Copyright © 1999 NLThomas
All Rights Reserved

"State Troopers Ask to Meet With Jim Anderson at Minnehaha Spiritual Camp Tomorrow, Thursday, December 9, 1999."

MINNESOTA - On the day before our 16 month anniversary, Captain Kitridge of the Minnesota Highway Patrol, has requested his second and last meeting with Jim Anderson and members of the American Indian Movement before they raid the Minnehaha Spiritual Encampment and cut down the Four Sacred Oaks.

Last week, members of the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community met with the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDoT) to see if they could move their planned reroute of Highway 55, over about 100 feet to save the Four Sacred Oaks, a sacred site to Native Americans. This was an offer that MnDoT had made to the Mendota last winter during court ordered mediation. MnDoT said that they "cannot recall" ever having made such an offer, and plan to proceed and desecrate this place of ceremony and prayer.

Kitridge has said that he has "paperwork" to deliver to Jim Anderson, and we assume that this may be the official trespass notices to proceed the raid. We anticipate that we will be raided this weekend or early next week. Kitridge has been quoted in the Star and Tribune Newspaper as saying that we would be removed before the new year.

We stand with the truth, with the graves of the ancestors of the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community, with the majesty and beauty of the Four Sacred Oaks, with the giver of life, the sacred spring that has flowed pure for 9,000 years. We stand with the sacredness of all life, and the original instructions of the Creator. We will not leave this place, for the trees cannot run, nor can the four leggeds or two leggeds who call this place home. We will circle the Oaks planted in the Four Directions with our bodies, and we will pray, pray for all life, pray for our opponents who come to carry out the legacy of 507 years of cultural genocide, to wipe out the memory of this sacred place of ceremony and peace, to wipe out the memory of our ancestors.

If you can come to stand with us, please come now. If you cannot, please remember us in your prayers and ceremonies. Pidamaya.

We know that they can never kill the spirit, that we will carry the memory of this place with us in our hearts, and carry the seeds of this truth with us as long as we live. We will pass on this truth to our children and our children's children, and in this way, they have not won. And some day, when the last tree has fallen, and the air is too sick to breathe, and all of our water is poisoned in the name of convenience, they will remember a small, beautiful circle of people, from the four directions who came together to try and tell them the truth, that we need these trees to breathe, and this water to live, and they will wish, deep in their hearts, that they had listened.

for the future generations,
the Minnehaha Spiritual Encampment
Jim Anderson