Sep 6

Sep 6 #StandingRock

If you have safe and easy access to drinking water... If your home is not under immediate threat of encroachment by a nationstate.... If a private company is not helping itself to land holding the sacred remains of your ancestors... Please take the time to make yourself aware of what is happening at the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota.

Over the weekend, while some Americans were honoring the contributions of workers and the American labor movement, the Dakota Access Pipeline Company attacked Native Americans with dogs and pepper spray as they protested against the $3.8 billion pipeline’s construction. The project has been protested by more than 100 tribes from all across North America for months. The reason they've been protesting? For starters, there's the destruction that comes with oil extraction and the development of oil pipelines that are well-documented at this point. In addition to the environmental threats (which would hit these indigenous communities the hardest, but would also have negative national and global impacts), Dakota Access pipeline's proposed route goes through a sacred burial site. This sacred burial site is what Dakota Access targeted over the weekend, ordering bulldozers to plough through the sacred earthen site.

I implore you to please read this New York Times op-ed by David Archambault II, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Archambault accurately, and heartbreakingly and infuriatingly, writes:

It’s a familiar story in Indian Country. This is the third time that the Sioux Nation’s lands and resources have been taken without regard for tribal interests. The Sioux peoples signed treaties in 1851 and 1868. The government broke them before the ink was dry.

For those amongst us that still have indigenous cultures, indigenous connections to the earth, indigenous connections to family and community, I believe we should be honoring and preserving those ways of life, those relationships to land and resources. We should be contributing to the preservation and protection of indigenous rights, indigenous sovereignty and indigenous wisdom. May we all be more aware of our own ancestries and histories, our own wiser and older connections to land and resources that sustain all kinds of life, not just our own. May we anchor ourselves in the places and heritages we come from, acknowledge each other's faith and right to self-determination, and respect one another's right to thrive.

In honor of, and with respect to, indigenous communities worldwide, sharing a ridiculously good song (and video) by A Tribe Called Red, a group out of Ottawa consisting of Ian "DJ NDN" Campeau (of the Nipissing First Nation), Tim "2oolman" Hill (Mohawk, of the Six Nations of the Grand River), and Bear Witness (of the Cayuga First Nation).