In this short piece, I explored the ways in which the North Dakota landscape is produced through acts of will in time, from when settler colonials arrived by horse, made and broke Treaties, organized and fought battles against indigenous natives, to the contemporary landscape where the winners established the empire of oil that fueled the American economy. The landscape is the contested grounds for both hegemonic interventionist projects but also localized activism from organized groups, united under the #NoDAPL movement, pushing back against forms of state-sanctioned environmental racism (Pulido, 2017). What happens within and outside the landscape is a power struggle over the shape of social life and social control.