Monthly Archives: October 2016

Last year, Indian Country Today launched a new series called “The 50 Faces of Indian Country.” Following up on my last post about the World Series, I thought I’d share these 50 faces with you. (PS: they look nothing like that guy on the baseball cap!)

Indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com//2016/10/21/50-faces-indian-country-2016-ii-166156?nopaging=1

In a few days, two Major League Baseball franchises will face each other in the World Series. Both have a lot to prove. The team from Chicago has experienced a post-season drought stretching back almost a century. The team from Cleveland, also unlucky in championship play, carry an extra burden into the October Classic. They can’t seem to shake their logo, a caricature of a Native American.

Rather than dive into a polemic against this offensive image, I will simply post a collage of the faces of Native sport over the past hundred years. These are the real Indians.

The history of many Native communities in the United States, when it is told at all, is usually recited as a series of convulsive events, tied together by a flimsy narrative of “contact,” “conquest,” and “dependency.”

A case in point is the occurrence at Pine Ridge Reservation on December 29, 1890—now known as the Massacre at Wounded Knee. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the word massacre was regularly attached to this event. Before that, it was a battle. A headline from the Leavenworth, Kansas newspaper of the day is typical of the coverage of the event in its immediate aftermath: “A Bloody Indian Fight: Treacherous Indians Fire Upon Troops.”

The truth is, like most incidents in Indian Country, the wanton killing of Minneconjou leader Spotted Elk and his band resulted from a series of false steps, betrayals, and misunderstandings that stretched back to the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1851. Of course, a tale of black and white, good and evil, sells more newspapers, and assuages more consciences, making history a parable of might and right for the “winning” side.

Only after several decades of historical detective work (including studies of Army General Nelson Miles’s comments that his subordinates acted either out of “blind stupidity or criminal indifference”) did the events at Wounded Knee take on all the traits of a full-fledged a massacre.

The protests in Cannonball North Dakota against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline under the Missouri River one half mile from the Standing Rock Reservation boundary have followed a similar trajectory. Proponents of the pipeline and detractors of the protesters have made the standoff seem sudden and irrational. It is an “uprising,” a fight. That’s why the people assembled there to stop DAPL refer to themselves as “protectors,” not protesters.

The recent arrests of well-known white activists may have fueled the notion in some quarters that this is merely an attention-getting stunt, or that it is just “minorities” complaining again. Sore losers.

Such erroneous characterizations stem, in part, from the remoteness of the action from the urban public spotlight, and the outright bias of reporting in many local news outlets. First reports out of North Dakota were very one sided:

“The Morton County Sheriff’s Department says hundreds of Dakota Access Pipeline protesters turned violent. Authorities say around 2:30 Saturday afternoon, a few hundred people marched to the construction site of the pipeline and broke down a fence to get in. Once inside, pipeline security officers were hit and jabbed with fence posts and flag poles. Knives were also reportedly pulled out. Three formal injury reports have been taken and two security dogs had to be taken to the vet” (Ben Smith, KX News, Sept. 4, 2016).

NBC lead with an emphasis on a “violent” turn in the protest, not pointing out until later in the piece that it was direct against protectors. Local newspapers in North Dakota have emphasized the cost to taxpayers of keeping up a police presence at the site.

In this climate, it is worthwhile to rehearse the long historical timeline that lies behind the efforts to protect the Missouri River watershed and the Standing Rock Sioux Community. Remembering history and returning facts to their rightful place in the historical narrative is also an act of repatriation.

A recent article on the situation in Mother Jones produced a clear timeline of events that shows the battle over the pipeline began in February of 2015, when the Army Corps of Engineers sent a letter to the Standing Rock Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO) asking for permission to initiate the process of building the pipeline. The THPO said no and asked for a full archaeological analysis of the route and the possibility that it would disturb human remains and other items of cultural patrimony.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/09/dakota-access-pipeline-protest-timeline-sioux-standing-rock-jill-stein

Between then and the summer of 2016, the pipeline was subject to litigation, not only by the Standing Rock Tribe, but also the Osage and Iowa Nations. Disregarding these pending claims, the Corps fast-tracked the pipeline, leading directly to the mobilization of Standing Rock tribal members and other concerned citizens, who formed a base of operations at Cannonball, calling it Sacred Stone Camp.

September 3, 2016 proved to be a turning point. On that Saturday, perhaps feeling the weekend would given them cover, private contractors bulldozed a strip of private land within sight of the water protectors, a section that was reported to contain human remains. The Standing Rock Tribe was in the process of litigating the status of this tract.  But the contractors couldn’t resist antagonizing the onlooking protesters, seeming to celebrate the desecration they were enacting. The water protectors rushed the heavy equipment to stop its vandalism, only to have the contractors unleash attack dogs and pepper spray on the men, women, and children who sought to protect what they believe is the final resting place of their relations.

It was a scaled down version of Wounded Knee. Both unnecessary and spiteful.

Thus the roots of the DAPL run deep, especially when it plunges beneath the Missouri. But they run deeper still in history—back to 1851 and the treaty rights the pipeline’s path so clearly disregards. And yet deeper. The bulldozers that scraped away the earth above the resting place of Lakota ancestors scarred as well the indigenous homeland of a people that stretches back thousands of years. It is the patria to which NAGPRA’s “repatriation” refers; it is the Grandmother earth of the buried dead that is, in itself, sacred.