A cheery spirit of industry runs through the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock. You can hardly walk 50 feet without coming across someone sawing wood or pounding in tent stakes or lugging a crate of canned tomatoes to the kitchen. A small army of independent documentarians-turned-butlers scurry from tent to tipi carrying thermoses of coffee and bowls of powdered soup to tribal leaders. The lawyers in Legal Tent deliver their spiels about bail funds and the Fifth Amendment with steady compassion. The cooks in the kitchen smile as they labor over steaming, industrial-sized stockpots filled with cabbage and well-stewed meats. But the most important enterprise—and certainly the only truly accurate marker of whether or not a bunch of people can stay dug in the tundra—are the shitters. When I arrived at camp in early December, the economy of shit had mostly been handled by clusters of meticulously maintained porta-potties, each one stocked with hand sanitizer and toilet paper. This, I was assured, was only temporary—that very week, a specialist had arrived with experience with hot and cold composting toilets.
A city was being built, and although everyone agreed the city should grow, not everyone knew why. In one of the long lines for the porta-potties, I overheard a conversation that reminded me, absurdly enough, of my time in the old Condé Nast cafeteria, where I would listen in on young editorial assistants chatting about what actress had agreed to be in a sponsored-content video or what Grace Coddington had said or how they had gotten out to Montauk without having to step foot on a bus. The topics were different (as, of course, were the clothes)—the campers were talking about all the reasons why their terrible bunkmate hadn't come for the right reasons—but the tone carried the same performative, perpetual exasperation that the world and all its ugly demands had dared to get in their way.
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