Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 2, Number 2. November 2019. ISSN: 2581-7094
--- Lance Henson
Within the resistant voice of captivity,
a longing prevails in the human spirit, a yearning for human justice. My
Cheyenne people have been surrounded by an American government that has imposed
severe sanctions on our abilities to live as sovereign and free peoples. My own
journey through this dilemma caused years of trauma and confusion. Ritual and
ceremony and the love and support of my family and poetry are the reasons my
life has turned toward a more positive cultural activism. Indigenous people the
world over are suffering today from programs of ecocide and ethnocide. The
assassination of Honduran water protector Berta Caceres last year at the hands of
mercenaries representing government sanctioned corporate entities represents a
most dangerous precedent. Since then and every month indigenous activists are
being assassinated on this planet. The corporate world and unregulated
capitalism cannibalises all of the resources it controls, including humans. In
response to this draconian monster, we tribal peoples have placed our hearts,
bodies and intellect on the front lines of resistance against these forces. In order to protect our
medicinal and ceremonial knowledge, we have listened to the earth’s message.
Crazy Horse, the Lakota warrior visionary predicted before his murder in 1878 a
seventh generation of young indigenous activists. In the autumn of last year, a group of young
Dakota activists erected three tipis beside the Yellowstone River in an attempt
to stop the Dakota access pipeline. They were attacked. In response, nearly all
the tribes in America, and indigenous peoples from many international
communities, activists from non-native groups, movie stars, musicians and
American politicians and combat veterans from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan
also arrived to support standing rock resistance. The major forces of American
military, police and mercenaries met the resistance. Treatment of those natives
arrested can be compared to abuse at Guantanamo. The camp has disbanded, and
relocated. Now activists standing rock was and is the epicenter of indigenous
resistance. A few of the opposing forces, mostly American police resigned and
joined the resistence. Since standing rock occupation, the courts of North
Dakota are currently adjudicating the cases of abuse from America’s police and
armed forces. Many of the approximately 800 native water protectors and others
arrested are being released from jails.
At current, the state judicial branches of North Dakota are refusing to
release data regarding standing rock. The resistance at standing rock is now a
name of resistance all over the activist world. In Hawaii, at Mauna Kea, for the past months
indigenous people and their brothers and sisters from all over the world have
stood ground against another government, another police force in the effort to
save their sacred lands from telescopes. Their prayers mingling in the
spiritual realm of all protectors of life in all its myriad forms. There is a
photograph of a large beautiful polar bear standing defiantly on the last
remaining piece of ice that was once an iceberg: its home. There is the
photograph of a Salvadoran father and his small daughter washed up from the Rio
Grande river on the American side. The horror of this photograph now hanging in
the memoried galleries of human cruelty, alongside the floating ghosts of
Wounded Knee and Tusla. At this writing, the lungs of our sacred earth are
burning in Amazonia. Our brothers and sisters there have been victimised by yet
another political leader vomited up from the underbelly of corporate
capitalism. The paramilitaries of corporate governments now in control of the
lives of children in the migrant holding pens in America imprisonment without
trial. Parents separated, perhaps forever, from their children. All people of
color are struggling the world over and the things we hold sacred are being
destroyed around us. We must build and recognize the human bonds that hold us
together, person to person. We must question all authority that approaches us or
ignores us. In doing these things,
we bring honor to one another. We bring solidarity to those ones who stand to
protect our one true mother. As an elder Cheyenne warrior, headsman sun dancer
and poet, I offer these few words. We are born out of water, in peace. In peace with the world so
lost, we must clear the way for our arriving generations. We must teach our
children things that will make them want to live and teach them how to fight
inhumanity.
Lance
Henson
August
23, 2019
Marina
of Lesina
Italy