‘We are Sitting Bull’s people’
At Standing Rock, the pipeline protesters turn to the Lakota leader for guidance and strength in their fight to protect their water.
By Bob Keyes
The road from Fort Yates was rutted with three days of snow and ice. In the late-afternoon’s fading light, the headlights of the rental car barely illuminated the sedan fish-tailing in front of me. I followed closer than I should have, and between sweeps of the wipers I read the simple, plaintive plea of the bumper sticker: Honor Indian Treaties.
After four days on the ground at Standing Rock, it seemed appropriate that on this, on my final night, I would read on a bumper sticker on the car in front of me the same thing I heard again and again at the Oceti Sakowin and Sacred Stone campgrounds, where thousands of people gathered to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Honor the damn treaties.
I followed the car south until it turned into Sitting Bull College, and continued on in the fading light over the icy hills of the Missouri River and into South Dakota, through Kenel and Wakpala and eventually to my hotel room in Mobridge.
The next day near the airport in Bismarck, at a red light among the slush, the North Dakota vanity plate on the late-model pickup truck caught my eye: DRILL, emblazoned against the backdrop of a bison and a robin-blue sky. The message was less a plea than a command: Drill for damn oil.
When the light turned green, the truck sliced through the slush was gone with a right-hand turn.
On two roads, less than 24 hours and 65 miles apart, one bumper sticker and one vanity plate distilled the Dakota Access Pipeline dispute in broad, simplistic terms: Money vs. morality, profit vs. principle.
On one side, big oil determined to push a 1,200-mile pipeline through from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota to Illinois.
On the other side, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the descendants of Sitting Bull, the self-proclaimed water protectors, standing up for clean water, for environmental sanity and, ultimately, for the honor of their ancestors. It’s the same fight that Indians have fought for generations, with the echoes of Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee filling the snowy expanse of the valley of the Cannon Ball River.
The decision by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to deny an easement necessary for Energy Transfer Partners to complete the pipeline is a temporary reprieve, a step in legal and political processes that almost certainly will turn in January when Donald Trump becomes president.
But it’s a victory nonetheless, for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and for tribal people everywhere. More than 400 tribes or sovereign nations came to Standing Rock by car, truck and bus, and on horseback, on foot and in dug canoes they paddled from the headwaters of the Missouri River. They were joined by environmentalists, activists, progressives, and by Indian and non-Indian U.S. veterans, who came to Standing Rock in early December to stand as a human shield in the event of violence — and, humbly, to apologize for the collective sins of the United States military against Native people, and to ask forgiveness for those sins.
Tribal affiliations didn’t matter. Non-natives were welcomed. The only people excluded were those with weapons, drugs and alcohol. As hosts, the Lakota grounded the community in tradition and ceremony, with a sacred fire, prayer circle and song. Welcoming ceremonies melted animosities and united people as one. A speaker at the sacred fire urged people to expunge the word “tribe” from their language. To hold on to that identity limits one’s ability to benefit from community, she said.
In post-election Trump America, a movement that began with women and children in one of the poorest and most marginalized communities in America became a symbol of strength and an example of what people can do when they set aside their differences and work together on a common goal. At Standing Rock, words became action. Ideas became reality.
Through the warm fall and into the bitter early winter, Standing Rock swelled from a protest to an occupation and became, perhaps, the largest gathering of tribal people ever and certainly the largest since Sitting Bull and other chiefs and elders convened to talk about what to do about the white people.
It’s been an ongoing conversation.
Enraged at the arrogance of the government negotiators, Sitting Bull told tribal leaders that white people couldn’t be trusted, that their treaties didn’t mean anything and their desire for land, minerals and natural resources would never be satisfied. When the Northern Pacific Railroad pushed through Lakota hunting grounds in 1872, Sitting Bull led the resistance to the “iron horse,” orchestrating attacks on surveyors and standing in the line of fire to prove his bravery and his commitment to what he believed was best for his tribe and for Indian people.
Sitting Bull was the original water protector, and remains a symbol of strength and resolve on Standing Rock and across Indian country. And Standing Rock represents unity and hope, where people from diverse backgrounds, and with ancient unresolved conflicts between them, come together to stand for the one human and environmental right they all share in common: Water.
Phyllis Young, a Standing Rock elder, lost her family home when the Army Corps of Engineers flooded the Missouri River in the 1950s. She calls herself “a daughter of Oahe,” a reference to the lake formed by the Oahe Dam near Pierre, South Dakota. The dam inundated the Missouri River valley, creating Lake Oahe that reaches more than 200 miles north to Bismarck.
The dam provides power to much of the Northern Plains, as well as safe navigation, recreation and irrigation. Young grew up feeling patriotic for the sacrifice of her family and her tribe for the betterment of society. Pride turned to resentment when she realized the land lost to the lake was the best and most fertile land on the reservation, and the promise of compensation never matched the loss of homes and land suffered by the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes.
Their sense of water vulnerability was reinforced in 2003, when low water levels on Lake Oahe left 5,000 families in Fort Yates without water for most of a week. Everyone knows it could happen again, said Avis Little Eagle, publisher of Teton Times newspaper in McLaughlin, S.D. “When they said the pipeline was coming through, that wasn’t new to us. We’ve had this fight before,” she said.
Young grew up familiar with the legend of Sitting Bull, and with deep-seated distrust of the Corps of Engineers and the U.S. government in general. She resents that her tribe has had to fight for essential water rights during times of drought and development.
“They are thieves, and they always have been,” she said. “We have collective memory. We are angry because we remember what they have done to our grandmothers. For them to come in and think they can take our water — we have a long history.”
News of the easement denial and the requirement of an environmental impact study came on a Sunday afternoon in early December, when temperatures reached into the 30s. It was a festive weekend. Veterans from across the United States began arriving at Standing Rock on Thursday and Friday. Some walked, others arrived in motorized convoys. The airport in Bismarck teemed with travelers.
Supporters delivered cords of woods, tanks of propane and loads of lumber. The mind-set was this occupation would last a long time, and people were digging in for cold days ahead. Small tents, which provided adequate shelter in the fall, would not withstand the howling prairie nights. With torrid pace, workers built structures with 2-by-4s and plywood, and stuffed walls with insulation.
The news spread from one camp to the next: The Corps of Engineers denied the easement. At first it was met with disbelief. Someone planted a fake news story. Who was the source? Then it became real. There was a statement from Standing Rock chairman David Archambault, and people began celebrating.
The news came as a surprise. The protesters had given up on the Obama administration, and a looming evacuation deadline cast unease across the camps. What some people feared might become a modern-day Wounded Knee, with unarmed Indians taken down by an armed militia, instead became a metaphorical Little Big Horn, with Indians vanquishing a stronger enemy with tactical smarts and smarter leadership. But the victory felt short-lived and bittersweet. The mild December afternoon yielded to a blizzard, and Standing Rock plunged into a many-day deep winter freeze. People and cars were frozen in, stressing resources and risking exposure to double-digit below zero wind chills. Community centers and the nearby casino in Fort Yates sheltered people, but travel was treacherous, and the risk of sliding off the road seemed worse than freezing in a tent.
The last time Bucky Harjo suffered from the cold like he did at Standing Rock was in December 1990, when he joined the Big Foot Memorial Ride. The horseback ride from Standing Rock to Wounded Knee marked the 100th anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in southwestern South Dakota.
That ride was brutally cold — minus-10 to minus-20 without the wind chill during the coldest days, when the riders moved quietly on horseback and on foot across the frozen prairies of central South Dakota, through the Badlands and out into the vast open plains bisected by creeks and draws.
“It seems they were back to back,” Harjo, now 63, said of the two monumental tribal gatherings 26 years apart. “It feels like there were no differences in the years between them. They were both such wonderful experiences and events. To be a part of either is mind-blowing and very uplifting.”
Harjo was a relatively young man on the Big Foot ride, at 37 years. By then, he had rediscovered the Indian heritage he had been encouraged to disavow growing up in Oklahoma. The Big Foot ride affirmed his commitment to his culture, activism and change, and made him a better and stronger man.
On the day he rode his horse through the Badlands, Harjo heard the voices of Big Foot’s people. They guided the riders through a treacherous pass of canyon formations. That evening, Harjo tried to describe the feeling of his spirit that afternoon.
“What happened today, what is happening on this ride, it is so spiritual. It’s sacred,” he told me as we sat together on the gym floor at a school in Kyle. I was a newspaper reporter from Sioux Falls. He was a subject in my story, a rider from the West Coast who came to South Dakota so he could sacrifice for his ancestors. He talked about the “dedication of the people” and how if he could, he would go back to the days of Big Foot and Sitting Bull.
“To live in harmony with the universe is beautiful,” he said. “To live and to walk and to breathe. To have respect for all life, all creation. To live and grow with the seasons — and not to be contaminated by man-made things and man’s pollution. Back then, we were a lot healthier. Stronger minds, stronger spirits.”
Twenty-six winters later, Harjo, a photographer, came back to Standing Rock to document, to protest and to participate. He came three times from his Nevada home to Standing Rock, for a total of 2–1/2 months. The last time, he stayed nearly five weeks, arriving in early November.
On the evening of Dec. 5, when the cold hit hard and the winds blew ceaselessly, Harjo posted these words on Facebook, like a dispatch from the wilderness: “Tent is now frosted from ceiling to floor. The wind is extremely strong. Tent sounds like a ship’s wooden mast on a sail boat. Strong gusts may eventually blow the tent across the prairie. We are filled to capacity. We have refugees from the weather.”
The weather was colder on the Big Foot ride, but he was younger and better able to adapt and endure, he said. Each night around the fire, riders were reminded that the discomfort they suffered couldn’t compare to the discomfort suffered by Sitting Bull, Big Foot and their people.
Sitting Bull died near Mobridge at his Grand River cabin on an icy morning in December 1890. The Army deemed him a troublemaker, and wanted him arrested before winter set in. A force of nearly two dozen regular and special police gathered early on Dec. 15 to take him as he slept.
The arrest went badly. Sitting Bull resisted, and ended up in a heap of men, shot in the back of the head and chest. His death led to an uprising that carried downriver to Big Foot and the Minneconjou band of Lakota. When they learned that Sitting Bull had been killed, they feared for their own well-being, broke camp and moved toward Pine Ridge, 400 men, women and children walking quietly in the dark to avoid detection by the police or Army.
In bitter cold and with Big Foot sick with pneumonia, they struggled for seven days across the Cheyenne River, the Bad River and eventually through the Badlands. The U.S. 7th Calvary intercepted Big Foot and his people near Wounded Knee, just north of their destination at Pine Ridge.
They made camp on the evening of Dec. 28, and the next morning, again in the cold, the Army circled the Indian encampment, disarmed the men and opened fire, killing hundreds. A mass grave marks the burial site of those killed at Wounded Knee, and has become a place of pilgrimage for people seeking truth and justice in Indian affairs.
The Big Foot ride was a prayer for the ancestors. Standing Rock is a prayer for the unborn, Harjo said. “The Big Foot Ride was about memorializing the loss of men, women, children and elders who were murdered mercilessly. Standing Rock is about defending water for future generations,” he said.
After the blizzard,the camps retained their vitality. As one sacred fire was extinguished, another was lit. People committed to staying, to see this action through to its conclusion.
Young, a longtime activist, said the victory, even if temporary, is a source of personal and tribal pride. She knows Sitting Bull was there alongside the water protectors, offering guidance. “He was watching over us,” she said. “I never doubted myself, my people or my tribe. I never doubted once that we could do something. We are who we are, and we know who we are. We are Sitting Bull’s people.”
On my final night at Standing Rock, I stopped at Fort Yates to see a marker for what had been Sitting Bull’s original grave. He was buried in Fort Yates, but his remains were moved in 1953 to a site west of Mobridge overlooking the Missouri River, closer to what had been his home.
I had to stop here to satisfy my growing curiosity about the Hunkpapa chief. I admired him since I first encountered his looming presence when I wrote about the Big Foot ride, arriving in Little Eagle, a small town in South Dakota, early in the morning of Dec. 15, 1990, 100 years to the day, and nearly to the hour, that Sitting Bull was killed.
I learned about a man who stood up for his people in battle and in politics. He hunted bison, fought other tribes and resisted intruding white men, always with the betterment and well-being of his people in mind. He was an aggressor in his early years, and shifted his role to that of protector after he accepted as inevitable the advance of the white men.
At the hotel in Mobridge, there’s a photo of Sioux leaders on the steps of the Interior Department in Washington, D.C. In the photo, Sitting Bull stands apart, off to the side. He refused to make a friendly pose. He face is full of doubt. One can sense his resistance in the image, which was taken in October 1888, a little more than two years before he was killed.
A marker at the Fort Yates burial site includes this quotation from Sitting Bull: “What treaty have the Lakota made with the white men that we have broken? Not one. What treaty have the white men ever made with us that they ever kept? Not one.”
Honor the damn treaties.
With the evening sky closing heavy overhead, a skein of geese appeared in the distance, filling the air with their throaty calls. In native culture, geese crossing your path signal the call of the quest. As the geese faded into the slate-gray sky, I got back on the highway and headed south toward Mobridge, picking my way across the icy hills along the Missouri River.
Bob Keyes is a journalist from Maine, where he writes for the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram. Previously, he wrote for the Argus Leader of Sioux Falls, S.D. E-mail him at bob.keyes@yahoo.com
