How cognitive science explains why complex Indigenous issues often get lost in translation
Picture this: You're scrolling through your news feed in late 2016, and you see a headline about "pipeline protests" in North Dakota. Your brain instantly starts filing this information into familiar categories—environmental activists versus big oil, protesters versus police, David versus Goliath. It happens so fast you don't even realize you're doing it.
But what if I told you that this instant categorization—this mental filing system we all use—actually made you miss the real story? The 2016-2017 events at Standing Rock offer a fascinating case study in how our own psychology can be used against us, creating blind spots that make complex stories disappear in plain sight.
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| Image source: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protests |
This isn't about pointing fingers or assigning blame. It's about understanding something much more interesting: how the human mind works, and how that knowledge can help us become smarter consumers of information. Whether you're Native or non-Native, understanding these psychological tricks can change how you see media coverage of any complex issue.
The Mental Shortcut That Changed Everything
Back in the 1970s, two psychologists named Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman made a discovery that would eventually win them a Nobel Prize. They found that human brains don't process new information like neutral computers. Instead, we use mental shortcuts called "heuristics"—and one of the most powerful is something they called the "representativeness heuristic."
Here's how it works in real life: When your brain encounters the phrase "pipeline protest," it immediately starts pattern-matching. It searches through your memory for similar situations, then uses those patterns to understand what's happening. For most Americans, those patterns came from previous environmental movements—Earth Day rallies, tree-sitters opposing logging, Greenpeace activists chaining themselves to whaling ships.
So when Standing Rock hit the news, millions of brains automatically slotted it into the "environmental protest" category. Everything that followed got filtered through that lens. The water cannons and police dogs? Classic protest suppression. The camps and civil disobedience? Typical activist tactics. The corporate pipeline versus indigenous communities? David and Goliath environmental story.
The problem is, this mental filing system missed something huge. Standing Rock wasn't primarily an environmental protest—it was one of the largest assertions of Indigenous sovereignty in modern American history.
What Really Happened (And Why You Probably Missed It)
Let me paint you a different picture of Standing Rock, one that probably didn't make it through your mental filters the first time around.
In April 2016, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a historian and member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, established the Sacred Stone Camp on her own land. LaDonna wasn't some outside environmental activist who showed up with a protest sign. She was a grandmother protecting the burial sites of her ancestors and asserting her tribe's treaty rights—legal agreements signed with the United States government in 1851 and 1868 that guaranteed her people's authority over their territory.
When tribal teenagers like Jasilyn Charger started running from Standing Rock to Washington, D.C., they weren't doing a youth climate march. They were citizens of a sovereign nation appealing to the federal government to honor its legal obligations. These young people could speak with sophisticated knowledge about federal Indian law, tribal jurisdiction, and the government-to-government relationship between their nation and the United States.
By December 2016, representatives from over 300 tribal nations had joined the camps. Think about that for a moment—300 sovereign nations coming together in solidarity. This wasn't a protest movement; it was the largest gathering of Indigenous governments in over a century, asserting their collective authority to protect sacred water and treaty-guaranteed territory.
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| Image source - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_Access_Pipeline_protests |
But here's the kicker: the pipeline was originally supposed to cross the Missouri River near Bismarck, North Dakota's capital. When officials worried that a spill might contaminate the city's drinking water, they quietly rerouted it through tribal territory instead. This detail—which reveals the entire story was really about whose lives matter and whose don't—appeared in fewer than 30% of mainstream news stories.
When Your Brain Doubles Down on Being Wrong
Once people had filed Standing Rock under "environmental protest," another psychological mechanism kicked in to lock that interpretation in place: confirmation bias. This is your brain's tendency to pay attention to information that confirms what you already believe while ignoring information that challenges it.
Media outlets quickly discovered which aspects of Standing Rock got the most clicks and shares. Stories about environmental risks and pipeline debates? Huge engagement. Dramatic confrontations with law enforcement? People couldn't stop watching. Climate change discussions? Perfect for existing environmental audiences.
Meanwhile, stories about treaty law, tribal governmental authority, and sovereignty issues got much less attention. Partly this happened because these topics didn't match what audiences expected to see, and partly because understanding them required background knowledge that most reporters and readers simply didn't have.
Social media algorithms made this even worse. If you engaged with environmental content about Standing Rock, the platforms showed you more environmental content. If you shared posts about police confrontations, you got more confrontation videos. The algorithm essentially created personalized echo chambers that reinforced whatever angle you'd initially focused on.
The Information That Disappeared
When researchers later analyzed Standing Rock coverage, they found some stunning gaps between what actually happened and what the public learned about it.
Less than a quarter of major news reports mentioned treaty rights or tribal sovereignty in any meaningful way. The government-to-government relationship between tribes and federal authorities—which is the actual legal framework that governs these situations—was rarely explained. Most Americans still don't understand that tribal nations aren't ethnic groups or cultural organizations, but actual governments with specific legal relationships to the United States.
The cultural and spiritual dimensions got similarly scrambled. When Lakota spiritual leaders conducted traditional ceremonies at the camps, when they shared teachings about Indigenous peoples' responsibilities to protect the water, mainstream media consistently described these actions as "protest tactics" or "demonstrations." Chief Arvol Looking Horse, the 19th Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe, carries spiritual authority that spans multiple tribal nations and represents centuries of sacred tradition. But coverage described him as a "protest supporter" rather than recognizing the governmental and spiritual authority he represented.
Even the language choices revealed the psychological sorting at work. Over 400 Indigenous people were arrested during Standing Rock, but mainstream media consistently used phrases like "protesters arrested" rather than "tribal citizens detained" or "sovereign nation members imprisoned." These aren't just word games—language choices like these shape how audiences understand who has legitimate authority and who's breaking the law.
Why This Matters for Everyone
You might be thinking, "Okay, this is interesting psychology, but why should I care?" Here's why: the same mental mechanisms that distorted Standing Rock coverage are working on you every single day, with every news story you encounter.
When you see coverage of immigration issues, your brain is using mental shortcuts to categorize what you're seeing. When you read about economic policy, healthcare debates, or international conflicts, the representativeness heuristic is instantly filing these stories into familiar patterns. And confirmation bias is making sure you pay attention to information that confirms your existing views while filtering out information that might challenge them.
Understanding these psychological processes doesn't eliminate them—they actually serve important functions in helping us process huge amounts of information quickly. But knowing how they work can make you a much more sophisticated consumer of news and information.
Becoming a Smarter Information Consumer
So how do you work with your own psychology instead of being manipulated by it? The first step is simply recognizing when your brain is doing its automatic categorization thing. When you encounter a complex news story, pause for a moment and ask yourself: "What mental template am I using to understand this? What familiar pattern is my brain comparing this to?"
Next, actively seek out sources that might use different frameworks. For Indigenous issues, that might mean reading tribal newspapers, following Indigenous journalists on social media, or looking for coverage that quotes tribal officials rather than outside activists. For any complex story, it means recognizing that your first source probably isn't giving you the complete picture.
Pay attention to language choices, both in media coverage and in your own thinking. When you see words like "protesters," "activists," or "demonstrations," ask whether those terms accurately describe what's actually happening. Sometimes they do; sometimes they're obscuring more complex realities.
Most importantly, get comfortable with complexity. The human brain loves simple stories with clear good guys and bad guys, but real life is usually messier than that. Standing Rock involved environmental protection and tribal sovereignty and treaty law and cultural preservation and economic considerations all at the same time. Learning to hold multiple dimensions of a story in your mind simultaneously is like mental weightlifting—it gets easier with practice.
What This Means for Indigenous Communities
For Indigenous communities, understanding these psychological mechanisms offers both challenges and opportunities. The challenge is that sovereignty and treaty rights are complex legal concepts that don't fit neatly into the mental templates most Americans carry around. Environmental activism and protest movements are much more familiar, which is why those frames often get applied even when they don't really fit.
The opportunity lies in becoming strategically sophisticated about working with and around these psychological shortcuts. This doesn't mean accepting misleading frameworks, but it does mean understanding them well enough to counter them effectively. When speaking to mainstream audiences, Indigenous leaders and advocates can explicitly address the mental templates people are likely using. Instead of assuming people understand sovereignty, they can start conversations by establishing the legal and governmental context before audiences have a chance to file the information under "protest" or "activism."
Building Indigenous-controlled media systems becomes crucial in this context. When you control your own information platforms, you can establish accurate frameworks from the beginning rather than having to argue against misleading ones after they've already taken hold in people's minds.
The Bigger Picture
The psychological analysis of Standing Rock coverage reveals something important about how democracy works—or doesn't work—in an information-rich society. When complex political realities get filtered through oversimplified mental templates, citizens can't make informed decisions because they're literally not seeing what's actually happening.
This isn't just about Indigenous issues, though Standing Rock provides a particularly clear example. Any time marginalized communities, complex legal disputes, or unfamiliar cultural practices make the news, similar psychological processes are at work. Understanding these mechanisms can help us recognize when our own mental shortcuts might be limiting our understanding.
The goal isn't to eliminate mental shortcuts entirely—that would be impossible and counterproductive. Instead, it's about developing awareness of when these shortcuts might be inadequate and building systems that provide more complete information when complexity warrants it.
Looking Forward
The next time you encounter news coverage of a complex issue, especially one involving communities or legal frameworks you're not familiar with, try this experiment: Read the coverage with fresh eyes and ask yourself what mental template you're using to understand the story. Then go looking for sources that might use different frameworks. See what aspects of the story become visible when you change your analytical lens.
For both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers, this kind of cognitive awareness offers practical benefits. In an era when we're all drowning in information, developing these critical thinking skills becomes essential for effective citizenship and advocacy. Understanding that your own psychology can be manipulated—and learning to recognize when it's happening—is one of the most powerful tools you can develop.
The water protectors at Standing Rock understood they were doing multiple types of work simultaneously: protecting the environment, asserting sovereignty, enforcing treaty rights, preserving culture, and fulfilling spiritual responsibilities. Media systems capable of reflecting this kind of complexity serve everyone better than those that reduce everything to familiar but inadequate sound bites.
Your mind is more powerful than you think, but it's also more vulnerable to manipulation than most people realize. Understanding how it works is the first step toward using that power more effectively—and making sure others can't use your own psychology against you.
