IV. The Return
Thousands stood strong, for billions at home,
Under wide open skies, they were never alone,
No bad guys to blame, only those not awake,
The morning has come, how do you like your steak?
*******
What an incredible journey this last year has been. Even before Standing Rock really. This time a year ago, I was wrapping up production on the biggest project of my career, the one closest to my heart, the one I had given up everything else to pursue. Then I found myself amid the hustle of LA, chasing fame and fortune, then San Fran, Houston, Austin, Denver, and in Boulder I discovered some hippies trying to make change, not dollars. From that point on, my heart was pulled in only one direction, didn’t much matter what my head thought about it.
I arrived at camp and immediately felt a sensation I’d never known, this was home, in a way that even home had never felt. I found family, I found love, I found purpose, I found God, I found steaks buried in the snow. My entire life had been leading to this, preparing me for the road ahead as I embarked into my future. My destiny. And the rest is history, or mystory, whatever, all I know is that it felt really cool to be driving past Echo 3 as we pulled back into Rosebud camp.
The first time I showed up here was right after the first blizzard of the season, everything was whiter than the populous of bismark. The people here before me hadn’t known what to expect, how could they? They prepared the best they could, but three feet of sideways snow can be a bit overwhelming, believe me. Then, when the winter was fading as we packed our bags under threat of invasion, the ice was just barely starting to thaw. Once again, we were witness to liquid water, but most of camp was still under several feet of snow, there were even cars completely buried in the stuff. I had not known this place in any other condition, though the camp had been operating throughout the summer months, ever since the previous spring’s last snowfall. I’d never seen grass in Standing Rock, as all of my traveling companions had, which made this surreal experience all the more incredible.
*******
Waves of joy at moments remembered,
waves of sadness as we recall its fate.
Such a fortress of strength that kept us all safe,
yet we were unable to save it as we fled its destruction.
This sacred space has been revisited before us,
prayer ties hang as reminders of transformation,
Unci Maka evolves through adversity right before our eyes.
The inipi is no longer, the altar has moved on,
only the grandfathers remain
as a new breath of life enters this world.
Where the lodge once resided, now lives a field of sage,
remnants of the seeds planted
through the prayers of our ceremony.
This place will forever resonate
in the hearts of those who answered the call,
those who gave up everything
to fight for the frozen water of a distant land,
those who arrived naive and weak and broken,
and through the struggle of surviving,
walked away as one united tribe.
We are family,
we are all related,
we are the water protectors.
*******
And we don’t give a flying Goose, we’re camping here tonight, we already proved that it will take an armored bulldozer to move us, so bring it on. We should be good though, the Rosebud side is supposedly still on the reservation, probably a good idea to only stay one night though. And probably shouldn’t invite ten thousand of our closest friends. Maybe though.
We were rolling a dozen deep, and we picked up two more locals for the evening, I hadn’t known them at camp, but they had been the closest native allies to most of our crew. She painted a picture of the events following our questionable eviction, and she had actual photos too. Not of the demolition in camp, but of the division of the tribe. They kicked us out, claimed an imminent flood that never occurred, which turns out was controllable by dam and would simply have slowed the pipe's construction further, so definitely no flood. But we already knew that something was fishy without poking holes in the ice.
Though, there had been a flood of donations sent directly to the tribe. It was so hard to find info from home, so of course one would assume that an amazon shipment directly to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe itself, would be the safest bet. And it was safe, still is, she showed us photos of the warehouse packed full of the choicest supplies that never made it to camp.
And after the armed bulldozers were done, there was still debris to collect, so the tribe hired a crew of their own, like, their immediate relatives, for a pretty substantial paycheck as they milked it for weeks. And the council members all got $1500 beaded pendants, while their members struggled to stay warm. The nepotism of the tribal government is what creates the ‘have’ and ‘have-not’ dynamic of the rez, which explains why they wanted us out of the way of the pipe, while the people begged us to stay.
This closed community is the ultimate example of how just a few generations of colonization, can completely ruin an entire population’s unified way of life. Now divided into ‘us’ and ‘them,’ only a fraction hold the power, and the fear of scarcity compels them to hold it tight. We don’t even have to keep close tabs on oppression, they’re doing it all on their own. This is not some problem with the indians, this is a small scale model of the framework that constructs our own cage. We’ve had millennia to evolve to the poisons of our ways, they’ve had but a few years, it doesn’t mean that we’re more suited for survival, it means that we’re more suited to accept defeat. To welcome it. I’m not talking about agriculture this time, I’m talking about money, and to see how it has completely demolished Standing Rock, is to see how it is destroying the rest of our planet as well.
We must stop. We must remember that the only thing of value in this material world, is life itself. We must stand up and demand a new system, one where profit plays no role in the health of our family. There’s only one way to remove the dollar signs from the equation of life - We must eradicate the controlling force that fuels every injustice on Earth. We must burn all the money.
*******
Now that sounds like a radical idea, and I mean that in the most ninja turtle sense of the word, totally awesome dude. Cowabunga. If there was a mass movement to hit the streets and light the night on fire, it would be a most impressive light show from space. And much like how the perceived destruction of a forest fire is actually the natural mechanism for the rebirth of life, as the smoke cleared, we would emerge anew. It’s like the rent strike thing though, it could only work if enough people signed up, in fact, the two might be complimentary components of the same plan, it is gonna be a bit tough to pay rent without money after all.
The rent strike ends with us flooding the streets anyway, and by that point people will see that our plan is working, they will certainly be hesitant, but once it is apparent that the dollar will not hold its value any longer, well, people do love burning stuff. And remember how in south korea they hit the streets with candles and defeated their oppressive government? Just imagine the impact of the citizens burning pictures of presidents as they denounce capitalism’s grip on their lives. Money is the mechanism of ownership, so as you eliminate it from your life, they will no longer own your time.
I’d imagine that those with the most of it will feel that they have the most to lose, and it would certainly level the playing field, creating an evenly balanced world without personal privilege, but they deny having that anyway, so it should be all good. And the wealthiest, the one percent who control over half of all the money, they’re definitely not jumping on board, so isn’t it just going to increase their grip on the rest of us? Sure, if you burn all your cash and still pretend it has value, but assuming that the concept of currency is as charred as the physical representation of it, then they’re just gonna be left with stacks of trash and no butler to take it out.
A fun way to kick off the festivities could be a nationwide “day of non-compliance”, a scheduled day on which none of us spend a single dollar. The cogs of the machine would begin to jam up, the system is not designed to operate without the lubrication of greasy money, and it would be even more spectacular if we all decided to call in sick too. It could provide a toe in the shallow end before we take the plunge into the depths of the moneyless pit, but if any of it’s ever gonna work, we just have to commit to the stunt as it all begins to ramp up.
And how will we survive? The same way any country survives after they topple their government, or after the Earth topples it for them, we’ll come together as a unified people and help each other. Sounds like a joke to most, but how do you possibly expect we’ll recover as the growing rate of natural disasters exceeds the cells of the fema camps? We are going to be left in the streets without government support whether we like it or not, wouldn’t it be easier to do it on our own terms, while we still have a society, electricity, phones, internet, fuel, and farms? Wait, maybe I do like that other plan better.
We’re going to be in charge, not some paper pusher behind a desk, money doesn’t grow on trees, and it doesn’t make them grow either. Every bit of food that we grow to feed ourselves now, will still grow. The water will still flow. We’re not talking about my big picture of a perfect world, this is just the short-term solution, so maybe still some pollution, we still have a farm and a truck and oil and all the things, there’s just no invoice or debt to waste our energy on as we are forced to cut quality out of our own life or others.
Cities will certainly have a challenge ahead, but they’ll also have an entire financial district with plenty of time on their hands to actually do something of worth. It will definitely be easier if we’ve prepared ourselves a bit, learned how to get by with minimal means, planted food instead of grass, or asphalt, but again, we’re on the verge of either doing that anyway, or just giving up as we prove unfit to survive.
And as for the logistics of the burn, there are a couple of clouds to clear up, like, the ecological impact of sending billions up in smoke. Yeah, I’m not sure about that one, but I can’t imagine it could be any more toxic up there than it is down here.
Even if we have to continue polluting as we figure it out, we will naturally transition to a more natural way. Without the incentives of money, we’ll no longer build just to build, we’ll only create what we need. We’ll no longer use unsustainable products and poisonous plastics just because they are cheaper. We’ll no longer eat inferior foods just because it’s all we can afford. We’ll no longer burn oil to export dirty oil as we import other oil to grease our pockets. We’ll no longer dump endless emissions for needless industries or equally idiotic commutes. No one would sit in rush hour traffic to drive into a city with empty offices, when there’s more food and family and work to be done in their own community. So, without the calculators of wall street, I can’t quite add it all up, but I’m pretty sure that destroying all the money will create a much more pleasant atmosphere around the globe.
Ok then big guy, what about the obvious flaw in this silly idea of humanity actually working together to create a better world for their children? Um, nobody even uses paper money anymore. It’s all debits and credits and direct deposits and wire transfers and paypal and bitcoins and online banking. What are we going to do, burn our computers?
You gotta pretty good point there, our money’s not even based on money anymore, which hasn’t been based on gold for a long time, and with each transaction away from tangible currency, the banks have only tightened their grip on our lifelines. Money’s not a real thing, I’ve said that all along, but it’s even truer when it’s all ones and zeroes. Or fractions.
So what can you do to help this movement when all of your funds are tied up in wells fargo? Well, first of all, you should have divested from them a long time ago, they are not a good company, they specifically fund the corporations that are destroying our planet. Sure, it’s hard to beat their convenient locations, which means that once you realize the graveyards their fortunes are built on, it’ll be that much easier to pull out.
But if you’re serious about kicking this deadly habit, then just visit the bank and go through the withdrawals. I doubt they’d like that very much, poor old personal megabankers, especially once we start trending on twitter. If enough of us flood in before they get bailed out, they will collapse. And that’s not even factoring in the mass mortgage default of the rent strike, I’m just talking about they’re fictional practices of fractional lending.
I can’t give wells fargo credit though, they’re not the only ones overextended, the entire banking system is built on fraudulent terms. Banks only keep ten percent of their clients’ money safe, the rest they are allowed to loan out as they circle their prey. This whole scheme enables them to amass wealth out of thin air, accruing exponential interest from indentured america, and now with the digital dollar, their purchasing power just skyrocketed. So what happens if more than ten percent of their victims come forward? What if say, a quarter of their fanbase all of a sudden remove their stock in the company? Well, they’d dry up, they’d have to shut their doors until they could replenish their inventory, it would be illegal to operate without their minimal balance, and no good banker would ever be so unscrupulous as to break the law.
Wells fargo is huge though, big enough to fund a planet’s upheaval, and lots of locations, remember? If it were only one branch, they’d just send an armored car to transfer funds. If it were a bigger bank breakage though, it could slow their cash flow to a trickle down theory, but I bet their bedmates in the government already have some kinda back up plan, like just more lies and deceit. But the bottom line is, that the people would have spoken, and they cannot silence us all.
And remember, this was all really just a fun side effect of us funding the revolution. As many of us that can, can liquidate our accounts, and we already know that they love to invest in flammable liquids. We’ll walk into the bank, take out our money, and torch it in the parking lot.
And that won’t draw attention from law enforcement I’d imagine, it is only a federal offense to destroy government property, though technically every dollar in circulation is only loaned to the US by the private entity who printed it, the federal reserve. The biggest fractional fraud of the whole friggin nation, and we are forever in debt at they are the regulators of our variable interest rate. They literally have a lien out against our country, which means that they hold the title, and until we can somehow manage to get our head above water, they own us. And ocean levels are rising.
We’re trillions in debt, though what difference is trillions from millions to someone who’s seen neither? 80% of our country is in debt, many suffering from the chokeholds of a colonized college education, and even more despicable is the death sentence issued to those whose medical bills exceed their motivation to live. Perhaps the least interesting side effect of breathing the burnt banknotes, is the ashloads of debt that will be erased overnight. No more money, means no more overtime just to make minimal payments on your never ending credit card fraud. It quickly becomes much easier to recruit volunteers to give up their gross income, as they realize that they’re actually coming out ahead on the deal. Regardless of the mechanism that we employ to reorganize society, and even if it takes us a substantial transition period to get there, we must erase all debt now, it is the only way to release the hostages of the biggest bank heist of all time.
It all seems too big to fail, but who would ever agree to cash-in their retirement to save the future? Once you’ve invested your whole life into another’s pocket, it’s scary to think about walking away with nothing, all that hard work down the drain, and this mentality keeps our heads down and mouths quiet as we do what we must to survive.
The whole messed up part about the money trap, is that without it, the vast majority of humans would experience a far greater quality of life. Which means that anyone’s unwillingness to give it up, is a direct willingness to allow the suffering of poverty to continue. I can live without money. I cannot live with the knowledge that my privileged pockets are filled with the deathnotes of another. I have personally burned united states currency - and it was one of the most gratifying experiences of my life. But what do I know, I’d rather just burn down the whole thing anyway, maybe I’ll just stick to books for now.
*******
I’m sure it didn’t look conspicuous at all, a caravan of hippies and indians led by a school bus of dropouts, as we navigated the narrow clearance back to what used to be tipi village. We even managed to get the bus tucked into a patch of trees so that it wasn’t visible from the road, pretty sure a daplcopter would still have noticed though. It took some real effort to orient yourself without any manmade landmarks, especially without any snow either. Go to the third army tent on the right and turn south, past Smokey’s tipi and the healing yurt, and you should see it straight ahead. Nope, just a piece of prairie with more trees than the other camps, and that’s the only way it was possible at all, Oceti was just a giant open field. Well, there may have been a few other identifiers, like the Squash growing out of the compost pile.
All on it’s own, no fence or fertilizer, the most fit seeds survived. The movement was evolving. Of course, the soil had been covered with poison, not the nuclear waste filled pellets of industrial fertilization that fill your grocery cart, but the chemicals that dapl was trying to stunt our growth with. Sure, there was three feet of silver nitrate all over, but that’s old news, they also used rat poison to try to eradicate the Buffalo that had survived our country’s initial species endangerment, but they really had no other choice on that one. Not only did the roaming herd give us the strength to stand strong, they performed their own direct actions as they stampeded the dapl cops and let them know who was in charge. Yeah, the Tatanka Oyate rushed their offensive line and forced them to flee the scene of their crimes, they ran back to their humvees in fear of the most sacred animal of the very land they were desecrating.
You couldn’t write something more poetically justified, I couldn’t at least, and I bet it terrified them to feel the wrath of Unci Maka in such a big way. Like the changing winds that dissipated the teargas, or the lightening that struck the drill pad, or the frozen days that broke their brittle bits, or the power of prayer that made them second guess their team affiliations. What possible service to the people can you provide, if it requires pointing assault rifles into their face while you do it?
But the more pressing question at hand - is this Squash safe to eat? Hmm... might take a little research on this one, poisons can either be water soluble or oil based, which would drastically affect its effect on our growth. But, if you’re a hippie or an indian, you could just pray over it and assume that the Earthlings sprouting out of this place of such sacred energy, will overcome whatever negative vibrations the enemies of life have poured into our dear mother. Freaking hippies.
No doubt about that one, as we sat around the fire and kumbaya’d for a bit. Then our numbers started to dwindle as our woodpile did the same, which meant that the time had come for my personal ceremony of moving on in a good way. I wasn’t waiting for the crowd to dissipate or anything, I’d imagined them all being by my side, and I still had a few stragglers left to bear witness, but like with anything else, I was patient until the moment felt right. I wasn’t going to impose my own intent over top of our community’s equally impactful return, plus, this way insured that I’d have all the time in the world to pray.
I’d also imagined being around the fire at Echo 3, my sacred fire, the flame through which I first shared my heart with the heavens. But that’s right up by the road. Now, I’m no pansy or anything, not that there’s anything wrong with Pansies, but this fire was held sacred by the members of my family that I was sharing space with, and it was still in Rosebud camp at Standing Rock, this was a most sacred fire indeed. It’ll do just fine, and it did.
I shared Tobacco with the flame, as well as words of my heart, sang the vibrations of a prayer song unknown to me the last time I prayed in the land where my connection began, all the while holding six months of prayers that I’d poured onto the page - and then I tossed them into the fire.
My brother Patrick had protested, a skill refined in this very terrain, “Are you sure you want to do this?” Certainly a valid inquiry, wouldn’t most novice writers want to retain their hard copies, a value of sentiment and one day even worth actual money?
Yes, I was sure, I’d known that this was the fate of these pages for some time, even before I had finished filling them. This was no rushed decision, this was a pull from my heart. I hadn’t even needed them since I left the farm, I was done transcribing long ago, I’d already removed any metal or plastic components and wrapped them in a red prayer cloth. I’d carried them to Sun Dance, and as I hitchhiked away from that sacred space, the six notebooks were the heaviest piece of my minimal means, they were dear to my heart no doubt, but a weight I was ready to let go of.
I offered him some real world logistic reasoning too, like, I only own four other things and have no place that I call home, where am I going to keep them? I could obviously task a friend to hold them, but I am consciously removing the baggage that ties me down, not spreading my burden to others. And the ‘no home’ bit, that’s a stretch, I have so many places that I call home, so many places that welcome me in, it’s just that I feel ‘home’ under my feet, no matter what the gps coordinates have to say about it.
Another tangible reason to make these words untouchable - this is my first draft, I did a severe edit as I typed the text, I don’t really want this version read by another, and I already know what it says. Plus, these books were composed before I’d relocated my witnesses. In order to keep up with my heart as it recalled its awakening, I used everyone’s real names. We are the resistance against an empire who will stop at nothing to silence us, I can’t just be handing them our entire roster on a spiral platter. No, these may not stay in this material world as a permanent piece of propagandic pollution, and the words are already out there for all to read freely, but really, I’m burning these for me.
Standing Rock had transformed me, as it had all of us, and then writing about it provided an even stronger transformation. My heart was in these books. My tears were on the pages. There was probably even blood in there somewhere too. I held them close for half a year, protected them from the elements as I steered my path based on their well-being. Tried not to imagine how I would feel if they were compromised, but in the end, I knew that I had written them for me, so as long as I completed my homework, it would be ok if my eyes were the only witness.
But I sure did want to share them. I wrote them for the good of all of humanity. For all of life. For Unci Maka. I had felt such a great weight of responsibility to share my experience, to a point that I was obsessive about my ten-hour-day schedule, and I felt that this pressure was holding me back from truly living the moment. From moving on to the next step of my transformation. How could I be in the ‘now’, if I was reliving the past to plan the future? I still got carried away with the wind, I still followed my heart and experienced coincidental miracles, and I still knew that this was absolutely what I was supposed to be doing.
And now, I understand the angst to share my words with a little more clarity. I’m yet again writing about the past and future, and feel that these words may be more important than the last, but I don’t feel anxiety to speed the flow. I know that it’ll be done at the perfect moment, probably some ironic date of national importance or something, and I also understand that I am here right ‘now.’
As I put my pen to this page, this is the moment that magic can happen. I didn’t plan most of the words you’ve read, maybe a few concepts as my growing philosophies have been blooming, but any sentence that struck a chord and put chills in your spine as it has mine, was purely conceived in the moment. I didn’t even know about the burning money thing until I wrote the words, and now I’m all about it.
I don’t keep a journal as I travel, I don’t plan what I’ll write tomorrow, I pen one word at a time, and they tell of this miraculous life I’ve manifested, through my unwillingness to compromise my commitment to this path. I’m constantly surprised at how each chapter weaves itself together as if I had planned it, I’m not near that good of a writer on my own. And back then I definitely wasn’t, but I had finished this leg of the journey, I was ready to move on, to begin the next step of evolving my connection, to release this weight from my heart and share it with the universe.
Until now, these had been ‘my’ words, but their work was done here, and just as we place our Tobacco ties into the peta wakan so that it may carry our prayers to the spirit world, I placed the stack of notebooks atop the fire, and watched their energy float away as it spread out into the great mystery of cosmic connection. My gift to the universe. A small token of appreciation for this incredible life that I am so grateful to get to experience. And as the smoke turned the pages of my own story, I prayed that it would carry them to the hearts of those who need them the most. To those that are ready to wake up. I prayed that they would make it to you.
*******
And geez did they take a long time to burn, about an hour. I sang that sunrise song, no Sun yet, but not only was it easy enough for my companions to accompany me on, it also felt appropriate as this was the dawn of my new chapter. This was the absolute last thing that I had somewhat planned, tomorrow was truly the first day of the rest of my life. I sat up alone for a bit and watched the last of the pages disappear into the wind, and then again, I laid my head to rest next to the heartbeat of my dearest Unci Maka.