Since last April, members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and their allies — who collectively call themselves “water protectors” — have been camped on the windswept prairie of North Dakota in an effort to block construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) across the Missouri River some 40 miles south of Bismarck.
For greater cultural and historical context of the water protections at Standing Rock, we sat down with John Grim, senior lecturer and senior research scholar at F&ES and the Divinity School. Grim, a native of North Dakota, is an expert in indigenous religions and culture. He has written and lectured extensively on indigenous religions, and has been adopted into a Crow family and participated in many Crow ceremonies. Grim, along with his wife, Mary Evelyn Tucker, coordinates the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. He is the author of “The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians” (University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), and series editor of “World Religions and Ecology,” from Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions. In that series he edited “Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community” (Harvard, 2001).