Debra White Plume’s words feel true. She was a Lakota Sioux teacher. I heard a woman at Occupy Wall Street tell this scary little story standing on a bench corner speakers-corner style. In this prophecy, Debra White Plume urges us to feel the opportunity to survive. It is a radical view for us, in how we should count minutes and hours and days in these dangerous days. And in the tradition of native cultures, she features the Earth as a conscious being. The Earth makes life and death decisions, with humanity looking on.
And the words have a haunt in them. The presence of something, call it the fabulous unknown, an invisible kind of commons. That is where our new protest starts, in the natural world, or you could say, the actual world. It isn’t our job to schedule our commitment of time and energy. We are left with the riddle of the real.
If we descendants of colonizers believed in White Plumes’ prophecy of the Earth cultures, then how could we bring this to our Climate-and-Gaza protests? This isn’t a “The Last days” story out of Book of Revelations, and it doesn’t have the grand death narrative of the “6th Extinction”…. It more as if it has “The First Days” in it, the evolution of a future.
In our environmental activist events we often feel far away from the Earth. We are grateful to anyone risking arrest to defend the Earth, but most us would agree that we are in trouble and a new approach is in order. We may be screaming about the Amazon forest, or the melting glaciers or the incredible storms spiraling up from the global south, but where are we? We are shouting in a box of concrete, pavement and toxin-dusted glass. We are gasping for air as cops knee us in the ribs and cuff us…. We are caught in the gears of urban machinery.
Back to Debra White Plume, whose life extends from the American Indian Movement, the defense of Pine Ridge and the taking back of Alcatraz – to the women-led movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. She passed in 2020, leaving us with the “water protector’ resistance, which ultimately triumphed with the cancellation of the Black Snake. She led us to a new cultural revolution.
Traditional marches and rallies did take place at Standing Rock, but much more powerfully in the resistance were the prayers at dawn, with hundreds from tribes around the Earth (and some white allies too) holding hands, raising their voices in a cacophony of many languages – which suggested a single emerging new language, a kind of high-intensity Esperanto…. WATER IS SACRED was often the song-chant when walking on the lonely road by Lake Oahu.
The presence of drums and singing created a different relationship to the Big Oil soldiers. Their aggression with dogs and pepper gas was stopped in favor of stalling tactics which didn’t work either. The soldiers slowed down, standing there on the prairie, drenched with wisdom-sayings raised in song. After months of this stand-off between guns and Earth, the company retreated to the courts, and then Obama stepped in.
The music changed everything. Earth-defenders from many origins took that lesson home with them. A song sung together encourages community touching, dancing, ritual and more resistance-strength. The words are memorialized in the mind if they are shaped with a beat and a tune and a rhyme. That music in the corner of North Dakota, with the tipis and trailer homes for 300 tribes, seemed to be coming from the hills and streams going down to the Missouri.
Each of the great social movements that gave us our present-day freedoms featured mad comedians and singer-songwriters. If you are bewildered by what we should do in response to Debra White Plume’s prophetic story, if you wonder how in practical terms how would we join the Earth, making music is a part of the answer. It opens that path to join the Earth in these days of radical change.
Here and now, with fundamental harm to life itself caused by rapacious climate criminals – why aren’t there stronger songs? My own feeling is that there ARE strong songs ready to lift our activism, but the singers don’t have the events in which Earth defenders gather in a critical mass – the catalyzing wave isn’t there.
The exception that proves the rule is the “The Rapist in Your Path” – “Un Violadoro en Tu Camino” – which swept on a tide of dancing shouting women out of the Chilean feminist art collective Las Tesis – to the world. In this case the song produced its own event. This dance-song overwhelmed common space, public plazas, as thousands of women in 200 cities sang an incantatory damnation of rapist police and courts. Like the “Water is Sacred” chant-walks, song-dance bans violence.
The arrival of stronger songs that use the space around them as amplification
Is possible because, yes, the Earth communicates. If you walked into a forest with a thousand little microphones and they fell in the forest floor, in the bark, up in nests…. Where-ever the microphones fell, the forest would have songful screams and beeps and crickets… there would be a thousands songs in your thousand mics.
The Earth alive with songs from mycelia underground up to the eagles in the sky. You cannot shut the symphony door. We are living beings singing with living beings. It is well-known that the musical phrases that we hum together in human culture have the same construction as the songs of birds and whales.
Debra White Plume says that the Earth has left the door open. Music is that passage to the unknown Earth, which is singing too. Let’s tune up! Song is a source of power for a new kind of revolution. At the heart of a 600 miles of stormy Helene there is a singable tune.
The Earth is Singing! Earthalujah!
Rev. Billy