Orion Magazine gives us a remarkable profile of indigenous women, in prose and pictures, and including their original poetry, memorializing the efforts of these women to defend their land, their families and communities. The article is entitled Women and Standing Rock:
The people of Standing Rock Reservation and their allies have stood solid in prayer to face lines of armed police who used attack dogs, tasers, tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, and sonic weaponry to silence this undeniable truth: Mni Wiconi. “Water is life.”
The Standing Rock standoff was a response to plans to build the Dakota Access pipeline, and represents the confluence of racism, misogyny, environmental degradation by billionaire carbon profiteers, and economic injustice backed by the force of law, and the firepower of law enforcement, with a global perspective:
At a big–box store in Williston, a lot sign advertises overnight parking for RV’s. You have heard about this, how girls are traded here. You had been heading here to see it, and now you’re seeing it. Mostly, you’re not seeing. You are in Williston for thirty-eight minutes, and you don’t leave your car.
You spend those thirty-eight minutes driving around the question of violence, of proximity and approximation. How many close calls constitute a violence? How much brush can a body take before it becomes a violence, before it makes violence, or before it is remade—before it becomes something other than the body it was once, before it becomes a past-tense body?…
At Standing Rock, the days pass in rhythm. You sort box upon box of donation blankets and clothes. You walk a group of children from one camp to another so they can attend school….
If I could convince you, would our brown bodies and our blue rivers be more loved and less ruined?
The Whanganui River in New Zealand now has the same legal rights of a human being. In India, the Ganges and Yamuna rivers now have the same legal status of a human being. Slovenia’s constitution now declares access to clean drinking water to be a national human right. While in the US, we are tear-gassing and rubber-bulleting and kenneling natives who are trying to protect their water from pollution and contamination at Standing Rock in North Dakota. We have yet to discover what the effects of lead-contaminated water will be on the children of Flint, Michigan, who have been drinking it for years.
The entire piece is haunting, beautiful (both the words and the images), and discomfiting.