The protestors and native tribes at Standing Rock warned us.
On Nov. 16, the Dakota Access Pipeline did what all scientists, environmentalist, opponents, protestors and native peoples all knew it would do — It leaked. Where did it spill? Thirty miles west of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate tribe’s wetlands, on their Lake Tranverse Indian Reservation.
Some of those wetlands drain into the reservation, and while the tribe was informed of what happened by officials (and, I’m pretty sure, were told “not to worry”), we all know how truthful companies and our government can be about our water supply.
We’ve all seen Erin Brockovich. We all know about the contaminated water crisis in Flint, Mich.
And the irony of universal timing wasn’t lost on me.
This latest spill happened on a Thursday — exactly one week before Americans will gather around tables full of food and give thanks for their many blessings while celebrating our ancestors’ first meal and harvest with the Wampanoag native tribes. That was, of course, before we forcefully removed those native tribes from their lands (probably screaming the whole time about how ungrateful and unpatriotic they were) and massacring them on a trail as they walked away.
Everywhere you look today — on the news, in our Facebook feeds — there are instances of overt racism. Black men are being gunned down by the police 2.5 times more often than whites. White supremacists now march down the streets unhooded, carrying tiki torches alongside their Nazi symbols and flags.
The proof that racism still exists is all around us.
With native peoples our racism is covert, meaning most people don’t think they’re being racists when they let their kids play “cowboys and Indians,” complete with faux scalping actions. Or when we’re reinforcing the idea in our history books that native peoples were “happy” to “give” their land away to white foreign settlers called Pilgrims. Or when we ignore the fact that we are still celebrating Columbus Day — a holiday that basically glorifies a man who brutalized and enslaved thousands of indigenous people after he “discovered” America.
Hell, we even like a little bit of racism in our football. Because despite protests from native peoples since the 1960s, we still have a football teamed called THE REDSKINS. Can you imagine the uproar if we had football teams named the Brownskins, Yellowskins or Blackskins? These are but a few of the many examples and instances of how our covert racism works.
For instance how, in football, players taking a knee isn’t about whether one supports our service members or how patriotic we are, or about not being grateful for the abundance, goodness and blessings in our lives.
It’s about looking beyond our Americanized bullshit and seeing the world through its natives’ eyes. It’s about not only acknowledging our past and the horrible things our ancestors did to other humans, but also taking steps today to rectify and heal the wounds we inflicted. It’s about understanding that, as Americans, we are inherently privileged despite our gender and race.
Is all American privilege the same? F-NO. But it’s still there on our passport.
So on Thursday, as I sat around the table with my small family — my wife, our dogs and Zen and Simon, and our cat Cayman who has now lost movement in her hind legs — I was humbled by my privileged. Not only because I have the perfectly imperfect family, or I have a table we can all gather around, or a home we can all rest in. But because there wasn’t a pipeline full of chemicals running underneath my home, threatening my family’s water supply.
I was extremely cognizant of those whose reality this is and that those people are still fighting for their native right to a chair at our America table.
What we do next matters. Because what our government officials (and Trump) are doing in South Dakota and now Nebraska now is repeating history. Only this time instead of small pox blankets or The Trail of Tears massacre, its steel pipes imported from Russia spilling 210,000 gallons of oil into the lands we “gifted” back to the original owners.
Hey, isn’t there a racist term for those who gift something and take it back? Oh, that’s right — Indian Giver.
It’s way past time for us, linguistically and physically, to do better and be better to our natives and their land.
Brandi Amara Skyy is a writer and drag artist and a regular contributor to Dallas Voice, DVtv and other media in print and online.
