Madeline ffitch on the Politics of "Conflict" in the Stories We Tell
What is the cost when we diminish conflict, when we aim to manage big stories instead of letting those stories roam free? During the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, the private security firm TigerSwan—in the pay of the pipeline and using military-style tactics—collaborated with law enforcement to derail water protectors. One internal TigerSwan document reminds personnel that the “exploitation of ongoing native versus non-native rifts, and tribal rifts … is critical in our effort to delegitimize the anti-DAPL movement.”
What TigerSwan says is true. There are “ongoing native versus non-native rifts, and tribal rifts.” One friend who was a long-term organizer at Standing Rock told me, “people are trying to keep camp tensions out of the media, so that infighting won’t weaken the perception of what’s going on here. But I think we should be frank about it. People need to know that there’s no way to have a movement this large without internal tensions and strategic disagreements. And that doesn’t mean that we’re weak.”
Rifts often exist for good reason, and they’re definitely not going away anytime soon. That TigerSwan would identify such rifts as ripe for exploitation shows what happens when the stories we tell about ourselves aren’t big enough to include real conflicts, when the fantasy of unity and resolution leaves us vulnerable to violence and domination. Where do we have power against forces like TigerSwan? If we hide our divisions under a guise of unity, they become vulnerable to exploitation. If we claim them, our stories not only might resist such exploitation, but become bigger, uncontainable, more real.
