Thousands of indigenous people and settler allies from across Turtle Island have gathered together within the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota to stop construction of an oil pipeline near sacred land.
The mainstream media says they are protesters but they say they are land defenders, following suit with the Six Nations people who said the same in 2006, over the Kanonhstaton Land Reclamation.
The Lakota’s have concerns over the safety of the water. The oil advocates say that there is very little risk that the pipelines will leak, but routes have often been rerouted when getting too close to large population centres.
The “Wild Indians” do not seem to be getting this protection. We are not Indians, we are the original people, the beings. We are not something other – we are hosts.
What is worse is when the armchair generals of the internet complain in every comment section about the Standing Rock protests. They say the usual rhetoric: the pipeline is creating jobs and then go on to point out that “we all use gas in our cars.”
The problem with this logic is that most humans are in favour of carbon based power, but the difference is that the Lakota’s are protesting to obtain it ethically and without compromising our drinking water. We don’t want to completely get rid of gasoline powered engines – that is craziness.
There’s gotta be a better way than creating the “Black Snake”, which is the name some have been calling the pipeline. The Black Snake is based upon an interpretation of an ancient indigenous prophecy.
If we take a closer look at ourselves we can see that we are wasteful people. There are some who support the recycling initiatives on Six Nations but many just do as they have always done and take their black bags to the dump week after week without sorting.
Many of us have grandparents who used to burn their garbage or maybe still do – and cannot see what is wrong with it.
It is not in our nature to be this way, but one hundred years of colonial conditioning has taught us to buy into materialistic capitalism in all its plastic-wrapped glory.
Side note: There is a theory that we subconsciously feel betrayed by our earth mother after we were wiped out by the smallpox virus, which explains why we so freely pollute her with our freezie tubes, diapers and soda cans.
To be fair to our honorable ancestors, many nations were fighting for survival in those days and some even went extinct! Today, we are still fighting for our survival as a nation and culturally as a people. Which is why some of us have been sleeping and forgotten about our responsibilities to the Creator and to the earth.
The front line warriors, the land defenders are the ones who have remembered their duty and have forsaken their own safety and well-being. They have put mother nature over money and should be celebrated and their names should become known.
These men and women were thinking of the unborn faces, the coming generations.
We should also take a look at our own political representatives and find out what their official position is on the snakes that are crossing through our territories and our precious waterways.
No amount of money is worth risking our water. Imagine if the Grand River got even worse.
