Meeting Donald
After George had drove away, I was instantly chatted up by a guy who looked like an old, short Buffalo Bill. He wore one of those nice old west jackets, and a nice heavy leather desperado hat to bat. He walked up to me with the most inviting tone, but immediately interrogative.
“The hell are you doing here? It’s all over!”
Trying to match his extravert demeanor, I smiled and tried to play off my embarrassment. It was clear from the signs of abandoned settlement that the fun was over. Apparently, they were going to be kicked off of this land.
“Standing Rock ain’t going anywhere. It’s over. I’ve been here on and off since the beginning. Name’s Donald by the way.” He didn’t lose eye contact - those sky-blue eyes and strong beard, you can’t help but feel intimidated. He reached for a handshake, and I acquiesced. At the time I was generally blindsided by certain people’s forcefulness in handshakes, and I was already kind of a scatterbrain with little intuition. He strangled my hand, and off and on for a couple minutes would crack jokes and inquire about where I’m from and why I ended up there. Not as many questions as I’d think, though. You’d expect some more skepticism for a kid coming to some hippie protest.
After walking around and giving me the rounds, he told me that there were other camps (with varying degrees of civilization, functionality, and degeneracy) that were still inhabited. The reason they were kicked off of this one and not the others is because the Lakota family who owned this acreage were generally unfavorable to the intrusive hippies and ne’er-do-wells setting up shop on their property, not paying any tax, and being loud nuisances. Many of these camps, I would come to realize in my short time at Standing Rock, were generally inhabited by petulant good-for-nothings from the west coast looking for an honest cause to permeate with their leftist disease. My experience at Standing Rock, as I will illustrate through my other memories, was really what radicalized me against leftism. We’ll get to that, but for now, I’ve gotta tell you more about Donnie.
Donald took me in to what was the sort of main hall/cafeteria. Every camp had a communal, big main tent or structure that everyone would gather in. Donnie introduced me to several people, but they all had morose or judgey looks as if I didn’t belong. I cracked it up to a sense of defeat they had, but what I didn’t realize is it was because I was being introduced by Donald. Nobody liked him. He was a spiteful drunkard with a habit of rabble-rousing. He would downplay people’s proactive attitudes, and cast judgement against any starry-eyed idealists. I would come to pity him not too long after I made friends with others who knew about him and would just see him in random places drinking hard liquor out in broad daylight, not doing a lick of work, and scoffing at passersby. In retrospect, I don’t even know why he was there. All he’d talk about was how he was a high school basketball coach back home in Washington; about the games they were going to win. He’d tell the same story to everybody when he wasn’t talking up a bunch of shit. I think he was just there out of spite and to maybe LARP as a cowboy. There’s another story I’ll talk about sometime where he plays a central role - as an intimidating villain who threatened my life (in the most laughable way). It was around the end of my 2-3 month stay in this wild world of deception, hippies, idealistic Lakota, and the manufactured hatred against a new era of rightist populism.
Anywho, Donnie took me to another camp about a half an hour or so after ending up at this one.
Oh by the way, I just texted a guy who I haven’t talked to in the six years since I’ve been here, so hopefully he can help me with some details about the camps.
Anyway, we drove about twenty or thirty minutes away to two camps that were along a river. They were giant. I’m talking these camps had the complex infrastructure similar to that of a Germanic horde. Hippie and injun infrastructure - but still, you even had some modest buildings constructed by volunteer carpenters who were sympathetic to the cause. Funnily enough, it seems all the useful people started to disappear as these camps were closed down, there became an issue with spies and feds, and the intrusion of bandits and ne’er-do-wells made trustworthiness and univocality completely break down.
For the next week or so I’d stay at this camp, occasionally going to the one across the river. These two camps were night and day in terms of organization and types of people. The one I seldom visited was a lot more guarded, and the people there were a bit more “extreme” if you wanna put it that way. They wanted to be rabble-rousers. Albeit organized rabble-rousers. The camp I stayed at seemed to have the softer variety of hippie that wasn’t hellbent on LARPing as guerillas.
My relationship with Donald immediately soured as I realized the type of guy he was, and would actively distance myself from him. Nobody trusted him, though the better people seemed to have pity for him. He wasn’t even among the worst people I met there. He was just pathetic. Not pathological or psychopathic like the bulk of the hippies who’d been left over.
Background on Standing Rock and DAPL
It might be helpful if I give some background to what this protest even was so that you don’t have to go read the immense wikipedia page. If you’ll remember, back in the mid 2010s there was a string of protests all throughout the Sioux Nation, and eventually breaking out across the whole US, in reaction to DAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline). At first, the protest was heavily made up of Sioux peoples (Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, and some others, those are just the easiest to remember for obvious reasons lol). Their prime issue was about the “poisoning of water and mother earth” from the pipeline possibly leaking into the ground. Then it became more about Native American land rights and regionalism. Then it got a little more extreme in a myriad of ways. Not soon after the protests broke out, whitey from the west coast butted in and quickly turned the entire protest into yet another free love psyop with rainbow flags, egalitarianism, and all. I’ll talk about it at some other point, but if you learn about indigineous cultures of America, they were by no means egalitarian in the way that white liberals try to paint them. It’s insane how revisionist the left have become on indians’ cultures.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to ourospost to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.