As efforts to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline grow, communities across the country are hearing from activists on their return from North Dakota and sending off fresh teams to lend support. The author believes that part of the support for the Standing Rock protests is a dawning consciousness that Native people have something important to teach us about living well on this planet.
*****
On Sunday, November 6, in Redwood Valley, a tiny agricultural community in northern California known for its premium wine grapes and marijuana and its back-to-the-land ethics, cars spilled out of the parking lot at the local Grange and lined rural East Side Road in both directions for most of the afternoon. In an event sponsored by the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians, several hundred people gathered to listen to activists report back from Standing Rock where they had stood in solidarity with Native American Tribes opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. In a kind of relay race that is being enacted across the country, the event was also a fundraiser for another team of local activists who will leave shortly for Standing Rock. I was there with my wife, Sherrie, who is Mihilakawna Pomo and Bodega Miwok, and comes from an activist California Indian family. In the 1970s, her father, Bill Smith, led a dogged ten-year struggle to stop construction of Warm Springs Dam, which ultimately flooded his tribe’s homeland in Sonoma County’s Dry Creek Valley, a project that was sold to the…