Do you have any advice for how people not from the US calling on our representatives to denounce the violence at Standing Rock should phrase ourselves? I'm not very good at speaking on the phone and I want to make sure I'm saying something clear and effective.
I think a lot of this depends on where you live, and what you know about your representatives, and what you can find out from your country’s media. I’m going to use the UK as an example really quick, because—while I know a lot less about the UK’s political system than I do about the US—I have some familiarity with it, and I know some UK media sources. Your goal is to raise the issue with someone who has more power than you, and—if applicable—ask them to raise the issue with people who have more power than them.
So let’s say you live in Hackney in London. First: Philip Glanville, the directly elected mayor of Hackney, is a member of the Labour Party, and he’s openly gay. You could appeal to his affiliation with Labour as the ostensible defenders of the ordinary people, or personally—especially if you are also a member of the LGBTQIA community—as someone who has close ties with a group that got a lot of their rights via protest, and understands why protest must be protected and defended. He’s also on Twitter, which may make him more accessible than a lot of politicians—I don’t know, I’m not a very heavy Twitter user, and I’ve definitely never tried to DM him or anything. He doesn’t have any direct national or international responsibility, but if you’re one of his constituents, you could call his office or tweet at him and ask him to encourage Labour to force the issue of human rights abuses at Standing Rock out into the limelight in the UK, and to ask the Conservative government what they are doing to put pressure on the US to follow international guidelines for human rights and the treatment of protestors.
Second: is Standing Rock on the front page of your newspapers? It should be! When there are major clashes between the government and protestors in other countries that pride themselves on civil rights, you’d better bet it hits the front page of US papers! I read the Guardian online but it’s very hard for me to tell what the UK edition looks like, so I don’t know how much coverage they’ve done of Standing Rock, but if the answer is “not enough,” you could write a letter to the Guardian—or your newspaper of choice—saying that the abuses at Standing Rock are a shameful violation of international standards for human rights and the treatment of protestors, which they are.
What I’m getting at here is that public opinion is a really, really powerful force, and it’s an especially powerful force when you have a country like the U.S., that likes to think of itself as land of the free et cetera, siccing militarized police on peaceful protestors. It would be great if we could get, you know, Theresa May on the phone with Barack Obama giving him a stern talking-to about international commitments to human rights, but even if you, personally, can’t make that happen, every time you get someone in power to talk about it—either in public or with other people in power, in (e.g.) conferences or lunch dates or party meetings—you increase the amount of international pressure that comes down on the U.S. government to protect the protestors at Standing Rock. So, I mean, Philip Glanville presumably can’t, like, ring Theresa May up and tell her to get Barack Obama on the line and give him what-for, but maybe Philip Glanville could raise it with senior members of the Labour Party, or mention it to a friend who works with someone in the opposition, who could encourage Jeremy Corbyn to go to the media and ask why the PM isn’t calling up President Obama to give him what-for. If he, or they, speaks about it publicly, that increases the likelihood that more people in the UK will get angry, and put pressure on their representatives, and so on and so forth. The point isn’t that Theresa May can make Barack Obama do stuff—she really can’t—but the louder and more persistent we are in raising the issue not just in the US but all over the globe, the more embarrassing the human rights abuses at Standing Rock become to the US government.
Basically: sometimes in international politics publicly shaming your friends and allies is absolutely the right thing to do.
