerability, Security, and Settler Colonialism in the Oil Assemblage Kai Bosworth

In April 2016, the Sacred Stone prayer camp was established near the path of the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) as it was planned to cross beneath the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. The Texas-­based firm Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) had proposed DAPL, a $3.8 billion pipeline, to bring 470,000 barrels per day of crude oil from the Bakken fields in western North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa to refineries in southern Illinois. In contrast to the nearby and perpetually delayed Keystone XL Pipeline, DAPL was quickly shuttled through state-­level environmental and utilities permitting in 2015, although not without local resistance and organizing along the pipeline’s entire length (Bosworth 2022). DAPL was an attempt to benefit from the acute desperation faced by hundreds of small Bakken oil producers during an oil bust, many of whom were in search of cheaper transportation costs than railroads could provide. But the speedy construction of this infrastructure project ran into an unexpected hiccup, as dozens, hundreds, and eventually thousands of pipeline opponents deeming themselves “water protectors” flocked to North Dakota 173

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to blockade the pipeline. The population of water protectors, led by the Oceti Sakowin Oyate—­sometimes known as the Great Sioux Nation—­ allied representatives from hundreds of Native Nations from across Turtle Island (North America) and eventually from around the world. Gathered with non-­Native supporters, they led peaceful and prayerful blockade actions that expanded to land claimed to be owned and managed by the Army Corps of Engineers. To the water protectors, DAPL represented a grave threat to not only their drinking water, but all those populations dependent on the entire Missouri River basin. Furthermore, DAPL was understood to be an incursion on Native sovereignty, as the land claimed by the Army Corps and private landowners was appropriated after the United States broke its obligations to the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed with representatives of several Native Nations who claimed sovereignty in the region. Due to the tireless action of water protectors, the politics and ethos of Mni Wiconi or “water is life” spread around the planet. In response to the water protectors’ nonviolent attempts to prevent construction of the pipeline, the Morton County Sheriff’s Department, law enforcement allies, and private security forces proactively and violently protected pipeline construction. Framing the blockade as a “state of emergency” allowed the ranks of security forces to grow to include law enforcement from surrounding states. Private security firms trained in international counterterrorism such as G4S and TigerSwan were hired to bolster the force. These law enforcement and private security forces used a bevy of crowd-­control weapons including bean bag cannons, long-­range acoustic device (LRAD) sound cannons, tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets to respond to what they framed as violent unlawful riots. From August to December 2016, law enforcement arrested over 550 water protectors, who often faced brutal, humiliating, and inhumane treatment during the process of arrest and detainment. Upon being charged with criminal trespass or conspiracy to incite a riot, individuals, including Native elders and minors, were frequently sent to prisons hundreds of miles away in hostile and reactionary North Dakota. Some were strip-­searched, kept in animal pens, and denied access to medical treatment. Sacred sites and objects



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were routinely and illegally desecrated by security forces, often in manners that appeared intentional. Yet the situation that police and private security described was framed in an entirely different manner. The Morton County Sheriff’s Department and private security firm TigerSwan would repeatedly represent law enforcement, local citizens, and the pipeline as if they were the ones vulnerable and under threat from a violent incursion of outsiders. In this essay, I argue that actions and ideologies of law enforcement and security forces surrounding DAPL attempted to retain not just a monopoly on violence but also a monopoly on vulnerability. By this concept, I want to indicate the actions by which the state must attempt to both discredit and belittle the supposed vulnerability of its citizens in order to claim a higher or more fundamental fragility under threat. In order to retain their supposedly legitimate use of violence, security forces had to maintain an aesthetic orientation open just enough to disorder so that their actions could be framed as responding to a prior violent offense imagined to have been perpetrated in this case by the water protectors. Security forces, of course, did not actually retain a monopoly on the actual experience of vulnerability. The monopoly on vulnerability is rather an attempt to control who gets to produce its aesthetics and claim its adjudication of legitimacy. In short, the monopoly on vulnerability is an ideological operation of splitting the moral economy between the victimized and the aggressor. This argument has broad implications for how we think about protest, police, and forms of violence perpetuated by oil securitization. Such ideologies of fragility are frequently encountered within state and capitalist infrastructure projects, especially those of circulation and logistics such as railways and pipelines. However, the centrality of vulnerability alongside violence suggests a more fundamental challenge to key assumptions scholars make as to what operations constitute the police. The geographer Erik Swyngedouw expansively defines “police” to include not only law enforcement, but all those institutions that “classify, order, [or] distribute” (2011, 375) in order to depoliticize and maintain peace. When political protest intervenes and transforms space so that different aesthetic articulations become sensible (e.g., different relations

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with land and water), Jacques Rancière argues that the police respond with the slogan, “Move along! There’s nothing to see here!” (2010, 45). Judith Butler (2016) recapacitates vulnerability as an ethical-­political orientation against such forms of sturdy containment. These are in some ways two sides of the same coin, each with implications for our understandings of political strategy. One problem with these forms of analysis is that they are liable to miss that in certain times and spaces police want specific spaces and bodies to be seen—­especially through particular frames. They want protests to appear as violent racialized riots in contrast to the position of police as the vulnerable “good guys” just doing their job, protecting innocent bystanders and their private property (Guenther 2019). Following Jackie Wang (2018) and Jasbir Puar (2017), I argue that an ontological opposition of the clusters police-­containment-­guilt and resistance-­vulnerability-­innocence can obfuscate the ways in which securing the oil assemblage relies on an aesthetics of vulnerability. The significance of such an argument is twofold. First, the reciprocities that officers and private security forces establish between the felt vulnerabilities and ideological claims of vulnerability result in the “recapacitation” of vulnerability as a juridico-­political right of the state itself. Second, within this aesthetic framework, Indigenous and racialized peoples will rarely appear pure, innocent, or nonviolent enough to demonstrate “actual vulnerability.” They will always appear as aggressors or, as in Gilles Deleuze’s (2006, 161) analysis of Palestinian resistance, “spoilers of peace” within the aesthetic situation of the global oil security industry. Though conditioned by my own experiences as a settler who grew up in South Dakota, and by participation as a “water protector,” this research primarily concerns the aesthetic portrayal of policing and resistance in the media. A more extended situation of this and other knowledge concerning pipeline resistance can be found in my other work (Bosworth 2022). This chapter was written in 2017 and thus takes into account the actions of security forces at that time; of course, policing has long been framed as requiring restless activity, so the strategies and tactics outlined here have likely changed as other pipeline struggles have emerged in the ensuing years.



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Infrastructural Vulnerability and Pipeline Security Pipelines are often understood as strategic “chokepoints” to global trade vulnerable to disruption; therefore, they are critical sites of security for the circulation of oil as capital (Mitchell 2013; Bosworth and Chua 2021). Contemporary security governance ideology frames such projects as “critical infrastructure” (Collier and Lakoff 2008). In doing so, scholars note, the security of oil infrastructure is posed as a necessary condition for the global economy and thus the well-­being of the nation and life itself (Cowen 2014a; Dafnos 2013; Pasternak and Dafnos 2018). Narratives of oil security emerging from the DAPL blockade modified this convention in important ways. In particular, they adapted transnational institutional security strategies to the violent settler colonial context of the Dakotas in an attempt to discredit and demonize Indigenous resistance to the pipeline. Security forces at DAPL did not only present themselves as responding to disorder with force. Nor did they only maintain the state monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Through their institutional aesthetics, including personal narratives, press releases, media, covert and overt operations, and overall public relations strategy, the police presented officers, local white settlers, and the pipeline as vulnerable. For example, the prominent private security force TigerSwan described its primary role as “vulnerability management” (Brown, Parrish, and Speri 2019, 204; Figure 6.1). Consequently, it is important to understand what could be meant by vulnerability, such that it can serve as such an important node linking oil infrastructure and security forces within a transnational oil assemblage. Rather than conceiving of the oil world as a distinct industry involved solely in the production, distribution, and marketing of oil, Michael Watts helpfully describes an “oil assemblage” as a broad and global web “with particular properties, actors, networks, governance structures, institutions, and organizations” (2012, 441). Conceptualizing the oil industry as an assemblage allows scholars to trace the shifting and uneven relationships among institutions and actors heavily involved in the oil world without understanding them as solely determined by it. These actors include environmental permitting firms, marketing and advertising firms, news outlets and Internet websites, financiers, and

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Figure 6.1. TigerSwan image captioned “vulnerability management” previously on its website.

contractors of all kinds. The oil assemblage opens the set of analytical relations examined to include infrastructures, landscapes, ecologies, and the oil itself. Yet the academic exercise of untangling the oil assemblage can be more difficult than it initially seems, for some of its institutions are more or less particular to the transnational oil assemblage, while others are the products of very specific spaces and histories, and still others opaque to scholars due to industry secrecy and security. The description of an assemblage or network can also give the idea that everything within the oil assemblage is equally related to everything else, or that the entire operation is so “gargantuan” (Watts 2012, 441) that it changes slowly or is even unchangeable. Haarstad and Wanvik note that if instead we follow points of crisis and instability, the concept of an oil assemblage can helpfully guide an analysis of its “various interrelated parts subject to change and destabilization” (2017, 433). The set of institutions, practices, and flows is constructed, not impermeable. Following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, we might think of the social assemblage itself as oozing with uncaptured moments: “as when you drill a hole in a pipe, there is no



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social system that does not leak from all directions” (1987, 204). Institutions, bodies, materials, and ideologies come into conflict with one another and are thus transformed or stabilized. Massive amounts of work are thus required to maintain the oil assemblage. The introduction of new elements, technologies, and populations into its webs can significantly modify the knots of power or incapacity it produces. The political upshot of an analysis of this kind is that one might be provoked to examine in more detail the alternately contingent or necessary way in which diverse institutions and practices like futures markets, international private security forces, environmental permitting firms, state institutions, or universities get bound with and are transformed through their relations with the oil world (LaDuke 2021; Wilson and Kamola 2021). Consequently, one must be attuned to the spatially situated or context-­dependent relations of oil infrastructure that firms must uphold in order to produce security. Securing the flow of oil through force and violence is essential to maintain the viability of the oil assemblage to deliver on its promises—­ namely, the accumulation of economic value. In order to provide a profitable return, crude oil must not simply be removed from the ground but transported to a place where it can further be transformed into a usable product through refinery. Thus, the institutions that attempt to produce oil security deserve special consideration given its historic concern to firms and states managing such flows (Bridge and Le Billon 2013; Mitchell 2013). Security here is conceived not only in the ordering of sites of oil extraction, but also in the perception of threats to both infrastructure and capital investment. These could include an imagined terror attack or even climate change legislation (Labban 2011; Zalik 2010). The specific way that oil is secured from potential interruption by locals, substate militias, other states, natural disasters, or market volatility undoubtedly varies in different contexts around the world. The necessity for securing oil infrastructure in part emerges from the historic role that blockade and sabotage of oil pipelines has played in gaining strategic political power, from the rupture of the Mosul-­Haifa pipeline during the Palestinian general strike of 1936 (Malm 2017), to the tapping and theft of oil known as “bunkering” in places like Nigeria

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(Watts 2012), to today’s global movement of nonviolent resistance to fossil fuels that Naomi Klein terms “blockadia” (2014). In response to the perceived necessity to secure oil, states have turned to more or less official means of criminalization of dissent (Le Billon and Carter 2012) and maintenance of structural violence, brutality, murder, and war (Zalik 2004; Watts 2001) that has specifically targeted Indigenous peoples and especially Indigenous women (Wilson 2014). Globally, security spending for oil and gas infrastructure is estimated to top $30 billion annually (Federman 2015). The ability for fossil fuel extraction and transportation firms to elicit support from state institutions like police forces and the military, private security firms, or unsanctioned militias is intimately tied in North America to the norms of settler colonialism that the state upholds as it attempts to maintain sovereignty over territories of movement and flow in the face of ongoing Indigenous refusal (Bosworth and Chua 2021; Coulthard 2014; Cowen 2018; Pasternak and Dafnos 2018). The threat of this disruption requires ideological work to link national security, supply chain security, and critical infrastructure resilience. The supposed threat of “foreign oil” to the U.S. market and consumer during the 1970s energy crisis is at least, in part, central to the unique popular connection between national security, economic growth, and oil (Huber 2013, 103–­6; Herbstreuth 2016). In the United States, the framework of “critical infrastructure” protection first became centrally important in the years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 defined critical infrastructure as “systems and assets . . . so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters.” In this definition, the federal government extended counterterrorism measures to infrastructure and extraction opposition movements, thus maintaining the right of firms to plunder and otherwise traverse the land bases of this continent’s Native Nations. Below, I will demonstrate how vulnerability and violence functioned in the DAPL struggle. First, however, it is important to note how this



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analysis of “monopoly on vulnerability” might depart from contemporary analyses of infrastructure and supply chain security, police and state power, and the aesthetics and politics of vulnerability and violence. For instance, Deborah Cowen has, using oil pipelines and other supply chains as an example, argued that “far from a mark of its strength, securitization of logistics marks its vulnerability” (2014b). This is in some ways true—­due to the just-­in-­time nature of contemporary capitalism, any interruption of flows of resources as important as oil could cascade throughout other markets. Nonetheless, interruption itself is no guarantor of disruption, as logistics firms have largely insured themselves against loss through financial derivatives and insurance. But this argument needs an additional supplement, for firms and states are still acutely aware of the vulnerability of both the market and its material infrastructure to volatility. In order to appear as requiring securitization and control, such infrastructure systems need to be aesthetically figured as vulnerable to disruption. Securitization thus not only marks the real vulnerability of such systems to disruption, but also is itself an ideological claim to vulnerability that must be constructed. Jacques Rancière considers the securitization/vulnerability dyad to be characteristic of “the essence of the police” itself. For Rancière, this essence “lies neither in repression nor even in control over the living. Its essence lies in a certain way of dividing up the sensible” (2010, 44)—­that is, the aesthetic. Scholars frequently note that infrastructure can take this background role in supporting a “nothing to see here” mode of security. Consumers aren’t supposed to think about oil pipelines. But this stance is inadequate to understanding the situation in full. While the police certainly have specific aesthetic modes that depoliticize situations by ordering people and things, Rancière evacuates the police of its fundamental role in the production of political aesthetics. Sometimes, security forces want the consequences of resistance to vital infrastructure systems to be seen and politicized. Doing so justifies their reaction. The concept of “monopoly on vulnerability” also contrasts with more positive figurations of vulnerability as a mode of power. Judith Butler argues that a kind of ontological vulnerability, stemming in part from

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our “dependency on infrastructure for a livable life” (2016, 12), can provide an adequate aesthetics of resistance. This would contrast with the paternalistic colonial state that she argues is fundamentally “vulnerable to a dismantling that would undo its very form of power” (23). While Butler acknowledges that vulnerability can also be claimed by the state or by white settlers to “shore up” (23) their power, her stance is that the performative-­ontological status of vulnerability-­in-­resistance is more fundamental than such transparent claims. But this position seems to dismiss the way that performances of vulnerability in resistance can also reinforce state operations in and through the infrastructures they contest. Rather than taking refuge in our ontological vulnerability, here I’m interested in understanding the relational ideological struggle over who or what is claimed to be legitimately vulnerable. While we must acknowledge that these problems are “at once political and aesthetic” (Wang 2018, 52), I follow Jackie Wang and Jasbir Puar in pointing out the limits of claiming vulnerability, safety, and innocence as aesthetic responses to police violence. Liberal political movements seeking to address anti-­Black violence are often predicated on proving the innocence of victims. Wang argues that this puts Black resistance into a passive position that allows the state to first adjudicate the value of life. Consequently, “when we rely on appeals to innocence, we foreclose a form of resistance that is outside the limits of law, and instead ally ourselves with the state” (Wang 2018, 291). Puar draws our attention to the ways that settler colonial operations like “the U.S. security state” and “the might of Israel’s military” are themselves “built upon the claim of an unchanging ontological vulnerability and precarity, driven by history, geopolitics, and geography” (2017, x). Puar suggests that we must pay close attention to how even claims of debility and disability can be “recapacitated” through selective projects of recognition that divide proper settler subjects from violent Black, Indigenous, or Palestinian offenders. Drawing from these arguments, I show that the oil assemblage, through a tightening transnational relationship with state and police forces, attempts to create its own aesthetics of vulnerability. This is first to protect, authorize, and legitimate security response to water protectors and, second, to deauthorize the claims to



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vulnerability (to state violence) lodged by Indigenous refusals. In order to understand the affective feeling and ideological claim to vulnerability that settler security imagines, we have to first understand its reactionary position with regard to a longer history of Indigenous refusal. The Continuity of Settler Colonial Violence in the Dakotas The images of police and private security violence lodged against water protectors in the Dakotas might have shocked many settlers. The circulation of images of police violence—­such as LRAD cannons positioned against Indigenous elders, security dogs lashing out at Indigenous youth, and lines of blank-­stare police with batons in hand protecting pipeline construction—­certainly played a crucial role in the prominence drawn to the DAPL blockade after August 2016. But this sort of police violence is not an exceptional rupture in the fabric of North American colonization. Nor is it a simple continuation of a mythic and unchanging “Wild West.” Instead, these actions should be understood as an evolving attempt to control the everyday life of Indigenous peoples living alongside and against the jurisdiction of the Dakotas and North America more broadly (Crosby and Monaghan 2018; Heatherton 2016). In this section, I seek to draw out some of the continuities of police violence and settler colonialism in the Dakotas with attention to how narratives of settlers’ vulnerability and safety conditioned the selective use of violence. Ladonna Bravebull Allard, on whose land the Sacred Stone prayer camp was started, emphasized the importance of the Inyan Ska or Whitestone Hill Massacre of 1863, which took place fifty miles to the east of the point where DAPL crossed the Missouri River (Allard 2016; Goodman 2016). As the genocidal Dakota War caused thousands of Dakota people to flee Minnesota in the early 1860s, military forces ruthlessly pursued them for hundreds of miles through Dakota Territory. This military campaign occurred under the guise of securing safe travel routes for white settlement in western North America (in violation of the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie) as well as bringing lasting peace to Minnesota. After hundreds of miles, federal military forces ambushed the Dakota people on September 3, 1863, near Whitestone

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Hill in present-­day south-­central North Dakota. These forces murdered some three hundred men, women, and children, while sending survivors to prisoner of war camps on the Missouri River. Eventually many descendants of these people were allowed to establish settlements on what would become the Crow Creek, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock Reservations in South and North Dakota. Although this land west of the Missouri was recognized as retained by “the different bands of the Sioux Nation” in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the discovery of gold in the Black Hills led to another unconstitutional nullification and violation of this second agreement as settler thirst grew for what was previously seen as worthless land (Ostler 2011; Estes 2016b; Ostler and Estes 2019). Central to the acceptance of these violations of treaties as “supreme law of the land” was the propaganda by local newspapers that painted Native resistance practices like the Ghost Dance in the 1880s as a conspiracy to incite widespread insurrection (Hall 1991; Estes 2019). These representations were in line with a long tradition of representing Indigenous peoples around the world as savage, uncontrollably violent, and thus requiring state pacification. When the federal government would not respond to the increasing panic white settlers felt in the 1890s, local white militias in the Dakotas willingly and violently enforced norms and laws as they felt necessary. Historian Philip S. Hall (1991) argued that the moral panic caused by the press and the militias helped incite the Wounded Knee Massacre, helping to create a frame of reference in which the very act of dancing could be understood as violent and thus necessitating response. Though some consider this moment of supposed “closing of the frontier” to mark an end to outright settler colonial violence, the production of settler safety and security in fact extended Indigenous dispossession. Centrally relevant to the story of #NoDAPL, in the 1940s and 1950s the Army Corps of Engineers’ Pick-­Sloan Plan sought to dam the Missouri River at seven different locations—­each affecting the land on reservations. Although it faced immediate and extended resistance from Native Nations, the Pick-­Sloan Plan would eventually be enacted under the guise of flood control and safety (hydropower energy and recreation were secondary concerns). But safety for whom? The



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Oahe Dam and subsequent reservoir flooding, completed in 1962, would severely impact dozens of Native communities, farms, graves, sacred sites, and sacred or meaningful flora and fauna along the Missouri River lowlands, further appropriating hundreds of thousands of acres from reservations and forcing hundreds of Lakota and Dakota residents to relocate (Lawson 2009). At the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball Rivers (where DAPL would later cross beneath the Missouri), the newly created Lake Oahe ended the geologic production of spherical concretions that, to settler eyes, looked like cannonballs. The interruption of the production of these sacred stones could itself be seen as an act of aesthetic violence, thus ending a unique aspect of the earth’s own geological production. Likewise politically relevant to the DAPL blockade decades later, the Pick-­Sloan Plan extended jurisdiction of the Army Corps of Engineers along Oahe’s shoreline without the consent of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (Ostler and Estes 2017). The largest #NoDAPL camp and blockade would eventually be established on a floodplain administered by the corps. The symbolic importance of reclaiming that land was not lost on many water protectors. Alongside these punctuated ruptures of violence perpetrated by the settler state are moments of what Mat Coleman (2016) highlights as the everyday “crudiness” of police violence that frequently escape either statistical measure or qualitative study. These can include either acts perpetrated by police outright or vigilante actions sanctioned by the legal system’s nonintervention. It is difficult to paint a picture of the overall debilitating conditions of settler colonialism perpetrated even directly by police; for example, over the last forty years, South Dakota’s incarcerated population has increased five hundred percent, with Native peoples adding up to one-­third of its prison population despite making up less than ten percent of the state’s population. Kul Wicasa historian Nick Estes argues that this “continual policing of space” has produced a carceral situation with unacknowledged roots in the practice by both police and white militias of apprehending any Native people who ventured “off the reservation” (Estes 2016a). This is despite the fact that border towns like Rapid City rely on Native labor, imagery, and art to reproduce Wild West mythologies for tourism, now one of the state’s

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largest single industries. At the same time, police continue practices of neglecting or actively exterminating the city’s houseless Native population. These acts of environmental and police violence combine and reinforce each other in manners that escape singling out one particular institution or event as their proper cause. They are endemic to police in the settler state. Each of these moments of violence was preceded by Indigenous resistance, of which the DAPL struggle is not exceptional but another moment in a long history or tradition (Dunbar-­Ortiz 2016; Estes 2019; Smith and Warrior 1996; Ostler 2011). Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor (1999) describes these as an “aesthetics of survivance” to denote an active sense of persistence and refusal of domination or victimhood. The most prominent site of survivance as militancy in the wider historical memory is the Wounded Knee II occupation in 1973, but throughout the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries, Native peoples in the Dakotas have resisted uranium mining, open-­pit coal mining and coal slurry pipelines, toxic waste disposal, and tar sands oil pipelines in or through their lands (LaDuke and Churchill 1985; Young 1996; Estes 2014), not to mention ongoing police violence, land theft, sexual violence, and an attempt to terminate their status as a federally recognized Native Nation. Within this context of violence and survivance, in 2008 the Canadian firm TransCanada proposed the Keystone XL Pipeline to bring 700,000 barrels per day of heavy bitumen or tar sands from Alberta to the Gulf Coast, with an upper route through Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska. Though largely understood as a tar sands pipeline, Keystone XL was originally also set to interconnect and transport up to 100,000 barrels per day from the booming Bakken fields in North Dakota. When the plan for Keystone XL was first made public, Native people were the first to begin organizing against it (Bosworth 2022). Some white allies—­farmers and ranchers, environmentalists, sympathetic leftists, rural community organizers—­began to join them at marches, public meetings, and events, eventually launching the pipeline into national prominence (Grossman 2017), but the group was not without its own internal racial and colonial divisions (Bosworth 2021).



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TransCanada, for its part, preferred to present itself as operating under transparency and corporate social responsibility norms dominant in the oil industry since the mid-­1990s. It made “social investments” in small towns along the route of the pipeline, supporting schools, fire departments, and other services to cash-­starved rural governments. It promoted “multi-­stakeholder processes” to reach “community agreements” on “how to be a good neighbor,” especially with Indigenous communities. These were not particularly successful in staving off Indigenous opposition. Behind the constructed façade, TransCanada seemed quite worried about pipeline security. It began meeting with local law enforcement and FBI offices along the route of the pipeline to train them on the potential tactics of those they deemed “ecoterrorists.” It began to identify activists and “leaders” of opposition organizations, beginning to use social media accounts to identify and characterize their past activities. Pipeline opponents were categorized into different groups, such as anarchists, ecoactivists, and American Indian Movement (AIM) activists, whom official documents suggested “blamed all forms of government for the poor state of being that most American Indians are living in” (Federman 2013). Local media played up the fear of “ecoterrorists” as well. When a group of Native people in fatigues and masks staged a silent protest at Keystone XL public hearings in South Dakota, one journalist railed about “people dressed as real eco-­terrorists” who “stand as symbols of intimidation and threats of potential violence” (Mercer 2013). A school security drill in Hot Springs, South Dakota, invented a fantasy scenario in which a fictional group sent a note to the school district that “things dear to everyone will be destroyed unless continuation of the Keystone pipeline and uranium mining is stopped immediately” (Simmons-­Ritchie 2013). As absurd as these situations might seem, from 2003 to 2013, the state of South Dakota received some $100 million in grants from the Department of Homeland Security, sixth per capita in the United States. It justified this use in part on the chance that someone might attack the Keystone XL Pipeline (O’Sullivan 2014). From surveillance activities to the broader cultural politics of oil resistance, lessons learned from the Keystone XL struggle conditioned

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the approach that infrastructure security would take with DAPL (Bosworth and Chua 2021). Frustratingly, many of these continuities are obscured by the very operation of counterterrorism, which is predicated on secrecy and redacted documents. For example, a whole host of inaccessible federal, regional, and state institutions exist to foster relationships between the state and oil corporations concerning “criminal” opponents. These include the Department of Homeland Security’s Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council (CIPAC), which houses the Oil and Natural Gas Sector Coordinating Council and an Energy Government Coordinating Council. Documents submitted to CIPAC by industry are protected from public disclosure (Federman 2015). The knotty relationships of a transnational oil assemblage have transformed in meaningful ways in attempts to produce infrastructure security. In order to enroll institutions, solicit funds, and seal the consent of the public, Indigenous pipeline resistance is framed to be by its very nature violent. In doing so, regimes of infrastructure security spread transparently racialized and settler colonial ideologies of violence, magnifying the activities of activists as deserving of surveillance and forceful response. These actions would be heightened in resistance to DAPL. Constructing Police and Infrastructure Vulnerability in the DAPL Struggle In the transition from Keystone XL to DAPL, opponents of oil pipelines and the oil industry itself were transformed by changes in the global oil economy. Keystone XL was proposed when global oil prices were at an all-­time high; by contrast, DAPL was initially proposed not because of the oil economy’s strength, but because it was foundering. The oil economy’s increasing tendency toward volatility made any margin of cost savings in transportation exceptionally important to Bakken producers. ETP’s CEO Kelcy Warren reflected on the importance of the bust in a Bloomberg profile: “‘We got so lucky,’ [Warren] says, flashing a giddy smile . . . ‘All of our competition vaporized. . . . Like Mother Nature, the energy industry purges itself now and then. . . . I don’t wish any negatives on my friends, but the most wealth I’ve ever made is



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during the dark times’” (Gruley 2015). As the political economy shifted, so too did the ideological strategies produced by the oil assemblage. Gone were the international norms of corporate social responsibility, the feel-­good projects supposedly helping rural communities, and the Indigenous relation teams of TransCanada. What took their place was a smear campaign with full-­fledged delusions of violent terrorists, outside agitators, and paid protestors. Central to these threats were the leveraging of vulnerable economy, labor, industry, private property, and police. The blockade camps established at the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball Rivers brought together some four hundred Native Nations along with environmentalists; anarchists; leftists; Palestinian, Black, and Latinx activists; legal professionals; socialists; punks; hippies; media (left, right, international, activist); nonprofit types; and even a few (if not enough) academics. This collective also included individuals and groups actively opposed to the interests of the blockade, including infiltrators and other police organizations surveilling events and even trying to instigate violence. Such heterogeneity included disagreements and divergences about strategy and tactics, leadership and public relations, organization and infrastructure—­frequently centering on questions concerning “nonviolence.” To me, these stories remain internal to the camp, and in many ways “the academy doesn’t deserve” (Tuck and Yang 2014, 813) to know about these debates. Instead, my focus is on how an aesthetic image of vulnerability was woven around police and their protection of the pipeline. In August 2016, after months of blockade and increasing frequency of direct action, attempts to stop pipeline construction began to result in arrests. Construction on the pipeline in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa had accelerated, and the Lake Oahe/Missouri River crossing was one of the few remaining stretches where construction had not started. When construction equipment began to appear at this site, water protectors attempted to halt any activities through nonviolent blockades of the gates of the site. After several days of confrontations in the second week of August, both construction crews and police forces abandoned the site for several days, presumably to rethink their strategy. During this time, North Dakota governor Jack Dalrymple declared a

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state of emergency. This was particularly important, for it triggered the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC), a statute designed to help states share resources and personnel during a crisis. Although EMAC was designed and continues to be used primarily during natural disasters, it also contains a clause that allows its use during “community disorders, insurgency, or enemy attack” (Sammon 2016). The state of emergency thus allowed the assembly of resources, vehicles, weapons, and personnel from across the country. At the end of August and in the early days of September, construction crews returned. But this time, they were protected not only by local law enforcement, but also by several private security firms, from the regional (Bismarck, North Dakota–­based 10-­Code Security) to the multinational (UK-­based G4S, one of the largest employers in the world). A temporary injunction to stop construction was filed on September 1 due to an archeological survey that found sacred objects and burial sites on the pipeline land. Two days later, on September 3, security forces were deployed early in the morning before a ruling on an injunction to stop construction could be handed down. The bulldozers targeted the top layer of the ground in the precise vicinity of the sacred objects identified in the injunction. Attempting to disrupt this egregious targeting of sacred sites, several water protectors were bitten by dogs brought by a private canine firm from Ohio, while hundreds were pepper-­sprayed by security firms or local law enforcement. Undoubtedly the imagery of the snarling attack dogs, mouths dripping with blood, was incredibly damaging to ETP’s public image. It immediately recalled the historic use of dogs against enslaved people, Native Nations, and protestors throughout history. The event also highlighted the lack of a coherent public relations strategy among ETP, private security, and local law enforcement. Press releases relied upon fantastical claims that officers were facing threats of violence, ambushes, riots, and “crowd[s] of protestors . . . stamped[ing] into the construction area” (Morton County Sheriff’s Department 2016a). The beleaguered local police force’s attempts to paint the protestors in a negative light would be comical if they weren’t backed by force. In one particularly egregious misstep, Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier claimed they had reports



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of people talking about making pipe bombs, a claim that water protectors believed could only be a willful misinterpretation of comments about sacred tobacco pipes (Healy 2016a). Sheriff Kirchmeier would claim at various points that gunshots were fired by water protectors or that officers saw or were afraid they had guns. But the only injury from a firearm recorded at the camp would be that of an officer accidentally shooting himself in the foot (Reese 2016). In this situation, private firms were far more equipped than the first awkward initial attempts at public damage control by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department. One prominent actor in the media world attempting to shape responses to the pipeline was the Midwest Alliance for Infrastructure Now (MAIN) coalition. Funded by oil and gas firms, construction agencies, and construction labor unions, MAIN had been sporadically posting fluff pieces about DAPL for the prior year. The group jumped into full-­fledged coverage of the opposition to DAPL in August and September of 2016, reframing and expanding upon local law enforcement reports to emphasize violent protest, trespassing, destruction of private property, disrespect for law and order, environmental damage caused by the camp, and the hypocritical reliance of water protectors on products made of oil. They also attempted to capitalize on the Standing Rock Reservation’s vulnerability by painting them as poor people hoodwinked by outside agitators and professional paid protestors from the coasts. Using the vastly superior means available to them, statements by the MAIN coalition appeared on the front pages of newspapers and on nightly television news in the Dakotas and Iowa, while comments from pipeline opponents were usually relegated to letters to the editor and social media. The MAIN coalition further promoted their own propaganda through independent-­appearing websites like the Standing Rock Fact Checker and DAPL Pipeline Facts, which they quickly gamed to the top of Google search results for terms like “North Dakota pipeline” or “DAPL.” Documents leaked to The Intercept in 2017 show that the private security firm TigerSwan, supposedly skilled in international counterterrorism, also began to advise both ETP and local law enforcement after the September 3 incident. No other organization more clearly demonstrates

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the close relationship between fossil fuel firms, private security forces, and local law enforcement than TigerSwan, who provided support for surveillance, combat strategy, public relations, and social media. Their frames again relied on presenting protestors as an active and violent force, positioning water protectors as terrorists who “generally followed the jihadist insurgency model” (Brown, Parrish, and Speri 2019, 198). TigerSwan’s daily briefings to ETP show that they had begun funding social media promotions using popular hashtags that water protectors were using. As one situation report put it bluntly, winning the public relations battle would require “strategic messaging from the client that drives the message that we are the good guys, tell the real story and address the negative messaging with good counter messaging” (quoted in Brown, Parrish, and Speri 2019, 207). A video series titled “Know the Truth” produced by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department highlights the attempt to produce an aesthetics of vulnerability. Instead of the intimidating line of police seen in photos from the water protectors’ vantage point, these videos seek to portray the human side of police as “the good guys” just there to protect and serve. The videos are repetitive and emphasize officers’ commitment to protecting public safety and the rule of law. Some are rather banal, such as a description of barbed wire entitled “Why Is This Barrier Important?” Others are bizarre, such as an instructional video titled “Restoring the Stars and Stripes to Its Rightful Position,” which accuses water protectors of the egregious offense of mishandling American flags (displaying the U.S. flag upside down has a long history in Indian Country, stemming back to the late 1800s). One of the more explicit examples of a claim on the aesthetics of vulnerability is a video entitled “Protestors Harass Female Officers” (Figure 6.2). This video depicts two officers describing the disrespect of being called “every name in the book” and having snowballs thrown at them by military veterans supporting the blockade. A montage of still photographs of menacing-­looking individuals standing in the dark plays as the two officers describe their fears. This video capitalizes on a gendered understanding of vulnerability while seeking to demonstrate what the sheriff’s department commended as their “restraint in the face of protest.” When the violent



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Figure 6.2. Image still from Morton County Sheriff’s Department video “Protestors Harass Female Officers.” This and other videos from the “Know the Truth” series have since been removed from YouTube.

protestors of their dominant aesthetic frameworks didn’t manifest, every action taken by water protectors had to be constructed as a fundamental infringement of public safety. While the Morton County Sheriff’s Department was lambasted for these videos across social media, for much of the regional population of settlers this was the dominant perspective they would see. Recalling the media reports drumming up anti-­Native sentiment in Dakota Territory in the 1880s, reports of violent protest and riot created the sentiment that innocent white people were the actual victims of the protest. This further exacerbated what Eva Mackey calls “settler anxiety” (2016, 35–­36) by authorizing frightened citizens to take the law into their own hands if threatened. News reports suggested that the massive blockades were increasing the economic vulnerability and safety of construction workers, the economic viability of oil firms (and thus the price of gas), and taxpayers’ pocketbooks to pay the millions for law enforcement. Because a direct comparison between the consolidated wealth of Native Nations and the white settler citizens of the Dakotas would be near farcical, these arguments are needed to further rely upon an image of the wealthy West Coast environmentalist and

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the paid protestor as the real disruptors of the precarious lives of vulnerable hardworking white people. The logic behind such an interpretation was that large groups of Native people could only lead to a loss of security for innocent local white people. As one white farmer was quoted in a New York Times article: “You get two thousand, three thousand Natives together—­is it safe?” (Healy 2016b). Not all attempts to create symmetry were necessarily premeditated or ill intentioned; many stem from the media norm of capturing “both sides” of a story. This “fair and balanced” strategy itself has origins in the fossil fuel and tobacco industries, which through the twentieth century each tried to induce uncertainty by forcing news outlets to cover “both sides” of the supposedly debilitating effects of their industry (Oreskes and Conway 2011). The reductive “both sides” strategy flattens power imbalances and creates the illusion of equality of perspective. For example, a Bismarck Tribune article quoted a North Dakotan saying, “They have every right in the world to protest, but I don’t think violence and weapons are the answer.” This statement was followed by an unquestioned comment that the individual “believes he saw a protester carrying a pistol,” and that despite his supposed statement that violence and weapons are not the answer, he carries a revolver with him when traveling (Grueskin, Holdman, and Emerson 2016). As Sabrina King of the Wyoming ACLU and water protector Will Munger argued, the regular accusations by the sheriff’s office of water protectors “harassing and intimidating ranchers, breaking windows, and cutting fences . . . are not backed by evidence, but they are being made [in order] to sway public opinion against people at the camp and to stoke tensions between water protectors and those who live in Morton County. This is a classic example of trial by media, an attempt to convict peaceful water protectors of things for which they are not guilty in the court of public opinion” (King and Munger 2016). A further consequence of stoking fears of violence was an authorization of harassment and hate crimes against Native people, which were said to be seen with increasing frequency during and after the DAPL blockade (e.g., King 2016). These included, most egregiously, an attempt by an employee of one private security firm to take the initiative



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to instigate violence in the camp by disguising himself as a water protector and carrying an assault rifle into the camp. When his presence was immediately discovered by water protectors, he brazenly brandished the weapon at them before eventually being chased away and convinced to give up his weapon. The man was taken into custody by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but the sheriff’s department deemed that he was acting in self-­defense to a perceived threat from water protectors. Astonishingly, he was described as “the victim” throughout their press release (Morton County Sheriff’s Department 2016b).1 Such instances demonstrate that the constant circulation of aesthetics of impending violence created conditions for violence to occur. Officer testimony of fears of bodily injury were crucial to claiming an ideology of vulnerability. Despite their psychological and corporeal shell of defense, law enforcement and private security constantly testified to their feelings of having been threatened by water protectors in order to justify and legitimate their actions. This is evidenced by the language of stampede, riot, and weaponry that officers frequently used. The purpose of videos like “Protestors Harass Female Officers” is to transmit the testimony of feeling under duress. By far the most frequent anxiety officers expressed was being charged at and threatened by protestors with knives. Against water protector witnesses, law enforcement testimony suggests that if police had not acted as they had, they would have been stabbed. Officers regularly described terror at having stones or water bottles thrown at them. They attempted to demonstrate their scrapes and scratches as comparable wounds to that of water protectors hit directly by bean bags and rubber bullets, the latter resulting in permanent loss of eyesight and in one case the amputation of an arm. In the wake of the use of dogs outlined above, the private canine firm bemoaned that their dogs were hurt by the encounter. An officer in a surveillance helicopter described himself and passengers being “in fear of their lives” due to the presence of photography drones (Associated Press 2016). Keith Woodward argues that in these “confused encounters where thought struggles to make sense of affective relations” (2014, 23) we can glimpse that police have an inconsistency and inability to produce

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the order they supposedly enforce. Importantly then, the frames of reference that are created concerning Indigenous people fill in the gaps between the confused affects officers feel and the necessity of reporting an adequate cause for one’s feelings. As Wang argues, testimony of officer fear demonstrates “how racism affects people on the level of perception, enabling them to hallucinate a reality that conforms to their predetermined expectations” (2018, 93–­94). Any major injury sustained by water protectors was deserved, for such violence was only due to the supposed prior aggression of said water protector. Images of the unruly crowd of “mob rule” decried by Governor Dalrymple (2016), the fright at radical Natives expressed by TransCanada, the “jihadi terrorist” of TigerSwan, and the paid protestor and outside agitator described by MAIN became dominant frames in which many settlers in the Dakotas whom I talked to would view the situation. That these frames work is at least in part due to the sense of fragility and vulnerability, whether economic, affective, or infrastructural, that settler colonialism relies upon to authorize the maintenance and expansion of its modes of policing and resource extraction alike. Security forces were both produced by and producers of these frames. Through the DAPL struggle, they extended transnational colonial and settler colonial approaches to oil securitization back to the United States, adapting their responses to local conditions and thus also updating the ongoing operation of settler colonialism. The significance of the monopoly on vulnerability that oil security forces tried to hold lies in the unsavory problem it presented for water protectors, who were thus forced into a reactive ideological position of constantly policing ourselves in order not to appear as violent within their ideological framework. Conclusion The litany of actual incidences of violence against the water protectors at the DAPL blockade would take far more pages. I have been unable above to talk at length about the material incidences of violence, in beanbag guns and teargas, drone surveillance and infiltration, the use of water cannons on water protectors in freezing temperatures, psychological warfare, the eviction of the camp, the flow of oil and nearby leakages in the Bakken fields and in South Dakota, the confederate flags that



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flew above construction crews, persistent sexual violence against Native women, and undoubtedly much more occluded from my viewpoint. Nonetheless, this account of the fossil fuel industry in a capitalist and settler colonial situation demonstrates that a monopoly on the legitimate use of vulnerability, as much as violence, is aesthetically claimed and produced by the settler state. Vulnerability served as important connective tissue that allowed the “state of emergency” in the Dakotas to be felt as a general condition variously applicable to white settlers, security forces, the regional economy, and the pipeline itself—­but not water protectors. The frame of vulnerability not only updated the security region of the oil assemblage by connecting and equating different racialized understandings of threats to the system, but also solidified connections that local and global law enforcement and security institutions have with the oil industry. These relationships create future precedents for the kinds of proactive violence that can be enacted under the guise of protecting vulnerable systems. For example, the South Dakota legislature passed a law in 2017 authorizing the governor of the state to create “public safety zones” in which no more than twenty people can gather without facing jail time. Incredibly, one of the justifications for this law included supposed protection of the land (see Bosworth and Chua 2021). A reciprocity exists between the image of the vulnerable oil assemblage and the perceived threat to that system. This reciprocity reinforces settler coloniality, in which state violence is always present yet acknowledged only to be either historic or preemptive. State violence is said to have existed in the past, resolved in a prior history of settler colonialism that is now deemed to be over. Or it is framed as judiciously used in response to a looming threat from the future, thus supposedly preventing a greater violence from occurring by instead securing peace. This is a structural feature of the aesthetics of security inscribed in the partnership between the state and capital and executed in their particular relationship through the oil assemblage. As Guillaume Sibertin-­Blanc puts it, “originary and always second, never having taken place and always legitimate when it occurs, state violence always wins” (2016, 78). When taken in the context of perpetual violence oriented toward exterminating Native Nations (along with Black people, migrants, the

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homeless and impoverished), the state’s ability to adjudicate legitimate claims to vulnerability suggests that a resistance strategy attempting to claim innocence and follow the rule of law risks fitting perfectly into an existing state aesthetics. A mere interruption of the status quo with a goal of inclusion as suggested by Rancière is also insufficient political vision for a politics. As Wang argues, we might ask ourselves whether the reliance on frames of innocence, nonviolence, safety, and vulnerability (especially by white settlers) reinforces the power of the state to adjudicate and externalize any exception to these frames. The possibility such an analysis opens is an evacuation of the relationships and norms that instrumentalize relative inclusion in the purview of the state when that recognition has the sole purpose of crushing anticolonial opposition. Note 1. As a notable addendum to this incident, the same man was arrested else�where in North Dakota in April 2017 for domestic abuse, carrying a concealed weapon, and possession of marijuana and methamphetamine paraphernalia (Grueskin 2017).

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.com/2014/03/13/the-keystone-xl-pipeline-coming-to-terms-and-demand ing-the-impossible/. Estes, Nick. 2016a. “Off the Reservation: Lakota Life and Death in Rapid City, South Dakota.” The Funambulist Magazine, no. 5 (June): 22–­26. Estes, Nick. 2016b. “Fighting for Our Lives: #NoDAPL in Historical Context.” The Red Nation (blog), September 18. https://therednation.org/2016/09/18/ fighting-for-our-lives-nodapl-in-context/. Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. New York: Verso Books. Federman, Adam. 2013. “Undercover Agents Infiltrated Tar Sands Resistance Camp to Break up Planned Protest.” Earth Island Journal, August 12. http:// www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/elist/eListRead/undercover_ agents_infiltrated_tar_sands_resistance_camp_to_break_up_planned/. Federman, Adam. 2015. “Power Play.” Earth Island Journal, Spring. http:// www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/power_play/. Goodman, Amy. 2016. “Standing Rock Sioux Historian: Dakota Access Co. Attack Comes on Anniversary of Whitestone Massacre.” Democracy Now! September 8. http://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/8/standing_rock_sioux_ historian_dakota_access. Grossman, Zoltán. 2017. Unlikely Alliances: Native Nations and White Communities Join to Defend Rural Lands. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Grueskin, Caroline. 2017. “Security Worker with Rifle at DAPL Protests Arrested for Domestic Violence.” Bismarck Tribune, April 18. https://bismarcktribune .com/news/local/security-worker-with-rifle-at-dapl-protests-arrested-for -domestic/article_db6bf981-6ba5-5bfa-9966-1359260511ed.html. Grueskin, Caroline, Jessica Holdman, and Blair Emerson. 2016. “For Morton County Residents, Protests Create Unease, Difficulty Farming.” Bismarck Tribune, September 29. http://bismarcktribune.com/news/state-and-regional/ for-morton-county-residents-protests-create-unease-difficulty-farming/arti cle_9b825efd-8a76-5301-b207-64a1ec8a385b.html. Gruley, Brian. 2015. “Pipeline Billionaire Kelcy Warren Is Having Fun in the Oil Bust.” Bloomberg.com, May 19. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/ 2015-05-19/pipeline-billionaire-kelcy-warren-is-having-fun-in-the-oil-bust. Guenther, Lisa. 2019. “Seeing Like a Cop: A Critical Phenomenology of Whiteness as Property.” In Race as Phenomena: Between Phenomenology and Philosophy of Race, edited by Emily S. Lee, 189–­206. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. Haarstad, Håvard, and Tarje I. Wanvik. 2017. “Carbonscapes and Beyond: Conceptualizing the Instability of Oil Landscapes.” Progress in Human Geography 41, no. 4: 432–­50.



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Hall, Philip S. 1991. To Have This Land: The Nature of Indian/White Relations; South Dakota, 1888–­1891. Vermillion: University of South Dakota Press. Healy, Jack. 2016a. “Occupying the Prairie: Tensions Rise as Tribes Move to Block a Pipeline.” New York Times, August 23, sec. U.S. https://www.nytimes .com/2016/08/24/us/occupying-the-prairie-tensions-rise-as-tribes-move -to-block-a-pipeline.html. Healy, Jack. 2016b. “Neighbors Say North Dakota Pipeline Protests Disrupt Lives and Livelihoods.” New York Times, September 13, sec. U.S. https://www .nytimes.com/2016/09/14/us/north-dakota-pipeline-protests.html. Heatherton, Christina. 2016. “Policing the Crisis of Indigenous Lives: An Interview with the Red Nation.” In Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter, edited by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton, 109–­22. London: Verso Books. Herbstreuth, Sebastian. 2016. Oil and American Identity: A Culture of Dependency and US Foreign Policy. London: I. B. Tauris. Huber, Matthew T. 2013. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. King, Sabrina, and Will Munger. 2016. “The Surveillance State Descends on the Dakota Access Pipeline Spirit Camp.” American Civil Liberties Union (blog), October 10. https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/rights-protesters/surveil lance-state-descends-dakota-access-pipeline-spirit-camp. King, Shaun. 2016. “Masked White Men Harass Indigenous People in North Dakota.” NY Daily News, December 9. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ national/king-masked-white-men-harass-indigenous-people-north-dakota -article-1.2904957. Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon and Schuster. Labban, Mazen. 2011. “The Geopolitics of Energy Security and the War on Terror: The Case for Market Expansion and the Militarization of Global Space.” In Global Political Ecology, edited by Richard Peet, Paul Robbins, and Michael Watts, 325–­44. New York: Routledge. LaDuke, Winona. 2021. To Be a Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. LaDuke, Winona, and Ward Churchill. 1985. “Native America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 13, no. 3: 107–­32. Lawson, Michael L. 2009. Dammed Indians Revisited: The Continuing History of the Pick-­Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux. Pierre: South Dakota State Historical Society Press. Le Billon, Philippe, and Angela Carter. 2012. “Securing Alberta’s Tar Sands: Resistance and Criminalization on a New Energy Frontier.” In Natural

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Resources and Social Conflict: Towards Critical Environmental Security, edited by Matthew A. Schnurr and Larry A. Swatuk, 170–­92. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mackey, Eva. 2016. Unsettled Expectations: Uncertainty, Land and Settler Decolonization. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Malm, Andreas. 2017. “The Walls of the Tank: On Palestinian Resistance.” Salvage 4: 21–­56. Mercer, Bob. 2013. “Eco-­Terrorists, Intimidation and the Keystone Hearing | Pure Pierre Politics.” Pure Pierre Politics (blog), June 25. http://my605.com/ pierrereview/?p=8806. Mitchell, Timothy. 2013. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. 2nd ed. London: Verso Books. Morton County Sheriff’s Department. 2016a. “Private Security Officers Ambushed and Assaulted by Protestors.” ND Response, September 3. https:// ndresponse.gov/archive/2016/dakota-access-pipeline/press-releases/sep tember-2016/private-security-officers. Morton County Sheriff’s Department. 2016b. “Update Regarding Gun Incident at Backwater Bridge.” ND Response, November 1. https://ndresponse .gov/archive/2016/dakota-access-pipeline/press-releases/november-2016/ update-regarding-gun-incident. Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. 2011. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Ostler, Jeffrey. 2011. The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground. New York: Penguin Books. Ostler, Jeffrey, and Nick Estes. 2019. “The Supreme Law of the Land.” In Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon, 96–­100. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. O’Sullivan, Joe. 2014. “State Gets Millions in Homeland Security Grants, but Where Does It Go?” Rapid City Journal, June 8. http://rapidcityjournal.com/ news/local/state-gets-millions-in-homeland-security-grants-but-where -does/article_1be9acf1-b8e6-5bdb-a01d-5d2e4e2362ca.html. Pasternak, Shiri, and Tia Dafnos. 2018. “How Does a Settler State Secure the Circuitry of Capital?” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 36, no. 4: 739–­57. Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Continuum. Reese, Sarah. 2016. “Sheriff’s Officer Serving in N.D. Accidentally Shoots Self.” NWI Times, October 27. http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/lake/



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sheriff-s-officer-serving-in-n-d-accidentally-shoots-self/article_30d60edc -b1ea-55a1-a0c6-1a48e1ce18d9.html. Sammon, Alexander. 2016. “How Did Police from All over the Country End Up at Standing Rock?” Mother Jones, December 4. https://www.mother jones.com/environment/2016/12/standing-rock-police-militarized-emer gency-management-assistance-compact-north-dakota/. Sibertin-­Blanc, Guillaume. 2016. State and Politics: Deleuze and Guattari on Marx. Translated by Ames Hodges. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Simmons-­Ritchie, Daniel. 2013. “Mock Drill in Hot Springs Riles Opponents of Keystone XL and Uranium Mine.” Rapid City Journal, May 24. http://rapid cityjournal.com/news/mock-drill-in-hot-springs-riles-opponents-of-key stone-xl/article_bdd2ff22-732d-55cc-b113-f326375e2ab6.html. Smith, Paul Chaat, and Robert Allen Warrior. 1996. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press. Swyngedouw, Erik. 2011. “Interrogating Post-­Democratization: Reclaiming Egalitarian Political Spaces.” Political Geography 30, no. 7: 370–­80. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2014. “Unbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of Refusal in Qualitative Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 20, no. 6: 811–­18. Vizenor, Gerald Robert. 1999. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Wang, Jackie. 2018. Carceral Capitalism. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e). Watts, Michael. 2001. “Petro-­Violence: Community, Extraction, and Political Ecology of a Mythic Commodity.” In Violent Environments, edited by Michael Watts and Nancy Lee Peluso, 189–­212. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Watts, Michael. 2012. “A Tale of Two Gulfs: Life, Death, and Dispossession along Two Oil Frontiers.” American Quarterly 64, no. 3: 437–­67. Wilson, Ralph, and Isaac Kamola. 2021. Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War. London: Pluto Press. Wilson, Sheena. 2014. “Gendering Oil: Tracing Western Petrosexual Relations.” In Oil Culture, edited by Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden, 244–­64. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Woodward, Keith. 2014. “Affect, State Theory, and the Politics of Confusion.” Political Geography 41: 21–­31. Young, Phyllis. 1996. “Beyond the Water Line.” In Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice, edited by Jace Weaver, 85–­98. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Zalik, Anna. 2004. “The Niger Delta: ‘Petro Violence’ and ‘Partnership Development.’” Review of African Political Economy 31, no. 101: 401–­24. Zalik, Anna. 2010. “Oil ‘Futures’: Shell’s Scenarios and the Social Constitution of the Global Oil Market.” Geoforum 41, no. 4: 553–­64.

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Beyond Settler Infrastructures A Conclusion Bruce Braun and Mary E. Thomas

What sorts of attachments do infrastructures foster? What detachments? Mario Blaser’s questions, quoted in the preface, remind us that settler temporalities direct infrastructures to assemble now, and those infrastructures are shot through with affective charge and economic promise. Indeed, this settler infrastructuring as a frontier project has been going on for almost two hundred years in the Bakken in the form of surveys, forts, homesteads, railways, fencing, highways, power lines, schools, and airports, creating the conditions of possibility for the “Bakken Booyah” of today. Infrastructural projects in the region, after all, from the material to the aesthetic, rely on backgrounded settlerist and white heterosexist epistemologies and temporalities that continue to presume the inevitability of settler futures (after Rifkin 2017). While the repeated images of state and urban economic-­development campaigns insist that you can “find the good life” in North Dakota (Figure C.1), these are at once imperative commands and iterations of “a great place” settler aesthetics that reproduces the settler fiction of the presumed neutrality of time itself (Simpson 2017). Across the chapters of this book, the authors argue that narratives and aesthetics of white settler colonialism, carbon capitalism, and heteropatriarchy suffuse the Bakken oil play and inform its normative settlements. They also show that the backgrounded, structuring fantasies that settler time will bring about 205

Figure C.1. A flyer titled “Find the Good Life in North Dakota,” featuring a predominant image of a white, blonde girl smiling broadly. The flyer was posted at the airport in Williston in 2016. Photograph by Mary E. Thomas.



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a “good life” in the Bakken, if not now then soon, frequently enact a cruel violence on its sites and subjects in the here and now. We end by considering infrastructure because, in the Bakken, infrastructure sits at the heart of both the violence of settler time and its cruel optimisms. Settler infrastructures presuppose settler futures and, as such, represent the tense of settler colonialism. Projected beyond the chaos and indetermination of the present—­a chaos that includes countless construction projects—­is a settled good life, after the acts of building, assembling, and reassembling are complete. In the meantime, the chaos of the present is endured. Most vitally, we offer these reflections as our refusal of this future-­oriented progression tale and a reminder that “what happened” in the Bakken boom and “what is to come” remain unresolved. In important ways, the boom was infrastructural at both material and affective levels. Infrastructure was necessary for the boom to occur. While attention was repeatedly focused on the inadequacy of Williston’s infrastructure at the start of the boom—­the lack of pipelines, roads, housing, retail, policing, mental health services—­it was the presence of existing infrastructure, inadequate as it may have been, that allowed the boom to take off: the highways and railways that enabled equipment, workers, and materials to flow in and oil to flow out; the affective infrastructures of Christian churches that ministered to precarious and often homeless workers; the infrastructures of finance capital that allowed capital to move frictionless between geographical sites and economic sectors; police and municipal planners; even the paved parking lots of department stores, which workers appropriated as a solid foundation on which to park the RVs, trucks, and cars that were their temporary homes. As Kregg Hetherington puts it, infrastructure is “that which comes before something else, which lays the conditions for the emergence of another order” (2016, 40). This is also where the promise of infrastructure lies: as that which comes before something else, new infrastructure embodies the promise of not just a new but an improved order and contains within it a progressive temporality that it shares with all development projects. In the years after the beginning of the boom, local municipalities and counties in western North Dakota invested heavily in infrastructure.

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So did extractive capital, although for different reasons. For extractive capital, infrastructure initially took the form of railway hubs and short water and oil pipelines, built to service oil wells (and their wastes) and to get Bakken oil to distant markets in the absence of any other regional infrastructure to do so. Moving oil by rail is expensive, dangerous, and deadly, as evidenced with several horrific accidents from North Dakota to Quebec; thus, the premium paid by producers to ship oil to markets made North Dakota oil expensive relative to other oil fields. When West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices were more than one hundred dollars per barrel, this was not a significant problem, though oil moved more slowly than petroleum companies wanted and at greater cost. But as oil prices fell, especially after 2014, oil-­by-­rail reduced margins and contributed to a rapid contraction of oil drilling. From the viewpoint of extractive capital and settler community leaders, including state leaders who had tethered state finances to oil production levels, to keep the Bakken “in play” required oil pipelines that could move oil to markets cheaply, setting up the violent struggles over the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL).1 While, as Kai Bosworth notes in his chapter, the capacity for the violent use of force on the part of settler institutions was immense, in one important respect settler society in North Dakota was vulnerable to Indigenous resistance: insofar as the settler state had remade itself as an oil state and anticipated a settler future founded on oil, any interruption to its flow threw a monkey wrench into the affective and material dimensions of what was to come. The completion of numerous pipelines in the region by 2017, along with modest increases in oil prices and decreases in production costs, revivified the oil fields and allowed North Dakota to reach record production levels in 2018. Pipeline construction, including feeder lines, water lines, and new gas lines, also maintained employment in the Bakken region, sustaining the boom high for a short time even after oil prices plunged in 2014. In this sense, oil infrastructure not only allowed capital to capture resource rents and realize value produced in global markets; it also sustained the sense that oil gives the region the futures promised through settler colonialism, further tethering communities to the commodity and to the whims of extractive capital.



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In part, the jobs created through building infrastructure and the optimistic guesswork about town growth, discussed in the introduction, maintained the fiction of endless economic growth for Williston and its surrounds, deferring the day of reckoning with the gradual reduction of oilfield employment, and paradoxically, propelling the need for additional infrastructure projects. But the problems faced by Williston and other communities in the Bakken did not correspond one-­to-­one with those of extractive capital: for local communities, the issue was not only how to continue to extract value from natural resource production, but rather, how to settle the energies of the boom and produce sustainable communities and, furthermore, how to sustain this community into a future beyond oil, which haunts Williston’s leaders and residents on a daily basis. It is here where municipal infrastructure plays a role that is simultaneously material, affective, symbolic, and political. In the boom years, Williston and Williams County, in which it is located, borrowed heavily to invest in infrastructure: a $70 million recreation center explicitly marketed to young families; a new wastewater treatment plant completed in 2017, designed to accommodate up to 120,000 people (guaranteeing that the facility will serve the community “far into the future”2); new roads and sewers that anticipated further growth; increased law enforcement and expanded prisons; a new truck bypass intended in part to “quiet” the city streets; state-­of-­ the-art schools that not only would meet the needs of new families but encourage workers to stay; improvements to its Stony Creek Rail Yard, in the hope of attracting investment in “value-­added” industry in energy (including wind energy) and agriculture; and, most recently, a gleaming new international airport, which, as then North Dakota governor Jack Dalrymple claimed at the facility’s 2016 groundbreaking, would “attract and facilitate business while helping the region continue to grow and diversify.”3 At one level, all of this investment was justified in terms of need, as the population more than doubled in just a few short years, and as oilfield traffic, including long lines of trucks, clogged city streets. But the investment in infrastructure was not only about circulation of people, materials, capital, waste; it was also the affective circulation of promise. As scholars of infrastructure have emphasized,

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infrastructures do not just facilitate the flow of goods, people, and ideas and allow their exchange over space (Larkin 2013); they also mediate time (Hetherington 2016) and set the terms and structure of something to come (Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018; Harvey 2018). Infrastructure therefore captures a sense of promise (and disappointment, see Figure C.2), according to Brian Larkin, who discusses infrastructure in terms of “political aesthetics,” drawing on the philosopher Jacques Rancière. Infrastructures, he writes, “address the people who use them, stimulating emotions of hope and pessimism, nostalgia and desire, frustration and anger, that constitute promise (and its failure) as an emotive and political force” (Larkin 2018, 177). For Larkin, infrastructures are not just about meeting needs, they are material, affective, and aesthetic: these dimensions are “part of the ambient life that infrastructures give rise to—­the tactile ways in which we hear, smell, feel as we move through the world” (177). As such they are always phantasmagoric as well as technical objects. They are made up of dreams as much as concrete or steel, and to separate off these dimensions is to miss on the most powerful ways they are consequential for our world (176). As

Figure C.2. A concrete curb abruptly ends in a neighborhood development project in Williston that was begun and then halted. The area is covered in weeds. Photograph by Mary E. Thomas.



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important as what infrastructures are, is what infrastructures promise and the affects that they generate: expectation and desire, but also deferral, sacrifice, and often frustration. The building of infrastructures like highways, pipelines, and airports thus participates in a (re)partition of the sensible. Its political aesthetics extends far beyond merely facilitating circulation; it instills hope in a future-­to-­come, a hope that is experienced itself in and through the circulation and movement that they enable. Other infrastructures (schools, recreation centers, playgrounds, and prisons) likewise promise a future that is ordered and settled, where good and bad are partitioned and reproductive futurity ensured. For a predominantly white city facing the massive influx of workers, the chaos of oilfield development, and an uncertain future, infrastructure provided a potent political rationality for translating present disorder into future order, in what was seen by planners as a virtuous circle of settled development. Yet these orderings extend settler colonialism and its violences. Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen tell us that infrastructures (like pipelines, in their writing) are monsters especially when they work well, not just when they break, leak, fail, or falter. They characterize the monster through the Anishinaabe legend of the Wiindigo. The Wiindigo, they write, creates destruction “not [just] in the system’s failure, but in its smooth operation . . . Wiindigo infrastructures are the material systems that engineer and sustain” violence (LaDuke and Cowen 2020, 253). In Thomas S. Davis’s chapter, he also presents the sculpture of artist Cannupa Hanska Luger (a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation who was raised on the Standing Rock Reservation) called This Is Not a Snake (Figure 2.6). The sculpture reimagines DAPL as Zuzeca Sapa, the Lakota black snake that destroys as it travels (see also Davis 2019). Settler colonial social, political, and economic tense are embodied in infrastructure. LaDuke and Cowen help us to remember that the monstrosity of infrastructure enables settlerist agreements and extends Indigenous dispossession in time and space, “deepening” dependence on fossil fuel (2020, 253). More to the point, they write that “the expansion and reproduction of settler colonial systems of value are literally,

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physically, enabled by infrastructure” and that “feelings, ideas, and attitudes that produce racism and white supremacy are also material systems of social reproduction that sanction the extension of the means of life to some, often through their withdrawal from others” (264). This is not just true of the infrastructures of the oil industry; it is also true of the “virtuous circle” imagined by city leaders and planners, whose infrastructural dreams seek to materialize and embed settler futurities built on the back of appropriation, dispossession, and extraction. Yet, through the practice of art, the defense and protection of water, and the persistent claims of Indigenous sovereignty, we insist, relations exceed and enliven other dimensions and possibilities. Despite its concretization (literally) in infrastructure, the settler futurities imagined are not always ensured or inevitable: the future rarely arrives as imagined. As Figure C.2 illustrates, development in Williston and other Bakken boomtowns literally stopped in its tracks in 2014 with the collapse of global oil markets. Like the truncated right margin of the population graph we referenced in the introduction, the sidewalk was not meant to end, but rather was poured in anticipation of even more settlement. Entire neighborhoods, midway through their development, were left to the weeds (Figure C.2 also shows a solitary fire hydrant, indicating additional subterranean infrastructures lying beneath the gravel and weeds). As Appel, Anand, and Gupta note, “there is always greater investment in future-­oriented infrastructures than is justified by their expense” (2018, 19). The very infrastructure that promised a settled, affluent future now saddles Williston with a burden of debt that threatens the very future imagined. Williston had $225 million in outstanding municipal debt in 2017 and has incurred even more debt in the construction of its new airport, to which it committed $65 million. In an ironic doubling of its dreams of endless growth, the city’s share of the airport—­which today sits largely unused (Figure C.3)—­was to be financed in part by the sale of its old airfield site to developers, despite the existing glut of residential and commercial developments in the city.4 By 2020, the city’s debt exceeded $250 million. The assumption is that these investments will be redeemed in the future in the form of an ordered community and vibrant economy after drilling has ended:

Figure C.3. This photograph of Williston’s new airport interior was taken at 9:00 a.m. on June 2, 2021, and shows no travelers or staff whatsoever. Photograph by Bruce Braun.

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a future that “will have been” realized, debts that “will have been” serviced. Nor is the infrastructure that is built timeless. As residents in northern-­tier states know better than most, infrastructures deteriorate. They must continuously be maintained and eventually replaced, requiring an economic base distinct from the infrastructure itself upon which to finance infrastructural “modernization.” While it is relatively simple to show that the dreamworlds of infrastructure rarely materialize in the manner imagined, our goal is not to evaluate infrastructural projects for their ability to deliver the futures promised. As Hetherington (2016) notes, to do so would be to reproduce the progressive sense of time that is inherent in discourses of “development.” We have been interested instead in how, on a material, aesthetic, and affective level, infrastructure contributes to settling the boom, producing an anticipatory state of settler prosperity around which subjects not only gather their hopes and aspirations but make material and life investments. The promise of infrastructure, we argue, is in part that which buttresses settlerism: it continues to tether settlers to the settler colonial project. Part of a decolonial politics, we argue, is not just to contest Wiindigo infrastructures and imagine other, affirmative infrastructures, as crucial as this is. It is also to disrupt the affective economies of settler infrastructure. After all, the affective economies of infrastructure are far from univocal and are subject to change. The sidewalk that goes nowhere. The fire hydrant marooned in a field of weeds. The airport that stands empty. While these may promise that everything is in place for renewed growth and future prosperity, they can just as much point to an arrested development, revealing the promise of a better future to be illusory. To borrow from Akhil Gupta, the unfinished project shuttles between “the hopes of modernity and progress embodied in the start of construction, and the suspension of those hopes in the half-­built structure” (2018, 70). Far from simply tethering the settler to settler colonial time, we propose that the suspension of infrastructure’s promise in Williston (the “ruins of the future,” in Gupta’s terms) may shelter within it the possibility of returning many settlers to the banal and exhausting experience of endurance within the cruel logics of settler capitalism. After all, the settlerist fantasy of a good



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life, predicated on an ever-­expanding geography and ever-­extended temporality of dispossession, perpetually reveals itself as a good life that arrives only for the very few. Notes 1. In 2016, severance taxes (taxes imposed on the extraction of natural resources) comprised 41.8 percent of all state tax collections in North Dakota, highest in the nation (Kolesnikoff and Brown 2018). 2. https://www.cityofwilliston.com/departments/public_works/water_ resource_recovery_facility.php. 3. “Dalrymple Celebrates Williston Airport Groundbreaking,” North Dakota Office of the Governor, October 10, 2016, archived at https://web.archive.org/ web/20161118121617/https://www.governor.nd.gov/media-center/news/dal rymple-celebrates-williston-airport-groundbreaking. 4. Branded as “Williston Square,” the eight hundred-­acre development “includes plans for a Civic Center, shopping, restaurants, and new residential homes and apartment buildings.” https://willistondevelopment.com/major_ initiatives/enhanced_health_care.php.

References Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, editors. 2018. The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Appel, Hannah, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta. 2018. “Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure.” In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, 1–­38. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Davis, Thomas S. 2019. “Perceptual Methods.” Cultural Dynamics 31, nos. 1–­2: 144–­50. Gupta, Akhil. 2018. “The Future in Ruins: Thoughts on the Temporality of Infrastructure.” In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, 62–­79. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Harvey, Penny. 2018. “Infrastructures in and out of Time: The Promise of Roads in Contemporary Peru.” In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, 80–­101. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Hetherington, Kregg. 2016. “Surveying the Future Perfect: Anthropology, Development, and the Promise of Infrastructure.” In Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion, edited by Penny Harvey, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Atsuor Morita, 40–­50. London: Routledge.

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Kolesnikoff, Anne, and Cassarah Brown. 2018. “State Oil and Gas Severance Taxes.” National Conference of State Legislatures. September 6. https://www .ncsl.org/research/energy/oil-and-gas-severance-taxes.aspx. LaDuke, Winona, and Deborah Cowen. 2020. “Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure.” South Atlantic Quarterly 119, no. 2: 243–­68. Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–­43. Larkin, Brian. 2018. “Promising Forms: The Political Aesthetics of Infrastructure.” In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, 175–­202. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Rifkin, Mark. 2017. Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-­determination. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Simpson, Audra. 2017. “The Ruse of Consent and the Anatomy of ‘Refusal’: Cases from Indigenous North America and Australia.” Postcolonial Studies 20, no. 1: 18–­33.

Contributors

M O R G A N A D A M S O N is associate professor of media and cul-

tural studies at Macalester College. She is author of Enduring Images: A Future History of New Left Cinema (Minnesota, 2018). K A I B O S W O R T H is assistant professor of international studies

in the School of World Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is author of Pipeline Populism: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Twenty-­first Century (Minnesota, 2022). B R U C E B R A U N is professor of geography, environment, and soci-

ety at the University of Minnesota. He is author of The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada’s West Coast (Minnesota, 2002) and coeditor of Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life (Minnesota, 2010); Environment: Critical Essays in Human Geography; and Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics. T H O M A S S . D A V I S is associate professor of English at The Ohio

State University. He is author of The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life. J E S S I C A L E H M A N is assistant professor of geography at Durham

University. 217

218 Contributors

M A R Y E . T H O M A S is associate professor of women’s, gender, and

sexuality studies at The Ohio State University. She is author of Multicultural Girlhood: Racism, Sexuality, and the Conflicted Spaces of American Education and coauthor of Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction. She codirects the Ohio Prison Education Exchange Project.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Adamson, Morgan, 10, 12, 30–31 Adorno, Theodor, 95 aesthetics: and extraction, 70, 71; family aesthetic, 58; petroaesthetics, 70, 74; and petrocultures, 27; and settlement, 27; settler, 46, 205; and settler colonialism, 46, 63–64, 205; of violence, 194–95; of vulnerability, 33, 175–76, 181–82, 189, 192 affective structure: and attachment to good life, 75, 134; and heteropatriarchy, 11–12; and museums, 8; and settler colonialism, 5–6, 22 Afghanistan, 12, 23, 160 After Oil (book), 71 Ahmed, Sara, 85 Al Jazeera America, 123 Allard, LaDonna Bravebull, 84, 183 America First, 46, 98, 101 American dream, 48, 58, 96–97, 100, 108 Anand, Nikhil, 212 anger, 85

Anthropocene, 109, 113 Anthropocene realism, 30–31, 100–101, 112–13; and capitalism, 101, 107, 109, 111; countering genre of, 114–15; defined, 107, 109; as genre, 104, 107–8, 110; mood of, 114; rejection of, 115 Antipode Foundation, viii, 72 anxiety, 21–23; and energy independence, 103; and settler colonialism, 23, 29, 193; and social ordering, 164 apocalyptic genre, 112–13 Appel, Hannah, 24, 212 Army Corps of Engineers, 84, 174; Pick-Sloan Plan, 184–85 Arnold, Sherry, 143–44, 147, 149, 158 art, 30, 85–86. See also museums Arvin, Maile, 61 attachments: affective structure of, 75, 134; dimensions of attachment formation, 85; enduring optimism of, 74–75; energy independence, 100–101, 104, 106, 219

220 Index 109; the good life, 74–75, 104, 114; Indigenous vs. settler stories of, 87; and infrastructure, 205; oil, 30–31, 75, 78, 110, 114; other forms of, 83–85, 87–88, 91; other futures unimaginable, 31, 71, 75, 80–82, 100, 107, 110, 112–13; single-family home, 108 Bakken: formation, 12, 13, 47; governance, 165; as modern-day gold rush, 23–24; and oil, 15–17; and settler colonialism, 43; as site, 5; stratigraphy, 12, 13 Bakken, The (film), 74 Bakken, Henry, 15 “Bakken Boom,” viii, 1; beginning of, 18, 127, 130, 148; and boomtown stories, 27–28; dark side narratives, 144–48; and energy independence, 22; as extraordinary, 31, 120–24, 131–33, 135–36, 166; false economics of, 78, 80; and fracking, 12, 17, 101; and heteropatriarchy, 10–11; and infrastructure, 207–8; as “last great place for opportunity,” 30, 95–96, 95–96, 96, 100–102, 104, 107–8, 110–13; New York Times on, 69; and oil production, 47, 103, 127, 130; other futures unimaginable, 31, 71, 75, 80–82, 100, 107, 110, 112–13; people flock to, 22, 144, 148, 211; petrocultures of, 4; and settlement, 6–7; typical characters engendered by, 76. See also oil boom; resource boom Bakken Boom! Artists Respond to the North Dakota Oil Rush (exhibition, 2015), xii,

“Bakken Booyah!,” 1, 4; cruel optimism of, 33; and history of oil exploration, 14; meaning of, 10; settler infrastructure creates possibility of, 205 Berlant, Lauren, 85, 135, 137; on crisis ordinariness, 124, 132; on cruel optimism, viii, 4–5, 62, 74, 107, 134; on extraordinary, 119, 121, 131–33; on fantasies of good life, 134; on genre, 100, 107; on slow death, 31, 132–33 Bernstein, Elizabeth, 143, 145 biopolitics, 31, 135, 137 Bismarck Tribune, 194 Black Gold Boom (public media project), 122 Blaser, Mario, viii, 205 blood and oil, 69, 89, 122, 124–25, 136 Bloomberg, 188 boom, the. See “Bakken Boom”: boomtown stories boom–bust cycle, vii, 5, 26, 47, 83, 96, 119–20; bust, 119, 173, 188 Boomtowners (series), 74 Boomtown Girls (reality TV), 154 boomtowns, and crime, 161 boomtown stories, 23–28; before and after in, 25; dark side narratives, 144–48; and heteropatriarchy, 25; and masculinity, 26; and news media, 23; normative accounts foreclose other possibilities, 27; oil workers as family men, 11; omissions of, 26; other arrangements of, 26–28; people flock to Bakken, 22, 144, 148, 211; and petrocultures, 4; promotional video counters narrative of, 95, 107; and settlement, 6–7; and



Index 221

settler colonialism, 7–8; and Williston, 47. See also dark side narratives; economic development; news media Bosworth, Kai, 10, 24, 33, 208 Braun, Bruce, 11–12, 23, 31–32 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 195 Business Insider, 154 bust, 119, 173, 188 Butler, Judith, 176, 181–82 capitalism: and Anthropocene realism, 101, 107, 109, 111; capitalist realism, 107, 109, 111–12, 114; and climate change, 106; crisis of, 102, 106; cruel optimism as condition of, 134; end of world easier to imagine than end of, 112–13; and extraction, 82–84, 87–88, 91, 102–3, 152, 164, 208–9; and financial crisis, 108; and the good life, 114; no alternatives to, 107, 114; oil as only escape from, 98; oil attachments and settler colonialism, 72; and postwar mobility, 105; problem of attachment to, 82; resistance to, 83–91; settler carbon capitalism, 26–27; and settler colonialism, 72, 84, 205, 208; and social ordering, 164; and suburban development, 104–5; and violence, 82, 121, 125, 129; and worker deaths, 130, 135 care, 159–60, 166 children: and Bakken boom, 79–82; in development video, 110–11, 111, 113–14; and oil, 30; and settler colonialism, 48–49, 52; in visitors guide, 50–51 Children of Men (film), 112 Children of Men (novel), 110–11

Christy, Jessica, Through the Window (art collection), xii Clark, Nigel, 15 Clark, William, 8, 42–43 climate change, 27, 31, 66n12, 104, 109–10, 179; and Anthropocene, 113; and capitalism, 106; denial, 109; and energy independence, 101, 104, 109; and habitability of the planet, 71; Paris Climate Accords, 98, 104; as threat, 52, 110 Clinton, Hillary, 103 CNN, 22, 149, 153–54, 156 Coffey, Brian, 70, 71 Coleman, Matt, 185 counterterrorism, 174, 180, 188, 191 Cowen, Deborah, 181, 211 Cramer, Kevin, 160 crime, 131, 147, 163, 167n4; and boomtowns, 161; correctional budget increase, 161; and governance, 160–61; and Indigenous people, 64; and migrant workers, 149–52; and news media, 161, 163; and oil boom, 165; and oil security, 180; and police, 150; and water protectors, 10 crisis ordinariness, 124–25, 132–33, 136 cruel optimism, viii, 4–6, 62; of Bakken Booyah, 33; documentaries replay version of, 74; and good life, 114, 134; and oil, 107–8; and petrocultures, 6; and settlement, 5–6; of settler colonialism, 21 Custer, George Armstrong, 56 Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), 33, 84, 188; as black snake, 86; and

222 Index Google search, 191; #NoDAPL, 71, 83, 86, 91, 184–85; and oil infrastructure, 208; and oil production, 173; and private security forces, 174–77, 190; resistance to, 173–77, 179–83, 185–86, 188–96, 208; state of emergency, 190 Dakota nation, 42, 183–85 Dakota War, 183–84 Dalrymple, Jack, 189, 196, 209 dark side narratives, 32, 144–48; and economic growth, 159; and liberal governance, 159–60; and migrant workers, 148–52, 149, 160; nonconforming gender and sexual identities, 153–58; and oil boom, 165; and social ordering, 164; threaten a valued way of life, 144–45, 147–48; and violence, 144–48, 159 Davis, Thomas S., 11, 24, 29–30, 211 debt, 2, 22, 34, 76, 78, 80–81, 105, 108, 127, 133–34, 148; and infrastructure, 212, 214 deep-water oil production, 127 Deleuze, Gilles, 176, 178 Department of Homeland Security, 188 Dewey, Myron, 88 diagonal reading, 145, 147, 150, 160, 163–65 disavowal, 109–10 documentary films, 29, 74–83, 77, 83; drone vision, 88; and oil boom tropes, 120; promotional video draws on conventions of, 97. See also Overnighters, The; Sweet Crude Man Camp; White Earth “Drill, Baby, Drill,” 42, 53, 102 drilling treadmill, 127 drones, 88–90

Duménil, Gérard, 108 Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, 91 economic development, 1–4; “Bakken Booyah!,” 10; “Build, Baby, Build,” 42, 59, 62; and collapse of oil markets, 212; “development” as concept, 6; “Drill, Baby, Drill,” 42, 53, 102; and family, 58–59, 113–14; “The Good Life,” 114, 205, 206; and infrastructure, 209–10, 210, 212; “last great place for opportunity,” 30, 95–96, 96, 100–102, 104, 107–8, 110–13; and news media, 58; “Open for Business,” 2; promotional video, 95–96, 96, 97–98, 99, 104–5, 105, 107, 110–11, 111, 112; “Rockin’ the Bakken,” 1–2, 2, 98; settler colonialism as marketing priority, 40, 46; settler histories naturalized for, 65; and settler patriarchy, 55–58; and single-family home, 104–5, 105; and suburban development, 114; Williston Community Guide, 2–3, 3; “Williston Reimagined,” 113–14; Williston Visitors Guide, 40, 48–49, 50–51; and women, 55–58, 62, 64 economic downturn, 7; and energy independence, 104; financial crisis of 1970s, 104, 106, 108, 180; and financial crisis of 2008, 1, 10, 12, 17–18, 22, 30, 75–76, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108, 130, 132, 144, 148; fracking, 108; fracking as antidote, 17; labor freed by, 18 economic growth: contradictions of, 71; and dark side narratives, 159; and infrastructure, 209–10, 210,



Index 223

212; and oil, 180; and peak oil, 106; prioritized, 29; steady growth predicted, 1–2, 4–6; unwavering optimism for, 46 ecoterrorism, 187 Edelman, Lee, 31, 101, 110 Edmonds, Penelope, 57 Enbridge’s Line 3, 115 energy: “America First,” 46, 98, 101; clean/Green, 115; crisis of 1970s, 180; and culture, 28; revolution, 69, 101, 107–8 energy independence, 101–4; attachments to, 100–101, 104, 106, 109; Bakken boom as hope for, 22; and climate change, 101, 104, 109; and economic downturn, 104; and extraction, 98, 103; and fracking, 30, 98, 102–3; and Obama, 102–3; and oil, 101, 103; and settler colonialism, 115; and suburban development, 106; and Trump, 101–2; and whiteness, 112; and white supremacy, 115 Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), 84, 88, 173, 188, 190–92 Estes, Nick, 39, 84, 91, 185 extraction: acceleration of, 109; and aesthetics, 70, 71; animation of Bakken, 35n12; and Anthropocene realism, 101; and capitalism, 82–84, 87–88, 91, 102–3, 152, 164, 208–9; difficulty of, 18, 20; and energy independence, 98, 103; and frontier, 8, 12; and the good life, 30, 107; history of, 14; and infrastructure, 17–20, 20, 208–9; and land, 18, 180; and police, 180; racial unconscious of, 112; settler colonialism uses vulnerability for expansion of, 196; and settler

time, 12; violence of, 82, 88. See also oil; oil production extraordinary: Baken boom as, 31, 120–24, 135–36, 166; Berlant on, 119, 121, 131–33 Facebook, 53, 88; social media, 130, 187, 191–93 family: aesthetic, 58; building a family town, 61; and economic development, 58–59, 113–14; economic development and single-family home, 104–5, 105; and heteropatriarchy, 7–8, 11, 39, 42, 49, 56, 145; nuclear family as proper domain of intimacy, 151; settler, 7, 39, 41–42, 46, 48, 152; suburban single-family home as ideal of American dream, 97–98, 99; white families and permanent settlement, 77, 166; white hetero family, threats against, 148, 150, 164; white heteronormative Christian family as rural idyll, 147–48 fast oil, 125, 127–29 FBI, 150, 160–61, 187 feminism, 54, 61, 85 financial crisis. See economic downturn Fisher, Mark, 107, 109, 111–14 Fort Berthold Reservation, 41, 43 Fort Buford, 40, 49 fossil fuel. See oil fracking, 18–20, 20; aerial view of, 89–90; and Bakken boom, 12, 17, 101; defined, 126; and economic downturn, 108; and energy independence, 30, 98, 102–3; and extraction, 18; hidden from promotional video of good life, 98;

224 Index “I’d frack that,” 53, 54, 57, 64; museum exhibit, 72, 73–74, 73–74; process of, 18–20, 20; production decline curves, 126–27; and retirement prospects, 110; and suburban settlements, 63; and tight oil, 126; and violence, 64, 98; and water, 19, 90. See also extraction; oil; oil production freedom, 29, 45, 72, 91, 98, 104, 106, 108, 112–13 frontier, 10; closing of, 184; and extraction, 8, 12; logics, 29, 61; masculinity, 49, 52; and migrant workers, 131; and oil boom, 22–24; resource frontiers, 10, 24, 28; settler infrastructuring as, 205; suburbanization, 42, 99; and violence, 24; white American myths about taming of, 39 Front Runner Magazine, 79 Gale, Isaac, Sweet Crude Man Camp, 29–30, 74–78, 91 gas. See oil gender: compulsory heterosexuality, 53–59, 145; gendered binaries, 54–55, 58; gender roles, 45; LGBTQ community, 152, 158–60, 163–64; nonconforming gender and sexual identities, 153–58; and oil drilling, 53; same-gender parents not represented in settler family, 48; violence against Indigenous women, 2, 23, 26, 32, 44, 64, 145–46, 163, 180, 197; and vulnerability, 192–93, 193 genocide, 44, 112, 183, 197 genre, 100–101; alternative, 115; Anthropocene realism as, 104, 107–8, 110; apocalyptic, 112–13

geosocial formation, 15, 17–19, 28, 32 Ghost Dance, 184 Gilio-Whitaker, Dina, 86 Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, 45 global warming. See climate change Gold, Russell, 103 Gómez-Barris, Macarena, 8 “good life, the” (narrative), viii, 96, 98, 132–34, 205, 206, 214–15; attachments to, 74–75, 104, 114; Berlant on fantasies of, 134; and capitalism, 114; and energy independence, 104; as genre, 100–101; oil as last hope for, 30–31, 100, 107, 110; and suburban development, 106–7; and white supremacy, 8, 114 “Good Life, The” (development video), 114 Gottesdiener, Laura, 23 governance: Bakken, 165; and dark side narratives, 159–60; liberal, 143, 150, 159–60; and oil culture, 146; and police, 160, 163; and resource booms, 119–20; and security, 177; settler colonial, 29, 59, 62, 146; and sex work, 161–63; and violence, 145, 150 Graham, Dan, 97 Great Recession, 1, 10, 12, 17–18, 22, 30, 130, 132, 144, 148; documentary film protagonists suffer from, 75–76; fracking as antidote, 17; labor freed by, 18 growth. See economic growth Guattari, Félix, 178 Gupta, Akhil, 212, 214 Gurr, Barbara, 49, 52 Haiven, Max, 115 Hall, Philip S., 184



Index 225

Hall, Stuart, 124, 145 Halliburton, 10–11, 11, 22, 72 Hensley, Nathan, 88 heteronormativity, 61–62; and infrastructure, 205; and nonconforming gender and sexual identities, 153 heteropatriarchy, xi, 27, 61; and Bakken boom, 10–11; and boomtown stories, 25; and compulsory heterosexuality, 54, 145; and economic development, 55–58; and family, 7–8, 11, 39, 42, 49, 56, 145; and housing, 60; and land, 45, 61; as master narrative for humanity’s survival, 52; and oil workers, 41, 52; and settlement, 41–42; and settler colonialism, 29, 32, 39, 44, 205; and suburban settlements, 61, 64–65; temporality dominated by, 49; threats to, 164; and violence, 145, 150–51; and women, 60 Hetherington, Kregg, 207, 214 Hoeft, Greg, 76–77, 77, 78 Homestead Act of 1862, 44–45 horizontal drilling. See fracking housing: “Build, Baby, Build,” 42, 59, 62; economic development and single-family home, 104–5, 105; and heteropatriarchy, 60; labor camps, 59–60, 162; man camps, 22–23, 56–57, 78–79, 98, 148–49, 157, 162; shortages, 22–23; singlefamily home, 1, 98, 104–5, 105, 107–8; sleeping in cars, 22, 30, 59–60, 76–77, 77, 149, 207; suburban settlements, 59–65, 97–98, 99; suburban singlefamily home as ideal of American dream, 97–98; suburbanization,

42, 105; trailer camp, 99; zoning requirements, 60. See also suburban development Huber, Matthew, 100, 102, 104–6, 114 Huffington Post, 149 illegal dumping, 19, 26 imagination: impossibility of, 112–13; radical, 115 Indigenous artists, 72, 83 Indigenous people: and crime, 64; dispossession, 5, 17, 39, 57, 112, 148, 164, 180, 184–86, 211–12, 215; distinguished from settler societies, 86; genocide, 44, 112, 183, 197; imagined nonexistence of, 84; incarceration of, 185; Indigeneity quelled for settlement, 29, 39; land, unbroken connection to, 86; and oil security, 194; resistance of, 25–26, 83–91, 115, 183–84, 186; resistance to DAPL, 173–77, 179–83, 185–86, 188–96, 208; resistance to Keystone XL pipeline, 186–87; sacred sites, 174–75, 185, 190; settlement of, 42, 56, 65, 184; settlerist representations of, 43, 146; sexuality, 57; situated in the past, 40–41, 47, 49; sovereignty, 33, 39, 41, 43–44, 64, 91, 174, 212; survivance, 166, 186; and temporality, x–xi, 10, 86; as threat to settler vulnerability, 10, 40, 148; treaty violations against, 25, 33, 44, 84, 174; and vulnerability, 176. See also Lakota nation; Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara; Oceti Sakowin Oyate; Standing Rock Sioux Tribe

226 Index Indigenous women, violence against, 2, 23, 26, 32, 44, 64, 145–46, 163, 180, 197 infrastructure, 205–14; aerial view of, 90; and attachments, 205; and Bakken boom, 207–8; and debt, 212, 214; doubts about stability of, 33; and extraction, 17–20, 20, 208–9; inadequate, 123, 128; monstrosity of, 211–12; oil pipelines as critical infrastructure, 177, 180; and oil price, 208; and oil security, 179–82, 188, 190; promise of, 6; security, 188; and settler colonialism, 205, 207, 211–12, 214; and temporality, 205, 207, 210, 214; transportations costs, 173; and violence, 207; and white supremacy, 212; Williston invests in, 209 innocence, 176, 182, 198 Intercept, The, 191 Iraq, 12, 23, 160 Jameson, Fredric, 112 Jensen, Dennis, 163 Jensen, J. Christian, White Earth, 29–30, 74–75, 79–82, 83, 91 Johnson, Ariston E., 150 Keystone XL Pipeline, 173, 186–88 Khasnabish, Alex, 115 King, Sabrina, 194 Kirchmeier, Kyle, 190–91 Kittleson, Chris, 76, 78, 80 Klare, Michael, 71 Klein, Naomi, 180 Krug, Howard, 150 LaDuke, Winona, 211 Lake Oahe, 185, 189

Lakota nation, 42, 86–87, 185 land: alien landscape, 79; and boomtown stories, 8; dispossession, 5, 17, 39, 57, 112, 148, 164, 180, 184–86, 211–12, 215; and extraction, 18, 180; geology of, 47; as geosocial formation, 15; and heteropatriarchy, 61; Homestead Act of 1862, 44–45; illegal dumping, 19, 26; indigenization of settlers on, 17, 45–46, 54, 63; Indigenous settlement of, 42, 56, 65; Indigenous vs. settler claims, 41, 64, 174; sacred sites, 174–75, 185, 190; sale of oil and gas leases on public land, 14; and settler colonialism, 17, 91; settler colonial narratives of, 39–48; and settler time, 6; settler wars always about, 91; suburban landscape, 61, 99, 104–5, 105; transformed landscapes, 69; treaty violations against Indigenous people, 25, 33, 44, 84, 174, 183–84; unbroken connection to, 86; U.S. history about, 39 Larkin, Brian, 210 Lehman, Jessica, 11, 23, 32 LeMenager, Stephanie, 69–70 Lévy, Dominique, 108 Lewis, Meriwether, 8, 42–43 Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, 52 LGBTQ community, 152, 158–60, 163–64 liberal governance, 143, 150, 159–60; and sex work, 161–63 Loaiza, Elena Guadalupe, 79, 81–82 Loazia, Flor, 79, 81–82 loneliness, 23, 25, 57, 82, 123, 156–57 Lucky Dog Films, 154



Index 227

Luger, Cannupa Hanska, 30, 83; This Is Not a Snake (installation), 30, 86–87, 87, 211 Lukács, Georg, 29, 75; The Historical Novel, 75; Studies in European Realism, 75 Mackey, Eva, 193 Magritte, René, 86 man camps, 22–23, 56–57, 78–79, 157, 162; and dark side narratives, 148–49; and homophobia, 57; suburban single-family home as counterpoint to, 98 Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara (MHA Nation), 41, 43, 211; illegal dumping on lands of, 19, 26; oil production on lands of, x, 43; ongoing political struggles by, 25; residence for thousands of years, 42 manifest destiny, 43, 52 masculinity: and boomtown stories, 26; compulsory heterosexuality, 53–59, 145; cowboy, 49, 52; and genocide, 44; and heteronormativity, 158; and loneliness, 156–57; and oil drilling, 53–54; and oil workers, 11; and settler colonialism, 10, 45; and sex workers, 155–56; and white supremacy, 64. See also gender; heteropatriarchy Mason, Arthur, 24 McLellan, James, 79–80 media. See news media Melby, Todd, 128; Black Gold Boom (public media project), 122; Oil to Die For (documentary), 122–24, 124, 129 Meyers, Leevi, 79, 81–82 migrant workers, 18; anxiety about, 23; and Sherry Arnold murder,

143–44, 147, 149, 158; and Bakken boom, 130; and care, 160; and crime, 149–52; and crisis ordinariness, 133; and dark side narratives, 148–52, 149, 160; documentary films give voice to, 74, 76, 81–82; flock to Bakken boom, 22, 144, 148, 211; narratives about, 131, 144, 147; pathologization of single male migrant, 151; and police, 164; vs. settler families, 152; sleeping in cars, 22, 30, 59, 149, 207; and suburban settlement, 61, 99; as threat, 148–52; West African migrants ignored in boomtown stories, 26 migration: and boomtown stories, 8; European settlers, 45, 56–57; global migration and American West, 151–52 military: and oil security, 180; and settler colonialism, 10, 45, 48–49, 183 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 82 Missouri River, 42–43, 46, 56, 84, 173–74, 183–85, 189 Missouri–Yellowstone Confluence Interpretive Center, 8, 9 Mni Wiconi (water is life), 86, 174 Morgensen, Scott, 58 Morrill, Angie, 61 Mosul-Haifa pipeline, 179 Munger, Will, 194 museums: and affective structures, 8; oil display, 8, 9; representations of Indigenous people, 43; representations of settler aesthetics, 46. See also North Dakota Museum; Pioneer Museum; Plains Art Museum mutual aid, 160

228 Index Nakota nation, 42 narratives. See boomtown stories; dark side narratives; good life, the; news media; settler colonialism Native Americans. See Indigenous people; Indigenous women, violence against necropolitics, 31, 135, 137 news media: and boomtown stories, 23–27; and crime, 161, 163; dark side narratives, 144–48, 159; and economic development, 58; on ecoterrorism, 187; Indigenous media, 83–91; origins of “fair and balanced” coverage, 194; people flock to Bakken, 22, 144, 148; on policing and pipeline resistance, 176–77, 191, 193; and sex work, 152–56; and treaty violations, 184; and Williston, 159; and women, 154 New York Times, 104, 109, 147, 149, 154–55 New York Times Magazine, 69 #NoDAPL, 71, 83, 86, 91, 184–85 North Dakota Museum, 16 Oasis Petroleum, 128 Obama, Barack, 102–3 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), 123, 132–33, 133, 160, 164 Oceti Sakowin Oyate, 25, 42, 89–90, 174 oil: attachments to, 30–31, 75, 78, 110, 114; and Bakken formation, 15–17; blood and, 69, 89, 122, 124–25, 136; centrality of, in everyday life, 27–28; and children, 30; contradictions of, 31; deepening

dependence on, 211; and economic growth, 180; and energy independence, 101, 103; fast oil, 125, 127–29; global dimensions of, 102–4; impunity of, 164; as last hope for good life, 30–31, 100, 107, 110; and military, 10; museum display of, 8, 9; oil culture, formation of, 32; oil shocks of 1973–74, 106, 108; other futures unimaginable, 31, 71, 75, 80–82, 100, 107, 110, 112–13; peak oil, 22, 103, 106; pipeline construction, 174–77, 183, 189, 208; pipelines as critical infrastructure, 177, 181; power of, 71, 76; resistance to, 179–82; and settler aesthetics, 46; and settler colonialism, 63, 180, 197; and state, 188; tight oil, 124–26; tough oil, 71; and violence, 24, 32–33, 179–80; Western cultural production predicated on, 146. See also extraction; fracking; petrocultures oil assemblage, 10, 33, 129, 137, 159, 182, 188–89, 197; and aesthetics of vulnerability, 176; defined, 177–79 oil boom: Bakken echoes early 20th century oil booms, 69–70, 70; and dark side narratives, 165; as extraordinary, 135; false economics of, 78, 80; and frontier, 22–24; as geosocial formation, 28; in, 1980s, 14; as “last great place for opportunity,” 30, 95–96, 96, 100–102, 104, 107–8, 110–13; and precarity, 166; resource boom narrative, 119–20. See also “Bakken Boom”; resource boom oil culture. See petrocultures



Index 229

oil drilling: “Drill, Baby, Drill,” 42, 53, 102; and gender, 53; “I’d frack that,” 53–54, 57, 64; and masculinity, 53 oil price: decrease of, 7, 52, 58, 62, 78, 106, 148, 162; increase of, 14, 17, 188; and infrastructure, 208 oil production: and Bakken boom, 47, 103, 127, 130; and Dakota Access Pipeline, 173; decline curves, 126–27; deep-water oil production, 127; history of, 14; increased productivity, 18; and infrastructure, 208; on MHA land, x, 43; number of rigs in ND, 53; peak in 1984, 14; peak in North Dakota, 18, 103; short-lived duration of fracked wells, 20–21; and stability, 102; steady growth predicted, 1–2; and worker deaths, 124 oil security, 24, 175, 177–82, 187–88; and Indigenous people, 194; and police, 180–81, 190, 192, 196; spending on, 180 Oil to Die For (documentary), 122–24, 124, 129 oil workers: and boomtown stories, 11; and care, 160; culture of speed, 128–29; and economic development, 56; economics for, 78, 80; and extraction, 18; and heteropatriarchal settlement, 41–42, 52; loneliness of, 156–57; portrait of, 69–70, 70; and sex workers, 156; and strip clubs, 157–58; and suburbanization, 61; in Sweet Crude Man Camp, 75–78; trailer camp, 99; work conditions, 128. See also worker deaths; workers Oliver, John, 123

Overnighters, The (documentary), 25, 74 Palin, Sarah, 53, 102 Paris Climate Accords, 98, 104 patriarchy. See heteropatriarchy peak oil, 22, 103, 106 people of color, 48 petroaesthetics, 70, 74 petrocultures: and aesthetics, 27; and boomtown stories, 4; and cruel optimism, 6; formation of oil culture, 32; oil as last hope for good life, 30–31, 100, 107, 110; and subjectivity, 71 Pick-Sloan Plan, 184–85 Pioneer Museum, 13, 47, 72–74, 73, 74 pioneers, 48 Plains Art Museum, xii, police, 10, 24, 33; budget increase for, 161, 164; and crime, 150; defined, 175–76; drones used to counter police narrative at Standing Rock, 88; and governance, 160, 163; growth of, 64; and migrant workers, 152, 164; and oil security, 180–81, 190, 192, 196; and pipeline construction, 174–77, 183, 189; and protest, 175–76; videos, 192–93, 193, 195; and violence, 165, 175, 183, 185–86, 189–90, 196; and vulnerability, 165, 175–76, 181, 190, 193, 195–96; and water protectors, 174–76, 183 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 6–7, 30, 132, 134–35, 143, 165–66; on diagonal reading, 145, 160 precarity, 31, 55, 100–102, 107–8, 132, 148, 152, 155–56, 165–66, 182; and

230 Index fantasy of good life, 134; inevitability of, 107; and oil boom, 166; and worker deaths, 124, 130, 134–35, 137 prison, 174; budget increase, 161; population increase, 185 progress, 56–57 prostitution, 96, 155, 159, 162 Puar, Jasbir, 176, 182 Purdon, Tim, 150 railways, 90, 173, 175, 205, 207–9 Rancière, Jacques, 176, 181, 198, 210 reproductive futurity, 31, 101, 110, 112–13, 211 resource aesthetics, 27 resource boom: boom–bust cycle, vii, 5, 26, 47, 83, 96; bust, 119, 173, 188; as extraordinary, 135; and governance, 119–20; and identity formation, 119; narrative form of, 119–20 resource frontiers, 10, 24, 119; and settlement, 28 Rich, Adrienne, 54 Rifkin, Mark, vii, xi, 4, 45; on heteronormativity, 61–62 Riley family, 76–78 “Rockin’ the Bakken,” 1–2, 2, 98 Sacagawea, 43–44, 44 Sacred Stone Camp, 84, 183 Saudi Arabia, 103 security: DAPL and private security, 174–77, 190; and governance, 177; infrastructure, 188; oil security, 24, 175, 177–82, 192 September 11, 2001, 180 settler colonialism: and aesthetics, 46, 63–64, 205; and affective

structure, 5–6; and anxiety, 23, 29, 193; and Bakken, 43; and boomtown stories, 7–8; and capitalism, 72, 84, 205, 208; and discursive construction of Indigenous people, 146; as embalmed culture, 31; and energy independence, 115; and governance, 29, 59, 62, 146; and heteropatriarchy, 29, 32, 39, 44, 205; and infrastructure, 205, 207, 211–12, 214; and land, 17, 91; as marketing priority, 40, 46; and masculinity, 10, 45; and military, 10, 45, 48–49, 183; museum exhibit, 72–74; narratives of, 39–48; and oil, 63, 180, 197; and oil workers, 41; and suburban settlements, 62, 99; and temporality, 4, 6, 21, 28; and violence, 48, 88–89, 121, 151, 166, 177, 183–85, 188, 197, 211; and vulnerability, 24, 182–83, 196; and white supremacy, 32; and womanhood, 49 settler patriarchy, 55–58 settlers, indigenization of, 17, 45–46, 54, 63 settler state, vii, x, 17, 41, 61, 64, 164, 185–86, 197, 208 settling/settlement: ix; and aesthetics, 27; and Bakken boom, 6–7; and boomtown stories, 28; and compulsory heterosexuality, 59; and cruel optimism, 5–6; and future, 6; and the good life, 106; and heteropatriarchy, 41–42; Indigeneity quelled for, 29; of Indigenous people, 42, 56, 65, 184; normative function of, appears final, 58; settler colonial narratives, 39–42; settling the



Index 231

boom, 17, 114, 163–66, 209, 214; unsettling, xi; and women, 29, 41–42 sex trafficking, 150, 154–55, 162, 167n6 sexuality: compulsory heterosexuality, 53–59, 145; Indigenous, 57; LGBTQ community, 152, 158–60, 163–64; nonconforming gender and sexual identities, 153–58; polarized, 151; queer sexualities, 54, 59 sex workers, 56, 58–59, 144, 147, 152–56, 167n6; double duty in boomtown, 153; and liberal governance, 161–63; and news media, 152–56; and oil workers, 156; prostitution, 96, 155, 159, 162; and women, 154–56, 162 Shah, Nayan, 151–52 shale, 15, 17–18, 20–21 Sibertin-Blanc, Guillaume, 197 Sica, Carlo E., 102 Simpson, Audra, x, 6, 146 Simpson, Leanne, 83 slow death, 31, 132–34 Smelser, Bret, 147 social media, 130, 187, 191–93; Facebook, 53, 88 Soth, Alec, 69–71; Sweet Crude Man Camp, 29–30, 74–78, 91 Standing Rock, 10, 24, 30, 33; resistance at, 83–91 Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, 84, 173, 184, 191 Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, 84, 185 State Historical Society, 40, 43–44, 44 storytelling. See boomtown stories stratigraphy, 12, 13; Williston Basin, 15, 16

strip clubs, 23, 26, 58, 81, 144, 148–49, 154–58, 161–62; Heartbreakers, 81, 149, 153, 158, 162; and liberal governance, 161–63; and oil workers, 157–58; Whispers, 23, 81, 149, 162 suburban development, 42, 59–65; and capitalism, 104–5; and economic development, 114; and energy independence, 106; as extension of post-WWII boom, 98; and the good life, 106–7; and heteronormativity, 61–62; and heteropatriarchy, 61, 64–65; and oil workers, 61; in promotional video, 97–98, 99, 104–5, 105; and settler colonialism, 62; and violence, 112; and whiteness, 61, 112; and white supremacy, 61, 106–7 Sweet Crude Man Camp (documentary), 29–30, 74–78, 91 Swyngedouw, Erik, 175 tar sands, 71, 127, 186 temporality: and attachments, 85; before and after in boomtown stories, 25; heteropatriarchy dominates, 49; Indigenous people situated in the past, 40–42, 47, 49; Indigenous vs. settler, x–xi, 10, 86; and infrastructure, 205, 207, 210, 214; reproductive futurity, 31, 101, 110, 112–13, 211; and settler colonialism, 4, 6, 21, 28; settler time, 6, 12; in White Earth, 79 tense, 6, 30, 207, 211 Thatcher, Margaret, 107 This Is Not a Snake (installation), 30, 86–87, 87, 211

232 Index Thomas, Mary E., 10, 12, 29 threats: anxiety over threats to settler colonialism, 22; climate change, 52, 110; dark side narratives, 144–45, 147–48, 159; ecoterrorists, 187, 189; energy independence wards off threats to freedom, 104; to heteropatriarchy, 164; homosexuality in man camps, 57; Indigenous threat to settler vulnerability, 10, 40, 184; migrant workers as, 148–52; nonconforming gender and sexual identities, 153–58; and oil security, 177, 179–80, 190; oil shocks of 1973–74, 106; water protectors, 192–93, 195; what might happen with so many men in one place, 54 TigerSwan, 88, 174–75, 177–78, 178, 191–92, 196 tight oil, 121, 124–26 tough oil, 71 tourism, 39–40, 42, 46, 48, 52, 185–86 TransCanada, 186–87, 189, 196 Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851), 174, 183 Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), 184 treaty violations, 25, 33, 44, 84, 174, 183–84 Trump, Donald, 98; and energy independence, 101–2; and Paris Climate Accords, 104 Tuck, Eve, xi, 61 Tuck, Sarah, 88 Turcot DiFruscia, Kim, 143 typical characters: engendered by the boom, 76; Lukács on, 75; oil workers, 69–70, 75; white heteronormative families, 77

USA PATRIOT Act, 180 Veracini, Lorenzo, 60 violence: aesthetics of, 194–95; against Indigenous women, 23, 26, 32, 44, 64, 145–46, 163, 180, 197; against water protectors, 196; anti-Black, 182; apprehension of, 145; Sherry Arnold murder, 143–44, 147, 149, 158; and capitalism, 82, 121, 125, 129; and dark side narratives, 144–48, 159; and diagonal reading, 145, 150, 160, 165; of dispossession, 164; and fracking, 64, 98; and frontier, 24; and governance, 145, 150; and heteropatriarchy, 145, 150–51; and heterosexism, 156; and infrastructure, 207; and migrant workers, 149; national culture of, 150; and oil, 24, 32–33, 179–80; and police, 165, 175, 183, 185–86, 189–90, 196; and security forces, 174, 190; and settler colonialism, 48, 88–89, 121, 151, 166, 177, 183–85, 188, 197, 211; state, 197; and suburban development, 112; and whiteness, 23; and workers, 31 Vizenor, Gerald, 186 Vox, 158 vulnerability: aesthetics of, 33, 175–76, 181–82, 189, 192; and gender, 192–93, 193; monopoly on, 175, 181, 196–97; of oil pipeline, 177, 179, 208; and police, 165, 175–76, 181, 190, 193, 195–96; and resistance, 182; and settler colonialism, 24, 182–83, 196; state’s, 198; “vulnerability management,” 177–78, 178



Index 233

Wall Street Journal, 21 Wang, Jackie, 176, 182, 196, 198 Warren, Kelcy, 188 water: DAPL path rerouted for whites, 84; and fracking, 19, 90 water is life, 86, 174 water protectors, xii, 10, 24, 33, 87–88, 189–97; and crime, 10; and Dakota Access Pipeline, 173–75, 182–83, 185, 189–96; and oil security, 182–83, 190; and police, 174–76, 183; as threats, 192–93, 196; violence against, 196 Watts, Michael, 24, 177 We Are in Crisis (documentary), 30, 87–90, 90, 91 White Earth (documentary), 29–30, 74–75, 79–82, 83, 91 White Earth (ND), 79 white families, 29, 33, 77 white flight, 61 white masculinity, 10, 45, 52 whiteness: DAPL path rerouted for, 84; and energy independence, 112; indigenization of, 46; as last hope for opportunity, 112–13; and oil, 33; racialization of, 45; and settler families, 42, 48; and suburban development, 61, 112; and violence, 23 white settlerism, 43, 48, 112 Whitestone Massacre of 1863, 183 white supremacy, xi, 27; and Anthropocene realism, 101; and energy independence, 115; and the good life, 8; and infrastructure, 212; and masculinity, 64; and oil policy, 62; other futures unimaginable, 113; and settler colonialism, 32; and suburban development, 61, 106–7

Wiindigo, 211, 214 Williston Basin, 15, 16, 19 Williston Herald, 159, 162 Williston (N. Dak.): airport, 2–3, 3, 113, 206, 209, 211–12, 213, 214; beyond oil, 209, 212–14; billboard welcoming visitors to, 40–41, 41, 49, 52; and boomtown stories, 47; Community Guide, 2–3, 3; dwindling communal feel of, 78; economic development, 1–4, 10, 30–31; economic downturn, 7; expansion of, 59, 61; FBI office in, 150, 160–61; “The Good Life,” 114, 205, 206; invests in infrastructure, 209, 212; “last great place for opportunity,” 30, 95–96, 96, 100–102, 104, 107–8, 110–13; and news media, 159; population, 2, 22, 26, 52, 58, 64, 209; promotional video, 95–99, 96, 99, 104–5, 105, 107, 110–11, 111, 112; settler colonial narratives in, 39–42; Visitors Center, 46–47, 52; Visitors Guide, 40, 48–49, 50–51; “Williston Reimagined,” 113–14 Winston, Brian, 97 Winter Count Collective, 30, 83; We Are in Crisis (documentary), 30, 87–90, 90, 91 Wolfe, Patrick, 91 women: and care, 159; and compulsory heterosexuality, 53–59, 145; and economic development, 55–58, 62, 64; and heteropaternalism, 61; and heteropatriarchy, 60; and “I’d frack that” heteropatriarchy, 53–54, 57, 64; and news media, 154; “oil-field honeys,” 63; and settlement, 29, 41–42; and sex

234 Index work, 154–56, 162; womanhood and settler colonialism, 49. See also Indigenous women, violence against; sex workers; strip clubs wonder, 85 Woodward, Keith, 195 worker deaths, 121–24, 129–31, 135–37; and capitalism, 130, 135; culture of speed and, 128–29, 136; and precarity, 124, 130, 135 workers: and care, 160; culture of subcontracting, 128; deaths of, 12, 31; expendability of, 31–32; and

infrastructure, 207–9; safety of, 128, 137; unemployment, 22, 58, 101, 130, 144; worker camps, 59–60, 162. See also migrant workers; Occupational Safety and Health Administration; oil workers; sex workers Wounded Knee Massacre, 184, 186 Yang, K. Wayne, xi, Yellowstone River, 46 Yusoff, Kathryn, 15 Žižek, Slavoj, 109, 112