The following press release is from Chicagoans, including LGBTQs, who are raising funds to bring donations of cash and supplies to Native Americans and their allies fighting against the pipeline proposed to run through Native lands in North Dakota.
Observing Thanksgiving requires that we hold the tension between the beauty of familial convenings and the brutality of erasure. While all over the United States communities and families come together to offer thanks for their beloveds and share sacred space, this time is also a representationally white-washed holiday which commemorates and celebrates the lineage of genocide of the Northern American Indigenous People.
It's in reflecting on these truths that facilitators Teresa Pasquale Mateus, Alicia Crosby and a team of volunteers from Chicago, New York and Minneapolis, in an effort to offer up their bodies, time and sacred space to share in community with the indigenous community and allies already present in prayerful and ceremonial protection at Standing Rock ( Cannonball, North Dakota ) this Thanksgiving.
Standing Rock Reservation has become the point of standoff between tribes and tribal leaders gathering to serve as Water Protectors to impede the Dakota Access Pipeline which threatens to desecrate sacred lands, native burial grounds, and potentially contaminate the water supply to the reservation. Thousands of people have come together at Standing Rock calling to the nation and the world the reminder to all of us: Mni Wiconi ( Lakota for "water is life" ).
While there are thousands standing at Standing Rock to protect the water there are a number of camps and camps within camps. One of these is the Two Spirit Nation Camp which is the LGBTQIA representative community. There is a long history within a variety of native traditions which not only discusses the two spirit ( non-binary ) gender and sexuality nature of humankind, but also offers a spiritual dynamic to this personhood. In many of these lineages it describes a sacredness to "two-spirit" persons—who can hold space between places, between genders and sexualities, and as such are a bridge of sorts. This Two Spirit Nation Camp reclaims this ancient wisdom in contemporary native context and offers an affinity space in this movement for those that identify ( native or non-native ) within the LGBTQIA frame who come to join the Water Protection at Standing Rock.
If you would like to support these efforts you can donate to the effort of this trip you can go to the following link ( see below ). If you would like to designate funds to the Two Spirit Nation Camp ( winter provisions are needed ) if you can note in your donation comments when donating and those funds will be earmarked for that community and go towards gift cards they can use at local stores in Bismark, North Dakota.
This trip will be leaving Chicago early Wed., Nov. 23 and returning back late Sunday, Nov. 27.
The link for donations is https://www.gofundme.com/decolonizethxgiving.
Teresa Pasquale Mateus
