By Jill Ahlberg Yohe //
They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.
—Sitting Bull, 1875
The rolling prairies of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.
In the Hunkpapa land of Sitting Bull, history is always being made. On a warm, sunny day in August, I traveled with Dakota Hoska, a research assistant in Native American art at Mia, to Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, where up to a thousand protestors have been encamped since July to block construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. If completed, the pipeline would carry up to half the crude oil coming out of the Bakken oilfields, in western North Dakota, and would run beneath the Missouri River, threatening the water source of millions of Americans.
At the entrance to the Sacred Circle Camp along the banks of the Missouri, hundreds of flags waved in the wind, symbols of the Native Nations from across the country and from distant lands that have united here in protest. Lakota Nations. Navajo Nations. California Nations. Northwest Coast Nations.
The Missouri is the same river that Lewis and Clark, Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, Charles Wimar, and other non-Native people traveled to “document” Native people’s lifeways and ways of being. It’s the same river that brought settlers through the established territories of Native Nations—along with the U.S. Army. The same river where hundreds of treaties were signed but never honored.
Flags of many nations arrayed at the entrance to Sacred Circle Camp.
The camp is set between rolling prairies, and the protestors’ tipis rise starkly from the earth, silhouetted 20 feet high against the horizon. They stand firmly just a short distance from the immense pieces of steel pipe already pushed into the earth, serpentine creatures intended to carry dark black oil and refuse. Young men and women on horseback travel through the camp, stopping to let children—on break from the school established at the camp—pet their ponies. Grandmothers move through camp offering prayers. Medicine men meet to discuss important matters. Food and coffee is served to everyone who comes.
We came to Standing Rock to deliver goods to those protecting the water, land, and way of life of its residents and everyone downstream. We came to lend our minds, our bodies, and our strength to the Lakota people. We left with a sense of having been part of something beautiful, historical, and permanent.
To learn more about the triggers of social change, please visit Resistance, Protest, Resilience, an exhibition of photographs at Mia connecting the protest movements of the 20th century—from Civil Rights to the Iranian Revolution—to the social, political, and racial conflicts of today.