The Ones We've Been Waiting For by Charlotte Alter

Author:Charlotte Alter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

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In the weeks after Trump’s election, New York was in a deep funk. The subway was full of people wincing at news alerts on their phones; coffee shops were full of depressed conversations about what had gone wrong and why they hadn’t seen it coming. New Yorkers woke up the morning after the election feeling as if they lived on an island in a foreign country. Alexandria felt drawn to Standing Rock, almost as if she was being called on a spiritual journey.

When Alexandria first contacted an organizer at Standing Rock and asked how she could help, she figured she could fundraise in New York City, or raise awareness among her friends. But the organizer told her that there was actually an urgent need for women to physically come to Standing Rock. In Oceti Sakowin tradition, women served as “water protectors”—the men’s role was protecting the protectors. Without enough women in prayer, they believed, the spiritual resistance would lose its power. Alexandria didn’t need to be asked twice. She wasn’t about to move there to be a full-time water protector (she wasn’t that spontaneous), but she figured it was at least worth a road trip to deliver some supplies and spend a few days praying in solidarity.

So she teamed up with her bartending buddy Maria Swisher and Maria’s friend Josh, a photographer with a dark beard who would prove to be chivalrous at things like de-icing the windows. They had started a GoFundMe page to raise money to buy firewood, wood-burning stoves, sleeping bags, and cots for the water protectors struggling through the sub-zero winter in North Dakota. The plan was to drive the supplies to Standing Rock while livestreaming their road trip on Facebook so their friends could follow along and donate to the cause. “If you want to help us fund the trip, you can Venmo us,” Alexandria said into the camera with a wink. She proved to be surprisingly good at this form of online fundraising: they asked for a few hundred dollars, and reached their GoFundMe goal in a single day.

It was Alexandria’s idea to try Facebook Live. She and Maria had been brainstorming during downtime at work about what to do after Trump’s election, and they decided they needed to get out of their bubble. They wanted to hear from people outside New York to get a sense of how this could have happened: a road trip to Standing Rock, they figured, could bring them some answers.

As soon as they drove Maria’s borrowed 1998 Subaru onto the George Washington Bridge and out of Manhattan, they started streaming. The plan was to drive through New Jersey and Pennsylvania and head to Cleveland, Ohio, where they would crash with one of Alexandria’s friends from college. They called their livestream “the Road to Standing Rock.” It would live for years on Alexandria’s personal Facebook page, undiscovered by the press even as she became one of the most famous women in America.

Maria did most of the driving at first, and her main goal was not dying.

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