Today, thanks to Oceti Sakowin Camp, as well as many Water Protector events and reunions that have followed, I have a visceral sense of how and what transformation can feel like. Still, as a white person, I have come to understand that this process is not only about experiencing the great blessings or even the basic human struggles of participation in Indigenous-led, intercultural resistance movements.
When my culture has located itself in direct opposition to Indigenous ways of life—and when I as a white person seek to oppose this very opposition—my life can seem to move in two directions at once.
In order to bring my own fullness, my own wholeness, to this work of liberation, I need a genuine understanding of the situation at hand, which calls for a genuine understanding of my own culture. Through this process of unfolding, this ever-deepening sense of who I am and who I come from, I believe I can participate with more energy and integrity in decolonizing movements that have nourished my body and my spirit, guiding the course of my life.
So what might (my) white identity mean? How might (my) whiteness relate to—and not relate to—the lifelong project of becoming a human being?
In the movement for collective liberation, how might (my) whiteness both complicate and mandate the role of allyship or even accompliceship, a mutual role that happens, according to Indigenous Action Media, “when we fight back or forward, together, becoming complicit in a struggle towards liberation”?
These are some of the questions that have shaped this memoir of heart, mind, body, and soul. It is a narrative of moments, a recollection of challenges and revelations, as I have gone from unquestioning allegiance to the colonial criminal justice system in 1987 to sitting in a jail cell on a Water Protector charge in 2021, and plenty of places both before and since.
In other words, this book is a memoir of practicing—of learning, moment by moment, to be more fully human, to live in more life-embracing ways. In this story, I hope you will find something you can relate to, whether it’s a lesson learned, a mistake made, or, here and there, a little bit of satire on colonial ways of life, which I have shared because, as the adage goes, sometimes satire is the only thing that makes any sense.