I just got back from the ongoing protest/occupation/celebration/action in North Dakota. Sacred Stone Camp. Cannon Ball. Standing Rock. Dakota Access Pipeline (aka DAPL as in #NoDAPL). It’s left me with a lot to think about, and a lot of impressions I need to process.
I went with my Overpass Light Brigade peeps (our “official” blog post about it). Sometimes I feel like we’re the Peripatetic Activist Brigade, hopping from place to place, issue to issue. As a Facebook commenter said, “you’re always there!” This makes me feel a bit sheepish: we have the resources to travel, to take time, to engage social media aggressively, to be somewhat informed on an array of issues, to “care” about lots of things, to be on the front lines or to be allies, as the situation demands. We’ve been aware, for some months, of this ongoing fight just north of the Standing Rock Reservation, on lands of tribal significance. We decided we wanted to go and understand what was happening in a more direct way, beyond the whirl of causes and struggles and fights that one just reads about in the virtual bubble of clicktavism and share-awareness.
Landscape through the windshield, Standing Rock Sioux ReservationThe drive to Cannon Ball was beautiful, through the familiar landscape of Wisconsin, southern Minnesota, and into north eastern South Dakota. There, on a small highway away from the interstate, I saw hundreds of pelicans, egrets, herons. As we made our way westward, swallows dipped across the path of our van, seemingly inches from our bumper, hour after hour. In South Dakota, we crossed the Missouri River/Lake Oahe and entered the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and began our drive along highway 1806, part of the Lewis and Clark Trail and the Native American Scenic Byway.
What a perfect nomenclature for the binary conflict I felt (and feel) about this trip. “American” (white, European) “explorers” “discovering” the land already long occupied by other people.
The interpretative panels along the byway continued to reinforce my inner discomfort as they, in the dry, detached historical language of passive voice, discussed early settlements, skirmishes, laws, resettlements, treaties, dams: all of which decimated the original inhabitants’ culture, economy, population, civilization and land.
View of Sacred Stone camp from Cannon Ball River, September 2, 2016We arrived at the camp. We are tourists? We are guests? We are allies? We are intruders?
The camp is pretty well organized, all things considered. There are rows of porta-johns in strategic places all over the camp. There is a check in tent, a medical tent, a man with a microphone and a surprisingly good PA system — good enough even for my buzzy-fuzzy tinnitus ears. He narrates the day with a mix of lost and found announcements, requests for help setting up tipis, unloading trucks, chopping firewood, and introductions of honored guests from far-away tribes, his disembodied voice booming across the camp. A kitchen and giant refrigerated truck hum along all day, producing delicious home-made food for anyone who cares to partake. There are some explicit rules at the camp: no weapons, no drugs, no alcohol. There are also some obvious but unspoken protocols or expectations that were easy to violate without knowing. After the invitation to “set up over there, wherever there’s a space” (wave of hand over vast campground scattered with tents, cars, RVs, tipis, horse corrals), we inadvertently camped in a large family’s encampment parking area. We discovered this after the family returned to the previously-empty tents. Oops! Lesson 1: don’t camp where there is a tipi set up, even a small one amidst a group of tents. They were very gracious.
Welcoming ceremony, evening of September2The world is now aware of what’s going on at the pipeline construction/destruction site. Viral photos of dogs’ bloody muzzles tend to get people’s attention. That’s not what this diary is about. The amazing cultural space that is the aggregation of camps known as “Sacred Stone” is, in many ways, the more challenging space. Protest and direct action are known spaces to me. This camp was not. It was a place of great personal unease, an emotional correlative to the wind-advisory gale which blew in a hot and gritty maelstrom almost the entire time of my visit. It is a place of strange opposites that unfold with a sense of cosmic inevitability. Watching a detached, scholarly and brutal documentary about Indian genocide (The Doctrine of Discovery: Unmasking The Domination Code), projected on the side of the kitchen’s refrigerated truck, while a young woman smilingly passes out bags of popcorn to the mostly-native audience. Participating in call-and-response native hip hop, fists raised against the oppressor (yourself). Breakneck bareback horsemanship, children’s boot races, drums beating into the night; bulldozers, attack dogs, pepper spray on sacred sites.
Children’s boot race, September 3 Horsemanship event, September 3It is unnerving and instructive to be in a place where you are welcome, but have no social capital. People were happy to participate in OLB actions, as they were happy to watch documentaries, run races, line up for dinner, listen to reservation rap. Events, spontaneous and scheduled, passed through the camp and then passed on. The Pipeline Fight looms, but the spirit of the camp is one of a growing gathering, a coming together of the nations in unprecedented numbers from around the country and the continent. In the aftermath of the dog-and-pepper-spray violence, Aztec dancers arrived. The flow of the camp is focused on the cyclical, ceremonial rhythm of welcoming its brethren. That was the important work.
The Avenue of Nations grows by the day.