There is no decolonizing without a firm relationship to wolakota inspired and informed enculturation by tribal people. After all, we are tribal writers, so learning a new communication tool even while critiquing it according to oral tradition, is something we do with every word, maybe every thought and feeling, we have.
Now, as we members of the Oak Lake Writers’ Society utilize the settler colonial construct of a 501c3 nonprofit corporation, we constantly question and observe how the nonprofit industrial complex might further serve to assimilate us into the majority culture. Realizing this, our Board and myself work together to ensure that it instead serves as a tool for our society to create space to determine how the cultural artefacts, languages, mores, philosophies, wisdoms, knowledges and, well, EVERYTHING, about settler nations and cultures and even local and global indigenous and cultural realities could instead be integrated and enculturated into our own wolakota expression.
We do this work while also aware of the ever intensifying digital age we now inhabit. My own children are probably more comfortable with technology, not just as a personal identity but also as a community member of what we arguably could call a transnational digital citizenship. After all, this generation is now often termed as ‘digital natives.’ As they come to age, especially my younger ones coming to toddlerhood or childhood, even, using digital devices and smart home technology, every day I ask myself as an ina and winyan, how do we orient ourselves in this new environment? When I try to move as winyan in an otherwise Western-structured domestic landscape, how do I teach my children wolakota in the midst of this unprecedented explosion of global information, information severely organized and shaped by Western Civilization? How can we be wolakota without becoming a reactionary indigenous luddite? (I’m still trying to live out wolakota in western structures and amongst my non-Lakota settler relations, as well.)
Sometimes I feel like I’m walking upstream in a fast moving prairie creek after a heavy rain. Speaking of our physical non-human relatives of the land, water, etc,. even when we unplug from technology and go outside, our lands are shaped now by settler colonialism, the flora, fauna, etc. We see these imposed settler realities on the land whether it be in our backyard, a nature park, a national park, range land or while driving down the road. Riding in the car a month or so ago, my unschooled 8-year-old son accompanied me as we went to visit my oldest son at his university. As we listened to a Red Nation podcast while galloping down the interstate in our Chevy Malibu, my son started asking some awesome questions about treaties and land thefts. I spoke in federal terms, so my son then asked, ‘well, did South Dakota steal our land, too?’ So I told him that yes, South Dakota stole our land, but even worse, they stole our name.
My son’s wide brown eyes looked stunned as he looked at me and then looked out at the patchwork of farms and fences along the I-29 corridor.
Yet, we are still here.
As the survivors of this mess of genocide and settler colonialism, and of wolakota, we are here.
Yet, to be the true beneficiaries, also, we must do that work as Oceti Sakowin Oyate people together, not separate. We must live for the mitakuye oyasin in all of us, not merely exist as fodder for the machinations of empires or global economics nor adhere to an impersonal philosophical dogma.
I remember that even as we do this work of life, our people remember we have always appreciated trade, innovation and a good story. It is a fallacy that tribal nations were isolated from one another and had no trade networks. We are no strangers to allyship nor hard work.
Oak Lake Writers’ Society honors this legacy. Currently, our funding has mostly come from grants from Native run and led nonprofit organizations (like First Nations Development Institute for #NativeReads), but also from our own membership. Our intellectual rigor comes from the examples and work of generations before us, and we’re constantly managing the wealth of wisdom left to us, together, even while we all work to birth the visions we all have individually, building upon these legacies to also build up the Oceti Sakowin Oyate.
As many smart people have said before me, the genocide of American settler colonialism was not inevitable. It was not the only way in which the United States of America had to come into existence and attempt to shape a better way of life and community apart from their ancestral ways of monarchs, nobility, greed and corruption.
When soldiers were replaced by American missionaries and agents, their ethnocidal coercion robbed all of us, mostly us indigenous nations, but all of us, from the wealth of possibility when the textbook ‘clash of cultures’ ensued. In fact we were robbed of that glorious mire, where we could have indeed brought in new technology and cultural expressions through our own lens of tribal nations, communities, tiospaye and tiwahe, and lastly the individual. That’s not to say that some weren’t doing the work from the very beginning of contact (and even before as some non-native plant species reached here before their human settler counterparts and were investigated and incorporated) even while being brutalized and watching their peers murdered and tortured in boarding schools, forts, churches, and in our own beds and homes. However, that work was systemically squashed and criminalized, instead of embraced or even recognized.
So, I invite every reader to recognize this space for a new imagination, a new reckoning, a truer accounting and reconciliation. I invite you to take action by reading and studying the works of the Oak Lake Writers’ Society, collectively in anthology and individually, as well as initiatives like #Nativereads, and I invite you to donate your time, attention and resources to support this crucial work. Monetary donations may be sent via this link with our current fiscal sponsor, and if you are moved to share anything else, please use the contact form to reach out.
Our goal is to finish our application for 501c3 status this summer, including onboarding the services of a tribally enrolled accountant and bookkeeper. Until that funding is set for the rest of the year, and funds to hire a communications coordinator, I myself as executive director will be donating my time as in-kind to the Oak Lake Writers’ Society. We are all giving from our resources.
While this newsletter has been quiet, for the first time instead of too little info headed my way to put on our website, I’m overloaded with events, news and content to stay up to date. This is an excellent problem, I assure you, but if this blog is quiet, it’s not for lack of the work behind the scenes, not merely myself, but the wonderful members of our board and board emerita, and our members as we work to build the organization in a good way to do the work of hosting our yearly retreat and to create this unique tribal space.
Mitakuye oyasin,
Tasiyagnunpa Livermont Barondeau
(Oglala)
OLWS Executive Director
