Marcus Mitchell, who was severely injured when a bean bag pellet entered his eye socket, was charged with trespassing after protest

Marcus Mitchell lay facedown on the snowy North Dakota prairie, blood pouring through the gaping wound on the left side of his face. It was just past midnight on 19 January 2017, and a Morton county sheriff’s deputy had just shot the 21-year-old indigenous activist with a bean bag pellet amid a demonstration near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation against the Dakota Access pipeline. The lead pellet entered Mitchell’s left eye socket, shattering the orbital wall of his eye and his cheekbone, and ripping open a flap of skin nearly to his left ear.

Paramedics brought Mitchell to the Sanford medical center in Bismarck, North Dakota, where hospital personnel removed the lead pellet from his face. But the harrowing ordeal was only beginning.

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Law enforcement officers and hospital staff concealed Mitchell’s whereabouts from family members and supporters, who spent a frantic day and a half searching for him, multiple witnesses say. When a group of family members and legal workers finally discovered him on the hospital’s fourth floor, he was shackled to a gurney.

More than 18 months later, Mitchell, who is Dine’ (Navajo), is being prosecuted in relation to the incident, even as the police officers involved appear to have faced no repercussions. He faces class A misdemeanor charges of criminal trespass and obstruction of a government function, which carry a collective maximum sentence of two years in prison and a $6,000 fine. His trial is scheduled for 8 November in Mandan, North Dakota.

For almost the whole time I was in the hospital, I couldn’t even speak for myself, but they still interrogated me Marcus Mitchell

The Morton county sheriff’s department declined a request to comment on this story, citing Mitchell’s forthcoming trial.

Mitchell has permanently lost vision in his left eye and partially lost hearing in his left ear. He can no longer feel or taste in parts of his face. His cervical spine was also damaged, leading to extreme bruising of the discs and nerves in the back of his head.

As police officers kneeled atop him, torquing his arms behind his back to place him in handcuffs, he says he felt like he was drowning in his own blood.

Mitchell’s injury is one of the most gruesome to occur during the months-long struggle against the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL), which drew tens of thousands to the northern Great Plains but was met with oft-ruthless repression by police and private security officers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dakota Access pipeline water protectors demonstrate in February 2017. Photograph: ddp USA/Rex/Shutterstock

Mitchell was initially reluctant to draw attention to his experience, he says, but as the battle against the pipeline continues to inspire indigenous-led struggles against resource extraction, including fights against pipelines from Louisiana to British Columbia, he is now ready to tell his story to the world.

“People in the movement need to know what happened to me,” he says.

Two months before Mitchell was shot, he was studying mechanical engineering at Northern Arizona University when several classmates showed him live streams of police spraying DAPL opponents with water hoses amid sub-freezing temperatures and shooting them with rubber bullets and concussion grenades. The following day, he dropped out of school and hitchhiked to North Dakota. He played numerous roles at the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Fires) Camp, including medic and fire-tender.

The night of Mitchell’s injury marked a turning point in the police’s treatment of the activists known as water protectors. Several participants who spoke to the Guardian feel that police became unrestrained in their brutality because Donald Trump, who has often encouraged violence against his political opponents, was to be inaugurated the following day.

“I was out there on every frontline action, and I saw and felt a whole different energy from the police that night,” says the Oglala Lakota water protector Candi Brings Plenty, who was part of the Oceti Sakowin Camp for six months.

The police arrested 21 people, including Mitchell. After a paramedic sedated him, he awoke in the middle of the surgery to remove the pellet from his eye. While Mitchell was shackled to his bed, two North Dakota bureau of criminal investigations officers questioned him, legal filings show. Mitchell says their questions concerned the possibility of weapons in the water protector camps and protesters’ upcoming plans.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mitchell in the hospital. Photograph: Courtesy Marcus Mitchell

“I was drugged out of my mind by the medications,” Mitchell says. “For almost the whole time I was in the hospital, I couldn’t even speak for myself, but they still interrogated me.”

In the meantime, supporters began worrying after Mitchell failed to appear at an arraignment hearing several hours after his arrest. “We started to get concerned that they had basically disappeared this person,” says Garrett Fitzgerald, a volunteer legal worker from Minnesota who helped track down Mitchell.

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Friends and legal workers, including Fitzgerald, called around to the sheriffs, the jail and the state’s attorney, all of whom claimed not to know Mitchell’s whereabouts. When the group visited the Sanford medical center, staff claimed to have no record of him in their system. Mitchell says a nurse had removed the phone in his room to prevent him from making calls.

“Sometimes, when patients are in custody, law enforcement will choose not to have them listed in our medical directory or take other measures for security purposes,” a Sanford health center spokesman, John Berg, said.

An armed security guard who identified himself as working for Bismarck-Mandan Security Inc was stationed in Mitchell’s room. Mitchell says he eventually convinced the guard to let him borrow a cellphone, allowing him to phone his grandmother, after which a family member posted his location on Facebook. When legal workers and family members arrived, the security guard told them the Morton county sheriff’s office had directed him not to allow any visitors. But he soon agreed to un-cuff Mitchell from his bed.

After Mitchell’s supporters transported him to Minnesota for further medical treatment, the Morton county sheriff responded by issuing an arrest warrant. It was later quashed by a North Dakota judge.

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“I think what happened to Marcus was just as brutal, if not more brutal, than any other injury that the police caused at Standing Rock,” says the Cheyenne River Sioux tribal member Joye Braun, an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network who was injured by police during the same demonstration. “And it’s made even worse because they kidnapped him.”

Since leaving Standing Rock, Mitchell has volunteered for the Black Mesa Water Coalition, a not-for-profit organization comprised of Hopi and Navajo people who work to promote cultural traditions and public health and address resource extraction.

Mitchell’s trial is among the final ones scheduled in relation to the DAPL project. The prosecution alleges that Mitchell trespassed on a bridge when it was closed to the public and “obstructed law enforcement” as it was attempting to clear people from the bridge.

Despite the trauma of his experience, Mitchell says the sacrifices he has made are worth it to stand up for the earth and for indigenous self-determination.

“I don’t want my grandchildren to live in a world that’s barren and dead,” Mitchell says. “I want them to live in a world that’s fertile and full of water. I don’t want to tell my grandchildren that I did nothing.”