Standing Rock and white supremacy

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Chris Mato Nunpa, Ph.D, is a retired associate pro­ fessor in Indigenous Nations and Dakota Studies at Southwest Minnesota State University. Mato Nunpa is a Dakota name and means “Two Bear.”

Ho Mitakuyapi, Owasin cantewasteya nape ciyuza­ pi do! In the Dakota Language, this is a greeting that means, “Hello, my relatives. With a good heart I greet all of you with a handshake!”

On Dec. 4, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would not issue a permit for the DAPL [Dakota Access Pipe Line] to drill underneath the Missouri River. As an Indigenous person, a Dakota man, I was absolutely delighted to hear the news and I rejoiced. One reason for my happiness and thankfulness—no Native person had been shot and killed.

Since the violence, on the part of the neo-Nazi Morton County Sherriff’s deputies, was escalating against the unarmed water protectors, it was only a matter of time before one of our people would be murdered. So, there was a temporary respite with the news of the denial of a permit to DAPL.

As it is, one young woman had her arm almost blown off by a concussion grenade (a war-time weapon), and another teen-age woman lost sight in her right eye when a canister of mace was thrown in her face. This young Indigenous woman is having dif­ ficulty getting medical treatment since she doesn’t have insurance or sufficient financial resources.

As of Monday, Dec. 05, DAPL was still there. They still had their planes and helicopters flying low over the Oceti Sakowin (“Seven Fires”) Camp all night. They, DAPL, still had lights shining on the drill pad all night. These are intimidation tactics designed to disturb sleep and reduce morale so that the water protectors will leave camp. However, these scare tactics have been going on for months, and I do not think they will work now.

I am absolutely amazed, but not surprised, at the blatant racial hatred and discrimination displayed by not only the Gestapo-like Morton County sheriff’s deputies in their violence, in which they appear to take joy against the water protectors, but also by the Euro-North Dakotans. A number of our Native peo­ ple have been asked to leave places of business, or they wouldn’t sell to them, in Mandan and Bismarck.

One of the Native journalists was followed and in­ timidated by a man who was wearing a skull mask. Fortunately, he was not hurt. Others are followed and sometimes stopped by white men in their cars and vans. I even heard that in one black van, it turned out that these intimidators were actually police, which is chilling. As I understand, advice is given to the campers: don’t go into town alone and travel the road alone—take one or two persons with you.

The nearby towns of Mandan and Bismarck, in their relation to Cannonball and Ft. Yates, are bastions of racism, discrimination, and white supremacy. Or to use a phrase of one of our Dakota poets, these towns “are stained with hate.”

It reminded me of my Dakota/Lakota/Nakota col­ leagues who have said to me that South Dakota was their Alabama, their Mississippi. Then, when I was talking, at breakfast in the Prairie Knights Hotel, to a Lakota man, a member of the Standing Rock, about what I heard about South Dakota, he replied, “Well, North Dakota is like our Alabama and our Mississip­ pi, too.” So I will consider South Dakota as Alabama, and North Dakota as Mississippi.

I wish to say that my home state of Minnesota is no slouch, either, when it comes to racism and white su­ premacy. Minnesota placed bounties on the scalps of my Dakota People ($25, then $75, finally, $200). And they also forcibly removed (“ethnically cleansed”)

... Fight for 15 (continued from page 2: “Fight for 15: ‘We’re not backing down’”)

ballot measure campaign when it looked like the state legislature was going to raise the minimum wage. A third of the state workforce still makes less than $15 an hour.

In Connecticut, on Nov. 29, the same day as fastfood workers were striking for $15, a hundred low-wage workers descended on the State Capi­ (Above) Gen. Wesley Clark Jr. and other U.S. armed forces veterans kneel before Leonard Crow Dog at the Standing Rock reservation on Dec. 5 to ask forgiveness for U.S. transgressions against the Native Peoples over the centuries.

my Dakota People out of their ancient homelands, Mini Sota Makoce, “Land Where the Waters Reflect the Skies, or Heavens,” or Minnesota. The name Mini Sota Makoce is a reference to the thousands upon thousands of lakes in our homelands, of which the state of Minnesota is a part.

Minnesota used concentration camps (“death camps”), forced marches (“death marches”), mass ex­ ecutions, and uttered savage cries—“extermination or removal,” “exterminate the wild beasts” (the Da­ kota); “utterly exterminate” (the Dakota), or “kill the lazy vermin” (referring to the Dakota)—to name a few of the recorded racial epithets. The above-men­ tioned acts are genocide. This is what “genocidaires,” perpetrators of genocide, do.

Another thing I would like to mention here is that a number of clergy came up to Standing Rock to stand in solidarity with the People and with the water pro­ tectors in their resistance to DAPL. Several of them went into the State Capitol in Bismarck, N.D., and prayed in a foyer. They were arrested.

One of the things I noticed right away is the “gentle” way they were treated; they were treated differently. That is, there was no beating on their heads with batons, no spraying of mace in their faces, no shoot­ ing in the face with rubber bullets or on the bodies with bean bags, no strip-searching of these men of the cloth, no being placed in dog-kennel-like cages, or being kept in jail for several days, like many of our women and men were (including my younger daugh­ ter). The clergy were non-violent, just like the nonviolent unarmed Native water protectors.

Of course, there were a number of non-Indigenous peoples, allies, who were shot with rubber bullets. One had her arm almost blown away, others were ar­ rested, and appeared in court to fight the trumpedup charges. Some of these white people were treated just like Native Peoples.

In the past 524 years of what I call Wosice Tanka Kin (Dakota for “The Great Evil”), there have been­ times, along the way, when the Church, and its clergy, worked hand-in-hand, or cooperated, with the state and with the military. They were complicit in the in­ vading, killing, stealing, destroying, occupying, and tol to demand a $15 minimum wage. In January 2017, the minimum wage is scheduled to increase to $10.10, but like workers in Massachusetts they are saying that the compromises in the past are just not good enough.

Alvin Major, who works at KFC in Brooklyn, N.Y., would agree. He went on the first fast-food strike in 2012 when he was making $7.25 and now he is making $10.50. But he says he will continue to strike for $15. “I used to be scared when I first went on strike. Not anymore. We don’t have a union, but we are acting like one.” n Standing Rock Victory: