by David Treuer
But the protest at Standing Rock does have something King possessed that confers dignity in the face of dire opposition. We have the same kind of spiritual calling, a sense of a collective mission beyond worldly things, not only to ennoble ourselves through protest but also to ennoble the democratic republic that seeks to diminish us.
David Archambault II wrote that the conflict was proof that this is the same old story of cowboys versus Indians, proof that the government, once again, is against us. But to say that the story of DAPL is another expression of cowboys versus Indians is to repeat the mistakes of past protests and movements: when we situate ourselves in a position of powerlessness, we make ourselves subaltern. Not only that: we absolve ourselves of our complicity in how the world of power around us has been shaped. It absolves our tribal leaders of their reluctance to show up for meetings and to fight intelligently, diligently, and thanklessly in the trenches of numb process. It also absolves all of us—Indians and all other Americans—of the greatest sin of all: that we made the government that is doing this to us. And that’s where the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. become more relevant: we have to show up to get up. Cynicism isn’t a politics. Neither is irony. We have to participate, at cost and peril, in shaping our government and thereby shape its processes—including how, where, and why pipelines are approved, permitted, planned, and built. The hard work of the civil rights movement wasn’t engaged to change city busing in Montgomery; those protesters meant to change the laws and heart of the country for themselves and future generations. The water protectors were aiming just as high by appealing to tribal sovereignty, working with tribal governments, forging international alliances, being gender inclusive, and striving for parity. But the success of the civil rights movement was vested in the degree to which activists voluntarily endured injustice and injury by marching in the street and by encouraging others to march into classrooms, and county boardrooms, and colleges and law schools, and the voting booth. In that way this protest is the same.
It might appear as though all that work, all that spirit, was wasted: within days of taking office Trump canceled Obama’s executive order, pipeline construction continued and was completed, and the camp was forcefully dismantled by the government. It was a huge loss, but that loss wasn’t for nothing. As on my own reservation, other tribal governments contemplating granting easements to pipelines across their ancestral lands now have to contend with a newly awakened tribal population that has been educated about pipelines and their consequences. Other rural communities—farmers, municipalities, and the like—have also become involved. What might have been seen as nothing more than an instance of an Indian problem is seen as an American problem. The protest made the difference. And the next time it won’t be so easy.
At a dinner recently in Albuquerque, while we were looking up at Sandia Peak, a man who worked for the Indian Health Service told me something of the work he’s doing. He mentioned that for many Indians in the Southwest, especially the elderly, access to health care, especially for mental health, is extremely difficult. Who, he wondered, would drive two hours to Navajo Medical Center in Shiprock, for instance, to talk to a therapist? Assuming they even have a car, or a license. He also told me—and this was something I couldn’t verify—that Indians possess and use smartphones at a rate that far exceeds the national average. Think about it, he said. So many Indians are transient: they move from here to there, they sleep on a cousin’s couch. They don’t have homes and so don’t have computers. For many Indians out there, their smartphones are their laptops and desktops, their only computers. And so his staff thought they could make use of that and began offering mental health services via Skype and FaceTime for Indian veterans and others too sick or too remote to come in. I wondered out loud if he could use the same thinking to develop apps where Indians—who suffer from diabetes at staggering rates—could check their blood and enter it into a program that would then feed into their health records at IHS. It would make monitoring and treating diabetes so much easier and could emphasize preventive care in ways not yet explored. And maybe do something else as well.
In 1891 the superintendent of the centennial census, Robert Porter, wrote in his findings that “there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” That sentiment was taken up again by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. For modern Indians, however, the “new frontier” has shifted; it brings the past into contact with the future. Sean and Sarah and Chelsey are each in their own way doing this through cuisine and health. Others are doing it through language revitalization and education.
It’s happening in politics, too. More than eighty Indians ran for public office across the country, at every level, in 2018. Peggy Flanagan (Ojibwe), who served on the Minneapolis school board before landing a seat in the Minnesota legislature in 2015, won the race for lieutenant governor of the state. Voters elected Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Sharice Davids (Ho-Chunk) to the House of Representatives for New Mexico and Kansas, respectively—the first Native women elected to Congress. (Both Democrats, they will join Representatives Tom Cole, Chickasaw, and Markwayne Mullin, Cherokee, both Republicans from Oklahoma.) In Idaho, however, Paulette Jordan (Coeur d’Alene) lost her bid to become the first American Indian governor in U.S. history. Not only did record numbers of Indians run for public office, record numbers of them were women. Thirty-one women campaigned for seats in state legislatures, three in gubernatorial races, and four for Congress.
This is impressive not just in terms of numbers. As with the Standing Rock protest, the influx of Native women into positions of leadership, or poised for leadership, is shaping Indian communities in new ways. In 2018, candidates of both parties ran on platforms that privileged health, education, and family; taken together, they are breathing new life into our democracy precisely at a time when our democracy seems to be in crisis. As dismal as the outcome of the Standing Rock protests might seem, it’s important to remember this: There were Indians everywhere in the picture. Indians were working for the oil companies and for the Army Corps of Engineers, to regulate the construction of the pipeline, at the same time that Indians were fighting it, as politicians and activists. The old western frontier might have been closed in 1890, but the modern Indian frontier doesn’t face that direction anyway.
I remember being a lonely Indian kid on the margins of Leech Lake, certain only that there was no one else out there like me, stuck in a kind of radical subjectivity. Surely my sense of my own isolation was hardly unique: many teens, and many teen Indians, feel this way. For so long we were undone by our solitude and by the differences within our communities, which loomed as great as the differences and distances between us and the dominant culture. This began to change during the boarding school era, when Indians from different tribes were shoved together at school. That isolation was further eroded during and after World War II, when Indians served together and with a wide variety of other Americans. The digital Indians of the next generation are more and more quickly closing the gaps that separate us. In past eras, it might have been enough for Indians merely to survive; the biggest shift I can see in my own lifetime is a kind of collective determination to do much more than that.
Our identity politics reflects this sea change. When I was a kid on the reservation, who was or wasn’t authentically Indian was determined largely in those endless clashes over how dark you were, whether you were enrolled, whether you came up hard, how much damage you could do to yourself and others and still keep on living. This is no longer true. To be Indian today seems to be more a matter of action. I hear it all around me—at powwows and ceremony and online. Do you speak your language? Gidojibwem ina? You hunt? Did you go ricing this year? You headed to the drum dance? Did you go to Standing Rock? Less and less do we define ourselves by what we have lost, what we have suffered, what we’ve endured.
We have grown diverse in Indian country. The numbers tell part of the story. Not only have those who identify on the census
as Indian risen from about 200,000 in 1900 to over 2 million by 2010; another 3 million identify as Native and something else. Of this ever-increasing population, in 2010 more than 70 percent lived in urban areas, continuing the trend begun in the years after World War II. Indians are young, too: 32 percent are under age eighteen, compared with 24 percent of the overall population. On reservations, the median age is twenty-six, compared with thirty-seven for the nation at large. And these many young millions are doing things. Between 1990 and 2000, the income of American Indians grew by 33 percent, and the poverty rate dropped by 7 percent. There was no marked difference in income between Indians from casino-rich tribes and those from poorer tribes without casinos. Between 1990 and 1997 the number of Indian-owned businesses grew by 84 percent. And the number of Native kids enrolled in college has doubled in the past thirty years. All of these demographic changes—rapidly increasing population, better education, more opportunities for business and work, a burgeoning urban population and a youthful reservation population—have begun to erase many of the old hurdles and divides. The city is not necessarily the place to which one escapes from a reservation, but it is a community, a homeland, in its own right. Reservation people go to the city and bring the reservation with them, and city Indians go back to the reservation and bring the city with them.
The net effect of all this diversity is a sense that we are surging, but in a more constellatory than uniform fashion. No longer does being Indian mean being helplessly characterized as savage throwbacks living in squalor on the margins of society, suffering the abuses of a careless, unfeeling government. We seem to be everywhere, and doing everything. Social media helps connect us. Chelsey and Sarah and the water protectors and powwow Indians and corporate types and college kids and Indian soccer moms and everyone else are in increasingly close contact, and I can’t help feeling we are using modernity in the best possible way: to work together and to heal what was broken.
Epilogue
In 1863, Hehaka Sapa (Black Elk) was born near the banks of the Powder River in what would later become Wyoming. His family was an important one: his father was a respected medicine man, and they were closely related to the famous war chief Crazy Horse. In his own words: “I am a Lakota of the Oglala band. My father’s name was Black Elk, and his father before him bore the name, and the father of his father, so that I am the fourth to bear it. He was a medicine man and so were several of his brothers. Also, he and the great Crazy Horse’s father were cousins, having the same grandfather. My mother’s name was White Cow Sees; her father was called Refuse-to-Go, and her mother, Plenty Eagle Feathers. I can remember my mother’s mother and her father. My father’s father was killed by the Pawnees when I was too little to know, and his mother, Red Eagle Woman, died soon after.”
The world of Black Elk’s youth was an Indian world. Of course his people, the Lakota, had been dealing with—meeting with, trading with, fighting with—white people for centuries. And even the fact that Black Elk was born on the Powder River and not on the Mississippi or the Minnesota or the Red River was the result of centuries of growth and migration and displacement. In 1862, one year before Black Elk’s birth, the Dakota in Minnesota had revolted and risen up against encroaching white settlers and corrupt Indian agents in what became known as the Dakota War of 1862. After the rebellion was quelled, thirty-eight Dakota were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, in the largest mass execution in U.S. history. The world hadn’t held still before his birth, and it would not hold still after. But his world, such as it was, was still a Lakota world, and he and his tribe were its authors.
Black Elk learned to ride and to shoot. He was much like any other Lakota boy at that time. But at age four he began to have visions—uncommonly detailed spiritual visions that came to him at night but also during the day. They scared him, and he spoke of them to no one. Then, when he was nine, as his family was breaking camp, heading west to hunt near the Rocky Mountains, he fell ill. At first, while eating in the teepee in the village his legs were suddenly laced with pain. The next day he was out riding with his friends, and when he jumped off his horse his legs buckled and he fell to the ground. His friends helped him onto his horse and brought him back to the village. His legs and arms were swollen and puffy. He was delirious and feverish. No one knew what to do and it seemed likely that he would die. A medicine man was sent for, and Black Elk slipped in and out of consciousness. It is impossible to know for sure, but it seems likely that he was laid low by viral or bacterial meningitis, an infection of the brain and spine that strikes suddenly and brings acute painful swelling of the legs.
As his body failed him and he began slipping away, he was granted a vision. It was long, ornate, and powerful: the kind of vision most people will never have. In it, Black Elk was shown—by degrees—all of creation and his place in it. He was able to see the past and the future of his own people and also the ways in which Indian lives would meet and mix with the American future. Near the end of his vision he stood on a tall mountain and looked down at the world at his feet: “And as I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.” And as quickly as his sickness and vision came to him, they began to leave: “When the singing stopped, I was feeling lost and very lonely. Then a Voice above me said: ‘Look back!’ It was a spotted eagle that was hovering over me and spoke. I looked, and where the flaming rainbow tepee, built and roofed with cloud, had been, I saw only the tall rock mountain at the center of the world. I was all alone on a broad plain now with my feet upon the earth, alone but for the spotted eagle guarding me. I could see my people’s village far ahead, and I walked very fast, for I was homesick now. Then I saw my own tepee, and inside I saw my mother and my father bending over a sick boy that was myself. And as I entered the tepee, some one was saying: ‘The boy is coming to; you had better give him some water.’
“Then I was sitting up; and I was sad because my mother and my father didn’t seem to know I had been so far away.”
Black Elk would travel farther. First he would travel down the path of violence with the rest of his tribe when—harassed—they finally lured Custer and the Seventh Cavalry in for the final conflict at the Little Bighorn. As the battle raged through gulches and over the hills, the central violence always seemed to retreat in front of him. He rode on and on until he was finally in the thick of the main battle, enveloped in a dust cloud filled with the voices of dying men, the screaming of horses, the thudding of hooves and bodies. In the aftermath, “Black Elk picked his way farther up the gulch, followed by the younger boys. By the time they reached the top, most of the gray horse troops were dead. But not all. The boys surrounded those retaining the slightest spark of life, shot them full of arrows, pushed those already in their bodies farther in. Black Elk continued on. He noticed a dying soldier with an engraved gold watch hanging from his belt; he took the watch and shot the dying man. He ascended the hill to where greater numbers of soldiers lay in clumps and guessed this was where the fight had ended. One of the boys ran up and asked him to scalp a soldier; Black Elk handed over the scalp and the boy ran off to show his mother. Another man writhed before him, flapping his arms and groaning in pain. Black Elk shot a blunt arrow into the soldier’s forehead and the man toppled backward. His limbs quivered and stopped. Black Elk kept climbing. He’d made three or four kills this day, but now each kill was like the other. He later told John Neihardt [his biographer] that he took no pleasure in them.”
Black Elk’s vision had been one of peace and healing, a vision of a world that was one “hoop” made up of smaller hoops, as he put it. How remarkably similar this is to the dreams
dreamed by the founding fathers: of a nation conceived in liberty and devoted to peace. And like the founding fathers, Black Elk and his people would engage in unspeakable violence. They would have to kill and be killed on their way to a more perfect peace promised to them by their better selves. Between the Battle of the Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee, more violence was to come. Rather than engage the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Lakota, and other tribes on the battlefield (though this did happen as well), the government chased and harried the tribes and burned their food and lodges whenever they were found.
Buffalo hunters continued exterminating the buffalo. The first transcontinental telegraph line was completed in 1861. In 1865 the United States was once again united. In 1869 the transcontinental railroad spanned the continent. After the Little Bighorn in 1876, Plains tribes, so long resistant to reservation life, began trickling and then streaming into agencies and reservations. In 1882 six hundred Lakota and Yanktonai found a big herd of bison west of Standing Rock Reservation. They killed more than five thousand bison. This was the last large hunt of bison by an American Indian tribe. By the 1890s only a few hundred bison remained. The old life was gone. A new life was beginning.
