Standing With Standing Rock: Affective Alignment and Artful Resistance at the March

The protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in North Dakota created a dynamic landscape consisting of a wide-range of interwoven visual and textual narratives and political performances. In this article, I engage in participatory activism research to analyze how the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and indigenous grass root leaders deployed digital media platforms to mobilize individuals from diverse geographical locations and diverse social, racial, political, and economic backgrounds to share their artistic expression and to stand in solidarity with The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. In examining the complex visual landscape of cultural production in the form of political posters at the Native Nations Rise March in Washington D.C., I demonstrate how protest organizers produced injustice frames that mobilized individual acts of artistic expression, which politically align indigenous and non-indigenous protestors together in affective solidarity and artful resistance.