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I’ve been filing dispatches from Indian Country for as long as I’ve been a journalist —just over two decades—and never have I seen the historic streak of Indigenous news as I have since last Friday. The headlines are HUGE: the U.S. Supreme Court upheld treaty rights in a landmark Oklahoma jurisdiction dispute; it appears the NFL team from Washington will indeed change its racist team name; and a federal judge ordered the Dakota Access Pipeline to shut down, at least for now. And there’s more. I credit much of this modern justice to the fires that were ignited at Standing Rock. Marcus Mitchell, pictured above, is just one of today’s many foot soldiers in the 21st-century Indigenous struggle —to restore broken treaties, rebuke racist agendas, and demand to be seen and heard. A water protector at Standing Rock, this week Mitchell advanced his case against North Dakota law enforcement alleging police used “excessive violence” during the NoDAPL demonstrations. He lost his left eye to a bean bag pellet fired by police the same night I was trampled on by a small army of officers. Standing Rock came to mind as protests erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder— the militarized policing, more black eyes, and the arrests of dozens of journalists like me. It was Standing Rock amplified, a symbolic reference to the real world impact people-power can have when pitted against inequality and historic injustices. Once more, this Indigenous moment should be impossible to ignore. A steady drumbeat under Trump has relied on the “rule of law” to argue for the normalized violence, fraud, and corporate manipulation that we saw at Standing Rock, just as now. But as I routinely questioned during my monthslong reporting from the anti-pipeline demonstrations—whose rule of law? The “rule of the strong” as Justice Neil Gorsuch raised in his opinion on Thursday? Or what is actually written in the treaties as “the supreme Law of the Land”—a game-changing affirmation that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation is and has always been “Indian country.” There’s more context to all of this and I invite you to please indulge on a long read I’ll be posting on the Indigenously Medium site, early Sunday morning. Enjoy.
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