As we begin this work week, one shortened by the formalities and festivities of the dominant culture, my thoughts necessarily turn to what this week purports to mean — and to how such concepts translate in our own world and ways. My contemplations are colored by the knowledge that, in all the time this country has observed what we call “Thanksgiving,” not much has really changed with regard to how that country has engaged with our peoples. The developments of last night were more than enough proof of that: Like the upcoming “holiday” and the country itself, this society’s very existence continues to draw life from acts of violence against both this indigenous land and the people indigenous to it, and continues to build itself inexorably upon our blood and bones, our skins and spirit.
Last night, in an attempt to beat the clock that is just as inexorably ticking down upon a colonizing corporation’s ability to desecrate land that belongs to Natives in order to extract wealth for itself, its partners in a fully criminal enterprise engaged in acts of torture against the members of the indigenous resistance. Its paramilitary enforcers engaged in typical goonery, what the rest of the thinking world calls a set-up, in order to box in Native protestors exercising the First Amendment rights this country supposedly guarantees them even as they sought to prevent the damage those same goons attempted to create in the form of a fire started in the middle of bridge over sacred waters, a traverse connecting sacred lands. Once the Native resistance made it to the center of the bridge the put the fire out, the governmental goons reportedly boxed them in with tear gas, then shot at them simultaneously with rubber bullets, an LRAD (a long-range acoustic device, a sound weapon that causes paralyzing aural and physical pain throughout the body, a weapon that has been deemed an instrument of torture by the international community), and with water cannon, which are firehoses sized to military use, the water fired at extraordinarily high volume and pressure from equipment attached to an armored military tank vehicle. All in temperatures that began at 27, dropped to 24 during the assault, temperatures that, wind chill taken into account, were effectively sixteen degrees above zero.
This was a deliberate attempt to kill.
There will be casualties, even if it takes more than a few hours or days for death to occur.
The people of the resistance camps there belong to a tradition that, like my own, treats fire as sacred. It is both name and symbol: a reference to prophecy, to polity, to purity, to the people. Fire manifests in ways literal and metaphorical, as a part of the mundanities of daily life and as a part of the most sacred.
The people there need fire now.
They need literal fire, that which keeps body warm and soul firmly attached. They need sacred fire, the sort that purifies and aids in ceremony. They need the fire of the human spirit, the kind that instills the necessary and entirely healthy, harmonious anger they will need to continue their resistance as the days grow ever shorter and colder, the nights and the external violence ever longer and more brutal. And they will need the fire of the people, the ancestors, the community, their extended relatives like us all across this land, to support their resistance and to resist ourselves on our own ground.
In my way, fire is prophecy. It is promise. It is the legacy of the ancestors and the hope of the future, of our children, of the Seventh Generation and beyond. It is that for which we give thanks, not once a year but every day, and that which we pray to help fulfill, by going well through life, as the spirits and the ancestors have given to us to do.
At this moment, the sacred fire is resistance.
The spirits, the ancestors, those upon whose blood and bones, skins and spirits the mythology of this week was built, are calling us to the fire: to resist.
~ Aji
* A personal note from Wings and Aji: If you’d like to support the indigenous resistance currently standing against the Dakota Access Pipeline, by far the best way to aid #NoDAPL efforts is with cash. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe is the front line of this resistance, and we always and only support funding the actual Native efforts. If you want to help, the best way to do the most good is with a contribution to the efforts of the Standing Rock people. You can do that here; scroll half-way down the page and 1) sign their petition; 2) call the White House; and 3) most important, donate through their link.
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