The Power of Nathan Phillips’s Song

I am honored to know the Omaha Nation elder and activist Nathan Phillips. I walked nearly 40 miles in the snow and ice alongside him last February, in a four-day prayer walk he organized in North Dakota to offer a healing for the land and for fellow water protectors who were part of the Standing Rock movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. When I woke early Saturday to see video footage of him at the Lincoln Memorial surrounded by a group of smirking white high school students in MAGA hats, I was livid, disgusted, and ashamed for this country.

Phillips had traveled from his home in Michigan for the first-ever Indigenous Peoples March in Washington; the Covington Catholic High School students had come from their Cincinnati suburb for the March for Life, an antiabortion rally. Phillips told The New York Times that he had interceded in what seemed about to become a fight between the students and some nearby protesters: “I stepped in to pray,” he said. The resulting videos show Phillips peacefully drumming, singing, and encircled by teens wearing MAGA hats and Trump merchandise that paid homage to a president who less than two weeks earlier had ridiculed the 1890 massacre by U.S. cavalry of hundreds of Native Americans at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, one of the worst symbols of settler brutality in modern American history. What has stayed with me, though, is not the callous or racist expressions of the boys, some of whom mocked the singing or made “tomahawk chop” gestures with their arms, but Phillips’s grace, strength, and resilience in the face of it.

Shortly after the video went viral in the news and on social media, the indigenous-led collective Seeding Sovereignty began sharing photos of Phillips on Instagram—pictures that showed the person who was speedily becoming an icon for enduring racism at the hands of white entitlement. The organizers behind Seeding Sovereignty wrote of working through their own complicated and emotional reactions to the video, and attested to the generosity Phillips displayed: “The way we see it, uncle blessed them in spite of their behavior because he knows our ancestral teachings. Many of us love to say we are rising in beauty, but how many of us put that sentiment into action?”

Dan Rather, writing on Twitter, described it thusly: “We’re repulsed by smug privilege in the face of pain, a lack of empathy in young people—symptoms of a much deeper rot stretching back centuries. But history also shows the chorus of the complicit can be vanquished by the heroic actions of those who will not be silent.” That’s the Nathan Phillips I want to tell you about.

On the video footage, it is difficult to hear exactly what is said. The students encircle Phillips, camera phones held out, a few jeering as he sings. One of them, smiling, maintains direct eye contact, inches from Phillips’s face. The teenager’s expression ignited immediate comparisons online: to Unite the Right rally attendees from 2017, to the white mob taunting African-American student Dorothy Counts in 1957, to the mental image of Brett Kavanaugh as a teenager, holding down Christine Blasey Ford. Phillips kept on drumming. “We’re indigenous,” he said the next day in an interview with Indian Country Today. “We’re different than that. When we see our youth going the wrong way, we will go up and say, ‘You are doing the wrong thing there, Nephew or Grandson. This is just the wrong way.’ ” The exact origins of the American Indian Movement song Phillips sang are disputed—some say it was written in homage to the brutally murdered Oglala Lakota elder Raymond Yellow Thunder—but it dates back to the early 1970s, when it was popularized by Severt Young Bear, the Oglala Lakota lead singer of the Porcupine Singers, and sung widely at the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. It has become an anthem for an organization that was founded, in part, to address incidents of harassment and racism—a song of strength and courage, protection against the kind of taunting that Phillips has endured his entire life.

Born to an Omaha Nation family in Nebraska, Phillips was separated from his mother around age 5 and raised by a white family until he was 17, when he joined the Marines and served as an infantryman in the Vietnam War. He has held pipe ceremonies for fallen and missing soldiers in Arlington National Cemetery. In the past he has struggled with alcoholism, but last fall he celebrated 34 years of sobriety. In November 1999 and 2000, Phillips and his wife, Shoshana, and their two children kept a monthlong vigil in a live-in teepee on the National Mall to raise awareness of indigenous issues. This was done through the auspices of their organization, the Native Youth Alliance, a grassroots group that has since championed the preservation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, advocated against nuclear waste dumps, and fought against the Keystone Pipeline. The NYA’s work continued as the Phillipses relocated to Ypsilanti, Michigan, where Shoshana received treatment for bone marrow cancer; she died of multiple myeloma in 2014.

I knew Nathan by sight and sound—that singing, that drum!—at Standing Rock, where he and his daughter, Alethea, had come to join the resistance camps opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline in November 2016 at the invitation of LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, on whose land Sacred Stone Camp was founded; Allard had heard Nathan singing prayer songs on the White House lawn during a NoDAPL rally. Two weeks later, the Phillipses made it to Sacred Stone; soon after they arrived, Alethea informed Nathan they weren’t leaving. They were home, she said. At Standing Rock, Alethea volunteered with a media group and broadcast on a camp-wide station as “Red Sky on the Radio.” Nathan was called “Uncle Nate”—a tall, wiry, congenial presence known for his easy sense of humor, a traditional dancer and singer, a carrier of a ceremonial pipe and handheld drum.

Nathan Phillips on Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 2018
Nathan Phillips on Indigenous Peoples’ Day in 2018
Photo: Rebecca Bengal

The drum is the heart of the music and ceremony that fueled the spiritual, indigenous-led resistance. Playing the drum is also a political act—for nearly a century after the Wounded Knee massacre, until the passage of the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act, it was illegal for Native Americans to freely practice their religion. In late February 2017, Nathan sang in prayer with fellow water protectors as they walked out just ahead of the forcible evictions of the camps at Standing Rock. When Alethea, then 17, knowing that armed police officers might arrive at any moment to arrest anyone who remained, decided to return to camp, Nathan was worried but gave her his blessing in the form of the protection of the AIM song. “When I started back over the bridge, I could hear my dad singing the American Indian song,” she told me. “I felt how proud and supportive he was of me. It made me feel strong.” Nathan marched with his drum at the Native Nations Rise gathering in Washington, D.C., weeks later, and in April in the streets of New York, at an overnight encampment outside a Wells Fargo in Soho, in an action calling on Mayor Bill de Blasio to divest from that bank and others financing the Dakota Access Pipeline.

When the weather got chilly and rainy that early April night, Phillips brought out the drum and led the 20 or so of us gathered that evening in an impromptu round dance, witnessed by passersby and a lone security guard working the bank’s overnight shift. In the morning he and the drum led a procession down Broadway to the steps of City Hall, where Gloria Steinem and American Indian Law Alliance president Betty Lyons led a press conference in favor of divestment. Less than two months later, De Blasio and city comptroller Scott Stringer began divesting from Wells Fargo.

A year ago, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Phillips was issuing invitations for a peaceful walk—a prayer walk—of his own. He was specific about the language: “It’s not a march and it’s not a protest,” he said. “It’s a walk.” Though on a far smaller scale, the walk Phillips envisioned held echoes, especially, of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march. The Standing Rock prayer walk would commence on the anniversary of the last day of camp, starting from the Cannonball River, near the former camps, and traveling a distance of 40 miles over snow and ice, over sacred burial grounds that DAPL vehicles had bulldozed, and across Backwater Bridge, where on November 20, 2016, in 26-degree weather, local law enforcement turned high-pressure water hoses, tear gas, and pepper spray canisters on water protectors armed with plywood shields.

The 8,000 souls who made the “mighty walk” from Selma, King recounted in his speech at the conclusion of the march, “Our God Is Marching On!”, logged 54 miles “through desolate valleys and across the trying hills,” sleeping in tents in fields and in mud and eating communal meals of spaghetti served from garbage pails. “In a real sense this afternoon, we can say that our feet are tired,” King famously said, “but our souls are rested.” King’s description of what the marchers faced have a chilling familiarity today. “It was normalcy on Highway 80 that led state troopers to use tear gas and horses and billy clubs against unarmed human beings who were simply marching for justice.” King said, “The only normalcy that we will settle for is the normalcy of brotherhood, the normalcy of true peace, the normalcy of justice.” The speech concludes with a song, the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and its cries of glory hallelujah.

When I returned to North Dakota in February 2018 to join the prayer walk led by Phillips, it was snow and ice rather than the rocky byways and sweltering sun of Alabama. Sometimes the roadside was so precipitous we walked single file, trying to catch up with Phillips, who carried a massive prayer staff aloft against the wind. Breakfast and supper took place at the Cannonball gym, a bare-bones kitchen and a basketball court. There was no spaghetti served in pails, but volunteers would show up, people who had heard that the walkers were back and had nothing to eat, and out of nowhere, seemingly, bowls of soup would materialize, along with baskets of fruit.

One night, as outside winds stirred up dusty whorls of snow in the parking lot, whipped across the plains and over the treaty land where the camps had been, inside felt briefly desolate, too. We had covered eight miles that day. Now there was not enough money for gas to travel to a screening in Bismarck, and not enough food for everyone’s dinner—and Phillips, for once visibly drained, sat in the bleachers and let his head rest in his hands. He didn’t know what we would do, he said.

Over the course of the walk, I had noticed, he used the word fellowship several times. I call the phrasing “quaint” in the story I would later write, and it is—a word you rarely hear these days, a little earnest maybe, a word you might recall from your own religious upbringing, if you had one, or maybe from camp or from school. But coming from him, it genuinely meant a kind of community, the kind that rose up when you needed it most. A community that he had shepherded daily, diffusing any outliers with calm, easy laughter, and holding fast to a spiritual, dreamlike conviction that we would reach our collective goal, that things would come together out of nothing. Unexpectedly someone showed up with bags of groceries and began to make sandwiches for the group. A game of hoops started on the far side of the gym. And when his friend Raymond Kingfisher stood and began to sing and drum, Phillips snapped out of his funk, jumped up out of his seat, and began to dance, spontaneously leading another friend, Carolyn Christmas, in a waltzing two-step from half-court and back.

Nathan Phillips dancing with Carolyn Christmas during a break from the Standing Rock prayer walk in February 2018.

Nathan Phillips.jpg

Nathan Phillips dancing with Carolyn Christmas during a break from the Standing Rock prayer walk in February 2018.
Photo: Rebecca Bengal

It was a small gesture, but an enormous lift. It would be repeated, a couple of days later, at the celebration of the prayer walk’s conclusion, a night of dancing and song in the gym. It would be repeated nearly a year later when Nathan Phillips approached a group of MAGA hat–wearing students, playing them the AIM song. The boys can’t really be faulted for not being able to decipher the words of the song—because the movement, and its anthem, is meant to be pan-tribal, to inspire unity among Native nations, most renditions of the song do not translate it into words.

At its core it is also simply a song of strength and courage—a gift. It’s a shame, really, that the boys misunderstood the offering.“I see a bright, beautiful future if we want it . . . it’s there for us,” Phillips told Indian Country Today. “It’s ours to pass on to the next generation.” Medicine, as a friend said. Fellowship.

See the videos.