Standing Rock Reflections: What Is Progress?

The Western poet and memoirist Terry Tempest Williams has written about "the range of memory" we humans have—a sense of history and place not told in books, but transcendent in a way in which language, culture, worldview and spirituality grows out of the land. 

Mountain Journal's poet in residence Lois Red Elk says the stories of her people may not be written down in paper or stone, but they've been carried forward almost like an ark of being. Once upon a time before Europeans poured into the West only a few relative generations ago, Red Elk's Dakota Oyate ancestors dwelled in the upper Midwest of present-day Minnesota, Iowa and the Dakotas.   

One element shaped their persistence, subsistence and perseverance: water.

Water was the one and everything ingredient that brought all living creatures together; near it was where wild rice grew, where fish and beaver swam, where bison, deer, moose and waterfowl congregated; where encampments were made; where the blessings of terrestrial living were mirrored by a sophisticated grasp of cosmology that informed where they needed to be in certain seasons.

Today's push for holistic thinking about "sustainability" is a bit ironic for Red Elk because it's always been here on the North American continent going on thousands upon thousands of years before the Euro-Asian breadbasket of Mesopotamia husbanded its first crops on the other side of the globe.

As Red Elk looks back three years to 2016, she remembers the vigil of Standing Rock with more than irony. While some would claim it was a dispute over oil flowing through the 1,172-mile-long Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) corridor, for protestors it was about protecting sacred water, exercising indigenous sovereignty—the right to say no to unwanted development— guaranteed in treaties brokered between different tribal plains nations and the U.S. government, and an indigenous notion of the precautionary principle.  The latter, of course, is a scientific notion of "looking before one leaps in taking action" but it's a basic precept for survival.

The protests at Standing Rock over the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' permit that allowed the DAPL to travel across the Missouri River and literally beneath Lake Oahe, attracted international attention. Media coverage highlighted, as a backdrop, the historical abuse and American-style genocide directed at indigenous people on this continent: it also revealed prejudice—call it racism—that still exists prolifically in American society.  Clashes between protestors and security guards hired by the pipeline company and law enforcement officials erupted.

Protestors were portrayed as radical, mischief-making Leftists and environmentalists who are out of touch with the way the modern world works.  Some of those who wanted to block the pipeline were labeled domestic terrorists.

Pipeline activists, meanwhile, were characterized as insensitive adherents of capitalism, driven by greed and racism, carrying an anti-science denialist agenda toward the relationship between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change.  The heavy-handed tactics of the security guards were compared to those of a police state.

Lois Red Elk and her husband, Dennis, went to Standing Rock from their home in Fort Peck, Montana to support the protestors. 

Just a few weeks ago, she was at Fort Peck, with elders and young people in her community, welcoming the arrival of 55 bison from Yellowstone given a new home on her reservation rather than facing slaughter due to prejudice against bison in Montana.

"Have been remembering Standing Rock since it's been three years that I, and my husband, journeyed there with other members of my tribe," Lois writes to MoJo readers. "I had a dream of being there and participating in the best way I could which was to pray for the water and to share the value of Dream Culture with my Hunkpapa relatives."

Ultimately, the protest failed. On February 2, 2017, just two weeks after coming into office, President Donald J. Trump authorized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to green light approval for the pipeline to be built. Oil now flows. 

"We are not opposed to energy independence. We are opposed to reckless and politically motivated development projects, like DAPL, that ignore our treaty rights and risk our water," Standing Rock Tribal Chairman  David Archambault II said in a statement at the time. 

Red Elk says Standing Rock served as a catalyst for galvanizing many people across Indian Country. In many tribes there is a "Dream Culture" where visions are interpreted and shared.  What follows are two poems.  The first, Sleep Ordering Space, was inspired by Standing Rock and the time Red Elk spent there. 

The latter is an older poem, a favorite of Mojo, titled Encounter at the Fort. How might a cavalry trooper, who had passed on, look back on atrocities committed against indigenous people in the West? It is inspired by real dreams that Red Elk and her sister had on the same night at Fort Union. Her poem is a haunting exploration and it speaks to how the afflicted possess the greatest power of all in offering forgiveness to those whose who consciences are loaded eternally with guilt and shame.  Read still another poem about the fort by clicking here. —Mountain Journal editors

©Lois Red Elk