Mark Ruffalo showed up. So did Taboo from the Black Eyed Peas. Dee Snider shot a music video here. Someone saw a young starlet spending all dinner at the communal kitchen getting reiki. Someone else saw the scion of a political dynasty accidentally getting the port-a-potty door swung open on him, mid-business.

From the original Sacred Stone, the camps grew north, eventually leading to the creation of what’s become the new main camp, Oceti Sakowin. (In Lakota, one of the primary languages spoken by the Sioux, Oceti Sakowin translates to the Seven Council Fires, the term used for the Great Sioux Nation at the time of its contact with the Europeans in the 17th century, before its fracturing.) In late October, working alongside state police and the North Dakota National Guard, Morton County pushed back, driving activists off a northern sprawl of the community that the activists had named Treaty Stronghold Camp. 141 people were arrested, including Johanna Holy Elk Face, age 64.

“Me and two elderly ladies were just sitting in a ditch on a log, praying,” she recalls one evening, as I give her a ride from Standing Rock to Cannon Ball. “They stood us up and handcuffed us with those plastic ties. Then they just started bringing us one by one onto school buses. I was like, ‘I haven’t sat on a jail bus in a loooong time.’ Then we seen all the buffalo running down the hill towards us. I was like, ‘Look you guys, the buffalo are gonna come and get us!’” Hours later, she was booked for trespassing. “I was telling them that I was diabetic and needed my insulin. They told me I had to wait until I got booked in and they did my profile and my fingerprints — like we were real criminals!”

Along with temporary holding pens likened by the arrestees to dog kennels, it painted the incident as a clumsy and dangerous enforcement of power. It was as effective as any call to arms. It fueled more attention, more money, more warm, loud bodies in the camps.

At one point, Morton County threatened to block the delivery of propane tanks, claiming they’d been used in attacks against law enforcement. In moments like this, you can see how a local sheriff's department can begin, perhaps almost unknowingly, to take small steps toward the language and tactics of international, entrenched power struggles: at times, Israeli authorities have put forth similar reasoning when blocking construction materials from getting to Gaza.

The barbed-wired, militarized blockade. The threatened confiscation of basic supplies. Propane can easily be used as a life-endangering flammable. But what the people in the camps would tell you they need propane for is to keep their RVs habitable in freezing nighttime temperatures. And what the folks in Gaza would tell you they need construction material for is to build houses. What they would tell you is that they’re just trying to live.