Bridge-Building and Radical Forgiveness: Standing Rock and Beyond
This is a post by Jacob Taylor who is a native to the Maketewah watershed in southwestern Ohio. His work is primarily concerned with the intersection between watershed literacy/eco-spirituality and Christian discipleship. All photographs in this post are his.
I decided to take a break from a few years of relative FB silence to voice support for anyone considering making the jaunt to Standing Rock. I'm really happy to share information from my (limited) experience there. If it's been on your radar, I think it's a really good time to start making plans. If it's not, there are a lot of avenues for you to extend support to that struggle from home, for real.
On another note, amidst a lot of heaviness, I feel an immense gratitude for all of the demonstrations of courage, solidarity, and bridge-building I've witnessed in the past two days. I sat in a mosque basement last night (I would've maybe never found myself there were it not for the election results) with a group of Muslim sisters and brothers to talk about how we can support each other in the coming days, and for every tearful voice that said, "I've never felt more vulnerable in my life" there was another that said "today I feel strong. Today I feel love towards those who would demonize me. I choose to extend compassion and listen to the pains and concerns of those who would cast a vote against my life." We wept and laughed and ate pizza and it felt like holy sacrament.
Last week I stood on broken glass with 500+ Christian clergy members against a giant police and National Guard barricade to renounce our complicity and silence in the midst of so much earth-pillaging in ND. I heard a Lakota elder, pointing up over the hill towards the construction workers currently ripping up native sacred sites and in the process effectively endangering the water supply of 18 million people, and towards the militarized police defending them, say "we must pray for them, for their well-being and and for the well-being of their families. We must forgive them because they don't know what they're doing." As a group, in ceremony, we acknowledged and mourned five centuries of profound violence, and pledged solidarity with the indigenous represented and renewed covenant with earth. We found out that the number of clergy enrolled in the Standing Rock delegation was 544, exactly the number of years since the Doctrine of Discovery.
There is reason for real concern. Anguish, even. But for despair, never. We're about to dive head-first into some deep and old historical traumas and wounds, and we're going to bleed in the process. But we're going to start the long work of healing. We're going to bind up each others' wounds and keep struggling towards Shalom. We're going to build stronger bridges and alliances, more sustained resistance movements, give longer hugs, plant bigger gardens, and we're going to call each other to unprecedented gestures of courage and solidarity. Our work has never been more cut out for us. This struggle is old as time, and as Canadian patron St. of heartbreak L. Cohen (rip) said damn, we have the music. And damn if I can't see a couple stars out tonight. If even just a couple. You are loved. You are strong. Together we are stronger. Kyrie Eleison, now and tomorrow, come what may. God of Life, give us vision and courage.
