hope.

 

All that energy, all our songs, prayers, stories, bundled up together as one mind, and headed out to Standing Rock to give our relatives hope.

I read an online article and watched a video in which the American Bison (Buffalo) came back to Standing Rock Sioux territory where Native Americans from over 300 tribes, and indigenous people from around the world are camped out, protesting, and protecting their land from a corporate oil pipeline project. If you are not familiar with this volatile situation in North Dakota, and admittingly mainstream media and our late Presidential candidates have been ignoring 10,000 people camped out on the prairie, search for the hashtag NODAPL or “Stand with Standing Rock”, or “Dakota Access Pipeline.” The indigenous people camped at Standing Rock are the only thing preventing this pipeline from drilling under the Missouri River to build a connecting pipeline from North Dakota to Illinois. The members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe (whose land it passes through) were never consulted on the development of this pipeline, never consented to it, and fear rightly that if this pipe leaks, it will poison the entire water supply of the west from the Dakotas to the Gulf of Mexico.

The video I saw of the Buffalo was very moving. These folks camped out on the harsh prairie, brutalized by police and security guards, arrested for terrorism and rioting, held illegally in dog kennels at the jail, and facing unprecedented opposition, had been repeatedly traumatized. Hope that they would effectively halt the construction of the DAPL was malingering. But, as a reporter was interviewing a young Native man about why he was there and what he hoped to accomplish, suddenly, out of nowhere, a herd of Buffalo appeared on the distant hill! The man stopped talking to the reporter and shouted, “Look! Buffalo!” and the crowd that was peacefully standing at the barbed wire fence praying for the water, all cheered and ululated and you could hear them blowing their sacred eagle whistles also.

The Buffalo gave the people hope that day. This is a sacred animal, no, ancestor, to the Sioux and many other western tribes who depended on it for shelter, clothing, and food. Their prophecies say that when the Buffalo return, then the people will rise again against the white colonizers, that Sitting Bull himself would come back to them, and they would be victorious in reclaiming their land and their proud identity. So, you can imagine how truly epic the sudden appearance of Buffalo at this place of conflict was to them.

Well, now, however, those Buffalo have been rounded up, fenced up in razor water without food nor water, and are being trucked away from the conflict at Standing Rock, so the DAPL can continue digging and drilling for the oil pipeline under the Missouri River. Is it 1835 again?! The US Army extirpated the Buffalo, hunted it almost to extinction, wasted its gifts of food, shelter, and clothing, to rob the western prairie tribes of their means of sustenance starting in 1832. Essentially, they killed and wasted the Buffalo so the people would either starve or surrender to the nearest US Indian Agency to beg for Army rations and maybe survive. Did they just truck hope away from the people again?

On Friday, November 11, 2016, the Seneca Nation of Indians in upstate New York, where I am from, celebrated their 222^nd Canandaigua Treaty Days. Treaty Days commemorates the first 1765 Treaty made between the United States of America and the Five Nations of Iroquois Indians living in New York State. The Five Nations have kept every word of that Treaty for 222 years. The United States has broken every clause and forsaken their every responsibility, and stolen all the land promised to the Five Nations in that Treaty. So, why do the Five Nations still celebrate Treaty Days at Canandaigua? Why do they not smash the sacred wampum belt that symbolizes their everlasting friendship with the United States? Why do they not bury the “chain of friendship” with the United States and let it corrode and rust in the ground? Because of hope. They parade the wampum belt that sealed that Treaty through the town of Canandaigua every year, and they “polish the chain of friendship” that that symbol represents. They polish their side of the chain, hoping that one day the United States of America will polish their side and keep their original promises to the Five Nations.

I believe that when people gather together to dance, to sing, to pray, and to tell stories, that those actions echo out into the world. That though some of us cannot go to Standing Rock and camp out on the prairie for the winter, nor can we travel to Canandaigua to polish the chain of friendship, we can gather together as one mind for hope. Hope is an energy, and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It is like sound waves, never ending but only diminishing with time. A dog that barked 500 years ago, is still barking today, though we can no longer hear it. The sound has traveled off, very far away. So, when we pray or we sing and tell stories, that energy also travels off, very far away; maybe even to our relatives in Standing Rock.

I can almost see it if I close my eyes: we gathered by a lake in Nipmuk territory yesterday, held signs that said, “Water is Life” (the war cry of the Water Protectors in Standing Rock), held hands, prayed for the water at the edge of the lake, sang songs to the water, and a little girl told us the story of Sky Woman. All that energy, all our songs, prayers, stories, bundled up together as one mind, and headed out to Standing Rock to give our relatives hope. I see that bundle of hope, traveling over the land of the Eastern people (where I am right now in Massachusetts), over my New York homeland and the Finger Lakes that Creator scratched into the earth, across the Great Lakes where Deganawida came to us in his stone canoe, skimming like a flat rock over the 10,000 lakes of Minnesota, over the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, up the mountains, and across the prairies to Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. A ball of energy. A bundle of hope. Now our minds are one.

(C)henry francis redhouse, 2016. Photo provided, property of its respective owners.