This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
At the Bismarck Airport, looking back on Standing Rock, my home for the past week, I see the flags fluttering and bending in the freezing wind and hear the prayers of the elders chanted and spoken over a loudspeaker. Prayers began before dawn, urging us, as temple bells, to leave the warmth of our blankets and sleeping bags and venture into the unrelenting cold wind of Oceti Sakowin, words in the Sioux language for the Seven Sacred Council Fires that were gathering for the first time in 200 years or more.
Whenever people spoke of these fires, their voices, choked with emotion, generated awe. At around 7 a.m., prayers were offered around the sacred fire near the entrance of the camp. My first morning, I joined a group of women singing as they walked to the river for the Water Ceremony. Men stood on either side of the steps down the muddy slope to catch our hands and steady our descent. At the river, women leading the ritual gave each woman tobacco to scatter on the river as we voiced our prayers. They poured water into our hands to return to the river and then to drink. After the ritual, we stood in a line along the river. "Hold the river," a woman told us. We reached out our hands and standing side by side on the banks, the cold river carried our prayers to the sea.
Each day colder than the last, wind whipped through the camp, clearing the thick smoke of the campfires and stoves being hastily installed in army tents and teepees and tarpees (teepees made from tarps).
"How did you come to this place?" we asked each other when we met a stranger, and most of our stories were the same. I said, "I heard something like a voice calling from within to travel here."
A man with formidable carpentry skills answered, "You were hearing the prayers." He told of traveling on the West Coast when someone gave him a car. "God brought me here," he said.
He was one of the workers who gathered to raise the Interfaith Unitarian Universalist yurt. The volunteers said the urge to come to this camp was so strong I wondered if they had heard the elders over the loudspeaker all the way to where they were living in Massachusetts or Washington or California or Arkansas.
This commonality of call made us gentle with each other when the man reading the yurt instructions neglected to tell us to put an inner layer of canvas over the roof structure first, meaning that we had to figure out how to slip it under all the layers and remove the little dome just as we thought we were done.
Each morning at 9, the community gathered in a large geodesic tent, beginning with prayer to center us for what the day held. All around the camp, signs were explicit about rules: No alcohol, no drugs, no arms. At the orientation, the facilitators told us, "Some of you are here to be on the front line, and others are here for different reasons. Every action is a prayer."
These were words that I heard over and over again. We learned how to participate in non-violent actions and to be aware of the anger we carried for it would be used against us. If we reacted in anger, that would become the face of the Water Protectors and would hurt the sacred purpose of the camp.
I helped to build a yurt that would be a warm place for Native elders and clergy and others during the winter, and I washed and dried dishes, peeled vegetables and stacked and organized garbage to be picked up.
A young man returning from an "action" in Bismarck asked me at dinner, "Do I smell of mace? The police were spraying mace at us today." Others were visibly shaken after being sprayed and dragged out of the front line by police. Many had the names and telephone numbers of lawyers written on their arms.
Leaving the kitchen tents, we watched a huge apricot moon rise above the camp. We scrambled up the hill, where we could catch signals on our phones and send messages to loved ones through the bright darkness. "I am safe."
The camp felt more vulnerable in the cold darkness. Before sleeping, we spoke of the possibility of bulldozers coming in the night to destroy the camp or low-flying airplanes spreading chemicals or fire.
On my last day, I delivered a prayer shawl knitted with hopes and prayers and blessed by the congregation I serve. It is now around the shoulders of the elder in charge of winterizing the camp. Utah prayers remain at Standing Rock.
The Rev. Patty C. Willis is minister of the South Valley Unitarian Universalist Society.