Vernon Benjamin

a posthumously-published (by his daughters) essay about a 70-year-old's trip from his native Hudson Valley (he'd wrtten a two-volume history of the area, taught about it, even may have local Native blood in his family tree) driving supplies (hay, bespoke chocolates, warm socks and hats, more) across the country to Standing Rock; this is about his reaction to that journey, most of which was triggers there making him think of other parts of his life, and how things tied together; very well written, but the focus was less Standing Rock than I'd expected from the title/description.… (more)

This short, booklet sized (60 page) memoir of Vernon Benjamin's musings on his journey to stand with the protesters at Standing Rock is not at all what I expected. We hear very little about the Keystone Pipeline -- today, yes "everyone knows", or has an impression and thinks they know, about it, but in twenty years all the oblique references will be a mystery. I've read some of GK Chesterton's journalistic essays and I know the feeling.

So, it's not history. It's not really memoir as we usually think of it, although it's certainly introspective. It could be called a meditation on the subject of crossing divides. The author crosses geological divides between watersheds, and then the Continental Divide on his cross-country odyssey from the Hudson River Valley to the protest encampment on the Great Plains. He tries with limited success to breach the divide between Indigenous folk and the descendants of colonizers: he feels some connection with the Haudenosaunee in whose ancestral territory he lives (and also for many generations his own ancestral territory, to which his ancestors were invited by the original inhabitants), but there is still somewhat of a polite distance. At the encampment, he is made welcome by a young couple who express appreciation for his donation of hay and money, but the presence of outsiders is not enthusiastically sought by most and he tactfully leaves (this is rather between-the-lines). The jumps in time and lacunae in events make the story harder to follow, but story would be the wrong word: musings: and as such worthy of being reread and mused upon in turn. The final divide for Vernon Benjamin to confront is the divide between his passion and the life he actually lives. He feels his life to be so superficial, so lifeless--like the capitalistic construct which outside forces mold us into. (And in the conflict over casinos that occurred in Haudenosonee territory, he shows this divide between spiritual life and spiritual death in Indigenous spaces as well.) Crossing that divide is the most challenging task of life and one that we all face.… (more)