On the banks of the Cannonball River in North Dakota, far from reliable cell-phone service, a struggle is underway. Encampments that have become home to thousands stretch along both banks of the river, begun by the people of the Standing Rock reservation, who are determined to protect their water source, the Missouri River, from the Dakota Access Pipeline, which will, if built, run directly beneath the water.

But in those camps, something bigger is happening—something that is both new and familiar to observers of the social movements of the post-2008 period. “We are free at this space in time,” Faith Spotted Eagle told me. A member of the Ihanktonwan Nation, she had organized Native people for the Keystone XL pipeline fight, including work on a new treaty to protect the environment between several Native nations. She sees what’s happening in North Dakota as a process of figuring out what kind of a society people want to live in.

Spotted Eagle said the protesters are drawing on the structure of the Oceti Sakowin, the federation of Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota people that had not come together in over 100 years; they’ve rediscovered dances and songs, built a school for the children, and prayed for the water. Drumming and singing alternate with public speakers at the open mic around a campfire, and riders on horseback meander through the camp. The campers are fed by a volunteer-run kitchen stocked with donated food (the night I was there, moose was on the menu, brought by campers all the way from Maine); they talk long-term strategy, study historic treaties, and call for a different relationship to the land and the water, one where the natural world is respected for itself.

“The corporations have become individuals, the privatization has given them rights of individuals to just go out and wreak havoc,” Spotted Eagle said. “Well, the river has a right and that right is being infringed upon. Those of us that grew up along the river, we consider that a human rights violation.” What was happening, she said, was a process of decolonization, of shaking loose from the rules and patterns and laws imposed by the colonizers, by Western capitalism, on her people. In the camps along the Cannonball and Missouri, they were drawing on old traditions and new alliances alike to create a different society in that space.

The people at Standing Rock were not the only ones considering decolonization this summer. On July 12, Black Lives Matter members in Los Angeles marched to City Hall to demand a meeting with Mayor Eric Garcetti. Yet another black woman, Redel Jones, had been killed by police, and yet again, the city had ruled that the police officers who killed her had done nothing wrong. Prevented from reaching the mayor’s office, the protesters camped out on City Hall steps and remained there, pitching tents at night and offering free food, making art, dancing, doing yoga, and talking to passersby about police violence in their city. Mayor Garcetti offered to meet with a delegation of the activists in private, but they refused and demanded that he come speak with them in their public space. They held the space for over 50 days under the banner of “Decolonize LA City Hall” before deciding to go mobile and track the mayor across the city with their demands. They chose the term “decolonization,” organizers said, because the “police and government structures that employ them are the occupiers.”