Graham Hancock has published a moving description of the ongoing efforts to stop the illegal construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline across tribal sacred and historical lands and waterways without required consent, entitled "Standing Rock: Water is Life," which can be found at his website at grahamhancock.com.
I highly recommend reading it in its entirety, as well as watching the brief video above.
Not only does Graham provide his customary well-researched and clearly-written discussion of the pertinent facts and historical context, but he also cuts right to the heart of the conflict: what he describes in the video as the amnesia which stems from the deliberate deception about humanity's ancient past from certain small groups seeking to control people and the gifts of the planet.
Beginning at about 1:40 in the video above, Graham says:
This is the thing: we've been deceived so much about our past, all over the world. There's dark forces at work in the world, and control of the past gives control of the present and of the future -- and that's what I'm seeking to do, is to break that grip on the past that very small groups have had, and to open this up for the world public to be conscious and be awake and to know what's happening.
We can't be conscious if we suffer from amnesia. We have to come out of amnesia.
In a very short and impromptu interview, Graham incisively and eloquently ties the conflict at Standing Rock with the struggle over the recovery of the truth regarding humanity's ancient past -- and shows very clearly that this confrontation has very deep echoes which reverberate back through the corridors of history, back through centuries and indeed the millennia.
Similarly, the longer article ties into the theme of the two visions articulated over a hundred years ago by Black Elk, who was in fact a holy man of the Lakota, and which I have written about in previous posts such as "Vision A or Vision B" and "Two Visions."
Note that in some of the quotations cited in those two previous blog posts, Black Elk refers to the European settlers as Wasi'chus -- and one of the most memorable and powerful parts of Graham's essay linked above involves the explanation of this term given to Graham by Cody Two Bears, the District Representative of the Cannonball Community to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Council.
The term Wasi'chu, Cody explains, means "he who takes the fat" or "he who takes the larger portion" -- in other words, a greedy exploiter, a user, a taker.
And, as Graham perceptively illustrates in his article, this term also cuts right to the heart of the confrontation over the pipeline and the refusal to respect the wishes of the indigenous nations as required by law and by treaty, and it also cuts right to the heart of the two visions articulated by Black Elk so many years ago, who explained that before the coming of the Wasi'chus, the tribes were guided by a vision of plenty for all, in connection with nature -- but that the Wasi'chus brought an opposite vision, one of separation and "little islands" and a "gnawing flood" that seeks to devour everything for itself, a flood that wants to cover the world, and that is "dirty with lies and greed" (Black Elk Speaks, 8).
This conflict speaks to the profound disconnection among the people in one particular part of the world, a disconnection from what Peter Kingsley calls the "original instructions" given in very ancient times to all the different families of humanity. That disconnection, which I believe can be traced at least in part to events that took place in the Roman Empire with the rise of literalist Christianity, and which resulted in the splitting of that empire into East and West -- and the subsequent rise of the culture which today is collectively referred to as "western" -- created the terrible dislocation and alienation from the Invisible Realm which has marked western civilization ever since.
I believe this disconnection can be shown to lead directly to the kinds of behaviors being exhibited at Standing Rock, including the bulldozing of sacred tribal grounds, the disregard for the wishes of the cultures to whom those sites are sacred, and the brutal deployment of water cannons (in sub-zero temperatures), rubber bullets, attack dogs, pyrotechnics, and exotic military equipment against unarmed protesters and water protectors.
It is also very noteworthy -- and Graham Hancock makes note of it -- that Cody Two Bears points back to the Ghost Dance and to the connection of his people to the invisible power of the Earth and the Stars, which cannot be understood by those who have forgotten their connection to where they came from. Readers may be interested in reading more on these important subjects in posts from years back such as "The Ghost Dance and contact with the spirit world" and "The Heart of Everything That Is."
In other words, this conflict can very much be seen as a confrontation between certain members of a culture which has lost its connection with the Earth and Stars and the Invisible World and where it actually came from . . . and another culture which has retained that connection, in spite of absolutely atrocious and concerted efforts to sever that culture from its ancient roots.
And because of this, we can see that this confrontation is vitally important to each and every one of us, at this particular juncture in human history -- when there are dark forces at work in the world, and small groups who have had a deathgrip on the truth about our past and have been working for centuries to keep that truth from us.
It should be obvious to everyone that bulldozing sacred heritage sites, which ironically enough testified by their very design to the connection to the stars and to the Invisible Realm, is deeply wrong, and that it cannot possibly lead to a desirable or beneficial outcome to anyone.
In fact, as Black Elk himself tells us, the Invisible Realm is the source of everything in this Visible Realm. If we act in ways that despoil that source, and in ways that cut us off from that source, we cannot be surprised if desolation and disappointment are the results. This is illustrated in the ancient myths found in virtually every culture on our planet.
Those who think they will benefit from such behavior (including institutional investors who own stock in the corporations and investment entities that are pushing for the completion of the pipeline across these lands in opposition to the wishes of the tribes) should consider those ancient myths very carefully, because in every one of them, deliberately disregarding and disrespecting the Invisible Realm always leads to disaster.
image: Wikimedia commons (link).