All That Remains Will Be Concrete and Tires

by Sue Ann Martinson, WAMM

On December 11, 1999, more trees in Minnehaha Park were cut down to make way for the rerouting of Highway 55. Sue Ann Martinson protested this action and was arrested. The following article is an excerpt of a statement she read at her trial on January 27, 2000.

One thing that the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MN DoT) has been over the years of this struggle to save our park, save our land, save our trees, save our environment, is consistent. That is, they have consistently attempted to get their way by bullying, by underhanded and unethical means, whether with the Minnesota Watershed District, the Pollution Control Agency, the so-called Traditional Property Survey, or the citizen meetings and records of those meetings.

They have also attempted to get their way by destroying the four sacred oaks, and then, after the trees were cut down, declaring the point moot in a federal court of law, as in the case of James Anderson, et al. versus Bruce Babbit, Secretary, United States Department of the Interior, et al., on December 17, 1999.

Such shenanigans may be acceptable to some in government, but they are not acceptable to the citizens. MN DoT,s tactics have been continually unethical. What is the difference between unethical and illegal? Should there be any difference?

I would like to read now an excerpt from a poem by the English poet Phillip Larkin.

I thought it would last my time--
The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms . . .
Such trees as were not cut down . . .
. . .
It seems just now,
To be happening so very fast;
. . .before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts--
. . .
And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
. . .but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.
. . .
I think it will happen, soon.

Phillip Larkin, 1972

We, in midwest America, might say the shadows, the prairie, the trails; we might talk about waterways and trailer camps. It is the same. The trees may be oaks, but not bur oaks. The concrete and the tires as "all that remains" are the same. And the greed, the greed is the same.

I wish that Larkin, who died in 1986, had lived to see these young eco-warriors. The other day by the elevator here in the courthouse, someone called us "tree people." I am very proud to be one of those tree people. How privileged I am to know these young eco-warriors--three of them here on trial today, and also some not so young--these Rainbow Warriors.

As the Native people have predicted, a Rainbow Tribe, a tribe of people with a new vision, has emerged, one to preserve the earth--not to exploit, not to tame, not to conquer--but to leave the children a living planet.

And it will happen soon, is happening now. Here is where we have drawn the line: here, where the Mdewakanton Dakota, whose name means "they camp by the holy water," know and claim their land by birthright; here, where the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers merge, here between Minnehaha Falls and Camp Coldwater Spring, here where they have always camped and held their sacred ceremonies.

I do not need a treaty to tell me that this is their land, not mine, not MN DoT,s, not anyone's but theirs.

And so the old rituals are acted out. No, I do not mean the pipe ceremony by the four sacred oaks. I mean the ritual of the oppressor over the oppressed, the claiming of "property rights" over a culture that does not have a tradition of private and individual ownership of land. How easy to fool them in the early treaties, and to attempt to destroy their culture and values; how easy to ignore them now, out of a greed to conquer the land.

But Robert Frost warns us: "We were the land's before she was ours . . ." We cannot own her. The Native people know that they are the land's--it's evident in every aspect of their religion and worship.

The "law," the treaty of 1805, gives them the "right" to be on this land. Yet I keep coming back to that same question: How can our laws, the white people's laws, give them what is so patently theirs?

Either way, the land belongs to those whose name tells all: "they camp by the holy water."