“Rise,” a new Viceland series about resistance movements in indigenous communities, makes its debut on Friday with a ruinous timeliness. Its first two episodes constitute a feature-length documentary about the protests against construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, and they build to the tearful celebrations when it was announced in December that alternative routes would be examined.

The second episode ends on the voice of a newscaster wondering what the incoming administration of Donald J. Trump would do about the pipeline. But of course we already know: On Tuesday, President Trump signed an executive order telling the Army Corps of Engineers to review and approve the pipeline “in an expedited manner.” Whatever the future holds, watching “Rise” at this moment is a decidedly melancholy experience.

Directed by Michelle Latimer (who is Métis and Algonquin) and reported by Sarain Fox (Anishinabe), both of Canadian indigenous descent, “Rise” is unabashedly on the side of the protesters it embeds with. Ms. Fox is on the scene in May 2016, long before the standoff became national news, when a handful of Sioux were warily eyeing the construction crews across the Missouri River.

The episodes contain an absorbing and often artfully filmed account of the opponents’ occupation. The granting of a permit in July to tunnel under the Missouri spurs the growth of the protest camp (to an eventual 10,000 people, many of them nonnative), captured in Woodstock-like images of cars arriving in slow files. Early skirmishes between small groups of protesters and security guards with dogs give way to large-scale battles against uniformed police officers. Unarmed protesters fall to truncheons and rubber bullets. An eerie nighttime scene of water cannons being fired from armored vehicles looks like something out of “Apocalypse Now.”