$45.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover (PLC)
244 pages with 124 color photographs by the author, 11 color photographs of artwork, 5 color maps, 16 color ledger drawings, 6 letters, 1 color painting, and 13 historic documents, drawings, and photographs
10.0″ x 11.0″ upright/portrait
ISBN 978–1–938086–66–3
Published in November 2019
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
No e-book has been authorized. Published in association with the American Land Publishing Project.
Events and Exhibitions
March 21, 2020 from 1-3pm
Book Signing & Talk
Bird Cage Bookstore, Rapid City, SD
by John Willis
with contributions from the Lakota people and allies, a foreword by Terry Tempest Williams, and an afterword by Shaunna Oteka-McCovey
2019 Winner of the Gold Medal for Best Regional Book of the Year Foreword INDIES Award!
Advocacy Award Finalist in the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association’s 2019 Best Book of the Year Awards!
When the Standing Rock Indian Reservation learned that the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) would pass through and along its sovereign and sacred lands, including burial grounds, the leaders said: No DAPL on Lakota land. This quickly led to a groundswell of support of the movement to relocate DAPL away from native lands and to engender new ways of thinking about energy use and a green future.
From the very beginning, the movement at Standing Rock followed the long-standing Lakota tradition of prayerful, peaceful resistance along the lines used by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the civil rights movement. Tens of thousands of people known as Water Protectors came to Standing Rock from all over the world and from more than 300 Indian nations. For nearly a year, they participated in organized prayerful and peaceful protests that, unfortunately, created conflicts with those in government who did not wish to relocate DAPL away from Lakota land, resulting in more than 800 arrests of Water Protectors.
Standing Rock also became a rallying cry for native and non-native U.S. veterans who came from all over the U.S. to Standing Rock to protest the brutal assault by police on the Water Protectors at Blackstone Bridge on November 20, 2016. The vets came to reject such police action, declaring that they fought overseas to defend and protect the rights of all citizens to engage in peaceful public dissent and protest.
In Mni Wiconi / Water Is Life, John Willis has assembled a compelling story—a true mosaic—of what happened at Standing Rock from the perspective of those who were there and witnessed life in the camps and conflicts with authorities. He shares his ever-insightful and penetrating photographs with contributions of art, poems, and commentaries by more than fifty other Water Protectors who were there plus an impassioned foreword by Terry Tempest Williams and contemplative afterword by Shaunna Oteka-McCovey. Mni Wiconi is a gift—a wopila— to the memory of Standing Rock and the ongoing challenges facing native people.
About
About the Author
John Willis is Professor of Photography at Marlboro College and a co-founder of the In-Sight Photography Project (www.insight-photography.org) and Exposures Cross Cultural Youth Photography Program (www.exposures-program.com). He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography after Views from the Reservation was first published in 2010. His photographs are in more than sixty collections, including the Amon Carter Museum, Center for Creative Photography, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, J. Paul Getty Museum, Heard Museum, High Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, National Gallery of Art, National Museum of the American Indian, Nelson-Adkins Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Yale University Gallery of Art. His other books are Recycled Realities, a collaborative effort with photographer Tom Young (Center for American Places, 2005) and Views from the Reservation: A New Edition (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2019). His Website is www.jwillis.net.
About the Contributors
Shaunna Oteka-McCovey, a member of the Yurok Tribe, is an environmental lawyer, writer, and poet, and the author of The Smokehouse Boys (Heyday Books, 2005).
Terry Tempest Williams is an environmental activist and the author of fifteen books, including Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Pantheon Books, 1991), Finding Beauty in a Broken World (Pantheon Books, 2008), and The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015).
Slide Show
Praise
“This inspirational book shows how powerful non-violent resistance can be and champions solidarity as a path forward to a sustainable future.”
—Lynne Buchanan, photographer and author, review written for Lenscratch (read full review here)
“Mni Wiconi is a book that will stand as one of the major sources of information about the massive gathering of indigenous nations and allies that captured the world’s attention and continues to resonate throughout the sovereignty and environmental movements.” (read full review here, pdf)
—Peter d’Errico (Graduated from Yale Law School in 1968; was Staff attorney in Dinébe’iiná Náhiiłna be Agha’diit’ahii Navajo Legal Services, 1968-1970, in Shiprock. He taught Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1970-2002. He is a consulting attorney on Indigenous issues.)
“Not since the 1973 American Indian takeover of Wounded Knee has an event galvanized and unified the indigenous community and focused attention on the issues facing indigenous people on Turtle Island the way that the 2016–2017 protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) did in North Dakota. Whatever one’s stake and opinion is about this pivotal occurrence, we should all agree that it must be fairly and accurately recorded in order that it not be misrepresented or characterized as anything other than what it was: a social, political, and cultural defense of Grandmother Earth by those whose values and philosophies are based on their relationship with her. Mni Wiconi / Water Is Life has done that eloquently from the indigenous perspective.”
—Joseph Marshall III, Sicangu Lakota, and author of Walking with Grandfather: The Wisdom of Lakota Elders
“Standing Rock was and is a Selma Moment for us all, a convergence of the power of people facing the power of corporations. Mni Wiconi / Water Is Life gives a space for our narratives—told through words, music, prayer, and art. We remember it all, vividly. The short-term battle over DAPL was lost to the economics of addiction; the longer-term battle over our reliance on fossil fuels in our future rages on. Through it all we know that water is life and what we lived, saw, breathed, and felt at Standing Rock helped us remember what it is to be alive, coherent, and present for the future generations. We should all be grateful for this book.”
—Winona LaDuke, author of All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life
“Lest we forget, John Willis has created an extraordinary document on Standing Rock, where the Water Protectors initiated a movement that offers a fresh indigenous model for future protests. This is an important book, a striking compendium of photographs, art, and deeply moving commentaries and poems by native activists and non-native allies that reveals the daily workings of the camps and offers spiritual and political incentives to continue the struggle. The images and texts convey the inspirational immediacy of participants’ experiences, resurrecting the energy that will continue to spark resistance. Standing Rock was not a failure, as some would have it, but a beginning.”
—Lucy R. Lippard, author of Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans
“Mni Wiconi / Water Is Life is a gift, as life is a gift—beautiful, tragic, many-layered. The story pays tribute to Standing Rock, and the book is worthy of the story and the legend. The story—in pictures, in honorary relics, and in eloquent words—is told in a way that must be listened to, as the place and struggle must be witnessed. I congratulate John Willis and all those who have participated in this collective narrative.”
—Wendy Ewald, MacArthur Foundation Fellow and photographer
“As this book does, I honor all the Water Protectors. The sacrifices they made at Standing Rock were for all the people now and in future generations. In my mind, the Water Protectors were just like Sundancers, earning appreciation and respect for the great commitment they gave to protect life.”
—Richard Move Camp (Wicasa Wakan), Lakota Spiritual Leader
“In Mni Wiconi, John Willis along with his contributors bear witness to the sacrifice and spiritual dedication of thousands of people who supported the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s resistance to the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on sacred and sovereign grounds. This powerful book allows those of us who were not present to appreciate the perseverance of people committed to protecting the safety and sovereignty of an indigenous nation and local community against corporate power. Willis and his contributors honor and preserve the prophetic power of the community that came together at Standing Rock and assure that the community’s message will be heard for years to come.”
—George Miles, Curator, Beinceke Rare Book Library Collection of Western Americana, Yale University
“John Willis’s powerful and empathetic photographs from Standing Rock are an essential and unforgettable document that let us all be witness to the injustices perpetrated on indigenous Americans, who, for countless generations, have been the guardians and protectors of their sacred lands and waters.”
—Kevin Bubriski, documentary photographer and author of Portrait of Nepal and Power Places of Kathmandu: Hindu and Buddhist Holy Sites in the Sacred Valley of Nepal
“As I opened the pages of this book the pictures began to fill my memory with the life that was in the Camp. Remembering faces as I paged through kindled again the relationships that were formed as we chose to make our Stand with Standing Rock. The words on the pages fixed the pictures with thoughts, reflections and focus. This was the Camp. This was a significant part of the movement. As it memorializes everyone that came—it is not simply a record of the past, but a call to continue what was begun.”
—The Rev. Dr. John Floberg, Priest of the Episcopal Church on Standing Rock (Father John was the one who called clergy of all faith to come stand with Standing Rock. He hoped he might get up to 100 to respond. In the end over 550 came in support.)
“In Mni Wiconi Water Is Life, due out in early December, Willis includes the voices of Lakota people and their allies. The resulting book he describes as “a layered assemblage of contemporary and historic photographs, stories, poems and artwork.””
—Nancy A. Olson, Landscapes correspondent, The Brattleboro Reformer (read article here)
My Place
The concept of “my place” is challenging for me. Certainly, there are the places that are integral to my overall “sense of place” and its associations with a sense of comfort, identity, and well being. For years, I have lived in Dummerston, a wonderful small home in the Green Mountains of Vermont, with my wife, Pauline. We have a quiet country setting on a hill overlooking the West River, with a vegetable garden and Pauline’s flowerbeds. My studio is there in my basement, and I teach at Marlboro College, a small liberal arts college nearby. My son, who is now grown and living on his own, is near enough for us to visit regularly, which is a gift.
In 1992, I co-founded The In-Sight Photography Project, a nonprofit organization that offers photography programming to area youth regardless of their ability to pay, and I have been involved with the program as a volunteer ever since. In that same year, I was introduced to a family on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, home of the Oglala Lakota Sioux Tribe, and I’ve spent one to three months a year there ever since, staying with people there I relate to as family. I consider the reservation to be another part of my home at this point in my life, especially since Pauline and I met there almost twenty years ago.
Through my work with the college and In-Sight, and being married to an Australian who wants to see the wider world, I’ve learned to appreciate diversity and culture by traveling a fair bit, often with students. The places we go to and experience with fellow travelers, learning from and collaborating with those we visit in host communities, all feels like a piece of home, welcoming enough to consider them as included in my space. I only hope that, in my treading into these various places from Vermont onward, I can share the welcoming feeling and learning with others so they, too, may gain from the shared experiences.
Copyright © 2015 John Willis. All rights reserved.
