21
The nights were definitely colder here, but they’d be getting shorter and warmer, hopefully. The tent magnified bursts of sunrise from the wide open Eastern sky, the day had come, the day to actually do something. He woke to the sound of splitting wood, guess that means it’s time, coffee first.
“What up bro, hihani wasté, good morning,” Jordan called, as he caught up to Miles a few feet shy of the mess hall.
“What’s up man, g’mornin.”
“Yo, I know you’re helping in the kitchen and all that, but I was kinda hoping you could go with me on an errand, shouldn’t take but an hour.”
“Yeah man, I don’t clock in til noon. Just gotta caffeinate and I’m ready whenever.”
“Word, I’ll meet you right here in thirty.”
“Deal.”
The hour long chore included a twenty-five minute hike each way, uphill only one. Miles would be thoroughly warmed up for his first day on the job, and it gave them a lot of space to connect in the process.
Jordan had been through a lot. A lot of messed up stuff. He was native. Lakota. Full blooded, but he was adopted off the reservation and grew up with only critical views of his own culture. Then they turned out to be not the best parents of their little Indian in the cupboard, then they split up and it got worse, until he ran away from home at fifteen, nobody noticed. He lived on the streets for a while, unloaded trucks for pocket change, hunted styrofoam leftovers nestled in the bushes, survived, but it was no life.
Eventually, he caught a ride across the country to the reservation, he didn’t know anybody, but he did have a family name, Blue Feather, Wiyaka To.
“And then all I found on the rez,” he went on. “Was that I didn’t know shit about being an Indian. Not about any of it. Not the buffalo or tipis, not the sweat lodge and spiritual side of it, not the broken down FEMA trailers with two families crammed into them, not the shitass commodities or poverty or alcohol or the meth. I didn’t fit in anywhere, in the whole world, so I fell into the easiest of them, alcohol, and then meth. Fucking fucked my world up for a long time, and still something I have to deal with everyday.”
“How’d you get out of it all?”
“Standing Rock, man. It saved my life. Gave me purpose. Filled the hole inside that I was only digging deeper with the drugs. Gave me a safe place to go, without temptation, and now I have a network of strong sponsors all over the place. Plus sweat lodge and prayer help a lot too. It’s this viscous cycle of guilt, you’re worthless so you do drugs, and more drugs only make you more worthless, which makes you want more drugs just to not feel anything, because feeling nothing is better than living with that emptiness.
But then Standing Rock totally turned it all around for me. I wasn’t empty anymore, I had a reason to live, and other people needed me, and loved me. I found who I was supposed to be, and that all the hardship was only there to prepare me for this. And I haven’t had as much as a drink since.”
“That’s amazing man, congratulations.”
“Hell yeah, she saved my life for sure, so now it’s dedicated to saving hers.”
“Her?”
“The Earth. Unci Maka. She’s who called us out there, and you here, just gotta listen.”
“Yeah, I’ve been working on that one.”
“You’re getting it. And out there is where I connected with Tiana, she’s my cousin, like blood cousin. Never met her til out there, but after we started talking Blue Feather, we figured out we were related. Glad I didn’t try to kiss her, she’d have probably kicked my ass anyway though.
She’s only half native, her mom married some guy in Utah, but she spent every summer on the rez and has a way different understanding of it all than I do. She’s cool, I promise, just takes a bit to open up, especially to a honky tonk like you.”
“Honky tonk, huh?”
“Just fucking with you. Alright, we’re here, come check this out.”
They had climbed to the top of a big hill with added vantage of the Fossil Corp construction site. Bulldozers and excavators, fifty foot sections of four foot pipe, a path of demolition as far as he could see, no armed mercenaries though.
“This is it. The frontline. Nine hundred miles of it. It’s quiet right now, because of the cease and desist, normally it’s hopping with the stench of an out of town workforce. The man camp is over that way somewhere, a concentrated cesspool of vulgarity with no local connections to hold them accountable. They terrorize the quiet towns they blow their steam into, meth and other drugs fueling their havoc, our young women missing, some turn up dead, some never turn up. Just doing their job they say, securing the future of energy dependence, and their extracurriculars just another notch on the scoreboard of us vs. them.
That’s how they see us, not as humans, but as the villains of their struggle to make it in this broken world. They need more money, and the pipeline’s got the most, so who cares what you have to do to get it, or who you have to hurt, at least your own family got everything they ever wanted. And if they didn’t do it, then somebody else would, and it’s all legal, itn’t?
They don’t want to hear it, because they don’t want to have to question their own loyalties, but it’s not us vs. them, they are us, we’re fighting for the people, their families too, for their kids, for a planet that is as vital to their future as ours. The only them is the diabolical corporation that understands the true cost of what they’re doing, who don’t blink an eye when someone falls victim to the machine, even if it’s one of their own, because they will never be an us. It’s the planet and her people against the bottomless greed of the privatized destruction of them both, is it really that hard to figure out which side you’re supposed to be on?”
“I guess it’s tough when everything you know tells you that you’re the good guy.”
“Yeah, at least until you have to shoot at unarmed civilians in prayer.”
“Where are all the cops and stuff now, during the work stoppage and all?”
“They’re still here, they’ve got their own base camp over that hill. All you gotta do is run down there and hop on a machine and a whole squadron will rush down to greet you.”
“No thanks,” declined Miles.
“And that hill’s sacred to my people, our ancestors are buried there. We submitted a whole binder full of documentation proving it, and the next day a bulldozer tore right through the top of it. They’d rather pay the fine of forgiveness than to stoop as low as seeking permission in a good way, not that we’d have given it to them, but we might have at least pointed them to a less controversial hilltop.
Some people think they’re intentionally destroying our sacred sites, trying to break apart an energy they don’t understand, but that they know can defeat them. We’re the only ones that have, bested America at their unfair firefight, we beat them into the submission of treaty and they’ve been trying to unwrite history ever since.”
“Little Big Horn, you mean?”
“Yeah, but we call it Greasy Grass, and we won that shit. They’ve tried everything they can think of to make us forget our strength, and succeeded in a lot of ways, but we are a force unbridled by the reign of colonial rule, especially now that we’ve got a bunch of honest-to-god white people helping us.”
Miles blushed.
“Alright then HonkyTonk, we should probably get going, don’t wanna be late on your first day, especially not if Becca’s your new boss.”