Individualists are not the type to concern themselves with other people.
My dismay at the constant contradictions of a modern reservation system has given me a migraine from hell.
Maple trees line the roads. The leaves of the maple trees are bright to dark red.
Imagine real maple sugar, wild rice, and clean water as medicine.
Im just beginning to learn of the variety of plants that serve as food and medicine in the woods.
Imagining, all the folks that I feed narcotics to, on plant medicine. Yes, this is legal.
My guide and me were gathering plants for the cultural center at Nagachiwinong,
As one expression of “usufructuary rights” to hunt , fish and gather.
The 1854 colonial treaty boundary begins about 20 miles south of Sturgeon Lake Minnesota.
Enbridge is omnipresent on Nagachiwinong. Smiling and waving at us, as we passed by the workers and their trucks. Monitoring the pipeline? It was unclear what their purpose was by the lake. They barricaded the road as we were finishing gathering a few medicinal plants.
In my slide show, you will see the resting lake where Calamus is found.
The root of Calamus looks much like an iris or a lily.
Several, not all, reservation rice lakes in Minnesota , are resting this season from ricing. However, the neo colonial reservation business committee saw fit to allow white people to hunt ducks on this small resting lake. Signs posted ” resting lake” There was no bumper crop of wild rice this year. Wild rice is a picky plant. Wild rice is intolerable of sulfates in the water.
When the cedar begins to turn orange, late August early September, is the usual ricing time.
Make no mistake about it, the tribal DNR uses the same tactics as state DNR.
Like ” electrocuting the lake” to obtain fish samples.
Indigenous people’s unwillingness to join the anticolonial, revolutionary government, lack of revolutionary political education lead by I.S.R, and overall lack of political will has led to incomprehensible demoralization.
People are still under the impression that the right job or a proper loan of money is going to fix this.
What are children taught in the public schools about the rightful stewards of the natural world? About being addicted to narcotics, strung out and dead of an OD?
Or the proper way to treat one’s body. I.S.R has solutions to these and other problems. We do not intend to give away our recipe. You need to actually apply a base level of commitment and join.
There’s no god going to step in and fix this.
We at ISR do not aspire to be president, mayor or on city council. When the people , of Nagachiwinong tell city council ” no means no” and they shove pipelines through the land anyway, there is a specific word that comes to mind. Only through decolonization, and the undermining of empire- will we be set free. Free from economic strangulation. Free from hunger. Free from rape.
Unified for a safe space for shelter. See: Committees, and Eco village. All are welcome. Provided, you agree to some simple rules. See: group rules.
Its going to be 30 to 40 ° degrees below this winter in Minnesota. Duluth needs to stop murdering people with felony records. But, that’s a whole other story.
Or is it?
We are our own search and rescue, through organizing on our own.
Deb Haaland is not involved. She is a neocolonial sell out with the blood of her own people on her hands.
On Nagachiwinong, the signs and symptoms of neocolonialism were everywhere, all at once.
The straight line ditch, that stopped meandering rivers and streams, compliments , ACOE. In the 1930′ s
Huge trucks with the company logo, rumble through the rez and down the logging roads. If we had any dignity as a people, we would set roadblocks on our reservations and close them to exploitation projects, they may even find where some of our missing and murdered indigenous people keep going but as wards of the state the reservations lack the political will to assert themselves because the power dynamic of sovereignty is a power under situation. A new indigenous government is needed. One that is actually revolutionary. One who’s power dynamic is a power over dynamic until the empire is overturned and any colonists who refuse to accept indigenous rule along with all counterrevolutionaries are deported or run into the oceans and seas.
Minnesota nice is pervasive. White devils with smiling faces tell lies. Crimes against the land and the people, insidious.
After the humiliation and verbal battery of one young water protector, by a group of ” elders” , the demoralization of various anarchist style water protectors was complete. This water protector had put up a valiant fight. There could have been a vastly different outcome through organizing from within, rather than organizing with outsiders. In my opinion, these adventurists need an apparatus or a structure for survival and for life. The absence of the revolutionary government leaves anarchists who would oppose a revolutionary government who might actually have a chance at rivalling the empire alone to battle with politically illiterate elders.
Neither wolf nor dog, the Anishinaabe numerically have sided with exploitation. The RBC conceded to this land and water theft.
They concede to duck hunting by outsiders in a resting lake. According to one spiritual leader who’s opinion I respect, ” we cant keep hammering away at the lakes” Hence the resting lake with ” no ricing” signs posted.
It was a beautiful day in Indian Country.
Warm by afternoon, Cool morning that required a light jacket.
I thought that the plant nations were and are stunning in their tenacity for survival.
Where we were harvesting wintergreen, (an indigenous plant), a perfectly round spot on the moss where waawashkeshi had bedded down.
I understand these pipelines, to be dirty and destructive beyond reason. I don’t know what the people in the trucks were doing, aside from smiling and making their presence known. By the time we were done harvesting, the truck people were barricading the road for no further entry. One young man had a really special helmet on. He worships the beast.
I feel devastated sad and guilty for this generation.
Mainly, the pipelines have to do with to much TOXIC CO 2 in the atmosphere.
As every living system and all beings are related, all sentient beings will be eradicated by the toxicity of empire.
At ISR, we want to bring people the education and the tools to begin anew.
Learn the lost art of self determination
for health care, womans health care, or otherwise. We have our own.
Respect is a requirement.
Knowledge of the plant nations is gradual and in person to person.
That knowledge can’t be analyzed through the lens of Western medicine.
Written by Blackfeather, Edited by The Invisible Warrior
Illahee Spirit Runners 