Deliver Wood, Coats, & Supplies to Pine Ridge

As of writing, there is no major blizzard that constitutes a natural disaster on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation as there was during last year’s winter fundraiser. Instead, what we continue to see on Pine Ridge is a designed genocide enforced through neo-colonial laws and economic denial, as well as a long history of settler-colonial policy meant to assimilate or replace the native. We have taken up the responsibility of helping with survival of families on Pine Ridge Reservation where we are stewarding land and will be building dual power systems; the hardest part is keeping people alive until these systems can sustain us and our people. This is primarily due to money, there are some lack of skills within the organization as while licensing, but ultimately it all comes back to licensed tradespeople giving us access to funding through programs on the reservation. Last year we started a fundraiser that became crucial for several families in the Porcupine community, when a blizzard trapped many people in their homes until the snow melted enough to dig out. By the time our organizers got to one of the elders we helped, he was burning his clothes to stay warm. Helping this elder, and more, is what prompted our last winter fundraiser, and ultimately the formation of the organization.

Like every year it is extremely costly to help people stay warm with electric bills, wood, propane, and of course groceries, diapers and more. We need the support of people like you. We are doing far more than just keeping people alive, but in the winter that's our main priority due to the severe wealth inequality between reservations and urban centers. This said, parts of the network center their organizing around helping houseless folks in those urban centers, welding these struggles together and anyone else who recognizes what austerity and neoliberalism will progress to. So we are once again asking for your help despite our previous fundraiser not being done (we hope we can garner support for that one through this one as well) to help people survive the winter on Pine Ridge and bring supplies. So we are asking for the following:

~$746 Base rental for a 20’ Uhaul and 950 base miles. ~250$ in extra fees due to our detour to Nebraska for firewood pickup, incurring r extra mileage costs of $1/mile.

$500 for Gas and Food for 2 people

$500 for plane tickets back home for our two organizers

~$200 for hotels for the 3 day drive and 2 days for distributing supplies. Staying in a hotel will help our cameraman to charge his equipment. This schedule and cost includes a buffer for emergencies while driving between Omaha and Porcupine, especially with winter weather.

$2000 for our Camerman’s intense labor and licensing access to restricted air zones with a drone. This price was chosen due to the amount of labor for 5 days: camera work, loading and unloading supplies, snowshoeing the property, chopping wood on the reservation, and doing interviews and filming sessions from Nebraska to Pine Ridge to give folks a sense of the size of the network. Given all this work, even $2000 doesn’t feel like enough, but it’s what we can manage for now.

~$4000 for a Shipping Container to be bought in Toronto, filled with supplies and then shipped over the border to Porcupine for later use in other fundraisers and/or when we can get our own legal driver and truck to do nationwide logistics for the movement (year 3 plan).

~$4000 for International Shipping we are finalizing these prices and searching for better quotes

~$300 for Childcare to support our lead organizer’s partner. Our lead organizer works from home and is usually the primary caregiver while their partner leaves for work, so we want to ensure their family is taken care of during this journey.

As should be clear, the majority of this fundraiser isn’t needed for immediate action, instead we only need 7-8k to bring the wood to Pine Ridge and fly our organizers home. This wood and supplies is already gathered and the opportunity presented itself to us, if we are able to fundraise. This will bring new footage and photos, save lives, build up our relations with the community on Pine Ridge and better connect our NE groups to each other, as well as the larger network as a whole. This trip is also an opportunity to introduce other faces of the org who are public facing, and other projects people can support if this one is too radical for you to suggest to friends and family for some reason. At any rate we hope this breakdown makes sense and will post receipts on our website once it launches. We’ll share updates here and on our social media sites, which you can find at linktr.ee/chunkalutanetwork. If you want to become a monthly sustainer of the people of Pine Ridge and our organizations work, there is a patreon on our linktr.ee and another fundraiser we are still trying to finish by the end of this month before it's too late. Please share with everyone you know. This is important, life-saving work. This is one way for you to help decolonization efforts globally, by helping colonized people thrive and survive here at home.

You can also mail old coats, gloves, hats, boots, snowsuits, heaters, blankets, and whatever else you think is good for winter or want our organizers to distribute to the following address:

Alfred Swallow

PO BOX 286

Porcupine, SD 57772-0286

United States

If you are a electrician, plumber, or contractor licensed to work in South Dakota or you are in the Greater Toronto Area and want to help fill the shipping container please email us at chunkalutanetwork at gmail Thank you for your time

More photos to come of the other wood but we are probably at double this now, and expect a bit more on top of coats and other winter gear and youtube channel launching soon. If we complete the initial goal and previous fundraiser, we want to push to get some more money for land. There is about 1500 acres available for us to purchase and bring into trust, at a severely reduced price due to the agreement allowing the land owner to continue occupying the land and we will build around him. This way we are not displacing people who already live there, while building up their conditions. The owner plans on moving back to the reservation and helping us build up the future we dare to invent.

https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/203NW32W8SEID?ref_=wl_share here is an amazon wishlist of items you can get instead too