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Abstract: In August 2016 Standing Rock Sioux activists began to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline; by the end of the year, thousands of Native and non-Native activists had joined Sioux tribal members to create one of the largest and most sustained protests in recent memory. Throughout the many images that circulated from Standing Rock, a constant form of embodied rhetoric used by activists was the graphic T-shirt. One of these tees, the Homeland Security shirt, has the words "Homeland Security" emblazoned above an image of Geronimo with three fellow Apache warriors and the words "Fighting Terrorism since 1492" located below the photograph. The Homeland Security shirt is a site of understanding the way irony and confrontation-specifically, a wearable, visual form of rhetoric-may be used as a form of critique and resistance. Through a textual analysis of the T-shirt and the discourse surrounding it, this essay demonstrates how the shirt ironically appropriates the dominant discourse and critiques the status quo using a confrontational tone.
Keywords: Native American resistance, embodied rhetoric, irony, confrontation, visual discourse
Locked arms. Loud voices. Blockades. Protesting on private land. Beginning in August 2016, Native activists and their supporters used these tactics to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline, an oil pipeline that would transport more than 520,000 barrels of crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois each day.1 According to the Standing Rock Sioux, the Native nation occupying the land adjacent to the pipeline's route, "the tribe was never adequately consulted on the project, which threatens their water supply."2 In addition, the tribe contends that the pipeline's construction is damaging sacred and cultural sites. The protests began with a small number of Sioux tribal members and increased to an estimated three to four thousand activists on the ground. The Washington Post deemed the demonstration, with over three hundred tribal nations represented, as a "national movement for Native Americans."3
In their efforts to stop the construction, the No Dakota Access Pipeline (NoDAPL) activists used various methods of confrontation to their advantage. One such tactic was the use of politically pertinent graphic T-shirts. From shirts that explicitly critique the Dakota Access Pipeline with phrases such as "Stand with Strong Hearts. No Dakota Access Pipeline" and "Mni Wiconi. Water Is Life" to...