39
The rez was not whatever it was Miles was expecting. He knew it wasn’t a romanticized cartoon, the one that made white people feel good about reserving some of their private property as a thank you gift for helping with thanksgiving. But how could anyone ever imagine what it’s like to live in a world outside of anything they’ve ever known, especially when all they know is the self-proclaimed greatest way of life in existence? And they’re not even outside it, they’re right here in the middle of everything, and still under the constrictive oppression of colonial rule.
It’s a hard place to grow up, you do it quickly. The culture’s fractured and the people are traumatized by generations of handed down pain, many have lost their prayer as they fill the hole with a bottle, they exist as outsiders locked in a country that is built atop the extermination of their families. We ripped out their way of life and pushed them to become reliant on the dollar for survival, they went from being the richest culture our continent’s ever known, to some of the most impoverished communities in the country. We set up liquor stands at the border and drop off meth at the schools, and then our prisons profit from it all, as families are torn apart and unable to stand up to the gross exploitation of a forgotten people.
We slaughtered the buffalo and sold off their land for a dollar an acre. We pushed them into ranching and forced them into ninety-nine year leases, for as low as three cents an acre. Banking empires were built off the raw deal, while today’s native families are displaced, with two households sharing the same decrepit FEMA trailer. We control their police, we shadow their government, they still have to follow our laws while we break their treaties, we never stopped stealing land for minerals, we give them access to only the shittest food, poison their water, kidnap their women, and create the conditions for the highest suicide rates in the country.
This is no fairy tale, this is the rez, and through this despicable mistreatment of human beings, has arisen the unbreakable spirit of the most vibrant people you could ever imagine. Their humor and positive attitude is across the board as it brightens every interaction, their love pours out to even the whitest of strangers who are there in a good way, their arts are intricately exquisite, their athletes are champions, their dance is absolutely mesmerizing, and their songs, in the most literal sense of the phrase, speak to your soul. No matter how much hate we build up around their borders, they are undefeatable, and they will be the key to surviving our own metamorphosis through the coming adversity.
Miles and Jordan rolled into town to trade some sage bundles for tobacco money, an exchange that would be perfectly plausible without the dollar, except for the two way taxation that the federation reserves for skimming the vig.
Downtown, we’ll call it, was a few brick buildings for tribal affairs, a school, and a gas station with several aisles of generic groceries. They had frybread though. Some teenagers were playing basketball with the first white person Miles had seen, he already knew she was a Water Protector before Jordan rushed in for the signature hug.
“Kola, how you been?” she most sincerely requested.
“Lila wasté. Here, I want you to meet Miles, he’s one of us.”
“Howdy friend, I’m Wendy, good to know you.”
“Yeah, you too. Water Protector, huh?”
“You know it. Haven’t been to camp lately, been busy here trying to keep up with all these youngsters, mainly just providing a safe space for them to figure out life and stuff.”
“How long have you been here doing that?”
“Oh golly, I guess nearly two years now. I didn’t have a clue about any of this before Standing Rock, then my eyes got slammed open to the reality of life out here. I got close to a lot of folks from this rez back at camp, so I came to visit, and my heart hasn’t let me leave since. There’s so much rigged against these girls, and not many places to be a teenager, not without drugs and alcohol at least, so I’m really just a friend they can count on to be sober and ready for whatever adventure awaits. This is my home now. Well, over there’s my home, but she stays parked on the rez nowadays.”
Her mobile abode was a retired school bus turned hostel. She lived alone, but could sleep six of anyone who needed to crash, and could feed them with the constant pot of soup she had on. The bus had it all, arts and crafts and games and snacks, even a kitchen sink. The boys boarded for a cup of coffee and a fresh scrambled brownie.
“I don’t have an oven in here, but it’s all good, back at camp we were making everything you could think of without an oven, just gotta learn how to wing it. You kinda remind me of our chef actually, me and him got real close. I guess all of us got close though, but you already know, huh?”
He did. Jordan recounted his version of Miles’ camp story. It was surreal to hear it all through another’s perspective, especially with Jordan pitching him as nothing short of a super hero.
“Good one. Sounds like you’re on one heck of a journey, friend.”
“It’s been unreal, and so real, and then a few days ago I sweat for the first time, and it’s like it opened up this whole other route that wasn’t even on the map before.”
“Yep, that’ll do it. Don’t start thinking it’s a shortcut though, it’s actually the long way, but it gets you way deeper into the game than just sticking to the yellow brick road. Want another scoop of brownie?”
“They’re just not the same without the little yellow clumps of frozen eggs in there,” Jordan critically reminisced.
“I know,” agreed Wendy. “But no freezer, sorry. Come back in six months and I’ll set you up right. You wanna take some back for Unci? And send her my love, will ya?”
“Yeah, sure, I’ll give her whatever’s left by the time we get back. Me and Miles fixed her ceiling up and patched over the vents that let all that snow in.”
“Heck yeah. That’s awesome. She said she was just sitting there and watched the whole thing cave in under an avalanche of snow. Crazy. But you know, there’s a lot of other roofs doing the same thing, they just weren’t designed to withstand the type of conditions we get out here, maybe we should team up and fix ‘em before it gets cold again. I could get the girls to help too, be something different to do at least, and it would nourish their soul to be giving themselves to the people like that.”
“Let’s do it,” cheered Miles before his brain even had to weigh in.
“I’m in,” agreed Jordan.
“Great, I’ll get it set up with the folks and let you know. I got a little bit of funds for materials too, might not be able to dumpster dive ten houses worth. Maybe though. I love it when a plan comes together out of thin air like that, just reminds me that I’m in the right place, you know?
It’s ridiculous really, that people have been scraping by in these shoddy emergency shelters for years, they’re pieces of crap really, a big step below your already substandard single wide. But the project houses around here are falling apart too, especially with sometimes ten or fourteen people crammed into them, but what can you do when you gotta drive thirty miles away for the nearest hardware store that you can’t afford anyway?
The tribe actually has a program to help with stuff like that, or to help pay past due heating bills, and they even have a program to get people into these new construction projects they’re slowly building. Like Bria over there, her family’s on the waiting list, number seven in line to get their own home, and they’ve been on the list for two years while four people sleep in her uncle’s spare room.
Makes you sad to see the conditions people are forced into out here, but you can’t exactly show up as another colonist trying to shape their world as you see fit. So I just show up, and do whatever I can for whoever I meet, but always being mindful that I’m a guest in a world that I will never fully understand.
And everybody back at my other home think we’re out here riding buffalo and sending smoke signals, they imagine tipis lining the river, unwilling to listen when I try to break down reality for them. I talk about housing issues and they hardly sympathize, because they think we like camping out in a blizzard, which I kinda do, but their dominating culture has destroyed the feasibility of a tipi way of life.
For one, that river is toxic, so where are you going to pitch camp without access to clean water? Or food? We killed all the buffalo and poisoned the harvest, so now you have to have a car, and gas money, to go hunting for anything healthy to eat. And the buffalo was what tipis were made of, so now that’s off the table. Then they grew hemp for canvas, until we sprayed their fields with agent orange. So how could a tipi way of life even get pitched if we destroyed all of their materials? They can save up and order one online from some business person for a couple thousand dollars, but how is that the most appropriate kinda culture?
And then they’ll ask, ‘Why don’t they just leave if it’s so bad?’ Leave to where? To a civilization built on destroying their way of life? To a society that treats them as subhumans and is rigged against them in every way? Cut off their hair and join the white man’s world, where even white people are struggling, let alone some pesky foreign natives?
It’s just not safe out there, especially for these girls. Indigenous females make up less than a percent of our population, but account for a quarter of the missing persons and unsolved murders plaguing the women of our country, cause nobody’s trying to solve them, and every man has dreamt of capturing their own Indian princess since they were a kid.
It’s not even safe here, where predators have to commute to find their next victim, so now you want them to go post up right in their backyard, with little means to get by other than answering the flash of cash from the settler descended recipients of stolen privilege?
It’s all messed up. I like to think that people just don’t know, that if they understood then they’d do something, but I know that’s just some kind of peace pipe dream at best. People all over the world are suffering at our hands around the clock, in the name of preserving the sacred American Way of Life, and nobody thinks twice unless they water down some hollywood satire of what it’s like to live in the other ninety-six percent of humanity, and those normally only further promote colonization as some white savior swoops in to save the world.
I wish I had the answers, says yet another white person on a mission to save the Indians, but it’s just too much. And I think their strength probably has to grow from within their own community, so I’m just trying to even the playing field in whichever ways present themselves, and looks like this week’s menu is rooftops and rainbows all around.”
“You ever hear of Earthbag houses?” asked Miles.
He filled her in on his own experience, the details of the low cost construction using on site materials, the built-in resistance to the specific natural obstacles that this particular region faces, and his growing vision of an entire community coming together to make short work of the elbow grease involved. There’s no snow or high speed winds creeping in through a foot of sandstone. The thermal mass keeps them way warmer than a bunch of t-shirts jammed into the attic. And once you realize that it’s not just some shack made out of dirt, that it’s a fully furnished custom design rivaling any cookie cutter palace in the colonies, well, it becomes real easy to make one of these houses a home.
Miles understood that his journey here hadn’t been by coincidence, that he’d picked up skills and wisdom at the exact moments he was ready to learn them, he knew he couldn’t just show up on the rez and in a week reverse hundreds of years of systemic oppression, he still didn’t even know the tenth of it, but somewhere in there was an idea brewing that could end up changing at least a few lives, and possibly even provide a blueprint for the people to rebuild the community on their own.
It all seemed a task too great for one person, but Miles now knew that he was far from alone in this world, and that as long as he gave everything he had to healing the planet, the rest would all sort of fall into place. He believed.