I will not become what was done to me… Part 2, My Path to Peace and Social Justice Activism

by Rev. Dr. Doe West

About a year after being forced out into a “normal” life that was terrifying, and being forced to learn that my life was not the life of all little girls, that something was terribly wrong with my mother, my life, and so, clearly, with me, I had what I call my “Habakkuk Moment.”

Habakkuk was a minor prophet in the Judeo-Christian Old Testament (a book I had never read). In it, he is brought to such immense anger over injustice that he raises a fist to God!

As I did. To the dark sky in the midst of another terror-driven night, I shook my fist and pressed my heart against the window screen and silently cried out “If you are REAL, if you are this God I am hearing about now, WHY!? Why would you create ME? Specifically ME? And have me live THIS LIFE!? WHY????

I stood and shook my fist and then my whole body as I convulsed into sobs.
Each night for seven nights.
I awoke the 8th morning with what I later termed “the peace that passes all understanding,” and that was the understanding that a creator existed.

My next life shift came when my Native American grandmother took me aside and told me the time had come for me to learn who I truly was. Specifically, I was of The People. I had not known anything about this heritage, this beautiful heritage.

Over the next 5 years, Gra taught me that heritage, and trained me as a “Wise Woman” as part of my lineage. She shared with me how when she was 8, she was orphaned and missionaries took her from the tribal community and placed her as a kitchen slave in a white woman’s home in the Hudson Valley in NY. Thus, we had kinship in a heritage of captivity as well as in understanding the critical role of our own response to it.

Nothing was within normal limits for many more years. I was found to have an IQ that startled our small-town village. In an era without gifted child options, I was “placed” in the library–denied basic education but given the freedom to read every book in that building and forge a lifelong love affair with knowledge! But I also became known as the “Library Gnome,” someone different, again isolated and living a life with the potential for self-hatred, shame, and fear. I chose to focus on the pursuit of knowledge and did research on my own beliefs and those of society around me.

When I finally skipped a grade for the 3rd time, and worked it out with the school system to show up for two classes a day before work, they got state aid and I got a diploma. I had worked full time since I was 13 but now had working papers and could do a regular job outside the village rather than under the table.

I worked three or more jobs to help support my family and pay my own bills and begin saving for college. I knew college was my huge wall to climb over or tunnel under to achieve my own essential form of freedom.

Then the adventure REALLY began… but I will leave that part for later, in simple yet profound celebration of life lessons and mantras that sustain, and lights that shine in the darkness.

Our histories, ourselves, Part 2

National Day of Mourning Plaque, Plymouth, MA. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

By Rev. Dr. Doe West

The story of Native Americans/American Indians continues, with some glimmers of hope for the future.

Having failed to fully record the genocide, contemporary U.S. governments have decided to recognize 562 Native American tribes. To be included on those rolls, you must have an ancestor who was processed and counted–and most likely ended up on one of the reservations created while treaties were being broken and peoples moved like cattle across lands unknown to them.

As with all people who are deemed different and set apart, a number of Native Americans, ancestors of the survivors who may not be recognized as such today, voluntarily removed themselves from that processing and relocation. Within that group were my Grandmother’s family members.

The tales my grandmother told me regarding my lineage included ancestors hiding in the woods of the Hudson Valley area and coming into newly integrated groups of various tribes surviving there (Lenape/Delaware, Mahican, Wappinger, and others who entered that area) as well as African Americans, Cajuns, French Canadian trappers, and other European traders) in villages that developed on the Hudson river. This beautiful mélange of cultures created what I consider my “true American mutt heritage.”

When the Missionaries learned that my Grandmother’s parents were both dead, they came to “save her from the Savages.” To do so, they placed her in a white woman’s home in Peekskill, NY, as a kitchen slave.

The recognition of the history that Andrés Reséndez recounts in his  recent book, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America” is growing, as more and more people learn about and recognize the truth of this aspect of a generally unreported part of “American history.  But whether or not painful facts are recognized or understood, the facts are the facts. And for my grandmother and for me, America’s historical degradation and enslavement of native peoples was and is a fact of life.

When you read this story, you may suspect that it bears a tone of anger that I did not feel in writing it. Instead, as an academic, I speak with a voice that is intended to be one of education.

November is Native American Heritage Month.

Learn the truth.
Understand what was done.
Know that tribal affiliation and lineage does not exist only on ledgers on dusty shelves in official buildings in Washington, DC.

I trust my Grandmother’s oral traditions, passed on to me along with other true tales of her life that persist above and beyond the records made by those who enslaved her.

I celebrated my heritage throughout this month and I celebrate the next steps in our attaining all the rights and privileges owed me on the basis of my citizenship and my humanity in the land of my ancestors.

And I welcome the coming waves of immigrants and invite them to learn more about the true heritage of all the peoples who have struggled to build a decent life in this land of ours.

Whose Independence Day?

Mass trial at federal Courthouse, Pecos, Texas, 2018. In the public domain. Author: Federal Courthouse, Pecos, Tex.

by Kathie MM

On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass, man of color, social reformer,  orator,  statesman, and fugitive from slavery in Maryland, had the following to say about the Fourth of July:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim.

To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes that would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Douglass’s words continue to ring true for millions of people in the United States today–men, women, and children routinely denied the liberty and justice for all promised to those who came to our shores.  Just consider a few examples:

The remnants of the Native American genocides, survivors who continue to see treaties broken, lands stolen and/or polluted, rights disregarded;

The 2.2 million men and women incarcerated in this country (significantly higher than any other country in the world) and the racial discrimination built into sentencing,

Zero tolerance immigration policies  towards men, women, children, and babies, more than tired and poor,  fleeing danger and death.

Please, this Fourth of July, think of how we can do it better. Activism in the form of protests, demonstrations, petitions, and relentless shaming and exposure of the  perpetrators of social injustice is probably essential; however, we also need to think creatively about combatting the fear and hatred those perpetrators deliberately seek to inflame for their own purposes. Many haters and hurters are reacting to their own anxieties and suffering in ways that help only the power mongers.

Can we create messages of love and brotherhood and sisterhood that can overcome the incentives to hatred and violence?

Can we follow the example of Kristin Mink, the brave young woman who spoke truth to power when the opportunity presented itself?  If more seekers after peace, social justice, and preservation of a viable earth followed her example, perhaps next year’s Fourth of July would be an independence day for more of our nation’s people, and our planet would have a greater chance to survive.

P.S. No, I don’t think the power mongers, the racists, the hate purveyors, the despoilers of the environment, the enemies of peace and social justice are entitled to relaxing meals with their buddies and secret service agents in public places.

Please let me know what you think about this.

 

The Sustaining Fires of Standing Rock: A Movement Grows

Beyond NoDAPL March on Washington, DC. Woman in red jacket speaking about her experiences as a water protector at Standing Rock. 8 December 2016. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Rob87438.

by Roy J. Eidelson

 Over the past year, a remote area of North Dakota has been the improbable and prophetic site of a struggle with profound ramifications for us all. The confrontation has pitted the Water Protectors — the Standing Rock Sioux, other Native American tribes, and their allies — against the oil profiteers of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners. The source of conflict is completion of the $3.8 billion, thousand-mile Dakota Access Pipeline — the Black Snake — that Energy Transfer Partners has built to carry fracked oil from North Dakota to Illinois.

The current planned route for the pipeline takes it beneath the Missouri River treacherously close to the Standing Rock and other Sioux reservations. A serious leak will threaten the water supply of these tribes and millions of people who live further downstream. Meanwhile, pipeline construction has already caused irreparable harm to Native American ancestral burial grounds and sacred sites.

The Water Protectors

 Beginning last April, Water Protectors from across the country — indigenous and non-indigenous alike — began to gather in the thousands at the Oceti Sakowin Camp, established just north of the Standing Rock reservation. Around the camp’s sacred fires, they shared and honored the rituals, stories, and principles of community fundamental to the traditional values of the Lakota tribes: prayer, respect, compassion, honesty, generosity, humility, and wisdom.

At the same time, the Water Protectors sought to block construction of the final section of pipeline. Their non-violent acts of civil resistance were met with attack dogs, tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, percussion grenades, water cannons, aerial surveillance, and hundreds of arrests by militarized law-enforcement personnel. The standoff ended a few weeks ago when the Governor of North Dakota, citing safety concerns, issued an emergency evacuation order. Shortly thereafter, authorities forcibly shut down and razed the camp.

Assaults like those that took place at Standing Rock are really nothing new for our nation’s Native peoples. Their history of removal, dispossession, degradation, attempted forced assimilation, and betrayal at the hands of White America runs as long and as deep as the Missouri River itself. Spanning centuries, these experiences form a chronicle of unresolved grief and historical trauma, which Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart has described as “the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over one’s lifetime and from generation to generation following loss of lives, land, and vital aspects of culture.”

The consequences of these brutal colonization practices are visible too in a range of cold, hard statistics. Today Native Americans have a median household income barely two-thirds that of the general population, and their poverty rate is nearly twice as large. They’re half as likely to have a college degree, and their life expectancy is six years shorter. They also suffer from higher rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, incarceration, depression, and PTSD, as well as suicide among their youth.

The survival of Native Americans, their diverse communities, and their rich cultures — despite hardship and oppression, and against such long odds — is a powerful testament to their extraordinary resilience. This abiding strength deserves greater recognition than it receives; like historical trauma, it too is transmitted across lives and generations. Shared narratives, traditional practices, spiritual teachings, the prayerful appreciation of time and place, and respect for the interconnectness of all things serve as crucial protective factors for indigenous tribes and their members.

The Oil Profiteers

 Compared to the Water Protectors who converged at Standing Rock, corporate oil profiteers are a very different breed. But they too have their sacred places: anywhere fossil fuels can be extracted from the ground at a handsome profit. They have rituals too: board meetings where successful ventures are celebrated and forays for new plunder are devised. And, of course, they have their own cherished stories: about the day they first struck it rich; or the time they duped a community into believing that fracking is risk-free; or the shrewd business deal that bankrupted their competition.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this contrast in cultural values. After all, consider the company profile for Energy Transfer Partners. Among its top institutional owners is Goldman Sachs, once famously described as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Donald Trump — “I don’t believe in climate change” — was himself a high-profile investor until conflict-of-interest controversies during his presidential campaign reportedly forced him to sell his holdings. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry was on the company’s board of directors until earlier this year. Perry’s response to the catastrophic BP oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico — ruled “gross negligence” and “willful misconduct” by a federal judge — is memorable in its own right: “There are going to be things that occur that are acts of God that cannot be prevented.”

And above all there’s Kelcy Warren, the multi-billionaire CEO of Energy Transfer Partners. His business philosophy is dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest, as he once explained this way: “Like Mother Nature, the energy industry purges itself now and then. …I don’t wish any negatives on my friends, but the most wealth I’ve ever made is during the dark times.” So where was Warren while the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies were braving “dark times” during a bitter North Dakota winter in makeshift huts and tipis? He was probably more than comfortable in his 23,000 square-foot home on ten acres in Texas, with six bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, and “a chip-and-putt green, a pole-vault pit, a four-lane bowling alley, and a 200-seat theater.”

A Movement Grows

 Energy Transfer Partners boasts that the nearly completed pipeline utilizes state-of-the-art safety measures. But comparable pledges have preceded other environmental disasters in the past. The Water Protectors also recognize that these assurances are essentially meaningless for another reason: any construction that encourages continued reliance on fossil fuels is inherently dangerous and potentially calamitous for the Earth and future generations. The world’s leading scientists long ago reached an overwhelming consensus that climate change and global warming are the result of human activity — especially the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas — and that among the adverse consequences are more destructive floods, hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires.

The oil profiteers know this too, but they have hundreds of billions of dollars in annual profits at stake, and large shareholders who vigilantly watch the bottom-line. So greed overwhelms conscience and they resort to false-alarm mind games as part of a massive misinformation campaign, insisting that warnings of planetary peril are vastly overblown. Favorite appeals in their propaganda arsenal include disingenuous denials that climate change exists; bogus claims that scientists disagree about the facts; unfounded assertions that there’s no crisis because we’re capable of adapting to change; and deceitful efforts to portray environmentalists as radical extremists.

Three days after last November’s election, CEO Kelcy Warren was confident about the prospects for the Dakota Access Pipeline: “They will not stop our project. That’s naïve. They’re not stopping our project.” Such arrogance seems to come naturally to someone who’s grown accustomed to relying on friends in high places and his personal wealth — he gave over $100,000 to Trump’s campaign — to achieve self-aggrandizing goals. The words of Dave Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, communicate humility instead: “We have no power…the only thing that we have is support from around the world.”

But this support and solidarity shouldn’t be underestimated. Regardless of the pipeline’s final disposition in the federal courts, Energy Transfer Partners and its cronies have unleashed a counterforce that may well exceed their comprehension and control. While digging for dollars they’ve awakened a movement that combines a long-overdue commitment to addressing the trampled rights of Native Americans with a reinvigorated call for climate justice and environmental action. Today the ranks of the Water Protectors present at Standing Rock have been thinned. But as spring soon arrives on the North Dakota plains, countless more of us are embracing their powerful message of reverence and resistance.

********

Roy Eidelson is a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings. He is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, former executive director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Roy can be reached by email at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com and on Twitter @royeidelson.