Yellowstone buffalo are on the move.
As indicated in a YouTube video, Tribal Voice Radio employee Joann Spotted Bear of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota is planning the Wounded Knee Million Man March for Peace and Justice from Wounded Knee to Washington D.C. May 10 to stand against the KXL pipeline. Moccasins will hit the ground at sunrise and march for eight to ten hours a day, 25 miles a day for roughly 41 days to reach the capital and make their voices heard.
The video opens with a prayer to the Creator and Spotted Bear stating:
“My dear relatives, before anything is said… I am speaking about something very important. We are always supposed to remember the Creator… This is I, Bear woman. I do come from Wounded Knee… this walk for peace and justice (also known as the Million Man March) is a walk that is to straighten out the wrongs that have been done to the Native Indian people of the land.”
The march builds on a wave of anti-KXL sentiment throughout the country, with over 100,000 people vowing arrest and thousands more willing to fight to the death over barring the pipeline from crossing Indigenous territories. Whether or not autonomous tribal rights will win over corporate might and greed remains to be seen, but currently offers one of the larger theaters for the intersection of racism and environmental exploitation. Not surprisingly, the KXL fight has brought to the surface once again America’s horrid lack of integrity when it comes to honoring treaty rights.
Spotted Bear stated:
“Treaties are supreme law of the land and they venture out worldwide. They started in 1059 before Christ. The first treaty in the world was the Ten Commandments. That was the first thing ever written by God before any man can write. And the alphabet was given to the African people… where the Ethiopians used it… was took by Europeans where a blank piece of paper became very powerful. And through that piece of paper is what the government calls ‘federal government documents.’ I call them abuse of federal government documents between the benefactor and beneficiary. The benefactor is the government, the beneficiary is 564 federal recognized tribes… Only upon request in universities are treaties taught. And in the military.”
Spotted Bear went on to say:
“The treaty is the deed to the land and land is not for sale to the United States federal government.”
No, it’s not, and the federal government should know that well and good, and it does; it just doesn’t care when money and resources are involved.
On the flip side, however, Spotted Bear states regarding the government’s treatment of Native peoples:
“Poverty and genocide was tooken [sic] upon the Indian people as almost as if it was a hatred sort of act, a death sentence against our 564 federal recognized tribes.”
Consequently, Native folks have had enough. After being painted into a corner and watching the bayonets come at you for generations, folks tend to fight for their lives, and that’s just what Joann Spotted Bear is helping folks to do.
Spotted Bear states:
“We should have never been so far behind… They said that the Lakota people were behind 10 to 15 years in education ,but the reality — the world was behind about a good 500 years of government employment… knowledge of what was happening.”
Spotted Bear says she is talking to 1,000 ambassadors and world leaders worldwide presenting her case in hopes some will “help us straighten this out nationwide.” One ambassador, she says, responded that he will be present at the UN on May 20, ten days into the march.
“I thought about if I should go to the UN to meet them instead of having the march, then I really thought about the grassroots and I said, ‘We wrote a letter to Obama… we told the FBI, the BIA, the CIA, we put it on Facebook, we made this problem notoriously known worldwide — all these problems, and nobody listened. Sometimes it’s best to listen to yourself, and what’s in your mind and heart, and tell creator. And if you’re gonna do something do it to the best of your ability. And if somebody really wants to help they’ll be there.”
Spotted bear continued:
“I pray that the ambassador who watches these videos, that you’ll join me in Washington, because we waited for help. There’s many a times anybody who was multimillionaire or rich, or any company in the world could come and help our Indian people, but they weren’t there. So now that I’m raising a lot of ruckus I’m gonna depend on God… I’m gonna depend on him. I’m gonna depend on Creator mighty God… to help me to help my people to live. I don’t want no XL pipeline to destroy the water for seven generations. I don’t want the land to be destroyed.”
The walk will be leapfrog style, with five groups of people walking roughly five miles a piece alongside a caravan for 25 miles a day. In this way, no one person or group is overtaxed too much.
“Those of you who are ready to walk, we’re gonna have to help one another. Through food, through camps — whatever we can… We’re gonna have to help because there’s nobody there helping us. It’s an empty field, and the only one who’s gonna nurture our life is us.”
Spotted Bear continued to elaborate on the march:
“[We] can’t be having drinking and drugs along the way because it only causes trouble. We don’t want trouble; we wanna be a good — we’re not like good angels, good representatives, hell, we can do whatever the hell we want. It’s our land! It belongs to us. But, if we’re gonna really mean what we have to say to ourselves and to the Creator, only Him, then we need to live accordingly.”
As for what people can expect along the march:
“Along the walk I’ll be taking pictures and videotaping and prayin’ and singin’ and maybe we’ll tell stories and have fire at nighttime. And we’ll be helping each other.”
Spotted Bear closed the video with why she feels compelled to stand up and speak out:
“I can easily turn the camera off, turn my back on my people and only survive for my son and I, but I’m not greedy and selfish and insecure like that; I’ve always felt that through my whole life, and so I want to help my people… I’m brown. I’m Native — a Native for life. God made me this way… gave me this land… Each and every one of you have the right to stand up, and none of you should be… feeling shame about anything… I’d like you to call me. Call me at (775) 622-1271, or Facebook me at Joann Spotted Bear… and I promise I will answer you.”
To join and/or support the Wounded Knee Million Man March for Peace and Justice, contact Joann Spotted Bear.
Dylan Hock is a writer, professor, videographer and social activist. He earned an MFA in Writing from Naropa University in 2000 and has been an Occupier since Oct., 2011, both nationally and locally in Michigan. He is published in a number of little magazines and has an essay on the muzzling of Ezra Pound included in the anthology Star Power: The Impact Of Branded Celebrity due out July of 2014 by Praeger. He is also a contributing writer for Take Ten, Addicting Info and Green Action News.
