A Fire at the Center

Karen Van Fossan

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A firsthand account of two colonial pipelines and their resistance: the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock and the Line 3 pipeline on Anishinaabe lands.

This is a story of becoming and un-becoming. When the living waters that crisscrossed the Standing Rock reservation came under threat, minister of the nearby Unitarian Universalist congregation Karen Van Fossan asked herself what it means, as a descendent of colonialism, to resist her own colonial culture. When another pipeline, Line 3, came to threaten Anishinaabe ways of life, the question became even more resounding.

In A Fire at the Center, Van Fossan takes readers behind the scenes of the Dakota Access Pipeline conflict, to penitentiaries where prisoners of war have carried the movement onward, to the jail cell where she was held for protesting Line 3, to a reimagining of decolonized family constellations, and to moments of collective hope and strength.

With penetrating insight, she blends memoir, history, and cultural critique. Guided by the generous teachings of Oceti Sakowin Camp near Standing Rock, she investigates layers of colonialism—extractive industries, mass incarceration, broken treaties, disappearances of Indigenous people—and the boundaries of imperial whiteness.

For all those striving for liberation and meaningful allyship, Van Fossan’s learnings and practices of genuine, mutual solidarity and her thoughtful critique of whiteness will be transformational.

Welcome

Is it about Standing Rock?

I have been asked this question when a loved one or colleague hears about this book and generously wonders what it’s about. Each time, the answer gets caught in my throat.

In this moment, the words seem to be caught in my throat again. The truest answer might go like this: Not exactly. And also yes.

Standing Rock showed me how to live.

At Oceti Sakowin Camp, the largest Camp within the Standing Rock movement, I was welcomed as a relative, one of a hundred thousand relatives who had gathered there from everywhere. In 2016, when the Indigenous-led uprising to protect the Missouri River roused the human family, it became my fondest wish to live as a good relative with people and all beings who comprise the Earth. When the colonial state forcibly closed the camps in collusion with the colonial extractive industry, thousands of people, including myself, lost their sense of home.

Many within our community lost their home altogether.

This book was born from that loss and longing, and also from an ever-deepening gratitude toward Oceti Sakowin Camp and the world I inhabited there. As far as I can tell, the way of life at Camp was a way of life that human beings were made for. I certainly felt more like a human being, an embodied member of the intricate web of life, than I ever had before.

Speaking of before—

Way back before my ancestors crossed the Atlantic Ocean, hungry for nourishment of many kinds, most of them lived in the Celtic Sea and North Sea regions of the world, landmasses that are now called the British Isles, northern Europe, and, as my mom and I were stunned to learn through DNA testing, the Baltic Sea region.

Guided by the Water Protector movement, I have begun to understand my heritage, as well as my own life’s story, not only in terms of culture and land but also in terms of water. Maybe this long-ago sea connection, this abiding presence of water in my own ancestral homelands, has remained within my bones.

From my earliest years, I have always rushed to the rivers—

The Kankakee River of my childhood.

The Missouri River of much of my adulthood.

The Red River of today.

As a child and grandchild of ministers, I grew up with epic stories about the watery beginnings of creation, the presence of God— or Goddess, or Great Mystery, or Spirit of Life, or Manifestation of Love—dwelling in all peoples, places, and creatures. This heritage has nourished me with an abiding sense of Spirit.

At the same time, I also descend from the very white settler colonialism that has sought to destroy both the Indigenous-led Water Protector movement and, for more than five hundred years, Indigenous peoples as a whole.

Though it’s painful to acknowledge, the same culture and system that raised and formed me has also enacted unthinkable acts of violence as a way of life. In this dissonant context, it seems this system of violence must have something to do with who we white people are, as well as who I am as a white person. Entrained by a system based on violence, it seems I must be touched by it, shaped by it, possibly even run by it.

Today, thanks to Oceti Sakowin Camp, as well as many Water Protector events and reunions that have followed, I have a visceral sense of how and what transformation can feel like. Still, as a white person, I have come to understand that this process is not only about experiencing the great blessings or even the basic human struggles of participation in Indigenous-led, intercultural resistance movements.

When my culture has located itself in direct opposition to Indigenous ways of life—and when I as a white person seek to oppose this very opposition—my life can seem to move in two directions at once.

In order to bring my own fullness, my own wholeness, to this work of liberation, I need a genuine understanding of the situation at hand, which calls for a genuine understanding of my own culture. Through this process of unfolding, this ever-deepening sense of who I am and who I come from, I believe I can participate with more energy and integrity in decolonizing movements that have nourished my body and my spirit, guiding the course of my life.

So what might (my) white identity mean? How might (my) whiteness relate to—and not relate to—the lifelong project of becoming a human being?

In the movement for collective liberation, how might (my) whiteness both complicate and mandate the role of allyship or even accompliceship, a mutual role that happens, according to Indigenous Action Media, “when we fight back or forward, together, becoming complicit in a struggle towards liberation”?

These are some of the questions that have shaped this memoir of heart, mind, body, and soul. It is a narrative of moments, a recollection of challenges and revelations, as I have gone from unquestioning allegiance to the colonial criminal justice system in 1987 to sitting in a jail cell on a Water Protector charge in 2021, and plenty of places both before and since.

In other words, this book is a memoir of practicing—of learning, moment by moment, to be more fully human, to live in more life-embracing ways. In this story, I hope you will find something you can relate to, whether it’s a lesson learned, a mistake made, or, here and there, a little bit of satire on colonial ways of life, which I have shared because, as the adage goes, sometimes satire is the only thing that makes any sense.

Welcome

1. The Spark, the Flame

2. Welcome Home

3. Bridge to Somewhere

4. Carrying

5. Out There Somewhere

6. Trash Talk

7. Eviction and Another Way

8. Incarcerated Bodies and Mutual Liberation

9. Pipelines, Crimes, and Empire

10. Sacred Subversion

Gratitude

Suggested Reading

Selected Bibliography

Sujets

• Indigenous Studies
• Personal Memoirs
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Unitarismo universalista
• Unitarian Universalism
• Anishinaabe

Informations

• Publié par: Skinner House Books
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781558969117
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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