Mary Pember: Native women blast Keystone XL man camps

Traditionally, membership in the Dakota women’s Brave Heart Society required a formidable spirit. These women carried the dead warriors from the battlefield and tended to the funerary treatment of the bodies; they also took on the task of comforting the families of those who’d walked on and helping them to go forward.

Not much has changed for the Brave Hearts in the last 100 years, except that these remarkable women have reorganized themselves into a modern-day version of the traditional women’s society in order to take on a new challenge to their families: sex trafficking and sexual violence. The surge in this threat, they say, is brought on by the predatory economics of the mining and pipeline industries in South and North Dakota.

Women of the Brave Heart Society and the Ihanktkownwan (Yankton Sioux) Treaty Council hosted the recent Protect the Sacred Conference at the Fort Randall Casino in Pickstown, South Dakota. The conference was further entitled, “Protect the Women and Families from the KXL [Keystone Pipeline system] Violence! Say no to Man Camps in Oceti Sakowin Territory!”