This morning as I listened to the radio interview of Daniel Dixon, an organizer with Wet’suwet’en Solidarity DC, not surprisingly I heard the same concepts that informed what we did in Indianapolis regarding the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines. And the same things my friends and I talked about during our eight day journey along the path of the Dakota Access pipeline from Des Moines to Fort Dodge, Iowa. Which is that our current environmental disaster comes from White settler colonialism. A culture of domination of peoples and lands. A culture that results in the rape of Mother Earth as vast areas are devastated for resource extraction. A culture that threatens our extinction. A culture that turned on White people who now find themselves, ourselves, dominated.

We are in a situation that cannot be corrected by this dominance. Our only hope is to reject this capitalist colonialism and to learn from, be led by the Indigenous peoples who have never stopped loving Mother Earth and each other. Our only hope is to find our spiritual way, that so many have lost.

In this segment, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Daniel Dixon, an organizer with Wet’suwet’en Solidarity DC, to talk about the blockades and resistance actions shutting down Canada in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en people’s struggle against the Coastal Gaslink pipeline, Ontario Provincial Police arresting land defenders blockading a railway in Tyendinaga Mohawk territory, the ways ongoing violent repression by the Ontario Provincial Police and Royal Canadian Mounted Police undercuts Canada’s international brand as the US’ kinder, gentler northern neighbor and how the ongoing struggle to resist the Coastal GasLink pipeline ties into the broader 500-year ongoing struggle against colonization and settler-colonialism.

This video is from an interview I did on Wyse radio. I took the photographs from several gatherings we held in Indianapolis related to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). One of the most powerful occasions was when we gathered for prayers and to talk about our thankfulness for what we did together. Thankfulness for the day.

This video was taken by my friend Matthew Lone Bear during the First Nation-Farmer Climate Unity March. The idea was for a small group of Native and non native people to get to know each other so we could then work together on areas of common concern. We all got to know each other pretty well as we shared our stories. There was plenty of time to do that during the hours we walked through rural Iowa in September, 2018. It took eight days to walk and camp the 94 miles along the path of the Dakota Access pipeline.