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This video features conflicting perspectives on the Dakota Access Pipeline’s impact to cultural and sacred sites from the State of North Dakota’s Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO), and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s Historic Preservation Officer (THPO). Their conflict–relevant to the Tribe’s ongoing lawsuit challenging the pipeline–illuminates some of the deeper tensions at play in struggles to protect sacred places: a clash of irreconcilable ways of understanding and relating to the land, and what happens when the State’s perspective has been codified into federal law and the input of Tribal Nations as sovereigns is disregarded.

For more than a decade, the House of Tears Carvers and members of the Lummi Nation have traveled across North America with totem poles to raise awareness about threats to the environment and public health. As the poles travel, they draw a line between dispersed but connected concerns, and help to build an unprecedented alliance of tribal and non-tribal communities as they stand together to advocate for a sustainable relationship between humanity and the natural world.

Kwel Hoy’: We Draw the Line was a cross-country tour, traveling museum exhibition, and series of public programs uplifting Indigenous leadership in struggles to protect water, land, and our collective future. With this journey, the totem pole entered a museum for the first time. Charged with the stories of resilience they have picked up on their journey across the country, the pole connected the museum—and the museum public—to the living universe in which they are enmeshed.

More information here: thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/events/kwel-hoy-we-draw-the-line/

“I am someone who, like many of us, is in the process of making history. My people knew that our great grandchildren would talk about the day that their grandparents went and stood in front of the pipeline that never became. And that is the story I want told in museums.”

Winona LaDuke is an internationally renowned activist working on issues of sustainable development renewable energy and food systems. She lives and works on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, and is a two-time vice presidential candidate with Ralph Nader for the Green Party.

As Program Director of the Honor the Earth, she works nationally and internationally on the issues of climate change, renewable energy, and environmental justice with Indigenous communities. And in her own community, she is the founder of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, one of the largest reservation based non-profit organizations in the country and a leader in the issues of culturally based sustainable development strategies, renewable energy, and food systems. In this work, she also continues national and international work to protect Indigenous plants and heritage foods from patenting and genetic engineering.

In this video, Master Carver Jewell James (Lummi) presents the House of Tears Carvers’ Totem Pole Journeys as a response to the challenges we face in our struggles for a just and liveable planet for all.

The Lummi Nation’s House of Tears carvers has created a tradition of carving and delivering totem poles to areas struck by disaster or otherwise in need of hope and healing. In 2013 the House of Tears Carvers began a yearly totem pole journey highlighting the impacts of fossil fuels across tribal lands throughout North America. These journeys raise awareness and strengthen and expand cooperation between tribes, intertribal organizations, faith-based communities, environmentalists and community leaders who oppose fossil fuel expansion projects.

“The totem pole journey does not draw a new line as much as it traces over one that already exists, making it visible. This line runs through the rocks, through the trees, through the sky, through the oceans. It is also a line that runs from the past to the present, and into the future.”

Narrated by Phreddie Lane of the Lummi Nation, this video was part of the exhibition Kwel’ Hoy: We Draw the Line, which launched at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in 2017.

More information: https://thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/events/kwel-hoy-we-draw-the-line/