Above Photo: Hundreds rally at the White House in support of the Standing Rock Sioux on Sept. 13/Photo by John Zangas
Native Americans are traveling the nation once again to raise awareness of their exploitation. This time, indigenous activists are spreading the word about an energy infrastructure company, with the backing of police agencies, politicians and union leaders, running roughshod over them.
Among their recent stops was Washington, DC, where Native Americans pleaded for President Barack Obama and members of Congress to help them stop Energy Transfer Partners’ proposed Dakota Access Pipeline from snaking through their land. “They need to know that Native Americans are no longer expendable,” Lauren Howland from the International Indigenous Youth Council told a crowd of activists protesting the banks investing in the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Howland, who traveled with her friends from the Camp of the Sacred Stone to Washington, reminded the activists that it wasn’t tribal leaders who began the campaign last spring against Dakota Access. It was a youth-led movement. It was a group of young Native Americans who learned from their parents and grandparents how Europeans sought to wipe them off the map.
“I am living proof that colonization has failed. I am decolonizing my people,” Howland said. She remembered the millions of Native Americans killed by white settlers. “It was the biggest genocide on this Earth and no one talks about it,” she said, before tears prevented her from continuing her speech.
A day earlier, Jasilyn Charger, a Native American youth activist from the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and a friend of Howland’s, told an anti-Dakota Access Pipeline rally how Obama once told Native Americans he would stand on their side in times of need. “You’re standing in silence as we’re asking for your help. You told the people if they wanted help to ask for it. Now we’re screaming it, we’re shouting it,” Charger said in Lafayette Square across from the White House.
But Charger understands it will be Native Americans and their allies, not the U.S. government, who will need to do the heavy lifting against the Dakota Access Pipeline and every other form of exploitation that comes later. “We have been here before this government has come here and we will be here long after, and that is a promise,” Charger said. “We are tired of people making decisions for us. So we are taking it into our own hands. We’re standing up. We’re organizing.”
Living in Unity with the Land
After centuries of colonization, Howland sometimes feels a sense of isolation in a country where her ancestors lived and died long before European settlers arrived. Upon her arrival in Washington the night before she spoke to the anti-pipeline activists, Howland said she stood outside the White House.
“I came here last night and I was walking around and I was getting stared at by everybody I passed. Every single person that passed me looked at me like I was foreign, like I wasn’t from here, which is crazy. My people have been here for thousands of years,” Howland said. “It’s funny how I felt like a tourist in my own land. My ancestors died here. Everywhere in America is built on my ancestors’ burial ground. That is desecration.”
Back in North Dakota, Native Americans and their allies have been met by riot cops with semi-automatic weapons, private security guards with dogs and mace, and political leaders with a reverence for corporate shareholders over the protection of Native American land and water. They’ve witnessed union workers with the Dakota Access Pipeline project demolish dozens of Native American burial sites.
Despite the heavy-handed police tactics, the Native people gathering near the Standing Rock reservation promise to remain there in protest of these types of practices. “My people lived in unity. We still do,” Howland said. At the protest camp near Standing Rock, money doesn’t exist, she explained, but the people at the camp are making daily life work well. By witnessing the juxtaposition of land desecration in the name of economic growth and a peaceful gathering of Native Americans, one sees a perfect “example of how capitalism has taken over America,” she said.