When the demonstrations against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) kicked into high gear last August, Lewis (Lew) Grassrope, a 39-year-old former policeman, dropped out of his race for chairman of the Lower Brule Sioux, his tribe in South Dakota, and turned his attention to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in Cannon Ball, on the Missouri River. The tribe was gathering, with many others, to stop the building of the DAPL, a project run by the Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners that would connect the North Dakota shale oil fields with the eastern pipeline networks in Illinois. Grassrope joined thousands of people from hundreds of indigenous nations—from every state in the United States and from countries as far flung as Tibet, Sweden,