They Took our Footprint Out of the Ground: For Ladonna Bravebull Allard, the past came creeping up behind her when she first heard of the Dakota Access Pipeline coming to threaten the water Cannonball River, the main water supply of the Standing Rock reservation. In an interview with Nick Estes, she recalls the prophecy of Zuzeca Sapa, or the Black Snake. In this Lakota legend, it is told that a Black Snake will come to destroy the earth. As a young girl, Allard overheard this story as her grandmothers related it to the interstate highways being built across the country, which were covered in black tar. “Well, maybe this was the Black Snake.” says Allard, looking back on this memory, “I remember them saying, ‘But how could that be?’ The interstates are covering the Indian trails and the Indian roads. How could that destroy the world?” While the roads, or even the pipeline itself are not enough to destroy the world, they do create even more of a threat to the native world. In a sense, the story serves as a powerful allegory for two different forces coming to meet each other in a head-on collision: the Native world of the Lakota and Dakota people, and the European world of expansion and colonialism that seeks to swallow everything in its path.