Okichize (Battle)*
*Note: “okichize” means “battle” in the Sioux language.
Two years into her exile and Rachel is dancing on stage, a high school dropout and reservation refugee, who fled home because the old ways and new ways clash and make casualties of the Natives caught in the middle.
Two years into her exile and Rachel is dancing on stage, content to let others choose her path, content to be far from home in both heart and mind, until she sees Natives from the Standing Rock Reservation on the TV hanging behind the bar.
Singing and praying.
Sprayed with tear gas.
Set upon by attack dogs.
Natives who just want to protect their water from the poison of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Though her own res lies in a different part of South Dakota, she recognizes that these are her people, and in that moment, on that stage, Rachel is done dancing.
Done using fake names. Done running and hiding.
This is how she ceases being trafficked, and chooses her own path.
In Bismarck, rides south are being organized, hodgepodges of carpools, buses and caravans, and Rachel stands on a corner waiting for the moment to sort itself out. A volunteer at the rallying point gives her a star-patterned blanket, and with her long hair pulled back in a ponytail, a forlorn expression, and the blanket around her shoulders, Rachel looks like she belongs on one of those rides.
Despite spending the last few years wearing glitter, garish lipstick and clothes easily removed onstage, she looks like she belongs far more than most.
This is how she meets Maureen and Avery.
“Need a lift?” says a young white woman leaning out of the passenger side window of a maroon Subaru hatchback. “I’m Maureen,” she says, and she introduces the driver.
When Rachel bends down to get a look, she sees Avery behind the wheel, another white woman, giving her a friendly wave.
Without a second thought, Rachel climbs into the backseat. Then they’re off.
It’s 2016, and as per the governor of North Dakota’s orders, the impromptu camp known as Oceti Sakowin has been razed by National Guard soldiers and state police. The very public, very ugly protesting of the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (the Black Snake, according to Lakota legend) is effectively over.
For this particular battle, Rachel, Avery and Maureen are too late.
#
An ex-housewife, an ex-grad student and an ex-dancer, fumbling around in the dark.
The nearly-overpowering stench of gasoline. The clink of glass bottles. Rags. Cheap plastic lighters. Sneakers and gloves. Warm coats in the chill night air.
Hands shaking with adrenaline.
Whenever they flick on their flashlights, they can see clouds from their breath.
A field in Iowa.
A gully in South Dakota.
The trick when it comes to industrial sabotage is to understand just enough of the mechanism to know where the line exists between damage and catastrophe.
You want to cost the oil company money, not create a natural disaster.
You want to hurt the oil company’s bottom line, not kill off all the flora and fauna in a ten-mile radius.
“Be careful, don’t get any on you,” says Avery, who left her husband when she saw the footage of Native Americans blasted with chemical irritants by the police. Who linked up with Maureen online and hasn’t looked back since.
Avery strums a guitar, which she doesn’t know how to play but is teaching herself. Thus far, the music she creates is awful.
Maureen and Rachel pour the gasoline into the bottles. Stuff the tops of the bottles with rags. Hold the bottles upside down so the rags soak up the liquid.
The trick when it comes to industrial sabotage of an oil pipeline is understanding the difference between the valves.
Like gate valves.
Like ball valves.
Control valves.
The trick is knowing where the booster pumping stations are needed, where they’re most vulnerable.
But Avery, Maureen and Rachel know nothing about any of that.
When they set off on their quest to make the Black Snake bleed, they suspect the government will eventually let the oil company have their pipeline.
They suspect the hopeful words of a departing president will give way to the indifference of a new one, and the oil will flow and the pipeline will—inevitably—burst at the seams from all the greed. Burst and murder the land.
They suspect the protests at Standing Rock were for naught.
That first night, they choose a finished section of pipeline that hangs suspended over the land in a small valley.
That first night, they leave their maroon Subaru hatchback parked a mile down the road, the guitar in the backseat, and when Maureen and Rachel hold the bottles out and Avery lights the rags, they’re breathless.
Flames dance behind them as they run, and when they get back to their motel room, they wait for a special newsbreak on CNN announcing that the oil has stopped flowing.
The news never comes.
When they drive back the next night, they realize all that they’ve done is damage the pipeline’s coat of paint.
A parking lot in North Dakota.
A field in South Dakota.
“The water is catching fire,” says Avery, who goes on to describe the combustible gases escaping from where the pipeline has already been installed, where it’s already leaking. “The Army Corps of Engineers sold out to the oil companies,” says Avery. “They approved the digging under the Missouri River, and now the water is on fire.”
“Fucking fascists,” she hisses.
“Your hair is so cool,” says Maureen, who left grad school when she discovered that #NoDAPL meant standing up to a powerful oil company for the sake of clean water for Indigenous people.
She braids Rachel’s hair, a skill she never learned how to do—her own hair is buzzed short—but Rachel has been teaching her. Thus far, she’s done nothing but create knots.
Avery sits on the edge of the motel bed, reading her phone. Reading about the number of barrels being produced a day. How much money the oil company makes.
The trick with industrial sabotage is knowing your limitations, and accepting that sometimes you have to scale down your goals. Aspire to less.
Like, don’t try to slay the giant.
Like, maybe just tie its shoelaces together.
Steal its glasses when it isn’t looking.
When they set off on their quest to make the Black Snake bleed, they suspect there will be a learning curve.
They suspect they have a lot to figure out when it comes to inflicting the maximum amount of damage with their limited capabilities and lack of engineering knowledge.
That second week they’re on the road, they spy a cluster of trailers in the distance, so they drive the Subaru down a dirt road until they come to a locked gate.
That second week, they help each other scale the fence, and shine flashlights in the windows.
The trailers are devoid of people, but full of desks, chairs and paperwork. Mobile offices. Already used or to be used, they don’t know. But the oil company logos on the sides tell them all they need to know.
This time, when they hoof it back to their car, the night sky is awash with shades of red and orange.
This time, when Avery hits the accelerator, and Maureen clutches the dashboard repeating the words “Oh my God,” Rachel can watch the inferno from the backseat and know, though it grows more and more distant behind them, they’ve actually done something.
As they drive away, Rachel laughs for the first time in what feels like years.
A shed in Iowa.
A line of dormant excavators in South Dakota.
“Be careful,” says Avery. “You don’t want to get tangled up with any of them.”
Maureen has Tinder open on her phone, showing the profiles of men to Rachel, the two of them giggling as they swipe left, swipe left, swipe left.
Rachel tells Avery she has nothing to worry about there. That every boyfriend she’s had was more manager than man, and she’s sick of their crap. All of them.
Later, when Rachel weeps, lamenting her loneliness and how her family never seemed to understand her or wanted to understand her, Avery and Maureen huddle close and rub her back.
The trick when undertaking a multistate campaign of eco-terrorism is to use your money up judiciously.
The trick when waging guerilla warfare against a monstrous conglomerate is to max out your husband’s credit card, and the credit card your parents gave you for emergencies at grad school.
Spend all the meager cash you saved up dancing.
Rely on the goodwill of strangers.
Charitable organizations.
Shelters for battered wives.
They never ask Rachel why she left her reservation, if there was a specific trauma, and she’s fine with them assuming the worst. But when she tells them she doesn’t have a license and never learned how to drive, Avery and Maureen make a big deal about how she needs to learn, that it’s essential for her independence.
“You’ve done amazing surviving on your own,” says Maureen. “But girl…”
That second month on the road, they spend a few days in a mall parking lot teaching her. When she can finally maneuver the Subaru around without hitting any snowbanks, they clap and cheer, and celebrate with one of Avery’s awful songs on the guitar while Maureen puts more knots in her hair.
A motel parking lot in Illinois with a line of oil company pickup trucks.
Empty mobile offices in North Dakota.
The three of them have grown adept at slashing tires and starting fires.
Smashing instrument panels on bulldozers.
Cutting hydraulic lines on forklifts.
“You’ve done amazing surviving on your own,” says Maureen, the grad student whose parents paid for everything. There is no “but girl” following her statement.
At a soup kitchen in Des Moines, Maureen and Rachel are filling the dishwasher, volunteering so they have a place to stay in between illicit excursions. Occasionally, Avery comes in and deposits a full bus tub of dirty dishes and silverware onto the counter, grunting from the exertion.
Rachel says she hasn’t really been on her own. She just went from one kind of family to another, and the levels of trust and safety pretty much remained the same.
Maureen’s face is suddenly colored by pity. She releases the nozzle and hose used to spray off the dishes after they’re racked, wraps her arms around Rachel and squeezes her tightly. “You poor thing,” she says, and Rachel rests her head on Maureen’s shoulder.
She wishes she could rest her head there forever.
When they set off on their quest to make the Black Snake bleed, they know they’re putting themselves at risk.
They know they might blow themselves up.
Get caught.
Get arrested.
Go to jail.
The trick is to make whatever they accomplish count.
It’s a cold winter night in Iowa when Avery drives them down a dirt road that twists and turns and leads to a gated lot full of machinery. Because of the twists and turns, and a hill with a lone tree, they’re hidden from the main road. But they also can’t see the main road, can’t see if anyone comes.
“Rachel,” says Avery. “Why don’t you stand up there,” and she points at the hill and the tree. “Be the lookout. If anyone comes, flick the flashlight on and off in our direction. We’ll keep an eye out for it, and know if the coast is clear.”
With the star-patterned blanket wrapped tightly around her shoulders, Rachel climbs the hill. Above, the moon is bright and full. Below, she can see her companions cut through the fence with wire cutters, then scamper about.
A shiver from the cold, and she turns to gaze at the main road. In either direction, there’s nothing, and Rachel thinks about how she’s survived. How for so long she let others choose her path. How her first choice in a long time was to join Avery and Maureen, and the choice before that was to leave the res.
Noises from below. The sound of glass shattering and metal clanking.
Meanwhile, a pair of headlights appear in the distance. A car on the main road.
Rachel curses. Points her flashlight toward the gated lot. Clicks it on and off, over and over again.
The car is closer, so close that Rachel can hear the hum of its engine. The sound of its tires on the cold asphalt.
The flashlight, on and off.
On and off.
Below, flickering flame.
Rachel curses again. Kneels in the dirt beside the tree, trying to make herself as small as possible.
On and off. On and off.
The car is near enough that she can hear the muffled sounds of music, blasting from behind its windows.
And then it passes, two red taillights speeding by, getting smaller and smaller, while below, orange and reds come alive and dance across the gated lot.
The red taillights are gone and the main road is empty.
Rachel watches her friends shimmy back through the hole in the fence. She leaves the tree on the hill and joins them back at their Subaru.
By the time they reach the end of the dirt road and turn onto the asphalt, the fire behind them has lit up the sky.
The trick, when it comes to wondering when it will end, is to wait.
Because every crime spree will eventually sort itself out.
A few weeks go by, and Avery is reading her phone while Maureen braids Rachel’s hair.
Around them, a tiny bedroom in a community house in Des Moines, where they’ve been volunteering. Sleeping. Plotting. Giggling.
The giggling ceases when Avery sits upright, puts her hand to her head and curses. “They got us on video,” she says. She looks at Maureen and Rachel. Hands them the phone.
There’s a news story. “Two women wanted for arson, vandalism and terrorism charges” is the headline. Photos. Still frames from a surveillance camera, taken from the lot down that dirt road. The one with the hill and the tree.
Further down in the story, a pair of headshots: Avery and Maureen.
“Damn,” says Maureen, and she jumps off the bed and begins pacing. “We’re screwed.”
#
There’s no mention of a third person.
No mention of an ex-dancer discovering herself.
No mention of a Native girl out for justice or revenge.
No mention of Rachel, happier than she’s ever been. Choosing for herself.
Though Maureen is upset, Avery remains calm. “We have three options,” she says, and Maureen stops her pacing to give the ex-housewife her full attention. “The first option is we do a Thelma and Louise and hit the road,” says Avery. “Go somewhere—Mexico, Canada, I don’t know.”
Rachel and Maureen exchange looks, and Rachel wonders aloud what Mexico would be like. A winter in Canada would probably be colder and snowier than the ones she’s used to, which, is to say, it would be very cold and very snowy, right?
“The second option is we keep doing what we’re doing, and wait for them to catch us.”
Maureen shakes her head at that.
“Which brings us to option number three: we turn ourselves in, but on our terms, with as much press there to cover it as we can get. That way, we can tell our story and why we did it and who we did it for. Really stick it to those fascists.”
Maureen raises her eyebrows, obviously considering it.
Rachel doesn’t understand. Turn ourselves in? Why would we do that?
As one, Avery and Maureen shake their heads, and Avery rises from the bed. Puts her hands on Rachel’s shoulders. “They don’t know about you,” she says.
Rachel says she did everything they did. She’s just as guilty as they are, and proud of it.
“You have your whole life ahead of you,” says Avery. “Don’t waste it on this.”
But they showed her how to fight back, says Rachel. To stand up for something. They taught her how to drive, she says.
“You are so amazing,” says Maureen.
Rachel is no longer shaking her head. Instead, she’s crying. Says it’s her choice, and she wants to go with them.
“There are more battles to fight,” says Avery.
“It’s up to you to fight them,” says Maureen.
There’s nothing more to discuss after that, because Rachel can see they’re right.
Nothing more to do, except one last awful song on the guitar and one last knotted braid.
Nothing more to say, except goodbye.
#
In Des Moines, Rachel stands at a bus station, her star-patterned blanket wrapped around her shoulders, her expression pensive.
Two years of wearing glitter, garish lipstick and clothes easily removed onstage, two years of dancing and fake names, and then a few months of fighting, and she thinks about how she once chose to run and hide.
Chose exile.
This is how Rachel decides to return home.
JIM GENIA—a proud Dakota Sioux—mostly writes nonfiction about cagefighting, but occasionally takes a break from the hurt and pain to write fiction about hurt and pain. He has an MFA in creative writing from the New School, and his short fiction dealing with Indigenous themes has appeared or is forthcoming in the Zodiac Review, the Corvus Review, Electric Spec, Sage Cigarettes Magazine, ANMLY, Storm Cellar, the Indiana Review and the Baltimore Review. Follow him on Twitter @jim_genia.