The First Thanksgiving scene depicted here by Jean Louis Gerome Ferris, 1932, is a romanticized and historically inaccurate version. The clothing worn by the Pilgrims is incorrect, and the Wampanoag did not wear feathered war bonnets, nor would they have been sitting on the ground. Reproduction of oil painting from series: The Pageant of a Nation.
In these abundant days of autumn as we come together to
celebrate family, food and a tradition that is largely fiction, many of us have
been delving into deeper truths about our nation – because we are ready,
because those who hold those histories are ready, and because it’s time.
Diné/Cheyenne/European American scholar, musician and
activist Lyla June is one of those truth-tellers who has been researching the
past from an indigenous perspective, and who has worked very hard to cultivate
an attitude of love and forgiveness. We share her eye-opening Thanksgiving origin
story, told from the Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where our
forebears began a colonization process that would devastate and very nearly
obliterate the civilization that gave them the keys to survival in these lands.
“Lyla June on The Truth of Thanksgiving” by Bill Hurley. Reproduced with permission by the filmmaker.
Greetings my kin, my people. I am here at the Plimoth Plantation colony where the separatists, as we now call them Pilgrims, first made their landing, and where they set up their settlement. And so we’re here today and we’re wanting to talk about the truth of Thanksgiving because we believe that truth is what’s going to set this country free. It’s really hard to look at the truth of this country, but I want to invite you to be brave right now. I want to invite you to take a little walk with me through time, and also to explore the notion of forgiveness and how we might all heal from this really hard past. And so I think it’s really important to tell the truth here today because while yes, Thanksgiving is a very important part of American social life, it is actually founded on a lot of untruths.
And so I’m really happy to come here today to talk about some of those untruths and to really set the record straight about Thanksgiving. You know, during the time that we talk about Squanto coming and helping the pilgrims and healing them and helping them understand how to plant food, how to survive on the land, he was also being kidnapped and sold into slavery in Europe only to come back here, and to find his entire nation completely obliterated by smallpox. So this man who gave a lot of compassion to people ended up getting sold into slavery.
A really important thing too, is that in 1637, when you have the governor of the Massachusetts colony, John Winthrop — this is only 16 years after the supposed Pilgrim feast with the native people — he declared the first day of Thanksgiving, but it wasn’t for what we think it was. It was actually after the massacre of hundreds of Pequot people down in Connecticut. And the Thanksgiving feast was to thank God that all of his soldiers had returned from this massacre. They massacred hundreds of Pequot men, women, and children. So we have to understand that the colonies here in Massachusetts were not peaceful. They were colonial. They were fearful and they were aggressive and they harmed many, many, many indigenous peoples. And that’s really, really important for us to understand so that we don’t rose-tint the history that we stand on.
Engraving depicting the attack on the Pequot Fort, published in 1638. “A new and experimentall discoverie of New England,” London: 1638, by John Underhill (d. 1672). STC 24518, Houghton Library, Harvard University
And so I think it’s really important, and it’s really similar to Pocahontas; because in the Disney movie, they talk about this beautiful woman who met John Smith, this beautiful man, and they fell in love and everything was great. But the real truth is Pocahontas was a child when she was married to an Englishman and had no choice in the matter, was shipped to England and died in England of disease.
If the Pocahontas story were true, that would be great. I actually liked that movie. But the fact is we’re not telling the truth. We’re not telling what actually happened. And this is a problem because we’re trying to evade our mistakes. So we have to understand that Thanksgiving, as we know it, was contrived during the Lincoln administration during a time of great civil unrest. He needed something, some kind of event to bring us all together into a single national identity. But we have him saying, ‘Oh, the pilgrims and the Indians just had a peaceful dinner and it was all wonderful.’ (Public domain image of Pocahontas: Clarke, Mary Cowden (1883). World Noted Women. New York: D. Appleton and Company.)
And not only is that not true — there was a lot of violence around that time — but also Abraham Lincoln was saying this as during his administration, the largest mass execution in this country happened and it was of 38 Dakota indigenous peoples. And Abraham Lincoln also oversaw the incarceration of thousands of Diné people, my ancestors, outside of Albuquerque, a concentration camp that Hitler would later study for his own because it was so effective at dehumanizing the people.
Thanksgiving for indigenous peoples is a daily ritual, a daily act. Because in the morning we give our offerings to Creator, thanking Creator for life. And it’s not a single day of the year, but it happens every single day of our lives; it’s the gratitude that we have for life and for living. So this is really important to know about Thanksgiving and to understand that no, it’s not oh, everyone was happy and they ate together and kumbaya, but rather the indigenous peoples were in an incredibly hostile situation where they were raided, sold to slavery and massacred.
And so that comes to my next point, which is forgiveness. I’ve been forgiven big time in my life and I’ve been through lots of horrible stuff growing up as a child and therefore I did lots of horrible stuff to other people. What happened to me as a child where I got hurt and confused and abused and then went on to hurt and confuse and abuse others is similar to the white colonists, to the European invaders, because they had been hurt and abused; in their homeland, for example, they had the Roman expansion. They had the Inquisition, they had the destruction of millions of women who were persecuted as witches. They have a complete obliteration of their culture. You have the Welsh language being illegalized and prohibited in schools. You have the colonization of the indigenous peoples of Europe. And as my elder Phil Lane Jr. says: Hurt people, hurt people; and colonized people, colonize people.
And so when I think of it this way, and even though people say I’m crazy, I step on this land with a lot of forgiveness. I look to these colonist homes here and I really have a lot of forgiveness for them. We have the opportunity as indigenous peoples to forgive and to send love to those who sent us hate. And to say, “I love you” to an institution and a wave of an ideology that nearly annihilated us from the face of the planet.
And I think forgiveness is a beautiful thing because it releases us all from the cycles of violence that we’re in. Because if we forgive the people who perpetuated these things, we can actually feel grace. And when people feel grace, people understand the type of love that Native people were all about. They can feel it in their whole being, and that grace can transform so many situations into beauty.
And so I’m really, really advocating forgiveness and even standing on this land where I know indigenous peoples were massacred, where I know indigenous peoples were destroyed, where I know they were evaporated to thin air by disease—I want to extend forgiveness to John Winthrop, the man who ordered the slaughter of Pequot nations. I want to extend forgiveness to him and tell him that I’m praying for him, wherever his spirit is, and I love him, and everything is going to be okay. And through that forgiveness, I think we can evolve and become a healthier nation. And through forgiveness, more truth comes out, right? Because we don’t talk about truth unless we’re feeling safe to talk about it. But if we come and say: “Listen, we’re sorry that you got colonized. We’re sorry that what happened to your people in your continent that made you so downtrodden, so afraid, so unhuman that you would come over here and harm others. We’re sorry for what happened to you and your ancestors. We’re sorry.” That releases a lot of pain for a lot of people.
17th-century Wampanoags examining a spoon as a European settler looks on, depicted through the Plimoth Plantation’s Living History program. Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism.
And so we’re in a time now where we can stop perpetuating
the legacy of colonization. We’re in a time now where we can actually change
things for the better, and we can take the truth of the bloody history of this
country and we can turn it into action to change the legacy of the shadow of
colonization. And so that’s exactly what Plimoth Plantation is doing here. I’ve
been speaking with the staff and I find it incredibly beautiful that the museum
here has officially changed Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day. The staff
here is working with a lot of indigenous staff who work here to talk about
Native American stereotypes and to talk about history from their angle. And the
people who work here are indigenous peoples.
And a lot of the people here who are learning about this
place are learning it from indigenous voices themselves, face to face, in
person. And so I think that this is just one example of how we can alter who we
are and become brave to look at the truth.
And just as Gandhi said, he believed that we could solve the whole world’s problems with truth and love. And he followed the principle of Satyagraha, which was a mixture of truth and love. And so we are here to bring out the dirty laundry and look at it and air it out. And in the face of that cruelty, in the face of those massacres, in the face of that genocide, to come here with love and to forgive.
And I believe that’s what we can do as not a nation of America, but as a nation of Turtle Island, this whole continent, we can heal. We can come together and we can fix this.
Lyla June walks the grounds of Plimoth Plantation during the filming of “The Truth of Thanksgiving” by Bill Hurley. Reproduced with permission by the filmmaker.
Temperate broadleaf and mixed forest. (CC Public Domain)
This is the second part of a series on indigenous food systems with Diné artist, activist and scholar Lyla June. In Part One: Kelp Gardens, Piñon Forests, she shares some of her personal journey with food and agriculture and what inspired her to focus the next stage of her life on traditional food systems and language.
In Part Two, she delves more deeply into the eye-opening science coming forward about pre-colonial land management practices and the sophisticated foodscapes co-created with nature over the centuries. This piece was drawn from a presentation to the Sovereign Sisters Gathering at Borderland Ranch in South Dakota.
The squash blossom, a recurring image in Diné art and jewelry, is a part of the Diné traditional agricultural and food system. Lyla June/Instagram photo in honor of Mauna Kea.
I’m introducing my clans from the Diné nation; our first clan is the Black Charcoal Streak Division, aka Zuni People; Division of the Red-Running-Into-the-Water People of the Diné Nation, also currently known as the Navajo. My father’s mother is of the Cheyenne clan, Tsétsêhéstâhese. My mother’s father’s mother is the Salt Clan of the Diné, and my father’s father’s mother is the Scandanavian clan. Those are the main matrilineal lines that I carry.
There’s a huge mythology that native people here were simpletons, they were primitive, half-naked nomads running around the forest, eating hand-to-mouth whatever they could find. That’s how Europe portrays us. And it’s portrayed us that way for so many centuries that even we’ve started to believe that that’s who we were. The reality is, indigenous nations on this Turtle Island were highly organized. They densely populated the land and they managed the land extensively. And this has a lot to do with food, because a large motivation to prune the land, to burn the land, to reseed the land, and to sculpt the land, was about feeding our nations. Not only our nations, but other animal nations as well.
So for instance, one of the things I’m interested in is the soil cores that they get out of the Earth; they’re very thin but they’re maybe 10 meters deep, and you can analyze the fossilized pollen from the bottom up to the top. And you can date each layer to see what time it was deposited; and there also is fossilized charcoal, and this is evidence that the people would burn the land routinely and extensively.
There’s a soil core from what we now call Kentucky that goes all the way back to 10,000 years ago. And it shows that from 10,000 years ago up to about 3,000 years ago, there was a mainly cedar and hemlock forest. But about 3,000 years ago the whole forest composition changed to a black walnut, hickory nut, chestnut, acorn forest. Also they noticed that a lot of edible species like goosefoot and sumpweed, their pollen was found around that time. So these people – whoever moved in around 3,000 years ago —radically changed the way the land looked and tasted.
Clockwise from upper left: sumpweed, or marsh elder (iva xanthafolia), and goosefoot or lambsquarter (closely related members of the chenapodium family) (Creative Commons photos: respectively, Matt Lavin from Bozeman, Montana; Pixhere; and Wendell Smith from Flickr.
This is a type of what we call anthropogenic or human-made foodscapes, where we would shape the land – not in a dominating way but in a gentle way. Similarly, in the Amazon you have these food forests where again they look at the soil cores and you have a lot of fruit trees, and they call it hyper-dominance, which means naturally you wouldn’t see that many fruit trees and nut trees. So you couldn’t know it but human beings really made the Amazon rainforest as we know it. And they also utilized the terra preta soil composting technology where they would generate highly fertile soils that were 10 feet deep and they would use their refuse and their compost to generate these black soils. And you only find the terra preta or black earth near these human settlements.
Human beings are meant to be a gift to the land. Another example is in Bella Bella, BC, where the kelp gardens are actually planted by hand by the Bella Bella Nation. And these kelp gardens provide the spawning ground for the herring, which lay their roe and their eggs – and their roe is a major foundation of the whole web of life there. The humans eat the roe, the wolves eat the roe, the salmon eat the roe, and that in turn feeds the killer whales — everyone eats the roe, and everyone eats the things that eat the roe. And without this human touch along the coastline, the whole ecosystem would be compromised.
What we’re finding, and what European scientists are finally
figuring out, is that human beings are meant to be a keystone species. And a
keystone species is a species that if you take it out, the whole thing
unravels.
When I was at the Parliament of World Religions there was a Yoruba elder there giving a speech. And he said in our language, the word for human means “chosen one.” And he said, “We are called chosen ones because we were chosen by Creator to take care of the Earth. We are the chosen species to steward her and to facilitate.” We are here for a reason.
Every being is here for a reason – every rock, every deer, every star, every person is here – Creator doesn’t just make things that don’t have a purpose or a function or a part in the puzzle. And so we as human beings are trying to bring the human being back into the role of keystone species, where our presence on the land nourishes the land. And one of the women I’m learning from for my doctoral pre-research is saying – I don’t like the word sustainability. We’re not just going to sustain ourselves; that’s a low standard. I’m going for enhanceability. The ability to enhance wherever I walk. The ability to make it better than when I found it.
So it depends on where you are from; what biome or ecosystem you live in, that will determine how we are meant to work with the land. For example the Amah Mutsun Nation, which is indigenous to what is now called Santa Cruz, California, have a ceremony that they do with the oak trees. And if you look at their oak trees, they’re very hard and fire resistant – because they co-evolved with Amah Mutsun people for tens of thousands of years. And he said what we do is, we have a rule of thumb. We say only 14 trees per acre. He said, these days you go around and you see 200, 400 trees per acre. The land can’t handle that. All those trees and all those plants are starving. They’re starving because there’s limited nutrients and limited water in the soil. So what our people used to do is we would create savannahs where there are 14 trees per acre.
And what we’d do each year is we’d cut down the low-hanging, older branches so that they wouldn’t get burned. And we’d gather all the leaves together and we would burn around the oak trees. And he said the smoke would go into the leaves and it would smudge the oak trees. He said we would bless the oak trees with the smoke. And the oak trees began to get used to that. And they miss us, because we hadn’t been doing that. He said the smoke would go up and burn or suffocate the pests, so you’d have a healthier acorn crop to choose from. And all the bugs would fall into the fire. And all the saplings would die off. So only the hardiest and strongest plants would arise, he said. So this is just one example of the very important role of fire in maintaining the health of the land.
He said we would do this all throughout what is now called California – and because we have been prohibited from our burning, we now have these catastrophic fires throughout California. He said that this has to come back. He said we wouldn’t just change the land however we wanted it; we would look at what was going on on the land, and we would preference the food-bearing plants, but we would listen to her, and then create what she had there and tend it. So European explorers and pirates would come to the Eastern seaboard and would marvel at the forests there, and they would say, wow, these forests are like parks. There was space between the trees, there were deer walking through; and they said wow, the wilderness here is beautiful.
Native Stewards tend hummingbird sage (Salvia spathacea) at the Amah Mutsun Relearning Garden at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum with AMLT Research Associate Rick Flores. (Photo: Amah Mutsun Land Trust)
But wilderness is a very interesting word that we need to examine and reconsider how we use it, because it’s not necessarily wild. If you call it wilderness, for one thing, you separate yourself from it. Like that’s that, and I’m over here in the non-wilderness. But secondly, it wasn’t so wild, actually, because it was very, very tended by human hands.
But this is not necessarily a bad thing. My father for example says, “We should just leave nature alone – don’t touch it, because it’s perfect the way it is.” But we’re saying you have to find a middle ground – where you don’t leave marks on the Earth, you don’t harm the Earth, but you’re also allowed to go in and gather. You’re allowed to go in and harvest. You’re allowed to go in and spread seeds as you harvest.
That’s what the Amah Mutsun elder said. He said, first we
give one shake for the birds. And one shake for the next year’s planting. And
then we take the seeds. So you’re regenerating as you’re harvesting. And the
harvest was the way in which we’d do these management practices.
So the Great Plains and the buffalo we hunt are also anthropogenic. People don’t know that but people used to call them Indian Summers because the sky would be black because there would be fires all over. And we would manage the Great Plains with fire. And yes, we hunted buffalo – but we hunted in the grasslands
we made for them.
For example, there’s something known as successive regrowth,
where if you burn an area one year later it will have one set of flora and
fauna. Two years later it will have another set of flora and fauna. Three years
later it will have another set of flora and fauna. Four years later it will
have another set of flora and fauna. So you had patches all over the Great
Plains that were at different stages of regrowth. Maybe this one was burned a
year ago; this one was burned two years ago. Three years ago, four years ago.
And each one had a different set of flora and fauna, and in that manner we’d
enhance the biodiversity of the area. That’s the kind of genius our ancestors
held.
But even today you’ll see our elders thinking that we weren’t all that smart. But we have to understand that 98% of our people were wiped out before they even started writing stories about us. Before they even started taking pictures of us. Every picture you see – those black-and-white pictures – were taken after 98% of the population was decimated – or at least 90% – by disease and massacre.
So the native nations we know of today – Cherokee, Seminole
– these are survival bands. These are the 2% who survived and got together and
tried to make things work. They do not reflect the original composition of the
people. It doesn’t belittle them, it’s just beckoning the world to look deeper.
To understand that the story that unfolded on this continent is much greater
than what any of us had been told. And that story needs to be told. And when we
think about the original composition of the people, it was vast, and it was
highly organized. We are the ones who inspired Ben Franklin to generate this
new thing called democracy.
The Iroquois Confederacy is the blueprint for American democracy – which at the time was very revolutionary, coming from monarchies. So we had technologies not only that enhanced the Earth but we had social technologies as well. And we didn’t learn these technologies just magically. We learned them through trial and error. The Peacemaker of the Iroquois Confederacy only came after centuries of war. We had war here, we had slavery here, we had horrific things go on here.
My people, we descend from the Chaco Canyon people. Chaco Canyon is revered as this great archaeological site – but if you really dig into it, we had caste systems there, we exhausted the land, we manipulated the water, we had running water there – which isn’t necessarily bad – but we weren’t honoring the way it wanted to flow. And Creator sent us a drought. And it was the youth of Chaco Canyon who decided that we were going to not live that way anymore. And so when the drought came it gave us the courage to change. And we left; we abandoned it.
And as Diné people, we’re not supposed to go back there. We
say, That era is over. And so from that fire was born a new society.
Highly nutritions prickly pear cactus (nopal). Lyla June Instagram photo: Learn more here.
All of these kinship terms: my maternal grandmother, my paternal grandmother, my sister, my younger brother – all those terms of endearment, of humbling yourself, of preciousness, came from that period of complete chaos, where we learned the hard way that inequality does not work. That altering the Earth does not work.
So that’s true for a lot of Native nations. We’ve been here
for hundreds of thousands of years. They try to say we’ve just been here since
the Bering Strait. No. They just found mastodon bones in San Diego that had
human carvings on them. 130,000 years old. And of course all the Western
scientists don’t want to believe it. They say, “No, no, no, you must have dated
it wrong. No, those can’t be human markings.” No, we didn’t date it wrong. And
those are definitely human cuts. Someone cut that mastodon up with a tool.
There’s no doubt about it. But they don’t want to hear it, because they want
our time period to be shortened. Because then we never really were here
anyways. And if they exterminated us – well, we hadn’t been here that long.
They don’t want to face the truth that we’ve been here a very, very, very, very
long time. And this is our home, and we do have a right to be here.
They also don’t want to face the truth that we were highly
civilized. More civilized than they – in the sense that we did not leave marks
on the Earth. If you leave a mark on the Earth, it meant you’d done something
disrespectful – marks that you could see hundreds of years later. So the
archaeologists are like, there were no people here – you would see aqueducts,
you would see pyramids, you would see roads – you would see something. And we
say, No. We never made marks on the Earth that lasted more than a decade at the
most. Because we were the original “Leave No Trace.” But we did leave one thing
in our wake, and that was biodiversity.
And so the archaeologists don’t even have the tools to
detect how long we have been here because they’re looking for the wrong things.
They say, “Oh, Chaco!” and “Oh, here’s a Mayan city in
Guatemala!” The Mayans left that city the same way we left Chaco, because we
decided we were not God. They went back to the forest.
So that’s why the Maya cities collapsed — they left the cities on their own because they decided they were not God. They were going to live humbly again. They’d kind of been there, done that.
So now here we are with all our fancy technology and we
can’t even close the wealth disparity gap. All of our PhDs going to the moon
and we can’t even keep our oceans clean. So we have all this knowledge but we
have no wisdom. So here we are learning, just like our ancestors learned –
inequality does not work. Patriarchy does not work. Rape culture does not work.
That’s why White Buffalo Calf Woman had to come – the Lakota were steeped in
rape culture. And it wasn’t working. Their whole world was unraveling. And
White Buffalo Calf Woman came to say, “This is how you treat the women.” Then
it gave birth to a great nation that we learn from today.
And so we are in the process as a species of learning the
hard way. And it does suck – it’s hard. We’re taking out a lot of species just
to learn this lesson. But we will emerge wiser, and we will emerge more
sovereign. We have to; it’s the only way. Only sovereignty is sustainable.
So when we circle back around to food, it’s not so much what
you do but why you do it. What you do can change from biome to biome; but why
you do it remains the same. You do it to honor what Creator has made; you do it
to enhance the land you live on. You do it to diversify genes at every
opportunity; and you do it to honor the natural flow of water. You do it in the
spirit of selflessness, in the spirit of service, in the spirit of community.
And as long as you’re doing that, the technical skills will follow.
And so when we talk about food sovereignty, I know the theory but I need to practice a lot more. I don’t know a whole lot about on-the-ground stuff, which is what I’ll be spending the next few years doing. But I think the core principles are: don’t leave marks on the Earth; honor what Creator has made; honor the women; honor women’s leadership; and diversify – diversify – diversify.
They talk about the Andean people having 400 types of potatoes. This helps us in a time of climate change because one potato does good in a drought; one potato does good in a rainy season. And they look at the signs of the plants – oh, this one’s blossoming early; that means it’s going to be a rainy season. Or they look at the stars at a certain time of year; this is going to be a wet season. But they still prepare for every situation. They might plant a little more of what they expect to work. But they’re still going to plant all the different types.
When we went to Villa Rica, Peru, that had so many fruits
I’ve never seen in my live. They have fruits that probably most of us have
never even heard of. When I went to a restaurant to order a juice — every restaurant has juice – you could order
from 12 different kinds of juice. How many kinds of juice do we have? Apple
juice, orange juice, maybe some kind of cranberry juice if we’re lucky – but
that’s Minute Maid, right? That’s your palate. So our corn, too, was smaller,
but it had way more nutrients in it. And when Cheryl and I went to Cuetzalan,
Puebla, I had the most delicious banana in my life – and it was only this big. (uses
fingers to measure about 6 inches)
And so those bananas – we don’t need to blow things up with our GMOs. Because it dilutes the nutrient content; we don’t need to eat as much as we eat. We don’t even know what it’s like to eat normally, to eat like a normal human being, the way Creator intended. We eat and eat and eat, and we’re still hungry. Back in the day, the Chia seeds would sustain a warrior for a whole day.
It’s hard to know where to go if you’ve never been exposed to the truth of what happened on this planet, and how it flourished – huge civilizations. There were 80 languages spoken in California alone. Eighty languages that were mutually unintelligible. Incredible things happened here – and a lot of that has been erased or we’re just not able to find it. So expanding your imagination about what happened here will help us set the record straight about who was primitive and who was civilized – and will also help us generate that world again. Maybe through thinking about which seeds we plant. Maybe trying to have 12 different kinds of squash, 12 different kinds of corn in your garden. Maybe instead of cutting down a forest to make room for a farm, realize the forest already is a farm, if you know how to take care of it – it will make food for you, way better than any monocrop.
So it’s time for us to remember that a forest is a farm. And if it’s not a farm, delicately, respectfully, carefully turn it into a farm. Don’t cut it down.
https://vimeo.com/301081646
Lyla June shares her perspective on the deeper meaning of Climate Change and her powerful song “All Nations Rise”. From the recent webinar “Responding to runaway Climate Change: Indigenous Wisdom for Planetary Health”, hosted by EARTHwise Centre and The Four Worlds International Institute.
Lyla June is a musician, public speaker and internationally recognized performance poet of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and Northern European lineages. A young elder with a rare wisdom, Lyla June sprang into the consciousness of many during the Standing Rock movement, when her powerful live feeds drew millions of viewers from around the world.
Though her art and activism continue to carry forward the messages of Standing Rock, she is now zeroing in on food and agricultural policy with the goal of building food sovereignty and eventually establishing a school to revitalize ancient approaches to farming.
A self-described “indigenous eco-Tubman” set on freeing people from slavery to a destructive and dehumanizing system, Lyla decided earlier this year to pursue a doctorate in traditional food systems and languages – “as a hobby,” she emphasized, as she prefers traditional forms of education. Clearly she’s no stranger to the Western academic model, having graduated from Stanford University and the University of New Mexico with honors – but traditional education is at the heart of her current pursuit. Curious about what this meant to her, I caught up with her at the Sovereign Sisters Gathering in the heart of the sacred Black Hills and asked her to explain.
This interview is Part One of our visit with Lyla June, and a part of our Women of Standing Rock series. In Part Two, The Farm as Forest, she debunks prevailing scientific theories about Native American civilizations, and shares some surprising findings about the way agriculture was practiced before the colonizers arrived – and what it means for our future.
Water protectors of all persuasions gathered in talking circles at Borderland Ranch in Pe’Sla, the heart of the sacred Black Hills, during the first Sovereign Sisters Gathering. At the center are Cheryl Angel in red and white and on her left, Lyla June. (Photo by Tracy L. Barnett)
A version of this story appeared in Civil Eats, a daily news source for critical thought about the American food system. The story is part of an Esperanza Project series: Women of Standing Rock. Stay tuned for Part II of our visit with Lyla June: The Forest as Farm, Ancient Foodscapes as Cutting-Edge Regenerative Agriculture.
Tell us about your journey with food sovereignty—how and where were you raised and how did that influence who you are today?
I am Diné, Cheyenne, Scottish, and Scandinavian—and maybe other things that I don’t know—but my mom is Diné, and we get our clan from our mother’s side. Diné people perfected a mode of existence in the desert where all of their gastronomic needs were fulfilled in a way that regenerated the land around them—everything from managing piñon forests and three sisters crops to maintaining and protecting deer habitat— even buffalo, which we used to eat as far south as our homeland.
So I think that’s where my food journey really started was hundreds of thousands of years ago, on this continent. The scientists say we’ve only been here about 10,000 to 14,000 years. But more evidence is coming up that’s showing our presence here is more like in the hundreds of thousands of years.
Growing up, I was not very connected to my foods, even though my ancestors were. I ate from grocery stores, restaurants, a little bit of fast food… I ate your normal Bureau of Indian Affairs school lunch menu – and it was just trash. They had all of us little native kids—the only thing we could drink was milk at school — [even though] we were all lactose intolerant, genetically.
I had mostly a colonized American diet growing up. And when I was about 27, an elder came and told me that it was time to plant the seeds. It was time to burn around the oak groves again. It was time to transplant the kelp gardens to make room for herring roe and herring spawning grounds. It was time to replant the chestnut forests in the East; space them apart so disease would not wipe them out. It was time to clear the understory of the forests to make room for the deer again. It was time to cultivate corn that might be smaller in size but is more nutrient dense. It was time to harvest the saguaro seeds again from the cacti. It was time to pick berries again. It was time to regenerate the highly sophisticated food systems that we as indigenous peoples cultivated and, through trial and error over many thousands of years, we had perfected.
And he said
that when the Europeans came, they were actually the primitive ones. And we had
vast societies and we managed the land extensively. And the Europeans didn’t
like seeing how sophisticated we were in the face of their society. They felt
scared because their whole mission was to conquer an inferior race. And so when
they saw our vast societies and huge complex governance structures — pyramids,
even — and everyone being fed very well, and the women being treated well, with
matrilineal societies — they called the ones in the South the Five Civilized
Tribes, as if those five were an exception to the rule that the rest were all
primitive. But the truth is, we were all very “civilized” in the
sense that we were highly advanced in our functioning.
So, this
elder told me a sentence that changed my life forever. He said, “Native
people control enough land to change the way the world thinks about food and
water.” And so even though our landholdings have been reduced to almost
nothing compared to what they used to be, we have enough landholdings where we
can — not to do anything new, but just bring back what our ancestors already
did — to change the way the world thinks about food and water.
So that’s what sparked my journey into traditional foods revitalization as well as language revitalization — because I believe that until we can speak the language, the paradigm and the lens through which we see reality will not be changed. So I think to truly change our relationship to food we have to change the paradigm by which we live. Even the word “food” is a noun [in English]— it’s an object, it’s static, it’s lifeless, it’s dead. But in our languages, food is always a verb, in the sense that it’s derived from a verb. It’s a noun that’s created into a noun from a verb. This is because for us, food is a dynamic, living process that is constantly in flux.
Lyla June, left, with Cheryl Angel, Sovereign Sisters Gathering, Borderlands Ranch, Black Hills, South Dakota, June 2019 (Tracy L. Barnett photo)
Can you give us an example of how food is dynamic?
As a Native person you are not just thinking about the nut you’re eating; you’re thinking about the ancestors who planted that chestnut tree 60 years ago and did so with ceremony and with song. You’re thinking about how you burned around the chestnut tree to prevent overpopulation of the forest and to return nutrients to the soil and to smudge the trees — it’s a ceremony when you burn around the trees.
When you look at that nut, you’re thinking about the rains that came, and you’re thinking about the mycelium that nourishes and sustains the soil for the chestnut tree. You’re thinking about going out in the forest by the dozens and harvesting chestnuts as a community. You’re thinking about shelling them, you’re thinking about grinding them, you’re thinking about processing them, you’re thinking about mixing them with other foods to create superfood mixtures. You’re thinking about the spirit of that chestnut tree and how she’s like your mother. You’re thinking about how we planted chestnut forests with our bare hands and always spacing them far apart so the disease couldn’t travel through them, to keep them healthy. You’re thinking about the plants that are sisters and brothers to the chestnut that grow around the tree.
But that word “food” [as a noun] isolates that nut from all those living processes. And when I think of the word food, I think of your kid in the back seat and you throw them a bag of Cheetos — it’s just an object that you can put in a bag and eat, and not think about where it comes from. But for us, our language is our verb base, because we acknowledge nothing is static. Everything is in flux, everything transforms, everything is moving from place to place. And the idea that things are static objects is nothing more than a mind trick, an illusion of the mind.
So that’s what sparked my interest in the intersection of food and languages — this yearning to go back to a more sane and sovereign lifestyle — and also this elder who really inspired me to start examining how we could become leaders in the world and sort of set the record straight: We are not the primitive ones — the most primitive thing you can do is poison your own water. And the most barbaric thing you can do is to use this life to dominate instead of love and uplift. And we didn’t do either of those things. We learned through trial and error that those things don’t work. This society is still learning that.
So you chose to investigate this through the academic route. Can you talk a bit about your process of deciding to do that, and where to go and who to study with?
I am almost half European, so I have both minds. I can view through the ceremonial lens and I can view through the left-brain, academic lens. And I’ve always been good at Western academics; I went to Stanford for my undergrad, graduated with honors; I studied American Indian education at the University of New Mexico for my master’s, and graduated with distinction. And so my entire master’s thesis was all about how Western education is not a priority, and should never be a priority in the education of Native peoples — that we should return to our own ancestral curriculum. Sometimes it’s helpful to express these things through Western language, to help Western peoples understand why we’re not going to send our kids to a private school or a public school or a charter school — why we have to make our own schools again. And you even have to explain that to Native people who have bought into the Western world, who have bought into the idea that Western academics are superior to our epistemologies and our pedagogies.
I have to
even talk to my own people through Western language sometimes to get them to
believe me. My grandfather was the president of the first tribal college. At
that time it was called Navajo Community College; now it’s called Diné College.
He was pretty much ousted because he was too Western. He wanted all the
students going through to be Americanized, because he had gone to the boarding
schools and he had bought into the lie that we are going to be better if we can
be more like white Americans. So there’s still a trace of that today, this idea
that the less Indian we can be, the better we will be.
So for that
reason it’s sometimes helpful to express this through Western language, to the
world and to each other. However, it will only ever get us so far. Western
academics is not the end of my journey — it’s a hobby, more than
anything.
So my PhD I
chose to do at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks because they have one of the
most cutting-edge indigenous studies doctoral programs in the country. When I
get my diploma it will say, “Doctor of Indigenous Studies.” Which is
nice, because they talk about re-centering our spiritual ways of knowing,
re-centering our spiritual ways of researching, re-centering the worldview that
our ancestors lived by, which was holistic, which was affective, or in other
words made room for emotions and love and respect. Which was purpose-driven;
there was always a goal to help the community within our research, within our
knowing. It wasn’t just to figure out the mechanics of nature, it was about
creating a life support system for the community, not just the human community
but all life.
A lot of my
professors are Alaska native elders, and they are brilliant people, and they
are very connected to the land because they’ve been colonized later than we
have, and just by necessity the isolation of their communities from the rest of
the “modern world’ requires them to be more sovereign in their living.
They hunt, they fish, they still know their stories, they still know their
dances — even though the government tried to stamp it out.
It’s a very
wonderful program and it allows you to study in your own community. So I don’t
have to live in Alaska to do the coursework; it’s delivered remotely. And even
though it’s delivered remotely, it’s very rigorous, and I can feel connected to
the professors and the other students; I get to hear their voices and see their
faces, and we are truly on a journey together. And the projects of other
students are equally mind-blowing — just beautiful things that the other
students are doing.
So that’s
why I chose the route that I chose. And I want to end this part by saying, my
PhD is truly just a side hobby. I never want it to get in front of me being
with the land, me learning my culture, me learning my language. It is merely a
vehicle through which I can do what I would be doing if I wasn’t getting a PhD.
Which is planting the seeds, generating the food systems, apprenticing with
elders and learning my own language. Not every university will let you do that
— but the University of Alaska does.
Looking forward, what would you say that a revitalized traditional food system would look like, and what would be your part in promoting that?
I think that it depends on your homeland. Every homeland has a unique set of foods that Creator placed there. In the Pacific Northwest, you have herring roe, seal oil, salmon, caribou perhaps, and other edible fruits and nuts and edible greens in the area. In my homeland, we live in the desert, and we also have a few mountains where we can hunt and gather berries and things like that — but we are very integrated into seeds, corn, beans, squash, amaranth — and just the things that sustain us.
Lyla June, Sovereign Sisters Gathering, Borderlands Ranch, Black Hills, South Dakota, June 2019 (Tracy L. Barnett photo)
Were sheep traditionally a part of the system there as well?
Yes — we have indigenous desert sheep, mountain sheep, and then the Spanish brought their sheep, and the churro sheep is when those two intermarried and created their own children. They created the four-horned sheep. So we have very special and unique meat sources.
If you live
in the East — maybe Kentucky — it would look like replanting the hickory,
chestnut, walnut, acorn forests, and those mosaics that depended a lot on
fruits and nuts. It looks like bringing the pawpaw back. It looks like bringing
— I think there’s 21 fruit trees that I read about in one study that people
would enjoy in the Eastern Appalachian forests.
Such as persimmons.
Persimmons — so many. So [what a revitalized food system looks like] depends on your biome. However, I do feel a responsibility to my own people — Diné — and I think that I could work most fluently there because I’m an “insider.” I’m allowed to lead there. If I go to other tribal homelands it’s my job to follow the lead of those tribal members. And I can do that; I love following, and a part of me also wants to lead; to be a leader amongst many leaders, where I’m allowed to really co-create projects with my people without feeling that I’m stepping on toes or overstepping my boundaries.
I guess for me it looks like bringing together community members to perform an experiment: how many years does it take for us to re-learn how to get our food locally? How many years does it take for us to become proficient in our language—and because my master’s degree is in education, I know what it’s like to generate our own schools. And I know how creative my people are and how brilliant they are and how much capacity we do have.
So as of now my plan is to go home, to Diné Bikéyah [in New Mexico], and to work with a cohort of people and just teach each other — bring the elders in, create a school. We have a seasonal school that we started for my master’s project and we can continue it, so that every season we’re getting teachings, we’re learning, we’re educating students in our way. And over time, through a curriculum that is improved and honed each cycle — which is the strategy of action research — with action research you perform an action, and then you evaluate how it went, and then you improve it and do the action again. And then you step back and see — how did we do? And you make tweaks and changes and amendments to the curriculum, and then you implement it a third time or a fourth time or a fifth time — however many times you need to in order to really hone in on the curriculum that works.
So this
form of action research is inherently grassroots because you involve the
community in the process of evaluation and re-creation. And so in this way we
can study and see, what is our proficiency? It’s basically a study in the
efficacy of a curriculum at the end of the day. Did this curriculum work? Why or
why not? And I’m hoping at the end of three years, four years, we will be
fluent in our language and in our food system. And we will be operating as a
team — which is what we did last time — and we will be able to have a success
story that other tribes can look to and model and be inspired by.
And so to me that’s what food sovereignty looks like. It looks like increasing the amount of food we get from the land around us from one percent — which is probably what it is now for some of us — to 80 percent. I think 80 percent is a good objective to shoot for. And fluency — we will know inside if we’re fluent or not. And we can self-evaluate in that regard.
Ultimately, [we will be] creating a school that is more… I want to say, formal and more legitimate, that our children can go to. That teaches them the whole spectrum — because they need to know the traditional ways and they need to know how to speak the colonizer’s language. They need to understand the colonizer’s world view — not so they can embody it, but so they can make peace with it, and challenge it in a way that’s constructive and yields real healing and change.
And so
that’s the end goal. Hopefully when I’m in my 50s or something I’ll be part of
a group that’s managing a whole school that doesn’t need federal funding,
doesn’t need state funding and doesn’t pander to Western curricular standards.
So that’s
the big vision. But right now, I’m just apprenticing with elders who know about
food. I’ll be spending a month with Rowen White who is a Mohawk seed saver;
I’ll be spending a month Loretta Afraid of Bear, who’s a Lakota ceremonial
foods expert. And I’ll be spending a month with an elder in Australia who gets
all of his food from the land around him, and a month with brothers and sisters
in Quebec who are hunters and are really connected to the Arctic food system —
just learning from different people, trying to gain an understanding of the
core principles that drive all sustainable food systems. And although they look
differently in different contexts, finding those core principles.
Some of the things you’re talking about remind me of an agroforestry project I visited recently in Mexico—Via Orgánica, it’s called, and the people there are regenerating a really degraded landscape. I was really impressed with the way that agriculture can actually be more than sustainable, it can be a regenerative and restorative process.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. My friend in Bella Bella, British Columbia — their anthropogenic kelp gardens — in other words, human-made kelp gardens — that sustain the herring roe, which sustains the wolves and the salmon and the killer whales and everything around them — she says she doesn’t like the word “sustainability.” She says, “We don’t just want to sustain ourselves; that’s a low bar. We call it “enhanceability.” We want to have the ability to enhance and leave the land better than how we found it. That’s actually a pillar and a core of everything I’m talking about.
It’s not as
hard as you might think. If you have the right action for a couple of seasons —
the Earth actually wants to be full of life. That’s it’s nature. We actually
have to work to get it to not do that. So if we just get behind her and breathe
life into what she’s already doing, it can change pretty fast. But we need the
tools and we need the skills and we need the knowledge and most of all the
wisdom that supports all of these things.
This story is part of an Esperanza Project series: Women of Standing Rock. Stay tuned for Part II of our visit with Lyla June: The Forest as Farm, Ancient Foodscapes as Cutting-Edge Regenerative Agriculture. A version of this story appeared in Civil Eats, a daily news source for critical thought about the American food system.
For Sicangu Lakota water protector Cheryl Angel, Standing Rock helped her define what she stands against: an economy rooted in extraction of resources and exploitation of people and planet. It wasn’t until she’d had some distance that the vision of what she stands for came into focus.
“Now I understand that sustainable sovereign economies are needed to replace the system we support with our purchasing power,” she said. “Our ancient teachings have all of those economies passed down in traditional families.”
Together with other front-line leaders from Standing Rock, including Lakota historian LaDonna Brave Bull Allard and Diné artist and activist Lyla June (formerly Lyla June Johnston), Angel began acting on this vision in June at Borderland Ranch in Pe’Sla, the grasslands at the heart of the Black Hills in South Dakota. Nearly 100 Indigenous water protectors and non-Indigenous allies met there for one week to take steps to establish a sovereign economy.
The first annual Sovereign Sisters Gathering brought together women and their allies to talk about how to oppose the current industrialized economy and establish a new model, one in which Indigenous women reclaim and reassert their sovereignty over themselves, their food systems, and their economies.
To see the entire Women of Standing Rock series, including interviews with Cheryl Angel and LaDonna Allard, click here.
“When did we as a people lose our self-empowerment? When did we wait for a government to tell us whether or not we could have health care? When did we wait for them to feed us?” Allard asked. “When did we wait for laws and policies to be created so that we could have a community? When did that happen?
Sovereign Sisters drove to Rapid City, South Dakota during the gathering to join a protest and court hearing of the Riot Booster Act, a bill introduced by Governor Kristi Noem aimed at criminalizing pipeline protestors.
“We’ve given our power over to an entity that doesn’t deserve our power,” she added, referencing the modern corporate industrial system. “We must take back that empowerment of self. We must take back our own health care. We must take back our own food. We must take back our families. We must take back our environment. Because you see what’s happening. We gave the power to an entity, and the entity is destroying our world around us.”
Allard, June, and Angel shared a bit about the work they’ve been doing to establish sovereignty, each in her own way, since the Standing Rock encampments.
LaDonna Brave Bull Allard: Planting seeds
As the woman who established the first water protector encampment at Standing Rock—called Sacred Stone Camp—and issued a call for support that launched a movement, Allard learned a lot about sovereignty and empowerment during the battle against the Dakota Access pipeline.
As the camps began to dismantle in the last weeks of the uprising, she frequently fielded the question: “What do we do now?”
Allard’s response was simple: “Plant seeds.”
Lakota Elder LaDonna Brave Bull Allard joined a van full of fellow Sacred Stone Village residents who made the five-hour drive from Standing Rock to join the Sovereign Sisters Gathering.
Planting seeds is what Allard has been doing since the Standing Rock encampment, as she’s worked with her neighbors and with those who stayed on at Sacred Stone Camp toward a vision of a sustainable community.
“Our first act is taking care of self. So no matter what we do, if we’re not taking care of self, we’ve already failed.”
“I tell people that our first act of sovereignty is planting food,” Allard said. “Our first act is taking care of self. So no matter what we do, if we’re not taking care of self, we’ve already failed.”
These days, self-care is more important than ever, she said, with the accelerating climate crisis, something that Native people are acutely aware of and have seen coming for a long time. “We’re not worrying—we’re preparing,” she said.
Sacred Stone Village has installed four microgrids of solar power and have two mobile solar trailers used to connect dwelling areas that can also be taken on the road for trainings, and the neighboring town of Cannon Ball has opened a whole solar farm. They’ve been planting fruit trees and growing gardens, fattening the chickens, stockpiling firewood. And in some ways, life on the reservation is already a preparation in itself.
“On the Standing Rock reservation, as you know, we are below poverty level, and many of the people live by trade and barter. A lot of people live in homes without electricity and running water. We burn wood to heat our homes,” Allard said. “What I find in the large cities is people who don’t know how to live. And their environment—if you took away the electricity and the oil, what would they do? We already know how to live without those things.”
Lyla June: The forest as farm
A Diné/Cheyenne/European American musician, scholar, and activist, June has gravitated toward a focus on food sovereignty through her work to revitalize traditional food systems. Currently, she’s in a doctoral program in traditional food systems and language at the University of Alaska, where she works with Indigenous elders around the country to uncover the genius of the continent’s original cultivators.
“I think there’s a huge mythology that Native people here were simpletons, they were primitive, half-naked nomads running around the forest, eating hand to mouth whatever they could find,” she said. “That’s how Europe portrays us. And it’s portrayed us that way for so many centuries that even we start to believe that that’s who we were.
“The reality is, Indigenous nations on this Turtle Island were highly organized. They densely populated the land, and they managed the land extensively. And this has a lot to do with food because a large motivation to prune the land, to burn the land, to reseed the land, and to sculpt the land was about feeding our nations. Not only our nations, but other animal nations, as well.”
Musician, public speaker, and scholar Lyla June on recovering traditional food systems: “What we’re finding… is that human beings are meant to be a keystone species… what [we’re] trying to do is bring the human being back into the role of keystone species, where our presence on the land nourishes the land.”
June is intrigued by soil core samples that delve thousands of years into the past; analysis of fossilized pollen, charcoal traces, and soil composition reveals much about land use practices through the ages. For example, in Kentucky, a soil core sample that went back 10,000 years shows that about 3,000 years ago the forest was dominated by cedar and hemlock. But about 3,000 years ago the whole forest composition changed to black walnut, hickory nut, chestnut, and acorn; edible species such as goosefoot and sumpweed began to flourish.
“So these people—whoever moved in around 3,000 years ago—radically changed the way the land looked and tasted,” she said.
The costs to the food system as a result of colonization is becoming clear.
So did the colonizers, but in a much different way. The costs to the food system as a result of colonization, she said, is becoming clear, and the mounting pressure of the climate crisis is making a shift imperative.
“When did we start waiting for others to feed us? That’s no longer going to be a luxury question,” June said.
Besides the vulnerability of monocrops to extreme weather events, these industrial agricultural crops are also dependent on pesticides and herbicides. Additionally, pests are adapting, producing chemical resistant insects and superweeds.
“We’re running out of bullets in our food system, and it’s quite precarious right now,” she said. “The poor animals that we farm are also on the precipice … so we’re in a state where we should probably start asking ourselves that question now, before we’re forced to, and remember the joy of feeding ourselves.”
That’s June’s intention: to take what she’s learned from a year of apprenticeships with Indigenous elders in different bioregions, then return home to Diné Bikéyah—Navajo territory—to apply it, regenerating traditional Navajo food systems in an interactive action research project aimed at both teaching and learning, refining techniques with each year.
“I’m hoping at the end of three years, or four years, we will be fluent in our language and in our food system,” June said. “And we will be operating as a team—and we will have a success story that other tribes can look to and model and be inspired by.”
The long-range goal, she said, is to create an autonomous school that teaches traditional culture, language, and food systems that can be a model for other Indigenous communities.
Cheryl Angel: Creating sovereign communities
To Angel, sovereignty is best expressed in creating community—the temporary communities created at gatherings, like at the Sovereign Sisters Gathering, but also more permanent communities, like at Sacred Stone Village.
Part of being sovereign lies in strengthening and rebuilding sharing economies, she said. And part of it lies in reducing waste, rejecting rampant consumerism and the harmful aspects of the modern industrial system, like single-use plastics and toxic chemicals.
Cheryl Angel in a late-night talking circle, sharing reflections about her Lakota ancestors: “We were never into entitlement; that’s why we didn’t have kings. We were into revering, honoring, relating to everything around us. All of these living spirits around us… That’s the system nobody is talking about, that needs to be protected.”
“I saw it all happen at Standing Rock; everybody came with all of their skills, and they brought [their] economies—and they were medicating people, they were healing people, they were feeding people, cooking for people, training people, making people laugh—they were doing everything. Everything we needed, it came to Standing Rock.”
Despite the money the pipeline company spent to repress the uprising, she said, water protectors around the world stepped up and pitched in to create an alternate economy at Standing Rock, and millions were raised to support the resistance.
“We could do that again. We can gift our economies between each other. We’re doing it right here,” Angel told the women assembled in the Black Hills—women who were gardeners and builders, craftswomen and cooks, healers and lawyers, filmmakers and writers—and, above all, water protectors. “These few days we’ve been here prove to me and should prove to you that we have the skills to create communities without violence, without drugs, without alcohol, without patriarchy—just with the intent to live in peace.”
Tracy L. Barnett wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Tracy is a freelance writer based in Mexico and the founder of The Esperanza Project. Interviews with Cheryl, LaDonna and Lyla June are featured in the magazine’s Women of Standing Rock series.
In the harrowing days of the Standing Rock resistance to the Black Snake, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard — Tamakawastewin, or Good Earth Woman — became an icon, though she’s quick to step away from such titles with her self-deprecating humor. The Lakota historian’s fight to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline from plowing past her son’s and her husband’s grave and under the Missouri River became the rallying point for a movement. And while the pipeline eventually prevailed, the seeds planted there have been quietly sprouting and growing at Sacred Stone — the resistance encampment that she founded, and the community that has sprung up in the wake of the encampments — and in water protector movements around the world.
Things are much quieter these days on the Standing Rock Reservation, but LaDonna continues to make her voice heard, from Mauna Loa to Portugal, as she speaks out for a way of life that honors the Earth. We were honored to catch up with her in Pe’Sla, at the heart of the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota, during the recent Sovereign Sisters Gathering. In Part I, the reflections she shared with the group provide plentiful food for thought. Coming soon, Part II, an interview with LaDonna on Sacred Stone Village, climate change and more.
LaDonna Allard at Black Elk Peak, Sovereign Sisters Gathering, June 2019 (Tracy L. Barnett)
My name is Tamakawastewin. I’m so honored to be able to be here at the Heart of the Nation, the Heart of the World. Each indigenous people takes care of a part of the Earth and that is our responsibility. Those are the original teachings. So here we are, at the center of the world – Pe’ Sla.
I think all of our history – good and bad, and whatever we learned – things happened the way they’re supposed to happen. There are lessons for us to learn. And for Pe’ Sla, we had to learn how precious this was, it had to be taken from us so that we could have it back again. And it was a process. So this land here is precious. I want to start out by saying that. Because this land, Pe’ Sla,can heal. And I don’t care who you are or where you come from, we all need to heal. Every day, everything that’s happening around us, we need to heal. And so this is a place of healing. People came here for thousands of years for that healing. Now we are so honored to be able to be here.
I find that as a great joy. It’s like when you pull up in a
car and you have to put your hands out because – Oh, my God! We’re here, at the
Center of the World. It is precious.
With that, I want to make sure you guys understand. I don’t
know nothing, I don’t do anything, the only gift I have is I come from a long
line of big-mouthed women and I have a big mouth. That’s it. (laughter)
Every day it’s the young people who teach me. They say, “Oh! Standing Rock!” I didn’t do anything at Standing Rock. I picked up garbage – yes. But it was the young people who showed me, who taught me, who were the strength – and I don’t want anybody to ever forget that. It was the young people who taught me Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Live Feeds – it’s the young people who taught how to spread the word. It’s the young people who taught us how to stand again. It was the young people who brought that empowerment to the people.
If you were there at the beginning of the camp and you saw
these young people sit down and strategize and talk, and now you see all these
young people who are standing up everywhere – it is them that we should be
acknowledging. It is these voices that these young people have.
And so I try to listen because they’re there to teach me
lessons. So I want to say that right up front because they’re just
such amazing young people.
A powerful compilation by Jaguar Bird including LaDonna’s heartbreaking history of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.
I don’t know anything but I do know how I grew up.
I grew up with my grandmother living on the Cannonball
River. We grew up hauling water from the river, we lived off the land. And I
know that’s a good way to live.
I tell people that our first act of sovereignty is food. Our first act is taking care of self. So no matter what we do, if we’re not taking care of self, we’ve already failed.
And so – ask the guys at home, they’ve been planting
everywhere, putting food everywhere – because we must feed ourselves.
When did we as a people lose that self-empowerment? When did that happen? When did we wait for a government to tell us whether or not we could have health care? When did we wait for them to feed us, to go to a grocery store? When did that happen?
When did we wait for laws and policies to be created so that
we could have a community? When did that happen?
All of a sudden, we’ve given our power over to an entity
that doesn’t deserve our power. We must take back that empowerment of self. We
must take back our own health care. We must take back our own food. We must
take back our families. We must take back our environment. Because you see
what’s happening. We gave the power to an entity, and the entity is destroying
our world around us.
I tell people that when you want to talk about finding
balance – we already knew that. We put
our hands and our feet on the Earth and it heals us. We already knew that.
We know when we’re planting or gathering on the Earth, it
heals us. That is why we didn’t have depression or all of these other things
that people have – because it was always here. And then all of a sudden they
took us away from there, and then all of a sudden we started having all these
issues. And I tell people, we need to go back to here (touches the Earth). We need to go back to the respect for the
Earth – because it is the first Mother. It is the first one that came to give
us life.
I don’t understand why we don’t respect that anymore.
Why do you want to cut down a tree when you know the tree makes oxygen? Oxygen helps us breathe. Why would you do that? Why would you destroy the water when you know we are made of water, and we need water to live? Why would you do that? So I have a hard time with a lot of things that I’m seeing going on right now on the Earth, because logic is: We care for the water, we care for the Earth, we care for our animals, we care for the insects, we care for all the things around us, and then everything stays in balance, and then we are in balance.
Chery Angel and LaDonna Allard at the center of a group of women from the Sovereign Sisters Gathering on pilgrimage to Black Elk Peak.
Somewhere along the line, we lost self-empowerment.
Somewhere we gave our power away. And I just ask people, go
to the Earth and grab it, pull it up. Empower self. Because when you empower
self, you have compassion for fellow man, you can have compassion for each
other.
Our first act of community is eating together. Feeding
people. I don’t have any other obligation in my life; I’m old now. My
obligation is to feed people. At camp, that’s all I did. Make sure everybody
had food – because that’s what I know how to do. It is a healing mechanism to
eat together. Somewhere we fell apart in our communities so people have these
little houses and they all eat by themselves and they’re all lonely — and it’s
creepy. When we should all be eating together, we should all be sharing, we
should all be having fellowship.
When I was a child, living in a community, everybody went
visiting. Grandma would say, ok, we’re going to go visit. But we didn’t visit
for one, two hours; we’d spend maybe two or three days. So we’d get all ready
and we’d go. And Grandma would make us all go to the wash basin and she’d say,
“Eat some bread! Because when you go to the house, the people will give you the
best that they have – and they don’t have much. So don’t be a pig.” That’s how
Grandma used to talk to us. (laughter.)
And she’d say, “And clean your dishes, and sweep their
floor, and get them wood, and when the adults are talking, don’t you kids be
standing around the table.”
So we’d get these lectures, and then we’d head out.
And all us kids would play, and then we’d head home, and then
Grandma would say – you know, we were talking. And so-and-so said, you know
that woman with all those children? They don’t have any food. So we’re going to
bake bread, and we’re going to take bread to them.
And did you hear so-and-so is fighting with his wife? And
all the grandmas load up, and they make the husband and wife sit down, and they
lecture them.
So-and-so’s son is misbehaving. So they go over there… A
long time ago, when we talked, it was about, how do we heal a community? How do
we help each other? How do we feed each other, how do we care for each other?
When our society turned upside down – which is the way it is
now – now when we speak, we speak from pain, to hurt, to cause dysfunction. It
is because in our homes, bad things are happening, so we don’t want anyone to
know. So now we’ve got to take that and
put it back up the way it was – to actually care about each other.
Which is really hard when you’re in the city.
I had the misfortune of having to stay in New York for three weeks (laughter). And me and Moisés – we were just kind of out of place there. Because Moises – he’s from the Sierra Nevada of Colombia, way up in the mountains – he’s Kogi. So me and him, we couldn’t talk to each other, but we’d be going around and he’d say – these people live hard in the city. And I said, Yeah, look!
We leave the place where we’re staying, we get on the bus, and the bus would take us to a train, and then we’d take the train and they would take us down to – I said hell. And we go down the stairs, all the way down, and there’s a subway down there, and we get on the subway. And then these guys get on there and we’re all squished like this, and then when we get out, then we have to climb all the way back up. And then you’re in the middle of a great big city, and there’s no trees and no birds singing, and it’s just kinda creepy. And people walk like this and they don’t look at you and they don’t smile. And Moisés said – these people live strange. And I said, Yeah, they do. They’ve got no Earth to touch.
So we had a lot of fun – even though we couldn’t talk to each other, our translator was looking at us – because it was really hard for us to not have that connection. So you go in this city and they have all these sidewalks, and they have these little squares with dirt and trees in them. So he took off his shoes and he put his foot in the dirt and I said don’t do that, Moisés! That’s where all the animals do their… (laughter) Strange stuff in cities!
My point is, in the cities, people are really lost right now. They have forgotten their connection to this (touches the Earth). They have forgotten what it is to respect water. People go and they turn on a tap – they never think about it. It never crosses their mind. And for us right now, we are entering the season – this is the season in our country where our people make the commitment to go without food and water for four days. And I tell people, when you do that every year, and you make that commitment, by the third day, all you can do is dream about water. How precious that water is; the taste of that water. You can smell that water. It becomes an obsession – because without water, your body starts dying on that third day. To be able to taste the first taste of that water – it’s so refreshing. Do not forget. So every time you see that water – Mni Wiconi – you say a prayer. You give thanks for that water.
And I think that’s one of those things we’re missing.
Respect. Respect for the Mother Earth, respect for the water. If you can
respect these two, then you can respect the birds; the songs they sing. The
insects – even the mosquitos that bite you – all of the things have a purpose
in this world. And I think we are lost in cities, and it was very frightening
to see people so disconnected. And so we are privileged – and I never thought
of that before, because in Indian Country we’re poor; you never know what’s going
to happen there. But we have this (touches the Earth). We have this connection.
We have this love of this Earth.
LaDonna Allard, left, with the author (center) and Sacred Stone Village resident Josh Diaz at Bear Butte, one of four sacred sites in the Black Hills where the women traveled to pray during the Sovereign Sisters Gathering.
I was talking to some environmental groups and they said,
how did you guys gather all of those people to do this? We’ve been doing
environmental stuff for 40 years.
And I said bad things to them. I said, You don’t love the
Earth. You love a cause. We are not a cause. This is life. It is not a cause;
it is not something we put over here and go home and watch TV every night. It
is our lives, every day. Every day we have to pray. Every day we have to sing.
Every day we have to have this connection. When you have those, you have healing
and self. When you have healing and self, then you become a whole person. Then
you can do anything. Save the world.
They always said, ‘What do you want to do, LaDonna?’ Save
the world. One toenail at a time. (laughter) Because that’s all I’ve got.
I really, really, truly believe in self-empowerment. I don’t
think with all the people here —there’s just very few I don’t know, but every
one of you has taught me a lesson. Every one of you continue to teach me – and
I think that’s how it’s supposed to be as human beings. Every day we have to
learn. There’s nobody that’s “an expert”. There’s nobody that “knows.” Every
day we have to learn. Our spiritual leaders tell us that. They’ve only just
begun; they’re just now learning, because every day there’s something new.
Once we think we know something – they’ll slap us back down
to the ground, to crawl around in the mud. Because it means that we lost that
lesson.
I don’t really know much. I just know how I was raised.
One time someone brought a group of kids out to Sacred Stone. So we get out there and there’s big eagles flying away. And we see where he’s sitting on the red van. So he’s sitting there and the kids are all there and I’m only there to talk about the environment and the plants – and two more eagles came through. And finally their teacher came and said – I don’t want any of you to talk. Close your eyes and listen, and tell me what the birds are saying. Tell me how many birds you’re hearing.
And these are all teenagers, and they’re like – wow.
That is your first connection. Listen – because each of
these have a story to tell us.
There was a time in my life when I thought that human beings were the parasites of the world; that we caused the destruction. I was just like – well, if we can eliminate at least 3 or 4 billion – my world would be better.
I don’t think like that anymore. Why? Because I can’t. I
watched all of these people come into my back yard. I watched this camp grow; I
watched people live there – and then they all left.
And so we went down to clean up anything – I even had the
micro-pickers to clean up the butts and such. There wasn’t that much to clean
up. And then we went down a couple of months later and we were like – what’s
happening here? Because before that point, there were a lot of noxious weeds –
it was a bad environment. They had grazing and cattle in there before. And the
land replenished itself.
There were more medicines and flowers growing on that land
than ever before. And there was squash and all kinds of stuff growing out of
there. We took two truckloads and gave it to the community.
And I thought – “Oh, my God. They’ve made this land better
than it ever was.” So people have a purpose here. We’ve just got to remember
what that purpose is. So that everywhere we go, we can live. But when we leave,
the land has to replenish itself. That’s
what I’ve seen at camp.
You could go down to Sacred Stone right now – because we’re going to go down and get chaka tea – there are so many medicines that haven’t grown there in such a long time. The whole land is just amazing.
And so I have changed my thought on that. I truly believe
that human beings have a purpose here. We just have to empower ourselves with
that purpose. We can no longer sit back and wait for somebody to do the work
for us. We can no longer sit back and say – Oh, I wonder if the food truck is
coming into the grocery store today.
No. We must do our own food. By doing our own food, it’s
better for you, it’s healthy, it’s better for you. Because right now, the
government is feeding you creepy stuff.
We have the ability to heal ourselves. We have the ability
to empower ourselves. We are entering into a new age – and it’s the age of
women. And so listen to the women.
Lakota Spiritual Activist Cheryl Angel believes in listening to her dreams – the ones that come to her at night as she sleeps, and the ones that arrive as messengers from the road as she travels the globe. She has been traveling extensively over the past two years, connecting with indigenous and non-indigenous women and people living in sustainable communities. Mexico in particular has been a rich source of inspiration as she has explored the best ways to take the Water Protector work to the next level.
Those travels – and a sacred staff she was entrusted with – are what inspired the June 10-15Sovereign Sisters Gatheringthat Cheryl is organizing this year in the sacred and besieged Black Hills of South Dakota.Here, Cheryl shares the story about the dream-led Sovereign Sisters Gathering, and how it came to be.
Tracy: What is the Sovereign Sisters Gathering, and how did it come about? When you say it is dream led, can you tell me more about that?
Cheryl: The Sovereign Sisters Gathering initially came from my deep gratitude for the women who were essentially the backbone of the occupation at Standing Rock. I wanted to gather them all and say thank you for your support, your knowledge, your bravery, your perseverance, your kindness, your generosity, your sharing of everything to make the occupation at Standing Rock into a community of water protectors.
I wanted to create a circle of healing for their traumas to be healed. I felt I needed to offer a Wopila in the Black Hills for the women who had supported me during my involvement during the occupation at Standing Rock. So a year ago I invited women who were vital to the occupation at Standing Rock and we offered prayers at Sacred Sites. I made a prayerful pledge at each site that I would bring more prayers to awaken the spirits leaving footprints on the lands and also to bring more water protectors to defend the “Sacred Black Hills — HeSapa — the heart of everything that is” from further exploitation and destruction.
Water Protector, artist and Indigenous leader Lyla June Johnston on the Sovereign Sisters Gathering(Click here to view).
Fast forward to September 14th of 2018 at theAniwa Gathering in New York, where I stood alongside a delegation of Indigenous leaders from several foreign countries to unite in a global prayer for the people at the World Trade Center. Later that day I reunited with a woman whom I first met at the Ríos Vivos (Living Rivers) Festival to save the river Atoyac in Puebla, Mexico. She handed me this box and said, inside the box is the woman’s staff, the Staff of Light from Peru. Accepting that box and learning about the responsibilities of the staff changed my life and gave me a vision that I have carried with me to this day.
I flew back to South Dakota with it and drove all the way from South Dakota to California, and I was alone with that staff in the car at several points. Every time I was alone with it, I felt this overwhelming need to pray. I felt that I was in ceremony, so I kept praying, and praying, and then I realized that it was only happening when I was alone with the Staff of Light.
Then I started having these dreams of women working with water and working with the elements, dreams of them living a sustainable life in a community free of violence, free of hate and illness – and I don’t even know what day it was when I woke up and said – “Wow, these are the economies that we have been missing!”
These past few years I’ve talked about how devastating extraction economies are to the environment and how the system needs to be stopped and replaced – but I never thought much about what we are going to replace it with. But actually, subconsciously, I was searching — because when I had the staff, all of a sudden I had these dreams and these thoughts.
Now I understand that sustainable sovereign economies are needed to replace the system we support with our purchasing power. Our ancient teachings have all of those economies passed down in traditional families. I found myself in small hidden communities where groups participating in ceremonies were there to learn, internally and quietly saying, “Teach us; guide us; show us the way.”
This planet has been sustaining every soul since our first breath of life, Woniya Wakan. However, it has always been the ancestral teachings and lifeways of Indigenous cultures that recognize and abide by the natural law of the land. It’s not the government, it’s not the state, it’s not the county – it’s the land that sustains us. The Sacred Earth Mother is alive! But today the majority of the people are not treating her like she’s alive, we’re not treating her like a family member. Yet despite our indifference, she is trying hard to continue to live, to continue to sustain all life. It’s very evident we need to change our behavior toward her, and choose a better economy to sustain ourselves, an economy that doesn’t destroy the planet, one that recognizes the natural laws of the land.
So just before I had gotten this staff I was determined to have a women’s gathering because I wanted hear women’s stories. I wanted to let those stories fill me with information and guidance. I’ve been listening to the elders for a long time, and I’ve been traveling everywhere in Mexico, India and Nepal, listening to elders in sacred places. I’m not the one with the answers, Creator has the answers. And people have stories that need to be listened to, and women have the stories that paint a picture of reality. Our realities as women are shared, so the effort to created a better reality comes from our own stories. Those are the stories that need to be brought to the Black Hills of South Dakota, to the HEART of everything that is.
When I was given the staff I immediately put it in the ground and made an altar for it. I told people about it, and I said that if they needed prayers, then they should go there. And I fed it water and fruit. Later I learned that it was called the Staff of Light and it was created in Qorikancha, Peru, by the circle of wise grandfathers and grandmothers of the planet. They saw the destruction on the Earth and they prayed. They asked what could be done to save the planet and get the people back on track, to live out their lives in peace and with dignity.
And they created two staffs, in duality, to establish the balance, a feminine staff and a masculine staff. They sent these two staffs along with a sacred cane on a journey together, moving from nation to nation to remind people that we have to live in harmony with all life on the planet, and to acknowledge each nation has teachings that are not only sustainable but are also about living naturally on the land — and they are recognizing that all nations have different cultures, different ceremonies and different sacred sites.
Soon after I received the Staff of Light, I was contacted by a group of women in Mexico –and they said, that staff has been missing, please bring it back – so I did. I flew here with the staff, and met all of the elders – they are grandfathers and grandmothers of the planet who meet and have ceremonies on the eclipses –they appointed me and another grandmother from Mexico to be the official carriers of the staff, a job that usually lasts a year. I told the grandmother that she should hold it the first six months and I would hold it for the second six months.
I was with this staff for maybe a month before I went to Mexico – and during that time I had the staff I felt completely different. My mind was always about the prayers of the people. Then I realized, this staff had gone to 12 countries before it came to me. And they had ceremony, and all the people came to pray with this staff. I thought, Oh my goodness – I’m feeling all of the prayers that people put into this staff.
All the prayers are for unity. The prayers are to stop all of the hardships that people are experiencing. They are for the hope for the future, for the betterment of the human race, for our planet, for our condition, for our lives. So the Staff of Light put me on this path where I began to think of the entire planet, and the need for unity and for us to treat the Sacred Earth Mother as a living being.
I realized that the Earth is totally, 100 percent alive, and has rights to life. The rivers are 100 percent alive, and have rights to life. But I was raised in such a way that individuals have rights and only individuals can own things – but in a legal sense, I never thought about the rights of the Sacred Earth Mother until I held that staff. And I thought – this planet has rights to life; she is the Source of Life. It’s as if we’re on a huge organic spaceship hurtling through space, spinning around the sun – She is amazing, this organic living vehicle, this life force – and she is a life force.
I had a dream when I first arrived at Standing Rock: I had my arms and my legs wrapped around the Earth, and I was hugging the whole planet. I was hanging on so tight – you know how you’re going around a Ferris wheel and you have to hold on or otherwise the centrifugal force will throw you off? So, I was hanging on for dear life, and I could feel the heartbeat of the planet. I could feel the heartbeat, the powerful bursts of energy and then relaxation. You know how the blood flows, it pumps out through your veins, and then it relaxes. That’s what I was feeling – I could literally feel the heartbeat of the planet.
And I’m thinking, this is alive. The planet is alive. Then I started falling asleep while I was holding onto the planet, like you would hold a child and protect it. After that I understand way more than I’ve ever understood — even though I thought I had a pretty good grasp on reality.
Life now, it’s all an illusion – all of these rules, all of these governments, all these genocidal policies that force people into wars, that force people to move from one space to another space. All these systems we hold up are an illusion, and the reality is that the Sacred Earth Mother is alive and she has a heart that beats. She has a power and we are the foolish ones who think we are in charge and that we have the power. In order for us to continue living on this paradise, we have to protect it. So we’ve got to stop being trash makers. We consume only about a tenth of what we create, and then we trash the rest. If aliens were looking at us or anyone was judging us from the outside, they’d say, “That’s a planet where they make trash, and kill each other instead of living in peace.” I want everyone to know… PEACE is a choice.
The way we have behave in America is very wasteful and it’s devastating to the landscape. So how can we get people back on track again? We can’t go on like this. Our soil is being destroyed for monocrops; the rivers are being killed by the tailings from mining operations. These things are happening everywhere. Lands are still being taken away, legally stolen from indigenous people since capitalism started. Since colonization started, people have been losing their lands and their rights to their lands.
So the Circle of the Wise Grandfathers and Grandmothers created two staffs, the masculine and the feminine, as a pair, signifying the duality of nature, including mankind. In Spanish it is referred to as a Bastón. These staffs travel from country to country and became a part of the protocol for the meetings held from country to country. They are to be carried and uplifted in ceremony in the land of the indigenous people. All those things, the language, the culture, the ceremony, must live in balance within natural law, and all of those things need to be taught and remembered, so that people wouldn’t be dependent on capitalism and the system. People can use those skills to save their communities and stop the violence against women and the violence against children, and to keep the bad influences from harming their communities, like alcohol and drugs. The Animal Nation and the Plant Nation need to be taken into consideration in the ways people are using the land, because more than humans are living there — so we need to be mindful of our relations.
So that’s what they were thinking about when they created these two staffs. And the Staff of Light is making its way north now. It is coming to me in June, so I have to create a place for this staff to be, where people are working and living off the land and the water in a traditional manner.
Last December I was invited back down to Mexico for a ceremony, a Kiva ceremony, where we light the fire and the traditional languages are spoken. The foods are all traditional, the dress is traditional – there were 20 different countries represented, and it was amazing. I saw all these beautiful regalia and languages centered around prayer for the protection of the planet and her people.
Traditional peoples from 20 different countries participated in the Raices de la Tierra Kiva Ceremony in Jalisco, Mexico. (Photo: Anna Katarina Jones)
So I wanted to create a venue in the Black Hills for people to tell their stories, especially women. And as I was traveling I learned and I saw with my own two eyes that they have sustainable economies. They have sovereign economies that were handed down from generation to generation about how to live in harmony with the Sacred Earth Mother, each one in the environment they were raised in. I knew that was part of the answer.
I want to show all the women in America – from the northern tip to the southern tip – that sustainable economies are available to us, and that we need to support a network amongst us, so that we can live. We can create these economies around us.
Tracy: What do you mean when you say “sovereign economies”?
Cheryl: A sovereign economy is one where you base your work and your lifestyles according to your existence in harmony with the environment around you. Retaining your culture, your traditions, your language – that’s what I was shown. That’s my interpretation of what I was seeing.
And so when I look at Walmart now – seriously – and seeing how other people live, so simply and so purely, without chemicals – I go to Walmart or even Walgreens now, and all I see is rows and rows of harmful products that we’ve accepted and allowed to be brought into our lives because we’re blinded. We don’t understand the substances in these products are causing our own illnesses and our own imbalance. So I try not to go into any of those stores at all.
So if I have a dollar I’m going to spend it on something that’s handmade – and support that community that has a sovereign economy.
But this didn’t coalesce until that staff was put into my hands. And then everything I’ve ever thought about started to connect to everything else. And then going to the sacred sites and the communities in Mexico – and hearing the stories of the people and of the history.
Sovereign economies meet basic needs while allowing people to focus on relationships with each other and the Earth. (Photo: Anna Katarina Jones)
Tracy: What are your hopes and goals for the gathering in the Black Hills?
Cheryl: It is time for the gathering of sovereign economies and celebration of people who have traditional skills living in balance and harmony with the Sacred Earth Mother, her waters, her life-giving plants and animals. And most importantly, uniting the people to stop the destruction of the planet by embracing the teachings that are tied directly to the Earth, the family and the sustainability of sovereign economies handed down within families.
I want to bring women to the Black Hills, not only for their stories of sovereign economies, but also for their prayers at our sacred sites. I’ve been to sacred sites all over Mexico, and I want to bring these prayers and tobacco offerings to our sacred sites so we can put gifts up there. They might be temporary and they might blow away, but that’s how it’s supposed to be.
I’m not here to build a church. I believe in temporary altars because we’re a temporary people who have sustained ourselves with our ceremonies and our language – and we’re still here.
But the blessings that we have — those are the things we put on our altar, that we want to protect. The seeds, the plants, the food, the good vibrations.
This gathering in the Black Hills is to empower women. I have learned that whatever is happening – a potluck or a picnic or a movement – women bring their children and their families.
Men will always be needed; they carry the seeds – and have a vital role. But the issue today is that they are part of the patriarchy. They’ve been uplifted by the church; they’ve been uplifted by the state; and they’re hanging onto that, because that’s what been offered up, but it can turn into a crutch or a cane. We are in a place that we couldn’t get out of without them sticking their hands in and lifting us up and pulling us out – and the churches did that, the state did that.
It works for the men — but it doesn’t work for women. If it worked for the entire community, there wouldn’t be any rapes, there wouldn’t be any murders, there wouldn’t be any child abuse, there wouldn’t be anybody starving in the communities. I know a lot of people go hungry. But when you have a sovereign economy – you’re not a grasshopper; you don’t eat every blade of grass you see. You have a sustainable economy that you can pass on to your daughter, you can pass on to your family.
The men have always surrounded the women; they are our protectors. We can’t live without men, and they can’t live without women. I guess as individuals maybe some can – but as a community, we cannot.
So yes, there will be men there – but I’m not inviting them personally, not right now, because it’s a women’s gathering. However, if a man shows up and says, “I want to work with a men’s group on how to protect the sacred,” I’d invite him to every gathering because that message is most powerful when it comes from a man. I already know that families are coming that naturally have a masculine presence. So yes, men will be at the gathering.
I want the women to empower each other, I want them to support one another, and I want them to experience what empowerment really is, because it’s really about uplifting one another. Women are a part of so many institutions that don’t lift us up and don’t hear our voices, and we’ve had to almost isolate ourselves and insulate ourselves from these institutions, insulate them from hurting us, because they don’t listen to us.
I believe men’s circles are needed just as much as the women’ circles are. I believe that men need to start talking about self-discipline. I believe men need to discipline other men who are abusing the Earth and abusing women. Because this is what I’ve learned and this is what I’ve seen with my own two eyes.
When you have a sovereign economy that a family practices in the home – it’s the woman in the home that’s doing it. What I’ve seen is that as the woman is becoming empowered, she is empowered to have an equal relationship with the man, and they have a partnership where both are in balance, and both see the strengths that they each have in the home.
In America it’s really off balance because the men are in charge, and if there’s domestic violence going on, it’s hidden. If there’s incest going on, it’s hidden. All these things that aren’t natural to us are going on in the home. The way our families are set up to be male dominated, that’s part of the reason why women have no voice. I want women to be empowered to create a sovereign economy. I want that balance to be restored in the family.
Driving along the Needles Highway in the Sacred Black Hills of South Dakota. (Photo: By Runner1928 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0)
Tracy: What should people expect if they come to this event?
What I want is for the women to get together and figure out how they’re going to keep their place safe and keep everyone in balance – I want to see them use consensus. I want them to say – “OK, we’re all sitting around the table now. How are we going to have this community up for a week? How are we going to set up the place? What’s the best place to put the composting toilets up? If needed. Where’s the best place to feed people? Where’s the best place for ceremony to be happening? Where are we going to park all the cars?”
I don’t want to create spaces and then say, “OK, here, here, here, here’s all your places.” The land is pretty large and the practice of using common sense and consensus will be adhered to in order to teach the value of each and every person’s voice and place.
I want the women to volunteer to prepare the meals and take care of elders, and keep busy till everything is finished. We’re great at that!
One of the things that amazes me in Mexico is their food sovereignty – they protect their backyards and they grow the most incredible foods. They’re all superfoods, in my opinion, because they’re not full of chemicals and pesticides. So the menu’s going to come from these sovereign homes, these sovereign economies – from the women who bring recipes passed down. So it’s about sovereign food. It’s about empowering women. It’s about protecting the seeds from your grandma’s garden.
Tracy: You mentioned that training for non-native allies will be mandatory for all campers, sponsors, and volunteers. What would you like for non-native people to know about in terms of that dynamic that has come up in past organizing efforts?
Cheryl: We have enough cheerleaders – and it’s good to start out as a cheerleader. That’s good to hear, but I need allies to say, “Cheryl, I know that you have this project, and I am going to stand beside you because I see the importance and the relevance of it, and I know that information needs to be shared across the board – so I’m going to stand beside you and I’m going to do what I can to support you – other than just words. We have enough words; we need action.
So the things that do the most harm in the community are INACTION against racism, bigotry and the lack of good people standing up to stop bad behaviors, right there in their community. If I can say, “Hey Tracy, good job, I’m working with you and I support your project,” then I can also be saying, “Tracy, what you said is racist. You need to stop saying racist things here, change your behavior, because this community doesn’t support racism.” Words chosen to that effect that won’t escalate the situation.
Tracy: Indeed! We all need to practice speaking the truth to those around us. Is there anything else that I haven’t asked? Closing thoughts and reflections?
Cheryl: I want to empower the women so they can go back into their communities and feel safe and be confident that they are not alone, and that they have tremendous value and responsibility in their own homes, to offer sustenance to their families; and their men, in the form of traditional teachings. Women raise children, and we want to raise them to be sovereign and work in balance with Mother Nature. We cannot raise them to sit and be idle. Our children must be safe inside the home learning the skills from the parents on how to be self-sufficient by the time they are in their late teens.
Ultimately I want a school based on sovereign economies where the children will be taught the skills to create and express using their hands, their brains and their hearts. So this is just the first step. It’s more than just a women’s gathering. It’s the creation of a safe community where everything that tribal people have can be protected and practiced. I want a school that’s not tied to the government. I want a free autonomous school where all these teachings can be taught.
All these practices need to be alive, in practice – the language, the culture, the traditions. And our children need to see it. So this weeklong gathering of women is just so that everyone can learn from each other on how to set up a safe community based on a sovereign economy – a balanced community, each with safe spaces, to work from.
It’s a dream-led project, and I’m dreaming of a community for women and their families to live in harmony with each other, their partners, their neighbors, and their environment. What matters is living in balance, with peace as a goal. It’s vital to our communities that they have a sustainable economy; they’re talking their language, they’re practicing their culture.
People told me a long time ago, nobody wants to go back and live in the olden days. People are not going to give up their jobs, they’re not going to go backwards – people think we lived in caves and that it was a forced hardship to live. Going back to the ways of our ancestors doesn’t mean living in hardship. I just want to have an option for people who do want to live with sovereign economies in their homes, who want to live with their language and culture, who don’t want to be tied to the system. People shouldn’t have to send their kids to a school that teaches them to support a system responsible for creating trash, displacing people, stealing water, and destroying the habitats the animals live upon. I know there are people who want to live in peace with the Earth.
So that’s what the end game is for people who live in harmony with the Sacred Earth Mother in a sovereign economy and a healthy family and a community that makes decisions based on consensus and what’s good for all of the people, not necessarily for the bank account.
Tracy: How can people support this initiative?
Cheryl: Here is our GoFundMe link. We are raising money to cover travel expenses for elders and activists of limited means. If you can’t come, you can still support the event by pledging an amount to help us cover costs.
Cheryl Angel is a a Sicangu Lakota Spiritual Activist and Water Protector. She is a former spokesperson and occupant of Sacred Stone Camp at Standing Rock.
The third anniversary of the Water Protectors movement at Standing Rock passed by quietly earlier this month. With the pipeline construction industry booming across the U.S. and Canada, Donald Trump seeking to bulldoze the cancelled Keystone XL Pipeline through more than 800 miles of unceded Lakota treaty territory, and at least nine state governments working to criminalize protest movements like Standing Rock, it seems that there is little to celebrate. We caught up with Lakota Spiritual Activist Cheryl Angel, an occupant and prior spokesperson of Sacred Stone Camp, to get her perspectives on the movement and what has followed, and to learn more about her upcoming women’s gathering in the sacred and besieged Black Hills of South Dakota.
This is the first in a series of collaborations with Grandmother Cheryl, whose travels and insights provide a refreshing, original and powerful counterpoint to the prevailing discourse on everything from economics to immigration to gender roles. When a Lakota woman speaks, it’s a good time to listen.
LaDonna Allard, center, and Cheryl Angel at a march led by the women of Sacred Stone to the backwater bridge one week after a brutal attack there by law enforcement. (Photo from social media)
Esperanza: Can you start by telling us a little bit about your background before your activism days, and what led you to become involved in the Standing Rock issue?
Cheryl: Let’s see — where do I begin? Well, before Standing Rock I learned how to become a pipeline fighter and worked to stop a pipeline — the Keystone XL — at the Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s Spiritual Camp named Sicangu Wicoti Iyuksa, located near Ideal, South Dakota. And just before our camp was set up I began following Idle No More, and was excited to see our Northern relatives standing up to stop the tar sands and to protect their lands. So I guess I was slowly being prepped for Standing Rock.
However my background was being a parent for half my life and surviving on a reservation the other half. When you live on a reservation that has an imposed schooling system, living on a landbase originally serving as a prison area, while our treaty lands were ravaged by gold mining — and then later to have those treaty right ignored — you become actively aware of what is happening not only in your hometown and on the national level with Indigenous spokespeople holding the government to task, but also very aware that in the neighboring towns around us, racism is rampant.
As a parent I worked hard to keep my kids in school, safe, off drugs, and out of gangs – and I wasn’t as successful as I had hoped, and prayed, despite my intentions. My children suffered most of the same tragedies that a lot of our tribal children experience when they’re growing up under an imposed system designed to separate everything, starting with the taking of children out of the homes to go to school, a concept in direct opposition to our traditional teachings.
The removal of children into boarding school has left a dark wound upon our people, even in my own family. The boarding school era started so long ago, some kids today don’t know that their own ancestors were able to live free upon the prairie. This loss of knowledge is a shared tragedy of all our communities. The Boarding Schools… sad and heartbreaking. Yet our people, including myself, my mother and her mother, survived. Our traditions were meant to be to taught at home, and in the center of the circle in our communities. Right now I’m counting my blessings that my children are now grown and out of the dangerous age group that is most prone to die. It is an ongoing tragedy.
People don’t see a suicide or an overdose or a brutal killing or drug/alcohol related violence as a tragedy to the entire community. I see the tragedy. Why? Because the life of each member of each tribe is vital – we’re so small in the overall population, not even 1 percent of the entire nation – yet we have the traditions that were lived in our homes that were handed down generation to generation that held the teachings of everything needed to learn how to be a good person to yourself, to your family and to your community and nation. It’s a tragedy that now there’s not very many of us left to carry the message the Creator gave us to share on how to live with the animals and the plants of the land.
So we’ve adapted. We have to use the school system. We have to use whatever tools we have in front of us to make sure those teachings are being remembered, being taught and being practiced. And we have to remember how to live on the land without causing harm.
Photo by Magdelion Moondrop. @moondrop1111/social media post
Esperanza: I suppose that must feel like a huge responsibility.
Cheryl: Yes, it is and again it isn’t. Once you stand up in resistance to the destruction of our Earth, our mother, there is no way you can sit back down. I’m positive I’ll be standing in solidarity aligned with all those who understand the threat to our water until the end. At this moment there are just too many multinational extractivist corporations to ignore. And with the current leaders in many countries, especially in my homelands, writing legislation to criminalize individuals and fast-track pipelines, now is the time for more people to stand up and fight for our next seven generations.
In the last couple of years I have met with original stewards and ceremony/wisdom keepers of many nations experiencing the real live threat of losing their water, their ancestral lands, and their traditional economies. And after being in ceremony with these elders and watching them, and seeing the wisdom they have, I understand what to do now. Deep inside we all know what to do. Stand Up Fight Back! But do it in a way that our ancestors would be proud of us. Our ancestors never went looking for a fight. We are defenders of the people, we are not troublemakers. You can see exactly what I’m talking about when you watch the video of an elder who also lived at Sacred Stone during the occupation of Standing Rock, Nathan Phillips, when he stepped into the chaos of two groups of individuals yelling at each other in Washington DC.
We were able to watch the video of what Nathan Phillips said in Washington D.C. He saw the verbal ruckus going on between two different church groups – one was really small less than 10 people, and then there were about 50 on the other side. He wanted to calm the waters, so to speak – and his story is common for most natives. We find ourselves in the middle of two struggling sides and we work to get them in a calm, peaceful state. But instead, we’re the ones who end up getting attacked in the middle.
This really happened in the Washington, D.C. march. A Catholic group of kids were wearing Make America Great Again red caps, and they were surrounding him and were mocking him, and weren’t letting him pass. They were jeering and making chopping motions.
What Nathan said was really crucial for many reasons. He said, we taught everybody in the community we lived in a long time ago how to live.
A student from Covington Catholic High School stands in front of Native American veteran Nathan Phillips in Washington in this still image from a Jan. 18, 2019, video by Kaya Taitano. (Social media/Reuters)
I agree with Nathan: HOW TO LIVE: We were taught how to recognize nature as a powerful, living source that we treated with respect; that’s where the animals lived; that’s where we got our sustenance from, that’s where we set up temporary homes – we were so careful not to leave a trace, that the next year we had to find the landmarks we left to remember where it was that we camped – because there were times we buried our dead along the trail and left landmarks for them. We’re still finding them today, those landmarks. Our relationship with the land is everything. How we live on those lands is everything we need to know. We were taught how to live in peace.
I’ve always carried the old ways inside, in the words of my grandmothers – I was raised to always do the right thing for others — and even if I was reluctant, because I was the only one doing it, my grandma would say: Especially if you’re the only one who is doing the right thing, then you have to do it, or nobody will see what they should be doing. It doesn’t mean I’m perfect. It just means I think about what I do and say before I think about myself.
So my grandma, she was an activist because she believed in action. She believed in doing the right thing. She didn’t believe in just preaching. So I listened and I did what she told me. And I will never forget her words. I loved sharing the things I learned from the grandmas at the time when I was very little. I would dream of ways to bring back the old days and talk about making changes, and once my oldest told me, “you’re radical”. Hehehe, now those radical teachings are more important than ever. What’s so radical about opening our lands to the buffalo and taking down all the fences and letting the water run free? The buffalo were here long before we were here on these lands and we are the Pte Oyate because of an ancient covenant. Pte is the female buffalo and Tatanka is the male buffalo. Well, that’s what I was told, anyway.
Esperanza: So at what point did that find its way into activism for you?
Cheryl: Whenever the Oglala aquifer was threatened. When TransCanada started using eminent domain to get rights of way for the Keystone XL from landowners who weren’t fully aware of the effects that a pipeline spill would have on the land.
It was a lot of things. I’ve always been a radical thinker, but I never put my body on the front lines until Standing Rock. Activism really took ahold of me when I moved to Sicangu Wicoti Iyuksa; that’s when TransCanada started using eminent domain to create a pipeline on our treaty lands.
Sicangu Wicoti Iyuksa spiritual camp against the Keystone XL Pipeline, September 2014
I don’t like using the word “first”, but our Tribe set up the Sicangu Wicoti Iyuksa spiritual camp on tribal land near Ideal, South Dakota, in March of 2014.
At the camp we were constantly researching all the material, and focusing on TransCanada’s history, the failures of their pipelines. We made alliances – at the camp I learned everything I could. I didn’t have any skills at that time except passion. (Laughter) And that’s all I needed.
I was filled with passionate love for the planet – I knew what TransCanada was doing was inherently wrong and went against everything I was raised to know about how to treat the land. So I felt a deep ache to be at the camp actively supporting in any way I could. I had to be there, because everything that I knew was at stake. Everything I was taught was in danger. That’s what it felt like. Like everything would be lost. So it was easy for me to go there.
Esperanza: So you were involved in the fight to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline. And then the leaders at Standing Rock contacted your leaders to ask for help.
Cheryl: Yes. At one of the hearings in Pierre, South Dakota, there was sign posted about the “Dakota Access Pipeline.” It was the first time I’d heard of the Dakota Access Pipeline. By that time the Rosebud Sioux Tribe had made alliances with Dakota Rural Action and Bold Nebraska. When everyone learned about the Dakota Access Pipeline it wasn’t long after that the leaders from the Standing Rock tribe contacted leaders from our tribe and asked how we set up our spiritual camp — in the end we were successful in using the camp to build alliances and together with those alliances Obama denied the KXL-TransCanada permit that the earlier George Bush administration had approved.
Or so we thought. Now the threat of KXL is looming in the horizon with our current leaders severely out of touch with their voters while ignoring all the disasters caused by climate change. They are failing to see what most 5th graders realize. Humanity has left a damaging legacy that is changing our climate and we must stop using fossil fuels and move forward with renewable energies and focus on supporting sustainable economies in our lives, including disciplining ourselves.
March to the front lines – Indigenous Rising Media
Esperanza: So you became involved with the Sacred Stone Camp, correct?
Cheryl: Yes, Sacred Stone was opened on April 1 – Joye Brown had her tipestola set up already when I arrived with my camp family from Sicangu Wicoti Iyuksa to support and assist in the “Run For Your Life” event, which was a relay run by native youth of the Oceti Sakowin from Cannonball, North Dakota, to Omaha, Nebraska, the headquarters of the Army Corps of Engineers. The youth carried with them not only the prayers of protection from the communities but also a petition to deny the permit of the DAPL: a petition signed by all the people who did not want the pipeline built.
Yes, it was the middle of the month of April. There were four of us, myself, my two sons, and my sister, Leota Eastman. We are all pipeline fighters and water protectors. Leota occupied both Spiritual Camps in Rosebud and Standing Rock. She was in the caravan of youth runners on the second Run For Your Life relay run to D.C. that carried the petition to deny the DAPL permit.
The first Run For Your Life relay from Sacred Stone Camp, three of us ran: Leota, my son Lance and me – to deliver a petition of signatures in opposition to the DAPL permit, to the district office of the Army Corps of Engineers. The second run was in July 2017, all the way to Washington, D.C., to the headquarters of the Army Corps of Engineers to deliver the petition… by that time it was signed by over 60,000 people.
Esperanza: Ah, so your kids came around then and changed their views?
Cheryl: Yes, they did. They used to say – “nobody thinks like you, Mom, you’re old-fashioned.” But they came around, yeah. (laughter)
I brought both my sons, Happy and Lance – Lance was the one who helped start the Rosebud Camp on the other side of the hill, right across from the Oceti Camp. My son Happy American Horse was really instrumental – he was the first to lock down one of those excavating machines. That was the first non-violent action.
Happy American Horse and other activists took non-violent direct action by locking themselves to construction equipment. August 31, 2016. (Photo: Desiree Kane, Wikimedia Commons)
At the Rosebud Camp, we had ceremonies out there. We had a welcome area where we gave out the information, we had them sign in, we told them what the plan was and invited them to join us, and had different roles they could choose – either they donated money or they donated supplies or they brought more people or they got on the network or they reached out to their allies… but everybody did something.
And that’s how Sacred Stone Camp got started too. The first time I went there it was to support the youth run. We got there at like 3 or 4 in the morning. A young KXL Pipeline fighter greeted us, and we were so happy to see him, because he was at every march and rally that we went to. He was wise, but very young. He was security. We parked on top of the hill where all the flags were at; later there’d be more flags.
The camp was small; there was only one tipi. Wiyaka, he was there, he’s also a pipeline fighter and water protect from the camp family from Sicangu Wicoti Iyuksa in Rosebud. As a matter of fact there are many many people from my Tribe who will never sit back down, after standing up. I’m really proud of all the Pipeline fighters and Water Protectors on the planet but especially proud of the ones who stood up to stop the pipelines first. Wiyaka stayed that first night when they opened the camp at Sacred Stone. That’s an honor no one else can share.
In July Sacred Stone had their second youth run, this time to carry the petition to Washington, D.C., and by the time they came back to Cannonball there were nearly 5,000 people coming to Sacred Stone with nowhere to camp. Shortly after that our Tribe, the Sicangu Oyate, set up camp — and that camp was filling up, too. And pretty soon everyone was sent to an flat area called the overflow area, A beautiful place — that’s where many, many smaller camps were set up and that area eventually became the Oceti Sakowin camp.
Running for their lives: Native American relay tradition revived by Native youth to protest Dakota Access Pipeline. (Salon/Social media)
Esperanza: Can you share with me some of the lessons you learned at Standing Rock?
Cheryl: One lesson from Standing Rock that stands out for me is that without the support of mainstream media telling the truth about what was happening at Standing Rock – the truth behind why all the people were camped there – without their honest reporting as to the impact of these oil and gas and fracking pipelines to water, the people who will be affected won’t know the truth of how devastating pipelines are to watersheds and rivers and their water supply.
In my opinion, mainstream media failed the people of the country, not just the water protectors. They could have prevented all of the abuses of the law enforcement, the unnecessary jailing of hundreds, and no one would even have had to end up with trumped up criminal charges, if they had wanted to share the truth about pipelines. They didn’t care enough about the water quality of the Mni Sose or the people of Standing Rock. Mainstream media has not ever accurately reported the facts of what pipelines actually do to the environment, nor the truth about the governmental figures lending their political weight to approve illegal pipeline permits and how the banking system was funding the pipelines, even though it was very clear that the banks were not following the Equator Principal.
There were some news outlets that were very loyal, to not only our struggle but to struggles similar to ours in other communities – Democracy Now, I have to hand it to them. The Young Turks, Josh Fox; the Huffington Post, The Guardian, Unicorn Riot was on the spot, taking front line videos and sending those messages out – they themselves were jailed for reporting. Neil Young had a song he wrote and added an extra verse that included a statement about Standing Rock that included my son Happy. There were so many people coming I can’t even list all the people – those are just the ones that come to my mind first.
At the very end when the Standing Rock occupation was getting shut down, CBS came and some other people came but they had to sign waivers from the state of North Dakota.
“Right now we’re just pebbles. But when we march together, and we sit down and pray — we’re a rock.” Cheryl Angel, Nov. 27, 2016, Standing Rock. Video by Beth Pielert, goodfilmworks.com.
Another lesson I won’t forget is that even when you are right, it doesn’t necessarily change anything. Early on, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe filed in court saying that the permit was illegal, that was the legality for us holding those grounds – they were building a pipeline using an illegal permit, signed without tribal consent. We knew we were right, that’s why we stood as long as we did.
After the pipeline was built, when the case finally went to court, the judge said, ‘Yes, you’re right, the permit was illegal.’ Standing Rock knew that the permit didn’t abide by the guidelines — it didn’t have an environmental impact statement, and it didn’t have a statement on how it was going to impact the tribal culture, or those effects into the future.
The Judge also said that since the pipeline is already built I’m going to let the oil flow. Which doesn’t make any sense. The judge knew the Army Corps of Engineers approved the permit knowing full well that it didn’t meet the permit requirements and the oil should be stopped until the impact study is completed.
Winning in court didn’t stop the use of the pipeline and it should have. The DAPL permit was illegal, so the pipeline should be removed. Like I said —even when you win, it doesn’t always change things.
Ladonna Brave Bull Allard and Cheryl Angel make ceremony on the Back Water Bridge, Standing Rock November, 2016. Photo by Beth Pielert.
Esperanza: I know, that was very hard, and very unfair. I know it affected everyone who was there. After Standing Rock, what was your thinking about what you personally wanted to do next, with your own life?
Cheryl: Well, that’s just it. My own life isn’t my life anymore, because once you stand up and you see the injustice and you see the lack of concern for the environment from a corporate and legal standpoint, it doesn’t end that easily. Another thing, while you’re standing there you get to talk to the person standing next to you, and you get to hear their stories.
And they all came with stories – devastating stories about what happened because nobody stood up – or when they did stand up they were either killed or massacred or forced off the land. But at Standing Rock people weren’t going to lay down, because we knew we were right. The judge said we were right, even after the pipeline was built.
Now it makes perfect sense to protect water everywhere. I have a deep relationship with water. I know its alive. I know it can hear our pleas, and our songs and all the prayers said along its riverbanks and shores.
As Indigenous people with sovereign economies, we don’t have the need for a huge capitalistic society to come onto our lands and we certainly don’t need these pipelines destroying the water we need to drink.
So water is in danger, globally. Right now Indigenous communities are still at risk, and they are standing up, because they have to stand up. When you finally realize — WATER IS LIFE — you understand why you can’t sit back down.
People keep saying “after” Standing Rock – but I’m still of the same state of mind, I still have the same passion for the water, it has to be protected. It was when I was at Sicangu Wicoti Iyuksa that I learned about the aquifers that were in danger and when I was at Standing Rock I learned about the rivers that were in danger.
Cheryl Angel with Karen Little Thunder
When I went to Mexico I learned that pipelines are coming down from Canada and then through the United States on down to Mexico. So this is a global issue. This encompasses the entire Americas – Turtle Island’s waters are in danger from the pipelines and the oil and gas and gold and silver and copper mining. So there isn’t an “after” Standing Rock for me. I’m still standing and so are the hundreds upon hundreds who understand what “Mni Wiconi” really means.
In my travels after Standing Rock I listened to stories about rivers and lakes that need to be defended from oil/gas and mining extraction – extractivism. These extractivism economies are all endangering the environment – and hold a huge responsibility for climate change.
So the power of making alliances with Bold Nebraska and many others, the power of telling the truthful consequences of what’s going to happen to the water when pipelines break – that’s what I work for. That’s my job. That’s my responsibility. That’s my future. I guess that’s my job description. I work toward the unity of people, the making of alliances. I know that building those alliances are the key to stopping extractivism from contaminating our waters.
What do I want to be called? Water Protector. Spiritual Activist. Unci. In reality, I’m just one person who stood up with thousands of others when the water called them. As one person I feel called on, at a very deep level, to connect with water. I go to ceremonies – especially water ceremonies. For centuries peoples all over the Earth have been doing that because a reverence for water is what’s needed. And that’s what the world’s leaders fail to see.
I go to urban places and I talk to the landowners – because the places I go the people own their houses, they own their land – and I say, ‘It’s time you stand up to protect your watershed.’ If everybody stood up and protected their own land, and their own watershed – if they remembered what it used to be called, if they remember the river and what the natives used to call it, if they called natives to have ceremonies on these lands where the watersheds are, we would be more in balance than we are today. We would be on the right path to reconciliation and a movement of unification of people who lived on the lands.
So I’m really working hard to unite people because of the need to protect the water. I really do believe if people could protect their own watershed – if they could learn the name of the people who used to be the guardians of that watershed, if they could invite those people back onto those lands to have their ceremonies again for the water – that would be building an alliance, that would be holding the water in reverence, that would protect the water and could start to heal the people who have been separated for too long. I also call upon land owners to return their lands to the tribal nations that were forcefully removed from their ancestral homelands, the places where they lived in peace and were getting along by practicing their sovereign economies.
Esperanza: That would be a beautiful thing. And do you see that happening?
Cheryl: I do! It is happening. I have a friend – I was going on this tour to talk about watersheds and talk about people returning their lands to their tribes – and she has a big piece of land and she said, I’m not going to give away my land to the Tribe (laughing). So I felt obliged to correct myself and say, “For people who really feel it in their hearts that the land belongs to the native people and especially if it’s where they have ceremonies, that they give them back a piece of their land so they can freely come back and have ceremonies as needed.”
Esperanza: Oh, yes! I remember reading about that!
Cheryl: See? So people are listening (laughing). And my friend — eventually she made a land deal so that her lands would eventually be turned back into Trust Status for the Tribes.
Esperanza: You’re right, it’s true. It’s beginning to happen.
Cheryl: Art and his wife Helen are the best people to listen to when it comes to being a land owners and pipeline fighters! We keep in touch and they are family to me.
Esperanza: That’s amazing!
Cheryl: Yes, it is amazing.
Next: Cheryl talks about economic sovereignty, the lessons learned in her travels in Mexico, and her upcoming gathering in the Black Hills, June 9-16.
This series is produced in collaboration with Intercontinental Cry, a Native-led magazine covering Indigenous issues around the world.
One week after Sunday Bloody Sunday, when militarized police used water cannons, rubber bullets, and tear gas on peaceful water protectors, Cheryl Angel led over four hundred women to the same bridge to invite the officers there to join her in a water ceremony. They peacefully abided. This is a clip from the non-violent training she gave earlier that day, to all the women and men who participated in that peaceful action. Video by Beth Pielert, goodfilmworks.com and leavesawaken.com.
