Water is Life: a memorial for B.A. Naholowa’a
With fists raised, Standing Rock water protectors gather on a roadway behind a bright red, black, and orange sign, "Defend the Sacred." They fill two lanes for a long distance -- it is unclear where their numbers end. The people are framed by a stark landscape of dark gray clouds overhead, green grassy hills, and one lone tree that fills the right side of the photo. Photo by Indian Country Today Media Network
dedication
Dedicated to the Naholowa’a clan. In memory of B.A., a great water protector, I share this story as prayer for water protectors in all realms + indigenous youth in the Pacific islands. Here is a father, uncle, man who shared our island ocean connection and taught me invaluable lessons with his work at Standing Rock. May our hearts be with our kin and relatives.
introduction
After travelling to Standing Rock with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship People of Color contingent during Thankstaking in November 2016, I stayed on to support the medic team for the #NoDAPL resistance at Oceti Sakowin. Here, I met B.A., an elder from Hawaii in the context of Pacific island medicine and healer work on Dakota, Lakota, nakota Land.
As you read, you may find yourself wanting more of a story of what went down at Standing Rock. But this is a story about B.A., about living and supporting others to live in the face of mass genocide. For those who came to this land as or are descended from those who came as settlers, refugees, and enslaved people, we easily forget we are on a foundation of indigenous death on turtle island. We come into a settler state that is still settling on indigenous dying. This amnesiac violence is in how we work and live. I feel very uncomfortable with colonizing and using a story about B.A.’s passing to make a point about another political agenda. Furthermore, it robs this piece of its Pacific Island, non U.S. centric heart. So I ask this piece to be read in honor and memory and prayer.
memorial
Winter 2016
I have been heartbroken this week…breathing shards of ice through my chest. The rattling has woken me up at odd hours. My body is in Houston/colonized Karankawa land. Here, toxic fumes from oil refineries and car exhaust fill a sky that no longer turns dark even at midnight. I have wandered and sat, praying as an ocean of grief carried my spirit back to Oceti Sakowin and through the 太平洋, the ocean of great peace that holds Taiwan and Hawaii.
Our ocean island connection quickly endeared me to B.A. He tasked me with serving coffee to guests on the medic bus with the Maui coffee blend. I hesitated, wondering if he should keep his last tin of island coffee for himself. When I go to the states, I have cried as I relinquished the taste of lemon sunshine from southern Taiwan. But B.A. insisted we serve his coffee and serve it generously. He was a man here ready to lOng-teh-lOh-ki, to throw all his chips down, with an open hand. So I served these cups of coffee, humbled that they were infused with 志, the will that cannot be willed, the feminine yin, that which embodies the inexorable and irreducible mystery of life, the will that only reveals itself after its destiny has manifested.
With gratitude, I remember this surly old man, who taught me multitudes about ceremonies of home and health in the ways he served our camps.
We first met when I had trekked across the camp looking for a medic. A friend had been fighting an upper chest infection to no avail and stubbornly refused to receive help. Her cough had worsened even with cough drops and tea. With the blizzard that had begun to gust across the plains, we finally determined that it was time to find stronger treatment.
When the medic yurt’s beautiful red door closed behind me, it was like walking into a cloud of warmth, the air infused with herbal scent of medicines. My glasses fogged up and I sensed two blurry figures sitting with their legs stretched out discussing medical supplies and nebulizers.
“Hello! Is there a medic here? My friend is sick.”
One of the lumps stood up with a jangle that sounded like 10,000 pockets of change and asked with a gruff kindness,
“Sure honey. What are her symptoms?”
He listened a bit and said he’d head over with me. With a shake of his head, he commented about how folks were just not ready for the cold and all the smoke from the un-permitted fires was really starting to show in people’s coughing. (Oh karma—digging a hole without permission and prayer meant someone dug up a someone’s grandma. Basic respect and home training 基本家教 don’t mess with elders.) I asked him to please wait a moment as I retrieved some ginger and honey for other friends with drier coughs.
“By the way, this is ~~~ and my name is ~~~ but you can call me B.A.”
[I blanked at the other medic’s name and B.A.’s full name until he repeated it a few times. Names in english are hard for me to remember until these sounds gain meaning by person, relationship or the work we do together somatically. I was so appreciative of simple sounds.]
He came over to our orange dome, which the Buddhist Peace Fellowship contingent had named Dharma dome. With a quick assessment, he determined that M, our stubborn friend, had an upper respiratory infection and brought her over to the medic bus to warm up and take some of the medicines he had available in his home.
M came back after an hour, her Qi circulating much better and already sounding clearer. She recommended me to B.A., since he was looking for someone to man the bus as he went out on patrols. Plus my own medic experience with bodywork, Chinese medicine might be a benefit and this opportunity aligned with my intention of creating spaces for indigenous/POC folks to return to their bodies (and exorcise the white devils, which sadly was too fraught an energetic burden even at Oceti Sakowin).
Soon, I found myself sitting in the first satellite warming/medic station on the South side of camp. B.A. had left me to attend to anyone who might arrive with hypothermia and general illnesses. He taught me how to run the generators, find the teas, coffees, soups and left a large jar of relish and pickled limes on the table. (I told him and M the story of how my mother sedated me with relish as a baby and it still had that happy effect as an adult. B.A. plunked this jar down and told me to go to town.) I marveled at this good fortune, that I could share decolonized bodywork with this space and tend to my small sorrow that our beautiful people of color contingent dissipated with departures. Through the windows I watched the snow fall almost parallel to the ground, with the wind growing stronger and stronger.
M was reveling in the soup and the birch tea (the essence imported from Norway, B.A. announced) when B.A. returned with Dandilion, a person serving as a cook in Grandma’s kitchen after years of cooking in kitchens. As he wrapped their wrist, he explained how they might benefit from finding a lighter knife and that the cartilage was simply worn down. B.A. talked about his own love for cooking, but the immense difference it made when he switched to different knives as he aged, so he could imagine how it might help Dandilion. They resisted, but took the information down about a doctor who did replacement surgery in Colorado, and B.A. shared a knife sharpener he had on hand with them. They headed over to me as they had spotted the moxa, and while we did a treatment, I expressed my hesitation that this mode of treatment would not address the extremity of their pain, nor would it really alleviate much with daily treatments.
And now a youth showed up, who had accidently drunk rubbing alcohol and was sick for a day. B.A. sat him down with coffee, checked his vitals and explained what to look out for to him and his worried father. People poured in and out, in waves, spurts, bites, bruises, frostbites, so many of them hesitant to seek help, but B.A.’s alacrity, ability and warm attendance soothed them as they sat, quietly and warmly with the snow coming down with the gales.
Time at Oceti Sakowin moves with a different viscosity than the oily, flammable instant bursts in the city of Houston. Perhaps similar to what we know in many “modern cities”. I try to remember and honor this cadence in this writing, but no words may suffice.
One thing I enjoyed about the lulls throughout the days and nights that we worked was when B.A. would spout off his personal “truisms.”
“Mother nature don’t care! She’ll kill all you just the same!”
“This effort started off well, but now there are too many angels on this pinprick!”
His way of popping off these B.A.-isms, with a cigarette dangling from his hands or his mouth, reminded me so much of my father figure, my coach 會長. 會長 is the reason I especially love people who simmer and grouse at indignities and always planned with a way to let all people step up or down graciously, no matter how deeply offended he was. His love was his students, coming from all walks of life, but many were farmer kids, worker kids, and tennis was a medium to transmit the disciplines and mores of living well. He cursed you out for being inattentive with your forehands while watering his peach trees lovingly, a man who I fought over about smoking Davidoff cigarettes while making us gasp during 15 kilometer warm down runs, who had 刀子口，豆腐心。 A dagger for a mouth, tofu for the heart. Both B.A. and 會長 retained that peculiar charm of being difficult about their principle and passion, which made their difficult-ness easy for me to love.
(會長’s death 5 years ago in August … B.A.’s likeness in the good ways has made this grief even deeper.)
During one of the nights after B.A. had rescued A and J, the allopathic doctors from a wretched sounding, non-prayerful situation at Sacred Stone camp medic tent, making them sleep in the bed and eat warm food and equipping them with military gold wrapped fajitas and what not, we sat around telling stories about what we were seeing around camp, the spiritual and physical illnesses that were rending people apart in fast and slow ways. While we talked, B.A. sat sipping energy drinks (the bus had gotten stuck in the mud next to the water refill station) and he’d cook for us all, making sure the medics were cared for too. He seemed happy to listen to us and a few times I’d hear him mutter to the cat, the real home owner of the RV,
“It’s been a while since we had so many beautiful women here.”
He’d also jump in and share about what he heard on NPR about our camp or he’d let the radio play country Christian songs or classical Russian concertos. Intermittently, the radio would crackle with folks needing help with tents coming apart in the wind and he’d suit up, trudge out and insist we stay and rest.
He’d come back, bringing Mountain Man and other people on the medic-security team he was doing double duty with, to make sure they ate and to pick up the gloves that were growing into a heap of lost and found items on his couch.
Once a Lakota man showed up near midnight, walking wobbly up the few steps to the bus. B.A. quickly sat him down and made him eat, speaking gently to him, insisting he stay and smoke a cigarette. I had been ranting about the utter stupidity and violence of white people appropriating ancestry and practices, even at the decolonization meetings, when this friend stood up, with a scratch across his eye, and shared his lament about what his Lakota people had endured and how hard it was to maintain a good way in his walk. As he spoke, his sorrow poured from his words and stayed as a vapor in the air after he left. B.A. watched him go and we watched in silence. When it was just us again, he spoke.
“He was drunk. That young man would get kicked out if I reported him, and I won’t. But he was drunk and I hope he sobers up.”
And he went back to sitting next to the window, puffing on another cigarette.
B.A. did an innumerable amount of good during his time at camp. Sorting out Sacred Stone Camp and aligning them with the main medic council. Preparing and healing the medic and security networks to bear the brunt of the coming winter and actions. Always substituting himself to the front to bear the potential brunt of any security issues around medical support.
I can only share what I witnessed, which seems like such a fraction of the multitude of ways he really lived to lOng-the-lOh-k at every hour, every day.
I was especially touched by his willingness to follow the leadership of younger women, those of us who were not veterans as he was, nor indigenous. He trusted Alex about diagnosing frostbites and advocacy for patients as we sent people to Indian Health Services or other nearby hospitals. He entrusted me with his home and for the time that I was there, it was my home, one of the best homes I have shared on this side of the ocean, Taiping Yang.
His trust in me to watch his home and our adventures as the bus got stuck filling up at the water station etched memories into my heart. As we waited for the frozen water to move from the tanks and into the RV, we sat there in those first nights of talking with each other. B.A. asked me why I came to serve at camp. I told him I came with Buddhist Peace Fellowship’s people of color contingent, and that in the history of Taiwan and my family lineage, water has kept us alive in so many crucial ways. Our ocean was the greatest resistance against countless colonizers, our well water and streams that my grandfather pumped with his inventions for the village, the cultural preservation of Dharma and temples with tea. All of this taught me that you could tell a lot about a place based on how they treated their water.
B.A. listened, and I suddenly wondered if I had spoken too much.
“Let me tell you about this country and its promises…”
He trailed off…
We sat together, and I could sense in the ways he was breathing, sitting that the elements of his body were shifting and his constitution was shaky. There was an ocean of sorrow I could hear-sense in the pulse of his breathing. I did not know the stories, but I felt some of his sentiments like a person standing at the edge of a shimmering pond. I looked up at the photos of his family that he kept up. A handsome family, a son who smiles so bright and daughters shine so beautiful with a wealth of grandchildren and badass motorcycles. I saw how hard he was pushing himself at all hours, and his breath-qi, one of the most precious and vital energies…I wished he would preserve it.
Plus, B.A. said more than enough to me, in his joyful expression when I returned from an excursion into town. I cannot forget his face, full of welcome and gladness at my presence.
For 49 days, I will remain heartbroken and praying for his peace.
When I left with friends, I feel like a left a funeral. And now, I see this sense was true. But with B.A. offering up the most fragrant offering, the coffee, the will, the 志, the warmth, the leadership, the surliness, professing he was ready to die at camp, he led in a way that was ready. He left in the way so 瀟灑 that untranslatable exuberance of a fishing boy who wears all white on his day off, singing as he walks along the eddys, that handsome and easy laughter of free people.
B.A. truly served with the will, the 志 that lOng-teh-lOh-ki. I pray the water and sorrows that rattled his 心 mind-chest-belly are free now and that he has more friends, more health, more homes that welcome him in the journey.
closing
Indigenous struggle for life continues. In honor of B.A., we highlight particularly struggles against pipelines and native Hawai'i'an struggle on the islands, with a current flash point being Molokai. Join these opportunities to directly support indigenous resistance:
Donate to Hui o Kuapā, indigenous established school by Walter Ritte passing on wisdom of Molokai indigenous technologies and traditions
http://www.ienearth.org/divest/
Sign this petition to stop a Singaporean corporate sale of Molokai ranch
About the author
薰艾 xūn aì