IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO LEARN OUR HISTORY
AND RECOGNIZE OUR HISTORY IS PRESENT
“You can’t come home until you know where you belong”
Nicole Baltrushes, from the album Another Home
Part 1
A week has passed since the day I piled into the rental car with my neighbor, who joined me at Standing Rock, and departed for the Bismarck Airport. We drove through the South Gate of Oceti Sakowin Camp to the sound of Emmy Lou Harris’s version of the Steve Earle classic 'Goodbye'. We crossed the Cannonball River (Íŋyaŋwakağapi Wakpá in Lakota), and followed the circuitous route required by the blockade north of camp on route 1806. I was speechless, consumed by memories of my 6 days and the deeply personal stories shared with Protectors I helped and who helped me. They still help me.
We turned off route 24 to head north on 6, and Gil Scott Heron chimed in:
I knew that not long ago, Protectors had stood bravely in the path of the pipeline where it crossed this road. I searched, but with my untrained eye, I found no evidence of the pipeline, “buried beneath the highway.” No blood stains visible from the attack dogs used by G4S and Frost Kennels to ensure that the project would march on towards the Missouri where it now is on the brink of completion.
Every word, every note on Brian Jackson’s flute, chilled me to the bone. I thought of my wife, my family, my friends far away, living in dread of “Democracy ragtime on the corner.” It dawned on me that while the world is gripped by the horror of Trump’s suspect election, Scott-Heron wrote this song 42 years ago when I was less than three years old. Our past is our present.
Not until I passed through airport security, did I have the presence of mind to text my wife that I was safe and ready to board. That might have been the first indication that I now shared a whole new set of traumas with the Protectors I left behind. As a provider devoted to helping others contend with the effects of PTSD and every other trauma-related mental health challenge, the work starts at home.
As we boarded the plane, my friend told me that he couldn’t find a single image of a Native American in the gift shop. In North Dakota. As luck would have it, I wound up seated next to a longtime activist and educator that I hadn’t seen since the day after he helped me hitch a ride from the airport. We chatted off and on, though I chose to be succinct as I had no idea who else happened to be flying from Bismarck to Minneapolis on that plane. I spent most of the short trip listening to my cousin Nicole’s album, Another Home. My friend from Brooklyn pored over Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People's History of the United States (2014). He asked me for music recommendations; I have since found Dunbar-Ortiz’s history to be a treasure.
Winter in America was released a year after the 1973 Siege at Wounded Knee. Organized Indigenous resistance paused the termination policy of the 1950s which aimed to eliminate all reservation land and nullify Native Sovereignty by 1985. That shameful federal policy followed a continuum described by Matthew King and Dunbar-Ortiz:
... the United States throughout its history [alternated] between a “peace” policy and a “war” policy in its relations with Indigenous nations and communities, ... these pendulum swings coincided with the strength and weakness of Native resistance. Between the alternatives of extermination and termination (war policies) and preservation (peace policy), were interim periods characterized by benign neglect and assimilation. With organized Indigenous resistance to war programs and policies, concessions are granted. When pressure lightens, new schemes are developed to separate Indians from their land, resources and cultures….
The logical progression of modern colonialism begins with economic penetration and graduates to a sphere of influence, then to protectorate status or indirect control, military occupation, and finally annexation…. Matthew King and other traditional Sioux saw the siege of Wounded Knee in 1973 as a turning point, although the backlash that followed was harsh.
The echoes of the siege at Wounded Knee are not lost on the survivors. Clyde Bellecourt mused, “My life is almost over, but there’s fresh energy here.” At least he can stand free, with many other elders, in solidarity with Standing Rock. Shortly before I left camp, I found a spiral notebook filling up with notes to Leonard Peltier. The price he paid planted in me the seed of attention that led me to that place. I drew him a buffalo and wrote, “your relatives will not abandon you.”
I was a teenager the first time I read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, long before I made a family of my own. I knew something about the bittersweet, interconnected histories of many Native peoples and the buffalo. I thought I grasped the depth of pain and elation expressed by the young man in the widely viewed video, as he gazed past barbed wire and militarized police and saw a herd of wild buffalo. I shared the video with my son, the best way I could think to explain why I was leaving the family for a week to help people I had never met.
He helped me carve the pumpkin shared earlier, and made some buffalo drawings of his own. He asked me to take a photo if I saw a buffalo. When I returned, I didn’t have the heart to tell him the only buffalo I saw were quarantined, in a video posted by EcoWatch. Nor was he ready to hear the rest of the story.
Thomas Fitzpatrick, the Indian agent in 1846...“My opinion… is that a post at, or in the vicinity of Laramie is much wanted, it would be nearly in the center of the buffalo range, where all the formidable Indian tribes are fast approaching, and near where there will eventually be a struggle for the ascendancy [in the fur trade].”
The Ft Laramie Treaty of 1851 depended on the consent of appointed Chiefs, yet most Native cultures depended on a more horizontal decision-making structure that emphasized consensus. The 1851 treaty promised to defend the Sioux from private interest and US citizens, a promise that has been persistently broken ever since. It also created the precedent for further land cessions. After over a decade of violent conflict, stoked in large part by the Western migration of non-Native people through Sioux territory, the second Ft Laramie Treaty of 1868 reduced the boundaries further, established reservations and ushered in a period of increased dependence on annuities of food and clothing.
Dunbar-Ortiz:
On the plains the Sioux gradually abandoned farming and turned entirely to bison hunting for their subsistence and for trade. This increased dependency on the buffalo in turn brought deeper dependency on guns and ammunition that had to be purchased with more hides, creating the vicious circle that characterized modern colonialism. With the balance of power tipped by mid-century, US traders and the military exerted pressure on the Sioux for land cessions and rights of way as the buffalo population decreased. The hardships for the Sioux caused by constant attacks on their villages, forced movement, and resultant disease and starvation took a toll on their strength to resist domination. They entered into the 1868 treaty with the United States on strong terms from a military standpoint- the Sioux remained an effective guerrilla fighting force through the 1880s, never defeated by the US army- but their dependency on buffalo and on trade allowed for escalated federal control when buffalo were purposely exterminated by the army between 1870 and 1876. After that the Sioux were fighting for survival.
My first efforts at writing while at Standing Rock revolved around personal and family pride and trauma. In large part due to the must-read Standing Rock Allies Resource Packet, I was prepared to own my family history, to come correct, rather than try to wear the host’s culture like some mask. Nonetheless, this came organically, from the first moment I laid eyes on Oceti Sakowin camp. My own grief and determination swelled in the presence of so many deeply traumatized and resilient people. The sight of so many flags from so many first peoples and allies, the generosity of one individual after another. And bittersweet though it was, I felt my daughter’s presence as vividly as ever. Two Protectors in particular, a medic and a nurse practitioner, helped me that first evening work through the intense pain and prepared me to channel my inspiration.
My arrival recalled another meeting with fellow travelers. My wife and I had struggled to care for Gavriella through multiple hospitalizations, medication trials, and worsening prognoses. We were put in touch with other families whose children shared vision impairment and seizure disorders. While volunteers at the Perkins School cared for our little ones, all the parents were free to heal and be healed. Suddenly, we were among people who would never judge us, who embraced us through every dark moment of despair and anger, and walked the path of education and advocacy together.
Gavriella taught me to care for others as nobody else could, which led to my career change. She also would have wanted me to see some buffalo. So I spent much of my last two days at the Art Collective, painting a banner of a herd of buffalo. Before I started, I asked some people near me to feel free to paint a buffalo if they liked. One artist smiled, “First, let’s see some of your buffalo.”
There wasn’t much space available so I weighted down a piece of tarp in a field of prairie grass. I stretched the cloth with strapping, enough to keep it from whipping in the occasionally stiff gusts of wind. Nobody joined in initially, but one Lakota woman began asking questions. Mutually acknowledging the irony of a white man painting this banner, I revealed that the buffalo motif I chose was as much influenced by Shoshone art as Lakota. Her eyes widened, she winced at me skeptically, then smiled. After some time she returned with her medicine wheel and showed me how it might be oriented if I included it. Without understanding details of the medicine wheel or the exact significance of the orientation she chose, I accepted this contribution without hesitation. The first day’s effort at painting a banner ended as the sun set.
The last full day in camp, I woke early to prepare supplies for those risking police violence. By the time I made it to the art collective I was already stiff and exhausted. A friend helped me by working on the medicine wheel and improvising a melodic chant that reminded me of Rokia Traore. With burial mounds before me, scorched hills to the West, sacred ground beneath, and my sweet Gavriella in my heart, I painted. Red, purple and blue buffalo seemed to dance off my brushes. I saw that the vulnerable buffalos, the purple elders and the smallest ones, were surrounded by the larger ones, echoing one of the principles of the non-violent direct action training. And then, just as another group was practicing their training, someone spotted a fire behind the art tent.
I had seen a large fire at the edge of camp closest to the pipeline the night before. I later asked the camp architect if a fire tower would be helpful. While he thought that might help, thus far the Protectors had managed to douse every fire in camp. The exact mechanism by which fires have been set is disputed, but the blaze by the art tent was far from any campfire or other obvious vector. I was close enough to help, but too old and creaky to stand up before the youngest had already begun dousing it. Thanks to my delay, I had time to spot a jug of river water nearby, accelerated to full speed, and ending up helping after all.
The sun was close to setting when it dawned on me that I would never have time to complete the painting to my own satisfaction. One of the incredible artists organizing the collective came to my rescue. With obvious conviction, she promised that the banner would be completed. In the end others would join to paint buffalo after all.
I never took a photo of the buffalo and I never asked any of the people taking photos of it to send me one. I guess part of me hadn’t come to terms with it being unfinished, uncertain when I would return. History has shown that the struggle will always be unfinished: War policy, followed by peace policy, followed by war policy, ad infinitum. So I left my buffalos for the hills and the peoples that haven’t given up the struggle.
Gil Scott-Heron wrote in the liner notes for Winter in America:
At the end of 360 degrees, Winter is a metaphor: a term not only used to describe the season of ice, but the period of our lives through which we are travelling. In our hearts we feel that spring is just around the corner: a spring of brotherhood and united spirits among people of color. Everyone is moving, searching. There is a restlessness within our souls that keeps us questioning, discovering and struggling against a system that will not allow us space and time for fresh expression... We approach winter the most depressing period in the history of this industrial empire, with threats of oil shortages and energy crises. But we, as Black people, have been a source of endless energy, endless beauty and endless determination. I have many things to tell you about tomorrow’s love and light. We will see you in Spring.
Mni Wiconi, Water is Life
Oliver Bassett
Next in Part 3: Psy-Ops and Psychiatry
ACTION ITEMS:
DONATE:
MUST-READ for VOLUNTEERS: Standing Rock Allies Resource Packet
and be sure to attend Orientation at 9 am on day one at Oceti Sakowin
350.org’s guide to Personal Divestment
Sign Lakota Law Project’s divestment petition, bring to your bank
Petition Obama: PARDON LEONARD PELTIER