On June 11, 2026, the federal government agreed to pay North Dakota $27.8 million to settle a lawsuit over the state's costs policing the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Combined with $10 million recovered earlier, the state's total came to nearly $38 million. The state had sued in 2019, arguing the federal government caused the protests to grow by allowing demonstrators to camp on federal land.

The same day, Julie Fedorchak put out a statement. Here is the heart of it:

"The Dakota Access Pipeline was legally permitted, has operated safely for nearly a decade, and remains critical to North Dakota's economy, energy industry, and America's energy security. More than 30 hours of public hearings were held with input from hundreds of people. Yet, for more than 230 days, North Dakota communities, law enforcement officers, and taxpayers carried the burden of responding to unlawful activity while the federal government failed to act responsibly on federal land."

"The people of North Dakota should never have been left footing the bill for the Obama administration's failure to enforce the law during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests."

Read the whole thing. It runs to two paragraphs of statement plus a "Background" section with arrest counts and agency counts.

Now count the words that don't appear anywhere in it: Standing Rock. Sioux. Tribe. Tribal. Treaty. Water.

Who was there, and why

The people at Standing Rock were not a weather event that happened to North Dakota. They were led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Harvard's Environmental and Energy Law Program lays out the tribe's case: the pipeline runs within half a mile of the reservation's current boundaries, "through land taken from the Tribe by Congress in 1958," and through "important cultural and burial sites." The tribe and others opposed it over "concerns that a spill would contaminate state and tribal drinking water" — the crossing is under Lake Oahe. They also pointed to the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which set aside that land "for the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation" of the Sioux Nation.

Fedorchak represents them. Standing Rock is in North Dakota. North Dakota has one House seat. She holds it.

Her statement treats the entire episode as a line item: 761 arrests, 178 response agencies, 230 days, dollars owed. In her telling, the only injured parties are "North Dakota communities, law enforcement officers, and taxpayers." The tribe appears in the story not as constituents with a grievance but as an unnamed source of "unlawful activity."

What "responding" looked like

On the night of November 20, 2016, at the Backwater Bridge outside the camps, police used water cannons on demonstrators in temperatures in the low 20s, along with tear gas, sound weapons and rubber bullets. PBS NewsHour reported that more than 160 people were injured and seven were taken to a hospital.

The Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council said that night: "we are concerned for the real risk of loss of life due to severe hypothermia."

Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network called the water cannons "an excessive and potentially deadly use of force." Morton County's sheriff's department said officers were responding to an "ongoing riot," and that water was used for "crowd control" and to douse fires.

That is the response the $38 million reimburses. You do not have to conclude that every protester behaved well to notice that a member of Congress summarizing all of it as "the burden of responding to unlawful activity" has decided in advance whose account counts.

The "out-of-state" line

Fedorchak's background section makes a point of noting that of 761 arrests, "709 involving out-of-state individuals."

It's the outside-agitator framing, and it's doing a specific job: suggesting that local people had no real complaint, only visitors did. But the tribe whose treaty land and water were at issue is a sovereign nation whose supporters came from other tribal nations — which is to say, from out of state. Of all the details Fedorchak could have chosen to include about 761 arrests, that's the one she picked.

She has been consistent about which North Dakotans she speaks for

This is not a one-off.

Fedorchak spent twelve years on the North Dakota Public Service Commission — the state's utility regulator — and went from there straight onto the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where natural gas transmission and gas and electric utilities are among her top industries. She has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025 and a 0% lifetime score — zero pro-environment votes and 33 anti-environment votes in 2025 alone.

Three months before this statement, the Trump administration proposed cutting all federal funding for tribal colleges and universities — a proposal that would close institutions in her district whose presidents used the phrase "death knell." North Dakota's senior senator said he expects Congress will keep funding them. Fedorchak said the president's budget was "a starting point" and that she planned to review priorities.

So: on the money the state spent policing a tribal-led protest, she issued a same-day statement with a quote, a thank-you list and a background section. On a proposal to close five tribal colleges in her state, she needed to review her priorities.

The last line of her statement

She closes by thanking Attorney General Drew Wrigley, the late Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem, "and the law enforcement officers and local officials who stood up for our communities."

Our communities. It is worth asking her, sometime, in a room where somebody else picks the questions, which ones she meant.

Source

Federal government to pay North Dakota $28M for Dakota Access Pipeline protests — Mary Steurer, North Dakota Monitor, June 11, 2026, and Fedorchak Statement on DAPL Protest Settlement, June 11, 2026. Photo by Mary Steurer / North Dakota Monitor.