A North Dakota judge just finalized erasure of Native American rights with an absurd $345 million judgment. It claims to be against Greenpeace for, among other things, defamation of Energy Transfer during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. The defamation finding is bullshit. It rests on two very political and narrow claims the jury decided: that the pipeline crossed Standing Rock Sioux tribal land, and that DAPL personnel desecrated sacred burial grounds.
Read that again.
The defamation verdict requires the court to rule that Indigenous people’s own claims about their land and sacred sites are not just disputed but demonstrably false because the billionaire white men of Big Oil say so.
That’s 1800s disinformation at work in 2026.
Erasure Mechanism
The Standing Rock Sioux’s position that the pipeline crosses their land is grounded in the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, which established boundaries the federal government subsequently ignored.
Whether the pipeline “crosses tribal land” depends on a legal framework you recognize. Do you believe in the treaty that the United States signed, or in the illegal seizures that followed?
The burial ground claim reflects what tribal members themselves reported about construction disturbance to sacred sites — reports that prompted challenges to the Army Corps of Engineers’ own environmental review as inadequate.
Greenpeace didn’t fabricate these claims. They amplified what Indigenous people were saying about their own land, their own treaties, their own sacred places. To find those statements “demonstrably false,” the jury had to accept Energy Transfer’s legal framework as the only valid one — ruling the tribe’s understanding of their territory out of existence as a prerequisite for the verdict.
The people whose dispossession created the underlying dispute got erased twice: first from their land, then from the factual record.
Oil Fumbled and Dropped the Ball to Win the Match
Energy Transfer quietly withdrew all defamation claims related to Greenpeace’s water and climate statements before trial. The core environmental and public health arguments that motivated the entire protest — the reason thousands of people showed up — were too defensible to take before a jury. What remained were narrower claims about treaty boundaries and burial grounds, reframed as simple factual falsehoods rather than the contested historical and legal disputes they actually are.
Energy Transfer’s former CEO Kelcy Warren fought to avoid deposition entirely, and the company argued that pipeline safety documents were “patently irrelevant” once they dropped the water and climate claims. Strip away the substance of the dispute, leave only the claims you can win by denying Indigenous legal standing, and call it defamation.
$50 Million Charge for a UN Report
The judgment includes tens of millions of dollars against Greenpeace International for co-signing a letter with over 500 other organizations that echoed findings from United Nations reports. The UN recognized the Indigenous position. Hundreds of organizations recognized it. A jury in Morton County, North Dakota — where the pipeline is critical infrastructure — said it was all false anyway.
Greenpeace International’s entire involvement in the on-the-ground protests amounted to six employees visiting the camps. Their real offense was lending institutional credibility to Indigenous claims that Energy Transfer needed erased.
SLAPP Architecture
North Dakota has no anti-SLAPP statute. There was no procedural mechanism to challenge the reframing of contested historical claims as defamation before it reached a jury. Energy Transfer’s first attempt was a federal RICO lawsuit — the statute designed to prosecute organized crime — which a federal judge dismissed in 2019, stating the evidence fell “far short.” So they refiled in state court with state law claims, in a jurisdiction where the pipeline moves 40% of North Dakota’s oil production.
That structure is textbook aggression: use a legal system that lacks procedural safeguards, in a venue with maximum structural bias, to convert political speech into tortious conduct. Greenpeace has countersued in the Netherlands under the EU’s anti-SLAPP Directive — the first test of that law — because the American system provided no defense against the strategy.
The Actual Verdict
Defamation doctrine distinguishes between statements of fact and expressions of opinion or rhetorical hyperbole. Protest speech has historically received strong protection precisely because reasonable listeners understand it as advocacy, not factual reporting. This verdict collapses that distinction entirely.
But the deeper problem isn’t doctrinal. It’s that the entire defamation finding is constructed on a foundation of Indigenous erasure. You can only call “this pipeline crosses tribal land” a false statement of fact if you’ve already decided that tribal land claims don’t exist. The 1851 treaty doesn’t count. The tribe’s understanding of their own territory doesn’t count. The UN’s recognition doesn’t count. Only Energy Transfer’s title, derived from the very dispossession being protested, counts.
Defamation law became the instrument for completing what the pipeline started.
The land was taken.
Now the right just to admit the truth and say it was taken has been priced by an American court at $345 million.