Just four days before the inauguration of a new President, people identifying themselves with progressive politics gathered from all over SLO County to see what could be learned from one of the closing battles of the Obama administration.
The event at the SLO Guild Hall on Jan. 15, billed as “Standing SLO: The Movement Comes Home From Standing Rock,” shared the experiences of at least 20 SLO-area locals who’d gone to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota and returned between November 2016 and this month.
Beginning with the sharing of food, the holding of hands and ceremonial “smudging,” to purify participants with burning sage, the event revolved around the experiences of indigenous peoples, both those rallying in the brutal winter 1,600 miles away, and the tribes that call the Central Coast home.
Violet Cavanaugh of the Northern Chumash Tribe began by noting that the Chumash have a long history of mutual support with the Lakota and Sioux, whose members came West in 1978 to save the sacred site at Point Conception from natural gas development.
The parallel with opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline and struggle to protect the Cannonball River from future contamination 29 years after that struggle was uncanny.
The Standing SLO event was organized in large part by local photographer and filmmaker Brittany App, and local musician Erin Inglish. The pair traveled together to Standing Rock last year with supplies and donations. Part of the event for the approximately 200 people spending the evening together was a silent auction of donated art, handmade clothing and prints, one of which was a copy of a now iconic photo taken Thanksgiving Day 2016 by App.
It shows a Standing Rock Sioux tribal member, known as Bill, standing on the bank of the Cannonball River arms wide to the sky, proving to armed riot police, and all observers that he is unarmed.
Inglish noted at the event that some of the money collected may go to the legal defense of Grover Beach resident Heidi Grant, who herself was arrested taking part in protest actions as part of a group of “Water Protectors.”
Among the lessons she brought back was the value of engaging the local constabulary as human beings.
“I saw a policewoman in full riot gear break down balling, in tears, because of the power of what she was seeing,” Grant said, referring to a silent protest that addressed not only the pipeline project at hand, but the issue of sexual violence against and long patterns of disappearance of native women in the area.
At the same time, Grant said, referring to another march, she had seen her compatriots attacked with dogs, doused with fire hoses and shot with rubber projectiles.
“I knew what those cops were capable of. We all knew,” she said. “You have to look at what you’re willing to live with and judge that as if it on your last breathe. That’s how I spent my time there.”
