THEY TRIED TO BURY US.

STANDING ROCK .
FORT YATES. NORTH DAKOTA, 2017.

“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”
-Proverb

During the week of September 17, 2017, between 100 and 200 native American leaders and supporters from the Standing Rock protest camp (water protectors) gathered for a week of ceremony and “healing” in a field near the now closed Oceti, Sacred Stone, and Rosebud camps of North Dakota. The land, belonging Phillis Young, was re-named “Sacred Stone Village”. Participants prayed, talked, sang, and shared meals as part of their re-connection and rejuvenation of resistance. In attendance was LaDonna Brave Bull Allard (who founded the first resistance camp and who put out the original call to “come to Sacred Stone and support the water protectors”), Phillis Young (a national organizer and activist as well as early planner of the AIM movement in the 1970’s), David Swallow, “medicine man” of the late AIM (American Indian Movement) founder, Russell Means, Raymond Kingfisher, long-time Cheyenne activist and AIM member, and Arvol Looking Horse, the 19th generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe and spiritual leader of all three branches of the Sioux Tribe.
After the February 2017 invasion and break-up of the camps by police, activists who had returned to their communities to spawn actions and organizations based on the Standing Rock model, also came to re-unite.