I came in to western South Dakota with one contact, third hand from a journalist who had been working in Spokane who became “completely obsessed with South Dakota”. A strange fate, I thought at first, but I can understand a bit better now how that obsession might blossom. Sabrina, who works with Dakota Rural Action, had invited me to come help work on a project Tuesday evening after driving up from Denver and thought I might meet some of the people I should be talking to there at the meet up. The project in question was epic and reminded me of my days in DIY/sustainability youth development where building strange things out of trash was part of normal life. A slowly growing group of rural and Native activists gathered around and helped drill, stretch, shape, and model an arrangement of hula hoops, wood supports, and industrial black plastic until it became a wearable black snake symbolic of the Keystone XL pipeline proposed to cut through this area. It would be used at a gathering in the capital, Pierre, that weekend to protest the Keystone XL.
After the building, I was invited to join the snake building crew for dinner–buffalo burgers no less!–and get to know a little more about organizing in and around Rapid City. Though this gathering was made up of both white and Lakota activists, they shared that Rapid City itself is steeped in racism and racial divide that is only recently being addressed as its own issue amid the other movements for sovereignty, environmental protection, and human rights like water access. I met Chas, an activist who was interviewed in Praxis 142, Sabrina, Dale, the artist laureate of the state, Jane, Dale’s wife and a longtime organizer, Cante, a young Native organizer, her cousin Jessica, a mother and newly-minted organizer, and Jerry, a volunteer with Dakota Rural Action. There is very little that I enjoy more than these kinds of gatherings where serious conversations about life and death issues on the planet mingle with jokes and stories and camaraderie.
I slept in a teepee constructed on the property and fell asleep to a strip of stars in the opening where the poles converge and the shadows and sounds of bats fluttering by during their midnight snack. In the morning, I interviewed Chas and we went on a short hike to see a stretch of the Black Hills and Bear Butte, or Mato Paha, the most spiritually significant piece of land for the Lakota and many other Plains tribes in the region. The surrounding area was theoretically protected forever in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, but beginning ten short years later with Custer’s arrival there, the Black Hills and Bear Butte’s sacred status has been continuously violated by the U.S. government.
After coffee and our interview, I headed out to the Rosebud Spirit Camp, a few hours drive southeast to see the place where Rosebud Sioux leaders have established a camp of resistance to the Keystone XL pipeline. I ended up lost and not spending as much time there as I would have liked (who puts I-83 so few miles away from I-183?) but was happy to arrive and meet Leota, who’s been living at the camp and hosting visitors there since it was established in 2014. We talked about the camp and the ties between its use as a spiritual site and its hypothetical use as a battleground if construction begins on the pipeline. Gary joined us by phone and you can hear both of those interviews in Praxis 142 and in full here soon. The land there was beautiful and the camp itself reminded me of the Tent of Nations where I stayed outside of Bethlehem in 2013. There, like at the Spirit Camp, people gather to protect land from an occupying force that wishes to destroy a people, a way of life, and the earth. Sites like this are important and inspirational examples of saying no and yes at the same time–invitational spaces for both resistance and restoration that illuminate a different way of being with and in the world.
I drove back to Rapid City from the camp and listened to the Vandana Shiva talk that David had given me in Boulder. It was fitting to continue the conversations I’d had through these two days with her words about radical compassion. Radical as in reaching beyond compassion for those with whom it’s easy to relate, but rather for all life and its interconnection. While this culture’s disconnect from that idea and our obsession with straight lines might seem daunting to overcome, I take comfort in the fact that industrial ideas, linear thinking, and large scale human destruction are incredibly new. For thousands of years, humans the world over have relied on understanding how nature actually works (in circles, forever) and that knowledge isn’t lost. I don’t say this to romanticize indigenous societies, but as a simple observation of fact.
I crashed at Sabrina’s home and spent the morning editing Praxis at a coffee shop in Rapid City. At some point, I will be interviewing her about her time in South Dakota as a rural organizer, but we were both on deadlines (mine for the show, hers for the protest in Pierre that weekend that the snake was built for) and couldn’t do it live in our timeline. I was grateful to once again have been met by hospitable, interesting people and to see resistance and collaboration building to protect the planet. I had another long drive ahead of me, this time to the Cody, WY entrance to Yellowstone National Park and was both sad to leave South Dakota so soon (I understand my earlier colleague’s obsession now) and excited to see Yellowstone for the first time and reunite with a good friend who works there.
And so I continued my big circle around the west, despite burning gasoline on straight roads, and had another uninterrupted nine-hour drive for the solitary consideration of all of the things.
…The Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round….. The Sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours….
-Black Elk
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