Wake up in the morning.

Stretch.

Breathe.

Swing your feet over the edge of your bed.

Step on a burial ground.

Brush your teeth on a burial ground.

Eat breakfast on a burial ground.

Go to class on a burial ground.

Go to work on a burial ground.

Go to your warm house filled with people you love, which all rests on a burial ground.

Go to sleep on a burial ground.

Never learn their names or their history or their culture,

But walk all over their dead bodies anyway.

Do you know if your life is built on a burial ground? If you attend Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, maybe you should learn what lived and died before you. Associate professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies, Kurt A. Johnson found significant evidence suggesting that Ithaca rests on top of ancient burial grounds of Haudenosaunee Indians.

Could you imagine building a school above a cemetery? What about a highway? Or a pipeline?

The Dakota Access Pipeline has recently been receiving national attention for being an act of cultural and environmental terrorism. Burial sites will be destroyed. Prayer sites will be destroyed. Artifacts will be destroyed. Water supplies will be at high risk of contamination. All the facts point to severe environmental consequences of uprooting oil via a pipeline, not to mention that oil is neither a clean nor safe resource to rely on.

Some days more than others I feel the heaviness of what I do not know. I feel the weight of all I have to learn, do, and see. It feels like getting caught between boulders to think of all that I will never know… but what about all that none of us will never know? What about all the thousands of years of Native American civilizations that were cavalierly destroyed without documentation, without record, without feeling, without reason?

We are at a crossroads. So much could be lost in the blink of an eye. The lives of so many, the landscape, the places that they have loved all of their lives could be changed forever.

How will this act be remembered?

Here lies the Dakota Access Pipeline

Who helped us dirty waters,

Warm weathers,

Weed out those who we do not know.

Who gave no thought to headstones,

Nor humans,

But held great amounts of power.

Who rooted itself in someone else’s home,

No peace will rest here.

Say “No” to the Dakota Access Pipeline and say it as loud as you can. Read as much as there is about the injustice that is happening. Hold out your hands and offer support to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. Help them protect what is theirs. Search not for short-term economic advantages nor oil reliance, but rather energy solutions that will benefit the Earth.

We are at a crossroads of history and humanity and we have so much power to help and so much power to hurt. We cannot keep digging deeper and deeper into the pockets of the Earth, taking all it has to offer until we run barren. In this country, we have often found ourselves arrogant enough to believe we can take what we needs without proper permission. We are guests here. When we write our final guestbook goodbye, what do we want our tombstones to tell?

That we were sisters?

Brothers,

mothers,

fathers,

daughters,

sons,

children?

That we were thieves of oil?

Thieves of ritual?

Will our tombstone read that we tread lightly on an Earth that did not belong to us?

Will our history remain intact?

Or will it burst like a pipe?

Will our tombstone say that we said “No” to unreasonable, thoughtless, short sighted destruction in favor of profit rather than people?

Say “No” to the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Do it for the people or do it for the place that they live.

Say “No.”