Building Unlikely Alliances to Defeat Fossil Fuels in Rural America
In this Dispatch from the Frontlines, Nebraska farmer Art Tanderup reflects on how unlikely alliances across generations and identities worked together to build movement power and defeat Keystone XL, and the challenges ahead for rural communities in the Great Plains who are now fighting carbon pipelines.
Art Tanderup gives a speech on his farm in Neligh, Nebraska (Credit: Lend Frison)
This September, we harvested our last crop of sacred corn from the Ponca nation on our farm outside Neligh, in the eastern Nebraska sandhills. For a decade, people gathered from all over the region and beyond, in what has become an annual ritual to celebrate a community victory over a defeated pipeline.
As I have done for the last ten years, I loaded folk onto the flatbed trailer attached to my tractor and drove them up to the fields, where I gathered them in a large circle to talk through the picking process. I’m a retired teacher, and now I’m a farmer. But I never thought I would be an activist in the twilight years of my life – and that I would find such meaning in a crop, and in the community that gathered to sustain it.
I am a member of the “Cowboy and Indian Alliance,” which consists of ranchers and farmers, environmental activists, and Indigenous land protectors, who successfully came together to stop the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline from carrying toxic fuels through our land. Our masterstroke was planting this corn, which we did on the ten acres my wife Helen and I subsequently deeded to the Ponca nation. It was the right thing to do, given that this used to be Ponca territory before they were forcibly removed to Oklahoma in 1877. But it also saved our farm from an “eminent domain” expropriation. And it helped to stop KXL in its tracks.
Before the harvesters set out into the fields, I shared that we had said a prayer for every seed planted earlier that spring. “As you pick every ear today, thank the creator for what has grown here. This corn is sacred to the Ponca nation, so this is a church, not just a field. You don’t drive a pipeline through a church or a synagogue, so you don’t drive it through this field of corn either.”
From L-R: Art and Helen Tanderup, Jane Kleeb of Bold Alliance, Ponca activist Mekasi Camp Horinek, and Morgan Brings Plenty (Credit: Lend Frison)
It was this argument, accepted by the Federal government, that prevented TC Energy, the Canadian operators of KXL, from taking our land. They would have to enter into Federal negotiations with the Ponca if they wanted to lay a pipeline through it. This helped delay the project until President Biden was elected, and – inspired by our activism – he canceled the KXL permits.
In the cornfields that I regularly plant, when I lay down a hundred ears, I can’t tell the difference between them. But with the Ponca corn, every single ear is different. There are all four colors of the Indigenous medicine wheel – red, white, blue, and yellow – but because the corn crosses with itself, it creates more beautiful colors too. Because it’s organic, you don’t know how long the cobs, or how fat the kernels will be.
And so it’s not just the joy of discovery of what’s inside each ear. “It’s that each one is unique,” I told the harvesters. “They’re all different, just like all of us gathered here, who have come here over the past decade to plant these seeds of resistance and harvest the hope that they give us.” This term, “seeds of resistance”, was given to the corn by the Ponca leader, Casey Camp. And the hope we harvested each year was not just that the KXL pipeline would be stopped, but that like-minded people from all walks of life would join forces to save our land and our water – and our planet too, of course, given the climate crisis that just deepens with the burning of fossil fuels.
My eyes welled up as I looked at the folks gathered at this final harvest. They had come from all over the country to help us pick the corn, including from places where there are other pipeline struggles, such as the Appalachians, Tennessee, and Louisiana. As always, a large contingent had driven up from the Ponca reservation in Oklahoma. This is now their land, after all.
Attendees at the annual Ponca Harvest gather in the field during the harvest (Credit: Lend Frison)
The idea to plant the corn came out of a Spirit Camp that Indigenous leaders held, here on our farm, back in 2013. Helen and I agreed to host the camp after we were told that the Ponca Trail of Tears – the route the people took in 1877 when they were forced to leave their land – actually crossed our farm. The Ponca had been forced to abandon the corn crop that they had already planted when they were driven off the land. One evening, around the fire at the Spirit Camp, the Ponca activist, Mekasi Camp Horinek, had a vision: if some kernels of that ancestral corn could be found and planted along the Trail of Tears, “it would heal our people”.
Could he plant the corn here, he asked me?
Of course.
The Lakota had been given the Poncas’ land, and through much effort, Mekasi found the Lakota keeper of a medicine bundle that included these original 137-year-old seeds. He bartered for the seeds and brought them to me. I know from experience how hard it is to grow new plants from old seeds, so I was deeply skeptical.
“It will grow, Art, don’t worry,” Mekasi said to me.
We planted our first crop in 2014.
Mekasi’s confidence was deserved. We have been so successful with our crops that the Ponca have been able to grow over eighty hectares of the corn closer to home in Oklahoma. And up here on the Tanderup Farm, they have decided to use their ten acres as the site for a sacred lodge.
I am very sad to lose the meaning and the rhythm that the annual planting and harvesting has brought us over the past decade. But of course Helen and I understand their decision. The Ponca have their traditional crop again, in the place where they actually live. And KXL is dead. The corn has done its job.
Ponca sacred corn was harvested at the final gathering and ceremony in September 2023 (Credit: Lend Frison)
My new life as an activist with the “Cowboy Indian Alliance” all began for us in the spring of 2012.
I was planting soybeans when there was a knock on the door. It was a land agent representing TC Energy, to tell us how “privileged” we were to have the proposed KXL pipeline cross our land for half a mile. We would become part of this “march of progress” that would bring prosperity to our corner of the prairie. It would be “un-American” for us to refuse.
In most cases, our neighbors bought this argument. An elderly farmer and neighbor signed away his land without realizing what he was doing. But perhaps because of my years as a school library media specialist, I was different. No way was I going to make a decision on the few words of a crafty used-car salesman, so to speak. I got down to researching. I read about how tar sands are among the dirtiest sources of fuel on the planet and about how wild game had died in Alberta; about the cancer rates among young people there; about the Indigenous tribes, and how their water had been polluted and their way of life disrupted.
I also read that this pipeline would not benefit the United States at all. It would basically be a highway running through us, between Canada and the Gulf, so that dirty fuel from North America could be exported to other parts of the planet. Helen and I came to the same conclusion. Sure, it was not good for the Tanderups for the gas to be piped almost directly beneath our home. But it was also not good for anyone, from the beginning to the end.
We would not sign.
Sure enough, the threatening letters came. The first was delivered, certified mail, just before Thanksgiving of 2014, offering us one last chance to hand over our land – for $20,000! The next letter came less than a month later, on Christmas Eve: sell us the land, or we’re going to take it away from you.
Hell no. We would fight.
Ponca activist Mekasi Camp Horinek harvests sacred corn (Credit: Lend Frison)
Helen’s family had lived here for generations, and had built great relationships with all the neighbors. But when we refused to grant the easement, and then when we started planting the Ponca corn and gathering folks here on our farm, we found ourselves shunned. People crossed the street to avoid us, or refused to greet us in church. Many businesses would only deal with us on the quiet. When over 8,000 people came to the farm for the “Harvest the Hope” concert starring Willie Nelson and Neil Young, our neighbors called the police on us.
It was so bad that at one point we considered selling up and moving elsewhere. Two things stopped us. First, this land had been in Helen’s family for over a century, and we were committed to stewarding it for our own grandchildren. And second, we found an extraordinary new community and purpose in life, even if it wasn’t what we had in mind when we moved here to retire.
There’s a Lakota prophecy about a black snake that would slither across the land, desecrating the sacred sites and poisoning the water before destroying the Earth. Many Indigenous folk see the pipelines as the realization of this prophecy. But the thing about this black snake is that it brings some good along with the bad. We know the “bad” was the pipeline, but we've learned about the “good” too: how it brought farmers, ranchers, Indigenous people, and environmental activists together to work for a common cause to defend the Earth and to protect the water.
After the harvest, Art and Helen Tanderup speak with Candace Schmidt, Chairwoman of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska (Credit: Lend Frison)
It's hard to describe the meaning this has brought to our lives, and the way it has expanded our sense of community. I have learned so much, personally. Given that I am a Christian, it was a bit of a challenge in the beginning to get used to these new rituals, this different religion. My own pastor introduced me to another pastor, who works on a reservation. When I told him I was struggling, he advised me to focus on similarities, and there are so many – there is even a Ponca equivalent of our Ten Commandments. This has really inspired me. We might all be so different, but there is one Creator, and this is to whom I offer thanks when we gather together in prayer after a harvest.
During our fight against KXL, we met the Sioux leader Joye Braun. When she died last November, I traveled with two other farmers to South Dakota for the memorial service. “I know who you guys are,” Joye’s mother said, when we offered our condolences. “You’re the rowdy farmers and ranchers down in Nebraska!” And she hooted out a big, “WATER IS LIFE!” It just took away all the somberness of the service. It was, like, “Yeah, we’re family. We’re here. This is where we belong.”
Now, on the prairies, we find ourselves threatened by two carbon capture pipelines that bring their own new health risks – and encourage Americans to keep on burning fossil fuels too. As I write these words, in October 2023, I am spending time at zoning hearings to argue against them. There is also the prospect of the black snake returning, if Donald Trump is elected. We might no longer be planting the Ponca corn, but we can’t just put the last decade in a box and forget about it. Our planet is at stake. I’m in my seventies now, but if that means that I spend the rest of my life traveling this country to share our experiences and to work with others as they fight the fossil fuel industry, so be it.
A sign calling for the end to carbon pipelines hangs in Art’s barn in Neligh, Nebraska. (Credit: Amelie Rao)
I have two grandchildren, who are twelve and ten. They were born into this struggle, and as we went through the whole battle of the last decade, Helen and I understood that we were doing it for them. We knew that if KXL happened it would have a far greater effect on their lives and the lives of their children, than it would on us personally. Kyle has Down Syndrome, with the challenges that brings. But Amelia has become quite the little pipeline fighter: she knows exactly what’s at stake, and that makes me immensely proud.
This year, as I watched Amelia in the fields, I thought back to the first harvest, when she was just a toddler. That year we had far fewer people to help us, and I was anxious we wouldn’t get it done in time. Suddenly, unannounced, two vanloads from the Omaha Mayan community – Central American immigrants – arrived. They know the value of corn, and they came out to help us. There was a boy with them, roughly Amelia’s age, and the two little ones were out there giving each other the biggest hugs. My friend Carolyn snapped a photo of them, and every once in a while I pull it out to remind me of what can happen, and what will happen, if we keep on fighting. How there’s hope for the world if we work together like this.
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