Former Kaslo resident pens poem about recent Standing Rock protests
Erin J. Bauman is a freelance writer who enjoys the challenges of creativity and attention to detail.
Spirituality, religion and human motivations in general have always been a source of wonder for her, prompting her to specialize, at university, in History and Sociology, as well as English, during her time there.
A small town background from Kaslo, combined with a father heavily involved in green politics, has helped to lend a philanthropic flavour to her, sometimes left-wing edgy work.
Bauman has written an immense body of poetic work and has had some poems published in the Confluence, the College of New Caledonia (CNC) Newspaper in Prince George, B.C.,and in The Nelson Daily, an online publication produced in Nelson B.C.
Bauman penned a poem about the recent Standing Rock protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota.
Time To Stand Up
I stand with Standing Rock
because it’s not just about the fact
that they probably wouldn’t attempt
to dig up the graveyard
in my suburban neighborhood.
It’s not just about the fact
that laws have been made, and upheld,
to prevent anyone
from poisoning the Prince George watershed
(anymore than the regular amount
of poison permitted
for any other Canadian city).
It’s not just about the fact
that any one of you
would be outraged
if someone sprayed mase in the face
of your defenseless grandmother.
And it’s not just about who really owns the land,
who really has the rights to be there,
although reviewing the Treaty of 1851
should clear that up for you
if you still
have any questions.
It is about all of that,
and that should be enough
to make you angry,
so you should stand with Standing Rock,
but it’s also about the fact
that no one
should be able to light their tap water on fire,
or have to watch the hair
fall off of their livestock
or pets
in patches.
It’s about the fact
that arsenic
shouldn’t be an ingredient
in anything we drink,
and any amount of methane in the atmosphere
should be considered somewhat abnormal.
It’s about the fact
that public land
shouldn’t be destroyed
for private gain,
and that if land ownership
is going to be a thing
it should mean something,
no matter where you come from.
And even though it doesn’t seem like it’s happening
in your backyard,
the river systems
that we all drink from
are as interconnected
as we humans are supposed to be
to each other
and every other
living thing,
so the whole world
is our backyard
and together we face the blowback
of ingesting this fracking flowback
of produced water,
no matter where it comes from,
and that should make us all angry,
so we should stand with Standing Rock,
because it’s ultimately about the fact
that class lines
that were meant to have been erased
now cut deeper than ever
across North America,
and the rest of the world.
Even though indigenous
is often synonymous
with lowest on the socio-economic totem pole,
the families that got flushed
in the Garfield County gas rush,
and the people who were
dicked over in Dimoc,
were largely of Caucasian descent.
Big oil doesn’t see color
and poverty is really a rainbow problem.
the only real cure for it
is to stop buying in
to the ideologies
that come with their petroleum based products
and by products
that we purchase in the hopes of producing
some satisfaction
in our selves.
Dakota Access,
Kinder Morgan,
Encana,
Keystone XL,
Enbridge,
Haliburton
Etc….
no matter what name you know them by
they have us all over their barrel,
because everyone seems to believe
that we need to consume constantly
to be truly happy,
and that these companies have some kind of monopoly
on the production of the energy
that we need to maintain consistency
in the rate of our consumption capacity
and everyone needs to wake up
come together to make up
a real system shake up,
so everyone should stand with Standing Rock,
because it’s ultimately about the fact that Roosevelt fracked us all in 1945
when he spent his Valentines Day
wooing Saudi Arabia
into a bad relationship.
Sloboda,
ufulu,
libero,
tipeyimisowin
freedom…
no matter what language you say it in
it doesn’t sound like oil to me.
In the words of Immortal Technique
we are all caught in a hustle
lead by Dick Cheney’s
Energy Task Force
who spend hundreds
of billions
of dollars per year
on oil related defense overseas,
and now that they’ve dried up those possibilities…
the war on terror
is coming home,
and being applied to any situation
where someone opposes the will of the corporation
and oil companies control the politicians that control our nations
and silence the scientists who worry about the health of future generations
and ignore the fact that it’s also a bad long term economic equation
and it’s clear there is only one solution, in light of all this scary information
and that is to stand up!
Stand up, and stand with Standing Rock!