Shaawan Francis Keahna

It was the end of October, 2016. I’d just turned nineteen years old and I was making good on a stupid promise from a decade prior—

I was running away from home.

There was an older woman, Wendy Joseph, for whom I’m not using a pseudonym because she’s a writer in her own right and deserves recognition. She was going to be driving from Seattle to Standing Rock to join the #NoDAPL protests, to live at the camp, to be a body among bodies on the shore of the Missouri. She was looking for a copilot. Someone who could drive, preferably, but she mostly wanted company. I had no license and a burning desire to leave the Pacific Northwest behind. I asked to be put in touch.

We slept in Walmart parking lots and on the sides of roads. We ate snacks and stopped where they buried Chief Joseph. One of Wendy’s great-grandmothers was buried next to him, her grave unmarked alongside three or four other human beings simply labeled “Women.” I left her alone with the bodies. I could go no further than the iron gate. By some fae logic or respect for the dead, I couldn’t. I simply watched as the stranger I’d met in a Starbucks in Queen Anne forty-eight hours previous crumpled to the ground, sobbing for everything taken. Crying for what will never be. When she returned to our heavily-packed car, she regarded me with distant, shattered eyes.

“All he wanted,” she said, “was to go home.”

The closer we drew to Standing Rock, the more the sky opened up. There were immense rock formations that divided the Cascades from Eastern Washington. Mountains swept us through Idaho and into Montana. Did I sleep through Montana? I couldn’t recall it, or else it joined the rest of my Montanan memories, Chief Mountain and the Rockies thumbed away into childhood with time and space and pain. Somehow we ended up where we needed to be. Montana’s immensity gone in a flash, a blink, a police officer asking where we were headed. I’m sure I talked Wendy’s ear off as much as I sat and stewed.

When I look back at whoever I was, I feel the insides of my cheek, chewed up and raw from all the words I kept under my tongue. I remember practicing silence. I remember I figured out I could pass for a boy if I kept my hair under a beanie and grunted my yes-and-no or better still, shook my head. I told Wendy I was a boy and explained how and why and she respected it. I loved her fast, that Wendy Joseph.

By the time we pulled into the camps, a beautiful, great plains sunset burned the horizon. We’d been redirected a few times—blockades, the mercenaries and lawmen explained, for our safety—and when Flag Road finally crested our windshield, I saw pits were dug near the entrance. Trenches, I realized, filled with razor wire.

“What in the world…”

We parked where we were told to park and joined the evening ceremony. We were nervous and kept close to one another that first night, but Wendy’s quest was to help the lawyers, and mine was—I wasn’t sure what mine was.

As I write this now, I struggle to conjure a coherent image of those first days.

When I was much younger and going to summer camp in Yakama Nation, the older Native kids and I would play bizarre, sexually-charged games with each other. One of these, the one I remember the most, was called “Are you nervous yet?”

Two players, plus an audience. One person would touch the other one, usually on the knee. They’d ask, “Are you nervous yet?”

And the recipient of the touch would, trying not to laugh, say, “No, no, I’m not nervous yet.”

So the person touching their leg would slide up a few inches. Again, “Are you nervous yet?”

“Don’t bitch out, now,” we’d say to each other sometimes. Or we’d lean in, grinning, waiting for the reply. I was one of those kids who you could only touch during these games. If you touched me outside of these settings, I’d flip a tit. I mean, seriously freak. So whenever I was the one whose thighs were getting rubbed, everyone in our sphere gawked at me.

“No.”

This was, I think, what Donald Trump was doing to the political establishment during his 2016 campaign. What began as a joke to those in power who thought they knew what was what grew more and more vulgar as it inched up the leg of the country.

So it was the end of October. So President Obama hadn’t shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline, which, yeah, I understand he couldn’t do it himself, he wasn’t a dictator, but the centrist, complacent government had damned its nation’s oldest people on a very public stage. Like the game of my youth, all eyes were on us as we—the Native we, the monolith, the metaphor, the flesh—were assaulted by mercenaries, shot with water cannons and rubber bullets, hunted and haunted and corralled and tormented on our own sacred land. And, for whatever reason, people cared enough about this particular atrocity at that particular time to make a mass pilgrimage. To build a city. To fund and fuel and fuck in it.

A life. This was what I found there. Cut off from social media by the stingers the mercenaries had set up, illuminated nightly by the floodlights they shone on our sleeping people, fed every day by the community itself, I slipped into a bustle of simple occupation. To be a body among bodies. To be a body for the land to live through. One body can be crushed. Many become a blockade in and of ourselves. We troubled the narrative with our embodiment. In trouble, we protected the water. I joined Two-Spirit Camp because I thought I might be one. They welcomed me with open hearts.

When I showed up, the act of being was enough. The camps had entered into a truce with their oppressors. There was a widespread sense of joy and peace as people who’d normally be breaking apart on the frontlines spent their days painting, sculpting, healing and visiting. An elder I grew up around described it as, “A real example of how things should be. All colors. All Indians. Together.” So it was.

Of course, I found the cracks in the chassis. There was an overrepresentation of Burning Man types, for one, who peppered me with questions about the hippie music festival that trashes my tribal lands every year and disappears a few vulnerable youths while they’re at it. Native people were still as racist as ever, hackles raised around their Black allies even as they invited these grifting mookomanaan deeper into our closed practices.

And the hedonists. God, the hedonists.

I ran into a white girl up on Media Hill, the only place in camp with a signal. Some of the other queers in Two-Spirit Camp called it “Two-Bar Hill.”

We were supposed to be a sober camp because our protests were in prayer. We were supposed to be Praying Indians. Still, people snuck in their weed here and there, their shrooms, their peyote and ayahuasca. Natural stuff, mostly. I didn’t see any booze the whole time. But it meant some of these hippies were high as a kite, during those days of peace, and even after—

Anyways. This girl sized me up with the black eyes of a python. In those days, I asked everyone why they came here. I don’t know why. Maybe I was just curious. She responded in a dead monotone, “I am a hedonist.”

“What?”

I knew what a hedonist was. I didn’t know what a hedonist was doing in an active war zone, truce notwithstanding.

“I seek the highest form of earthly pleasure.”

Her thin lips hardly moved as she spoke. I stared at her. Neither of us blinked even once. I hadn’t showered in what felt like a small eternity, though it had only been four days. Wind tousled her lank black hair only slightly. I turned away from her and her slimy aura, disgusted. Pleasure was one thing, but to seek it in such painful conditions seemed heinous to me. Extractive.

Are you nervous yet?

I was, back then, still a “virgin” on technicality. Two people had gone down on me before for exactly two minutes, both times, and I had gone down on them back. Our sex had been a robotic pantomime of intimacy, pornographic voices played up because we didn’t know how else to do it. Hedonism, pleasure to excess, was more alien to me than aliens themselves—at least I had encountered an alien before. I’d never encountered sexual pleasure beyond the vastness of kissing. I could kiss for hours. I was good at it. People showered me with praise, so I kissed a lot of people, just to try and prove them wrong. I loved kissing and I loved knowing people through kissing. If heat built up between my legs, though, I ignored it and I silently, psychically urged my partners to do the same for themselves. Call it dysphoria or cPTSD. Call it whatever you want.

This was my obvious truth, telegraphed openly on my pretty, unreachable face.

I was always already nervous.

***

At Two-Spirit Camp, I turned heads. I knew I turned heads. I played with the head-turning. I studied people’s faces, people far older than was appropriate for me, and I leaned in when I felt they wanted me to lean in. I watched their mouths quirk up at the corners, their eyes open just a little bit wider, illuminated by firelight.

There were older fags I wanted badly. Cis gay guys who painted their nails and saw me as a kid, a vulnerable butch for them to protect and tease and look after. I miss those men terribly. I sometimes wonder if they remember me as fondly as I remember them, or if I’ve faded away entirely with the incomprehensible flicker of that political moment. We stayed up late. People shared their coming out stories and their first loves and their worst breakups. Dykes, fags, transsexuals, multi-gender friends and lovers from all generations, crammed into military tents or curled around the sacred fire at the heart of our camp.

I want you to be there with me, for a minute. I want you to imagine what it was like to walk down Flag Road. To see an enormous banner, painted on canvas by the people of Gaza and sent all the way to our rugged realm—Palestine stands with Standing Rock. Flags of all tribal nations flying high, a new United Nations for the world we dreamed of. The mud beneath my boots and the rush of the disrupted Missouri. The sky never-ending. The clean, clear air. If I wanted to see someone, I had to find them myself. I couldn’t text or call them. We had to find each other. Or plan to meet somewhere.

After the first two nights, I slept at Two-Spirit Camp in the communal tent. I’d stay up later and later under the stars, listening to people spin their subtle lives into coherence. On Election Day, the long-haulers, everyone who’d been here from the start, boarded a convoy with the other locals to Bismarck, where they’d vote for our next president. Someone suggested I vote, too, since I had no address. I stood on the side of the hill, blinking sleep and the sharp scent of copper away. Every morning, we went to the water and prayed. Males on one side. Females on the other. I kept my mouth shut and shuffled in with the males, my heart in my throat until the head man shook my hand with a “hey, brother” and let me go. That stamp of approval. I shook my head and lied, “I already voted,” then watched as the convoy receded over the bleached horizon.

***

Someone screamed.

I tumbled out of the military tent, away from my soft suitcase, my pile of clothes, my laptop and my tangled earbuds. There were more screams, shouts, curses. A cacophony of anguish. Overlapped voices and the sound of splintered wood as someone brought down an axe again and again and again.

The truce was gone.

People were running, pulling their clothes on as they ran. One of our cooks, a small white person with thick, coke bottle glasses, had been chopping wood for the better part of an hour.

“They want to feel something break in their hands,” one of the other cooks murmured in my ear.

“What… happened?” I asked, though I knew.

“Oh, baby,” the cook said, wrapping me in a tight, damp hug. “He won.”

Over the course of the day, I found myself attached to the crew who saw what happened firsthand. The night the results of the election were announced, the men on the other side raided our camps. They stole our religious tools, our “sacreds,” as we call them. They pissed on them. Defecated in them. Then they stole our canoes and pulled them to the middle of the river their pipeline would later burst inside. Nobody will tell you this happened, so I’m telling you now. You’re sick with it. You will ache like I ache. You will carry this burden with me and you will know it as deep as you know your first heartbreak. I’m sorry. I wish it could be any other way.

There was a young Lakota trans woman who was, at the time, dating a high-ranking security officer from the Red Warrior Camp. Though trans people were normally pushed away from ceremony by the elders, there were teachings they still recalled. Old adzookaan to do with giving birth in the other world. Death work. Sorry business. She had gone with her man to the shoreline and done her duty and now it was nightfall, just like that, and I was in the car with them, leaving camp for the first time since Wendy’s and my arrival.

Benefactors from out-of-state kept a few rooms available for our usage at the nearest casino. Going from the pitch black highway to the dimly lit parking lot and emerging in the crimson, windowless building tipped me over an edge I had no idea I stood on. Just like that, all I’d known to be familiar—all the indoors I’d taken for granted—became foreign to me. I felt caged and overheated and watched by the patrons of this establishment. My soot-covered face, my dirty body, the dirty god we appeared to worship.

A man on the news gestured to a green map. I stared up at the tiny screen he silently inhabited and wondered how long I was to stay here. Here, in the camp. Here, in the hotel. Here, in North Dakota.

We took turns in the hotel room’s shower. Grit and chemicals formed a scrum at my feet. Grey and black circled the drain as the water peeled my pale body.

I sat on the edge of the bed, eyes locked with the Lakota woman as she recounted the day’s events. The rough cloth of the burgundy cover under my callused hands. The knowledge that I would not sleep here, that I’d be returning to camp with all who were able to return that night.

We rode through the dark and walked in grim silence. When we finally returned to camp, my spot belonged to someone else and the embers of the sacred fire were low. The keeper, a tired trans masc I’d been eyeing confrontationally, nodded at me. I glanced around, newly washed, and looked for a body to take my body in.

The first one I picked was in her forties. She had no idea I was nineteen. She was tall, trans, a race traitor who wore a braid the way Meskwaki warriors did, shaved on the sides. She stayed in the Red Warrior Camp, which I’d been warned off of, because it was “men only.” The aunties said, “We have good men here, my girl, but who knows what they’ll want come nightfall?”

As I followed the woman, she led me through the armed gates with a firm nod at her brothers, who nodded in acknowledgment. Everyone backlit blue and purple from the floodlights. Listen: the camps were so populous, it seemed I encountered a new face, a new group every day, and never ran out of newness. I could disappear from camp with the intent to barter my body, and it seemed, however naive this assumption, to be my business and my business alone.

We were deeply secluded from the other warriors, this far out, and the floodlights could not reach us. The woman, a full head taller than me, dropped to a crouch and crawled into her tiny, one-person tent. She held the flap open for me and looked up. I was here to sleep, her eyes said. Anything more was my choice. I lowered myself and shouldered in after her, laying down on her left in one slow, even exhale.

“It’s… cozy,” she said, her voice heady with desire.

I turned away from her and hummed in assent. For reasons I wouldn’t know until much later, I needed to be touched and unseen. I wrapped her strong arm around me. Even to this day, my size baffles me. I am so small in my head and so big in the world. Back then, I was five-foot- eleven. Now, two inches taller than that, I still imagine myself a frail body, a small frame, even as I tower over the other congregants at church, the other organizers at Red Emma’s, everyone in the club or the bar or in Broadway Square. She was warm. I mirrored her desire, echoed it, multiplied it within myself until I could face her and offer my mouth.