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Former Kaslo resident pens poem about recent Standing Rock protests

December 19th, 2016

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!

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