'It's Indian time!' Lawyer Jeff Haas stands up to the Dakota access pipeline.

• Author: Madeson, Frances

On the day before his seventy-fourth birthday, civil rights attorney Jeff Haas was at home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the phone with a New York City radio station. A producer for WBAI was hoping to arrange a call-in interview a few days hence at exactly the hour Haas would be driving from the airport in Bismarck, North Dakota, to an urgent meeting at the encampment where he volunteers under the auspices of the National Lawyers Guild.

But there was a problem: Much of the thirty-five-mile route from the airport to the tract of Army Corps of Engineers land where a group called Water Protectors is occupying Red Warrior Camp, Sacred Stone Camp, Spirit Camp, Oceti Sakowin Camp, and others, is beyond the reach of Verizon's cell phone towers. In the end, Haas had to travel to the tribe's casino "where the reception is good."

Haas frequently drives the two-lane oil road known as Highway 1806, named for the 1806 expedition made by Louisiana Purchase cartographers Lewis and Clark. It's worth noting that neither the sale of native homelands west of the Mississippi River nor the mapmakers' expedition were ever consented to by native peoples. In fact, Lewis and Clark were so roundly rejected by the Oceti Sakowin (the proper name for the Sioux) that the explorers characterized them as "the vilest miscreants of the savage race."

That history is alive today as the Standing Rock Sioux try with all their political might and spiritual power to run off another uninvited intrusion--this time by the Dakota Access Pipeline. As proposed, the more-than-1,000-mile pipeline, transporting oil from the Bakken formation in North Dakota, would run under Lake Oahe, the source of the tribes drinking water, and ultimately under the Missouri River, the source of drinking water for more than 12 million Americans.

With the arrest of Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Dave Archambault II, along with dozens of other Water Protectors committed to nonviolent direct action to stop "the Black Snake," the National Lawyers Guild put out a call to attorneys willing to travel to this remote part of North Dakota to provide legal defense to the tribe. Haas, who in 1971 participated as a Guild lawyer in the aftermath of the Attica prison uprising, responded to the call, in part because of his great respect for the Guild's approach to helping in societal crises.

"We endorse the movement strategy," he says. "We do not come in as lawyers and tell people what to do."

Haas has an extensive background...