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Why Standing Rock is incomprehensible to most white people

Why Standing Rock is incomprehensible to most white people

Last updated on: October 28, 2016 at 11:35 am by Morgan Guyton

Why Standing Rock is incomprehensible to most white people 2016-10-28T11:35:51-05:00 Morgan Guyton

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“Defend the Sacred” (Huffington Post)

I’ve had an image haunting my mind for the past several months. At a progressive Christian gathering this summer, there was a drum circle late at night. I’ve experienced some powerful spiritual encounters during drum circles, so I went. It was cool until an older white man started making nonsensical “Indian” noises like “Heyah! Heyah!” and then a bunch of other people started doing it. It made me feel sick. So I tried to redirect by singing some of the Taize Christian chants that I’ve learned in Latin like “Veni sancte spiritus.” But nobody was interested in singing in Latin, which is the closest thing that white people have to ancient sacred words. They wanted to play “Indian.”

This ugly memory comes to mind as I contemplate the tragedy happening at Standing Rock in North Dakota and the suspicion I have that it doesn’t make sense to most white people. An oil pipeline is being constructed through sacred native lands. It’s true that it also might threaten the water supply of the Standing Rock Reservation. But the main issue according to LaDonna Bravebull Allard, the original organizer of the protest, is the desecration of sacred land:

Of the 380 archeological sites that face desecration along the entire pipeline route, from North Dakota to Illinois, 26 of them are right here at the confluence of these two rivers. It is a historic trading ground, a place held sacred not only by the Sioux Nations, but also the Arikara, the Mandan, and the Northern Cheyenne. The U.S. government is wiping out our most important cultural and spiritual areas. And as it erases our footprint from the world, it erases us as a people. These sites must be protected, or our world will end, it is that simple. Our young people have a right to know who they are. They have a right to language, to culture, to tradition. The way they learn these things is through connection to our lands and our history. If we allow an oil company to dig through and destroy our histories, our ancestors, our hearts and souls as a people, is that not genocide?

I imagine that many good-hearted people want to sympathize with these concerns. I don’t think anyone outside of the alt-right is openly ridiculing them. A Hillary Clinton campaign spokesperson recently said that it’s important to “listen to all sides” and take everyone’s perspective into account in order to have a reasonable, sensitive process. But ultimately, protecting a “historic trading ground” makes about as much sense to most white people as letting our preschoolers leave their train tracks all over the living room when company is coming over.

I’m sure whenever native activists have gotten an audience with any other government official who wasn’t a complete jerk, they have listened with great sympathy the entire time they were talking, just like good parents listen patiently to their children when it’s time to pick up the train tracks and move on. It’s sad; it’s sweet; but in the grownup world, pipelines just have to be built. They’re using all the best technology; they’ll be very gentle; they’ll put the bones back in the ground when they’re done; you won’t even notice there’s a big piece of metal carrying toxic fluids through the ground when they’ve buried it.

The reason a “historic trading ground” is a quaint but ultimately uncompelling concept to most white people is because we are definitively a people without roots. Whiteness means assimilation into a generic, cosmopolitan humanity. Irish and Italian and Polish immigrants were not white until they were assimilated into the great melting pot, stopped speaking with accents, and stopped dreaming about their homeland. Our loss of authentic cultural identity is an invisible tragedy that manifests itself in dozens of clumsy cultural appropriations like singing “Heyah!” when dancing around a campfire as a profoundly disrespectful, bizarre lampoon of sacred tradition.

I have no idea where my ancestors were buried, nor would that knowledge have any meaning to me if I got onto ancestry.com and researched it. Because I have been socialized to view physical space as interchangeable. My wife leaves the TV on the real estate channel most of the time. We watch hours and hours of shows about houses that could be transplanted into any suburban cul-de-sac anywhere in America. What matters are things like a big yard, an updated kitchen, curb appeal, a good view. And most importantly, will it sell for more than what you bought it for?

Even the idea of having a family home that gets passed down from generation to generation has become quaint and odd to white sensibilities. Who cares whether or not your great-grandma used to bake pies on your counter-top as long as it’s granite?

I’ve said before that the greatest battle of our age is between the sacrament and the commodity. Do the objects in our world have value because they radiate God’s glory or because the market has given them a price-tag? All of our social conflicts ultimately boil down to this question, especially the sexuality debates that Christians never stop talking about. Are our bodies sacred temples of God’s mystery or are they commodities to be bought, sold, and consumed? Many Christians say that human bodies are God’s temples but leave everything else about creation to the market’s dominion, partly because they have a toxic, gnostic doctrine of creation as inherently fallen and valueless.

If the purpose of creation is to glorify God (which is about as conservative evangelical a statement as you can make), that means that every inch of creation is sacred and irreplaceably particular. If everything is generic and interchangeable, then the market has displaced God as our source of value no matter what ideologies we use to mask that.

The apostle Paul writes that “creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it” (Romans 8:19-20). The basic problem of humanity is our disharmony with God and all the sacred beauty that glorifies God. We have subjected creation to futility because we have seen it as an object to conquer, exploit, and marketize into profit. Capitalism is the most metastasized form of the human brokenness Augustine called “humanity curved inward upon itself.” It is our collective fear and mistrust that turns reality into an all-consuming plantation of commodities.

Paul defines the purpose of Christianity as a “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18). Many white Christians view this reconciliation as an abstract, juridical process that takes place in a disembodied heaven where we go after spending our lives in disembodied, generic suburbias. But Paul makes it very clear that reconciliation includes every aspect of creation. It’s not merely something that happens in a divine ledger book; it is our reintegration into the song of God and our rediscovery of the sacred world that God created.

In this sense, LaDonna Bravebull Allard and the native peoples who have gathered with her are much better ministers of reconciliation than most Christians ever have been. If God’s glory is actually more than an ideological code term to us, then Christians need to defend the sacred against the hegemony of the market. This is a religious freedom issue if there ever was one. Christians need to stand with the people of Standing Rock.

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