In the lobby diner of Sherman Inn, in windy, downtown Wolf Point, Montana, Lance FourStar sips a cup of coffee and orders a reuben sandwich. He hasn’t slept much in the last 24 hours, but that’s nothing new. He’s been up manning the suicide hotline. If someone in eastern Montana calls 988, a person in Great Falls representing Voices of Hope will answer, and if that person lives on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, they’ll be patched through to FourStar.
“My job is to sit there in the middle of the night and answer the phone if someone calls,” FourStar said. “A lot of times they need a meal, or they need a ride to get an ID to get food stamps, usually things like that. Our community is just in that survival mode.”
FourStar is a member of the Red Bottom Clan of Assiniboine Nation. He’s also the director of the Montana American Indian Caucus and the treasurer of the Montana Democratic Party, two groups FourStar said he is not speaking on behalf of.
“I’m speaking as an individual,” he said. “That being said, it doesn’t change the way that I think about things.”
On March 19, FourStar released a statement calling for a ceasefire in Palestine and expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people—a move in direct contrast to the Montana Democratic Party. FourStar said he felt it was necessary, especially considering the shared history of Palestinians and the Assiniboine people.
“You look at these kids who are starving in Gaza, the Palestinians who are starving and put in these humanitarian safety zones,” said FourStar. “They’re living on the beach in a tent, with no running water, no food but the food that’s given to them, and that’s the same thing that happened here in Wolf Point to the Assiniboine.”
FourStar is referring to the winter of 1883-84, known as Starvation Winter. With the buffalo populations decimated, Indigenous people throughout the state were left dependent on government rations that never came. That winter, 300 Assiniboine people and 600 members of the Blackfeet tribe died of starvation and exposure.
“The starvation tactic was used to gain control of this land and the people,” FourStar said. “So when I see what’s happening in the Middle East, see these people being cut off from humanitarian aid, there’s a reason it’s so familiar.”
Claire Charlo, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in western Montana, has been long aware of the Palestinian’s fight for liberation and describes Israel’s recent assault on Gaza as “a land grab.”
“Colonialism is colonialism, and we see it every single day. We see it, of course, in the past history, and we see it happening in Gaza,” Charlo said. “It’s the same reason why Montana was invaded by colonial settlers. They wanted the land, they wanted the resources, they wanted the copper, they wanted everything. They didn’t want the Indians.”
Charlo’s assessment of an Israeli land grab has been confirmed multiple times. Take, for example, the 2004 interview with Benny Morris, dean of the Israeli New Historians, who repeatedly called Palestinians “barbarians” and explained occupation of the Palestinian homeland was not only intentional, but necessary for the sake of “civilization.”
“A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians,” Morris said in the interview. “Therefore, it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population … Something like a cage has to be built for [Palestinians]. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.”
Morris then used the U.S. as a prime example of why, sometimes, it’s necessary to attempt an extermination of an entire people.
“Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history,” Morris said.
Montanans for Palestine
In 2010, Brendan Work, the founder of Montanans for Palestine, was a journalist for the Palestine News Network in Bethlehem, covering weekly protests against the construction of the wall snaking its way through the West Bank, separating families and villages and cutting into Palestinian agricultural land. It was then he was tear-gassed and shot at for the first time.
In one incident in late 2011, at a weekly wall protest at the Columbia checkpoint in the West Bank outside Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority canceled school to allow Palestinians to show up in support of the statehood initiative, which the U.S. had vowed to veto regardless of the outcome. When an Israeli soldier shot a 14-year-old Palestinian boy in the eye with a tear gas canister, Work lifted the boy to get him to an ambulance. Another photographer snapped a picture of the scene, which later became a New York Times photo of the week.
“I do think that played a role in me getting kicked out,” Work said, describing the day Israeli border control banned him at a checkpoint. “I got a big red ‘DENIED’ stamp in my passport.”
Work stalled out in Jordan for about a month. After multiple unsuccessful attempts to reenter the West Bank, he found himself back in Montana, where he took a post with Missoula County Public Schools teaching Arabic.
He founded Montanans for Palestine shortly after and now spends his little spare time coordinating with the group’s organizers and members to arrange calls to federal representatives, share Palestinian stories on the group’s social media pages, and draft ceasefire resolutions for various organizations and individuals.
“Some days it feels like a second full-time job,” said Work. “But then I remember that Israel and its supporters do work full-time jobs to enact this genocide, and the Palestinians facing annihilation deserve more than my break-time solidarity.”
Omar Awad, a Palestinian Montanan in Bozeman, learned about Montanans for Palestine from a social media post made by his sister. He has since become a crucial member of the group.
Awad’s family is in Turmus Ayya, a town roughly 14 miles northeast of Ramallah in the West Bank. He speaks often to his cousin, who informed him last June that more than 400 settlers attacked their village, setting fire to homes, cars, and land. Their grandfather’s house was targeted.
“Last time I talked with my cousin, he told me a 10-year-old boy was shot by settlers while he was picking olives in the olive groves,” Awad said. “He died … It never ends.”
Work once described Montanans for Palestine as little more than a collection of “Missoulians with a conscience,” but the group has now grown to a statewide collective that includes college students, veterans, members of the Jewish community, Palestinian Montanans, and, of course, members of multiple Montana tribes who see the issue of Palestinian sovereignty as one linked with their own.
“I would consider myself one of the first grassroots organizers of Montanans for Palestine,” said Oma F., who is a descendant of the Blackfeet, Assiniboine, and Dakota Sioux and has requested her full name remain private. “There was a small group of us who came together and understood that Palestinian voices needed to be heard even here in Montana.”
Another member is Benjamin Yawakie, a citizen of the Pueblo of Zuni and White Bear First Nations and a descendant of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Fort Peck Assiniboine, and Sioux.
“This not only seemed like the place to exert my desire for change,” said Yawakie, speaking of his involvement in Montanans for Palestine, “but also to meet like-minded Missoulians.”
Both Yawakie and Oma are proponents of the LANDBACK movement, a return to communal land ownership overseen by Indigenous peoples and a rejection of colonial concepts of real estate and private land ownership. The term was coined in 2018 by Arnell Tailfeathers, a member of Kainai Nation, or the Blood Tribe, of the Blackfoot Confederacy.
LANDBACK is rooted in the upholding of tribal sovereignty and the rejection of Manifest Destiny, two critical concepts to both the Native American and Palestinian fights for justice.
“Sovereignty is the ability of tribes to exercise all of their powers within their own lands,” Yawakie said. “It’s the ability to self-govern in all aspects of life.”
On March 30, 2022, known as “Palestinian Land Day,” the NDN Collective released a position paper titled, “The Right of Return is LANDBACK.” The paper provides a historical account of the interwoven struggles of Native Americans and Palestinians and a statement of “full solidarity and commitment to the Right of Return of our Palestinian siblings and full liberation of their homeland.”
Yawakie was previously a climate justice organizer with the NDN Collective. During that time, he worked with a team to create a technical report on the environmental effects of the Dakota Access Pipeline’s proposed crossing of Lake Oahe, the primary drinking source for the Standing Rock Sioux.
“One thing that caught my attention over the first several months of this genocide is how Israelis were using saltwater to flood the underground tunnel systems, and it was just mindboggling that they were going to co-mingle saltwater with groundwater to the point where individuals wouldn’t have access to drinkable water anywhere,” Yawakie said. “They already weren’t allowing humanitarian aid in, but to destroy their access to drinkable water? Water is sacred. It’s everything.”
FourStar, Charlo, and Oma were also all involved in Standing Rock.
Charlo, who works as an Indigenous feminisms organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network, ran supplies and helped with legal support from Montana. Oma got her start at Standing Rock as an Indigenous advocate, attending the camp as a middle schooler to learn about cultural resistance. With the help of veterans from Fort Peck, FourStar organized what he calls a “modern day war party” to join the Standing Rock protests—protests that also included a Palestinian delegation that spent two months at the Standing Rock camp to support Native tribes in their fight against the pipeline.
“Palestine was there,” FourStar said. “They stood with us.”
In a published statement of solidarity, the Palestinian Youth Movement emphasized the commonalities between Native Americans and Palestinians, specifically their shared struggles in facing genocide, displacement, and environmental destruction. The organization also called for an end to the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The Senate
“We condemn all forms of state violence against our First Nation siblings,” the statement reads. “We demand that the United States honor the treaties as the supreme law of the land and payment of governmental reparations. Water is life for all of us. Free the land. Free the people. Long live International Solidarity.”
This year, the international solidarity from Wolf Point to Gaza may have a direct impact on control of the Senate come November, as Sen. Jon Tester, Montana’s sole federal Democratic representative, is running for reelection.
Tester’s path to victory in Montana has always been narrow. In each of his three Senate challenges, he won with less than 51% of the vote, and The Cook Political Report adjusted Tester’s race projection last November from leaning Democrat to one of only three toss-ups. While March 6 polling by Emerson had him at 44% support, 4 percentage points ahead of Tim Sheehy, March 26-29 polling by J.L. Partners showed him trailing Sheehy by 3 percentage points with 45% support.
Tester owes much of his electoral success to Indigenous voter participation. In 2018 Native Americans almost single-handedly propelled him to victory—a fact not lost on Tester or the Montana Democratic Party, as they recently announced a million-dollar program dedicated to tribal voting efforts. Coordinated Campaign Director Nick Marroletti described the program as “the earliest, best-funded organizing program Montana has ever seen.”
Tester, however, has continuously supported Israel’s “right to defend itself”—even as Francesca Albanese, a United Nations Special Rapporteur, stated in a press conference in November that in accordance with international law, “Israel cannot claim the right of ‘self-defense’ against a threat that emanates from a territory it occupies.”
Montanans for Palestine has repeatedly asked that Tester use his position as chair of the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee to make weapons aid to Israel conditional on the assurance that war crimes are not being committed, especially after the U.N. reported in March that Israel’s assault on Gaza is an ongoing genocide.
“Gaza’s facing the worst famine in the world right now, and it’s a man-made, forced famine because Israel will not let the aid that’s outside the borders in. They won’t allow enough food, and people are starving to death,” said Awad in his speech at the Bozeman statewide Free Palestine Rally. “There has been over 28 children who have starved to death, and we’re told this isn’t a genocide.”
Nonetheless, in an interview with Tester published May 9 by the Washington Examiner, the senator expressed his disagreement with Biden’s potential pause of weapons distributions to Israel.
When asked for further comment on the pause of weapons shipments, a spokesperson for the senator stopped short of a direct answer, instead relaying to Prism that Tester “has expressed directly to American and Israeli officials that a higher priority needs to be placed on avoiding civilian casualties and delivering humanitarian aid.”
On June 7, Israeli U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan stated in a post on X that he had received notification from U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres that Israel was to be added to the U.N. “blacklist,” a running list of parties known to commit human rights violations against children.
On June 8, in what is now named the Nuseirat Refugee Camp Massacre, Israeli military forces used American military equipment to rescue four Israeli hostages and kill 274 Palestinians sheltering in the refugee camp, including 64 children.
Earlier this year, Montanans for Palestine launched a campaign urging Montanans to vote “no preference” in the June 4 Montana primaries, a move meant to send a clear message to both Biden and Tester.
“It shows we have the power to withhold our votes in the fall if Biden does not call for a ceasefire,” according to a social media post by the group.
The campaign netted 9,141 “no preference” votes, about 9% of the votes cast in the Democratic presidential primary. This is more than twice as many as the 2020 “no preference” total of 4,250, nearly double the group’s goal of 5,000 votes, and roughly half of Tester’s 2018 win margin.
As Tester’s campaign ramps up Indigenous organizing throughout Montana, his public messaging regarding his stance on Israel will prove crucial—and Montana’s Indian Country is watching.
“I think it’s making people think about the connection,” says Charlo. “What is happening in Palestine can happen to any of us in the U.S., and it’s just not an ‘over there’ problem. It’s an ‘us’ problem.”
For Oma, that connection is a non-negotiable factor in whom she votes for in the fall.
“I don’t see me putting my faith right now in people who participate in upholding an oppressive system rather than dismantling it,” Oma said. “I got involved because I felt the cries of Palestinians, I felt their lives, I felt their land, their spirits. And I still do.”
Whether Tester adequately addresses the concerns of Palestinian sovereignty among his Native voters remains to be seen. But there is no doubt the solidarity runs deep.
In his now infamous 1992 poem, “The Penultimate Speech of the ‘Red Indian’ to the White Man,” Palestinian author Mahmoud Darwish writes of salt and sea and poplar leaves, of sacred stone and the Mississippi River, of ceilingless skies and the dead who come at dawn.
FourStar’s ceasefire statement is equally as poignant and provides an austere warning to any candidate hoping to win statewide office on the backs of Indigenous voters: The issue of Palestine is personal.
The final paragraph of FourStar’s statement reads:
“Make no mistake, it does not escape us that so many of the dead and wounded children in Gaza look like they could be our siblings, our children, our grandchildren. It does not escape us that the Assiniboine people can look out our windows and see the graves of victims of intentional starvation by our own colonizers, just as the Palestinian people can see mass graves holding the bodies of their similarly martyred loved ones. It does not escape us, and we will not forget.”
