Another Thanksgiving Story By Red Wolf Returns "If you are here because you feel sorry for me, you are wasting your time, but if you are here because your life and destiny are linked with mine, then we will make a difference..." - Elizabeth Penashue, an Innu elder A number of years back, I was living in Denver, Colorado and had gotten involved with a local group of political activists who were organizing in support of traditional Dine (Navajo) elders down in the four corners region of Arizona. The Elders were (and still are) resisting being relocated off their ancestral lands to make way for a huge coal strip-mine that's been headed their way for well over a decade. The coal mine's purpose is to supply energy for the power plants which provide electricity to the western U.S. power grid. (For more information on this issue see Black Mesa Indigenous Support's website at: http://www.blackmesais.org/) Our group was called the Traditional Support Caravan (For more information, see: www.traditionalsupportcaravan.org) and was based out of Boulder. Our purpose was to use the week of Thanksgiving break to take supplies to the elders who were the last hold-outs on the land there. This was done at the request of the elders themselves. We were very clear that our intention was support -- we were not going down there to receive, but rather to give. We spent the better part of four months organizing, fundraising, and collecting food. We commissioned an 18 wheeler to haul the primary bulk of the supplies and brought together over twenty of our own vehicles (pickup trucks & SUV's mostly) to haul the rest of the stuff down to the reservation. We drove for a little over twelve hours to get there, and camped out along the way. Once we arrived, we proceeded to spend the next week delivering supplies to the various households and volunteering to help out wherever we could. During the time we were there the group I was with had the honor of staying with an 80 year old widowed Dine woman named Ida Clinton. She was half deaf, and blind in one eye. She lived in a small cabin on the land where she was born, and she lived mostly by gardening and herding sheep. She still cared for one of her daughters (now over 50 years old herself) who was born developmentally disabled. Her extended relatives would come and visit her often, and she would go and visit them (it seemed as though everyone who lived on the reservation was related to Ida -- her "clan sisters" and "brothers", as she called them). Ida had never signed a piece of paper in her life, and was adamant that she never would. Ida had never had electricity, and saw no particular good use in it. During our stay with Ida, she insisted on cooking for us, even though we had brought our own food. Over the week, I saw the very same flour and oil that we had given her being used to make the fry-bread that she served us. She told us stories -- rich & playful stories from her own experiences -- stories that spoke to her courage and resourcefulness in the face of adversity, and showed the deep connection she had to the land, the spirits and wild creatures who lived there, as well as to her people. We fixed a gate on her horse stable, shoveled some sheep-shit out of the pens, and chopped firewood. We felt really good about ourselves and what we had done to help "this poor Navajo woman". After driving the 12+ hours back to Denver, we found ourselves speeding into the suburbs just after dusk, while endless rows of individual apartments and sprawling nuclear-family houses awaited us. Since it was now post-thanksgiving, many of the suburban houses had their Christmas lights out. I remember thinking how much I hated those Christmas lights, knowing that the power to light them came from the coal mine that was destroying Ida's home. I remember thinking how Ida had never used electricity a day in her life, and how she could see no particular good use in it. Then I walked into my suburban house and flicked on the light switch. And it occurred to me; how many times do I need to flick that switch before I've fed more of my life-energy (in the form of money) to that coal mine than I just fed to Ida (in the form of flour and oil and shoveled sheep-shit)? And then a second thought occurred to me; was Ida a poor woman for her lack of money or was I a poor man for my dependence on it? The life I had seen Ida living was intimately connected. Her daily relationships included contact with the necessities of her own subsistence, with her extended clan family, with the land, and with the spirits and wild creatures who inhabited that land. Ida's life had given her a resourcefulness, playfulness, and aliveness-of-spirit that I had rarely encountered in people half her age. The suburbs waiting for my return appeared stifling and lonely by contrast to her life. No clan-family awaited me. The land was paved over. The spirits mostly mute. My work paid me in little pieces of paper. I knew my life included nothing that would have been important to Ida. And then a final thought occurred to me, what relationships in my own personal life actually have the power to stop that damned coal mine? The answer I've come up with so far is -- all of them. Not one less than all of them. The reason the coal mine exists in the first place is because it is fed by the life-energy of those whose life-way depends upon it. That is our life-way-yours and mine-not Ida's. No matter how loudly we protest the mine or proclaim our solidarity with Ida, our words are empty if we continue to live as we do. This is not because we are insincere, but rather because we don't truly know ourselves and our relationship to the circle of life. And this is not just about coal and mining-our relations are just as devastated on lands where the native inhabitants were conquered to make way for the grain farms that feed us and the cotton farms that clothe us. The same obviously goes for the lands where the petroleum comes from to feed, clothe and move us. Every aspect of our Euro-American way of life feeds energy into the problem, and we expect "political activism" to fix it? We are able to be in solidarity with native people (and here I mean all native people-the wolves, the trees, everyone) only when we authentically re-connect with what it means to be "native" ourselves. Anything less is a token sham designed to give us an identity that allows us to feel good about our colonial ways and continued rape of Mother Earth. ("Sure I pay the electric bill which funds that coal mine, but I took the elders some flour and sugar. See, I'm one of the "good guys". The "bad guys" are those people over there…") From my perspective, the world doesn't need any more white crusaders, no matter how right (or "left") they might be. The world needs more people who know who they are the way Ida knew who she was. I can't speak for Ida, but I can say that Ida's relationships told me who she was. "All our relations" is not a new-age slogan. It's a way of life. What do "all our relations" say about us?