Lessons from Standing Rock, Four Years Later

Today, as we honor Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island and around the world, I’m remembering my experience at Standing Rock, which has actually felt closer and more vivid than ever. The camp at Oceti Sakowin was a powerful embodiment of prayerful direct action, a place where people lived in reciprocity and called each other brother, sister, cousin, a place where caring peacefully for one another stood in direct affront to the violent, colonial settler State, a place where we sang and listened and fed each other.

Since Standing Rock — which started in April of 2016, but grew both physically and in the collective consciousness around the 2016 election — I have been living with something inside, something that’s blooming against my chest. It’s fiery and I don’t quite know what it is. It’s not hope or despair, not simply a question or a desire. Maybe it’s a knowing, a knowing that things can be different than they are. Standing Rock felt different. For *some reason*, despite the other dozens of pipeline fights, despite the centuries’ long struggle for indigenous sovereignty, despite the noise of Trump and the election, Standing Rock was heard.

So, as a sacred activist, I’m holding this question: what have we learned (and are learning) that we can keep honoring and tending as we create a world more beautiful?

I know that these simple words hardly do justice to honor the nations and people who still live on with their culture, tradition, and relationship to the earth present in their bodies and blood and breath, people and culture still somehow living no matter how decimated by colonization and supremacy. It’s a miracle this still living, a miracle of resilience and faith and an inner fortitude I may never fully understand as a person of white European descent, myself so many generations separate from any culture that isn’t married to supremacy and restraint and disconnection from the land and air and water surrounding me.

Not even my actions could ever fully do justice for the harm committed. And yet, I will keep trying. And failing. And praying with my hands and feet.