Creator, thank you for this life,
I am so humbled by all that you provide in this abundant universe.
Thank you for this way to pray,
and for helping my heart to resonate with it so deeply.
Please help me to share this connection with my brothers and sisters,
to inspire them to begin their own journey of transformation,
and to provide guidance as they face the lessons I’ve already learned.
Please help me with humility,
I’m grateful for the gifts you’ve given me,
but I know that I must continue to exercise them everyday.
It’s hard to stay humble in a world built on ego,
but your constant reminders of the wisdom to be gained by others,
help me to remember my walk on this path,
and that I have so much farther to travel.
Thank you for keeping my heart in such a way
that I have no fear of this material world,
that I feel connected to the universe
as it allows me to move across Unci Maka unencumbered,
without doubt that she will take care of me,
and with the perseverance to take care of her along the way.
Please help to keep all of the water protectors walking in a good way,
with prayer in their hearts as they move along their onward journeys.
And wherever they may be across our Turtle Island,
please help to keep them safe, warm, and nourished,
as they receive the healing that we all dearly need,
so that we may continue to do the work that you’ve asked of us.
We are so lucky to be alive
at this critical point of our planet’s evolution,
and grateful to carry this responsibility through her metamorphosis,
it is an honor, not a burden,
and once again I pray that my brothers and sisters
will wake up in time to join us.
Aho, mitakuye oiyasin.
*******
Well, book’s done, guess it’s probably time to move on. The first book I mean, I can probably still drag this one out a bit longer. I knew that I wanted to have a ceremony when it was done, a way to move past this step of the journey and into the next. Figured it woulda been cool to do it at Sun Dance, but obviously there’s some better plan in mind, so let’s get to it.
One last visit to the book of faces before I disappear again, my brother Ziggy always on my mind, but he’s still a few weeks away from the dakotas. Folks at the enbridge camp still need a chef, west coast protectors want my rolling pen, there’s some kind of youth gathering up north, east coast always calling me, and texas camp recruiting, and then in about two minutes it became apparent what direction I was heading.
My ride was driving through pierre tomorrow, luckily it doesn’t take me long to pack, and it gave me the evening to spend with Unci as I patched up my cords for the road. And right on schedule, which happens a lot when you don’t have a plan, Carolyn’s phone rang and I ran outside to help my family find a parking space, turns out it takes a little talent to situate a bus full of tipis and excited kids. Yes. I’m rolling out with the Erenbrooks, what could possibly be any better than this? Oh yeah, how about if Unci decides to hop in as we head north for our first return to Standing Rock? Epic.
It was almost the equinox, an actual holiday based on a real calendar, not the capital buildings, and also the one year anniversary of the Erenbrooks’ initial debut as water protectors. They thought it would be fitting to celebrate at home, Unci wanted to check out this youth gathering thing nearby, and I couldn’t imagine a better place to turn the page on my next chapter. So, road trip it is.
They were traveling with their pickup truck too, I guess it’s a little much to pack up the bus every time you head to town, so I volunteered to drive it so that they could manifest their pilgrimage to destiny, as a family. A beat up truck, a trailer overflowing with gear, a “No uranium mining in the Black Hills” sign on the back, a long haired hippie and an indian grandma on the way to Standing Rock - nope, not conspicuous at all. Especially when we’re caravanning with a tipi bus that only goes forty-five. And we’re all on the government’s watch list. Well, might as well keep them entertained while they tune-in.
First stop, let’s see what this whole gathering deal is about, Unci’s the closest we have to a teenager, but it’s always nice to cross paths with water protectors of any age. Of course, as we roll into a riverside field of tents and tipis, we’re greeted by the most rugged of security officers - Smokey welcomes us back to camp. What? This is no youth summit, although I’m sure the cool kids congregated somewhere outside of the old folks tipi, no, this gathering was for us.
We just caravanned with nine water protectors, each with our own heartstring pulling in this direction, as our personal paths coalesced into one, and the next thing we know, we’re setting up camp at an unpublicized water protector healing gathering. This is such a cool life. And we weren’t the only ones living it, a bunch of the couple hundred attendees also showed up unaware of why they were here, wait, was this a vacation? (inside joke, sorry) Yet again humbled by the intricacies woven into my path, and reassured that I am in exactly the right place, and we still had five more days of reunion and celebration as we stumbled in on opening night. Holy Buffalo.
*******
Yeah, Buffalo stew and frybread, always, plus a few other round meals a day, completely free of charge, although you can do dishes if even that is beyond your budget. Not too many Rosebuddies, Smokey and a camp from White Clay were across the field, and there was a couple who knew the Erenbrooks from the fall, though we slightly remembered crossing paths as their way out had coincided with my way in. And then there was a fellow I had only met once, Patrick, the guy who had set up the MASH tent before Henry took it over and invited me to set up shop. Needless to say, we hit it off pretty quick.
He’d been spending time with the indigenous communities of california since camp, before that, he had been a city boy from LA, but after you’ve been through what we have, it’s a little tough to go back to sleep with all that noise. He’d learned that pre-colonialism, california was home to over 200 distinct languages, two hundred vernaculars rooted with the Redwoods, two hundred ways to pray, at least until we homogenized it with the king’s english. But, I thought that we were free from england, that we performed our patriotic duty and stood up to the oppressive regime that only wanted our money at all costs, guess I’m just another misinformed american or something.
He also enlightened us to other omissions from the his-story books, like the part about there being zero record of any in-fighting between the tribes of california. Pretty remarkable considering the language barriers, although, I guess a real language without the obstruction of abstraction would be a bit easier to interpret. When a language has evolved with the Earth around it, you can literally just look to the land for a translation, it’s only when you make up silly ideas like ownership and religion, that the native tongue has a hard time understanding what in the world you’re talking about. An indigenous language symbolized by pictures of the landscape and the characters, connects the reader’s synesthetic vibration perception to the physical location of the rooted words, not some abstract empty space between two closed off ears.
But in our english textbook, it says that the natives were savages, brutal heathens, violent pagans, cannibals, and probably liberals too. Human nature is naturally bent towards killing, and the only way to combat our terrible tendencies is to murder, maim, and imprison any who think otherwise. Wild humans are a horrible people that we had an american duty to eradicate, so that we could build the greatest civilization in his-story. But actually, it turns out that the indians are pretty cool, so why on Earth would our government regulated handbooks on being a proud american, lead us to believe such a vastly skewed version of our nation's past? You’re kidding, right?
The reports of the very first european explorers of the ‘new’ world, were of only the most open arms of a peaceful people. It was the next wave across the atlantic, those that were already openly armed, that provided the photoshopped sketches that compelled a fledgling nation to fulfill their moral obligation of mass murder. Not all of us could hand out a blanket sentence though, so we just sent them packing, at gunpoint, through the snow, without food, but they were so glad to be alive that there were tears of joy all along the trail. They headed out west with stars in their eyes, and once they escaped the city lights of the Virginia Company, they set up camp and regained their bearings, but they built their cook shack in someone else’s kitchen.
Back before the Virginia Company settled on america, when massive trees still filled the forests of the earliest oceanside evolution, there was plenty of this world to go around. Just enough, in fact. The coastal ecosystem was far more vibrant than virginia beach, and there was always enough food for weary travelers to stop in for dinner. I bet we probably just killed most of that first bunch, but any that escaped were certainly taken in by their inland neighbors. We weren’t gonna stop at the privatized beach of course, and as we advanced into the island, we successfully displaced village after village as we flooded them with white power. As the westward bound genocide continued, entire tribes were forced to relocate, but they found themselves overpopulated in a new neighborhood that was already at capacity.
It’s easy to be friendly when you’ve only ever known a life of complete abundance, but once your family is threatened by gunpoint on one side, and starvation on the other, it’s a bit tougher to keep up neighborly relations all the time. And it’s only instinct to protect your family, plenty of advice from the animal kingdom on this one, somebody’s gotta go. They may have even tried to work it out diplomatically, with a series of riddles or physical challenges or something, but eventually, yeah, the bigger tribe pushed the smaller one around. This one displaced that one, who displaced another, and enemies were created. There was now ‘us’ and ‘them’ among the ‘them’ of US history, and we were happy to document the savage behavior of the natives we had starved out.
Oh, they’re horrible, don’t feel bad about killing these animals, plus, if you don’t, they might scalp you. No. The first american scalping was done by a white man as he removed a native’s samsonite strength, it was already a practice in europe when we introduced it here, and we offered a cash reward for this proof of indian murder. We started this war against the peaceful inhabitants of the Garden of Eden, period.
*******
Nice story, but the indigenous americans were supreme warriors, it really was the home of the brave, even I’ve bragged about their superiority in battle as they defeated the offense of uniting states. World class warriors, and world class horsemen, they even had raiding parties to steal Horses from enemy tribes. But, Horses aren’t native americans, they were brought here by the invaders, so how could these raiding parties have been a thing before us? And how could the indians be better than us at bareback riding, if they’re new to the Horse race?
Ah, I see, it’s the same way that they are better battlers than we are too, even without a long history of duking it out. They were simply better than us. It’s what I’ve been saying all along. The native americans were still a part of the world around them, still a part of nature, still a part of evolution, at the very front of it, in fact. They were undeniably more evolutionarily advanced than the backwards fall of european descent.
It’s hard to grow fat and lazy when your food’s not grown in a cage, you have to actually work for it, you have to be fast, and silent, and with an Eagle’s eye. (8x that of a colonized human) No boomsticks to sit back and relax on the hunt, only convivial tools that are powered by your own strength. And when everything you eat is also at the peak of its evolution and tuned to the land, it connects you to Unci Maka in a real way. I’ve eaten raw wild Buffalo heart and it gave me a twenty minute burst of intense clarity and precision, this is not some made up fantasy of a romanticized way of life, this is the way humans were designed to operate.
And if you couple the physical prowess of indian superiority, with their intricate understanding of the land they were defending, yeah, I’d imagine they probably were pretty unstoppable on the battlefield. And it starts to explain why we had no choice but to resort to massacre and murder, especially if they started praying too. Or even better yet, we could just write up a treaty, a magic piece of paper written in a language that makes no sense to them, or the rest of life on Earth, but that doesn’t matter, we’re not gonna do any of the things we say anyway.
*******
And that’s our legacy, a lying cheating double crossing people with no honor system, but even if I’m to assume that everything I’ve been taught about the legitimacy of our constitution is pure fabrication, do you actually expect me to believe that the indians didn’t fight with each other? They lived in nature, and sometimes animals in nature get in fights. Passions rise and moments get heated, they were only human, after all, and it must have happened often enough that the Lakota even had an official policy upon death. If you murder someone from another village, then it is your duty to leave your own life at home and replace the son that you took away, you move to the other village and the mother of your victim adopts you, as you repay your vibrational debt to society. Talk about a rehabilitation program.
And as far as war, no mother wants to send her son off to battle, which is convenient for the matriarchal societies who would much prefer to talk it out. Without the patriarch’s power struggle of ownership and ego, the grandma in charge would rather invite any old stranger in for dinner before she’d ever call for an attack. Bad stuff still happens though, and she’d be prepared for self defense, but just remember that her strongest warriors knew that a love tap on the shoulder was far more powerful than a drop of bloodshed, and immediately settled any dispute on the spot.
Somehow that sounds way better than our current conflict abroad, you know, the one that’s been going on longer than a lot of the soldiers have even been alive. But history’s written by the victors, and if we keep at that one long enough, maybe we’ll eventually win. Plus, if we can manage to eradicate any hope for their survival in the process, we might even be able to convince america that they attacked us first. They didn’t. We started it. For oil. We are the warlords. We are the bullies. We are the bad guys. We are still invading distant lands for money. Mass murdering for money. And once the war machine runs out of foreigners to execute, do you really think your privileged life is going to be more important, than money?
*******
Speaking of money and oil and governments and indians and all that stuff, which seems to be a common rhetoric among my motifs, next thing I know I’m being recruited for another frontline. A few protectors from a Line 3 camp stopped by ours as we were setting up, and eager eyes widened once they found out about my newly found free agent status. I’d known about a camp on Ojibwe land, the White Earth reservation, whose indian name coincidentally means, ‘where there is an abundance of white clay.’ I’d considered going there after Standing Rock, and I knew several people who were there now. It was a cultural learning camp, a prayer camp, and everybody got to build their own wigwam. That sounds cool, I’m definitely in the market for some action, and they’ve got an extra seat for me. What better place to recruit than a gathering of the dedicated, tell me more, like is so-and-so still there? “Well, actually, we’re at a different camp than that one.”
There were three camps in close proximity to the construction zone, friendly, but not working in conjunction like the last three I was at. This was an action camp. Still cool, I specifically remember saying that I was down to get dirty, so what do you got going on? They were currently halting excavation as often as they could, which meant locking down, which meant getting arrested. For those that aren’t hip to the slang of the youngsters, I’ll give you a lowdown of a lockdown.
You sneak into the construction area, either at night, or you can simply swarm an active machine, as the indifferent working-class operator is happy to take the rest of the day off. Then you wrap your arms through a vital piece of the excavator’s componentry, stick them through either end of your ‘lockdown,’ which is essentially a large metal pipe segment, and you cuff your hands together on the inside. So now when the Tigercops show up because you’ve stopped their illegal digging, they can’t just shoot you and take you to jail, now they have to get a crew to cut through this big steel pipe before they can uncuff you, to cuff you.
And maybe they don’t even hurt you in the process. Takes three or four hours to get you free before they can lock you up, no permanent damage is done, and although they’re back in business, you did cost them a half a day of progress. And if you can manage to get someone to lockdown everyday, it ends up being quite substantial. Sure, they end up increasing their unlicensed security details, but that’s exactly how Standing Rock started. And more guards means more money they had to spend, and the longer the project is drawn out, and the more likely that investors will back out as more protectors join the fight, and our mother gets to live another day as we pull the plug on the machine.
So, yeah, I’m pretty down to do some covert-ops, can’t keep preaching revolution and not living it, plus, it’ll make for a good book someday. It’s about time, which I’ll have plenty of while I’m sitting in jail, and I’m sure you guy’s have a lodge, right? “Nope.” Woah, what?
It wasn’t a prayer camp. It was an action camp. They had several strong activists who were all about action, but they were also atheists, and they didn’t want to run them off with a focus on prayer. I see. I get it, I’ve been there too, and if I’d been told to, “just pray on it,” I’d have walked out the door as well. You don’t have to believe in God to feel a deep need to protect our planet at all costs, in fact, it’s those acting in the name of God who are destroying most of it. I’m not knocking anyone for their beliefs or disbeliefs, especially if they’re still standing up for what they do believe in, and especially if it’s protecting the Earth. You don’t have to pray to understand the scientific importance of preserving the world we depend on for survival, you actually have to be an idiot not too.
I could be at a camp with nonbelievers and be just fine, I’m a science man too, but it’d be tough not to have a lodge, especially knowing the physical benefits of melting off the teargas and clearing clogged lungs. I can lock arms with an atheist as we stop the machine, they are just as much my brother as anyone else. We can talk quasars and quarks and evolution and revolution, and I can not preach, but I cannot not pray. I’m all about doing some crazy stuff to stop the government tyranny, but if you expect me to go out there without prayer in my heart, now that’s just plain crazy. And I’m gonna be singing songs the whole while. Four hours is a long time to have the ears of a few on the other side, I’m sure the cutting equipment is pretty loud, but my heart vibrations are quite strong these days.
Again, no judgements at all, in fact, I think camps like this are probably vital until the masses wake up, we need every bit of help we can get, but I can’t personally be at a camp like that. I need to pray. So it’s cool that there are different camps fighting the same fight in different ways, not in competition, but in corroboration. Praying’s not for everyone, getting arrested’s not for everyone, so now we have something for everyone. The only downside is that I was somewhat an atheist before Standing Rock, and many others found their initial connection there as well, so to me, the spiritual waking up of a resistance camp is one of the most vital components of the whole thing. But that’s me. You do you. I will help you in any way that I can, but I can’t go with you. I can pray for you though.
*******
And I can fix your car. Maybe. While we were talking about camp, one of their homies came by to announce that the car wouldn’t start, they were clueless, so I hopped up and got to work. A few of us poked around a bit, Smokey included, and then we jumped the solenoid as a temporary solution, just had to start it with a screwdriver. And an hour later I found myself under Patrick’s truck fixing a ball joint, had a ball, and a joint. Not really, but I did charge him a cigarette, freaking capitalist, but I’m just stoked to have a new camp career outside of the kitchen.
I guess fixing cars is a bit counterproductive in the particular resistance movement I’m a part of, but so was cooking on propane. Now, healing the water, that sounds more like it. Early in the morning there was a riverside water healing ceremony, we gathered around, each offering Tobacco and praying with the liquid of life, and then sang a few water songs. “Unci maka yuonihan po, mni wiconi wakan yelo” Then back to bed, and an hour later on my way to get coffee, I stopped by the scientific counterpart for this morning’s wet vibrations.
The Lovewater truck had been at Standing Rock, but in Oceti, and possibly before it all turned into ice. This vehicle was amazing. We need a million more of these off the road. It was a big delivery truck, like a bread truck, but instead of gluten globs clogging up the highway, this thing purified water. And not your mama’s brita filter either. He had the technical jargon down to a science, and the gist of it is that our water is pretty darn polluted. By a wide array of toxicants. There’s of course the easy stuff to pronounce, like oil and lead and uranium and fertilized farm feces, but there’s also enough big words in there to cause a nuclear reaction. So a one-size-fits-all filtration system, won’t cut this hard of water, even if it’s bigger than a bread truck. Each pollutant requires a unique process in order to remove it from our life, so every time he arrives at a new water source, like the Cannonball River, he performs a detailed analysis of just how dirty they’ve been pissing upstream. Inside the truck is a fully customizable array of cleansing components, really heady science kinda stuff, and after he’s assembled the appropriate combination for our particular particulates, the water flows through and is available at spigots and bottle fillers on the side of the truck.
So cool. Even tasted like water. It kept our entire gathering hydrated, and provided a perfect locale for water cooler conversations. Like, about how we need more of these, one at every camp for sure, but probably one in every town. Doesn’t even have to be on a truck. Filter stations along dirty rivers, built onto ocean liners, or even a facility housed on the massive garbage patch floating in the pacific, not just providing water for us, but healing the trauma we’ve circulated into all of life. Of course, we all know why that plan would never work, at least not in the current mainstream.
I grew up in the woods, we played in the creek every summer afternoon, but good God don‘t drink that water. We were upstream from the super toxic lake energized by the surrounding ‘duke power state park,’ and far enough downhill from ‘dupont state forest,’ but our state of emergency response was still owned by agriculture, even if they did have to pay the farmhands nowadays.
I was taught not to drink the water, because animals were pooping in it. I of course imagined Deer and Squirrels and Jackalopes, but I’m guessing they probably meant the claustrophobic confines of cattle ranches. It takes a lot of water to raise a Cow, and a lot of work, so it’s super convenient to slap a feedlot right next to a merry little stream. The herd get cool fresh water, much more natural than some stagnant watering trough full of Mosquitos, and I’ve even seen where the trickle was completely rerouted to provide maximum cash flow. I’ve also seen cornfed Cows emptying their liquid bowels, just feet upstream from where your ribeye took its last drink. Well done fellas.
The thirsty stampedes stomp out all of the creekside grass as they crowd around the fecal fountain, or in it, seems that the cages of this desolate wasteland offer little reprieve from the beating sun. It then bakes a field of Cow pies, that even without doorstep delivery, still get washed away from this concentrated camp.
You’d think that animals would instinctively know not to unload where they drink, and I’m guessing that the ones we allowed to keep their instincts, do, but they also have the entirety of nature to evacuate, all two or three acres that are left. Plus, animals that live a natural life, excrete a naturally nontoxic byproduct, it is actually quite critical to the circular flow of nutrition.
It’s also polite to offer a little privacy, the natural world doesn’t overcrowd the same stall, they spread out their load of manure all on their own. It’s then far more absorbable by the ecological waste management services, a much more moderate portion for the microbiology, an easier breath for the treetop canopy, and the water is free to runoff with it’s own diluted dreams of life. And then, when you consider the nomadic nomenclature of the traveling herds, like the ones I heard about leading the parade, it does seem a bit improbable that they’d be able to back up the plumbing of their planetary potty.
But yeah, if we artificially inflate their population and their stomachs, and lock them into a shithole apartment with close neighbors, the overwhelming stench of their warming methane floats skyward like the combined vibrations of the lodge, while the downstream disease keeps the threat of dysentery alive. Oh, and carbon emissions may be a bad thing, but methane is about twenty times as destructive to the atmosphere, and pretty much exclusively provided by the cattle industry as it is the second largest contributor to climate change. Plus all the exhausted truck drivers required to bring the farm to table, and the carbon capturing ecosystems that were plowed under to contain all the cornfed beef, and the corn. But it’s still not the most toxic byproduct of all, the prolific poison that’s even more widespread than polluted water, the absolute worst contamination of corporate america, yup, dolla dolla bills ya’ll.
*******
Oh no, your naturally abundant water cycle, the one that literally just springs up out of the ground, is somehow unsafe to drink anymore? Well, no worries, we’ll be happy to lead pipe it directly to the comfort of your owned home. Oh no, our lead pipes are even more poisonous than the previously poopy water outside? We still have no worries, here’s a case of poop-proof plastic bottles that we purified out of your local lead-based sewage system. Plus, you’re shopping local.
It’s just good business, really. Choose a product with high demand and limited supply, check. Eliminate competition, check. Outsource materials, check. Create global craze over the availability of your product as you artificially regulate the market and raise prices according to maximum profits, yup. Cities are already running out of hydration, even the flooded streets of miami are in hot water as the salt of the sea is spilli