The Esperanza Project

Category: Lakota

  • Native ‘hempsters’ follow global cooperative example

    Native ‘hempsters’ follow global cooperative example

    PINE RIDGE, S.D.- A global enterprise based in Spain may seem an unlikely role model for a fledging American Indian initiative. But inspired by its success, Winona’s Hemp and Heritage Farm in Anishinaabeg territory is sowing the start of an intertribal cooperative consortium.

    The new endeavor, called the Indigenous Hemp and Cannabis Farmers Cooperative, is laying the groundwork for the envisioned network. Farm owner Winona LaDuke and fellow founders intend to support the development of seeds, Indigenous standards, cultivation, value-added processing, appropriate technologies, and fair-trade markets.

    LaDuke spoke to other Native hemp growers during a recent informational meeting at Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center, located not far from Oglala Lakota tribal offices. Alerting listeners to an upcoming fundraiser for the cooperative cause, she said, “I hope that some seeds are in the ground, and we will pray for gentle rains.” She announced the initiative at the fundraiser, a concert featuring folk singer-songwriter David Huckfelt at Madeline Island in Lake Superior.

    Workers at Winona’s Hemp and Heritage Farm pose with seeds for fabric, food, oil, and building material. Photo Courtesy of Winona’s Hemp and Heritage Farm.

    Henry Red Cloud, an Oglala headman and founder of Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center,  said this was his 14th hemp gathering. “I encourage our tribal membership to start a cooperative,” said the fifth-generation direct descendent of Maȟpíya Lúta, the principal Teton Lakota leader who negotiated the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.

    “We can have 10 acres here, 10 over there, 20 over there, five over here, and maybe a couple of acres over here, but we can do it together,” he urged. “Let’s go partner up. Let’s get down this road together. Some of us are way down the road already, so, you know, share that knowledge.”

    Henry Red Cloud encouraged tribal members to walk the path of the New Green Revolution. (Talli Nauman Photo)

    With those words, Red Cloud hit on the most glaring problems of the Native hemp challenge. He and other “hempsters” — as advocates of a hemp-based economy call themselves — must produce, transform, and market exponentially more than they do now. They don’t quite have a road map.

    Hemp is a versatile building and textile material, with many other uses as well, including for the basic needs of fuel, food, and medicine. LaDuke touts its carbon sink potential in the field and its substitution as an input to save trees from paper or building industry demands.

    The 2014 federal Farm Bill re-legalized hemp across the United States after a post-WWII moratorium on growing it. But almost a decade later, tribal citizens, who are among the most interested in its possible community benefits, are barely cutting their teeth in the business.

    For example, Winona’s Hemp and Heritage Farm, in collaboration with the non-profit Anishinaabe Agriculture Institute, has harvested hemp for eight years. Yet they have only seeds and stalks to show for their troubles. They purchased a processor they needed only by importing it from China.  They are trying to obtain abandoned mills to weave textiles. In an experiment with one bale of hemp, they found that they had to send it to North Carolina, then Virginia and Mexico for a finished fabric product. It wasn’t until 2023 that they raised their first hemp-and-lime (hempcrete) walls.

    Veteran hempster Alex White Plume has long advocated for diversifying reservation hemp activities. “If we could turn the dollar over seven times within our communities, and then the chain reaction starts,  we’ll start a local economy,” he said.

    Alex White Plume shares experiences of hemp industry in Indian Country. (Talli Nauman Photo)

    However, White Plume pointed out another hurdle to overcome. Speaking at the Pine Ridge meeting, the former Oglala Sioux tribal president said his reservation’s regulations have become too onerous for hemp production and processing. “I know how to grow hemp, there’s no trick to it,” he said. But with a 55-page ordinance, “it’s just impossible.” He said he hopes other local growers will help him convince the tribal council to convert the regulations into voluntary guidelines.

    LaDuke, a Harvard-trained economist, has been cultivating the idea of an intertribal cooperative consortium since visiting Spain in 1981. There she discovered the Basque Country and the employee-governed Mondragon Corp., she told Buffalo’s Fire.

    She maintains the road to prosperity depends on raising enough hemp and processing it into fiber products in a vertically integrated Mondragon-style commercial network. A two-time Green Party presidential running mate and founder of several successful Indian Country non-profits, she encourages fellow Native hemp growers to join hands.

    “In the nonprofit sector, the wealth stays in the nonprofit, and having done that for 35 years of my life, I now want to see how to get more generational wealth into my community,” LaDuke said.

    Winona LaDuke uses processed hemp fibers like these and shows their application in the building industry. (Talli Nauman Photo)

    The much-studied Mondragon Corp., the world’s largest conglomeration of cooperatives, ranks first in Basque business performance ratings and tenth overall in Spain. Founded in 1956, it has grown to encompass 95 separate companies, owned by some 80,000 employees on every continent.

    The model enterprise boasts revenues on a par with those of Kellogg’s and Visa. No top manager makes more than six times the entry-level pay, sharing profits where needed among participants instead. To bolster economic sustainability, personnel operate their own credit institution, plus 14 R&D centers.

    Mondragon Corp. headquarters are in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, one of 17 such jurisdictions that make up Spain. Like tribal governments in the United States, the autonomous units are second only to the federal government, in terms of the countries’ hierarchies of authority. Known in the Native language as Euskadi, the community located in the Pyrenees Mountains has 2.1 million residents, most of whom trace local ancestry to times before Roman Conquest.

    Mondragon personnel operate their own credit institution. Photo Courtesy Mondragon Corp.

    “The people that they call Basque own all kinds of businesses. They grew them out of their Indigenous values and proceeded to build wealth in their community,” LaDuke said. Mondragon Corp.’s Indigenous roots, size, and wealth are not the only assets that attract the  Pine Ridge meeting goers. Its social justice principles resonated with participants from tribes in Minnesota, as well as in North Dakota and South Dakota, as they hope to launch a similar enterprise.

    “Social values are embedded in its core working practices and drive it forward,” concluded a case study of Mondragon Corp. conducted by The Young Foundation in the United Kingdom.  A focus on people and solidarity has underpinned the cooperatives’ ongoing development for more than six decades.

    Thanks to Mondragon Corp., the Basque region claims the lowest levels of poverty and economic inequality in Spain, the non-profit Cincinnati Union Cooperative Initiative, Co-op Cincy, determined after a May fact-finding mission. The New York City-based business source Fortune Magazine included Mondragon Corp. in its “Change the World” directory. That list is comprised of more than 50 successful international businesses and initiatives that are “taking on society’s unsolved problems.”

    Fortune exalted Mondragon for demonstrating “no business succeeds alone” and the importance of “collaboration among companies.” Its cooperatives have helped to combat the COVID-19 pandemic by starting up new businesses and proactively placing their technical resources at the service of others, the magazine noted.

    Hemp’s prospects for reducing global warming while turning around fossil fuel dependence led LaDuke to champion it as the cutting edge of a New Green Revolution.

    The original Green Revolution, attributed to the University of Minnesota Agronomy and Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, is the precursor of today’s transnational agribusiness monocropping. It relies on petroleum supplies to feed the world and makes for a hydrocarbon economy, said LaDuke. In contrast, she added, a carbohydrate economy would result from an allied grassroots producers’ movement.

    This story was originally published by Buffalo’s Fire and is reposted here with permission from the author.

  • Tribes and water protectors ward off new Black Hills gold rush

    Tribes and water protectors ward off new Black Hills gold rush

    SILVER CITY, South Dakota — The moment the U.S. Forest Service posted its July notice of a draft decision to permit gold prospecting at Jenny Gulch here in the Black Hills, tribes, water protectors and treaty rights defenders turned out in droves to ward off the project and others like it.

    The Black Hills make up a sky island of tree-clad mountain peaks in a sea of Northern Great Plains tall grass and farmlands. Long known as the He Sapa to the Native community, the 100- by 75-mile area is “the sacred heart of everything” for the Oceti Sakowin — only filched from tribal jurisdiction by treaty violation.

    Para leer este artículo en Español haz click AQUÍ

    Water and treaty rights advocates crafted an effigy of a sacred white buffalo on a parade float to raise awareness of Native stakes in protecting the Black Hills from a “modern gold rush.” Photo by Karen Ellison for Black Hills Clean Water Alliance

    Native nations and citizen watchdogs were prepared to take action against the permitting, because this is not the first time the federal agency has moved to allow the renewal of large-scale mining at these headwaters of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.

    Sign the petition to turn the Rapid Creek Watershed into a protected recreation area HERE

    The circle outlines the Black Hills tributaries to the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Photo COURTESY / Amazing Maps TM

    Four toxic Superfund sites are the result of water pollution from the mining over the past 70 years. Two generations of Lakota and settler descendants have worked across and through cultural differences to prevent any more of the same. Taxpayers already are footing the bill for the cleanup of hazardous heavy metals used in modern mining: cyanide, arsenic, chromium III and VI, copper, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium, silver, thallium, and zinc.

    Oglala Sioux Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Thomas Brings documents the gold tailings waste ponds at the Gilt Edge Superfund site in the northern Black Hills. Photo by Talli Nauman

    About $100 million of public money has been spent on runoff at just one of the sites, which generates approximately 95 million gallons of poisonous acid rock drainage a year. No end to the remediation is in view.

    In response to the draft permit, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Chair Harold Frazier, who is the elected
    head of the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Association, and other tribal leaders immediately met with Forest Service brass at U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s office in Washington, D.C.

    A resulting missive to Vilsack demanded that the USDA withdraw “any and all gold mining-related approvals in the Jenny Gulch, including exploratory permits, because you have failed to obtain our consent in violation of Articles 2 and 16 the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty.”

    The treaty “requires consent of the Great Sioux Nation for non-Indians even to be present in our territory, let alone to rape it by mineral extraction. The USDA and the USFS did not ask the Great Sioux Nation for consent on this mine, and you did not obtain it,” the letter states.

    The Black Hills National Forest permit would allow Minneapolis-based F3 Gold LLC’s exploration near Silver City, an unincorporated community in the central Black Hills. The company would conduct diamond core drilling at 47 sites, punching an unknown number of holes, each up to a mile long, in unspecified directions.

    The Black Hills area offers lakes and streams for swimming, boating, kayaking, canoeing, floating, fishing,
    birding, picnicking, camping, winter sports and sightseeing. Near Silver City, this popular Black Hills
    recreational spot of Jenny Gulch is the target of gold mining claims. Photo by Talli Nauman

    The 62-square-mile Jenny Gulch Project would take place in a prized recreational spot. On July 10, Carol Hayse and Justin Herreman were among members of local grassroots organizations who put out the word about the threat. They attended a pie social, a fundraiser for the Silver City Volunteer Fire Department, to speak to neighbors and gather signatures opposing the permit.

    Volunteers at the annual Silver City Volunteer Fire Department fundraiser served homemade pie and
    ice cream. Photo by Talli Nauman

    The organizations the activists represent include the Black Hills Chapter of statewide Dakota Rural Action, Black Hills Clean Water Alliance, Save Rochford & Rapid Creek from Gold Mining, and Rapid Creek Watershed Action (RCWA). The latter takes its name from Rapid Creek, the lively river along which new upstream mining claims threaten to forever alter the water quality, supply, livelihoods, recreational opportunities, and historical preservation of secret historic ceremonial sites.

    “We believe the economic value of that water far exceeds any value that our economy would see from mining the area, which is, in our opinion, too sensitive for us to do that and very likely would endanger our drinking water,” Herreman told The Esperanza Project.

    After finishing his blueberry pie, Justin Herreman, a member of the board of directors for Rapid Creek
    Watershed Action, spoke with The Esperanza Project. Photo by Talli Nauman

    Rapid Creek collects water from tributaries in the highest part of the Black Hills. Dams creating Deerfield and Pactola reservoirs serve to channel it to homes, businesses and farm-ranch operations in Rapid City, population 76,541, the largest town in the Black Hills area of influence. The creek and tributaries help recharge the Madison and Minnelusa aquifers, the other vital clean water source for the town and surrounding locations, including Ellsworth Air Force Base, the largest employer in the region.

    At Silver City, Carol Hayes gathered signatures opposing the Forest Service draft permit for F3 Gold LLC exploration in Jenny Gulch on the edge of the Black Hills’ most important lake, Pactola Reservoir. Photo by Talli Nauman

    Outdoor recreation business and related activities attract $2.27 billion annually to South Dakota, providing one of every four jobs in the western part of the state, RCWA reckons. The Black Hills area offers visitors lakes and streams for swimming, boating, kayaking, canoeing, floating, fishing, birding, picnicking, camping, winter sports and sightseeing. Tourism is second only to agriculture in importance for the state income.

    The national non-profit American Rivers designated Rapid Creek one of America’s Most Endangered Rivers in 2020, due to the threat of mining megaprojects posed by prospecting and related water permits, including F3 Gold’s and others issued to the Canadian Mineral Mountain Resources Ltd.

    “Mining could devastate Rapid Creek’s clean water, fish and wildlife and sacred cultural sites,” Chris Williams, senior vice president for conservation at American Rivers, said at the time. Among other things, tribal historical preservation surveys have yet to determine protected locations and a sensitive Bighorn sheep birthing area lies within F3 Gold’s tract.

    Mineral Mountain Resources Ltd. already is exploring for gold, with bore holes as deep as a mile underground on claims spanning 7,500 acres upstream from Pactola Reservoir on Rapid Creek tributaries and adjacent to the tribal trust land of Pe’ Sla. Prospectors vow they will prove “North America’s Largest Gold Discovery.” They promise it could produce the equivalent in pay-dirt of the record-setting, now defunct nearby Homestake, once the biggest gold mine in the hemisphere.

    The drillers on that project are sinking exploratory holes in the Rochford area. If a mine is established, untold damage will be done to land, wildlife and water, Sicangu Lakota great grandmother Cheryl Angel said in a national forum on July 18. “That’s the reason why I’m so worried. That’s why I literally hurt, and I’m so afraid that the watershed of Rapid Creek is going to be damaged, it’s gonna be contaminated, it’s gonna be harmed,” said the Rosebud Sioux tribal citizen.

    “So, when people ask me about the Black Hills, I say it’s under attack and the water is under attack, because people are doing things that you wouldn’t do to a human being,” she said at an EcoSapiens Speaker Series event. “It’s an attack on the heart of everything that is.”

    Cheryl Angel at the Sovereign Sisters Gathering (2019) She is a former spokesperson and occupant of Sacred Stone Camp at Standing Rock.. Photo by Tracy Barnett
    Guarding the Heart of Everything That Is, Black Hills Protection Featuring Cheryl Angel, a Sicangu Lakota Spiritual Activist and Water Protector. She is a former spokesperson and occupant of Sacred Stone Camp at Standing Rock. Interview by Earth Sky Woman Tami Brunk in the Ecosapiens Speaker Series.

    For drilling, South Dakota officials have granted Mineral Mountain Resources Ltd. 880,000 gallons of Rapid Creek water use, free of charge, at a peak pump rate of 200 gallons per minute and daily rate of 10,000 gallons. The water permit, issued without a public input process, provoked rural Rapid Creek resident Bruce Ellison to remark: “It is not in the public interest to give a foreign company our waters for, really, any uses without greater public input.”

    As is occurring in the case of F3 Gold LLC, state and federal regulators are giving the green light to Mineral Mountain Resources Ltd. activity despite the opposition of tribal governments and individual tribal members. The permits for the Rochford Gold Project go against the stated positions of the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Association, Rosebud Sioux tribal chair, Yankton Sioux tribal chair, Oglala Sioux tribal administration, and individual Cheyenne River Sioux tribal members, all of whom submitted written arguments to authorities.

    Four tribal governments said that they wanted government-to-government consultation on the Forest Service Draft Environmental Assessment for the Jenny Gulch Project, but that did not happen. Many of the 500 comments submitted for the assessment noted that the Black Hills are Lakota territory by rights of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty as confirmed in a 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision. The Forest Service declined to respond, directing attention instead to the 1872 Mining Law.

    F3 Gold LLC, like other speculators, has a statutory right under that law to explore its mineral claim areas, the Forest Service said in releasing the draft decision to permit. “While the USFS cannot deny the company its right to explore for gold on their claim, the USFS can impose limitations which are reasonable and necessary to protect NFS lands and resources,” said Black Hills National Forest Supervisor Jeff Tomac.

    Cheyenne River Sioux tribal citizen Carla Rae Marshall displays a “Protect Water” bandanna at a Black
    Hills Clean Water literature table during the annual Black Hills LGBTQ+2Spirit Pride Festival.
    Photo COURTESY / Black Hills Clean Water Alliance

    Commenters who previously registered during the environmental assessment period for the Jenny Gulch Project received a 45-day notice to make additional remarks. “Hopefully, the Forest Service will take a stronger stance than it has in the past,” said the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance, for which Angel is a board member. This phase of the federal permitting is taking place under a different administration

    These two companies, operating in the central Black Hills, are only a part of a much bigger picture of the local scene.

    In the southern Black Hills, F3 Gold LLC also has a batch of lode claims. Another company is prospecting for lithium. Meanwhile a longstanding attempt to mine uranium is being held at bay by citizen action and Oglala Sioux Tribe litigation against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. All these projects would sully the aquifers and related headwaters of the Cheyenne River, another tributary of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.

    A “modern gold rush” is evident, thanks to a citizen initiative. Credit www.bhcleanwateralliance.org

    The results of a recent citizen mapping project led by Mato Ohitika Analytics LLC highlight “the vast extent of potential mining projects, as well as the modern gold rush that threatens Black Hills water, health, wildlife, and our recreation and tourism economy,” the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance said at a news conference in early 2022.

    Even just one of six separate gold companies the organization pinpointed in the northern Black Hills, Dakota Territory Resources (or Dakota Gold Corp.) has more than 35,000 acres of claims. With many more left to map in the Maitland area between Spearfish and Central City, the alliance notes that this company has ties to Barrick Gold, the second largest gold company in the world.

    Downtown Square on Main Street in Rapid City was one of the pop-up actions on July 12.
    Photo COURTESY / Black Hills Clean Water Alliance


    In addition to the six companies already tracked, other operators are active in the immediate area. Spearfish Creek, the Northern Black Hills headwaters of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, is surrounded by claims. The mapping shows claims right up to the edges of the Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway.

    The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe passed a resolution earlier for funding to protect environment and cultural resources from the Rochford Gold Project. It calls upon the U.S. Congress to withdraw the Black Hills National Forest from the scope of the 1872 Mining Act and authorize an initial $200,000 of non-federal funds to fight the project.

    The tribe approved another resolution calling on the federal government to provide funding for the Great Sioux Nation to employ professionals to investigate the environmental and archeological impact of the project. The tribal legislation also authorizes litigation regarding the operation.

    Karen Ellison, a participant in Black Hills Clean Water Alliance, conceived the wildlife theme for the
    water protector parade float. “The animals of the Black Hills are my inspiration,” she told The Esperanza
    Project. “They take clean water for granted just like most people do. It’s up to us to save the water for
    them, as well as ourselves.” Photo by Tanya Novikova


    Meanwhile, the grassroots organizers pursue a petition drive to convince South Dakota’s U.S. Congressional delegation to introduce a measure setting aside the Rapid Creek Watershed as a national recreation area. It concludes, “Please take leadership on this issue in Congress and sponsor a bill to create the recreation area and mineral claim withdrawal, so that we can be blessed with the use of this recreational resource for ourselves and for future generations.” Federal land managers currently oversee 40 national recreation areas across the country.

    Among previously unmentioned organizations supporting the petition drive are Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation; NDN Collective; Protect Pactola; Izaak Walton League, Rapid City Chapter; Clean Water Legacy; Black Hills Paddlers; and Black Hills Group, Sierra Club.

    Including the pie social, petition supporters had an intense week of campaigning outdoors in temperatures hovering around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, unusually hot for the northern high altitude summer. They took part in Rapid City’s annual Black Hills Pride Festival, sponsored by Black Hills Center for Equality.

    Next up in the activities was entry in a parade at the southern Black Hills annual Gold Discovery Days in Custer. The event celebrates the first gold rush in the 19th Century, which led to dispossession of the Native territory. A military expedition headed by Lt. Col. George A. Custer proved gold finds were real, detonating the invasion.

    The day after the parade, clean water advocates were at Pactola Lake on launches with signs to promote the cause.

    Pactola Reservoir, 15 miles west of Rapid City, covers 800 acres. It is the largest and deepest reservoir in the Black Hills National Forest, with 14 miles of shoreline and 150-foot depths. Photo by Tanya Novikova

    Concerned citizens turned out to a county commission meeting in Rapid City to testify in favor of a proposed Hard Rock Zoning Ordinance. They have been providing input on it since they convinced the planning board to consider it more than a year ago. It would have stiffer exploration and mining requirements than the state does. When the commission set Sept. 6 for a hearing on it, they mobilized to gather public comment.

    Organizers planned more events during summer outdoor gatherings leading up to the 2022 Mni Ki Wakan (Water is Sacred) Summit “to advance water justice for all” Aug. 16-18, at the civic center in Rapid City. Sponsors note they are promoting “youth-centered Indigenous water innovation.” To learn more about this go to https://mnikiwakan.org/

    ​Co-Conveners include the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance, the Thunder Valley Community Development Corp., Cultural Survival, Navajo Water Project, DigDeep, Tokala Inanjinyo, Nakoda Youth Council, Sicangu Youth Council, and International Indigenous Youth Council Oglala Chapter.

    “We’ve gotta stop this extraction,” Angel emphasized. “There’s a lot of work to be done. There’s a lot of alliances to be made. The first start is having a relationship with the land that you walk on, being committed to living in harmony,” she encouraged listeners. “I hope that for the benefit of our future dear grandchildren you make a lasting change.”

  • Youth demand redress for Indian boarding school atrocities

    Youth demand redress for Indian boarding school atrocities

    Maria Hazel Stands, center, was among elders invited to tell stories about abuse during the #ChildrenBack rally. Photo by Candi Brings Plenty

    “But since people who are harmed deeply yearn for truth and justice, addressing this is essential for reconciliation.” — Ervin Staub Ph.D., Nazi holocaust survivor, advisor to the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, Rwanda, 1999.

    Oglala Lakota citizen Maria Hazel Stands takes the microphone. Surrounded by Pine Ridge Indian Reservation community members she accepts the introduction as a “survivor” of Red Cloud Indian School, where they are gathered under a canopy of trees in the grassy yard.

    “I went to school here back in ’68-’69. I remember I tried to speak my language. I said ‘lowáčhiŋ.’ That means ‘I’m hungry,’ and a nun heard me. They said, ‘We don’t want ever, ever to hear you speak your language.’  You see that steeple. They put me up there. They said, ‘You’re gonna live here. You’re a monster. You’re a little monster for speaking your language. We don’t want that here,’ and I was up there almost a week.” 

    Para leer este artículo en Español, da click AQUÍ

    A former boarding school student recalls being confined for a week in one of the turrets at Red Cloud Indian School – for speaking her Native language. Courtesy of Red Cloud Indian School

    Stands is one of several speakers invited by the Oglala Lakota Chapter of the International Indigenous Youth Council to speak at an October presentation of demands to the administration of the Jesuit-run former Indian residential school.

    The #childrenback event presaged Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s announcement Nov. 16 of her decision to lead Republican Party support for federal legislation to redress Indian boarding school atrocities dating back to the 1880s across Turtle Island.

    The youth council’s redress demands range from the Catholic Church’s repeal of the Vatican’s 1493 papal bull, known as the “Doctrine of  Discovery”, to the release of archival records, to the immediate deployment of ground-penetrating radar in search of children’s unmarked graves from the early days. Back then, the institution bore the name of Holy Rosary Mission.

    Youth read redress demands a Children Back rally. Photo by Candi Brings Plenty

    School President Raymond Nadolny, Ph.D., stood with other administrators, telling the youth, “It is with a sorrowful and grateful heart that we welcome you…and we are here to listen.” 

    Deborah Parker, Tulalip-Yaqui-Apache director of Policy and Advocacy at the national non-profit Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, NABSHC, helped the youth organizers arrange the face-to-face encounter. Beginning in the 19th Century, the U.S. government funded 12 Christian denominations to operate nearly 500 residential schools in 30 states. They followed a policy on children that Cavalry Capt. Richard Henry Pratt espoused from the opening of the first one in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879: “Kill the Indian in him and save the man.” Red Cloud Indian School is among 64 boarding schools that remain open today in Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. All of them have cemeteries.

    In this late 19th-century photograph, Jesuits pose with Lakota students outside Holy Rosary Mission — renamed the Red Cloud Indian School in 1969. Courtesy of Red Cloud Indian School

    Nadolny created a Truth and Healing Commission to address this history at Red Cloud Indian School shortly after he became president in 2019. He is the first non-Jesuit in the position. Commission members sought guidance from the NABSCHC, while facing off with the Covid-19 pandemic protocols. When ground-penetrating radar revealed 215 unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada, they were among the officials who felt spurred to action.

    “When I imagine the 215 Indigenous children at Kamloops who were secretly buried so that no one would find them, I am sickened at how much fear they must have experienced during their short lives,” Red Cloud Indian School Executive Vice President Tashina Banks Rama wrote in an op-ed in June 2021. The daughter of American Indian Movement founder Dennis James Banks, she recalls the “horrific” story of her father and his siblings being wrenched away from their homes to attend boarding school in Minnesota.

    “My personal struggle today is that Red Cloud Indian School, where my children thrive as students, where their brown skin is celebrated and their long hair respected, and where I serve as a leader, was once a boarding school,” she said. 

    Tashina Banks Rama

    After 130 years of evolution, “the school is transforming itself into an Indigenous-led, community-focused and spiritually based organization that serves our Lakota relatives. Red Cloud is also finally confronting its dark history—and acknowledging the complicity of the Catholic Church in that history,“ she said. The commission “signals our commitment to acknowledging and examining the trauma that is part of our history as an Indian boarding school.” She noted the commission was considering deployment of ground-penetrating radar, “if our Lakota community wants that.”

    Four months later, the youth and invited elders called for a little more action. Speaking at the assembly on the campus just outside of the Oglala Sioux Tribal Headquarters of Pine Ridge Village, South Dakota, former Tribal Chair Bryan Brewer, who attended the school, said, “There were many good things that happened here. It provided good education for us. But there were many bad things. After what happened in Canada, I am very concerned that might have happened right here. I don’t know why we are not going over the grounds right now with the radar. If I was the (school) president, that is the first thing I would have done.”

    Healing the Boarding School Wound in Kansas

    Brewer, whose grandfather and father attended Holy Rosary, said his dad didn’t want him to. “He said, ‘They’re mean.’ But because all of my friends went to school here, I wanted to go to school here. There was a lot of abuse. There were beatings every night.” 

    The legacy is a situation in which today’s adults carry on the violent behavior they learned while institutionalized, he noted. “I’m concerned about how those of us who went to school here were affected. We know that when we are abused, we can grow up to become the abuser. Right now, our children go to school every day abused mentally, physically, sexually, and we wonder why our children cannot learn.”  

    He received traditional cheers of ululation when he said, “I want to thank the administration for being here and we don’t need an apology from you. We need an apology from the Vatican for all of our people on all of our reservations. This happened all over the United States and in Canada.” He praised the youth for standing up for the cause and organizing the event.

    Another Holy Rosary survivor, Alex White Plume, who took part in the first revisions of the program half a century ago, called for a change of the school’s sports team name. 

    “Let’s not mistreat these priests or the nuns,” he entreated. “Maybe they will be honest and share our feelings; and I wish they would change that name Crusaders.” Flanking him were youth with posters reading, “Red Cloud was not a Crusader” and “Search the Church.”

    Former Oglala Sioux Tribal Chair Bryan Brewer: “I don’t know why we are not going over the grounds right now with the radar.”
    Photo by Candi Brings Plenty

    “Since first contact with the Catholic Church, all they’ve been doing is crusading, trying to turn us into white people. Mitakuyape (my relatives), we are a poor imitation of white people,” continued White Plume. “We have abilities, a different language. We have ceremonial ways that are really beautiful that help us with our historical grief and trauma that was caused by this black robe that came amongst us.”

    White Plume met with a representative of the Holy See (Roman Catholic Church governing board) in the United Nations offices in New York City at the request of the late Chief Oliver Red Cloud to demand revocation of the “Doctrine of Discovery.” It was to no avail. Holding up a copy of the papal decree, he said, “This document is still in effect; they still use this. This is the document that gave Columbus the right to kill us and get us out of the way. It said that they could own the land.

    “So that’s responsible for over 90 million people being wiped out on our lands here. That’s a reason for our historical grief and trauma. We need to get it out of our DNA. We need to get it out of our blood to be Lakota again.”

    He called on the school’s new administrators to help  deliver the message to the Pope. Sicangu Lakota citizen Cheryl Angel then stepped up and joined him in torching the replica – to the sound of more jubilation.

    Alex White Plume and Cheryl Angel set fire to a copy of the Doctrine of Discovery. Courtesy Facebook of Deborah Parker/Stylized by Talli Nauman

    Angel, a third-generation boarding school survivor, told The Esperanza Project, “I’d like to see a new papal bull.” It would admit the Church’s fault in the historic trauma that boarding schools caused, return the lands occupied by missions worldwide, and fund reparations supporting local community initiatives to reestablish the “societies of peace” that existed pre-contact.

    “A religious organization used its authority to abuse an entire race of people. Indigenous children were treated as sacred until they met Christians. All they ever knew was peace and love. Then they were treated like dirt. They had no right; I don’t care what color you are.

    “How do we make that point? I’m looking for someone to be criminalized,” she added. “Turning over all the old boarding school records to each tribe would be a good start, and if there’s some of the perpetrators alive, make them accountable. There’s so much space for accountability, so much room for healing.” 

    By October, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission acknowledged findings of more than 6,000 unmarked graves. It had previously documented 3,200 children who died while at residential schools but suspected the number of deaths could be much higher. The commission has released the names of 2,800 children who could be identified; in many cases family members had never been notified about their deaths.

    Rwanda’s National Unity and Reconciliation Commission addressed some 750,000 deaths in eastern Africa’s 1994 post-colonial genocide. Through neighborhood tribunals, survivors could obtain investigations of specific cases, penalties, and reparations. The accountability and healing process led to legislation instituting free elementary education and banning discrimination in government hiring.

    Maka Black Elk

    However, Red Cloud Truth and Healing Commission Executive Director Maka Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux citizen, commented, “The term reconciliation doesn’t always work very well in Indigenous communities,” he said. “Reconciling means returning to some kind of positive relationship, but there is no returning here. It always started from this place of imbalance. We are responsible as the perpetrator institution to provide a platform for survivors’ stories to be told and … to tell the truth as we know it.”

    Commission member Brad Held, pastor of the Pine Ridge Catholic congregation, recognized healing can’t occur before confrontation with the truth about the historical impact upon community and family life, child rearing, and the connection of trauma to addictions. A Jesuit team in the U.S. capital is lobbying in favor of a law to support that, he revealed. “Red Cloud Indian School Board of Directors approved our support of legislation,” he announced. 

    Brad Held has served as the pastor of Pine Ridge Reservation since 2019. Photo by Marcus Fast Wolf

    SB 2907, the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policies Act, would establish a tribunal to investigate and document United States Indian boarding school issues, locate the graves of Native children who died while attending these schools, and provide recommendations to Congress.

    “For many years, thousands of Native children were taken from their families, homes, and communities, and forced to attend boarding schools far away,” Murkowski recognized in co-sponsoring the bill. “These Indian boarding schools stripped Native children of their identities and forced them to assimilate and conform to an identity that was thought to be more acceptable to Western society. Many Native children were abused, both physically and emotionally. Many developed illnesses and died — and were buried far from home. In many cases, their families and tribes were never notified of their death.”

    Holy Rosary Mission elementary schoolers line up, 1890-1920. Courtesy of Red Cloud Indian School

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) is the lead sponsor of the proposal after she and former Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) first introduced it. With Haaland since tapped to head the U.S. Interior Department, Representatives Sharice Davids (D-Kansas) and Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma,) have reintroduced a House companion bill, HR 5444, of which Congressman Don Young (R-Alaska) is also a cosponsor.

    Held said one of his fondest hopes is that the law will pass. “We’re going to be uncomfortable for a while, and that’s what this is all about: not just a transformation for the Indigenous community but healing for all of us.”

    Angel stressed that the intergenerational trauma resulting from the boarding school era claws into every corner of life, as youth seeking solace fall victim to predators of any stripe. “I would like Congress to say, ‘Indigenous people are endangered; they’re targets.’ People literally are hunting us. Our young girls are prey to drugging, violence, human trafficking, murder, and disappearance.”

    A law that tips the scales toward justice could underpin Native efforts to recover cultural strength once it unveils the truth and helps “name the abusers,” she said. “You can’t just point the finger at someone. it’s not just one-sided. We as community have a lot of work to do; we have to be responsible for healing. But we can’t have that unless we hear who says what they did wrong.”

    A participant in the #Childrenback rally wore this insignia. Photo by Candi Brings Plenty 

  • Lakota child boarding school victims come home to rest

    Lakota child boarding school victims come home to rest

    Malorie Arrow recalls the Sicangu Lakota Youth Council members’ tour of the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania like it was yesterday. Their last stop was at the gravesites of children who had died while attending the boarding school some 140 years ago. They laid small pieces of candy on the graves as offerings. Her cousins Chris and Trey sang a song for the children. As they were getting ready to leave the cemetery, a swarm of fireflies appeared.

    “It was such a beautiful and spiritual sight for us to see,” Malorie related last week in a Facebook post.  “One of them followed us into the bus and I hadn’t seen a firefly in such a long time so I held it in my hands, and as we started driving away I released the firefly out of the bus window. I recorded this moment and in the video, Rachel said, ‘This is one of the spirits,’ and ‘Bye, friend.’  At the time we didn’t know one of the names of the children we would be bringing home was named Friend Hollow Horn Bear.”

    Moved to repatriate the remains of fellow tribal members, the Sicangu Youth Council succeeded after exactly six years of collaborations. During the week of July 10-17, participants journeyed from the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation to Carlisle and back to escort the caskets of nine among 187 children buried at the prototypical U.S. Indian boarding school.

    “We want our children home no matter how long it takes,” U.S. Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland told tribal members as the transfer from Carlisle Barracks military installation commenced on July 14.  The first Native American to hold a Cabinet post, Haaland recently announced the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a probe like one in Canada that so far has revealed more than 1,500 unmarked graves.

    Tribal members hold transfer ceremony at Carlisle Barracks military installation on July 14. PHOTO COURTESY/ Rosebud Sioux Tribe

    The U.S. Army, which runs its War College at the former boarding school site, agreed to the exhumation. Rosebud Sioux Tribal Historic Preservation Officer Ione Quigley supervised the disinterment.

    Thousands of students from more than 140 tribes attended Carlisle during its 38 years of operation ending in 1918. Its cemetery had 187 graves of children forced to live there. Hundreds of boarding schools, both private and government-run, modeled their programs after Carlisle, according to the Carlisle Boarding School Project.

    Participants in the project aim to build a museum and heritage center near the original school site to relate its far-reaching impact. Opened in 1879, it was the first government-run boarding school for Native Americans. Civil War veteran Lt. Col. Richard Henry Pratt spearheaded its goal of forced assimilation.

    Pratt, like many others at that time, believed that the only hope for Native American survival was to  assimilate fully into colonist culture, according to project documentation. His common refrain was “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”

    The program forced students to cut their hair, change their names, stop speaking their languages, convert to Christianity, and endure harsh discipline, including corporal punishment and solitary confinement. Hundreds of other Native American boarding schools — some operated by the government and many more operated by churches – ultimately used this approach, the project notes.

    “We want our children home no matter how long it takes,” said U.S. Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold a Cabinet post. PHOTO by Lea Ann Rattling Leaf.

    Many survivors and offspring still carry the emotional scars and lack of cultural identity that resulted, the Carlisle Boarding School Project explains. Some conscripts died of disease, some of broken hearts.  Parents lost children. Tribes lost members of their community and tribal traditions.  Trauma has a long-lasting impact that remains with Native people for generations. Research about adverse childhood experiences (ACES) shows it changes how adults parent their own children.

    “The Department of War directed Pratt to travel to the Dakota Territory and recruit the first students from the Oglala Sioux and Brule Sioux,” according to the Carlisle Indian School Project. The student roles are packed with hundreds of Lakota tribal members.

    Those whose remains returned to Sinte Gleska University in Mission, S.D., for an honoring ceremony July 16 were Dennis Strikes First (Blue Tomahawk), Rose Long Face (Little Hawk), Lucy Take The Tail (Pretty Eagle), Warren Painter (Bear Paints Dirt), Ernest Knocks Off (White Thunder), Maud Little Girl (Swift Bear), Friend Hollow Horn Bear, Dora Her Pipe (Brave Bull), and Alvan (Kills Seven Horses). Exhumed along with their remains for return to her people were those of  Sophia Tetoff, a citizen of the Alaskan Aleut Tribe of Saint Paul Island in the Bering Sea.

    Carlisle Indian Industrial School/Wikimedia Creative Commons

    On July 17, relatives held a funeral procession from Mission to the Rosebud Sioux Tribe Veteran’s Cemetery to rebury some of the individuals’ remains. Other remains went to private burial plots.

    The caravan that brought them home received generous support and gestures of solidarity from communities along its route, including Portage, Ind., Maumee, Ohio, Tama and Sioux City, Iowa;  and the Santee Sioux and Yankton Sioux reservations. Many well-wishers wore orange attire in remembrance of the boarding-school victims and survivors.

     

    Meskwaki tribal citizens honored the Sicangu caravan at Tama, Iowa. PHOTO COURTESY/ Rosebud Sioux Tribe

    Sicangu society roundly endorsed the effort. Chipping in were tribal government departments and programs, including budget and finance, roads, sand and gravel, solid waste, employment training, and alcohol treatment. Tribal Council representatives donated their bonus money; local grocers pitched in;  parents held sales and gave time, participating with their children.

    A motorcycle brigade turned out to accompany the caravan, and Sicangu Community Development Corporation’s running club,  Sicangu Oyate Ki Iyanka, held a 100-mile welcome relay July 16 to culminate the transfer to the homeland. “As our relatives are laid to rest, let today serve as a milestone for each of those who attended residential and boarding schools in the U.S. and Canada. Prayers to all of you,” the club said in a social media post.

    Sinte Gleska University, the tribal land grant college in Mission, S.D., hosted the homecoming ceremony.
    PHOTO COURTESY/ Sicangu Community Development Corp.

    Historically boarding schools have a reputation for abuse of Native children and their families in Canada and the United States. Grassroots pressure resulted in the June discovery of 215 on the grounds of an old residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan was an additional site with 750 subsequently found unmarked graves.

    The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is discussing ways to help hold Canada’s federal government accountable for its role in the residential school tragedy.

    The United States today has over 350 Indian boarding schools, mostly funded by churches or the government through the Bureau of Indian Education, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

    “In sharp contrast to the policies of the past, these schools aim to provide a quality education to students from across Indian country and to empower Indigenous youth to better themselves and their communities as they seek to practice their spirituality, learn their language, and carry their culture forward,” Interior Secretary Haaland said in announcing the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.

    Sioux City welcomed the caravan with a ceremonial lodge. PHOTO COURTESY / Rosebud Sioux Tribe

    “After this moment, we wanted to call our movement, “Project Firefly” in honor of the children at Carlisle,” wrote Malorie. “That evening, after stopping and being welcomed by our Meskwaki relatives, we started back on the road to Sioux City, Iowa. We noticed we were surrounded by fireflies again. Asia Ista Gi Win Black Bull had captured a video of two fireflies following the van that she and several other Sicangu Youth Council members had been traveling in on our way home with the remains of our relatives. You could also see more fireflies in the background. This was another beautiful and spiritual sight for us to see as this was how it started for us, and now it’s how this chapter ends. We have more relatives to bring home, so this is not the end of the journey for us. We have more work to do. ” (Malorie Arrow, Sicangu Youth)

    A different version of this story appeared in Buffalo’s Fire.

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  • Native hemp farming, opportunity to lead New Green Revolution

    Native hemp farming, opportunity to lead New Green Revolution

    We are proud to share this new piece by Native American land and water protector, environmentalist, economist, politician, and author — and now, hemp farmer — Winona LaDuke.

    OSAGE, Minnesota – Our New Green Revolution springtime pre-party is over, but the growing season is just beginning. This fall, when we bring in the sheaves, they will be of hemp. Then we’ll have a harvest hoedown to follow up.

    My Anishinaabe Agriculture Institute farm was the site of the pre-party in mid-May of 2021. My organization Winona’s Hemp anchored it. Oglala Lakota hemp farmer Alex White Plume co-hosted the educational event.

    Alex White Plume and Winona LaDuke (center) pose with contributors to recent hemp education forum in Indian country, Roman Vyskocil (left) and George D. Weiblen (right).
    (COURTESY / Keri Pickett    )

    Taking part in the informal gathering were about 50 people from around the region. Workshops featured hemp in foods, textiles, paper, and construction materials. 

    The event underscored our vision of a New Green Revolution — a movement placing carbon-reducing appropriate technology at the center of economic change. Our crop of choice, hemp, stands to be a leading material in a transformation from fossil fuel dependence to renewable energy stability.

    A hemp plot constitutes a carbon sink: Because the plant grows quickly (up to 12 feet in four months), it absorbs huge quantities of carbon, offsetting greenhouse gas emissions that cause destructive climate change.

    More than that, the plant can replace carbon-intensive materials used in manufactured products ranging from plastics to concrete, creating a new carbon-friendly economy. That’s what we need to survive the decades ahead, and hemp can be a part of that New Green Revolution.

    White Plume Hemp Co. has been motivational to many projects nationally, and a number of people were very happy to see him in northern Minnesota. Nicknamed the “Hemperer,” the pioneer of the hemp renaissance made a road trip to Osage from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. 

    Alex White Plume discusses the history of the hemp renaissance at his home on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
    (Photo by Talli Nauman)

    He travelled with his grandson Mato White Plume to see new Indigenous hemp projects showcased here. Many of them were inspired by his agricultural operation on sovereign tribal lands overlapping South Dakota. The White Plumes shared stories about the applications of hemp in community healing and ecological restoration, offering suggestions during various project demonstrations.

    Having built a hempcrete house in rural Manderson, South Dakota, in the l990s, Alex was pleased with the new hempcrete building projects here modeled on his endeavors of 30 years ago.  “I liked seeing the work of our relatives and how this plant is making a comeback,” he commented.

    Workshop presenter Roman Vyskocil finished off a hempcrete project, putting some plaster on the outside of a greenhouse dug into a hill. “I’m really pleased with how it turned out,” he told participants.

    Hempcrete is a valuable alternative to concrete in many forms of construction. It produces about four times the amount of fiber in a fraction of the time needed for processing an equivalent amount of wood.  

    Winona LaDuke and her granddaughter work on a new hempcrete structure at the Anishinaabe Agriculture farm
    (COURTESY / Winona LaDuke)

    This spring, the cost of framing lumber, oriented strand board, plywood, and other materials increased steeply, adding an average of $36,000 to the cost of constructing a home. That’s causing the building industry to take another look at the centuries of hemp building, and new innovations in hempcrete blocks, which add structural integrity as well as create a reduced-carbon house.

    Belgium-based IsoHemp manufactures 1 million hemp blocks per year and will increase production to 5 million blocks per year with a new robotic factory to keep up with demand. In an email, its spokesperson, Charlotte De Bellefroid, assured HempBuild Magazine, “We have been working to decarbonize the construction sector for 10 years now and we remain 100 percent convinced that the hemp block has a crucial role to play.” 

    It will be “impossible” to halve U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, as advocated, “without rapid decarbonization of the building sector,” Alliance to Save Energy President Paula Glover said in a recent statement.

    Hemp’s fast maturation time also makes it ideal for replacing tree fiber in paper, which means that forests can stay intact. This is very important to protect the natural world, animals and water, and also for jobs. 

    Many Minnesota paper mills are closing down or have been suffering during the times of the recession, pandemic, and reduced sustainable harvests.  Hemp provides for a premium paper product that can be reused several times more than wood fiber paper, while putting paychecks in employee pockets.

    Hemp’s more glamorous cousin, cannabis sativa, is going through major expansion in production and sales to fill demand for products used in recreational and medical form. Meanwhile, industrial hemp has been sidelined. However, that’s about to change. That’s why Anishinaabe Agriculture is interested primarily in fiber hemp.

    The 2018 U.S. Farm Bill amended the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1946, making growth and possession of hemp and hemp seeds legal again for the first time in a generation.

    Alex White Plume traveled with his grandson Mato (left) from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to the Anishinaabe Agriculture farm in Minnesota to see evidence of the New Green Revolution he has helped inspire. Keri Pickett (right) gave Alex White Plume a photo she made of him with his wife Debra White Plume and their first hemp crop in 2001, before a federal raid destroyed the harvest. “Alex deserves 20 years of restitution” for the setback, she said. (COURTESY / Pickett Pictures LLC)

    The global Industrial Hemp Market was estimated at $5 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach $36 billion by 2026. It is expected to develop at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 34 percent from 2019 to 2026. Anishinaabe Agriculture is interested in making sure that Native farmers have a place at the table, not on the menu.

    Rebuilding an economy with hemp requires a lot of land. This is not a boutique business. Tribal nations have 20 million acres. Some of that can be hemp and cannabis (after food and buffalo, perhaps). That’s what a real just transition could support.

    George D. Weiblen, the Science Director at the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum, attended the hemp conference to meet White Plume and other Native farmers in the region.  White Plume is a hero to the museum director. 

    Weiblen has been working on hemp and cannabis varieties for the past decade and is keen on building new collaborative relationships with tribes. His department has helped the Sisseton Oyate with its hemp work, and colleagues are assisting Red Lake. Weiblen’s work recently was featured in High Times Magazine. 

    Indeed, Weiblen’s efforts represent a new era of collaboration between universities and Indigenous peoples. An integrated hemp and cannabis economy represents a multi-billion-dollar industry, which is a brand new industry — a brand new pie. That is a game changer. The hemp economy entails the need to learn together and work together.  

    Among topics addressed at the hemp event was how legalization of hemp and marijuana can be leveraged to deal a blow to discrimination. The War on Drugs has hit communities of color hard. Legalization can equal restorative justice. The American Civil Liberties Union found that marijuana “has been a key driver of mass criminalization in this country.” Every year, the lives of hundreds of thousands of people — the majority of whom are Black or Latinx — are impacted by marijuana arrests, it states.

    Pushing back are initiatives like that of Karim Webb, who is working to secure dispensary licenses for people of color in Los Angeles. The most lucrative element of the industry is in the consumer sales, and people of color should benefit from the industry, Webb contends.  

    Winona LaDuke is an Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe) member of the White Earth Nation. An economist from Harvard-Radcliffe and Antioch universities, she has written more than a half dozen books, the most recent To Be A Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers. A mother, grandmother, and orator she is the award-winning leader of the 33-year-old non-profit Honor the Earth. Her mission is to raise public environmental awareness, preserve land-based economies of scale, and enable grassroots efforts to promote Native American communities’ resilience in the face of climate change.

    “There’s a new Revolution coming…and it’s green!” said the Los Angeles-based NSRGNTS in releasing this Art by @votanik, part of the Rezzie the Riveter series.
  • Anti-Pipeline Grandmothers Launch Treaty People Gathering

    Anti-Pipeline Grandmothers Launch Treaty People Gathering

    1,000 Grandmothers rallied “for future generations” May 26th to punctuate a call from organizers worldwide urging allies to attend the Treaty People Gathering during the first week of June 2021.
    (Courtesy / Honor the Earth)

    ST. PAUL, Minnesota – At the state Governor’s Mansion on Anishinaabe (Ojibway) ancestral land, 1,000 grandmothers rallied “for future generations” May 26th. They timed the event to punctuate a call from organizers worldwide urging allies to attend the Treaty People Gathering for non-violent direct actions against oil pipelines during the first week of June 2021.

    “Respect Native Sovereignty: Stop Line 3,” supporters of the elders’ mobilization chanted to Gov. Tim Walz. The governor has declined pleas from Native nations’ officials to stay the construction of the Canadian tar-sands crude-oil pipeline until their lawsuits against it are settled. 

    Lakota grandmother Madonna Thunder Hawk took the microphone at the rally to remind listeners that tribes in the states on Minnesota’s western border — North and South Dakota – are still fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline after grassroots pressure succeeded in convincing President Joe Biden to revoke the permit for Keystone XL Pipeline construction through 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty territory. 

    “We’re here as elders from South Dakota. We come from our struggle. We know what’s going on. This is your time. We’re here to help you,” Thunder Hawk said.  

    Madonna Thunder Hawk is among numerous indigenous grandmothers who founded and anchored prayer camps to raise awareness of tribal governments’ lawsuits to stop DAPL construction across the Missouri River just upstream from the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Tribe’s Oahe Reservoir drinking water intake. 
    (Courtesy Warrior Women)

    The 2016-2017 Standing Rock encampments attracted supporters from around the world, making the issue into the prime environmental justice flashpoint in  the administration of former President Barack Obama. The 1,000 Grandmothers organization, based in California state, is an outgrowth of that.

    The Treaty People Gathering — subtitled “Rise, Protect, Stop Line 3” —  is on track to again shift the political center of gravity from Washington, D.C. to a major water source subject to treaty guarantees in the Midwest. This time, instead of the Missouri, it’s the Mississippi River watershed.

    Some 300 organizations brought the June 5-8 week of actions to President Biden’s attention with a letter calling on him to direct the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to “ immediately re-evaluate and suspend or revoke” its Clean Water Act permit for Canada’s Enbridge Energy Inc. to build the hazardous materials conduit through 200 waterways. 

    If built, the Line 3 pipeline would unlock CO2 emissions equivalent to 50 coal plants and cost society more than $287 billion in climate impacts in just its first 30 years of operation, the letter contends. The project is set to cut through the 1854 and 1855 treaty territory where Anishinaabe people retain the right to hunt, fish, gather medicines, and harvest wild rice.

    Among signatories are prominent Indigenous, environmental, youth, faith, and health organizations, including Giniw Collective, Honor the Earth, Indigenous Environmental Network, Sierra Club, Sunrise Movement, Fridays for Future USA, Hip Hop Caucus, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Jewish Climate Action Network, CatholicNetwork.US and more.

    “The decision to mobilize for non-violent action was not made lightly, especially with the occurrence of state violence at Standing Rock in 2016,” the letter said. However, they need thousands of people to turn out, according to the Indigenous Environmental Network.

    “On June 5-8, we will gather in Northern Minnesota to put our bodies on the line, to stop construction and tell the world that the days of tar-sands pipelines are over. Only a major, nonviolent uprising — including direct action — will propel this issue to the top of the nation’s consciousness and force Biden to act. We are rising. Join us,” says the invitation.

    Winona LaDuke, a Bear Clan member from Round Lake on the White Earth Reservation and executive director of Honor the Earth, invited supporters to “come and stand with the Earth and to come and stand with us and to stand up for someone who’s not yet here.” She said, “Our ancestors made agreements to take care of this water and land forever together, and now is our time to do that.”

    Tara Houska, Couchiching First Nation Anishinaabe and founder of Giniw Collective dubbed Line 3 “a climate atrocity and a slap in the face to the multiple Ojibwe nations suing against its approval.” She demanded a halt to construction “before it’s too late; before our rivers, wetlands, and wild rice watersheds are violated irrevocably.”

    Dawn Goodwin, a citizen of the Anishinaabe White Earth Mississippi Band and co-founder of R.I.S.E. Coalition, recalled,  “Our Elders have told us that over 50 years ago we were told to start moving away from fossil fuels due to the dangers of rising CO2  levels in our atmosphere.  Today the youth are calling upon our elected officials to take their future seriously, and to heed the warnings of scientists.”

    Dawn Goodwin
    “Today the youth are calling upon our elected officials to take their future seriously, and to heed the warnings of scientists.”

    Joye Braun, a Cheyenne River Sioux tribal citizen and the National Pipelines Organizer for Indigenous Environmental Network, submitted: “Line 3 is a climate bomb waiting to go off. “It is yet again another dirty tar-sands project that threatens the sovereignty of tribal communities, wild rice, sacred medicines, and above all, the water.”

    Braun was the first camper at Standing Rock’s spirit camps, where the Lakota phrase “Mni wiconi” — water is life — drew global appeal.

    An outreach ad for the Treaty People Gathering notes that pipeline construction brings trauma and tragedy with it. “One out of three Indigenous women are raped, go missing, or end up murdered,” it states. “When infrastructure such as KXL and Line 3 are built, there’s a 22— percent increase to those statistics that we as Indigenous women are already facing.”

    The spot notes that tribes signed treaties here in 1854 and 1855, retaining inherent rights to hunt, fish and gather. “Climate change affects our treaty guarantee because that puts our Anishinaabe lifeways at risk.” It encourages non-Native allies to “come and check  out what it means to be treaty people and to uphold your side of the treaty also. ‘We look forward to seeing all of you on the front lines,” it says.

    The Treaty People Gathering is being staged along the route of the pipeline, where multiple encampments have been built. The exact locations will be determined, based on logistics, according to organizers. They will provide camping facilities, they say. 

    The Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network,WECAN International describes itself as “a solutions-based, multi-faceted organization established to engage women worldwide in policy advocacy, on-the-ground projects, direct action, trainings, and movement building for global climate justice.

    WECAN was honored to organize the recent letter with over 300 signatures that was sent to the Biden Administration calling for Presidential action to stop Line 3 and they are uplifting Indigenous women’s voices on the frontlines. 

    This story was reported with the generous support of The One Foundation.

    Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network demands that governments respect the right to freedom of expression, organizing, and protest — and calls for an immediate end to the criminalization of land defenders, whose efforts are central to a climate-just world.
    WECAN (Courtesy)

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  • Conversations with LaDonna and Cheryl

    Conversations with LaDonna and Cheryl

    Many thousands this past weekend were hit hard by the news that we had lost a living treasure on Earth, the inimitable and irreplaceable LaDonna Allard. The Lakota historian, water protector and Standing Rock movement founder had been struggling for a long time with brain cancer. And even though those of us who love her knew that she was ready to go join her beloved Miles, it was still heartbreaking to lose her. She had a way of turning the colonized mindset on its head and inside out, perhaps more than anyone I have ever sat with.

    I was instantly reminded of the unfinished business I had with her; I had been planning a trip to her ecovillage on the Standing Rock reservation when the news came of her cancer diagnosis, and then the pandemic. So it was never possible. I had the privilege of spending a couple of very fleeting days with her in the sacred Black Hills in June of 2019, surrounded by a small group of amazing women convoked by fellow Lakota Water Protector and Standing Rock stalwart Cheryl Angel. The gathering was called Sovereign Sisters and was a rare meeting of indigenous and non-indigenous women, an indigenous-led exploration of the concept of sovereignty, in all its dimensions.

    I gathered some audio at that event, and some of it went into the three stories I wrote featuring LaDonna (see below for links). As always, there were random bits of conversations that didn’t make it into any story. I share some of them here, in honor of LaDonna and also of Cheryl, who created this space and opened the door to other ways of thinking and seeing the world. It’s such a tiny fragment of what could have been. But I join those giving gratitude for her legacy, and give thanks for what was and for what remains.

    Cheryl, from the road on the way to LaDonna’s funeral, shared that the next Sovereign Sisters gathering will be held in remembrance of LaDonna and other matriarchs that have led the way. For more information, contact her at her Sacred Activism page on Facebook.

    Cheryl and LaDonna on borders, sovereignty and the ancient trade routes

    Cheryl: The trade routes were established long ago, and also the routes of culture – and it’s against our laws to close those borders because people from the top of America were trading with the people of the bottom of America – and that’s our right to do that, because that’s our sovereign economy.

    LaDonna: So, as I said before, all of these have been continued but they’re quiet. The round that me and Miles used to do with all these spiritual leaders everywhere we go, they have this network, but it’s so quiet, as one man said – we don’t have to pay tariffs and taxes and such – we just trade. So when we go down to New Mexico, we bring sage because they really like our sage – and we trade the sage for piñon nuts or green chile or that amazing oven bread they have.

    My point is that it’s always been going on – it’s just become this covert thing so the United States wouldn’t know. So we trade medicines, we trade paints, we trade constantly. So when my son took me to Santa Fe he said, Mom, this is where all the Indians trade. This is where they go to the market. This is where you get the Indian discount.

    So I went there and I sat among all the Pueblos and the Navajos and everyone. And you can just see them; it’s a back room over a restaurant – and only they go in there, and they sit there and they’ll order their food because this restaurant has big plates of food – and they’ll lay out their jewelry and start trading. Then they all go down to the market to put their stuff out. But they spend their morning trading, and it’s so cool. Food, herbs, medicines, jewelry…

    Cheryl: What I want is for the indigenous people to protect that. We need to say, we shouldn’t be stopped at these borders, because our trade industry is older than any governmental institution on the Americas.

    Tracy: Do you know if anyone is working on a legal case about this?

    Cheryl: I don’t know. But that’s what we need to do, we need to stand up and say we’re exempt from your border control, your border laws, and as tribal people we have the right to continue to go back and forth from the top to the bottom without being stopped by these borders.

    LaDonna – There are several groups that are organizing now and filing lawsuits and working. And then there are also my relatives from Colombia, Nicaragua, and El Salvador and are all working on this.

    The Tohono O’odham, whose lands are on both sides of the border, are saying …

    Cheryl – The National Congress of American Indians had a meeting where the Tohono O’odham came and they talked about national security – homeland security was working with the local people to give them new passports – and there they came up with a passport and they wanted the tribal people to accept it. And they said, “Oh no, Hell no, we don’t need the passport. Now you’re trying to enhance the passport? No!”

    LaDonna: That’s why I’ve spent the last two years not talking to any tribal government. Homeland security is in every tribal government, and Homeland Security is controlled by the United States. And there is not sovereignty there.

    Cheryl: When I’m here on these lands I’m a beneficiary of the treaty of 1851 and 1868. That’s my legal status. Anytime I’m on unceded tribal territory that’s talked about in the treaty. But when I’m not – I have dual citizenship and people say, you have to be one or the other. No, you can have duality. When I’m on a state highway, I have a state drivers’ license so I can drive in that territory. But when I’m on the paths of my ancestors, following my ancestors when they were living their sovereign economy – that lifestyle we had before capitalism – that’s my inherent right to travel all the way to Alaska to get the shells that we need for our ceremonies, and the right to go all the way down to Argentina, to the bottom, and trade, like my ancestors did. Because we weren’t at war with each other, and we had this unbelievably beautiful trade system that ran up and down, all the way from the north to the south. That’s my inherent right.

    LaDonna: In North Dakota we have the Arikara People. So what are their sacred feathers? Parrots. And before all the colonization, they would make a trip that was called the sacred journey, and they would make the trip all the way down – because in their oral histories, they came from Middle America and came all the way up. And so they have these feathers and when I first went up there, I was like – hmm. These are not from here. And they said, no, these are a part of our ceremonies. This is what we have in our bundles. And so they make this ceremony, and they make this trip, and they bring their bundles with their feathers.

    Next Steps After Standing Rock

    Cheryl: It started at Standing Rock and we put out the call – and everyone felt the ancestral call to respond. But it could have started anywhere.

    We tell everyone to protect their own watershed in the place where they’re standing. Yesterday I put the four pillars in the four directions and told everyone to stand in the spot representing the direction they came from. Because in all those places we need water protectors. So if we can teach people to protect the watershed in the places that they come from, to build those relationships and to continue the ceremonies and to live in respect – we’ve had enough of these genocidal policies, this genocide must eventually turn toward justice, toward social justice and environmental justice. So what is the next step? Stay in prayer.

    Ladonna: I say, plant seeds. If you live in an apartment, get a flowerpot; make a window box. Plant.

    Cheryl: Because the people are all separated by the system – the acculturation or whatever you want to call it – and they start taking up the chunks of land and destroying the network of roots that were alive and connected. So every time you plant, you’re restoring the framework that supports everything that lives. All those roots – they need to talk to each other. They need to be intact. We can’t be tearing up the root system that covers the planet – because that’s like the nervous system inside of our brain. It literally enables everything to communicate with each other. And now the communication is cut off because there’s so much area that’s uncovered. So take that plant that’s in a pot and put it in a longer planter box with more plants so they can talk to each other.

    LaDonna: Can you imagine what would happen if everyone on the planet would just take the initiative to plant? Just to throw seeds – that doesn’t mean dig it up, plow it up; that means, put a seed down. We would have enough food to feed the world. We have enough resources for everybody on this planet right now, we just have a small percentage of people who are holding the resources; and we need to learn compassion and sharing and all of these things. For me, Standing Rock was nothing more than a seed that is spreading across the world.

    Tracy: And Sovereign Sisters is a part of that, right?

    Cheryl: Sovereign Sisters is – this is a part of the language that I had to change when Gov. Noem put out that riot-boosting rule and the legislature supported her. It literally took the words from my vocabulary. I was literally speechless, and my mind couldn’t think fast enough to replace the words she had just taken away from me. The words that build peace, the words that give direction; all of those words that I’m used to using … so I was speechless, and I had to go back to the beginning.

    So we had an economy that was intact and it was successful and it was flourishing all over the planet. And then the world started changing and the masculine started taking over, and the women started being put down. And now we live in a masculine world, and that’s slowly crumbling, naturally; and it’s time now for the women. There have been so many ceremonies that have pointed to that. The Earth is slowly going to restore the living aspect of this planet; whereas while the past 500 years the masculine has dominated, that’s not how this planet was designed, we are slowly moving now in the other direction, toward nurturing that which is going to sustain us. So that’s the next step; it’s like LaDonna said, plant a seed, so all those roots can be reconnected. That’s going to build the foundation. We’ve been separated for too long.

    Tracy: So part of it is about food sovereignty, and part of it is also about building alliances and creating connections, right?

    LaDonna: Planting seeds is telling stories. You can’t quantify it. You can’t put it in a box. Everything means way more. So planting seeds is telling that story, telling that origination of people, telling that relationship with the land, Telling that relationship with the animals and everything. Telling story is planting seeds for the next generation.

    Tracy: So it happens on many levels.

    LaDonna: Everything happens on many levels.

    Freedom (McLaughin, LaDonna’s son): Go back to the original encounter – the Native in this river in your mind. What was the interaction happening back at the 1851 treaty point? What was the crux of that interaction? The crux was: We’re here, and you guys want to make a big gold production. And Sitting Bull, then, made a big precedent and said, We’re going to stand up. And it hasn’t changed. It’s something that you saw with No DAPL.

    I say – How can we flip it on its head and say: OK, we’re going to issue you a pass. And we’re going to retrain you as people on this continent on how it goes. It never changed – it got way less loud – like she mentioned, the trading got less loud, but they’re still there. So waterways – around Seattle, in Nisqually, around the time of the 1973 Wounded Knee encounter – that was an affirmative ruling that the waterways are a treaty area still. So all those Northwest Tribes fought and died and won their right to have — 50% was the ruling, but the custom was to have their usual and accustomed fishing grounds. And the waterways here are the same way. So if someone here is enjoying the waterways here, they’re under a legal blanket of tribal sovereignty. So there are different ways that you see that.

    I just went to jail and they arrested a guy with a joint and threw him in there. He was coming up on a vacation so historically he could have fallen under that blanket of the authority of the tribes – if you go by the waterways.

    Talking Circle with Cheryl and LaDonna and Lyla June

    Lyla June: Anthropologists who met us thought we didn’t have a religion, but it was really just that our ceremony didn’t end. We’re here to set a good example, and what we want to do here is set a sacred agenda to create a space of deep compassion, where women feel safe… because there are very few safe places for women where they’re not going to be predated upon. This is that safe space, and we’re here to make sure that it’s a place where your feet can connect to the Earth and your head can connect to the Sky. So you can focus on prayer without having to be afraid. We’re all striving for excellence in thoughts, words and deeds, and taking care of how we walk. We want these next few days to be a template for action, compassion and kinship.

    Cheryl (introducing LaDonna):  LaDonna is a very inspirational woman, she is my elder, she’s someone I’ve listened to and watched, and what I’ve learned is that we need to share – everything we’ve been given, everything we’ve been blessed with – whether it’s a language or a culture or any gift that was given to us, we should be sharing it.

    And that’s what I have learned from LaDonna – specifically in a time when everyone was giving, I saw her giving the most. Her mind was always on – what can I do to make this better? Even if it was driving to town every day to buy food – what can I do to make this better? She’s still doing that today. That’s where I learned – what can I do to make life better? So everywhere I’ve gone, it’s because there was something I could learn, and it’s been about, what I can do to make life better.

    On sharing stories, and colonial language

    LaDonna: If you don’t have a relationship with people, they won’t talk to you. I learned that when I was doing all this history and listening to elders talk. When I first got back from college, nobody talked to me. And Grandma would say, “What’s your relationship with them?”

    And I’d be like, “I don’t know.”

    “Did you make them tea? Did you make them coffee? What did you bring them?”

    “And I was like, ‘Oh, OK!”

    So now, when I talk to people, I tell them, “My name is LaDonna Brave Bull, I’m Punchie Brave Bull’s daughter.” And then all of a sudden: “I remember your grandma.” Or: “I remember your tribe.” “I’ve been in your town.” And so then, once the relationship is established, they start telling you their story. But you have to establish that relationship. And as I was going through looking at things, that is the way Indian people react. And if you don’t develop a relationship, they will not talk to you. Mitakuye Oasin – We are all related. That means everything. 

    It also matters how you talk. Because if you talk that colonized talk, people are going to turn you off. That young lady who was talking about the projects they were doing, she said some words, and I pulled away and I stopped listening.

    Tracy: Which words?

    LaDonna: Payment. Money. Profit. Just watch – we shut down, and we won’t hear another word you say. Because that’s just…

    Cheryl: Like disconnecting us.

    LaDonna: So words and how you say the words is really important. Because that young lady may have had a really good project and was doing good things, but she shut everybody down because she started talking colonized. “How do we take this information, how do we monetize it? How do we get the necessary funding? Speaking about money turns us off. NGOs, nonprofits, etc.

    At Standing Rock, the way it worked, we brought our own stuff. And those who had, put their own money, but we didn’t all have money. We took care of each other.

    On Standing Rock, and Recycling, and Self-Sufficiency

    Tracy: I was there in time for the veterans and the blizzard. And that’s why I didn’t get to meet you, because it was snowing… I got there too late.

    LaDonna: Nobody did. All I did was get up in the morning, fill my truck up with water, haul water down, pick up the list for groceries, go buy groceries — then they’d give me construction lists, and I’d go to town, get wood, nails and whatever else they needed, come back…. That’s all I did … and pick up garbage.

    Tracy: I would have loved to have helped you with that.

    LaDonna: Well, you know, there’s a large mental deficiency with urban people. They had all of these women who were sorting garbage out in the winter. But they’re sorting out — why are they doing that? For recycling. We don’t have recycling here. I have to pick it up and put it in the same bin. They said, Why don’t you have recycling? I said, They charge two times the amount and we can’t afford it. So I put the garbage in the garbage bins. But now you know that recycling is a farce. Now they have so much recycling, they’re just dumping it in the middle of the oceans. So all these people who are recycling think they’re doing a good thing, but they’re dumping it.

    So the middle-class New Agers that live in cities are primarily destroying the Earth, and they’re thinking they’re being environmentally friendly. Right now they’re throwing it in the ocean because no country will take it. China used to take it but now they refuse. So now they’re putting it on barges and dumping it in the ocean. It’s like the big farce of America, how to control the people through media and tell them this. And none of it’s true. Why are you listening? That’s why I said everybody in America has to empower self, everybody has to empower self.

    When did it happen when we as a people waited for the government to tell us what to do? Waited for the government to fund programs, waited for the government to feed us, waited for the government to give us medical care. Isn’t that an oxymoron? Shouldn’t people have already empowered themselves to care for themselves, plant their own food, gather their own medicines, heal themselves from the Earth? It’s all right there. So that’s why I have issues.

    So that’s what we’re talking about with sovereign systems, right? Sovereignty. And the first act of sovereignty is food. Feed yourself. And one of the things that people… They sit in their little house and they eat by their self. And I was like, is that creepy? Everybody who stays with us all must eat communally.

    The first act of community is sharing food with each other. And if you have food, it should be free. It should be shared with everybody. That first act of sharing food sets a community and teaches you compassion. So that’s why I always say the first act of sovereignty is food. So how do you get that food? The second you plant your own food, what does that planting do? It heals your body, it heals your mind, it keeps you in balance.

    The first act of community is sharing food with each other. And if you have food, it should be free. It should be shared with everybody. That first act of sharing food sets a community and teaches you compassion. So that’s why I always say the first act of sovereignty is food. So how do you get that food? The second you plant your own food, what does that planting do? It heals your body, it heals your mind, it keeps you in balance.

    See also:

    LaDonna fights on in the resistance of Native youth

    Women of Standing Rock: LaDonna Brave Bull Allard

    From Encampment to Ecovillage at Standing Rock

    How the Women of Standing Rock Are Building Sovereign Economies

  • LaDonna fights on in the resistance of Native youth

    LaDonna fights on in the resistance of Native youth

    FORT YATES, N.D. – As the Standing Rock Sioux Nation prepared for services April 16-19 honoring late water protector LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, Native youth carried on the crusade to defend treaty land from pipeline construction, which she inspired when she established the Sacred Stone Camp near here five years ago.

    Known as Tamaka Waste Win, or Good Earth Woman, she was 64 when she began her journey to the Spirit World on April 10. “A matriarch in the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline,” the Standing Rock Youth Council called her.

    LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, “a matriarch in the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline,” the Standing Rock Youth Council called her. (Photo: Tatyana Novikova)

    “We will continue to stand,” the group posted on social media. Participants in the council — based at Standing Rock Sioux Nation Headquarters in Fort Yates, joined other Native pipeline fighters from the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, as well as from the Three Affiliated Tribes, in an April 9 rally for the pipeline’s shutdown.

    Before leaving Fort Yates to caravan to the rally at the Mandan, Hidatsa & Arikara Nation tribal headquarters in New Town, N.D., participants paid a call on Tamaka Waste Win’s home.

    “Prior to LaDonna’s passing, she heard the youth still standing and fighting in the protection of water rights outside her door — with a message of love and never giving up,” the council affirmed. “We must continue to fight and stand in her memory,” it said.

    Before leaving Fort Yates for a rally at New Town, N.D., participants paid a call on Tamaka Waste Win’s home.
    COURTESY / Standing Rock Youth Council

    In that “beautiful moment” on April 8, a small dog greeted participants, jumping and barking in excitement within the fenced yard of her tree-sheltered Ft. Yates home. A contingent of about a dozen youth, some of whom wore ceremonial ribbon skirts, hung banners on the fence and chanted:

    Ft. Laramie

    1868

    We stand

    For our brothers

    And our sisters

    For water

    For life

    Water is life

    Mni Wiconi

    We stand

     We love you LaDonna

    The caravan to New Town carried on the widespread grassroots support initiated at Sacred Stone Camp for tribal governments’ lawsuits against the Dakota Access Pipeline’s permit. Some of the rally participants were fresh from a journey to Washington, D.C. to demand U.S. President Joe Biden stop, not only DAPL’s flow, but also Enbridge’s Mountain Valley, Line 3 and Line 5 construction.

    At the Washington event, held April 1, participants stressed Biden’s fulfilled campaign promise to withdraw the Keystone XL Pipeline permit. They requested the president follow suit with the other pipelines, in the interest of climate justice.

    Love Hopkins, a pre-teen of White Shield, N.D., puts a finishing stab on the 300-foot effigy of a black snake April 1, as she returned with other tribal youth to the U.S, capital five years after their first relay run — to demand tribal consultation in petroleum pipeline and other megaproject permitting. COURTESY / Honor the Earth

    At New Town, youth asked MHA Nation Tribal Business Council Chair Mark Fox to honor his campaign commitment to protect the water. Voters remember Fox stumping for office with a poster saying, “Water is more valuable than oil!!!”

    Fox had addressed a March 23 letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, requesting “immediate consultation on the alternatives being considered regarding continuity of operations of the Dakota Access Pipeline” while the permit is under court-ordered review.

    Fox notes in the letter that more than half of the oil produced on his Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation goes to market via DAPL, making the Three Affiliated Tribes “unique among other tribes in our region.”

    Standing Rock Youth Council participant Love Hopkins — dressed in a green ribbon skirt and black t-shirt — addressed the MHA Tribal Business Council through Fox when he came outside of its chambers to meet the delegation. “The Army Corp has been playing with First Nation peoples and we are tired of it,” she said. “The government needs to start taking us seriously. They do not have the right to make moves on our land and without our say.”

    Fox agreed, but he pointed out that two thirds of the revenue generated by the leased oil sent through the pipeline accrues to individual tribal members. For that reason, he said, they have elected a business council that is “choosing to develop our trust resources.” He added, “We believe we can develop energy responsibly and still have a place to live.”

    Cheyenne River Sioux tribal member Morgan Brings Plenty, 26, said, “I am here to change you guys’ minds. You need to understand that you are destroying our water. What are you going to do whenever that oil is in our water?”

    MHA Tribal Business Council Chair Mark Fox met with rally participants: “choosing to develop our trust resources.” COURTESY / Standing Rock Youth Council

    Fox responded, “I understand where you’re coming from. There is no doubt, the pipeline was wrongly placed there.” The DAPL crosses the Missouri River just upstream from Standing Rock’s drinking water intake from the Oahe Reservoir.

    He recalled that he met with Standing Rock elected leadership during the 2016-2017 militarized police siege of the resistance camps that joined Sacred Stone. The MHA Nation acted in solidarity by sending part of its corn harvest to the thousands of campers on the banks of the Cannonball River, he noted.

    MHA tribal member Kandi White said the reason some people want fracking is fear of the unknown options. Some 70 percent of the tribal members don’t receive any royalties. She called for community education and workshops. An organizer for Indigenous Environmental Network, she asked for the release of studies the tribe has undertaken on health and environment, as well as a promise to shift away from oil dependance to renewable sources of energy.

    Fox admitted that negative impacts likely outweighed positive ones in the history of oil development on the tribes’ share of the petroleum rich Bakken Formation. Noting that petroleum supplies are finite, he said, “I don’t make promises, but I promise you we know that renewable is the way to go.”

    What’s more, he said, “I will never ever change my position that water is more valuable than oil.” He also pledged to release requested documents.

    Lisa DeVille, another citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa & Arikara Nation, said she hails from Mandaree, the community on Ft. Berthold with most oil extraction. Her grassroots Protectors of Water and Earth Rights, POWER, predates the Fox Administration, advocating since 2010 to protect water, land, and air. She thanked Standing Rock youth for joining in.  “No pipeline is safe,” she said.

    The Standing Rock youth returned home to the news that Brave Bull Allard’s funeral would be held within a week. “Sending our thoughts and prayers to the family of LaDonna Tamakawastewin Allard,” the youth council said.

    Tamaka Waste Win shows a visitor around Sacred Stone Camp in 2016. Photo by Tatyana Novikova

    Motorcycle and mounted horse escorts confirmed they would join the ceremonies honoring her. DaWise-Perry Funeral Services took charge of arrangements and published an obituary. The Fort Yates Youth Activity Center was the site of the scheduled wake. Anyone who wanting to “help out” could deliver blankets, star quilts or food to 202 Main St., or P.O. Box 670, Fort Yates, N.D. 58538, her son Freedom McLaughlin said.

    “We are grateful for the outpouring of love and support, care and concern, for our mother, teacher, sister, and friend Ladonna Brave Bull Allard,” he posted on the Sacred Stone Camp social media channel. “She lived life courageously and humbly as she pointed towards new possibilities through her way of life and commitment to the land.”

    Pictured on the banks of the Missouri River outside Three Affiliated Tribes headquarters, Native youth rallied for the Dakota Access Pipeline’s shutdown, vowing, “We will continue to stand.”
    CREDIT COURTESY / Morgan Brings Plenty

    This story was written with the generous support of The One Foundation.

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  • Tokata Iron Eyes stars at Black Hills Film Festival

    Tokata Iron Eyes stars at Black Hills Film Festival

    HILL CITY, S.D. — A Standing Rock Sioux teen tribal member is among Native headliners to play on the moving picture screen beginning Feb. 22 during the Black Hills Film Festival’s 12th annual season.

    Lakota youth pipeline fighter and climate justice advocate Tokata Iron Eyes stars in “My Name Is Future,” a new independent feature documentary that fuses her worldview with the art of Los Angeles-based activist Andrea Bowers.

    Andrea Bowers is a multimedia creator whose work with Tokata Iron Eyes is on exhibit at the Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York until Feb.22, as well as in the collections at MoMA NY, The Whitney Museum, The Hirschhorn, MoCA LA, and German galleries. CREDIT: Andrew Kreps Gallery

    Bowers met Iron Eyes at the Oceti Sakowin camps that attracted international solidarity and provided grassroots backing for tribal lawsuits against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016-2017.

    As one of thousands of campers who joined the Lakota-led resistance, Bowers agreed: “For the Standing Rock Tribe and surrounding communities, the pipeline was not only a threat to the region’s drinking water and farm irrigation but was also a direct threat to ancient burial grounds and cultural sites of historic importance.”

    During her stay at the Standing Rock camps, she said, “I was moved by the activism of these young water protectors. One of them was Tokata Iron Eyes.”  She learned that Tokata means future in Lakota and that youth from Lakota communities were at the forefront of the movement to stop DAPL.

    Since the movement’s inception, Iron Eyes has been involved in trying to prevent the hazardous materials pipeline from crossing the Missouri River just upstream from her tribe’s drinking water intake.

    The 16-year-old from Standing Rock hosted global youth climate action leader Greta Thunberg when the Swedish teen visited Lakota Territory on her 2019 tour of Turtle Island.

    Lakota youth pipeline fighter and climate justice advocate Tokata Iron Eyes and Swedish teen climate action leader Greta Thunberg lead school strike March in Rapid City, South Dakota on Oct. 8, 2019. CREDIT: Photo by Talli Nauman]

    Bowers is a multimedia creator whose work is on exhibit in the collections at MoMA NY, The Whitney Museum, The Hirschhorn, MoCA LA, and German galleries.

    She applied her media skills to direct the 51-minute indie picture show because “I believed along with thousands of other opponents of DAPL that the pipeline threatens sacred native lands and could contaminate the Missouri River—the longest river in North America,” she explains.

    After meeting Iron Eyes at camp, Bowers said she asked her “to show us some of her most sacred places in South Dakota.

    “With a small group of friends – all artists and activists, we traveled together recording video interviews and landscape drone shots” while discussing their histories, as well as the personal and political issues that arose from being in these sacred sites, she relates in festival program notes.

    “I want to thank Tokata Iron Eyes for graciously sharing some of her most sacred sites in South Dakota and for lending her voice, intelligence and joy to this film,” Bowers says. “I can’t wait to see the gifts she gives this world in the future.”

    “My Name Is Future” was edited by Lindsay Mofford and recorded by cinematographer Teena Pugliese.

    It is among dozens of movies destined to attract attention this season at the local non-profit festival providing films from the world over and specializing in titles of particular interest to the Black Hills viewing public, including many films with indigenous and environmental justice themes.

    Film trailer – Click here to view

    Titles are easily accessible with the festival’s first-ever all-virtual format. Tickets are available online at $9.99 for this or any other single release on the festival program.

    Gift certificates, day passes, and full festival passes also are available through the internet. Films will display on your TV, computer, or mobile phone. Bonus viewing extends to March 1 for “all-access” pass holders.

    Seminars and discussions, such as the “Activism Discussion,” are included in their own carousel and can be viewed anytime during the festival for anyone who has a login.

    The event, which runs through Feb. 25, pays a tribute to Cheyenne River Sioux tribal member, performer, and festival mainstay Barry LeBeau, who was master of ceremonies for screenings and film discussions held at theaters in communities throughout the Black Hills during the festival’s previous 11 seasons.

    LeBeau passed away unexpectedly at age 69 in late March of 2020.

    Now, with the novel coronavirus pandemic encouraging moviegoers to stay home and make their own popcorn while watching shows, a business called Film Festival Flix is stepping up to provide a digital master-of-ceremonies function with a platform introducing the offerings for the Black Hills Film Festival online.

    LeBeau was known as an actor, a voice talent, a narrator and an announcer for the South Dakota Symphony’s Lakota Music Project, a tribal relations consultant, as well as an Indian affairs and arts lobbyist.

    LeBeau played the protagonist in the 1999 creative release “Yes I am Not Iktomi.” In it, he wears a coyote mask to portray Trickster for the half-hour blend of legend and satire. Filmed in the Black Hills, it includes a deconstruction of Mt. Rushmore through filmic special effects.

    He was the first member of the Black Hills Film Festival board of directors after the festival’s creation by its three founders in 2009. He served several terms as president and secretary, as well as 11 years in the capacity of master of ceremonies.

    “Barry, we will miss your dedication, sense of humor, big voice and hearty laugh,” his colleagues say in a message shared with festival fans.

    The song “Between Earth and Sky” accompanies his homage, thanks to Ojibwe-Tohono O’odham musician Darren Thompson, who recorded the original composition and played it on an 800-year-old Native Pueblo flute made of western cedar.

    This event pays a tribute to Cheyenne River Sioux tribal member, performer, and festival mainstay Barry LeBeau, who was master of ceremonies for screenings and film discussions held at theaters in communities throughout the Black Hills during the festival’s previous 11 seasons. Photo by Talli Nauman

    During the festival, a 48-minute presentation of “7th Generation” will examine how Oglala Lakota tribal member, advocate and educator Jim Warne helps tribal nations find ways to succeed in the contemporary American system and remain Indian at heart.

    Also filmed in South Dakota, this award-winning feature documentary covers generations of history. It addresses past and current perspectives gleaned from elders and community members, focusing on a positive future for youth – the seventh generation.

    A Native American Short Program, underwritten by The Puffin Foundation Ltd., will provide more than an hour of viewing that covers “She Carries On” – directed by Isaac Fowler and Tim Morris, and produced by Natalie Welch and Nick Geidner; “Little Wolf: The Night Trail” – written and animated by Jesse Cowan; “Whiteface” – written by Todd Houseman, Lady Vanessa Cardona, Everett Sokol, and Sam Burns, and directed by Everett Sokol; “The Lakota Daughters” – written and directed by Victoria Kupchinetsky; and “Hop Along Hang On” – written and directed by Cobra Collins, and produced by Xstine Cook.

    The festival is presented thanks to support from South Dakota Community Foundation, South Dakota Arts Council, and Hill City Chamber of Commerce. Supporting sponsors are the HomeSlice Group, KEVN and KOTA. Hill City Arts Council provides additional backing, and Stu Fromm underwrites the inclusion of South Dakota films.

    Talli Nauman is Lakota Country Correspondent for The Esperanza Project. She is a longtime Americas Program collaborator and columnist, a founder and co-director of Journalism to Raise Environmental Awareness, and Health and Environment Editor for Native Sun News Today. She can be reached at talli.nauman(at)gmail.com.

    This story was reported and produced with the generous support of the One Foundation.

    Young Lakota water protectors flank Tokata Iron Eyes (right) and Greta Thunberg as they share the podium at climate justice pipeline opposition rally in Lakota Territory. CREDIT: Talli Nauman