Lessons from Fighting The Black Snake at Standing Rock

by Nick Jaina, Leslie Orihel, Taylor Ross (Photographer)

"The Black Snake is why everyone is camping in ever-colder temperatures on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. It is a reference to an old Lakota prophecy of an evil serpent that will crawl through the Great Plains. If it is allowed to win, the prophecy goes, we will have violated our bond with the earth too much, and the Black Snake will eat us all up, causing the end of the world." "It wasn’t until I was in Standing Rock for a few days that I started to hear the most brutal of stories regarding confrontations with the police. These stories included reports of elders being arrested, pulled from sweat lodges while they were unclothed, then being labeled with numbers and put into cages. I learned that the kind of “non-lethal weaponry” being used by the military and police forces is very ill-defined. A horse had been killed in one of the actions by rubber bullets. One of the few camp physicians described the risk of pulmonary embolism, a potentially fatal blood clot in the lungs, within 48 hours of being struck in the chest by a rubber bullet. Another medic told me her firsthand account of gross police “After we [medics] were pulled out of a moving vehicle, it continued to roll towards [the other medic]. He successfully struggled to get out of the way of the car and was charged with resisting arrest.” I was given goggles and trained how to flush people’s eyes after mace exposure." Nick Jaina is a writer and musician in Portland,Oregon. His memoir Get It While You Can was nominated for the Oregon Book Award. www.nickjaina.com Leslie Orihel is a writer, photographer and registered nurse living in Boulder, CO. Taylor Ross is a multimedia artist in Fairfield, Iowa. She recently designed and built a mobile winter solar/wind module for Standing Rock in collaboration with the community of Fairfield. Middle Creek Publishing believes believe that responding to the world through art and literature-and sharing that response-is a vital part of being an artist. Learn more www.middlecreekpublishing.com 100% of profits from sale of this book go directly to Oceti Sakowin.

44 pages, Paperback

Published December 8, 2016