The Power of ‘Protection’ Over ‘Protest’ (or: How Standing Rock May Hold the Key to an Emerging Future)

Here’s something I love:

The fact that the folks in Standing Rock are calling themselves ‘Water Protectors’ as opposed to ‘Protestors.’

I love this for a few reasons:

1. It proactively claims their narrative. There’s an old Hopi saying that ‘Those Who Tell the Stories Rule the World.’ Owning their own position is powerful.
2. As ‘Water Protectors’ they are not in explicit opposition to the pipeline. They’d protect the water against just about anything that threatened it. It so happens that the most immediate threat is the pipeline. Their identity exists independent of the pipeline. Protest, by its nature, dead-ends when the object of the protest topples. Protection is an ongoing, deep commitment. That’s powerful, too.
3. Linguistically and energetically, the ‘protestor’ legitimizes and gives power to whatever the object of the protest is. A ‘protector’ has a cause of their own. Language matters.

So I see this dynamic at Standing Rock and I wonder what would happen if those of us not aligned with the incoming Trump Administration took a similar approach. Right now, here’s what I’m seeing (and, frankly, participating in):

• A multiplicity of causes, most of which seem to anchor themselves in some form of ‘protest.’
• A tendency to chase down and tackle any utterance from the administration-to-be or President-elect with a maelstrom of outrage and fact-checking.
• A ton of action and energy directed in 2,000 directions all at once.

On the other side, I see an administration-to-be that, while its figurehead may be somewhat erratic and politically incoherent, is actually anchored by people, most notably Steve Bannon, who do have a cause: the re-establishment of what they deem to be ‘traditional Christian values’ with the aim of restoring America’s moral and economic center so that we may more effectively battle the evil scourge of Islamic fascist terrorism.

I’m not making that up, by the way. It’s taken straight from this speech Bannon delivered in 2014 and this recent profile in the Hollywood Reporter.

Read through the lens of this core narrative, all of the racist rhetoric and money-grabbing from special interests is incidental. Bannon et al. simply don’t care about it because they have a greater mission: to re-establish a moral center and do battle with heathens. If rights must be quashed in the process, so be it.

This is an old story. It lead to the crusades. A lot of people died.

So that’s the narrative that I see driving the incoming administration; it’s the lens through which they see all their actions. They are protectors of freedom and saviors of the American Dream.

When we who are not aligned with that narrative protest against their actions, we actually give the core story power. Paradoxically, the very act of ‘protest’ can indicate that the protestors buy into the narrative framework established by the object of protest.

Oof.

The tribes at Standing Rock have a concrete cause: to protect the water.

Here are questions I’ve been grappling with:

What is our cause? What would it look like to build a generative movement on ideals of creation or protection.

How can we use language to create a story that runs parallel to, or perhaps on a collision course with, the administration’s narrative without legitimizing it?

What is the future that wants to emerge from this moment?

Please share your thoughts below. Or at the coffee shop. Wherever, really. We get to create this future together.