Crossing Divides: My Journey to Standing Rock

On Thanksgiving Day in 2016, Vernon Benjamin, aged 70, loaded his pickup with supplies for the protesters at Standing Rock opposed to a new oil pipeline and left his home in upstate New York for a journey across America, unlike anything he’d ever done. He cared deeply about Native American causes. But Trump had won the election. The country was falling apart. Benjamin had always been a journalist, a historian, and a poet. Now could he be an activist who put his heart and soul on the line? What he found at Standing Rock and in himself changed his life

Vernon Benjamin also wrote the definitive two-volume set, The History of the Hudson River Valley. A lifelong Saugertiesian, he was a journalist, Saugerties supervisor for a term, aide to Maurice Hinchey in the New York State Assembly, and civic leader active with the Saugerties Public Library, Esopus Creek Conservancy, and the Saugerties Historical Society.

Crossing Divides documents a journey from the Hudson to Standing Rock on the banks of the Missouri River, where Vernon Benjamin delivered supplies to Indigenous protestors opposing the construction of an oil pipeline they feared would desecrate and contaminate their ancestral land and waters. Benjamin’s account of his trip into the heart of the Lakota encampment is wrapped in his own personal story—journalist, political leader, academic, friend to New York’s Mohawk Nation, and activist. This is a little book with a big heart.  —Ned Sullivan, President, Scenic Hudson