We were two of many white, impassioned, brokenhearted millennials drawn like flies to the sticky-sweet crossroads of environmental justice and indigenous sovereignty on sacred land scarred by old and new wounds gouged by settler colonialism.
We were asked to come, and for all our reasoning, flawed and sound, we arrived at this intersection to witness and participate in a powerful movement.
We travelled 1,800 miles to Cannon Ball, North Dakota with the Vermont Builders Delegation to assist in winterizing camp. The delegation consisted of a caravan of just over 40 builders from across the Northeast traveling in their beat-up pickups and Priuses, a Penske truck stocked with building supplies, and a passenger bus, which brought 40 willing workers from Vermont and Massachusetts.
Upon arrival, we sprawled just northeast of the Red Warrior camp and, during the few days we were there, we were quickly rotated into the wheel of camp life: work from sunup late into the night, punctuated by 9 a.m. morning prayer and orientation and a 2 p.m. direct-action training.
While cautious celebration is a new and strange mode for many of us, fragile and potentially flimsy promises are sadly familiar to Native peoples in the United States.
In the wake of the news that the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) will likely be rerouted from Standing Rock Reservation, we still do not quite know how to talk about our brief time at Oceti Sakowin.
Still, it feels urgent to try to illustrate and celebrate what we think is working so well there.
We struggle with our desire to set the scene for you in a way that does not attempt to define a place or people by means of a patchwork of impressions. “Avoid romanticizing indigenous struggles,” warns a handout from Standing Rock organizers.
We want to tell you about how each morning a slice of pink light crops up on the horizon and backlights the loose herd of horses grazing and sleeping in the frozen field that arced around our spray of tents.
We want to tell you how we know the horses to be sorrel, dappled, and Appaloosa, but that they read as simply black against pink - a pink which is not ours to name. These are not our horses to paint. (In fact, we were asked not to photograph them without permission; they are legacy horses bred from horses that witnessed the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre.) This is not our landscape to interpret.
We want to tell you how the prairie grass is soft and dry. How the noise overhead is constant, and we observe and record drone and plane patterns as we would those of birds. Most people are under-rested. A couple kisses passionately, oblivious to the plane engine roar above.
We want to tell you how we watch dogs do their dog work: circling groups of people, guarding tents, and demanding play. How we see women coated in sawdust with chainsaws slung over shoulders. The incessant chopping of wood. Pigs rooting in cold mud and children bicycling. How we hear hammering, welding, sawing. Singing and drumming always come from somewhere, like a heartbeat or a lullaby.
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The work life of Oceti Sakowin at its best is an alternative economy. Its worker-bee swarm of activity allows for and forgives human error, is guided by prayer, engenders frugal and innovative design, and centralizes the health of its workers as individual spirits and bodies.
It is the most holistically productive environment we have ever witnessed. Just as you find yourself getting hungry, someone appears to offer you food.
All actions and gestures seem to stem from the heart rather than just the mind. And then there are times when we simply follow our feet, which seem to take directions from the heart and lead us inevitably to work that needs to be done.
The work itself is rarely glamorous; we spend hours reading medical labels on milk of magnesia (used to flush tear gas from eyes) and cough syrup to filter out artificial flavors and alcohol.
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The violence we are addressing in our work here at Oceti Sakowin is subterranean and subcutaneous. We walk on it. It moves under our skin. Just as fracking waste leaking into groundwater, it courses beneath the messy intricacies of politico-legal disputes drawn on the land above.
In his track “The Land of Enfrackment,” Albuquerque Native rapper Def-i, who performs in subfreezing conditions our last night at camp, reminds us “they're creating agents in our aquifer.” He locates the trauma - both the assault and the resulting pain - deep in the aquifer.
Nine years after the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, the federal government illegally excised the Sacred Black Hills from Sioux Reservation land in what the United States Court of Claims about a century later called a “ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings.”
The “ripe and rank” sludge of reneged promises and outright violence is not a thing of the past.
Native American youth have the highest rate of suicide in the country, and at Standing Rock, that rate is three times the national average. In 2009, in a community of about 8,200 people, seven young people took their own lives.
A posse of Standing Rock Sioux teenage boys on horseback clusters at the front lines on National Day of Mourning. This is their homeland, and these are their horses. At this particular action, the people of Oceti Sakowin are led to the waterside in prayer, where they are asked to remain in prayer throughout the action.
A policeman comes on the microphone.
“Please stop building the bridge [across the river to a sacred burial mound which they occupy]. Return to your camp and enjoy the holiday.”
A Native woman hears this as she walks towards the front line.
“Motherf--s,” she says.
Another water protector adds, “No thanks, no giving.”
From a distance, you can read in the posture of the police phalanx perched atop the burial mound that they have no sacred attachment to or sense of stewardship for this land.
In fact, they don't even seem to want to be here today. For most of them, it's Thanksgiving.
Water protectors implore them to go home to their families. The officer manning the water cannon floods the roots of a lone tree. He does this almost, but not quite, aimlessly. It is less an empty threat than it is an absurd punctuation mark on the violent events of Sunday's action, which erupted just after we had pitched our tents.
“You are not being prayerful and peaceful,” we hear through the megaphone, as if it wasn't insult to injury to have a white man, fully armed and in protective gear, claim the authority to define prayer and peace in that moment.
One of the teenage boys, his chin propped on his horse's rump, pretends to take a nap in the middle of the action.
“Where's the pie?” shouts the teen, the class clown of the group. It is not our place to discern whether or not a wound-up, exhausted teenager speaks from a place of prayer, so instead, we talk about pie.
And wouldn't you know it: someone appears with a cooler full of hot sweet potatoes wrapped in tinfoil. We help pass them out to the women who led a silent walk to the front lines, carrying sacred smoke.
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Now is the time to leverage white privilege to create spaces for indigenous voices to reach audiences who otherwise would not hear them.
Those of us who are non-Native must be mindful we are still, and always, guests. We must consider the fatigue of our hosts; we would not ask our hosts to take time from their day to satiate our curiosity and fill us in on the histories we were not taught, especially after they have spent hours cooking and building in the cold.
Instead, we seek out the voices of Indigenous peoples who have decided they are ready to speak and are assembling an audience. We listen quietly and ask how we can support them. As non-Natives, our engaging in uncomfortable dialogue and occupying strange new roles as students of unfamiliar Indigenous systems of organization, logic, speaking, and decision-making will help us continue to address the underlying disease.
* * *
So what is working? Here's our perspective:
• Not getting in the way of an Indigenous-centered and Indigenous-led movement initiated by Indigenous youth.
• Arriving and working as guests in the way you would enter someone else's kitchen asking, “How can I help?”
• Marveling, as guests, at the natural and human-made beauty our Indigenous hosts stewarded and the incredible systems they designed and implemented to ensure camp was healthy and active.
• Refraining from making the easy slip from wonder at the colors and textures of the earth, water, buildings, artwork, mudflats, and animals to the anxious impulse to record, purchase, or otherwise insist on having them.
• Cultivating a nonviolent movement, with reminders at every turn for us, as water protectors, to take care of our bodies. A circle of medic tipis and yurts with room for Native autonomy in choosing treatment options from among counseling, herbal medicine, allopathic treatment, midwifery, and bodywork.
• Sharing food. Thanking people frequently. Deliberate movements and intentional words. Apologies when appropriate, and the willingness to do hard and sometimes mundane work that does not feed the ego.
• Practicing not speaking when we have something to say so that discourse centers itself on Indigenous-authored and illustrated words and art.
• Acknowledging Native peoples' pain at face value and not asking them to articulate a well-crafted and thoroughly researched defense of a bone-deep, centuries-old, subterranean trauma.
• Doing honest work spun from humble introspection and prayer.
• Discerning between what's right and what's legal, as Chairman Dave Archambault II stated in his response to the Army Corps of Engineers' recent announcement.
We will need all these tools moving forward.
If promises are kept, the pipeline will be rerouted - but the pain is still percolating up.