Dakota Pipeline: The Best Way Forward!

The Lakota, my people in spirit, fighting the Dakota pipeline know. Whatever else is best for us to do as a life aim than to serve helpfulness?

Seven generation stewardship is a concept that urges the current generation of humans to live and work for the benefit of the seventh generation into the future.- From Seven generation sustainability – Wikipedia

“The words come from the Constitution of the Iroquois Nation.
A common, summarized and short version of ‘seventh generation’: derived from the Constitution of the Iroquois Nation that most of us have heard of is In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation… even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine.” — From Native Insight: Seventh Generation

Our forefathers in the USA were wise to pay heed to set up our own governance on this Native American pattern before ravaging this set of people, who made and lived in democracy and devised like some ancient Greek Athenians the democratic pattern. After taking their political pattern, our forefathers set forth on a resource stealing path and carnage of the American democracy founders writ large.

How sickening! How utterly deplorable and tragic! Infuriating and grievous in the extreme!

The Six Nations: Oldest Living Participatory Democracy on Earth

The people of the Six Nations, also known by the French term, Iroquois [1] Confederacy, call themselves the Hau de … [19] Artwork by John Kahionhes Fadden.

Yup, here’s the thanks that they, major founders of American democracy, got:

Population history of indigenous peoples of the Americas – Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/…/Population_history_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Ameri

The population figure for indigenous peoples in the Americas before the 1492 voyage of …. Earlier explanations for the population decline of the American natives … The scope of the epidemics over the years was tremendous, killing millions of …

It’s a Nazi type of nightmare to imagine the natives trekking step by small step to the Dakotas, in some cases barefoot and bloodied footed, in the snow with babies in tow while guarded by US government troops holding rifles closely to their heads.

Thousands of Native Americans, white settlers and U.S. soldiers were killed in the Indian wars. Native Americans were coerced to cede their lands and then forced onto reservations.

In the Upper Plains, that included members of the Great Sioux Nation, which comprises Lakota to the west, Nakota in the middle and Dakota to the east around Minnesota.

The seeds of the Dakota war were planted years earlier, in the 1830s, according to historians, when the fur trade that had been the basis of the region’s economy since the late 17th century began to fade and land became valuable for settlement.

By the by, pacifist Quakers were spared in  the murderous slaughter. They had a feathers attached to their home doors — a sign by tribal leaders to spare the house occupants meant to imply that they are one of us.

The Quakers also were spared in the Vietnam War and in Ireland’s religious wars.

Every time that these pacifists entered a field to collect the dead and wounded in the Asian war, no one fired as the Quakers went about their business to haul out the dead and tend the wounded. … Now if you were one of the gun-shot survivors, you might end up in an infirmary bed next to someone who’d fired on you. You’d share pictures of your children, smile at each other and have to suffer for having taken carnage against each other as you recognize some deep affinity, union and sameness, amongst yourselves.

Deliberate move by the Quakers to set it up that way! How can you shoot someone who you learned is like yourself? Clever way to end warring.

Ireland? Every time children in a line for school or a house — Protestant or Catholic — was bombed to rubble, the Quakers, as was done in Vietnam, swooped up to pick up people and brought them into sheltering places, taught the Protestant and Catholic children to play together, housed them and their families together and taught union.

No body wants to bring the Quakers harm since they are so embracing in a universal pattern to serve all. (I know about this since I was raised in a Quaker household.)

A number of my friends consider our species as a plague species — like locusts ravaging area after area across the world and consuming all consumables or like the Black Plague ravaging more and more victims as infliction spreads and decimation ensues to spread into wide arrays to destroy life in a fullness. Not too far off the mark, eh? … Un-Quakerly!

Yet we, some of us, trek onward to minimally curtail the gargantuan ravage. What other path to take for people like you and me in light of our common values?

I wish that I had more hope for the future than I do. I don’t see betterment in the spread of times ahead, but I do what I do since I have no choice.

No matter the outcome, I have to strive towards the best of the best outcomes until I get senile in loopy-land of the brain corrupting itself through breakdown or gasp my last breath and die as did my Quaker pacifist mother as I cradled her body into mine, locking us together for all times, as she, smaller than I, curled under my form covering hers and with my daughter touching my shoulders behind me outside of the hospital bed in which I held my Mom in painful death throngs. Yes, I wrapped her with myself as she died.

My child’s grasp on my shoulder was strong, thank goodness. It held me strong as I wept and curled on top of my mother with all my strength of being. I needed it — her touch. It offered a reassurance of connection, as my child and I both let go forever of someone seminal to us both. Good-by part of myself. Good-bye you of me and me of you, the mother and grandmother!

… I know that you know my position well in yourself. It’s a mirror. You can look into it and see yourself … or my face instead. …and look at the Lakotas, too. … some sort of oneness and similitude that expresses half way across the world from my country to yours and vise versa. So we carry onward with all of the entire force that we can muster from within ourselves at any given moment to create betterment for life beneficially forward.

Forget the carnage on our food plates. Let’s keep going, eh? I need you before I get coo-coo from senility or draw my last final breath. I need you to support my path forward. Subsume it into yourself. Draw a deep breath and join my mother, my daughter and me to improve life for us all.

Sally Dugman is a wriiter in MA, USA,

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