On April 14, see acclaimed documentary filmmaker Shannon Kring’s The End of the Line: The Women of Standing Rock (USA/Finland, 2021), the incredible story of a group of Indigenous women willing to risk their lives to stop the Dakota Access oil pipeline construction that desecrated their ancient burial and prayer sites and threatens their land, water, and very existence. **Director Shannon Kring will be present with activists and Standing Rock Sioux Tribe members Phyllis Young and Wašté Wičaku Win Yellow Lodge Young for a film talk after the screening.** Held in coordination with the opening of our exhibition Arctic Highways this weekend, the Gallery will also be open until 7 PM today for viewing before the screening.

“Kring paints a moving, poignant portrait of courage, determination, and tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds and eloquently honors the women who serve as the protest’s oppositional foundation” (Film Threat). Nominated for News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Outstanding Social Issue Documentary.

Phyllis Young is Woman Who Stands by the Water and Woman Who Loves the Water. She comes from the land of Sitting Bull, Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, the Seven Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation—the predecessor sovereign of this territory. You may know her as Phyllis Young, coordinator of and spokesperson for the 2016-2017 peaceful protests against the $3.8 billion Dakota Access oil pipeline construction that desecrated her ancestors’ ancient burial and prayer sites, and threatens their land, water, and existence. The resistance drew more than 13,000 supporters from around the world. Under Presidential Order, the Army Corps of Engineers shut down the encampment on February 24, 2017.

In 1974, Phyllis co-founded Women of All Red Nations (WARN), the women’s arm of American Indian Movement. She went on to cut her activist teeth at the UN. In 1975, she established the 1^st International Indian Treaty Council Office at the UN Plaza. In 1977, she secured the Council’s credentials as an NGO with Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council, making it the first Indigenous NGO. That same year, Young led the coordination of the First International NGO Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. More than 100 Indigenous delegates attended, with an additional 150 in attendance as observers and guests.

Thirty-three years later, Young was one of the authors of the precursor document that became the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. In 2007, the declaration was adopted by the General Assembly by a majority of 144 states in favor. Only four votes were cast against it: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, four countries boasting high Indigenous populations.

Phyllis served as a board director of The National Museum of the American Indian for 15 years.  An enrolled member of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, she leads Lakota People’s Law Project’s #GreenTheRed campaign to bring renewable energy to the people of Standing Rock. In 2017, Phyllis Young and LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, on behalf of Standing Rock Water Protectors, were finalists for the MIT Disobedience Award. They were selected from 7,800+ candidates from six continents.

Shannon Kring is an Emmy-winning producer/director. Fearless humanitarian. Ally to the world’s forbidden and forgotten. Wielding the transformative power of storytelling, she amplifies the experiences of those left vulnerable and voiceless through years of systematic oppression. Her work changes minds, opens hearts, and inspires social and policy change.

Shannon’s documentaries have been presented by dozens of governments, top international broadcasters, and institutions including the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the Smithsonian Institution Museum of the American Indian, NASA, MIT, and the British Museum. Shannon works with the United Nations; the White House; the US Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Community Services, an Office of the Administration for Children and Families; the US State Department; United States Agency for International Development, UN Environment Programme, and other national and global bodies concerning the indigenous and other marginalized members of society, environmental sustainability, animal welfare, human rights, and cultural preservation. She is a UN World Tourism Organization Liaison and serves as Honduras’ Official Goodwill Ambassador.



After living in places as diverse as Helsinki and San Pedro Sula, Honduras (then the Murder Capital of the World), Shannon returned to the US in 2016 to begin production on her latest feature documentary, END OF THE LINE: THE WOMEN OF STANDING ROCK. The film won the 2022 Hollywood Critics Association Television Award (Best Broadcast Network or Cable Documentary TV Movie) and took runner-up at the UK’s prestigious 2022 Sanford St Martin Awards (Journalism). It was nominated for the national 2022 News & Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding Social Justice Documentary.

In 2018, Shannon became the first US director and only third woman awarded backing by the Finnish Film Foundation in its then 69-year history. In 2019, she won the Stella Artois-Women in Film Finishing Fund Award. This year, she is producer on two of the six finalists for the Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize—including on the winning film, PHILLY ON FIRE. She serves as the film’s producer and executive producer. Shannon is also an accomplished writer, having authored five multi-award-winning nonfiction books and articles for publications ranging from TIME Magazine to GASTRONOMICA: THE JOURNAL OF FOOD AND CULTURE. She was recently nominated for Hollywood’s highest screenwriting honor, the 2022 Humanitas Prize.

Wašté Wičaku Win Yellow Lodge Young is Ihunktowanna Dakota/Hunkpapa Lakota and an enrolled citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. From the time she was born, she was immersed in Dakota/Lakota language, songs, ceremonies, oral traditions, and history. She learned that the collective is more important than the individual, and that compassion is the greatest value to have.

From 2003 to 23015, Wašté Wičaku Win worked at the Tribal Historic Preservation Office for Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, serving as Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for eight of those years. It was in this capacity in August 2014 that her department discovered that Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) had begun construction on the 1,300-mile-long Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The pipeline was slated to cross the Missouri River at the northern border of Standing Rock. Despite the Tribe’s objections, the company began to build the pipeline within Sioux Treaty land in August 2016. Despite extraordinary efforts by tribes, water protectors, and their allies, oil began to flow from DAPL on June 1, 2017.

The #NoDAPL movement profoundly changed Wašté Wičaku Win’s life for the better. Surviving that experience showed her that there was a dire need for the cultivation of justice in Indian Country—and in the United States. It was the catalyst that led her to law school in 2019. While in law school, she studied Federal Indian Law, Environmental Law, Constitutional Law, and Access to Justice issues. She received the UNM SOL Natural Resources and Environmental Law certification. In the fall of 2021, while working in the Southwest Indian Law Clinic, Wašté Wičaku Win represented a juvenile from the Picuris Pueblo, and successfully got him released from custody. In the fall of 2021, she presented at the New Mexico State Bar in Albuquerque with Professor Veronica Gonzales-Zamora on Access to Justice issues in New Mexico.

Wašté Wičaku Win graduated from the University of New Mexico School of Law in May 2022. It is her hope to continue to work on issues impacting Indian Country. She is presently working on several projects about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, human trafficking, and other initiatives that ensure Indigenous women are informed of their reproductive rights.

Wašté Wičaku Win is a single mother of four children.