Wakan Tanka, wopila, thank you for this day,
for the Sun, for the Moon, for the soil of Unci Maka,
and the water that connects us to her heart.
We are so grateful for every piece of this great mystery,
and continually humbled as you reveal the depths
of the interconnectedness of existence.
Thank you for keeping us strong in heart, and prayer,
and for the perseverance to stand up
when others say that all hope is lost.
Thank you for our understanding of those who are lost themselves,
and the patience to help them along in a good way,
without becoming disheartened
when their transformation doesn’t happen overnight.
We know that this is a long road, thank you for the humility
to step back and see that it is not a race to the finish,
but an eternal journey that is happening right now.
Thank you for the constant reminders that we are on the right path,
and the reassurance that we will be victorious
as long as we carry love in our hearts.
Thank you, thank you, thank you,
for every single moment
that we get to experience this beautiful creation.
Please help us to see the ways that we can each
personally bring healing to those around us,
and in turn bring healing to ourselves.
Please help us to see the differences in each other’s walks,
as unique elements of the same, not a mechanism for separation.
Please help us to wake up and realize that we are all one love,
and help us to break free from the barriers that keep us divided.
Please help us to unlock the cages that imprison Unci Maka.
Omakiya yo.
Aho, mitakuye oiyasin.
*******
Sometimes I’m one for long goodbyes, though now I only say toksa, see you soon, but either way, I can drag one out. For days sometimes. So I’ll spare you the scene, or else I might get wrapped up in another chapter about heady space crystals or something. We finally hit the road back to Unci’s, well, actually, maybe we should stop by the camp at the Wind Cave, while we’re already in the Black Hills and all. Carolyn had been talking with a caravan of teenage twenty-somethings from the indigenous youth council, they might be stopping by the cave too, and if they get involved, then the fight for the Black Hills could very well be the next Standing Rock. They started the first one.
The next generation are not the future of the movement, they are the now, they are the ones with the uncorrupted convictions to do what is right in the moment. Undefeated by the complacency of defeat, unwilling to believe that nothing can be done, understanding that it is each and every one of our responsibilities to make a stand, regardless of whether it’s “your problem” or not. They see that any attack on our precious home, is an attack on their children’s children. They see a generation of grown adults completely wrecking any chance for their future. They see that the time is now.
And I saw them at the front of the frontline, standing on the barricade, plywood shields to slow the bullets, gas masks to slow the fog, megaphones to remind the government that children are people too, can we please think about them for a change?
The seventh generation is upon us, the rising up of those unjaded by society’s insistence on helplessness, and I’m sure glad that I don’t have to face off against them. The faces on the other side, both the flying felines of private security and the local police who were “just doing their job, although they didn’t sign up for this,” they’ve got their work cut out for them. It’s easy to overwhelm a peaceful mob of prayer with the firepower of superiority when it’s just a tipi full of indian grandmothers, but how’s it gonna feel when the interconnectedness of the internet, empowers a nationwide movement of upstanding teenagers that look like, wait a second, is that your kid?
The seventh generation is not tired of fighting, they just got enlisted, and they will inspire far more recruits at a much faster rate than big oil could possibly keep up with. No excuse of mortgage or career or bad back or “sorry, I have to focus on the kids right now, I don’t have time to think about their future.” Once the disease of destruction goes viral, and millions are instantly gramming and snapping chats from the frontline, the chains of command are certain to be riddled with weak links, as human parents are conflicted about shooting children for a corporation. Even fox news would be on our side. Maybe.
It is a shame that a few white kids being mistreated would raise more alarm than the millions who suffer everyday, or the death sentence of devastation that we insist on imprisoning our own future to, but as they come into their own, and understand the power of their privilege, they will not deny the imbalance tilted in their favor, and they will embrace their advantage as they use it to topple the entire power structure.
And they're already doing it. Kids around the world have been organizing school strikes as they demand that their governments acknowledge our climate emergency, and prioritize the planet over profit, otherwise, they see no need to invest their time in a future that we insist on condemning.
They are capable of understanding that we are all human, and that no matter the color of your skin or the country of your birth, we all have the same inherited right to life. They are capable of seeing the strength in our unity, and in our differences, as they are unwilling to accept the indoctrinations of separation. They are capable of giving up their free ride down the flooded mainstream, in order to return clean water to the rest of the planet, are you?
*******
They probably had an app or something though. We only had a couple newbies with a flip phone, a hippie who follows the cliches of his heart, and a Lakota grandma who tried to get the guy at the AT&T store to unlock her facebook account. Obviously she was our navigator, so we just googled Wind Cave, that should work, right? We knew that the camp was small, really just a couple of people keeping tabs on the ‘progress,’ we’ll hope to run into it, but it may not jump out and bite us. So when we show up at the visitors center of Wind Cave national park, Unci jumps out to bite them. She runs up on the fully armed park ranger and requests info on the resistance camp to stop the seismic testing of the cave network. She essentially asked dapl security where the frontline was. I was cracking up, kinda, a bit nervous based on her previous run-ins with authority, but once we escaped the eyes of the law, I couldn’t contain myself.
And we were never in any danger anyway, the cop was as nice as could be, we were just some confused travelers, why, he’d never even heard of seismic testing. Of course it wasn’t happening in the public sector of the park, and the out-of-sight out-of-mind philosophy of our american shuteye, has even those closest to the blasting zone convinced that it could never happen in their backyard. If only they could see the truth, that if we allow this vast cave network to collapse before the economy, well, that would be the biggest loss of all time, we’re talking about a handful of good hardworking-class american jobs here, priorities people.
Speaking of, we didn’t have time to stop by another ranger’s station on the way home, we actually had to go to work in the morning. Like, actual work, like, for money. Yuck. We took the long way home as the Sun set over the Black Hills, passed a Buffalo standing almost in the road, must be on the right path. Then three more, another omen. And as we rounded the next corner, we drove through a crowd of twenty as they cheered us on, or made sure we left, either way, we were honored to slow down and thank the freely roaming Tatanka Oyate as our path intersected with theirs.
And this crazy path I’m on, it had me publishing a book denouncing capitalism and agriculture, in the same week that I started a job at a Pumpkin patch. ‘Started a job’ might be a stretch, it was really just a few hours of day labor, but even that’s enough to cause concern in this convicted man’s uncaged heart. I’d harvested plenty of food back at the farm with little dilemma, save a fence or two, but this was certainly different.
It was the money. This wasn’t a homestead growing clean food for the nourishment of those who were there to tend the garden, this was an actual farm, operated by the produce market down the street from Unci’s. A piece of conquered land, enslaved to work for not only a single species, but for the monetary gain of a single member of our race, as they charge another for the sacred right of food. And honestly, to most it seems a noble dream of the simple life, running a fruit stand and farming out the country, and certainly even dirty bomb vegetables are healthier than the procession of the grocery aisles.
And if contributing to the delinquent vibrations of south dakota wasn’t enough, there’s also the bit about me exchanging my precious lifeforce for some worthless piece of paper, and coincidentally, through the exact industry that my heart compels me to dismantle. But, I don’t quite believe in coincidence anymore, so when our traveling companions lined up some work to replenish Unci’s vacation fund, I didn’t consider it an occupation of the empire, I saw it as a chance to taste the genetically modified predisposition of an undocumented farm worker, first hand.
*******
We combed the field with clippers as we freed the Pumpkins, though there was no where for them to run. I daydreamed of poking holes in this gated community, but before I knew it, we had two trucks loaded and we were paroled. The warden of the crew hadn’t been some tyrannical prison guard of oppression, she was as nice as could be as she worked right alongside us, even the indians. She was out doing her job, a respectable hard day’s work of putting food on the table, and so was her second in command, a mexican immigrant living in a state that would most certainly vote to send him home. If only the indians had maintained a stronger immigration policy.
We live in a country founded on the importation of population, and we still paul revere anyone with a fun european accent, but God forbid any of them darkies try to hop our wall and steal hardworking american jobs. I was the only white guy on the crew and I wasn’t even in the market for employment, but we were all they could find, they’d have hired as many caucasians as had shown up, but I was it. They even paid ten bucks an hour, cash, so it’s not that an influx of immigrants cut the wage out from under america, it’s that even dirt poor americans are too good to do the work of the dirty mexicans.
Still gonna let I.C.E. illegally alienate and immorally steal kids, as they’re locked into old walmarts for some good old fashioned indoctoring, nothing new here, plus it’s a good trial run for converting the grids of walmart into prison camps, just look at ‘em real close sometime. We can vote to deport the latest wave of the american dream, all in the name of saving jobs for the dreaming americans, but I wonder how many jobs we’d lose when the infrastructure of food supply goes home for siesta. Then there’s the consideration that monsanto’s manipulations, and john deere’s automatic milking machines, have also decreased the need for hands on the farm, but the techno-profits of future food already own washington, so we don’t get a vote on that one.
No, they don’t want us coming to the polls to fix the system they rigged, they want us caught up in a battle of ‘us’ vs ‘them.’ Divided into the democrats and republicans of a democratic republic - sure sounds pretty similar to me. And the divisiveness of democracy is meant to keep us incapable of action, much like the stagnant standstill of fractionated reservation land, and with consensus of change an impossibility, the government is free to 'govern' the path of humanity. To limit the evolution of our revolution, to slow the flow of our lifelines, and by even its earliest definitions, 'govern' meant to inhibit the power to the people.
And the next level up are the divided highways between our international relations, as our unchallenged nationalism keeps us contained within the borders of our closing minds. America vs mexico - build a wall. America vs canada - blame canada. America vs muslims - give up your civil rights as we bomb innocent civilians in any country that doesn’t bow to our superiority.
You’re dang right, we’re america, we gotta show ‘em who’s boss. Gotta have a country we can be proud of, can’t be proud of no sissy. We can’t let some other nation on the other side of the world figure out their own way of exploiting natural resources, not when we’re talking about oil and opium here, and not when we’ve already patented a perfectly good system for controlling the masses. So we’ll just fund some operatives to take out the functioning government as we stick our puppets in there, and when they decide they don’t like our ideas for their homeland either, we’ll just use their names to wage endless wars on terror-fied innocent civilians.
We trained and funded the ‘evil’ regimes of Saddam and Osama in order to displace a government that wouldn’t bend over, and then we bent them over too. Can you imagine growing up in a place where your way of life was working fine, and then the bullets of oppression sweep in and dictate who you’re allowed to be, as they take anything that can possibly turn a profit? I know a few that can sympathize.
I don’t think I can blame anyone for holding a grudge against a country who bombed my village, shot my parents, and mistreated my sister as they were blowing off steam from a hard day’s work. I’d want to blow them off too. But that wasn’t you, you didn’t do anything wrong, that was your government, and even you can agree that they’re not perfect. So the next suicide bomber that feels that passionately about how bad america must be stopped, well, I’m sure he wouldn’t come after you. You’ve got white privilege, remember?
Or do you remember after nine-eleven, when we gave up an uncivil amount of rights in order to display “shock and awe” to an entire country, when really it was just their government that we wanted? Or maybe just the cia-funded splinter cells. Or maybe just the oil and poppy fields. And do you remember how approving americans were, to wage war against a country that wasn’t even the one that we claim did the attacks? We were ready to blow every one of ‘them’ sky high, after ‘they’ attacked a country that has held their homeland hostage at misslepoint for their entire life.
So, no, you should be fine, I bet there aren’t too many foreigners that hold blanket grudges against all american capitalist pigs. But I can’t blame anyone for being upset with a country whose citizens did nothing to stop the complete annihilation of everything they ever held sacred in their life.
See what I did there? That last one also describes the mistreatment of the indians, who you would never have treated as poorly as our ancestors did, but that’s in the past - america’s current stealing of homelands, is not. You have a duty to stop your government from committing genocide in your name, at least if you want to believe that you wouldn’t have let it happen on your watch. It’s happening right now. Casting a democratic vote for the republic, will not stop the profits of the war machine, both sides are in on it, the only option is to stand up, assemble, and overthrow the US government. It’s time for revolution. If we can’t do it for ourselves, then we must do it for the innocent lives that we have yet to take, otherwise we’re no better than their murderers. And by the way, everyone’s beef is with the tyranny of our government, ours too, so once we throw them out, we’re gonna get along just fine, we have so much in common.
*******
Though we've now arrived at yet another uncommon occasion of my current contemplation, today, I touched money for the second time, although I think I managed to hardly make skin contact on the way to my pocket. A whole whopping fifteen bucks, I guess we only picked for an hour and a half, definitely drove and waited on them for twice that long, and now that I’ve started commoditizing my time again, I feel the urge to push for a raise. I don’t like this feeling of selling my soul, I’d much rather give it away. Which I did, as soon as we got home to Unci, and then she traded it for some greenbacks I can actually get down with. But, is someone who eats weed brownies, a cannibalist?
We weren’t quite tired of Squash yet, not after a measly one and a half, so I pulled out some symbiotic leftovers, Corn, Beans and Butternut, and I proceeded to top a tossed crust with the trinity as I turned the table on their preconceived notions of pizza. “I didn’t know you could do that with pizza.” Yeah, I get that a lot.
And now, even as much of an existential experience as yesterday’s visitation to the Pumpkin prison turned out, today was an actual milestone. I was publishing my first book, 'Step One: Save the World - The Journey of a Water Protector.' Just publishing it online, needs a good editor before it’s printed, and maybe a good author too. I’d spent all of last week doing a final read through, still missed so many typos, but this digital screen had to go, it was time.
Wait, not time yet, still gotta design a cover to be converted to a thumbnail for people to judge the book by. No photoshop on this computer, so I found a free shareware version and intended to design some kind of water droplet motif. Then as I was hanging out in the apartment, I found this patch, a simple water drop sewn from two pieces of scrap material, the perfect colors to catch the eye, but still keep it simple.
Unci said, “Oh, you like that? So-and-so water protector made that for me at Sun Dance.” No way. A water protector who I had served with, made this from scraps at the most sacred Sun Dance, no wonder I hadn’t felt compelled to design a cover yet, this was it. Still took a bit of tweaking, but I was yet again humbled by the depths to which the universe is looking out for me.
So now it was time, hit the library for wifi, double check each entry, and, click, published. And about five seconds after it was live, I looked at the page and realized that I had just published a book about standing up to the nefarious government of the united states - on september eleventh, exactly sixteen years after the government may or may not have allegedly concocted the greatest wool pulling of american eyes. And sixteen’s a sacred number, four fours, and then I noticed that my unabridged story of getting off the bridge, just so happened to come out to be 777 pages, a super sacred number. Uh huh. Am I still supposed to believe in coincidence at this point? Oh no, I’m way over that by now.
Still not quite over the internet, getting real close though, just need a few days of sending links to friends and a few related outside sources. Which means a few days of being ‘online,’ so a barrage of messages to tend to, or not, plus I should probably start manifesting the next thing. Staying here with Unci has been great, just what I needed, but that’s because I needed electricity and stuff. Now that I’m about to drop my coverage, I need to be in a tipi somewhere.
*******
She understands, that’s where she would rather be too, but she’s in a tough spot of having to pay rent here. And she’s even got an unleased piece of land on the rez, ten acres, but still she feels fenced into colonization. It’s not because of the meds she needs in town, or the access to a few organics, she can’t escape to the rez because she’s caught up in the prison corporation of america.
While I spent every waking hour working on the book, she did the same trying to navigate the web of cages that held her family hostage. Two of her sons and her uncle were behind the fence, and for the same crime - being native. Indians are for some reason severely over-represented in the overpopulations of south dakota’s privatized prisons, they must be as bad as the black people back home I guess, although it seems that a staggering percentage are serving hard time for non-violent crimes, some that aren’t even illegal in many states.
A lot are caught up in the cartelled meth ring on the rez, an imported intoxicant that conveniently made its debut just six months after a brand new prison finished construction, and sat empty for six months, and now it is disproportionately filled with indigenous americans. Obviously mere coincidence, our corporate government would never intoxicate the indians in order to exploit their way of life for a profit. Oh yeah, I guess we did do that a few times. Well, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
And they don’t, the overcrowded cellblocks of many facilities sit in a dilapidated state, but no need to renovate, they’ve already got a full roster of clients. It’s much more profitable to just build another one, plus it provided all those american construction jobs, as america super-sizes the sentence we hand our children. And just like the road crew in the forest, the free masons who put up the walls of the system, only get paid if prisons keep going up. If you build it, they will come. Especially when we have a lower class race that no decent white american will blink an eye at mistreating, haven’t yet at least.
So there’s the masonry bit, plus the hardworking billy clubs of racist guards who finally found a job where they can be themselves, and even the prisoners can find work within these walls. Sure, they work for pennies on the dollar, and just to buy commissary snacks to supplement what we try to pass off as minimal nutritional value, but at least they get free room and board. Of course, the work they do gets marked up and sold to the highest bidder, and low labor cost means higher profit, but that’s just doin bidness - said every slave owner ever. Made in america, don’t you worry, although their hands just aren’t as nimble as the tiny little chinese fingers that stitched your wardrobe together, maybe we should just send the asians to prison camps. Again.
And all that stuff is on top of the government check that we send them, well, that taxpayers send them, and just like any government handout, it only weakens the resolve of everyone involved. We privatized the prisons, meaning that they are now run by privately owned for-profit corporations, but we still have to pay them out of our pockets. So how is this setup anything more than just a further drain on the system? Ah, they have business savvy, they can squeeze a dollar out of thin air, or thin inmates, they don’t have to answer to anyone but the shareholders, who are all about cutting food costs and increasing the customer base. They make more money the tighter they can pack them in, as they innovate new ways of lowering their quality of life.
And you thought that this world out here was riddled with disconnection, in there, the separational state is even more instantly gratified. The longer we can keep them broken, the longer we can get paid, plus we want to make sure they come back and see us. Concrete cubicles with fluorescent bulbs on twenty-four hours a day, and outside time sees four more concrete walls, a little Sun, but not even a visual connection with Unci Maka.
Many went in for minor offenses, but in order to survive inside, they were forced to become full-fledged hardened criminals. Gotta join a gang, based on race, and just so happens that most of the guards side with the supremest gang of them all, who in here carry their privilege proudly. Sure, you’re just in here for having a little bit of weed, a ‘drug’ that was purchased legally for recreation, one I’ve never known to cause anyone to do anything more than play call of duty. But now that you’re officially a ‘bad guy,’ it’s time to start acting like one.
Ok, now I’m obviously exaggerating a bit, must be stoned or something, there’s no way that today’s progressive views on legalizing such a useful medicine, would allow for the strict sentencing of our outdated misconceptions that schedule pot to the same timeslot as heroin. Sure, maybe it was initially villainized in part to criminalize a darker class of 3/5ths voters, those who only recently received their freedom, so how bad could they possibly miss it? But that’s the old america, back when it was still socially acceptable for cops to shoot black people, though I guess fads do seem to make a comeback.
*******
I think pot might be here to stay for a while, hopefully at least seven years, because that is how long Carolyn’s son is facing for possessing a tiny amount of marijuana. Today. In america. Seven years in prison. First time offender. Imagine how different your life would be if you had to pay seven years of innocence for that teenage dimebag. He’s no teenager either, probably about my age really, and his girlfriend is eight months pregnant. Stuck on the outside with a rent payment that used to be paid by the job that he just lost for no call/no show. What is she supposed to do now? How will she survive? Without doing something illegal at least? And how will his seven-year-old son have any chance of standing up to his oppressors, when he’s never even seen his father outside of the visitation room’s digital screen? Don’t worry though, they’re building a juvenile detention center right down the street.
Well, maybe he should have thought about all that before he broke the law. Before he walked into a legal dispensary and legally purchased two capsules of cannabis oil, which then dried out as they sat on a shelf in the privacy of his own home, and as the police came in for a completely different alleged offense that he was never charged for, they found two empty capsules with the slightest residue of evaporated marijuana concentrate. He got caught with two old empty weed pills in his own home, and now he’s facing seven years in prison. Makes me feel sick to my stomach, good thing pot cures nausea.
No worries though, not that anybody was, he should get a pretty fair trial from the white judge and his golfing buddy, the white district attorney, too bad it isn’t par for the course to include his public pretender, I mean defender. Everybody knows you can get away with murder with a good lawyer, even if you’re black, but you also have to be rich. And guess what, he wasn’t. He wasn’t some gangbanging hustler with pockets full of cashflow, he was an expecting father who worked an old-fashioned american construction job as he fixed up the nursery. A few grand might save his son’s future, but what can he do about it from behind bars? At least the court will appoint you one of the lawyers who isn’t good enough to get actual white clients, coincidentally, that same court profits the most from a guilty verdict, oh that’s right, I don’t believe in coincidence. But for her son’s sake, we’ll give his lawyer the benefit of the doubt, cause I doubt he’s got any other benefits in his corner.
Unci was on the phone constantly, including a monitored call from her son almost everyday, that’s nice at least, even if she had to spend her disability check to buy a fifty dollar phone card every couple of days. And it only worked to call her phone, which meant that she needed to relay some messages for him, like telling his unborn son that he loved him, and telling his lawyer that he’d like to get out sooner than later.
You’d think even the court appointed lackey could figure that one out, but Unci couldn’t even get him to return her call. Her son didn’t even have an arraignment date yet, and from the inside they said he should, so he should probably talk to his lawyer and get sorted out of here. She called their office, but got filtered out as unimportant by the receptionist whose primary job was to screen