Back then the snake was taken to be the new Interstate highway, surfaced with black tar. One was of Zuzeca Sapa, a black snake that would destroy the world unless her people stood up to defeat it. It happened because they were living in prophecy, the sort the old women liked to discuss round the kitchen table while she, and the other young, pretended not to hear. Yet the only thought in her head was a historian’s: how could this be happening again, on the anniversary of so much killing? Dogs were set on them, and now she was facing one with blood on its dark grey jaws. Hundreds of protesters were being tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed. Again, white men in heavy fighting gear-this time company security guards-were breaking up a camp, one she had made to obstruct the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline beneath the sacred lands of her tribe. On the very date of that massacre, September 3rd, but in 2016, LaDonna herself was in a field, frozen and immobile. She survived, but had shivered in a field for hours crying for her mother. Among them was her great great grandmother Mary Big Mocassin, then nine years old, who felt the sudden heat of a bullet tear into her hip. They had been members of a large camp of tribes, mainly Sioux, who had been meeting to prepare for winter by hunting buffalo and arranging marriages. Whitestone Hill in 1863 had seen a terrible massacre, when hundreds of men, women and children had been herded into a ravine and shot by the United States Army.
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