Blue Like A River: Cecily Fong and Rob Keller interview

In spite of everything, the dude abides.

Blue Like A River: Introduction

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On June 12, 2017 I drove to Fraine Barracks in Bismack to meet with Cecily Fong and Rob Keller. Fraine Barracks is the state headquarters for the North Dakota National Guard (NDNG) as well as housing other emergency service offices. It’s not far from Memorial Bridge, which was the site of protests and demonstrations. According to the NDNG website, the barracks are on the site of a former Bismarck Indian School, one of 37 non-reservation boarding schools in the nation. Before the school, it had been the site of a brewery.

You just can’t waltz into Fraine Barracks, so I gave my name to the guard at the security gate and was directed on where to go. I parked, gave my name at the reception desk, and Cecily Fong quickly greeted me and showed me to her office.

One of the first things I noticed when I walked into Fong’s office was a boxed figurine of “The Dude” character from the film The Big Lebowski sitting high up on a shelf. It really tied the room together. In the film, The Dude was ridiculously laid back, even in extreme situations.

Every once in a while, during the interview, I’d look up to the shelf and see The Dude abiding, which was hard to believe considering what I was hearing from both Fong and Keller as they shared what they’d experienced during the protest. This was especially the case at the end of the interview, when Fong played a sample of phone messages from people around the country who had left them for North Dakota law enforcement and emergency services personnel.

Imagine it: tens of thousands of nasty and negative phone calls from out-of-state people filled with every vile swear word and slur a human could muster, every disparagement and curse one could bestow on another. You could hear the voices almost cracking with hate, tripping over their tongues in search of new vulgarities to give verbal life to that hate, as if they were stringing a necklace made of evil and rage.

“You traitor, you coward, a scumbag fucking turd...you ignorant fucking piece of filth.”

“My name is Kim H. I’m calling from New York. This is like my 800th call. I’m calling to tell you how disgusted I am by you, Morton County Sheriff ’s Department, and frankly all police officers everywhere. You’re murderers. There’s nothing respectable about you. You are disgusting murders. I have absolutely no respect for the police force, and I’m a white lady. I’m just a white lady who’s 43 years old and I tell everyone and children and the world, do not trust police, they are hired murders, they do not work for the people. Look at Morton County Sheriff ’s, they’re slaughtering innocent people. You’re disgusting. You disgust me. You make me ashamed we even have a police force in America. I think you should all be fired, all police forces everywhere, because of what you do. You disgust me. You are frankly the devil. You are doing the devil’s work right now. How evil you look to the rest of the nation. You should be ashamed of yourselves, your wives should revile you, kick you out of the marital bed and refuse to allow you anywhere near their children. You’re murderers. You’re disgusting. You have no soul, and your god will absolutely decimate you upon your death. You’ll burn in hell because you are murdering innocent people. And you are disgusting because you’re doing it for money. You are filth.”

For the record, no protester was killed (“slaughtered”) by law enforcement at any point during this protest. They did not use lethal force.

“Eat shit you hypocritical piece of shit bastards, fuck you all.”

As I continued to listen, I was sure that somewhere my mother’s ears were probably bleeding by proxy.

“Morton County Sheriff ’s, you’re a bunch of pigs. You guys are shooting people that are unarmed, crossing the barricades in which they are on their rightful area, their rightful side and you are shooting them full forward. I was watching a live feed where you are shooting them in the face towards them right at their heads...you broke someone’s finger and there was blood everywhere, what the fuck is wrong with you?! What the fuck is wrong with you, you sick fucking bastards you oil snake sons of bitches! What is wrong with you? They are fighting for the water that is for your grandchildren, too. You guys are all pieces of shit there in Morton County, and this call is coming from Albuquerque, New Mexico thank you very fucking much, you assholes!”

That woman’s voice rose to a fever pitch by the end, clearly excited to say thank you at the end of her little rant.

“I just want to talk to the racist pig who would throw two women out of a restaurant using their badge. I don’t mean pig because you’re a cop, because I don’t like cops. This call is from Canada. Expect a lot more of them. You’re all over Facebook you piece of shit.”

This was but a small sample.

Fong and Keller described getting 500 messages a day as typical. When you consider the number of messages and phone calls people in this country made towards anyone involved in emergency services or in an official capacity in North Dakota, I’m surprised the country’s GDP didn’t take a hit. That’s a lot of people not working and spending their time either on Facebook or calling people about what they saw on Facebook.

Fong assured me she’d saved all of the messages, just as others I’d interviewed had told me they’d done with theirs. Whether good or not, the names and phone numbers of tens of thousands of people across the country will be forever associated with a vile recording on hard drives in North Dakota.

“What do you think I should do with them all?” Fong later joked. I suggested a greatest hits CD to bring in some money to help pay for what this protest cost the state. That’s a joke (maybe), but I can say with certainty that, regarding the people who left those disgusting messages, The Dude does not abide.

But there was one phone call. Just one, the gravelly voice of an elderly man who had been roughened by life experience, it seemed.

“Hey, you guys are doing a great job. Hang in there. Get that pipeline built. It’s gonna be environmentally sound, and it’s gonna be fine. It’s not gonna leak. Oil companies don’t want it to leak. If it leaks they’re losing money. They’re not out to lose money. So god dang it, let it go through. I live in Alaska. I’ve been around the Alaska pipeline and I’ve never seen it leak a drop. Anyways, hang in there and don’t let them daisy sniffers kick your ass. Bye.”

Dude.

In fact, this one elderly man, whose real name no one knows, was referred to by officials dealing with this protest as the “Cool Alaskan Dude”. In photos of the Joint Information Center (JIC), you could see, written on a whiteboard in the background, the phrase “don’t let the daisy sniffers kick your ass.”

Words to live by.

Please introduce yourself so readers can learn a bit more about you.

Fong: My name is Cecily Fong, and I’m the public information officer (PIO) for the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services (NDDES). I’ve been here since November 2007. I have close to 15 years experience as a PIO.

Keller: My name is Rob Keller. I was the PIO of the Morton County Sheriff ’s Department from early on. I came on around August 20th, and stayed until the end. I had retired as the PIO for the NDNG in 2008.

What was the role of NDDES during this protest?

Fong: We’re a coordinating agency. All incidents are local until local resources are no longer sufficient to respond, and then it goes up the next level to the state government. We provide a support and coordination role, procurement, logistics- -basically we provided the expertise needed from a planning standpoint in setting up the forward operating base (FOB).

Keller: There were several different people that helped at different times of the protest. We were all on the Incident Management Assistance Team (IMAT).

Fong: IMAT is a team that has specialized skills that can be used to support local emergency managers if they need it. We have people on the IMAT team that have various skill sets that they train for. If they match up with the skill set that’s needed somewhere, they will go there and they get paid through DES.

What did the early days look like for you as PIOs?

Keller: At the very beginning, we were just trying to stay ahead of the game on putting out press releases, developing a process for dealing with this type of emergency. I teach crisis communication and my whole life has been crisis communication in the military. You would think someone who had 30 plus years of crisis communication would have experience in this type of event but it kind of caught us short.

Fong: It was really unprecedented. I’m sure you’re no stranger to the #NoDAPL hashtag. There were 100,000 people posting on Twitter and Facebook and that number didn’t really change from the beginning of the protest to the end.We’re four or five people and there was just no way to get ahead of 100,000 people posting It wasn’t until the protesters moved from the camp into the cities and started angering local residents that it started to work for us because people in Bismarck and Mandan started wondering “what’s up with these people?” And then the community Facebook pages and other local community-driven social media pieces helped us a lot.

Keller: Morton County did not have a full-time PIO. We were building the plane as we flew it. As the trolls started to permeate the Morton County Sheriff ’s Department (MCSD) Facebook page, it just grew and grew. The gentleman who was the administrator was actually out on the protest and on the SWAT team, so it was neglected. About three months into it, we decided we needed to shut down the MCSD Facebook. So we shut it down for about five or six days.

Fong: It had literally been taken hostage by horrible people. It was just abusive.

I saw protesters saying Anonymous had taken it down.

Keller: No, we took it down on purpose. We had to go in and look at the terms of use and really tighten it up. Within the time that we had it down, we had 15 rogue pages identical to MCSD pop up. They were being made almost every hour, almost. And some of them looked very similar to our page. It’s a good thing we’d come across a Virtual Operations Support Team (VOST).

Fong: It’s a kind of an emerging FEMA concept where they create teams in other areas of the country. Literally from a distance, they can help support locals, particularly the PIO. VOSTs seem to be focusing on media and social media monitoring. They can provide a roll-up of “this is how you guys are in the news”, but they don’t provide any proactive help, like helping to dispel rumors. They just provide information on how you’re being presented out in the media and on social media.

Keller: We connected with the VOST team through some folks at the Bismarck Police Department, and we had a woman monitoring our site from the Washington D.C. area. We had a constable from Toronto who was monitoring our site, who was more of a Twitter person. And then we had a law enforcement person from Omaha, Nebraska. Those three really helped us in getting the terms of use right. We gave them administrative rights to go in and help us with all of that. We provided content, though.

What kind of content did you post to the MCSD Facebook page?

Keller: We changed the approach of what we put on there. Once we took it down and brought it back up, we did not link to news stories because they were high flash points.

Fong: You have to have numbers before things like this happen, and you have to ask people to share it. You have to interact with your social media audience or there’s no reason for them to come to your Facebook page.

Keller: Morton County didn’t have that base, so when the trolls took over, they kind of filtered away the ones who were supporters. Our connections in Omaha and Toronto were monitoring it almost 24/7. They also had a connection with Facebook on the inside, someone they could call and say, “Hey, this is Morton County Sheriff ’s Department. We have another rogue site up. It’s not legitimate, can you take it down?” So we were getting those 14-15 rogue sites, but they were coming down within an hour or two. That was a benefit for us.

What else did you do as far as public relations were concerned?

Keller: We have a three-inch binder that’s full of press releases. A lot of people still like the press releases, but we started to use more avenues to get the word out. “Said and Heard”, or “Myth vs. Fact”—you saw those. They developed as a result of trying to reach another audience.

Fong: People were sort of getting wrapped around the axle about the social media piece and how to get ahead of it. It became very apparent to me in the early days that there’s no way to get ahead of it, and there’s not one single message that we could send to those people that was going to change their minds. We had to come up with a different way to communicate to a different group of people. There was nothing we could say that would make those protesters go away, bottom line.

Keller: We began look at setting up the Joint Information System (JIS), which is a FEMA concept. When you have so many agencies coming in, who’s the spokesman, who’s the PIO talking about this? The Joint Information Center (JIC) came out of that. The JIC is the physical location for the JIS.

Fong: The JIC can be virtual, too. We use online methods to share all of our photos, video, press releases—it’s so any PIO can access it so we’re all on the same sheet of music. That’s why you have a JIC.

Keller: There were 14 different agencies in the JIC. Departments of Commerce, Tourism, Transportation, IT, Game and Fish, the Water Commission, Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Land Management, National Guard—at one point we had 15 PIOs from the different agencies represented on the JIC. We’d meet three times a week here at the facility. They were still autonomous back to their agency, and so Maxine and I still wrote press releases for Morton County if it was just Morton County. But if it was one or two agencies, then it came out on the JIC masthead. Whether we were putting out to international media or local media, we needed that message to stay on focus.

“[Y]ou look at a few months compared to how we have been persecuted for more than 500 years now, and they think we are all gonna go away this winter, but we live for this. This is us. — Dana Yellow Fat, SRST Tribal Council member in a November 11, 2016 interview with The Williston Herald

When did you first realize this protest was turning into something much bigger than anyone had imagined?

Fong: For me it was October. October 27th was when we had that big initial push, and that was shocking to me. Keep in mind that down in the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) we’re watching it happen because we’ve got Nest cameras down there. We were able to see in real time, in some cases, what was happening. And we had the feed from the Highway Patrol plane that flew overhead during that whole October 27th incident. Never having participated in anything like this, it was just jaw-dropping to watch it unfold. As you know, that was the day when Red Fawn Fallis popped off three rounds and one went through the pant leg of a law enforcement officer, so you’re just watching the whole thing unfold and it was, internally, very unsettling to me. I think there was a lot of belief out there that winter was going to shut it down. When that didn’t happen, it was alarming to me.

Keller: For me, it was early on. There were a lot of firsts. For example, 100 plus tribes come together under one flag—if you’ve studied any Native American history, it was huge! Absolutely huge! There was an alarm in my mind early on but I didn’t know what it meant until that day in October.

Fong: We saw what they were capable of. I think Sheriff Laney summed it up really well in that news conference where he said that your beliefs, no matter how strongly held they are, do not supersede other people’s rights. The other really unfortunate thing for Standing Rock, I think, is the extent that outside actors coopted their imagery and the optics of the historic trauma. This had nothing to do with Native American sovereignty. It’s not on their land. Ultimately this will have a profound impact on our relationship with the tribe. Think of the number of people out there who will never go back to Prairie Knights Casino. That’s going to have long-term significant economic ramifications down there.

Keller: Not only that, but I’m looking at southern Morton County where there are ranchers who have been there for generations who have done commerce in Ft. Yates, school kids have gone to Selfridge and Solen, marriages that have happened—so how do we get back to that?

Do you think we can get back to how it was?

Keller: The relations have been strained. I think we can get back to that, and I think Governor Burgum is on the right track to create listening sessions and dialogue so we understand, because there are concerns on the reservations. There are issues on the reservation, and so maybe this can bring attention to some of those issues after this pipeline is all said and done. What can we do for our relationship with Sioux County? What did we learn from this? Where do we go from here? And I think, despite what the rest of the world thinks, North Dakota is on the right track to create and continue on that dialogue.

Fong: Scott Davis has been helpful. He gets both sides, you know? He has a lot of insight.

Keller: The only drawback is that I wish we would have had him at the beginning. But because of the different administrations—two presidents, two governors—

Fong: —with very different approaches! It was like a complete swing.

Tell me about that issue with two different administrations; I’ve heard comments similar to that from others.

Fong: I don’t want to be critical of the previous governor’s administration, but I think they just thought the protest was going to go away. And so at least initially, I felt like we had our hands tied. There was a moment, for a blip in time, where they didn’t even want us talking about it publicly. And then Burgum came in and really wanted to lean forward and provided us with some direction.

Keller: The state may not have been able to say anything, but as Morton County I could say anything as PIO.

What kind of public response were you fielding?

Fong: I listened to what we called the “kook line”, a Morton County number that forwarded to a state line. There’s no point in engaging with these people in a phone call, so they would just forward them to this state line that we set up that had a polite voice message inviting them to share their thoughts. So I was fielding their phone calls, watching their voicemails. Tens of thousands of recorded messages.

Wow.

Keller: I know. How do you handle that? Who has the time?!

Fong: Nearly 90,000 calls and voicemails. Over 100 public records requests. Over 9,000 emails and written correspondence.

Were a majority of these emails and calls out of state?

Fong: Oh, yes. And mostly women. Two-thirds were women. Maybe two-thirds of them were polite—

Keller: Not the ones I took.

Fong: (laughs) It’s like, “you kiss your kids with that mouth?” The profanity was unsettling to me.

Keller: We had two phones. At first we were using our own, but we got two iPhones and I could always tell when an incident happened down at the protest site.

Fong: Phones would blow up.

Keller: Within ten to fifteen minutes, we’d start getting the calls here on our phones. At first we’d try to pick them up, but they were reading from a script.

I saw some of those scripts online.

Keller: I could always tell. “The world is watching.” So we knew not to answer those. But that really went at the heart of what public information is. We respond to our phones.

Fong: It feels weird not to answer our phones. We’re public information officers. We’re supposed to be helpful and provide info.

Keller: So we had to let it roll over to voice mail. Fong: Plus, they’re from out of state. We owe them nothing. All of this squawking about “we’re taxpayers!”—well, you’re not taxpayers in North Dakota. I owe you nothing.

Keller: If a voicemail was over thirty seconds, it was always a protester. If it was under thirty, it was legitimate media, so we would call those back. Almost 90 percent of the time, that’s the way it was. I’ve had five-minute voicemails.

When people leave nasty phone calls, obviously you have their number. What do you do with them all?

Fong: I save them all. I personally didn’t get to all 27,000 that I have in my possession. But I got to quite a few.

Keller: Every morning I’d hear her listening to a few. For a while we’d get about 400 a day.

Fong: It spiked after the November incident with the water hoses. My highest day would have been 5500 calls, forwarded to me.

Did law enforcement hear those voicemails?

Fong: I kept that completely away from them. There are some that would hurt them. I just couldn’t do it. But you would talk to the media who contacted you, right?

Keller: I can deal with the New York Times, the Washington Post, left, right, the major organizations, the local ones. One thing we always told our JIC is that the national media is great, but when this is all said and done, we go back to our local media. But when the “alternative media”, the fake news people would come in—

Fong: —they’re becoming a huge segment. They’ve got an agenda. It’s like journalism for a cause.¹

Keller: I’d never heard of Unicorn Riot until this.

Fong: Thank god for them, by the way. We got a lot of good imagery from them. In real time.

Unicorn Riot? Their videos actually helped law enforcement?

Fong: We’d watch them on Facebook and sometimes they had a better vantage point about what was happening.

Keller: They’d show up at the Morton County Sheriff ’s Department to talk to the PIO. The ladies at the front desk had to take so much guff. They’d come over and say “hey, we’ve got a supposed reporter out there.” We probably had twenty-five, thirty show up. I’ll talk to anyone, and if you’re honest and open and transparent to me, I can be the same to you. But I’d walk out there and if you have scraggly clothes, you smell like smoke and couple that with body odor, and you say you’re a stringer for the L.A. Times...sure.

Fong: There was just no credibility.

Keller: A reporter from Al Jazeera came in and there were four or five around him. I went out to talk to them. I’m a fast talker, so I talked very slow and without doing a lot of detail. That was turned against me when it went online. So the policy we implemented was we will talk to them out in the hallway when they come in, but if you’re a stringer for a major publication, I need a phone number and the contact information of the person you are marketing your story to. Or, if you haven’t marketed it yet, I want the name of the person you are going to call. I also need two examples of something you’ve written.

Fong: We were quite circumspect and thoughtful about putting this credentialing piece together. I went out and looked at a lot of different credentialing policies from different states and organizations, and I picked and chose based on what we were experiencing. The people who were giving us the biggest amount of trouble were people who were basically activists down there with a camera who were saying they were journalists and just making up whatever they wanted to fit their own narrative. I put together a policy for this purpose, because we didn’t want them hijacking our news conferences over at the law enforcement center when we had the sheriff there, or at the governor’s office. A lot of these people appeared to have fairly erratic behavior.

I read reports of meth or other drug use in the camps.

Fong: On February 22nd we did this sort of media tour down there, the day before they cleared the camp. Dan Gunderson, a reporter from Minnesota Public Radio, had been to the camps over the course of the entire protest, so he had experienced it over a variety of circumstances and over a broad time frame. His personal observation was that after that peak in October, the camp population became weirder and weirder. For him, it was like there was something mentally ill about these people. And then you had all of those other, secondary proofs of that. You know, chemtrails were spraying them, or we gave them the DAPL cough, or we made that storm happen. I mean, that’s tinfoil hat stuff. That’s not healthy.

Was that the only time you heard of possible drug use?

Fong: I did hear about some from the guy from High Plains Reader.

Hagen?

Fong: Yes. I took him down there on the 22nd in my little media van. He was very supportive of the protest movement. He told me that he interviewed someone in a yurt or tipi, and it was clear that there were drugs. He saw it with his own eyes.

You know, he never reported that.

Fong: No, I know. I don’t get it.

Oh, I get it.²

Keller: It goes against what their agenda is.

Did the “journalists” credential themselves?

Keller: When we gave them that information, probably only one responded back. They weren’t going to get an interview from me until we credentialled them. They’d hold up “press badges” but that doesn’t tell me anything. That was such an insult to the legitimate media who come with all kinds of credentials, someone trying to imitate a valid press reporter. Some of these legitimate folks were with agencies we had embedded with our units in Iraq!

Fong: And those people, all they really wanted to do was to try to convince you of how horrible this was, not actually ask questions. There was no point in even having the conversation. Social media is an echo chamber. So it’s all of these people who agree with one another posting and sharing creating a preference prison because Facebook delivers to you based on what you click on. So it anticipates your preferences and starts to send you stuff they think you’re going to want to see based on your clicks. That’s a problem. You basically get stupider and stupider. Behavioral research shows that you cannot change a person’s mind with facts. They don’t want to hear it. You’re not going to change their mind. It’s through emotion.

There were definitely a lot of emotional people. How many protesters do you estimate came up here?

Fong: We think at the height it was around eight thousand people. But we also think that over the entire course that there were 40,000 unique visitors.

Keller: Had all 40,000 come against us we’d have been overrun, no doubt. There were teachers who took their kids down to the camp at the beginning to see the colorful dresses and the dances, and that was cool.

Fong: It really was!

Keller: That’s what started permeating out into all of the world, that image. “How could this protest happen with this peaceful people here?” I have no doubt that there were some great people who came there to experience the moment. We weren’t concerned about those people. It was those two to five hundred agitators with what I call “scripted violence” that concerned us. We were told when you checked in at the camp you were asked if you were here to be peaceful and prayerful, you go to this group, are you here to be media, ok you get camp credentials and go to this group, if you’re here to get arrested, over here, are you here to make a statement—people were partitioned out.

Were they actually doing that, partitioning them out?

Keller: I’m sure as they came in they were because our law enforcement was able to see the same individuals who were agitators. Part of that is when you hear terms “we want the arrestables up front.”

I did hear that. I was in downtown Bismarck that day, when I heard that during a protest on 3rd Street.

Keller: There were probably planners who had been military before and knew techniques. We call that TTP: techniques, tactics, procedures. You never give that out. We always change it because once you watch it long enough, it becomes known.

Fong: We watched them using sort of standard tactical military techniques, trying to flank law enforcement. The November night that they got sprayed with water— that was because they were flanking. They would have run right through that law enforcement line had they not resorted to the water hose. It was a last resort.

Keller: You see them send the arrestables up front for passive resistance—you know, “you’re going to be arrested so just lay down.” For some of these people it was a badge of honor to get arrested for a misdemeanor. Once the Morton County Sheriff ’s Department started changing it to inciting a riot or engaging in a riot, to a felony, or when the sleeping dragons became a felony, that dropped off. They don’t want to be arrested for a felony. That goes on your record. Now you have a trial. It was that small percentage that started to create the problems for law enforcement. And our law enforcement, if you were able to talk to them, would be able to tell you specific individuals who were problems. Some were always in the back and the peaceful ones up front.

So the peaceful ones were sent to the front?

Fong: Oh sure, yeah. Absolutely. It’s the optics.

Keller: They’d ask “do you want to go, do you want to march?” Not everyone at the camp wanted to do that. Some just wanted to be part of this hippie festival moment.

Fong: There was probably a brief period of time where it did have a festival like atmosphere to it, when the banners were flying pretty and the dancing was happening.

Keller: But there was that other segment which was really why law enforcement was there. That’s what I heard from our law enforcement on the radio and just talking to them—they were not concerned about the main camp and those who were there for the experience. It was the ones who came forward and were inciting.

The protesters often claimed they had PTSD from their experience.

Keller: Coming from Iraq and with our soldiers, there is PTSD, the disorder. There is also PTS. Everyone can go through PTS. When it starts to consume your life and other things, then it starts to become a disorder.

Fong: I felt like I had been held hostage. I’m in the EOC and I’m watching it and that was one kind of stress, right? Because law enforcement could get hurt, something tragic could happen—but it was almost worse when they weren’t doing something, because you had no idea what they were up to. So it was like “should I go ride my horse?” No, I’m not going to go ride my horse because if I’m in the middle of the pasture and my phone starts to blow up with a code red, that creates another stressful situation because I have to race back. So I just kind of binged Netflix for the 233 days because I could push pause on that.

I imagine you worked long hours.

Keller: I’m an early riser, so I was there early. I pulled 10, 12, 14 hours a day for almost the full time. I remember October I only had three days off.

Fong: We were in anywhere between 6:30 and 7 in the morning most days.

Keller: And then the code red, I was there until two or three in the morning. The only thing I can liken this to is a deployment, though it was the worst kind of deployment because they’d come home every night, and repeat it every day...and you couldn’t talk about it at all.

Fong: We were under OpSec—operational security—rules. You can’t share what was going on. The EOC was on lockdown, so if you didn’t have a reason to be in the basement you were not allowed in the basement. We had to do all of our own janitorial, because no one who wasn’t directly involved could be down there. There was a code at the door. It was the right way to do it.

What did you do when the protest was over?

Keller: Once we started to wind down, one of the questions I asked our team was, what stories haven’t we told? We worked really hard for law enforcement spouses to share their stories, and we actually pitched it to the National Sheriff ’s Association. They helped get it to the Washington Times or Post, I can’t remember which one.

I’m guessing it wasn’t the Post.

Keller: Those women were phenomenal. They spoke for hundreds of other spouses. They and their families went through so much people weren’t aware of.

I imagine you had your own somewhat sketchy experiences.

Keller: One night I had two or three suspicious cars near my house and my neighbors would go out and walk up to them and they’d drive down and turn around and park at the other end of the street. They wouldn’t leave my block. And I always, being military, vary my route home. I taught others, Maxine especially, “when you go home, look in the rearview mirror.”

Fong: I kept my eyes in the rearview mirror all the time.

Keller: “When you pull into your block and if someone is following you, go past it. And if they follow you either go to a law enforcement station or a safe public spot” It was wonderful to watch the spouses talk. Tears, but they were finally able to tell their story and I’m glad that it came out.

I’m going to shift gears a bit. I’m sure you’re aware of the articles in The Intercept, regarding the use of the private security company TigerSwan. What can you tell me?

Fong: It’s totally being mischaracterized. Did TigerSwan and Leighton Security and all those folks interact with law enforcement? Yes. It was information sharing. They provided a daily sort of tactical status report, the equivalent of what would be considered an operations briefing. “Here’s today at a glance, these are the sites we’re going to be working at…” It was basically done as a courtesy.

So they were just providing information they already had to let you know what they knew?

Fong: Yes.

Keller: Say for example a farmer was going to do a burn on his ranch. He would call the local fire district to let them know that he was going to do that. He wouldn’t have to, but it’s for safety so that if there’s a fire problem, the fire department knows where to go. Knowing what happened up and down the pipeline and where there were flashpoints was was about good patrolling in the county for the sheriff ’s department. We needed to know where the activity was.

Fong: It was purely for coordination. We shared some assets, like that yellow helicopter they used, which was contracted out. They provided us imagery from that helicopter, or they would let a law enforcement person go on board to provide video footage, which is basically creating situational awareness for the folks who are working up at the TOC and the folks working out of the EOC. That was purely a courtesy. But this notion that there was some vast conspiratorial response between local law enforcement and TigerSwan is complete and utter bunk. TigerSwan was not allowed off of Cannonball Ranch property or off easements. They had no jurisdiction anywhere down there. Now, were some of the security guys jerks? Oh yeah. They got the radio frequencies for the protesters, and started basically goading and baiting them. That was not cool. That was not being a good neighbor. That just riled them up.

Would you say that made it more difficult for law enforcement?

Fong: Yes, absolutely. Private security absolutely did not get involved in law enforcement. Their sole purpose was to protect the drill pad, company equipment, and manage the security for that specific space, the lawful easements and the Cannonball Ranch, which they purchased.

Keller: There are always going to be leaks, like those that are in The Intercept. At the very beginning, there was information getting out that Sheriff Kirchmeier would come into the TOC and get after whoever had released it. I mean, it was damaging because it gave away a technique, tactic, or procedure. And that’s why we had signs in our TOC that said “who has a need to know?”

Fong: Who else needs to know? And that’s two-fold. Don’t say it if they don’t need to know it, but tell them if they need to know it.

Keller: What we’re taught in the military is that if twenty people have different unclassified information, it’s like a puzzle. You put those twenty pieces of unclassified information together, now it could become classified. So you have to be cautious. The protesters watched when our people went code red. When our units were coming in from Minnesota, we knew about it because it was on Facebook! They had people in Fargo going on Facebook saying “hey, there’s a group coming towards Bismarck.” On the flip side, if you were able to talk to some of the detectives, they’ll tell you that the protesters’ live stream was our best intelligence.

So maybe less intel came from TigerSwan, and more from the protesters’ own live feeds?

Fong: We relied so much on social media to get information.

There were so many rumors swirling about during the protest. For example, did you jam cell phones?

Fong: We did not have that equipment, for the love of God. Why would we jam it when we need our cell phones too? It’s so ridiculous.

It seems Morton County was made out to be the inept Keystone Cops and also technologically advanced at the same time, according to protesters.

Fong: That’s a very good point. You can’t have it both ways. Cell reception is spotty down there at best, and when you have thousands of people trying to livestream on Facebook, there’s just not enough bandwidth.

Did you spray the camp with chemicals?

Fong: When you look at the footage that was supposed to show us spraying? First of all, it’s a crop plane. We’re familiar with crop planes in this state. That helicopter came over a ridge and probably freaked the pilot out.

One thing people probably don’t know is that crop sprayers often don’t have radios.

Fong: Right, so he was—what’s it called—when they drop oil on the manifold so it makes a white smoke? It’s just like at an air show.

Basically putting out a smoke plume to let the helicopter know he was there.

Fong: That’s exactly what he was doing, when you look at that footage. So all that smoke is there. And then we have officers standing right there without gas masks. Now, on what planet would we gas our own officers?

How did you combat the various rumors?

Fong: In August, I got a phone call from Snopes—that was my first win, when Snopes asked “you didn’t shut off their water supply?” and “you’re not blocking their cell service?”

Did Snopes ask hard questions and report it accurately on their website?

Fong: Absolutely, and I provided a statement to them that they printed in full.

Keller: You know what those rumors do? The event may not have happened, but GoFundMe account dollars go up. At the last count by our folks, it was $14 million with the sites we’re aware of, with GoFundMe and other crowdsourced funding. I hope Congress looks at this stream of funding because you could probably have a million dollar account and never have to have it accountable.

Fong: Never pay taxes on it.

Keller: GoFundMe gets something like 5%, so right there we know GoFundMe was making loads of money off of this event.

Were you frustrated with the lack of federal assistance you received?

Fong: Oh yes. Both state administrations very proactively asked for federal resources, and basically we had injects in the JOC and the TOC from the Justice Department, the FBI, Corps of Engineers—they participated more from a standpoint of just situational awareness. So Justice and FBI provided some intel services. They helped our intel unit keep tabs on protesters, but that was all pretty much open source stuff.

So it wasn’t really boots on the ground?

Fong: Well, they were here, but we’re talking only about three or four people.

Keller: There was Customs and Border Patrol. They had about twelve officers here. They were the only ones to help, and that was only at the intervention by our congressional delegation to get them here.

Fong: And they provided civil rights attorneys to monitor our law enforcement and staff, to make sure we weren’t abusing protester rights.

The federal government did?

Fong: Yeah. Isn’t that interesting? No actual boots on the ground to help us police this protest, but people to police us.

What did you think about the media coverage of the protest? I’ve noticed a pattern of frustration in people regarding a local reporter—

Fong: Caroline Grueskin.

Right. So, do you feel like there was even an attempt to get as much information from you as there was from protesters.? Do you feel media was trying to be even-handed?

Fong: Some were trying to be even handed. I don’t think that there is a single local reporter who would deny the fact that there is historical trauma associated with Native American tribes, and that that historical trauma is fairly fresh. It’s not like the Picts and the Saxons from 1200 years ago. They have an oral tradition, so I’m sure that there have been stories that have been shared. I think that there was maybe a lean towards the protesters because of that, and the two that did that the most would be Caroline Grueskin and Lauren Donovan. Another local reporter started off that way until he got threatened down there, and then they took a kind of more critical approach. I think they started to realize that the Native piece was very separate from the protest piece, and that to confuse the Native optic with what was really going on down there was a mistake. On the national level, because there was that strong Native American optic, there was a romanticizing of that picture and of what they were fighting for.

Keller: And that became world-wide, because of the indigenous narrative.

Fong: That was unfortunate because basically the Native Americans were just being used. At the end of the day, the impacts in Sioux County are going to be enormous. I mean, this impacted people in Cannon Ball, this impacted ranchers. It’s going to impact the casino. It’s impacting relationships. All because they allowed themselves to be co-opted, because they were the center of attention! It probably felt great for a while.

Keller: People saw a lot of the other side, of the protest and the general camp itself, because it was accessible. A reporter could not go down and cover law enforcement just by driving down there. We had gatekeepers. You had to have a reason for being there. So we turned down a lot of interviews for the sheriff and others because we knew they weren’t going to tell the story. And, at the beginning, because there was a lot of TTP, law enforcement didn’t really want a lot of media going down there. That’s why I went down there, that’s why Tom Iverson, or other law enforcement folks who were journalists, would go there. It wasn’t until later on that we went through a vetting process and allowed other journalists to go there. Of course, we always try to work with our local media. And for the most part, they did great, with the exception of the Bismarck Tribune. And yes it was Caroline who I’ve had issues with. Do you want to hear about it?

Yes, actually. A few people in the community groups had some issues with her, and I had contact with her as well. It’s becoming a kind of theme that pops up in nearly every conversation about media I’ve had.

Keller: So, I’m riding my motorcycle to Alaska, to the Arctic Circle, this summer [2017]. I called the Bismarck Tribune city editor, because the last time I did this, they ran a story. The city editor said she’d have a reporter call me. Well, Caroline was assigned the story. She did the interview, but she asked me if she could link the motorcycle story to the protest! I asked her why she wanted to do that. The angle was that the ride was my stress reliever after all of this, and I’m riding along the Alaskan pipeline. I said no. The protest had nothing to do with this trip. But she did mention in the story I was retired as a PIO for DAPL. It’s a mentality, trying to connect things that aren’t connected.

I had an email exchange with Caroline asking why she covered a story in a particular way; it was a similar situation, connecting unrelated stories in an attempt to string together a narrative.

Keller: We had an incident where we had a huge protest going down south of St. Anthony, blocking roads, and trying to get to the sites along the pipeline route. I’m watching it live on the protesters’ feeds, and Sheriff Kirchmeier says “Is that Caroline?” I saw that it was. “Well you tell her that if she crosses over into private property she is going to be arrested.” So, I called her. “Caroline, we’re watching you. Please don’t cross over onto private property or our law enforcement will arrest you.” She meekly replied “OK, thank you,” and didn’t cross the property line. That’s not all. We’d send out press releases of what factually happened. About 75 percent of the time, she’d quote someone down at the protest as the factual reality of what happened, but she’d quote our press release as “alleged”. Alleged. Alleged. Alleged. I don’t get upset a lot but that boiled me up. No, it wasn’t alleged! It was a factual statement by observers and witnesses of what happened. So then we go to the time we had the protest across the Burlington Northern track. Do you remember that day?

Fong: They parked a truck on the tracks, popped the tires, and shoved a rag into the gas tank.

Keller: It didn’t burn thank goodness, but that’s a federal offense. You just blocked a federal railway.

Fong: You can’t block interstate commerce.

Keller: So we were getting good images and making arrests, but what happened was the law enforcement in Mandan had stopped traffic because they were looking for someone who had been seen slashing tires when we were down on Highway 6 by St. Anthony. The Louisiana law enforcement had parked their cars along the highway, and someone walked by and slashed the tires. They thought they saw the suspect in this lineup of cars, which was perfect. Now we had a chokepoint of the officers pushing back to the east to Mandan, which is about a mile, and all of these cars were locked in there. I’m with another officer. I’m walking along and I’m videotaping license plates and occupants. You should’ve seen everyone. They were caught! So I come up to this Subaru, license plate North Dakota. There sits the driver, and it’s Caroline. I didn’t say anything. I kept walking by. She didn’t say anything, but kept looking straight ahead. She was caught. She was in that protest. I got back and I started talking to other officers, and one of the officers said “I saw Caroline down there, she was in that protest.” She had been pepper sprayed, and she had the milk of magnesia on her face. She had two protesters in her car, giving them a ride. I didn’t do anything, but I found out later that the assistant police chief at Bismarck PD called her into the office and said “you did this.” That happened. She was caught in that. I was always going to talk to the editor. I should have, but didn’t. But everyone who saw her writing could surely tell what her angle was.

Do you think situations were created for the benefit of media?

Keller: Yes.

Fong: February 22nd, that day when they cleared the camps? When the protesters lit everything on fire? I was down there, with the media. You could feel the concussion of it when the stuff blew up. It was raining and it was snowing and it was explosion after explosion and the place reeked. The propane smell and whatever else—I mean it was horrible. And it was just fire, fire, fire. The protesters did that. It was like eye candy for the media.

Are you getting a lot of contacts or training requests from other places due to your experiences from the protest?

Fong: Oh yes. It’s not top secret that many other states have reached out and asked how we’ve dealt with this. Sheriff Kirchmeier has been at the National Sheriff ’s Association. There are some folks that see this particular model as probably the trend for the future. Leveraging the GoFundMe angle, leveraging the whole emotional aspect to raise money for your cause, the notion of being on federal land. I mean, they were lawfully, legally protesting while on tribal land. It wasn’t until they trespassed that it became a problem.

Hopefully they are paying attention in other states.

Fong: For the first month, we were like deer in headlights. It was incomprehensible that it had happened, and the the Corps wouldn’t let us clear it when it was small. Could you imagine if we could have cleared it when there were only 20 people on Corps land? Because there were only 20 people there at one point.

Keller: What I hear now is that the moment one tipi goes on Corps land, we’re going in.

Did this protest have an impact on North Dakota tourism?

Keller: Yes, I think if you watch the numbers and compare 2016 with other years, you’ll see an impact. Was it that people didn’t want to come because they thought North Dakota was so evil, or they were afraid to come?

Fong: Both. I’ve listened to several voicemails. What about hunters? I’m guessing hunters won’t come out if they think there’s a riot here.

Keller: That’s another thing. It was deer hunting season, among others. I’m sure it had that kind of impact.

Fong: Game and Fish says that no animal will use that for habitat for at least ten years, because of the smells associated with it, all of the human activity.

I’d read that the Historical Society was collecting items from this for their collection?

Keller: Yes, the historical society wanted artifacts from this. Morton County gave them some of the shields we confiscated.

Fong: I gave them C-wire. I offered up a painted jersey barrier (laughs). They opted not to take it. It’s 4,000 pounds.

(Rob Keller had to leave. Fong began showing me the photographs she had taken, some of which are used in this book.)

You were in the camps when they were cleared. What did you see in them?

Fong: That’s the other piece of this that has to be addressed, the hypocrisy of how nearly every single thing down there existed because of petroleum. That included cars, nylon, Patagonia polar fleece, chairs, water bottles, all that stuff coming here, the whole transportation chain of how goods get places, food—everything.

If you tell them, they respond that you have to use the system at hand, the products, in order to stop it, but once we get to where we don’t need them, then we won’t do this.

Fong: Absolutely without a doubt, there needs to be a larger discussion about our energy policy. Do we need to be gravitating towards green sources of energy? Yes, as they become economically viable. And those policies and conversations need to be had. But you can’t just shut the spigot off. It won’t work that way.

What was the human waste situation like in the camp when you saw it?

Fong: In some cases they had latrine pits. They have to be cleaned up. You can’t leave them out there. You have to dig them out, which the health department did, wearing gas masks.

Did you see wasp spray? I’d heard they were using that to spray defensively.

Fong: You can see it in some of the photos. We were worried about that. We literally got reports from Ace, Lowes, and I think Menards called in one time, to tell us that a group of protesters had come in and bought a bunch of Raid. We were worried that they were going to weaponize it.

Did you return their sacred items that you found after the camp was cleared?

Fong: We were careful about that. I understand their importance, and wanted to respect that. We didn’t doze them. We returned everything of that nature.

1. Fong’s comment about “journalism for a cause” is both true and troubling. Prior to reporting for the Bismarck Tribune, Caroline Grueskin had worked for The Marshall Project (themarshallproject.org). The Marshall Project calls itself a “nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system” with a wide variety of articles that tend to lean left. I queried one source about the kind of influence that might affect a reporter covering the protest. The source pointed me to specific Bismarck Tribune stories to illustrate a pattern of showing a particular law enforcement angle, in which those opposing law enforcement were depicted sympathetically and personally, as victims wrapped in atmospheric descriptions, while law enforcement tended to be one-dimensional.

I noticed this in The Intercept (and other publications) as well, in which law enforcement or North Dakota officials seemed to be quoted mechanically only to serve as a foil for protester descriptions and claims. Additionally, writers would use passive voice to describe negative protester actions. For example:

“And a woman named Red Fawn Fallis faces three federal felony charges — after a gun went off when officers tackled her to the ground on the day of the Treaty Camp raid.”

The way this is written, Fallis didn’t shoot; the gun magically “went off ” through no fault of her own. The officer’s October 26, 2016 sworn statements, however, place the gun in her left hand. She later said, on the transport bus, that she was trying to pull the gun out of her pocket while resisting arrest when it went off, and that they were lucky she didn’t “shoot all you fuckers.” Her legal team said those were un-Mirandized statements and moved to suppress them in October 2017. It is not disputed that Fallis was a convicted felon in possession of a gun at the protest at the time of her arrest.

From: “The Battle Of Treaty Camp” The Intercept. First Look Media, 27 Oct. 2017. Web. 28 Oct. 2017.

2. On June 8, 2017 I emailed Christopher Hagen with the High Plains Reader, taking him to task about using the newly-dumped ex-girlfriend of a man as a source for his story on private security tactics, noting that she might not be the most agnostic source.