The Long Walk to STANDING ROCK Has Begun

[Christine]

After spending the last several months "processing" the journey and the destruction of a very valiant attempt to return to our native state of being, for this is what Standing Rock was for me, I once again feel the pulse beat of the call home.

Our history is so corrupted that more layers need to be peeled away, the "Long Walk" is further back in time's memory as it is a projection into an unknown future one. I continue to find connections to all the root races and a convergence of timelines occurring as we embrace a fuller view of humanity's connection to each other and the stars ... A few months ago I 'heard' a message that said that Native Americans are the 'lost' tribe of Israel, it puzzled me at the same time felt very real.

Spiritwind, perhaps you can add more about the significance of the Lost Tribe and the connection to Egypt. Interlocking pieces putting our corrected view of humanity's history in the light of a true perspective.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1c3L0qfNko[/youtube]

[Naga_Fireball]

Very interesting! !

Israeli Researchers: Group of Colorado Indians Have Genetic Jewish Roots
Sheba Medical Center geneticists find common genetic mutation, often called the 'Ashkenazi mutation,' associated with an increased risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer.

Dan Even
30.05.2012 | 02:40 48 comments
Sheba Medical Center geneticists have found that a population of Indians in the U.S. state of Colorado has genetic Jewish roots going back to the expulsion of Jews from Spain.


The common marker was a unique genetic mutation on the BRCA1 gene. This mutation, commonly known as the "Ashkenazi mutation," is found in Jews of Ashkenazi origin and is associated with an increased risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer.

The trail began with research conducted by Prof. Jeffrey Weitzel, an oncogenetic (cancer genetics) expert at the City of Hope Hospital in California. Weitzel examined samples from 110 American families of Hispanic origin, and followed them through a computational genetics study, and in 2005 published an article pointing to their common ancestry: People who had immigrated to the United States from Mexico and South America.

Weitzel's discovery of the BRCA1 mutation in these Hispanics led him to suspect that there was a genetic connection between them and European Jews, and he sought to confirm the connection.


A study recently conducted at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer whose findings have been accepted for publication by the European Journal of Human Genetics has found the missing link: The mutation was also found in a group of Mexican Indians who had immigrated from Mexico to the United States over the past 200 years and settled in western Colorado.

When their samples were submitted to a computational genetic study, it emerged that they, along with Weitzel's original Hispanic subjects, all had a common ancestor: A Jew who immigrated from Europe to South America up to 600 years ago, the period in which Christopher Columbus discovered America and the Jews of Spain were expelled.

The Sheba research was performed by a team headed by Prof. Eitan Friedman, head of the medical center's Oncogenetics Unit, and student Yael Leitman, and sought to identify the original source of the BRCA1 mutation, found in about 1.5 percent of Jews of Ashkenazi origin and 0.5 percent of Iraqi Jews.


To do this, they collected samples from 115 families carrying this mutation from all over the world. These included Jewish families of Ashkenazi and Iraqi origin, and Jews originating from the Indian city of Cochin. They also, with Weitzel's help, collected samples from 16 mutation-carrying families among the Mexican Indians in Colorado, five British families from Manchester, and three families from Malaysia.

The study was based on previous Sheba research from 15 years ago, during which primitive analyses were done on the mutation found in Ashkenazi and Iraqi Jews; at that time, it was thought the mutation had first occurred 2,500 years earlier, during the dispersion after the destruction of the First Temple.

However, the new analysis, which checked 15 different genetic markers associated with the mutation, demonstrated that the Iraqi version of the mutated gene traces back only 450 years, which testifies to a migration of Ashkenazi Jews to Iraq - most probably merchants - that has not been well documented.

Meanwhile, the mutation found in the Colorado Indians was found to be identical to that of Ashkenazi Jews, and dates to a period more than 600 years ago. Researchers say this offers incontrovertible genetic proof that some of the Jews expelled from Spain who reached the New World intermarried with local Indians whose descendants later migrated to the United States.

The mutation identified in the British and Malaysian families, on the other hand, does not come from the same source as the Ashkenazi mutation, indicating that the mutation developed in other communities in parallel.

According to Friedman, the Mexican-Indians of Colorado, who are concentrated in the Mesa Verde area, have never demonstrated any adherence to Jewish customs, nor do they possess any oral traditions that might link them to Jews.

[Spiritwind]

This doesn't directly have to do with the lost tribe and the connection to Egypt. I did do some research into Scota as a daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh who has been called the mother of Scotland. I don't have all the links together for that right now, but it was interesting to just trace the name Scota and its many derivatives, such as Scotia. We have a Scotia Rd and Scotia Valley that I plan to investigate more. These names were often associated with families that settled a particular area. Nova Scotia is another.
Here's one link: http://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-le ... aoh-003798" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


But then there is also the Ohio Decalogue Stone and Keystone.

Ohio Decalogue Stone and Keystone

https://godssecret.wordpress.com/2009/0 ... g-solomon/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

In November of 1860, David Wyrick of Newark, Ohio found an inscribed stone in a burial mound about 10 miles south of Newark. The stone is inscribed on all sides with a condensed version of the Ten Commandments or Decalogue, in a peculiar form of post-Exilic square Hebrew letters. The robed and bearded figure on the front is identified as Moses in letters fanning over his head.

[Spiritwind]

Here we are about a year later and this came across my Facebook feed. Even though this monumental event where so many people stood their ground on behalf of all life and Mother Earth did not prevent them from pushing forward with their agenda, the fight is by no means over. In fact, it has only just begun. This needs to come back into our awareness. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what is to come if we don't lose all fear and start standing our ground in unison. Water IS Life!

Keystone Pipeline Oil Spill Could Be Worse Than We Thought

https://news.vice.com/story/keystone-pi ... we-thought" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

By Sarah Sax Nov 18, 2017

An oil spill in South Dakota that leaked thousands of gallons of highly polluting oil could damage the environment more than the company has let on.
TransCanada shut down a portion of its highly contested Keystone Pipeline, which transports oil from the Canadian tar sands to refineries in the U.S., at 6:00 a.m. on Thursday after 210,000 gallons, or around 5,000 barrels, of oil spilled across South Dakota farmland. The type of oil in the pipeline, however, makes pinpointing the size of the spill more difficult than usual, worrying local environmental groups and landowners about its environmental effects.

The spill comes days before a crucial moment for the pipeline: when Nebraska votes on Monday whether to approve the final step in the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would move 830,000 extra barrels of Canadian oil through the Midwest to refineries in Texas and Illinois.

Worries of water contamination

A viscous type of oil called diluted bitumen, or tar sands oil, flows through the Keystone Pipeline. Because it’s so thick, leaks can be difficult to detect. If the oil does spill, it’s often far more detrimental to sensitive water resources. Bitumen is also as one of the dirtiest fuels in the world. Unlike conventional crude which can be pumped directly from the ground, water is required to separate the heavy, tar-like substance from the sand it’s found in — a process that depletes and pollutes freshwater resources.

Thursday’s spill happened on a section of pipe along a small road approximately 35 miles south of the Ludden pump station in Marshall County, South Dakota, three miles southeast of the town of Amherst. In a statement, Transcanada said the oil “was completely isolated within 15 minutes and emergency response procedures were activated.” The company did not respond to a request for further comment.

Kent Moeckly, a nearby land owner and member of the Dakota Rural Action Group, told VICE News he’s concerned that the spill could be much larger though, in large part because the computers used to detect oil pressure drops don’t always detect small leaks. “Transcanada thought it was 200,000 gallons. What we found out working with Transcanada, it could very well be 600,000 gallons,” Moeckly said.

His concerns aren’t unfounded. After the last major Keystone oil spill in South Dakota in April 2016, Transcanada revised it’s initial estimate of the spill from 187 gallons to 16,800 gallons after the company started digging up the field where the spill occurred. Because diluted bitumen is so dense, it seeps into the soil and river beds rather than rising like conventional, lighter crude, potentially masking the full spill.

In 2010, when over 800,000 gallons of tar sands oil spilled into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, the clean-up took nearly three years and cost the company in charge, Enbridge, over $1 billion, making it one of the most expensive clean-ups in history. Enbridge also had to pay over $60 million in civil penalties for violating of the Clean Water Act, which the Trump administration wants to dismantle. That could make spills less costly for oil companies like Transcanada but more expensive for landowners and communities.

Another concern for Moeckly is the proximity of the spill to the Crow Creek drainage ditch, a small tributary to a major water supply for South Dakota, which flows just a few dozen feet from where the spill happened. “What this ditch does is that it takes the snow melt to the east and escorts it to the James River about 40 miles east of here,” Kent said.

“Any spill of any size presents problems to the soil and to the water,” the Nebraska Sierra Club told VICE News in a statement. “Investing in oil at this time in history is like staking the future on land-line phones. In both cases, their days are numbered.”

In a statement to VICE News, however, the South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources said the spill didn’t happen at a site used for drinking water. “There are no nearby municipal drinking water users in the area of the spill. There is anticipated to be shallow groundwater at this site, however, this groundwater at the site is not being used for drinking water,” a spokesperson said. “The full extent of environmental impacts has not yet been determined as environmental testing will need to be performed.”

Concerns about drinking water contamination aren’t new. Environmentalists feared a major spill from the proposed Keystone XL pipeline could contaminate the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the world’s largest aquifers, which supplies drinking water to more than two million people in the Great Plains. A spill from the Keystone XL pipeline over this aquifer, in a worst-case scenario, could contaminate five billion gallons of water.

That fear was a key reason for President Barack Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline extension, which forced a string of lawsuits from Transcanada. But President Donald Trump put the pipeline back on track in one of his first executive orders earlier this year.

A crucial moment

The spill comes at another critical moment for the future of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which has triggered massive protests since its proposal. Diverse groups, such as Native American tribes, landowners, farming associations, and environmental conservation groups, have argued the pipeline unnecessarily threatens the environment.

On Monday, five members of the Nebraska Public Service Commission will vote on whether to go forward with the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would add an additional 1,179 miles to the existing Keystone system. All the extension needs to move forward is approval on a 275-mile portion of the pipeline that cuts through Nebraska.

But a 2011 law prevents the commission from considering Thursday’s spill in their decision. Instead, they’ll rely on oral and written testimonies from over half a million people who have commented so far.

Despite concerns from local landowners and environmental groups, it’s unclear if the spill, regardless of the uncertainty surrounding its effects, will have an impact on the future of the pipeline.

[Christine]

Truth is always simple and shots a straight arrow.



They take and take and destroy, yet they will never be happy with what they have already destroyed, giving the illusion that they are creating jobs, when in reality they are poisoning our waters, injecting poison into the air causing sickness at an alarming rate, our animal relatives are feeling the effects as our kids will one day feel the effects of this sickness if a change doesn’t come, its a responsibility unwritten but we do have a responsibility to protect the children’s prayers as our ancestors protected ours, this greed and sickness they can keep, we will never just stand by as they come for more of our lands to fill their pockets with. Resist the lie and stand for truth

#honorlife #standyourground #protectbearsears

[Christine]

Laurie shared a post this morning on fb and it set up a resonant stirring in my soul ... frickin' tears haven't dried up as the call of the wild returns full bore. She clearly draws the line in the sand. We must forge an inner stand to truth and to truth be true.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIMumo_MzA8[/youtube]

[Spiritwind]

Three years later, and we still have water protectors receiving prison sentences, while the real perpetrators continue their destruction of the envirnoment. Clearly the wrong people are behind bars : (

https://www.kgw.com/article/tech/scienc ... hkW69WJCa4" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Keystone oil pipeline leaks 383,000 gallons in North Dakota
Crews on Tuesday shut down the pipeline after the leak was discovered, said North Dakota's water quality division director. It remained closed Thursday.

[Spiritwind]

Native Americans Fighting Back Against Oil Companies – Again

https://www.publicnewsservice.org/2019- ... n/a68407-1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;?

November 25, 2019
BISMARCK, N.D. – It's been three years since Native American communities attempted to block an oil pipeline in the Standing Rock protests.

After a spill from Keystone XL in North Dakota and a proposal to expand the Dakota Access Pipeline, those protests continue to echo.

Chase Iron Eyes, an attorney with the Oglala Sioux Tribe, says the four tribes of the Great Sioux Nation are standing together to oppose pipeline development.

But that won't be easy. Iron Eyes says tribal members know from experience what happens when people try to stand in the way. Take the Standing Rock protests.

"Eight-hundred-fifty people went to jail over it,” he points out. “I was facing six years in prison over it. The president of this Oglala Sioux Nation was facing a year in jail over it.

“Sophia Wilansky lost her arm over it. And a couple others lost their eyeballs over it. So, no small matter to us. We're preparing to fight again."

Last month, the Keystone XL Pipeline leaked about 383,000 gallons of oil into the ground in northeast North Dakota. Last week, it was discovered that the leak affected about 4.9 acres of land – 10 times larger than what was first reported.

North Dakota officials also are considering a proposal from Energy Transfer Partners to double the capacity of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Iron Eyes and other tribal leaders in the region are pushing back hard on this proposal.

Pointing to the Keystone as an example, Iron Eyes maintains leaking is natural part of the process for pipelines. He says the legal system needs to adapt to properly punish companies when a pipeline leaks.

"How can these guys destroy our children's very lives?” he questions. “And they're paying maybe a fine, but they're not facing any jail time or public humiliation and shame. Those things work and we have to do them. It's our civic duty."

U.S. House Democrats have called for an investigation into TC Energy's management of the Keystone Pipeline.

Iron Eyes knows it's an uphill battle to take on the oil industry. He says supporters in the fight will have to stand strong on all fronts.

"Sometimes it means putting ourselves in harm's way in order to defend the sacred and the sources of our livelihoods, the real, true sources of any real economic value, which is, you know, our water and our natural ecosystems," he states.

[Spiritwind]

The Long Walk Continues....

How the Women of Standing Rock Are Building Sovereign Economies
By Tracy L Barnett - August 24, 2019

Food security, traditional agriculture, and local self-reliance are key to regenerative societies of the future, say water protectors taking the movement’s lessons forward.

https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment ... e-economy/?

For Sicangu Lakota water protector Cheryl Angel, Standing Rock helped her define what she stands against: an economy rooted in extraction of resources and exploitation of people and planet. It wasn’t until she’d had some distance that the vision of what she stands for came into focus.

“Now I understand that sustainable sovereign economies are needed to replace the system we support with our purchasing power,” she said. “Our ancient teachings have all of those economies passed down in traditional families.”

Together with other front-line leaders from Standing Rock, including Lakota historian LaDonna Brave Bull Allard and Diné artist and activist Lyla June (formerly Lyla June Johnston), Angel began acting on this vision in June at Borderland Ranch in Pe’Sla, the grasslands at the heart of the Black Hills in South Dakota. Nearly 100 Indigenous water protectors and non-Indigenous allies met there for one week to take steps to establish a sovereign economy.

The first annual Sovereign Sisters Gathering brought together women and their allies to talk about how to oppose the current industrialized economy and establish a new model, one in which Indigenous women reclaim and reassert their sovereignty over themselves, their food systems, and their economies.

“When did we as a people lose our self-empowerment? When did we wait for a government to tell us whether or not we could have health care? When did we wait for them to feed us?” Allard asked. “When did we wait for laws and policies to be created so that we could have a community? When did that happen?

“We’ve given our power over to an entity that doesn’t deserve our power,” she added, referencing the modern corporate industrial system. “We must take back that empowerment of self. We must take back our own health care. We must take back our own food. We must take back our families. We must take back our environment. Because you see what’s happening. We gave the power to an entity, and the entity is destroying our world around us.”

Allard, June, and Angel shared a bit about the work they’ve been doing to establish sovereignty, each in her own way, since the Standing Rock encampments.

LaDonna Brave Bull Allard: Planting Seeds

As the woman who established the first water protector encampment at Standing Rock—called Sacred Stone Camp—and issued a call for support that launched a movement, Allard learned a lot about sovereignty and empowerment during the battle against the Dakota Access pipeline.

As the camps began to dismantle in the last weeks of the uprising, she frequently fielded the question: “What do we do now?”

Allard’s response was simple: “Plant seeds.”

Planting seeds is what Allard has been doing since the Standing Rock encampment, as she’s worked with her neighbors and with those who stayed on at Sacred Stone Camp toward a vision of a sustainable community.

“Our first act is taking care of self. So no matter what we do, if we’re not taking care of self, we’ve already failed.”

“I tell people that our first act of sovereignty is planting food,” Allard said. “Our first act is taking care of self. So no matter what we do, if we’re not taking care of self, we’ve already failed.”

These days, self-care is more important than ever, she said, with the accelerating climate crisis, something that Native people are acutely aware of and have seen coming for a long time. “We’re not worrying—we’re preparing,” she said.

Sacred Stone Village has installed four microgrids of solar power and have two mobile solar trailers used to connect dwelling areas that can also be taken on the road for trainings, and the neighboring town of Cannon Ball has opened a whole solar farm. They’ve been planting fruit trees and growing gardens, fattening the chickens, stockpiling firewood. And in some ways, life on the reservation is already a preparation in itself.

“On the Standing Rock reservation, as you know, we are below poverty level, and many of the people live by trade and barter. A lot of people live in homes without electricity and running water. We burn wood to heat our homes,” Allard said. “What I find in the large cities is people who don’t know how to live. And their environment—if you took away the electricity and the oil, what would they do? We already know how to live without those things.”

Lyla June: The Forest As Farm

A Diné/Cheyenne/European American musician, scholar, and activist, June has gravitated toward a focus on food sovereignty through her work to revitalize traditional food systems. Currently, she’s in a doctoral program in traditional food systems and language at the University of Alaska, where she works with Indigenous elders around the country to uncover the genius of the continent’s original cultivators.

“I think there’s a huge mythology that Native people here were simpletons, they were primitive, half-naked nomads running around the forest, eating hand to mouth whatever they could find,” she said. “That’s how Europe portrays us. And it’s portrayed us that way for so many centuries that even we start to believe that that’s who we were.

“The reality is, Indigenous nations on this Turtle Island were highly organized. They densely populated the land, and they managed the land extensively. And this has a lot to do with food because a large motivation to prune the land, to burn the land, to reseed the land, and to sculpt the land was about feeding our nations. Not only our nations, but other animal nations, as well.”

June is intrigued by soil core samples that delve thousands of years into the past; analysis of fossilized pollen, charcoal traces, and soil composition reveals much about land use practices through the ages. For example, in Kentucky, a soil core sample that went back 10,000 years shows that about 3,000 years ago the forest was dominated by cedar and hemlock. But about 3,000 years ago the whole forest composition changed to black walnut, hickory nut, chestnut, and acorn; edible species such as goosefoot and sumpweed began to flourish.

“So these people—whoever moved in around 3,000 years ago—radically changed the way the land looked and tasted,” she said.

The costs to the food system as a result of colonization is becoming clear.

So did the colonizers, but in a much different way. The costs to the food system as a result of colonization, she said, is becoming clear, and the mounting pressure of the climate crisis is making a shift imperative.

“When did we start waiting for others to feed us? That’s no longer going to be a luxury question,” June said.

Besides the vulnerability of monocrops to extreme weather events, these industrial agricultural crops are also dependent on pesticides and herbicides. Additionally, pests are adapting, producing chemical resistant insects and superweeds.

“We’re running out of bullets in our food system, and it’s quite precarious right now,” she said. “The poor animals that we farm are also on the precipice … so we’re in a state where we should probably start asking ourselves that question now, before we’re forced to, and remember the joy of feeding ourselves.”

That’s June’s intention: to take what she’s learned from a year of apprenticeships with Indigenous elders in different bioregions, then return home to Diné Bikéyah—Navajo territory—to apply it, regenerating traditional Navajo food systems in an interactive action research project aimed at both teaching and learning, refining techniques with each year.

“I’m hoping at the end of three years, or four years, we will be fluent in our language and in our food system,” June said. “And we will be operating as a team—and we will have a success story that other tribes can look to and model and be inspired by.”

The long-range goal, she said, is to create an autonomous school that teaches traditional culture, language, and food systems that can be a model for other Indigenous communities.

Cheryl Angel: Creating Sovereign Communities

To Angel, sovereignty is best expressed in creating community—the temporary communities created at gatherings, like at the Sovereign Sisters Gathering, but also more permanent communities, like at Sacred Stone Village.

Part of being sovereign lies in strengthening and rebuilding sharing economies, she said. And part of it lies in reducing waste, rejecting rampant consumerism and the harmful aspects of the modern industrial system, like single-use plastics and toxic chemicals.

“I saw it all happen at Standing Rock; everybody came with all of their skills, and they brought [their] economies—and they were medicating people, they were healing people, they were feeding people, cooking for people, training people, making people laugh—they were doing everything. Everything we needed, it came to Standing Rock.”

Despite the money the pipeline company spent to repress the uprising, she said, water protectors around the world stepped up and pitched in to create an alternate economy at Standing Rock, and millions were raised to support the resistance.

“We could do that again. We can gift our economies between each other. We’re doing it right here,” Angel told the women assembled in the Black Hills—women who were gardeners and builders, craftswomen and cooks, healers and lawyers, filmmakers and writers—and, above all, water protectors. “These few days we’ve been here prove to me and should prove to you that we have the skills to create communities without violence, without drugs, without alcohol, without patriarchy—just with the intent to live in peace.”

TRACY L. BARNETT is a freelance journalist based in Mexico and the founder of The Esperanza Project, which will be continuing coverage of the asylum seekers and their allies

[Christine]

A reminder: Medicine For The People

[youtube]https://youtu.be/E-QGkYNc0Ls[/youtube]