Native American Heritage Month--A Poem for Standing Rock and #NoDAPL

I've been so frigging mad about the news coverage of the Standing Rock protests. The media, for the most part, can't be bothered to go out and actually investigate what's actually going on. No lattes out on the prairie. So they just take the word of the lying sheriff and governor. After NPR's recently, I just blew, and my poor husband had to listen. Finally, I decided to try to tame the anger in form. So, a sestina for Standing Rock.

NO MORE (SESTINA FOR STANDING ROCK)

I have run out of time

and patience with news coverage so

lazy and biased with a bow

always to

the company owners, powerful and rich,

and to what they want said.

It never matters what my people have said

again and again. Every time

government or corporate forces, so

violent and powerful, require us to bow

in submission, and we won't, the rich

dictate what's broadcast—and written, too.

When I try to explain to

well-meaning white friends, they've said,

“But disorder!” to which I reply each time,

“But oppression!” and sow

seeds of doubt in their comfort. The bough

must break some time and dump the rich

into the mud with the rest of us. The rich

tapestry of cultures that we are can't be reduced to

only WASP—Native, Black, Latino said

to be lesser, negligible, inferior. Each time

I hear this, the fire of anger grows within, so

hot and fierce. It's time for the ruling class's farewell bow.

So long we've stayed peaceful. Soon, it may be time for bow

and lance and rifle, if the rich

can't be compelled to lift the boot, too

sure of their own power to listen to what we've said.

They don't realize it, but they're running out of time.

In arrogance, they rip the fabric of the nation we sew

back together in new, shiny shapes, so

colorful, strange, stronger, tied with the bright bow

of human dignity and rich

gleam of equality and justice. To

those who've always had power and said

to the rest of us, “Give us time

to dole out bits of freedom,” we say, “No,” so...

You've run out of time. Now, reap what you sow.

We'll no longer bow in submission to

the demands of the white and rich. Hear what we've said.

© Linda Rodriguez 2016

Enough Already, 2016!

I have had it. I'm fed up with this year. We won't even talk about all the talented, loved figures who've died this year. There are always deaths like that, but this year, we were hit hard in this arena. Aside from the Angel of Death hovering over our favorite writers, actors, musicians, and other artists, this year has been downright ugly and mean—one could even say, nasty.

The election has thrown its grotesque, sinister shadow over the entire year, dredging up thousands of people who are happy to do and say—nay, shout—things that insult and demean whole swathes of the citizenry—immigrants, women, Latinos, Blacks, Muslims, Natives, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA people, teachers, veterans, journalists, and just about every other segment of society you can think of that isn't privileged White male. We've had one candidate running who's made no secret of his admiration for ruthless dictators and intention to become one himself and another candidate who's faced accusation and investigation after accusation and investigation, only to be repeatedly found innocent but tarred with the constant scandals, and we've had a national media who've falsely focused on those faux scandals while giving the would-be dictator a pass and billions of dollars of free publicity.

Every day, we think we've seen a new low in this election, surely the lowest it could ever go, only to have a newer, lower low replace the old one in the next day or so. We've watched Nazis, white nationalists, and the Ku Klux Klan roll out from under the rocks beneath which they'd had to hide for decades and parade openly with swastikas and Confederate flags in the would-be dictator's rallies, unashamedly retweeted by him and his campaign. The election has become a sickness infecting the entire country.

Then, there are the extrajudicial executions of people of color by modern, militarized police, the same police that our would-be dictator intends to use as shock troops to impose his will on the country, rounding up millions of people “from the first hour of [his] presidency,” the same police who enthusiastically endorse this man who openly brags about breaking laws and disregarding our constitution.

Add to all this, the standoff at Standing Rock, where Native nations from all over the United States have gathered to protect the Missouri River and their own sacred lands from destruction by a rapacious corporation. I have friends and relatives with the Oceti Sakowin Water Protectors, who are being attacked by dogs, pepper-sprayed, maced, teargassed, beaten, shot at, dragged from ceremonies and sweat lodges, strip-searched in public view, and caged, naked, in dog kennels by militarized police from seven different states—sort of a preview of what many of us in this country could expect at the hands of the would-be dictator if we're foolish enough to give him that power over us. When young students must throw themselves physically on top of elders to protect their more fragile bodies and bones from beatings with billy clubs and batons by men in law enforcement uniforms and combat gear, it seems the final straw in an ugly, hateful year.

The election will be over in a couple of days, and I hope and pray that the majority of voters in this land prove themselves to be sane and decent. But that will not do anything about the many others who have proved not to be either. As a country, we'll still have to deal with them, especially since they talk loudly about riots and violence if their dictator doesn't get the chance to rule us all. We'll still be dealing with militarized police who act like an occupying army in their own country. (I've had combat vets tell me they never rolled out in Afghanistan or even Fallujah in all the equipment these guys are using against their own citizens.) My relations will still be standing firm and peacefully as they're attacked, humiliated, and caged out in North Dakota. I want all of this nightmare to be over with the election, but I know it won't be. 2016, hateful year that it's been, seems determined to carry on its ugliness and hate into 2017.

Against this, I try to impose the facts that my husband and I are happier than we've ever been in our own private life, even as the public world seems more dangerous to us and more frightening, that I've come through a dark, physically threatening personal ordeal and am heading back to normal, that I have so many wonderful friends of all colors, races, ethnicities, classes, religions, and all other backgrounds who believe in the same love and tolerance that I do, that I do believe—in the long run—goodness, love, truth, and justice eventually triumph over hate and bigotry (though I fear that sometimes the long run is awfully long), that there are an awful lot of us working to bring decency and equality back into our public sphere.

2016, you've made it downright hard to remember these good truths, but I keep reasserting them against your miserable meanness. I can hardly wait to see your backside, nasty year. Good riddance, even though we won't be rid of most of your pestilent detritus. But it won't be the first time in this country's history that we've had a big moral cleanup job to face after a horrible paroxysm, i.e., mass deportations of citizens of Mexican descent in the 1930s, the camps for Japanese-Americans in the 1940s, the McCarthyism of the 1950s, the violent segregationists of the 1960s, and more before and after those. Every so often, the worst this country contains comes out publicly. Then, the good, decent folks, who usually spend their time quietly minding their own business, have to come out and clean house—and then work hard to mop up the resulting mess. But we always do. I remind myself of that.

2016, you've done your worst, and it's been pretty bad, but we decent folks of the U.S. are coming after you finally. We've had enough, and we're bringing our brooms, mops, and disinfectants with us. Your time has finally come.

Tecumseh's Dream, Part II

Tecumseh was the great Shawnee leader of the early 19^th century, who had grown up in a time of constant warfare and continuing displacement of Indigenous nations from their lands by violent white settlers. He had a vision of uniting as many Native tribes as possible to stand against the flood of white settlers and save the traditional lands of the Shawnee and other nations. He had to convince other nations to join his confederation of nations, and we still have his prescient words to Pushmataha of the Choctaws when he worked to convince them to join, words that resonate with the history between his time and ours—and even with the actions of a pipeline corporation in North Dakota just last weekend.

"Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mochican, the Pocanet, and other powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man... Sleep not longer, O Choctaws and Chickasaws... Will not the bones of our dead be plowed up, and their graves turned into plowed fields?"

Tecumseh was a man ahead of his time. He came close to achieving his dream, however. He united several of the northern tribes, including the Delaware, Potawatomie, Kickapoo, and Osage, but had little luck with the Southern tribes, except for a band of the Creek Nation that came to be called the Red Sticks. Had his brother, Tenskwatawa (also known as the Prophet) who was no warrior, not led a failed sneak attack on the American soldiers, and had Tecumseh not been drawn into the War of 1812 to be betrayed by the cowardly British general he was forced to fight with, I've often wondered if Tecumseh might not have been able to lead a united band of Indigenous nations to force the settlers back beyond the Appalachians and change the entire history of Native America.

Recent events have left me thinking of Tecumseh and his dream of uniting the tribes in dealing with the settlers. Since April, a movement that began with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe offering peaceful but determined opposition to a potentially dangerous pipeline has increasingly drawn members of over a hundred other tribes and the formal endorsement and physical and financial support of over two hundred other tribes. The understanding of the sacredness and importance of water to all of us has led them to become Water Protectors, standing up to a powerful corporation and saying, “We will not allow you to endanger our water and the water on which millions of others depend, as well.”

The two camps of Water Protectors at the Cannonball River, Sacred Stone Camp and Red Warrior Camp, now contain over 5,000 people who have come from tribes all over the United States and Canada to join the Standing Rock Sioux in opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. Recently, this situation had gone to court, and the court had said it would rule the next week. The Standing Rock Sioux delivered materials to the court, identifying an important burial site and other sacred lands lying in the proposed path of the pipeline, another reason its construction should be halted. The corporation sent out workmen over the Labor Day weekend to destroy those sites, in order to make them irrelevant to the case. When the protectors tried to stop them, private security employees assaulted them with pepper spray and attack dogs. The workers and security agents left, probably because of a news program and its video cameras, which recorded what they did, but the site was torn up and destroyed. As Tecumseh said so long ago, “Will not the bones of our dead be plowed up, and their graves turned into plowed fields?"

Still, the federal government has called a temporary halt to construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline. The fight is hardly over. The protectors are not leaving the camps. They are preparing for winter on the prairie. The gathering of tribes that they have built, however, is unprecedented, and I can't help thinking when I see so many relatives from so many different sovereign Indigenous nations gathered together, the flags of the more than 200 nations supporting this action waving above them, that, finally, Tecumseh's dream is coming true.

An Old, Old Story—Dealing Illegally and in Bad Faith with America's Indigenous People

Near the Cannonball River in North Dakota just outside the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, over 3,000 people are gathered from Indigenous nations all over the United States to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (a kind of stealth or back-door Keystone XL Pipeline approved under a “fast track” option that didn't require the scrutiny Keystone had undergone) from destroying tribal burial grounds and sacred sites and from crossing the Missouri River, endangering the source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and for millions of other Americans downstream.

The land the pipeline is scheduled to cross is ancestral land of the Standing Rock Sioux, taken from them in the 20^th century in violation of U.S. treaties with the Standing Rock nation. When they went to federal court in 1980 over this and other land depredations, the judge said, “A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history.” President Obama, when questioned about the DAPL situation at a university in Laos this week, said, “...the way that Native Americans were treated was tragic. … This issue of ancestral lands and helping them preserve their way of life is something that we have worked very hard on.” He did not, unfortunately, answer the question he was asked about the situation of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The elders, who are the leaders of the Standing Stone camp in resistance to the DAPL (as is customary among most Native nations), issued this statement:

“With over 200 river crossings the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline puts the drinking water supply of a large part of the country at risk. Our prayer is to keep the waters pure for all tribal peoples and all Americans.

We pray for the waters used by farmers in Iowa and Illinois, the water consumed by schoolchildren in South Dakota, Missouri, Tennessee, and Arkansas.

Millions of Americans get their drinking water from this system.

We are Protectors not Protesters. Our camp is a prayer, for our children, our elders and ancestors, and for the creatures, and the land and habitat they depend on, who cannot speak for themselves.

We wish the Army Corps had done their job in protecting federally administered lands, unceded Indian lands, and Tribal lands, relying on science and judgement in protecting Indian culture from construction. Whether by intention or omission, the Army Corps broke federal laws, and didn’t do their job.”

The pipeline was originally slated to run past Bismarck, North Dakota, at a distance of 15 miles from the city, but there was outcry that the state capitol's drinking water might be endangered by a leak or break in the 1,100-mile pipeline. Thus, it was shifted to run within half a mile of the Standing Rock reservation. As Dave Archambault II, the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation, told CNN, whenever the United States wants to make sacrifices for economic purposes, it tends to do so on the backs of its Indigenous people, and this longstanding history of economic decision-making at the expense of Natives must stop.

After a federal court injunction to stop construction until the matter could be litigated and the day after the tribe's lawyers filed additional papers in court with information of sacred sites and burial sites along the pipeline path, DAPL sent work crews on a holiday weekend with three bulldozers to dig up those sites and destroy them in order to make them irrelevant to the case. As the gathered Natives tried to block them from digging up and destroying their relatives' graves, a private security company hired by DAPL blocked all cell phone reception to keep word from getting out and then assaulted them with pepper spray and attack dogs. Several protesters were bitten, including a pregnant woman, and one was hospitalized with facial dog bites. Amy Goodman and Democracy Now were in the camp interviewing its members and caught the entire event on camera (see link below), including dogs with bloody mouths after biting Natives, which is probably the only reason the security guards finally left and didn't cause even more injuries. It becomes apparent from this and from the sheriff's statement afterward that the camp attacked the security guards and dogs, injuring them, (when the sheriff was not on the scene at the time) that neither DAPL nor the local authorities are dealing in good faith or legality.

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/4/dakota_access_pipeline_company_attacks_native

This is national news of great importance, but until the past two days, this defense of sacred lands and waters, which has lasted for months, was paid no attention by the national news media, although multiple major international media outlets stayed on top of it and broadcast/wrote about it for their audiences around the world. It's an old, old story, however—U.S. government and private corporations deal in bad faith and illegally with Indigenous nations. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, land theft, you name it—this treatment of its Indigenous people by a country that claims to be a shining city of virtue and fairness on a hill above all others as an example to the world is, with slavery and its modern results, as well, hiding dark, shameful roots.

When racist trolls at public events and online tell us to “get over it,” this is why we can't. It's still going on, still happening to our people—even today when Americans say, “That was our ancestors, not us. We would never do that.” To all those Americans, I say this, “If you allow this corporation and your government to do this today, you are still doing what your ancestors did to the Indigenous people whose land you live on and work on today.”