Debra White Plume - Lakota activist at Wounded Knee & Standing Rock Passes on to Spirit World

Debra White Plume, Lakota, was an activist and prominent Native American advocate for civil rights, environmental issues including 'water is life' movement. During her lifetime, White Plume has faced police bullets, fought uranium mining companies and oil pipeline projects while trying to protect the traditional Oglala Lakota way of life,

While Plume died on Tuesday, November 10, 2020 in Rapid City, South Dakota. She was 66 and according to her husband, Alex White Plume she died of cancer.

White Plume was among the first to join the American Indian Movement's (AIM) occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. AIM demanded the U.S. government respect its treaties with Indigenous tribes from the 19th and early 20th centuries. During the 71-day occupation, both sides traded fire nightly, leaving one federal agent paralyzed and two Native Americans dead.

In a videotaped interview with Democracy Now, White Plume said, 'That's enough for us, too. We're not going to take this anymore" – it was a moment in time with the women's movement, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War protests.

Since the 70's, little has changed for some 20,000 Oglala Lakota – unemployment is around 85%, alcoholism is rampant, and the life expectancy for an American in 2020 is about 78 years old. For a Lakota, the life expectancy is 48 years old.

It is these very conditions which inspired White Plume to help found Owe Aku (Bring Back the Way. Owe Aku and the International Justice Project "takes its direction from Lakota leaders to preserve traditional protocol & stewardship on behalf of Mother Earth utilizing the legal basis established in our treaties" – an advocacy group dedicated to cultural preservation and the protection of Lakota treaty rights through nonviolent direct action.

White Plume's biggest challenges were protecting their water supply. Fighting uranium mining just outside the reservation that could contaminate water with radioactivity and chemicals like arsenic, used in the extraction process. As well, White Plume was active in fighting two major oil pipelines - the Keystone XL and the Dakota Access, both seen as threatening not only ancestral burial sites but also their aquifers.

According to NYT, "Ms. White Plume was the lead plaintiff in a still unresolved lawsuit to stop the giant uranium mining company Cameco from expanding its operations at Crow Butte, a sacred site across the Nebraska border and within Lakota treaty territories. (The company has suspended its mining there.) And she had a leading role in promoting nonviolent direct action to protest the oil pipelines".

The article went on to say, "In 2011 she was arrested outside the White House in Washington during a protest over the Keystone project, a 1,200-mile pipeline that would extend from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska. In 2016, at the Standing Rock Reservation, which straddles North Dakota and South Dakota, she helped establish camps for thousands of occupying protesters who for months had gathered to stop the completion of the 1,172-mile-long Dakota Access Pipeline".

"I'm Lakota, I'm a woman, and water is the domain of the women in our nation," Ms. White Plume said in a video interview at Standing Rock. "And so it's our privilege and our obligation to protect water." She added, "If somebody wants to label me, I guess it would be water protector."

In addition to her husband, Ms. White Plume is survived by their children Johnny Joe White Plume, Lance Martin, Wacinhin Ska Win Rosebud White Plume, Jessica White Plume, Wiwang Waci Win Camp, Vic Camp, Posh Camp, Dallas White Plume and Sam Tall and many grandchildren.

She dedicated her last years to Ama's Freedom School, which she founded. A school without walls, it teaches traditional Lakota culture outside the regular school system. (Ama means memory in the Lakota language.)

Over the years White Plume's objectives remained the same, even if she had mellowed.

Speaking during the Standing Rock protests White Plume said, "I fought with cops before. I've been shot at by police. I've been shot by police. We got it on with police on Pine Ridge back in the day, so I understand that rage. But when we're together to protect sacred water, let's do it with dignity, let's do it with training, let's do it with unity."