Water Protector Legal Collective

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Water Protector Legal Collective

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WPLC is a diverse group of people from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences.

Born out of the movement, the Water Protector Legal Collective is an Indigenous-led legal nonprofit that provides support and advocacy for Indigenous peoples and Original Nations, the Earth, and climate justice movements. The Water Protector Legal Collective is an Indigenous-led legal nonprofit that provides support and advocacy for Indigenous peoples and Original Nations, the Earth, and climate justice movements.

Born out of the movement, WPLC's founding mission was to serve as the on-the-ground legal team for the Indigenous-led resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) at Standing Rock, North Dakota. Since we first arrived at the request of tribal leadership and set up a legal tent in Oceti Sakowin, WPLC has been providing legal support to the Water Protector Movement. We are guided by our shared vision of a world that is grounded in our belief that Indigenous peoples have a unique and profoundly important role to play to stem the tide of the unfolding climate emergency we live in. This vision is in part a result of the inspiration we draw from the transformative experiences that some of us glimpsed, and others of us lived at the resistance camps at Standing Rock. In 2019, after over 800 criminal defense cases for Water Protectors came to a close in North Dakota, WPLC moved our office to New Mexico, where we have expanded our organization’s founding mission. In addition to our core legal support work, we recognize that education and skill-development for Indigenous peoples is a central component of our work, as is sharing legal information as a means to building agency and power in the struggle for liberation and against environmental destruction and racism. The thread that ties us together is that we are called to protect those who stand up to protect the environment and sacred, ancestral lands threatened by extractive industry, and economic development projects that put property rights over human rights. We remain deeply honored for the opportunity to be a part of this growing movement and to continue this vital work beyond Standing Rock.

10/15/2026

Environmental protections are not obstacles to progress. They are safeguards against irreversible harm.

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), one of our nation’s most important laws protecting historic and culturally significant places. Yet Congress is considering sweeping legislation that threatens to dismantle these protections and weaken environmental safeguards across the country.

The Water Protector Legal Collective (WPLC) has joined the 106 Strong Coalition in opposing S. 5653, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, a proposed permitting reform bill that would weaken protections under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), NHPA, and Clean Water Act.

Under the promise of faster development, the legislation would roll back critical safeguards that help communities challenge harmful projects before the damage is done.

For Indigenous Peoples and frontline communities already confronting the impacts of extraction, industrial development, and environmental degradation, these protections are essential. They provide opportunities to participate in decisions affecting their lands, waters, cultural heritage, and futures, and to hold federal agencies accountable when they violate the law.

Clean water is not an obstacle to development. Environmental accountability is not unnecessary bureaucracy. And communities should never have to sacrifice their health, homelands, or futures for faster permits.

Meaningful reform should address delays without dismantling the protections designed to prevent environmental and cultural harm.

With a vote anticipated on November 9, WPLC joins the 106 Strong Coalition in calling for the rejection of S. 5653.

We need your voice. Contact your senators and urge them to vote NO on S. 5653.

Our lands and waters are not expendable. Neither are the protections that help defend them.

Read the letter and learn more: http://106Strong.com/the-statutory-fight.

10/12/2026

Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a recognition of the strength, sovereignty, and enduring presence of Indigenous Peoples whose defense of our lands, waters, and right to self-determination continues today.

Across the world, we continue to confront the enduring consequences of colonization while facing new threats to our lands, waters, and ways of life.

At Standing Rock, the Tribe continues its decade-long fight to protect the water. In Guåhan, CHamoru advocates are challenging U.S. military hazardous-waste detonations. In Hawaiʻi, communities are rebuilding after devastating storms. Along the U.S.-Mexico border, the Tohono O’odham Nation is defending its sovereignty and lands against border wall construction. In Brazil, Indigenous Peoples are facing renewed political threats to their territories.

These struggles are unfolding in different places, under different circumstances, but they reflect a shared reality: decisions about our homelands continue to be made without our meaningful consent, with consequences for future generations.

Yet we are not defined solely by the injustices we have endured. Our strength is reflected not only in our survival, but in our continued leadership, resistance, and determination to protect what generations before us fought to preserve. Our Peoples are governing, organizing, revitalizing languages, protecting ancestral knowledge, asserting our rights, and shaping our futures on our own terms.

Our sovereignty is not a gift bestowed by governments. Our rights are not relics of history. Our struggles are not confined to the past.

This Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we honor those who have walked before us, the communities defending territories and waters, and the generations continuing this work.

At the Water Protector Legal Collective, we carry this responsibility into our work, defending Indigenous Peoples’ inherent rights, lands, waters, and sovereignty.

Honoring Indigenous Peoples requires action: respecting Tribal sovereignty, upholding Treaty obligations, and defending our right to self-determination.

10/09/2026

The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has filed a new federal lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and PHMSA, continuing its decade-long fight to protect Lake Oahe, its sole source of drinking water, from the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL).

The Tribe challenges federal actions allowing DAPL to continue operating beneath Lake Oahe, less than half a mile upstream from the Standing Rock Reservation.

After six years of environmental review, the Army Corps issued a Final Environmental Impact Statement in December 2025 and Record of Decision authorizing a new 25-year easement in May 2026. Yet the Corps has failed to adequately address serious concerns including pipeline safety, emergency spill response, cultural resources, and Treaty rights.

The stakes have only grown. The ROD authorizes an increase from DAPL’s original capacity of 574,000 to 1.1 million barrels of oil per day, nearly twice its original capacity through the same infrastructure.

The new lawsuit raises claims under the National Historic Preservation Act, including Sections 106 and 110(k), NAGPRA, NEPA, the Clean Water Act, the Mineral Leasing Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. These laws impose distinct obligations on federal agencies concerning environmental protection, cultural preservation, consultation, and lawful decision-making.

Ten years after the struggle to protect the water first began, the Tribe continues to defend its water, sovereignty, and future generations. A new chapter begins in that battle.

Standing Rock is represented by the law firms of Jeff Parsons, Peter Caposella, and Natali Segovia of the Water Protector Legal Collective.

Mni Wiconi. Water is Life.

10/08/2026

And here is caption: Today, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Department of the Air Force v. Prutehi Guåhan, a case arising from the Air Force’s decades-long practice of detonating hazardous military waste at Tarague Beach.

Prutehi Guåhan challenged the Air Force’s attempt to continue these operations without first conducting environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The case now before the Court raises an important question about when federal agencies must comply with NEPA when another federal environmental law also governs their actions.

The outcome could affect when agencies are required to examine environmental consequences before moving forward with projects and activities affecting communities, lands, and waters.

WPLC Board Chair Naek Flores, who also serves as Executive Director of Prutehi Guåhan, is leading this fight on the legal frontlines of a Supreme Court case that could have consequences far beyond Guåhan.

As Naek explained, NEPA is “truly one of the only mechanisms that we have to have an impact on federal projects that will permanently alter our physical landscape, our environment, our cultural resources and our daily lives.”

We are proud to stand with Naek, Prutehi Guåhan, and our CHamoru relatives as they defend Guåhan’s lands, waters, and people before the nation’s highest court.

Environmental review is not a technicality. Communities deserve a voice in decisions that affect their future. Prutehi Guåhan

09/23/2026

What makes a place worthy of protection?

That question sits at the heart of proposed changes to Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, with potentially profound consequences for Tribal Nations.

For generations, Indigenous Peoples have maintained relationships with mountains, rivers, valleys, waters, and entire landscapes that hold cultural, spiritual, and historical significance. Those relationships do not require a building, monument, or other physical evidence of human alteration to make them real.

Yet proposed regulations would introduce a requirement of “tangible human improvements” into what qualifies as a historic property. The draft states that noncompact, unimproved natural features such as mountains, valleys, bodies of water, and landscapes would not qualify for Section 106 purposes.

A sacred mountain could be culturally significant for thousands of years and still fail that test because no one built upon it. A body of water could carry generations of ceremony, history, and knowledge and become harder to protect precisely because it remains physically undisturbed.

The proposed changes could also affect Tribal consultation, federal review, and protections for sacred places and ancestral lands beyond present-day reservation boundaries.

Section 106 does not guarantee that every sacred place will be saved. It creates a process requiring federal agencies to consider potential harm and consult before decisions are made.

Sacred does not have to mean built.

WPLC is part of a growing national coalition working to protect Section 106. If your Tribe or community is concerned about how these changes could affect a sacred site, historic property, or cultural landscape, or would like a risk assessment for a place your community is working to protect, contact our legal intake team at [email protected].

We are in this together.

09/21/2026

Ten years ago, more than 500 civil society organizations from over 50 countries signed an open letter organized by BankTrack calling on the banks financing the Dakota Access Pipeline to halt further funding and construction until the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s concerns were addressed. The letter raised concerns about threats to water, sacred lands, and unceded Treaty lands.

What followed were years of litigation brought by DAPL owner Energy Transfer, including lawsuits targeting BankTrack, Greenpeace organizations, activists, and others connected to opposition to the pipeline.

Today at Climate Week NYC, Greenpeace International is bringing together movement leaders connected to that history for The Sixty-Five Million Dollar Letter, a conversation about what these legal battles have meant for free speech, protest, and movements working to protect Indigenous Peoples’ rights, water, and climate justice.

WPLC Executive Director Natali Segovia will join Mads Christensen, Anne Jellema, Rebecca Brown, Elizabeth Bast, Ryan Brightwell, and Michelle Chan for the conversation.

Join us today in New York City or online.

September 21 | 2–4 PM ET

09/10/2026

The story of the buffalo cannot be separated from the history of Indigenous Peoples on this continent. 
In the 19th century, the great herds that had sustained Indigenous Nations for generations were reduced from tens of millions to a tiny remnant. Their destruction occurred alongside policies that dispossessed Native peoples of their lands and sought to dismantle Indigenous food systems, economies, cultures, and independence.  
That history is part of what makes the return of buffalo so profound. 
Today, Tribal Nations across the Plains are rebuilding herds and renewing relationships that colonization attempted to sever. Buffalo restoration supports food sovereignty and cultural connection while returning an ecologically important species to the grasslands it helped shape. 
That is also why a recent federal grazing dispute in Montana reaches beyond the fate of one herd. 
Earlier this year, the Bureau of Land Management revoked permits allowing American Prairie’s bison to graze on federal lands, relying on a new interpretation that grazing permits should be tied to “production-oriented” purposes. Tribal governments and organizations warned that the interpretation could have consequences for Tribal buffalo programs as well.  
Now, a federal court has temporarily paused the removal. 
On September 4, Judge Brian Morris issued a preliminary injunction allowing more than 900 bison to remain on three federal grazing allotments while the lawsuit proceeds. The ruling is not a final decision on the legality of BLM’s action, but the court found that American Prairie had shown a likelihood of succeeding on its claims.
For now, the buffalo stay. 
And across Indian Country, the larger work of bringing buffalo home continues. 

09/03/2026

Ten years ago today, sacred ground was desecrated.

On September 2, 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed evidence with the court identifying sacred and culturally significant sites in the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline, including burial sites, stone features, and other places of profound importance within the Meyer Buffalo Pasture.

The next day, September 3, construction crews moved into that very area. Bulldozers tore through the land.

When Water Protectors rushed to defend it, they were met by private security guards with pepper spray and dogs. The images captured that day by Democracy Now! traveled around the world: Water Protectors being bitten, people trying to flush pepper spray from their eyes, and dogs lunging toward people who had come to stop the destruction of sacred ground.

There is something especially poignant about the sequence of those two days: places were identified for protection and before they could be protected, they were desecrated.

For those who were there, and for all who remember it, the pain, grief, trauma, and memory of that day carry forward.

Ten years have passed. The pipeline remains in operation. The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe continues its fight to shut DAPL down, and the struggle to protect sacred places continues while facing increasing risks to NHPA Section 106, NAGPRA, and meaningful Tribal consultation.

Memory is part of accountability. Read WPLC’s For the Love of Water, 10-Year Retrospective on Standing Rock. Visit Democracy Now!’s archives for its reporting from September 2016, and listen to Episode 5 of SLAPP’d from Drilled, which revisits the destruction of sacred sites and September 3, 2016.

Ten years later, the responsibility remains.

Protect the water. Protect sacred places. Shut down DAPL.

08/31/2026

Ten years is a long time to fight. It is also no reason to stop.

In 2016, tens of thousands of people came to Standing Rock from across Indian Country and around the world in defense of the water. What unfolded there became one of the most significant Indigenous-led movements of our time and carried a message far beyond the camps: Mni Wiconi. Water is Life.

Water Protector Legal Collective was born in that movement. We came together at the camps to provide legal support to Water Protectors, and the responsibility we took on then continues today.

As Chairman Sitting Bear reminds us in the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s statement marking ten years of NoDAPL, this anniversary is a moment to remember what happened, honor those who stood together, and carry forward the responsibility to protect the water and future generations.

There is much to honor from 2016. The courage. The solidarity. The people who traveled thousands of miles to stand with Standing Rock. The Water Protectors who put their bodies, freedom, and safety on the line. The relationships and movements that grew from those months along the Cannonball River.

But the pipeline is still operating.

Today, WPLC is honored to serve as pro bono counsel to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in its ongoing efforts to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline.

So ten years later, we remember. We honor. And we keep going.

Protect the water. Shut down DAPL. Then we celebrate.

08/30/2026

Behind nearly every movement to protect a river, a forest, a coastline, or a sacred place are people willing to speak up despite enormous personal risk. 
Too often, those individuals face intimidation, criminalization, surveillance, arbitrary detention, and even violence simply for defending their communities and the environments they depend upon. 
The Escazú Agreement represents an important recognition that environmental justice cannot exist without protecting environmental defenders themselves. Access to information, meaningful public participation, and access to justice are not abstract legal principles. They help create the conditions that allow communities to advocate for their rights without fear of retaliation. 
There is no equivalent under U.S. law. And as extractivism intensifies, the United States is increasingly building the opposite: legal infrastructure that criminalizes and demonizes environmental defenders rather than protecting them.
We need laws that protect—not punish—those who defend the Earth. 
Protecting those who protect the Earth is not only a human rights issue. It is essential to safeguarding the lands, waters, and future generations they defend. 
   

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Albuquerque, NM
87176

Telephone

+17015669108

Website

http://waterprotectorlegal.org/

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