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Sept 5, 2004 Bear with us, folks... this is a long one... Hello Everyone. It's us again. It's a rare beautiful rainy Sunday in Porcupine to start a letter to all the people we've been missing. Hope you are all doing well. These past several weeks there's been a lot going on in the community -- school registrations happening all over and classes beginning, Pow-wows in a number of different communities, community meals, and other events. Three weeks ago we went to the Oglala Nation Fair and Pow-wow -- probably the biggest event on the reservation all year. We spent two evenings there talking with people, watching the wacipi (dance) and rodeo and eating delicious Indian tacos (taco fixings on a large piece of fry-bread). Two weeks ago we attended the wake and funeral of Antoine Black Feather, a well-known delegate to the United Nations for the Lakota Nation. He has done a lot of work internationally for indigenous people. He will be greatly missed in this community and around the world. Two weeks before he passed away we had attended an all-day honoring for his life's work. The night of August 2nd was particularly eventful for us. We attended an evening meeting in Rapid City about the effort to create a Citizen's Review Commission for the Rapid City police department. It's still unclear how and when this will take shape, but the goal is to provide ways for the Police department to be accountable to community members, especially to the Native community. The process has been slow and painful with a lot of resistance from the city government. The current effort began when a Native man was shot and killed by a police officer, provoking outrage in the Native community which the city couldn't afford to ignore. This man's mother was among the presenters at the meeting and is pushing hard for the commission. Once their presentation was finished the meeting got more intense. One woman shared a story about an 86 year old Native man who was pulled over by police about a year ago, thrown on the ground, kicked, and had his collar bones broken on both sides. There's a video tape of the incident which has 6 minutes missing with no explanation. He almost died in the hospital after the arrest. When he finally did recover, the state put him in a nursing home against his wishes and would not allow the family to make decisions about his care. The woman told us that he cried every time his family came to visit and begged that they would take him home. The family tried to take legal action to get him home again, but in the meantime he died in the nursing home. After she had told her story, other stories began coming out and it became clear that all the Native women in the room had sons, nephews, husbands, or fathers who had been beaten or killed by police. The worst part was that there seems to be no way for people to seek justice, have questions answered, or address abuses. It's next to impossible to win police abuse cases in court, or to even get any information about what really happened or how or why a loved one died. The system denies that there is a problem and doesn't show remorse when people are injured or killed. It's all incredibly infuriating and deeply saddening at the same time. I was well aware before I came to this meeting that racism was a huge and ugly problem in the South Dakota justice system and that it seriously impacts people's lives. But hearing these personal stories was nevertheless an intense emotional experience. I would encourage others of you to become more aware of how this may also be a problem in your community. Racism is a huge problem all throughout the US justice system and often white people who don't deal with the police every day are not aware of it. When we returned home late that night from Rapid City, it seemed to us that something was not quite right in our home. We checked around the house and found pieces of glass blasted all across the office. At first we thought maybe someone had been throwing rocks at our house, but we couldn't find anything in the room that could have broken the double pane window. When Carl went outside to do some sleuthing and found windows broken on the north side of both cars in the yard and pock marks on top of Harley and Sue's old camper, we realized that we had missed the hail storm of the century. The next day, neighbors told us that some of the hail had been baseball-sized and even showed us some pictures ^Ö pretty incredible. Carl spent an afternoon on the roof patching broken shingles. We had to have three windows replaced in our trailer and two in our Suburban. And my poor tomato plants! Of course we weren't the only people with serious damage. There are still quite a few cars riding around in the Porcupine community with spiderwebbed windshields and windows out. We had 4 Mennonite Disaster Service volunteers from the Freeman, SD area come out this past week to help with repairs on homes in the area. They did a lot of hard work, but there are still a lot of windows out. Rumors are that this will be a hard winter with lots of cold and snow -- plastic and duct tape won't cut it. I'm thinking about that especially this morning with the heavy rains and wind. We went for 2 weeks ourselves with only plastic on our trailer windows -- not too much fun. Ok, time for "Dear Carlissa." Dear Carlissa, Can you give us some current sociology on the Lakota community - I am wondering about family and friendship structures, language use, and community events/gathering places. Are there ways you can connect on a more friendly social level with your community? How can you identify with your partners and neighbors? Do you feel like you are doing more good or harm by your presence in the Lakota community? -kns Dear kns, Would you prefer to finish reading this e-mail in less than 6 hours? In that case, we may have to short change you a little on this answer. But thanks for the good questions. Regarding Lakota sociology -- If I share any information here, I need to make it clear that I am NOT an expert on this. It is always tricky to describe a community that is not your own. I can tell you the little I know and hope that I don't misrepresent anything. I do know that extended families are a very important part of the social structure here in this community. Traditional Lakota governance was based on the tiospaye kinship system. A tiospaye is an extended family unit that would traditionally have lived and traveled together. Today extended families do often live and work together, but more and more, these family systems are broken up. This has been happening for a variety of reasons. The US government has been a huge force in the erosion of this system, by forcibly taking children out of their homes to attend boarding schools which teach European-American cultural systems, by imposing a foreign government system and outlawing the tiospaye governing system, by encouraging people to move off the reservation, and by using a variety of tactics to make it very difficult or impossible for families to continue living together on their land. Many people live in government cluster housing projects which are not conducive to preserving the tiospaye system. The Lakota language is still used primarily in some families and especially in the older generations. We hear the language used most often in religious contexts: ceremonies, prayers, and songs. We often hear Lakota spoken on the radio on weekday mornings. It seems to us that a majority of people over 50 in the Porcupine community speak Lakota, and many elders knew Lakota as their first language. However, the language is endangered because there are very few young people who can understand or speak it. When the older generation passes on, so will the language unless something changes. There are a lot of people in the community who are very concerned about preserving the language and are working hard to save it. Unfortunately, the No Child Left Behind Act makes it difficult to include anything in school curriculum that isn't on the standardized tests. There are certainly a lot of community events happening here that we try to attend. We usually visit a local church on Sundays. All summer long there have been Pow-wows in different communities across the reservation. This weekend we've been attending events at the Porcupine Labor Day Pow-wow. We sometimes go to wakes or funerals in the community, of which there have been far too many since we arrived. Wakes go often for 24 hours and sometimes for 48 or more. Sometimes people in the community hold commemorative events for relatives or historical events -- either a walk, a community meal or honoring. Sometimes there are community meetings that we are invited to attend. In the interest of time, I'll save the answers to the rest of your questions until next time. Sincerely, Carlissa Dear Carlissa, How does your work with SNOW inform your work with the Lakota people who you now live among? [SNOW stands for "Sound Non-violent Opponents of War" -- an organization that we worked with while living in Seattle in 2002-3] - your brother in Seattle Washington - John Dear Seattle brother John, You ask a good question. To be honest, it's not something I've thought a lot about, as the contexts seem so different, and we've been focused pretty heavily on getting into the community and work here. But it's good to be pushed to make those connections. In SNOW we felt fully authorized to take leadership in community organizing because we were primarily organizing "our" community - ours by virtue of shared culture, shared whiteness, shared middle-class-ness, etc. Here in Lakota country, we're keenly aware of the destructive history of well-meaning (and ill-meaning) white people imposing "solutions" on the Lakota. So although the work here (in the broad sense) is still community organizing, our role is very different (background support rather than any sort of leadership) and we're very hesitant to propose ideas or initiate action - I think rightfully so. As we get more comfortable in our role on Pine Ridge, we hope to do a lot of education and bridge-building work with the white Mennonite community in eastern South Dakota. This summer, we attended the Sioux Falls MCC Relief Sale and visited 2 Mennonite churches in the Freeman, SD area. The discussions I had with some members of those churches about Native issues in South Dakota reminded me much more of SNOW street-corner work, in terms of the gentle touch needed to have constructive conversation on controversial issues with people coming from a different perspective. Thanks for your letter, John. Carlissa Dear Carlissa, What are the greatest joys/hardships you've experienced recently in your work? hope to hear from you soon. peace, tom Dear peace tom: Joys would be beautiful breezy evenings with colorful sunsets, neighbor kids camping in our backyard and roasting marshmallows, being told by someone that I'm appreciated, making new friends and new connections, witnessing people of strong faith in action. Hardship would be dealing with tangly situations, being expected by others to be an expert on things I know nothing about, not knowing where to focus my time and energy, the challenges of seeking accountability and of being an outsider in a community, especially when I'm an outsider who represents a terrible oppressor. If you've read this far, you get a star! Thanks for your interest in our lives and the concerns of the Oglala Lakota people. Blessings to all of you in your lives and work. Your friends/brother/sister/daughter/son/cousin/niece/nephew/grandchild etc, Karissa & Carl
