IN SHORT:
UPRIGHT: Legal success. Public recognition. Dedication and courage is rewarded. Moving into an expanded field of vision.
REVERSED: The importance of smaller or private achievements that build up towards great victories. Focus on personal definition of success. Practice humility, beware egotism.
KEEP SCROLLING DOWN FOR IN DEPTH EXPLANATION
IN DEPTH:
The Six of Wands show horse-back warriors holding ground at sunrise. The ride against the pipeline has been long, an it’s by no means over, but for now they enjoy the celebration of being reunited, and breathing the damp morning winds. “Mni wiconi!” she calls out. “Water is life!”
Here we see six flags, but thousands more are gathered, from other tribes, nations and allies from the world over. On this morning they return to some fanfare, having spent nights in jail, their reappearance on the landscape feels not only like a victory for all those that participated in ‘jail support’ in the previous days but also, it feels like a foreshadowing of greater victories to come. The despicable way in with these water-protectors were brutalized prior to their capture, further galvanized the movement and the viral videos attracted swaths of new-comers to help defend the land.
By the fire, everyone recounted the courage these riders showed during the previous weeks, and rejoiced in recent legal victories. Informal recollections gave way to ritual, smoke, prayer, dance and drumming. The land and its peoples pulsate with song. Later while being interviewed for a major magazine about the horse-backed heroics, one of the warriors humbly deferred the praises from the journalist back towards the community, he asks her to listen, “That…That is our trail song,” he said. “For we all had a trail to get here.”
………
“Indigenous resistance is not a one-time event. It continually asks: What proliferates in the absence of empire? Thus, it defines freedom not as the absence of settler colonialism, but as the amplified presence of Indigenous life and just relations with human and nonhuman relatives, and with the earth.”
― Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
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