Native American USU students travel to Standing Rock Indian Reservation
This week, as millions of Americans gathered in celebration of the Thanksgiving holiday and colonial settlers’ relationship with indigenous Americans, three students from Utah State University’s Native American Student Council set off on a pilgrimage of a different kind.
Rather than taking advantage of Black Friday bargains or packing in a few extra hours of sleep before final exams, Christopher Capitan, Denishia Tsosie and Tyra Hardin decided to finish out the holiday with a trip to Očeti Sakowin Camp, where indigenous people and environmental activists from around the country gathered to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline.
All three said they don’t really celebrate Thanksgiving anyway.
“It depends what you mean by ‘celebrate’,” Hardin said. “We still have the dinner — we have a big dinner — and then that’s about it.”
So traveling to North Dakota wasn’t a huge sacrifice — aside from the long, cold night spent in camp and the drive itself, which was over 14 hours each way.
For Capitan, Tsosie and Hardin, the focus didn’t seem to be on gaining recognition or joining a movement. They simply went because that’s what they thought they should do. For them it wasn’t so much a matter of protest as it was a matter of service.
“I want to be there,” Capitan said, “and try to help out as much as I can.”
The trip was Capitan’s second to the camp in as many weeks – the first was to drop off supply donations NASC members had collected and “to see firsthand what was happening on the line,” Capitan said.
“After seeing all the wounds that everyone sustained and seeing the pictures, it looks like they don’t have as much medical supplies apparently or looks like they don’t have as much medics,” Capitan said.
Having grown up an EMT on the Navajo reservation in southeastern Utah, Capitan decided to donate his trauma bag to the camp — and ended up spending the day in the medic tent, attending to the very wounds that had drawn him back to Očeti Sakowin Camp in the first place.
Some injured protestors were treated for hypothermia and some had to spend time in a pepper spray decontamination tent, Capitan said. One man reportedly had trouble breathing after being shot with a rubber bullet in the abdomen.
Capitan plans to make the trip to North Dakota again in another month, too, and get back to work in the medic tent.
Tsosie grew up in Navajo Nation as well and recently began a campaign to raise money for the Navajo Water Project, an organization dedicated to providing Navajo people with clean water. The work became especially pertinent after the San Juan River – the reservation’s major water source – was contaminated last year.
“That river is a huge resource to the Navajo Nation, so that was a pretty big deal for us,” Tsosie said.
It was a big deal, yet Tsosie and Capitan both felt media coverage and government response didn’t what it meant for them and their families on the reservation.
“The only one that really got attention was Flint, Michigan,” Capitan said, “when their water source was contaminated.”
Similar to Flint, the San Juan River’s contamination was the result of an EPA screw-up, Tsosie said. Not only that, but when the government sent the reservation water to make up for the mistake, that water was also contaminated.
Having gone through their own water struggles along with their indigenous community, Capitan and Tsosie were in a position to relate to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s aversion to allowing an oil pipeline to disrupt their land and water.
But “it’s not just water, it’s land things too,” Hardin said. “A lot of the land is just slowly taken away.”
Hardin, who belongs to the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation, said her tribe’s ancestral lands in northern Utah were taken over by white settlers, so her people were forced to relocate.
For her, the trip to the Standing Rock reservation was a chance to stand against a tradition of indigenous exploitation by the U.S. government and white settlers.
“I feel like we’ve always been fighting, just at this point I feel like we’ve come together more — we united more on this one,” Hardin said.
Hardin shared Tsosie and Capitan’s concern that a lack of media coverage — both currently and historically — downplayed and failed to properly illuminate indigenous struggles for land and resources.
“Before, we fought all the time, it’s just not shown in history how much we fight, like even Standing Rock’s not on the media that much,” Hardin said. “There’s so many other times that we have and it hasn’t even been shown.”
Though they can’t control how media sources or history books shed light on indigenous struggles, the three did what they could and traveled to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s land in a show of solidarity.
The trip came at the heels of a letter from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — delivered Thanksgiving day — demanding the camp be evacuated of public protestors within 10 days. If demonstrators failed to leave within the allotted time, they would be cited for trespassing on “Corps-managed federal property,” the letter said.
As of Saturday, there were no active plans to evacuate the camp.
David Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, said in a statement that though the news was saddening, it wasn’t “at all surprising.”
“It is both unfortunate and ironic that this announcement comes the day after this country celebrates Thanksgiving — a historic exchange of goodwill between Native Americans and the first immigrants from Europe,” Archambault said.
Though circumstances cast doubt on the fate of Očeti Sakowin Camp, Capitan said he’ll follow the demonstrators wherever they end up.
“I’ll find out where they’re going to relocate their camp and (depending on the need) make another supply run,” he said.
If the Corps maintains the position taken in its letter, Dec. 5 will be the day that decides the camp’s future and the day Capitan finds out the destination of his next supply run.
@alyssarbrts