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OUR AMERICA: Get Up, Stand Up: Part Two


Direct Action

Oceti Sakowin is also a training camp. We attended a several hours long direct action training our first day in camp, mandatory for anyone who wishes to participate in direct action. One of its clear goals is to train others in effective nonviolent direct action, in its principles of unity and non-isms, and in learning how to take space and how to relinquish space. The direct action trainers told attendees to return home to their own Standing Rocks and train others. As such, I see Oceti Sakowin as a site in a much larger movement. I think that’s particularly threatening to the army: that indigenous people and their allies, that marginalized and oppressed people and their allies, from all over the country, come to Oceti Sakowin and learn how to take action, that they can take action, and then bring that knowledge and know-how back to their own communities: how to operate in a security culture, how to run a legal team, how to connect with media, how to stage an action, set up a medical tent, build a culture, etcetera. Real power shifts will come when there are many Oceti Sakowin’s, many direct actions, many Standing Rocks.

The training itself was designed to teach us how to hold space in order that an action (usually a prayer ceremony) might take place while the police used threats, gas, water hoses, rubber bullets, etcetera. This, it turns out, is what direct action is. Direct action is trespassing against edicts that are unjust, edicts set and enforced by those who hold power at the cost of those who don’t. That trespass leads those oppressors to either a) enact the violence the threat of which until now adequately enforced their power, or b) relinquish power.

Honestly (embarrassingly), I’ve always thought nonviolent direct action meant something akin to a march, even though I understood that the sit-ins and marches of the civil rights movement trespassed in some way, were disruptive, and that they were impactful 1) because they were met with violence, and 2) because they persisted until the violence could no longer stop them. I think I had paid less attention to distinguishing between protest marches, which are fairly ineffectual (though better than on-line petitions, which are meaningless), and those marches and sit-ins from the civil rights era that were part of a specific action, one forbidden to the activists. Marching to go register to vote. Sitting down to buy a cup of coffee at a whites-only counter. Refusing to defer to a white person on a bus. By contrast, a protest march lodges a complaint.

Most of the direct actions undertaken by the water protectors are prayer ceremonies, prayer ceremonies held in places in which the people of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe feel entitled to pray, or in places where their prayer disrupts the ordinary business of those complicit with the pipeline’s development. They pray where they aren’t allowed to pray, and then the police respond violently, and with increasing (and increasingly frightening) brutality. Here’s the thing about the violence: the violence was always already there: the actions simply expose it, force it to show itself, to reveal its willingness to hurt human bodies when they disobey its violence. The water protectors, I discovered prayed for the perpetrators of violence, too.

The training was as much about how a diverse group could act in unity, and about what it means to take and hold space—and also to relinquish space to those who are denied it by the systems of power, and to then protect that relinquished space. In simpler terms: how, for me, as a white man, to give up space to indigenous people, POC, women, people whose identity, visible or otherwise, puts them at risk of physical harm, the people with whom I am in unity, and to then help them hold that space. I wouldn’t begin to claim that this is something one masters in an afternoon of training; it was, though, a physical embodiment of a larger principle: this was a training in how generally to see and hear and relinquish and protect and privilege others. It foregrounded for me the ways in which generally, culturally, protecting and privileging others sets off a romantic notion in our heads: we see ourselves as heroes, which leads us to new acts of entitlement, and precludes us from hearing and seeing, from relinquishing space. This principle was constantly and visibly articulated and practiced everywhere in camp. It was really beautiful and a reminder that equity isn’t all that complex to pull off: it just requires those who benefit from inequity to relinquish; it requires them to see that establishing equity isn’t so much as lending a hand up as making space on the platform.

 

Water Warriors

When we visited, Oceti Sakowin was, quite possibly, the most diverse community in America right now, and maybe the only one in which unity is practiced as aggressively. But what struck me most about everyone I encountered was how willfully kind they were, and how earnestly of service they were trying to be. Yes, I saw some folks wandering aimlessly. . . myself and Courtney included. One of the advantages of going for longer than a few days is that one might learn how to function there. We regularly confused times and locations of things. Made rounds between places asking if we could help of people who didn’t need help at that moment. . . with time, we’d get better at it. But that’s our own self-critique.

We really didn’t see many, if any, people who were there just for the ride, so to speak. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered less peacocking: folks were happy to talk about themselves, no one wanted to talk about what they’d accomplished or what they brought to the table. Everyone seemed to get that they were there in service, and that seemed equally true of locally resident Tribe members and people who’d traveled from overseas. Perhaps it was that the constant reminders of intentionality and methods of expressing that intentionality that made people so great.

The messaging started with a predawn wakeup call over the loudspeakers reminding all the water warriors to wake up and pray, because that’s what they were there for. Or maybe it’s the prohibition of intoxicants that makes community so much better. I imagine both help, but I think that it’s simpler: The context is tragic, but everyone seems to know why they are there, and everyone seems to be there out of choice, participating at the level at which they are willing. And I know that that’s somewhat different for the Sioux who live there, but the Sioux elders set the principles and intentions and regularly reinforced the notion of choice. I hate to think of people as good or bad. What I would say is if I needed to call in a group of people to stand with me against an oppression that confronted me, I would be overwhelmingly grateful if this was the group that showed up.  Perhaps, I should say that when I need a people to come to the inevitable Standing Rock near me, I hope these are the people who come.

 

The Sheriff and the State

The police have been violent and they’ve been unjust. At the action we went to, they yelled from the hill that they didn’t want a confrontation, and pleaded with the protestors not to “force a confrontation.” They claimed that carrying gas masks was “very aggressive,” as was filling water bottles with a Maalox solution. The solution neutralizes chemical weapons when flushing the eyes of gas victims. In other words, shielding ourselves from their violence is aggressive. These were tens of heavily armed men in full riot gear, wielding water hoses and holding the high ground, yelling at people who were holding a silent prayer on a burial ground. A group guaranteed to be sober, guaranteed to not have weapons, guaranteed to be trained, a group whose training includes methods of removing agitators.

When I saw the Morton County Sheriff interviewed on local news on a Motel 6 TV the night we flew out, he would only refer to the water protectors as “rioters.” He continuously called them “aggressive and violent, very violent.” He talked about “protecting everybody to the north on 1806 from violent rioters, not just the corporation, but all the people.” To parse this: he was claiming that his choice and his men’s choice to deploy violence constitutes a “violent confrontation,” which then makes the water protectors violent. When he talks about all the people north, he means white people and their property. He was literally claiming that the very presence of the water protectors, of the Sioux, of the indigenous people and their allies was violent. He was claiming that as long as they are allowed out of their prisoner of war camp they are a threat to all the white people in Bismark and Mandan.

In a way, this makes sense to me. Those tasked with the dirty work of oppression are rarely oppression’s beneficiaries. They’re other poor folk, looking for good paying jobs, who end up in the army or law enforcement. And, I think, to do those jobs, to oppress, they either have to decide to be bad people, or they have to find a way to justify their oppression in moral terms. I don’t think many, if any, people consciously choose to be bad. So the oppressors have to reconstruct their imagined understanding of those they oppress; they have to see them as subjects who somehow deserve that oppression. To the police the water protectors must be rioters because the police chose to use anti-riot tactics on them. And, I think, it is a kind of violence to oneself to intentionally hurt other people; if you’re in that business, and feel that pain, I can see why you would want to blame someone else. Just because an abuser’s actions aren’t justified doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel pain. Because to address the real source of that pain would mean to understand that one is inflicting it upon oneself—by hurting others, by being unjust and immoral. And stopping would require changing everything, beginning with one’s sense of moral surety.

I guess there is something worth struggling against, in all of us: moral surety. If we’re sure, we’re likely not moral. And if we’re unsure, well then, there’s clearly work to do.

And there is, I think. There’s work still to do at Standing Rock; we cannot let our attention lapse. And there’s work still to do at all the other Standing Rocks, those around us and those yet to come.

Here’s a useful map.

Link to "Get Up, Stand Up": Part One


Jacob Paul’s 2010 debut novel, Sarah/Sara, was called one of that year’s five best first fictions by Poets & Writers. His work has also appeared in Western Humanities Review,  Massachusetts Review, Seneca Review, The Rumpus, and Numero Cinq. For more on Paul and his work, please visit his author website.


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