11/26/2025
She buried her son on a hill overlooking the river. Then a pipeline company announced plans to drill right next to his grave.
She said if she had to stand alone to stop them, she would stand.
LaDonna Brave Bull Allard knew every inch of the land where the Cannonball River meets the Missouri. Her people, the Standing Rock Sioux, had lived there for thousands of years. She had hauled water from that river as a child. She had watched her family's burial sites flood when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a dam in the 1950s.
And in 2009, she had buried her son Philip on that sacred ground.
Then in 2016, she learned that the Dakota Access Pipeline was coming. The route would cut through burial sites, sacred grounds, and run beneath Lake Oahe—the drinking water source for her entire reservation.
And it would be built right next to her son's grave.
LaDonna was 59 years old. She was a tribal historian, not an activist. She worked as Standing Rock's Historic Preservation Officer, documenting sacred sites and protecting her people's history. She knew these lands held 380 archaeological sites. Twenty-six of them were right there at the river confluence—places sacred not just to the Sioux, but to the Arikara, Mandan, and Northern Cheyenne nations.
She had spent years cataloging these sites, protecting them, making sure the world remembered her people existed here.
Now a pipeline company was going to bulldoze through them anyway.
On April 1, 2016, LaDonna made a decision. She would donate her family's land to establish a resistance camp. She called it Sacred Stone Camp, named after the spherical sandstone formations the river used to create before the government destroyed them decades earlier.
She set up tents. She started a fire circle. And she waited.
"I told Dakota Access that if I'm the only person standing, I'm standing," she said. "They will not build this pipeline."
Her reasons were both universal and heartbreakingly personal.
"It's not some grandiose 'save the world,'" she explained. "I'm just a mom. I can't conceive of anybody building a pipeline next to my son's grave."
She posted a message on social media. A call for help. A prayer that someone, anyone, would join her.
People came.
First, a few. Then dozens. Then hundreds. Indigenous youth who called themselves "ReZpect Our Water." Tribal elders who brought teachings and prayers. Representatives from other tribes who remembered their own battles with broken treaties and stolen land.
By summer 2016, Sacred Stone Camp had become something no one predicted: the largest gathering of Indigenous peoples in over a century.
Thousands of people from more than 100 tribes traveled to Standing Rock. They came from across North America and eventually from around the world. They called themselves water protectors, not protesters, because they weren't opposing something—they were defending life itself.
LaDonna stood at the center of it all, teaching about the land's history, explaining why these sites mattered, reminding everyone that this fight was about more than one pipeline.
"We say mni wiconi—water of life," she told visitors. "Every time we drink water, we say mni wiconi. We cannot live without water. I don't understand why America doesn't understand how important water is."
Then came September 3, 2016. Labor Day weekend.
LaDonna had documented sacred burial sites directly in the pipeline's path. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe had submitted this information to the courts, requesting protection for these places.
On September 3, hundreds of water protectors walked to the construction site to plant tribal flags in ceremony. They thought work had stopped for the holiday weekend.
But when they arrived, bulldozers were already destroying the exact burial grounds LaDonna had identified.
The company had bulldozed sacred sites on the weekend—before the judge could even rule on the tribe's request to protect them.
When water protectors tried to stop the destruction, private security guards unleashed attack dogs. At least six people and one horse were bitten. Security workers used pepper spray on the crowd.
The world watched the footage in horror. Dogs attacking Indigenous people trying to protect their ancestors' graves.
But the pipeline company kept building.
Throughout that fall and winter, LaDonna kept the camps going. When critics said people would leave when North Dakota winter arrived, she laughed. "I'm from North Dakota. Winter is nothing. We know how to survive."
And they stayed. The grandmothers stayed. Young people stayed. Water protectors endured subzero temperatures, blizzards, and increasingly violent confrontations with law enforcement.
Over 140 people were arrested. Many reported being strip-searched in harsh conditions. LaDonna's own daughter was strip-searched in front of male officers and left naked and freezing in a cell for hours.
But the resistance continued.
LaDonna traveled to the United Nations to speak. She wrote articles. She gave interviews. She explained over and over that this wasn't just about one pipeline—it was about the fundamental right of Indigenous peoples to protect their land, water, and sacred sites.
"We are fighting for our liberation, and the liberation of Mother Earth," she wrote. "We want every last oil and gas pipe removed from her body."
In early 2017, the government forced the camps to close. Protesters were evicted. The pipeline was eventually completed.
LaDonna returned to her home in Fort Yates, heartbroken but unbowed. She kept fighting. She turned her property into a refuge for water protectors from around the world. She continued speaking at the UN. She never stopped advocating for her people.
But something had shifted. The Standing Rock movement had awakened a global consciousness about Indigenous rights, climate justice, and the sacredness of water. The images of water protectors—the prayers, the elders, the youth, LaDonna standing by her fire—became symbols of resistance worldwide.
In 2020, LaDonna was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. She underwent surgery, but the cancer was relentless.
On April 10, 2021—exactly five years and nine days after she founded Sacred Stone Camp—LaDonna Brave Bull Allard died at age 64.
Indigenous youth on their way to another pipeline protest stopped by her house. They placed banners and signs in her yard: "We love you LaDonna" and "Water is Life." They chanted outside her window.
Her son told them: "She heard you. She knows you're here."
Even dying, LaDonna's last message was clear: "Don't be sad for me. Continue the fight."
Today, LaDonna's legacy lives in every movement that protects water. In every Indigenous community fighting pipelines. In every person who understands that clean water is a human right, not a privilege.
She proved that resistance can begin with one woman standing on her family's land, next to her son's grave, saying: "Not here. Not this. I will stand."
And when she stood, thousands stood with her.
LaDonna Brave Bull Allard didn't stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. The pipeline was built. The oil flows.
But she started something they can never build over: a global movement of people who refuse to let corporations and governments destroy sacred land and poison water without a fight.
She was just a mom who couldn't conceive of a pipeline being built next to her son's grave.
And that mother's love became a revolution.
