“There’ll be frybread, and drumming, and singing,
a carnival, baseball games, a rodeo, and even mud trucks.
Man, they got everything, you’re gonna love the powwow.”
*******
And what a time of astral celebration, a chance to honor our father’s Sun and the gift of life that he provides to us all, but there was also a star studded lineup appearing all week. First there was a lunar eclipse during the pre-party purification, then the Virgo/Jupiter birth of a king that only happens at every dawn of civilization or so, some meteor showers, and today, after pouring half a month of our hearts out to our nuclear nucleus, we’re still getting the lights cut off on us. Complete solar eclipse. What an amazing life of experience. Thank you creator, thank you Unci Maka, thank you Sun, wopila tanka.
We weren’t actually in the path of totality, pretty close though, and I had a ride into nebraska on the bus if I wanted it. The kids begged me, and it certainly would be awesome to be there with them, but I was kinda leaning towards not. One of my closest comrades felt compelled to keep cleaning up the grounds, she would be heading home soon and didn’t want to leave anything undone. I’d thought about hopping in the car with her, or the bus, but in the back of my head was something that a dear friend had shared with me.
She said that she was taught to acknowledge this wonder of our worldview, but not to chase it, to simply go about your life of momentous occasions. If you see it, you see it, cool, but forcing it might make you miss something truly spectacular in the now. Like, when I was standing in the door of the bus, ninety percent sure I wasn’t climbing in, but trying to convince them of it, and I successfully stalled just long enough for one of our long lost water buddies to pull into the deserted plains of an empty Sun Dance grounds, and park directly in their path of totality.
Woah, out of nowhere our dude Dean rolls up, and joyous jubilee erupts as his magnetic field pulls all into a close hug. What a cool moment to have been there for, glad I wasn’t halfway to nebraska by now. He didn’t make it for ceremony, but he was here now, on his way through a camp tour which included a revisit to Standing Rock, and checking into the Line Three camp to check out our current frontline of opposition to the oil occupation. Hmm...
*******
He came bearing gifts, as many of us do, it really is the way of the future, but he has a crazy good knack for picking out the perfect present every time. And this time he had a massive box of organic seeds, enough to sew the garden back together, or maybe just the right amount to load up on a plane and disperse across the desolation of our demise, as we bring life back to our mother. Or maybe just some drones. The seeds that want to grow in that particular cornfield, will, they’ll be the most fit for it, and the rest will feed hungry birds who will gladly carry them to their final destinations. Crop dust seeds, not poison.
The Erenbrooks had been struggling to find food that met their minimum requirements of realness, so the thought of them being able to share this gift with their growing rez family was heartwarming, we might have organic dinner reservations yet. Plus he brought some strong medicine, west coast flowers, way more powerful than the brick pins of Rosebud fame. And now that he’d unloaded his cargo, he had an empty seat available. He’d already scooped up Greg on the way, and they were headed a couple hours west to a camp in Pine Ridge, and now the plan is to rendezvous in nebraska with the bus for the obligatory total eclipse of the heart joke.
Well, this is what it’s all about, this is why I don’t make plans, why I don’t get in a car unless it feels right, why I’m unwilling to perceive the future as anything but a 'now' that I’ll get to experience later, and in this now, I’m jumping in this ride to the unknown, yet I know without a doubt that my heart’s in the right place. The ‘plan’ we’ll call it, is to come back through here tomorrow, just an overnight trip, but of course I’m taking all my stuff just in case, all three items. And I’m still lugging around this computer. I’d pulled it back out now that ceremony was finished, and was halfway through giving it a final revision with my new perspectives of prayer. This place had coffee and power, pretty much all I needed, so I assumed I’d probably be back soon to finish it up, but you never know.
I was finding it difficult to be completely in the moment while I carried this burden, I still had forward thinking work to do, and it required electricity, and not hitchhiking in the rain, but that rules out so much fun. Though I was obviously on the right track, living more than I ever had before, knowing that wherever I am is exactly where I am supposed to be, because I unconditionally follow the pull of my heart. It’s so freaking cool. Exciting. I never know what’s next, or when’s next, it’s a tad nerve-wracking for friends who never want to see me go, but they also understand the mechanics of my nomadicism. It may take me away at a moment’s notice, but it also drops me back into their lives at the most significant of mile markers.
I’ve got a lot of work to do, a long road of service, and adventure, and that means I’m gonna be hard to pin down. It would be easy to feel overwhelmed by the seemingly impossible tasks ahead, but that’s not for me to worry about, I only ever have to survive today. As long as I live out my heart’s content in each moment, when I look back at my evolution, I’ll be astounded by the way it all seemed to come together.
It’s already happened a few times as I spiraled deeper and deeper into my own consciousness of the world around me, and the more I learn, and the more I think I understand the secrets of the universe, the more I realize that I’m just getting started. With every epiphany of spiritual connection, it is revealed that I’ve only opened the door into the next larger chamber of secrets, the cosmos unfold themselves into the next iteration of Fibonacci. We truly are the tiniest of dots within the construct of the Great Mystery, yet somehow we hold all of the answers of universal truth within each fractally fragmented cell of our being. And if what I’ve been experiencing is only going to get better as I wake from the fog of forgetting, well, I’m certainly not making any plans of stopping anytime soon.
*******
So we get to the Pine Ridge Rez, to Camp White Clay Justice, a social justice camp fighting against the intoxicating invasion of alcohol, on a reservation where it is illegal, yet somehow they still maintain the highest rate of alcoholism in the country. And poverty, as it’s literally the poorest county in the country as well. This is arguably the roughest rez in the nation, or at least they’ve had it the roughest. It’s home to Wounded Knee, the site of the ancestrally traumatic massacre of innocents, and home to further movements of repression when new generations gained the momentum of resistance. There have been armed stand-offs in the streets, the Oglala Oyate know that any day fighting for our home, is a good day to die, and many have been murdered in the process. And they have one of the highest rates of missing and murdered indigenous women in the country, who need I remind you, make up a quarter of the cases nationwide, but only 0.7 percent of the general population. WTF.
For many, the only way to cope is with a bottle, which wrecks their dwindling spirit faster than their dilapidated cars. No alcohol on the rez, thank goodness, nope, gotta walk all the way to nebraska for that. All 0.1 miles across the reservation border to the town of white clay, a supremely white town with a population of twelve, not 12,000, just 12. And in this grand metropolitan municipality, capitalism is king and the markets have spoken, and these 12 white clayers sure would like four liquor stores to make up their skyline. 42,000,000 beers sold in the past decade, 12 people.
The street has been littered with drunk indians, passed out on the road along the two mile stretch back to the trailer park village, and hundreds are run over and killed as they feed their genetic predisposition to alcoholism. This town’s sole existence for over a hundred years, has been to oppress, depress, and repress a broken people, and to make sure they stay that way. They claimed no racist motivations, simply supply and demand, just quit drinking if it’s such a big deal. So this camp was standing up to the devastation of dependence, and offered a place of healing to any who struggled with the disease. There was a sweat lodge running, an integral part of a Red Road recovery meeting, and they created a safe sober space to work through the pain of past lives.
There weren’t many here, just ten or fifteen really, though community members stopped by for frybread and prayer. But even with such low support staff, I still managed a handful of Rosebud reunions, including my most ornery leader. Yeah, Smokey was helping the camp founder keep everyone in line, frontline, at least until I came traipsing in the back door. No use giving him a new alias, his essence is so recognizable that you’d pick up on it even if I tried to hide him, plus, ain’t nobody gonna mess with Smokey. What a great reunion, and not as a boss and chef, but as bonded brothers, we are forever family, and so now it kinda makes sense to just stay here for the eclipse.
We had some of the one-time-use disposable eclipse glasses that I’m sure are now littering the total path, so we just went to the inipi, prayed a bit, and laid on our backs to watch the sun shrink to the tiniest sliver. It got darker, and colder, and through a cloud filter you could almost see it with a naked eye, but no totality. Others will report complete darkness, nocturnal bugs coming alive and trippy circular shadows. Sounds so cool. And I’ll probably see it one day, like maybe in seven years when it comes again to coincidentally complete an ecliptical X right over top of Turtle island.
It’s tough to not wish I’d been there, but I know I was in the right spot. The protector who insisted on not chasing it, had happened to pull up just before, so our paths of not pushing it had brought us here for another moment together, and now I was laying next to Smokey, oohing and ahhing the black hole sun. Epic. So if not jumping on the bus to totality is the closest thing to regret I’ve felt all year, I think I can probably live with that one on my conscience.
We helped around camp and set up a giant army tent, they had a whole box truck loaded with supplies from Standing Rock. The Natty Gs may have bulldozed a lot of it, but there are caches of resistance supplies all around the country, so don’t think your heartfelt donation was all for naught, you directly empowered this growing movement of unity, bless you, we can absolutely not do it without you.
They put us in a spare tipi for the night, and then another, but with my dead battery, I had to catch the return flight to Rosebud, Greg stayed though. Or I could take the ride to the pipeline protest of Enbridge in minnesota, but no round trip on that one, prob don’t want to show up and start asking for an outlet and wifi, no, I think Rosebud it is, for now at least.
*******
It was cool being at Sun Dance after Sun Dance, just the crew, had the chance to get a lot closer to a few of my spiritual leaders, and now I actually had a piece of understanding to bring to the table. We’re all here in this world learning about how it works, sharing our insights with one another as we composite a more complete concept of the universe, it takes a tribe to figure it all out. I thought I had learned some songs too, but those were mainly for the lodge, so now that I get to be on the drum with the big boys, I gotta pick up some Sun Dance songs. It’s a different beat, the driving heartbeat of Unci Maka, and for all I know it’s synced up with the 7.83hz of the Earth, the pulse width modulation of our incoming sun rays, and sung in the key of 432 cycles per second. When you’re dancing through the heat and pain for four days, you need some pretty intense prayer music.
We were just sitting around the drum in the cook shack though, every night over cigs and medicine, four or five on the drum, or twelve, and a few high pitched girls on the sideline for their choreographed contribution. I thought I had connected with indian music at camp, just feeling it move me, then my prayer got stronger as I learned songs with Ben and let them lift me above the heat. And the next thing I know, I’m connected to the planet through the vibrations of the drum, and the reverberating drumstick that’s aligning my heartbeat with hers. As I learn the words, it gets even more powerful, can’t wait to see what its like to understand each translation and feel them in my heart. We offer a little Tobacco to the drum, to the spirits, to the animal who sacrificed his skin so that we can pray, and the tree that gave us the wood - except that this was just a regular old drum kit drum, a big floor tom, the spirits still like to listen though.
If I was a spirit of an ancestor who lived these old ways, I’d certainly be at Sun Dance hanging out, jamming some tunes. And even without a ghostly positioning system, I’d be able to find the passed down ritual. That goes for the sweat lodge too, the ancestors like to sweat, like to pray, they know where and when and how, and we’ve invited them, and the stones are called ‘grandfathers’ because they are. And they carry our prayers with them. I don’t see them yet, but enough of my medicine people do that I’m convinced.
I pray to Tunkasila, grandfather, ancestors, those who were here before me. And now it’s a skeleton crew, so I’m helping set up the lodge and tend the fire. Sounds perfect to me, I have a growing relationship with the peta wakan, and I’ve got the basics from Ben, so I think I’m ready to up my game - 36 rocks. We prayed real good, real hot, an honor to be in such a personal lodge with the Sun Dance chief, and for him to know me well enough to be able to pray from his heart, for mine.
And when I climbed out, my brother running the door and the stones, pointed up to the sky and asked if I saw what he was seeing. Uh, yeah, that’s the same UFOey looking light that we saw changing colors and squiggling around at Standing Rock, on a very important night of intense spirituality, and here it is just as we share this unified prayer with the constellations, hmm.
Haven’t seen Bigfoot yet, I guess I wouldn’t though. I did hear something walking around my tent one night, bigger than a Dog, smaller than a monster, I just rolled over and sang that protection song.
*******
I woke up alive, so I guess it worked, unless that’s a little too Stevie Wonder for you. (Wait, do you mean superstitious or blind faith?) If all the indian lore stuff isn’t doing it for you, there’s always the untold histories of america’s flagship sin - genocide. We won the war against human rights, so we got to choose which tales of valor made it to print, and in our colonized minds, the trail of tears was a candy coated parade. That’s one I’ve at least heard of though, like Wounded Knee, but one of my brothers here holds ancestral trauma from his relatives who were slaughtered in the Blue Water Creek Massacre of 1855.
Now the colonizers refer to it as the Battle of Ash Hollow, makes for a more fair sounding story in Mr White’s his-story class, but the New York Times clearly believed that the “lamentable butchery of indians” was a ‘massacre’ indeed. It all started when a mormon farmer’s Cow wandered into Lakota hunting grounds, well, that was a dumb idea, shouldn’t someone have put a fence up or something? Of course my brother’s relatives killed and ate the Cow, it’s kind of our thing, and of course the ‘owner’ of this particular living organism was none too happy. Luckily the US army was here to protect the privatized settlers and their financial investments of the planet’s natural resources, and killing nearly a hundred men, women, and children, should get the point across pretty effectively.
But what’s dust is dust, and those bodies have had ample time to return their sacred energies to the Earth’s circular motion, however, there are still lingering wounds to be healed and spiritual vibrations to mend. What untold massacre would be complete without a few souvenirs to remind the general of the mayhem? So his story writing ‘victors’ hunted and gathered some ‘artifacts’ to take home to the kids, though we of course know these sacred belongings to hold much more than meets the eye.
These are the spiritual possessions possessing the broken spirits of my brother’s ancestors, only by returning them to the Earth though a ceremony of healing, will those dissonant vibrations of Unci Maka begin to be repaired. Unfortunately for my Lakota family, and for my two-legged family, and for my Earth family, and for my sickly mother, the white man just sees all this spirit science about our singing planet as some kind of looney tune.
The family heirlooms sit in the basement of the smithsonian. One of General Harney’s descendants has been on a path of trying to repair this wound as he atones for his own negative vibrations, he comes to sweat with the family, and he is an advocate for releasing the possessions of spirit. Well, so maybe releasing them is not quite congruent with the business plan of displaying murder cases, but I bet with the current global climate of indian prophecy, we could probably sell a lot more tickets if we exhibit some humanity. You can’t have them back, so the best you can hope for is that we decide to dig the skeletons out of our closet and lay them out for the world to see, the privileged white world who can afford to pay to play, but how else will my readers get to have an authentic indian experience as they forget to remember why we are here?
Such a shame that we’re too busy putting indians in museums to realize that they still exist. That yet again america was unsuccessful at a genocidal war they claimed to have won, but super successful at propagandating the public to not blink an eye at our current concentration camps, oh sorry, I meant reservations. And when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound too bad, kinda like some exclusive dinner for two in downtown colonialsburg, my bad, that’s for whites only.
*******
But here on the rez, I’m the one in the minority. I’m the one who feels the watchful eyes of being different. No longer one of the privileged with an assumed access to equality. No lifetime of living here to have taught me anything about how to survive in a world foreign to me. For the first time ever, I feel a fraction of the otherness experienced by ‘them.’ Just a bit though, they were mainly just curious, and I’ve never received anything but open arms from every Lakota person I’ve ever spoken with. But if I look through my new perspective of ‘them,’ it starts to get scary once I consider the less inviting welcome we’ve given every race, ever.
I’ve taken my whole life for granted, it was so easy that I didn’t even know it could be hard, because my mom dedicated her life to making it look that way. And my dad brought home a good check, borrowed generational wealth from his dad to start a business, in an industry of good ol’ boys, and I was able to get a good family business job and build my first career without college. I walked into gas stations as a kid and wasn’t assumed to be a thief around every corner. I was never refused service because of my color. Or just straight up ignored. For my whole life I may have felt like I didn’t fit in on the inside, but my outside wore the right shade to grant me access to every convenience of colonized living. If I walked into one of the supremely racist towns that make up the border patrol of the reservation, I would encounter only the friendliest of smiles. “Why, what a sweet young white man you are,” and through my filter of privilege, I would never even consider that the infrastructure of hatred, had built walls intended to keep the bigotry from ever escaping the close-minded community.
It’s easy to not live near the rez, and assume that if you did, you’d be nice to the indians, even though they are obviously prisoners of the industrial inferiority complex. But once you’ve opted to actually be honest with yourself about exactly how you got here, it’ll be only natural to feel a deep shame for the deplorable mistreatments spanning from settlement to Standing Rock. Consecutive lifetimes of tough luck that conditioned the defeated dakotas to become hardened against the cold shoulders of a white winter. Once your perspective is opened to a point of understanding how your way of life bulldozed over theirs, the worst part of the ancestral guilt is not knowing what to do about it.
What could you possibly do to even begin to right the wrongs of your forefathers? Especially from all the way over here in the east, a land long displaced of any natural heritage, and from the comfort of your couch it seems that you can’t do that much at all. So you don’t. How could you? You’re as lost as coastal indians pushed to the plains. So you’ve got a good heart and the weight of remorse, but are you just supposed to drive onto the rez and start saving indians? I’m pretty sure that’s the same white savior complex that destroyed everything in the first place.
So all you can do is nothing, I guess. Sure, you can talk about it, share your understanding with others, help along this global awakening in your own neighborhood, and that is most certainly a critical component to this revolution. Bringing awareness, without it, how will anyone know that there’s something worth fighting for? But just how aware of the public indecency enacted by every progressing politician, are the americans who watch the nightly news before switching over to dancing with the stars?
People are already aware that the government sucks. It’s pretty hard to miss. But as long as you vote every couple of years, you’ve done about all you can do to fulfill your civic duty. So just sit down and shut up, do your work quietly, and if you’re good, we might even give you a snack. Forced to slave away in submission for the privilege of eating dinner, and you’ve earned the right to forget about the fence and bury your head in the bullstuff.
But now you’re hip to the adjacent prisons shared by our living stock, our incarcerated indians, and our dependence on the grid, a grid just like the cubicles of fractionated cattle ranches and the gridlock of cellblock C. When you start to see the uncanny parallels, it might get a bit scary, definitely easier to pretend that you don’t notice, and no amount of some hippie bringing awareness is going to wake you up, because you were already aware of the travesties of tyranny and decided to throw in the towel. Be prepared for your words to fall onto deaf ears, I am, people don’t want to hear you preach about the sins of man and the cage they’re trapped in. But keep talking, with a lot of patience and humility, practice more than preach, and you’ll eventually get through to them, even if it’s years later as they begin their own path of understanding.
*******
So yeah, raise awareness, but I guarantee that the victims of colonization are already hyperaware of the layered assault on their own livelihoods. And in all sincere honesty, it really is hard to know how to go about repaying your true debt to society, there’s no boy scout handbook on healing the wounds of our broken population. It’s an incredibly daunting task, and the deeper you get, the more disgusted by every facet of your former life you become. You see every shortcut of convenience for the parallel shortchanging of another’s well being, and it becomes nearly impossible to function within the borders of the colony, once you realize that the razor wire is not there to keep people out.
I feel for you, and I will continue to help you along this road the best I can, but you will also have to put in some legwork on finding your role in the repairing of humanity. I’m no expert, maybe your God-given job is to sit and do nothing behind the tv. And I do feel bad for not having more 'real-world' advice for you, but that’s because there is no middle ground that I could possibly stand on that satisfies this deep need to decolonize.
I couldn’t fathom a way to start reversing the forward movement of backwards thinking, from within a system that my very presence inside of, automatically enters me to win the right to oppress. I can’t blog about Lakota healing ceremonies and consume the slave trades of another continent’s indigenous community. I can’t vote to change columbus day’s title, if it means paying my tithe to the corporate government whose ‘doctrine of discovery’ still enables the ‘manifest destiny’ of colonial superiority. And remind me which candidate’s platform was a stance on indigenous rights?
I can no longer be a mindless cog in the systematic demolition of every single culture who cares about anything other than money. So I’m not. I checked out. And this amazing relief of actual freedom has enabled me to build strong relationships and deep understanding on the rez, to create bridges of healing through compassion, and to physically put my body where my mouth is. You wanna help the indians out? Then quit funding the genocide and come over for a friendly piece of frybread, I got the recipe pretty much dialed in by now.
*******
And boy was there frybread, the smell was almost as entrancing as the powwow, the 141st annual Rosebud Fair, one of the biggest baddest dance-offs of the year. And this particular celebration, has been ongoing since its conception a hundred and forty-one years ago, with a victory gathering that followed Custer’s defeat. The only war that america had no choice but to admit they lost, and I get to be here to partake in this celebratory reminder, that a united tribe can indeed overpower a conniving government regime. There’s hope yet.
I loaded up with the Erenbrooks and we traded songs on the few miles to powwow, hmm, what if songs could be the new currency? The eldest was all decked out in his dancing regalia, he’d collected the entire ensemble piece by piece along his travels, no money, each gift from someone who crossed his path and felt his heart. Feathers and leathers and jingle bells, and he was head-to-toe covered to enter the ‘youth traditional’ category of this multi-day tournament. We parked in a sea of cars and tents, and a few tipis, but we all tried to picture the scene back in the day, nothing but a field of conical homes and horses.
Tribes came from all over, not just the Sicangu Oyate, it took weeks to travel for some, but the journey was the first leg of the celebration. And with no speed traps, they could be present in each moment of movement, living within nature, not driving a death machine through it, and as they neared the gathering, the merging lanes could get the pre-party started. Imagine a web of excitable parades that all converge at the same location of joyous merriment, sounds pretty great to me, and a bit reminiscent of our uniquely common paths back to unity. Maybe we’ll try something like it after we defeat the government too, we could make it a tradition or something.
As promised, there was a carnival and mud trucks, but I was unable to peel myself away from the dancing arbor. Kinda like at Sun Dance, but less sacred and more spectacle, complete with a light pole in place of the tree. And thirty-six drums under the shade of the perimeter, each surrounded by incredible singers, a roaming microphone amplifies the action and a boisterous announcer pumps up the volume.
We find our crew’s drum and set up behind them just in time for grand entry, the opening ceremony of the powwow, where we’ll see all of the dancers entering the arbor. All ages, toddlers to grandmas, the entire gamut of the teething process, and each sporting the official attire for one of the very different styles of dance. The Turkey feathered traditional, and the best dancers almost resemble the bird as they two-step and robotically crane their necks around the circle. The women shake their jingle dresses and arise such a clatter, each ‘bell’ covering the outfit is handcrafted from the metallic lid of a can of skoal or copenhagen, dipping tobacco, and a way more pleasant use for refuse than constructing a landfill. The grass dance has transformed chores into pastime as its sweeping steps perform the function of utility, it is how the tribe lays the grass down before setting up camp, far more efficient and far less pokey than the hokey landscaping of the lawnmower man.
But my favorite by far, are the fancy dancers. Each fast-paced dance move covered with an intricate