North Dakota has had three oil booms; the most recent one, which started around the end of the last decade, is much larger than those of the 1950s and the 1970s. If you drive around the back roads of northwest North Dakota with a couple of lifelong residents, they can spot some of the older rigs from a half-mile off (The New York Times, 2015). Perhaps the most salient event of the latest oil boom is the siting of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and Keystone XL Pipelines and the resistance shown by the Standing Rock Lakota Nation and other Lakota, Nakota, Dakota citizens who founded a spirit camp along the proposed route of the 1,172 mile pipeline. Looking out at the Dakota landscape using the active gaze of the late American geographer Peirce Lewis, one may stop at the contemplation of cues of culture. The gaze would probably linger on the storage tanks, gas flares, towering derricks and jack pumps that dot the plains today and are, simultaneously, active carriers of the previous oil booms (some jack pumps date back to 1957 according to the New York Times). In this piece I will illustrate, following \citet{Mitchell}'s axioms for reading the landscape, how this visual morphology of North Dakota is instead the result of a landscape that is produced, and where under capitalist culture, its primary function is the production of exchange value through through money. Mitchell also proposed to see the landscape as a product of history, of a power struggle over the shape of social life and social control and ultimately as the mirror of the social justice we enact in the world.  
North Dakotan landscapes, the Standing Rock Syllabus tells us, have been a battle ground long before oil discovery, dating back to the nineteen century history of contact between Europeans and the Oceti Sakowin, extending to the Louis and Clark expedition of 1803, followed by a series of Treaties signed by the United Sates, the Sioux, and other tribes which would be repeatedly violated by the United States. The syllabus provides a historic timeline key to understand that this landscape is a product of history \citep{Mitchell}, where the landscape is the setting and the witness of numerous indigenous uprisings and bloodshed: the Great Dakota Uprising of 1862; the 1876-77 Great Sioux War; the break up of the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1889, which guaranteed certain territories as both indigenous land and hunting grounds; the famous battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 leading to the massacre of 250 to 300 indigenous Lakota, mostly women and children. The syllabus also delves into more recent events such as the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Plan which led to new violations to the Fort Laramie Treaty as the US Army Corps of Engineers built a massive water infrastructure project along the Missouri River and its tributaries.