Shirley Sneve
ICT
NIOBRARA, Nebraska — Water warriors from all over Turtle Island gathered at the Old Ponca Agency Grounds in northeastern Nebraska to pray, plan and plant.
The Fourth Convening of the Four Winds, co-hosted by the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, The Ponca PaThaTa, and Movement Rights, began in a spirit of prayer and thanksgiving. Rain the day before had brought cooler weather with sunny skies.
The convening on May 16-18 was the first to be held outside of Oklahoma, and it brought the separate bands of Ponca together. The tribe was forced out of the Niobrara homelands in the 1860s and 1870s, and most moved south to establish a new home in Oklahoma in White Eagle and Ponca City. Those that remained in Nebraska didn’t gain federal recognition until 1990.
Julia Horinek, Movement Rights plains coordinator, said they reached out to the Northern Ponca to co-host the event to broaden the impact of the Movement Rights mission.
“The convening of the Four Winds is about coalition building,” Horinek told ICT. “ We want to build what is already a movement. We’ve always been a movement. Most of us Indigenous people have grown up in a movement of some sort forever and ever.
“This is building on those blocks of bringing people together who are working in rights of nature work, against environmental genocide for the rights of our water and for our land back.”
The two-day gathering of relatives, allies, activists, wisdom keepers, and change makers was organized around the rights of nature, rights of rivers, tribal sovereignty, and environmental justice.
The coalition released a statement July 16 that supports the decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which issued a landmark advisory opinion linking governments’ human rights obligations to its responsibility to address the threat of climate change — a move expected to shape policy and litigation across Latin America and the Caribbean.
The opinion is the first of its kind from the region’s top human rights tribunal and responds to a 2023 request from Colombia and Chile. It says states have a duty under international law to prevent, mitigate and remedy environmental harm that threatens human rights, including through laws, policies and actions aimed at curbing climate change.
Threats to nature
Horinek’s mother is Ponca elder, actor and activist Casey Camp-Horinek, who is also a delegate to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
“We were at the forum to gather not only among ourselves, but to see what’s going on in a global sense, in terms of how Indigenous peoples are leading what they call this fight against climate change,” Camp-Horinek said. “But in reality, it’s a rebalancing of our traditional knowledge within the contemporary world so that there can be that.”
The threat to nature begins at home for Camp-Horinek. Like many Oklahoma tribes, the Ponca oil and mineral reserves are being exploited, she said..
“Where we live, Ponca City, Oklahoma, Conoco Phillips 66, has polluted the air, water, earth, everything to the place,” Camp-Horinek said. “Every Ponca family has multiple cases of cancers, autoimmune diseases, children not even making it to birth.”
Activism is a family tradition, said Julie Horinek.
“My grandma was the original fire. She was about five foot tall and full of life. She raised us always to stand up for human rights, the rights of our Indigenous people,” Horinek said. “It’s only natural that the rights of Mother Earth and the water fall in with that, that we grew up in.”
She continued, “My family is part of the American Indian Movement from the early 1970s, establishing all the chapters throughout Oklahoma. My uncles were at Wounded Knee, and Mama staying at home with all of us. Before that, they were active with migrant farmworkers in California or marching with Doctor King in the South.”
Conference participants came from as far away as Alaska, Canada, Louisiana and both coasts. They brought waters from their homelands to participate in a water ceremony that mingled the offerings together, which were used in planting the sacred Ponca corn later in the day.
The Pawnee were another tribe that was removed to Oklahoma from Nebraska and has kept its traditional corn alive through generations of agriculture activists. Taking lessons from them, Alexsia Boggs, deputy director of tribal affairs, said the Ponca sacred corn was first planted on a donated plot of land in Neely, Nebraska.
“Last year was the first year we were able to plant our own corn on our homelands. That was exciting. This year we were able to continue that tradition.” Boggs said.
The Old Ponca Agency Powwow Grounds has an educational trail, and to the west of it, the Ponca tribe keeps its bison herd. A cornfield was prepared for planting, and fenced in to prevent deer and other wildlife from eating the crop.
Ponca elder Diana Vallier addressed the crowd before the corn planting began.
“My role in this gathering is to encourage people to plant corn, and to understand that some of us are teachers, even if we just planted it in our own backyard,” Vallier said. “We have knowledge to share and give to the other people so that we can grow as a community, even though we don’t have a reservation.”