OUR AMERICA: Get Up, Stand Up
- By Jacob Paul
If I had to be as simple as possible, I would say these two things:
1. The simplest reason to support the Lakȟóta People, the Sioux, in their struggle at Standing Rock was, is, because they asked for support. It’s the reason to keep actively supporting them now, even after Sunday’s decision by the army to not grant Energy Transfer Partners an easement to run the Dakota Access pipeline beneath the Missouri River at Lake Oahe. The Sioux are a sovereign people, a people who’ve suffered hundreds of years of injustice, genocide, and oppression by Americans. That oppression has always been carried out by the army, by businesses and their interests, by ordinary citizens homesteading, and by local law enforcement. The army and the police and business interests are aligned against the Sioux again. If the Sioux had decided that this was how and when and where they need help, who were we to question that request?
And:
2. The police at Standing Rock have been violent and unjust in their actions to protect a corporation’s profit. They have been so and remain so with the backing of their state’s elected officials: Governor Darlrymple said yesterday of the army’s decision, “It does nothing to resolve the issue, and worst of all it prolongs the serious problems faced by North Dakota law enforcement as they try to maintain public safety.” Clearly, he doesn’t see the army’s decision as final, but as a delay until January 20. The army, through its corps of engineers is complicit, as it has always been, in serving the interests of those who exploit natural resources at the expense of indigenous people. ETP’s response to the decision to deny the easement reinforced this alliance, commiserating with an army whose commander-in-chief had overruled them.
Before reading the long version, I’d urge you to watch Aaron Huey’s excellent Ted talk on the history of Lakota Peoples (the Sioux).
And, of course, you should visit the Tribe’s page.
How We Came to Go to Standing Rock
When Courtney suggested over late night tacos that we just go there, go to Standing Rock to stand with the water protectors and help out however we might, I had that dizzy recognition that this was actually something that we could do, and that I was scared to do it, but that I should do it. We debated whether to go over my Thanksgiving break, or in December when my semester ended. Then maybe a day later I saw a photo of a line of police and men in fatigues wearing full body armor and face shields, backed by armored personnel carriers, advancing across the prairie towards a small group of indigenous water protectors holding banners. I thought: This is a picture from a history book, this is the US military getting ready to slaughter the unarmed Sioux à la Wounded Knee again. This isn’t supposed to happen in my country.
We decided not to wait for December. We finished packing that Sunday night, just in time to watch a live feed of the police brutalizing 400 or so protectors at the barricade on Highway 1806, hosing them down in sub-freezing temperatures and lobbing canister after canister of tear gas, so much tear gas that protectors vomited, lost control of their bowels. It turns out they were also lobbing concussion grenades, at random, into the crowd. There were 167 injuries that night, 15 of which required emergency room care, the worst of which was incurred by a twenty-one-year-old woman from NYC, whose forearm was blown open to the bone. The next day, I bought us surplus Czech gas masks at the High Point Army-Navy store.
Here’s the thing: I didn’t want to go. Not just that I didn’t want the context for my going to exist (I didn’t want it to exist then and I don’t now), but also, I didn’t want to go anywhere I could get tear-gassed, shot, hosed, blown up. I’m not particularly brave when faced with the threat of physical violence. It startles me when there’s the possibility that someone might want to physically harm me. I’m not fully capable of believing that they do, despite intellectually understanding it to be true. But I also knew that I could go, that I’m privileged that way: to have vacation time, money, the capacity to travel (TSA precheck!), to not have dependents, and to know that I’d basically be okay. So I went.
Courtney, I think, was just ready. Of the two of us, I’m the chicken.
Protest Communities on the Cannonball River
I only figured out that Oceti Sakowin Camp was a thing—and that the thing was different than Standing Rock (which is a whole reservation), or than Sacred Stone Camp—in the days immediately prior to our departure. Oceti Sakowin, though, while a camp, isn’t exactly a camp. It’s a prayer, not prayerful, but actually a prayer.
While my own work has striven to expand our understanding of prayer, or maybe because of that, I know that most people who come from Abrahamic traditions expect prayer to be a personal communiqué with a divinity. This, however, is a collective manifestation of worship/prayer. All acts in it are meant to be done with that intentionality. Though some of the rules and principles for the camp, like the strict prohibition of intoxicants, whether on or in participants, are expedient for multiple reasons—alcohol mixes poorly with nonviolent direct action—their intention is based in the fact of the camp being a prayer. This applies, too, to the fact of the Seven Councils Circle – Oceti Sakowin means Seven Councils – with its sacred fire at its center. And, of course, there’s lots and lots of other prayer.
Oceti Sakowin is the much larger of the water protectors’ two camps. It’s at least as large as several city blocks. Multiple construction crews are actively building permanent structures, erecting yurts on platforms and winterizing teepees. The scale of the endeavor is breathtaking. It sits on land currently controlled by the Army Corps of Engineers: control that the army took in violation of the Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1851, in 1871, when the army restricted western Indians from leaving what then became prisoner of war camps (reservations within their treaty-guaranteed sovereign territories). The Cannonball River separates Oceti from Sacred Stone Camp. They’re adjacent. Their entrances are only thirty yards apart, but Oceti sits on unceded treaty land controlled by the army, and Sacred Stone is on reservation land.
Less than a mile north of the river, the police blockade on Route 1806 cuts off the fastest route between the reservation and the cities of Bismark and Mandan, which are only about forty miles away to the north. It also cuts off water protectors’ foot access to pipeline route. The pipeline’s river/lake crossing is about half a mile from the reservation. It’s as close to being on the reservation as it can be without actually being on the reservation. In other words, while Oceti Sakowin is where it is because that’s as close as the protectors can get to the pipeline-crossing site, it’s also itself an act of taking and holding space, contested territory, through nonviolent action and in an act of prayer. And, again, Oceti Sakowin is an act of prayer.
The False Logic behind Eviction
When Colonel Henderson, district commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, implies that by evicting Oceti Sakowin he’ll move water protectors far away from the confrontation sites, he’s lying. He’d move them across a river. When Governor Dalrymple says that it’s harder to get emergency services to Oceti, he’s lying. Oceti is just one bridge crossing further. In fact, if the governor or the army removed the months-long blockade north of Oceti on 1806, emergency medical services could reach ALL of the Standing Rock reservation in about half the time. They’d reach Oceti first. With the denial of the easement, it’s hard to imagine that the eviction notices set for today, December 5—one from the army, one from the governor—will stand. On the other hand, DAPL and North Dakota don’t seem so much ready to relinquish space as to hold and wait for the current commander-in-chief to leave. Kicking the water protectors out of Oceti Sakowin now would serve that strategy.
Moving the water protectors gives the army, police, and DAPL several tactical advantages: First, it means that they can even more effectively barricade the tribe in the reservation: rivers are effective boundaries, that’s why the Cannonball was enforced as the northern border of the reservation by the army. Second, because the majority of the winterization projects underway by the protectors are in Oceti, it would disrupt winter preparation. Third, it would reassert the army’s entitlement to disputed lands. Fourth, it would be an assertion of the army and the state’s power. In other words, the eviction notice is an act of war over land, in part to build a pipeline, in part to enforce an oppressive status quo. It is NOT an act of public safety.
The army land for which Energy Transfer is seeking an easement was seized from the Sioux even more recently: in 1962, as part of a 56,000 acre land grab that established Lake Oahe and destroyed 90 percent of the tribe’s timberland by building the Oahe Dam in central South Dakota. To manage the lake, the army then seized strips of land on either side of the lake, the land through which the easement must run. An excellent article from the Washington Post discusses this history
Oceti Sakowin as Prayer
I was impressed and moved by how much the Tribe and the water protectors at large hate violence and strive to escape it. There was real soul-searching about whether the intentionality of the prayers was loving enough, or whether some other failure in that regard had led to Sophia’s grievous injury. Perhaps because of this, many of the actions that took place while we were there occurred in places where tear gas and rubber bullets would have been hard to deploy, places like Mandan’s city center and a Bismark mall. And this, perhaps, is where the Oceti Sakowin’s status as a prayer becomes so important. The prayers I heard stated and restated that the camp was there to fight the black snake, yes, but that wasn’t why it was there or why the people were there: they and it were there to heal, and to heal meant to move past hate and violence.
The Oceti Sakowin prayer, its attempt to heal, these are things that, at least in part, work as prayers to oneself, to find a way to love the police on the hill, to find a way to love oneself and everyone around oneself. To make that love an act rather than a feeling, and to live in that act as, again, a kind of prayer. To heal.
Jacob Paul’s 2010 debut novel, Sarah/Sara, was called one of that year’s five best first fictions by Poets & Writers. His work has also appeared in Western Humanities Review, Massachusetts Review, Seneca Review, The Rumpus, and Numero Cinq. For more on Paul and his work, please visit his author website.
