Winona LaDuke
A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is finished no matter how brave its warriors or how strong their weapons.
—Cheyenne proverb
There is a powerful metaphor between the economic policies of this country, Canada, and the USA and their treatment of our Indigenous women and girls. When you look at the extreme violence taking place against the sacredness of Mother Earth, in the tar sands, for example, and the fact that this represents the greatest driver of both Canadian and US economies, then you look at the lack of action being taken for thousands of First Nations women and girls who have been murdered or just disappeared, it all begins to make sense. It’s also why our women have been rising up and taking power back from the smothering forces of patriarchy dominating our economic, political and social, and I would say spiritual institutions. When we turn things around as a people, it will be women who will lead us, and it will be the creative feminine principle they carry that will give us the tools we need to build another world. Indigenous peoples have been keeping a tab on what has been stolen from our lands, and there is a day coming soon where we will collect. Until then, we will keep our eyes on the prize, organize and live our lives in a good way and we welcome you to join us on this journey.
—Clayton Thomas-Muller, 2013
In the winter of 2012, Chief Theresa Spence of the Attawapiskat First Nation in northern Ontario drew the world’s attention when she went on a hunger strike in front of the Canadian capital in Ottawa. Spence, a modest woman, helped inspire an international movement called Idle No More, which drew attention to Canada’s hyperaggressive resource extraction era, the Harper administration’s equally aggressive violation of the human rights of indigenous peoples, and the destruction of the Earth.
Chief Theresa Spence is the leader of Attawapiskat First Nation—a very remote Cree community from James Bay, Ontario, at the southern end of Hudson Bay. The communities on the reserve, 1,549 residents (a third of whom are under nineteen), have weathered quite a bit: the fur trade, residential schools, a status as non-treaty Indians, and limited access to modern conveniences like a toilet, or even electricity. This is quite common in the North, but it has been exacerbated in the past five years, with the advent of a huge diamond mine in the area.
Enter De Beers, the largest diamond mining enterprise in the world. The company moved into northern Ontario in 2006, where the Victor Mine reached commercial production in 2008 and was voted “Mine of the Year” by the readers of the international trade publication Mining Magazine. The company states that it is “committed to sustainable development in local communities.” This is good to know, because, as the Canadian MP Bob Rae discovered in 2012 on his tour of the rather destitute conditions of the village, this is also the place where the first world meets the third world in the North.
Infrastructure in the subarctic is in short supply. There is no road into the village for eight months of the year. For four months, during a freeze-up, there’s an ice road. A diamond mine needs a lot of infrastructure, and all of this has to be shipped in, so the trucks launch out from Moosonee (another rather remote outpost), connected to the south by a railroad. Then, they build a better road. The problem is that the road won’t work when the climate changes, and already-stretched infrastructure gets tapped out.
There is some money flowing in, that’s for sure. A 2010 report from De Beers states that payments to eight communities associated with its two mines in Canada totaled $5,231,000 that year. Forbes magazine reports record diamond sales by the world’s largest diamond company:
… increased 33 percent, year-over-year, to $3.5 billion.… The mining giant, which produces more than a third of the world’s rough diamonds, also reported record EBITDA of almost $1.2 billion, a 55 percent increase over the first half of 2010.
As the Canadian MiningWatch group notes:
Whatever Attawapiskat’s share of that $5-million is, given the chronic under-funding of the community, the need for expensive responses to deal with recurring crises, including one that DeBeers themselves may have precipitated by overloading the community’s sewage system, it’s not surprising that the community hasn’t been able to translate its … income into improvements in physical infrastructure.
Attawapiskat gained international attention in 2012 when many families in the Cree community were living in tents in the dead of winter. The neighboring Kashechewan village was in similar disarray. They were boiling and importing drinking water. The village almost had a complete evacuation due to deteriorating health conditions—scabies and impetigo epidemics. And, on top of all of this, “… fuel shortages are becoming more common among remote northern Ontario communities right now,” as Alvin Fiddler, deputy grand chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation (a regional advocacy network), explained to a reporter. That’s because the ice road used to truck in a year’s supply of diesel the previous winter did not last as long as usual. “Everybody is running out now. We’re looking at a two-month gap until this winter’s ice road is solid enough to truck in fresh supplies,” said Mr. Fiddler.
Kashechewan’s chief and council were poised to shut down the band office, two schools, the power-generation center, the health clinic, and the fire hall because the buildings were not heated and could no longer operate safely. According to Chief Derek Stephen, “In addition, some 21 homes had become uninhabitable due to flooding.” Just as a side note, in 2007, some twenty-one Cree youth from Kashechewan attempted suicide, and the Canadian aboriginal youth suicide rate is five times the national average. Both communities are beneficiaries of an agreement with De Beers. Sort of a third world situation … eh? In one of the richest countries in the world.
Now that story could be a story from India, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, or the Congo, but it’s a story of the North. It is a story of the indigenous communities of the North, and a story of the reality of a resource extraction state that is cannibalizing the land from which it sprang legislatively, economically, and with a new onslaught of militarization.
With our communities living in these conditions, how can there be consent given to fossil fuel extraction and mineral mining contracts? Indigenous women have resisted the dominating and coercive spirit of the predator economy that devastates the land, and our bodies, since our land was first colonized. That colonialism continues.
The model is well known. As indigenous scholar Russ Diabo explains,
The intent is hyper-acceleration of resource extraction and development, and these are on indigenous territories, and the way to accelerate that process is to create legislation, and to have that legislation part of the instrument through which poverty is utilized. This is the old colonial model, which is having the veneer of consent. It is to manufacture it. To manufacture poverty and then manufacture consent.
The Stephen Harper government, the present government of the settler of Canada, did what all Canadian governments have done, and has done it more aggressively. It deprives people of the basics of a dignified life: running water, infrastructure, stable health, and security. Canada, like its American counterpart, does this by systemically appropriating the resources of indigenous communities, militarizing those communities, bringing in new paramilitaries to the borders of those communities, ensuring long-term health instability in those communities, draining intellectual capital from those communities (through educational and financial institutions), and never investing in infrastructure. Then, they offer only one choice.
That choice is a series of laws and gun-barrel diplomacy that supports the intensification of resource extraction. And it turns out that what Canada does in Canada to Native people is what Canadian corporations do around the world—perhaps having learned well from their neighbor to the south. It’s an important point in history because 75 percent of the world’s mining companies today are Canada-based. In the present era we’ve seen the inefficient and extravagant consumption of the North American first world (especially the United States and Canada) drive a level of resource extraction that will not only require additional planets to continue, but will ultimately destroy the land and water with which we live.
One more time: Canada is the home to 75 percent of the world’s mining corporations, and they have tended to have relative impunity in Canadian courts. Canadian corporations and their international subsidiaries are being protected by military forces elsewhere, and this concerns many. According to a UK Guardian story, a Quebec court of appeal rejected a suit by citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo against Montreal-based Anvil Mining Limited for allegedly providing logistical support to the DRC army as it carried out a massacre, killing as many as one hundred people in the town of Kilwa near the company’s silver and copper mine.1 The Supreme Court of Canada later confirmed that Canadian courts had no jurisdiction over the company’s actions in the DRC. KAIROS Canada, a faith-based organization, concluded that the Supreme Court’s ruling would “have broader implications for other victims of human rights abuses committed by Canadian companies and their chances of bringing similar cases to our courts.”2
The North American economy consumes a third of the world’s resources, with perhaps one-tenth of the world’s population. That level of consumption requires constant interventions into other countries, and constant violations of human rights. Canadian companies will necessarily need impunity, as there is no way to extract the remaining fossil fuels without drastically accelerating the damage that’s already been caused; and there is no compensation for what has been done already.
Consider that we’ve consumed one-half of the world’s known fossil fuels, so what remains is largely difficult to extract—requiring extreme measures, and with very little return in terms of energy. Copper is close to the most inefficient product to mine from a big dig; you need to remove one billion tons of material to recover 1.6 tons of copper. The only substance with a lower recovery rate is gold. Mining projects in northern Anishinaabe territory will now mine copper, creating vast rivers of sulfuric acid. The Ramu Nickel Mine proposal in Papua New Guinea will dump raw waste into the depths of the ocean, destroying an ocean’s worth of life. Both projects, one in Anishinaabe Akiing and the other in the PNG mine, are for the Chinese market, illustrating how global markets and inefficiencies impact us all. Whether the companies are Canadian or Australian, the markets today are often Chinese. In turn, much of what will be produced may end up coming back to North American markets in the form of the multitude of trade goods North America continues to purchase from China.
The rate of extraction is not only unsustainable, it is ecologically and economically disastrous. “When indigenous peoples oppose the destruction of our ecosystems we get challenged as people who are saying, ‘Let’s go back to the Stone Age …,’” Caleen Sisk, Winnemem Wintu chief tells me. “The fact is that these guys with their extraction and pollution will take us back to before the Stone Age. We won’t even be able to eat.…” There is a monetary economy, and then there is an economy based on clean air, clean water, and food—or quality of life.
Fossil fuels are even worse. The North American economy has moved to blowing the tops off five hundred mountains in Appalachia (known as mountaintop removal) to benefit markets as far away as India. Deep-water extraction is being pushed into the most pristine and untouched regions of the ocean, and with climate change accelerating, the retreat of ice has left more ocean accessible to extraction. An example of one experiment gone awry is British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico. The extraction of oil and gas through fracking methods threatens groundwater and the aquifers we rely on the world over. And, finally, the aggressive push into the tar sands of the Athabasca River basin destroys an ecosystem, sickening all who live there, for the benefit of international oil interests. It is in this context that the resistance of indigenous women is essential and it is found wherever our people are.
Pamela Paimeta, a spokesperson for the Idle No More movement in Canada, talks about the movement that sprang from Canada’s violations of basic human rights, in which the Harper government gutted laws that would protect communities. The administration launched an economic war against these same communities if they refused to sign mining agreements, by holding out basic transfer benefits for food, education, housing, and health, and then dismantling the environmental laws of that country, in a bill called C-45.
C-45 was passed at the end of 2012. That bill, and a series of other bills, removed roadblocks in the legislative and regulatory arena within a first world country for the benefit of mining corporations. Paimeta, a legal scholar, points out that treaty rights and the rights of indigenous nations are essential for all Canadians to support (despite all that they have been taught in schools, and despite the teaching and implementation of the construct of white privilege) and urges the larger community to see what is occurring across the country as a reality check.
The first Nations are the last best hope that Canadians have for protecting land for food and clean water for the future—not just for our people, but for Canadians as well. So this country falls or survives on whether they acknowledge, or recognize and implement, those aboriginal and treaty rights. So they need to stand with us and protect what is essential.
In some ways, the Idle No More movement’s emergence, and the increasing visibility of indigenous women, is an essential step in educating a larger nonindigenous community. Native women have historically been marginalized, and have definitely been marginalized in the media, as dramatic pictures of Native people on horseback, or Native men in occupations, have captured the media more than pictures of Native women have. That is changing as they become more militant, and it is changing because there is a more enlightened North American feminist community. Native feminism does not exist in the same paradigm as non-Native feminism. At the basics, we would say that we are not fighting for a bigger slice of the pie; we want a different pie. We want the world we were instructed to carry on by our ancestors, and our traditions. In that world, we have a good and respectful life, and with the adaptation of those values into a set of appropriate technology, we are clear on our path and what we will accept and want.
Back to Chief Theresa Spence and the implication of her hunger strike in the capital, Ottawa. She hoped to meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, urging him to “open his heart” and meet with Native leaders angered by his policies. “He’s a person with a heart but he needs to open his heart. I’m sure he has faith in the Creator himself and for him to delay this, it’s very disrespectful, I feel, to not even meet with us,” she said. Her actions encouraged a movement, Idle No More, which emerged in Canada and quickly spread to the United States and the rest of the world.
Idle No More consisted of protests, marches, direct action, and often, traditional round dances that would appear at the spur of the moment, as “flash mobs,” at places like the Mall of America, the state capitol of Colorado, or other public spaces and city centers. The movement has captured the attention and imagination of many of the youth in indigenous communities, and it has been propelled into the media, using social media well to document stories that otherwise would never appear in mainstream media. Frankly, Natives have historically, been marginalized in the media so effectively that the only stories about the Native community that appear are of arrests (a survey of northern US Native papers will find that is the majority of coverage), or of Native poverty. That, however, is a trend that may be changing with an increasing number of Native writers, radio stations in more reservations and reserves, and the increasing presence of social media in remote communities.
Some have likened the Idle No More movement to the Occupy movement. There is some shared terrain, particularly in terms of the significance and power of social media, and the access the information age promises to historically marginalized communities. They now control their own media. There is in the youthfulness of the indigenous movement (most of the Native community is under twenty-five years of age) a similarity to the youthfulness of the Occupy movement. The Idle No More movement itself, however, is old, mature, and evolving with technology, as is the larger movement of indigenous peoples. I do believe that the Idle No More movement resembles more the Zapatistas and the ongoing indigenization of Western Hemisphere politics, but with the added advent of instant media and cell phones, something there was little or no access to in Chiapas. We have seen our youth break open spaces in which their voices and stories have been heard, and where they have a chance to influence policy and public opinion, and to support one another and connect over shared experiences between remote communities.
Kristin Moe writes, in YES! Magazine, “Idle No More is one of what Subcomandante Marcos, the masked prophet of the Mexican Zapatistas, called ‘pockets of resistance,’ which are ‘as numerous as the forms of resistance themselves.’” The Zapatistas are a part of the movement of indigenous resistance (which is five hundred years old), which crested in the early 1990s. It has continued to grow, change, and adapt in many South American countries. In Bolivia, this resulted in the election of an indigenous president and the enshrining of the Rights of Mother Earth in the Bolivian constitution. We share common histories of colonialism, and today, with a continued globalized presence, where Spain and England have been replaced by Suncor, BHP Billiton, De Beers, Conoco, and TransCanada, we understand that our resistance is still essential to survival.
Indigenous resistance is, in many cases, the strongest front, and has the capacity to protect the land, a semblance of a land-based economy for all. Native women do not by any means have a monopoly on creative resistance to colonialism, but Native women have played a significant role in that resistance. There may be some historical reasons.
There is something about never having been enfranchised or privileged by industrial society, which means that indigenous women are less colonized, even than some of their male counterparts. It’s an armchair sociologist’s observation. American, British, and its descendant, Canadian, colonialism liked treatying with men, dealing with men, and naming men. After all, that is what the European monarchy and feudal system was accustomed to. It did not notice the clan mothers of the Iroquois Confederacy. Nor did it recognize the place of women in Anishinaabe or other indigenous societies. Hence, when decision making was put in that realm and favoring and privileging resulted, it focused not on the status of women, but on the status of men. That is how a clientele class is created in the process of colonization. In that process, the colonizer has at some point so infiltrated the world of the object of his desire that we become the colonizer ourselves.
We are “digested” (the root of “colonization” is the same as the root of “colon”), and in that digestion we begin to emulate the colonizer. There is a good argument to be made, however, that the status of Native men also diminishes with colonization, particularly as we are denied access to our lands, our waters, our food, and our ceremonies. It is a process of colonization, and it is, therefore, also a process of decolonization.
What I know is that the hierarchy of colonization finds it easiest to deal with a few appointed leaders, or those who meet with the approval of the federal or Canadian governments. A lot of decisions are made by those individuals—often after a good deal of indoctrination, force, and gun-barrel diplomacy with the Native community. Some of this is reflected in the militarization of the Indian country, which, it turns out, is heavily militarized, as old cavalry bases are turned into new weapons training centers, and more and more of our people are pulled into the US military, until we have the highest rate of enlistment of any population in North America. They still test weapons on our lands, and take over our lands for more military actions.
Gun-barrel diplomacy is Canadian Premier Stephen Harper’s full-scale assault on Native resources, by starving communities. Gun-barrel diplomacy is when your land is occupied by multinational corporations that want to frack your territory for oil to export to, well, the United States or China, and the Canadian government sends paramilitary riot police into a small community, or stands by and watches as supermilitarized security forces protect multinational energy corporations.
Gun-barrel diplomacy leaves little room for talking. And so we find that often the front lines of indigenous struggles to protect our land are made up of women. That is because we have never had access to the privilege of big expense accounts of the federal government and corporations, and because, by and large, someone is still needed to look after our families and children—in the face of heartbreak, and in the face of colonization, the face of an all-out war that destabilizes our Native men. Now, this is a story about some of that process, but it is also a story of why our resistance as Native women is so strong.
Canada has demonised us. We “lost” our land, we “lost” our language, we “lost” our heritage. We are these rambunctious, crazy people who just “lose” stuff … that is not what happened, and that is not what is happening …
—Frank Molley, Mi’kmaq First Nation
In the colonial to neocolonial alchemy, gold changes to scrap metal, and food to poison. We have become painfully aware of the mortality of wealth which nature bestows and imperialism appropriates …
—Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, 1973
This is how it works. The verb is “underdeveloping.” That is what is happening to indigenous territories on an ongoing basis in North America. Tribal lands, resources, and people are being mined and destabilized, as water is contaminated, territories are impacted by mega projects, and wealth is appropriated.
The military takes indigenous lands and has taken them historically in the United States, the largest military power in the world, from Alaska to Hawaii—where a full third of the state is held by the US military, and more expansions for the so-called “Pacific Theater” are under way. Alaska alone has seven hundred used military defense sites, toxic sites that tell a story of the Cold War, and every other war since. The levels of radioactive and persistent organic pollutants in the environment impact people who are dependent on the land for their subsistence way of life.
Elsewhere, the Barrière Lake Algonquins see an estimated $100 million in revenues extracted every year from their territory in the form of logging, hydroelectric dams, and recreational hunting and fishing. The First Nation itself lives in seemingly third world conditions. A diesel generator provides power, very few jobs are available, and families live in dilapidated bungalows. These are not the lifestyles of a community with a $100 million economy in its backyard.
The six hundred Canadian First Nations have provided a lion’s share of those resources. From oil and gas in Alberta to uranium in Saskatchewan, mega dam projects in Quebec, Labrador, and Manitoba, and old and new mines in Ontario. Not to mention the trees—there used to be a lot more in Canada, but now there are more stumps, fewer trees, and the money has not gone to Native communities.
The same thing has been happening in the United States.
One-third of all uranium, two-thirds of all western coal, four of the ten largest coal strip mines in the country, vast dam projects, and land seizure: all of this means a transfer of wealth and a destabilizing of traditional economics and communities. In turn, we are the poorest postal codes in both countries and lack basic infrastructure. About 14 percent of reservation households are without electricity, ten times the national rate.
Energy distribution systems on rural reservations are extremely vulnerable to extended power outages during winter storms, threatening the lives of reservation residents. Reservation communities are at a statistically greater risk from extreme-weather-related mortality nationwide, especially from cold, heat, and drought associated with a rapidly changing climate. For instance, Debbie Dogskin, a Lakota woman on the Standing Rock Reservation, froze to death in February 2014 because she couldn’t pay her skyrocketing propane bills. Her propane ran out.
Ironically, she lived about a hundred miles from the Bakken oil fields, where they flare off so much gas that they light up the night sky. They have so much. Reservations need more than two hundred thousand new houses, and there is no money for them. And then there is the special case of Pine Ridge, the largest Lakota reservation, and the poster child of those who want to talk about how horrible the conditions of Native people are.
At Pine Ridge, 97 percent of the people live below the federal poverty line. The unemployment rate vacillates from 85 to 95 percent on the reservation. At least 60 percent of the homes are severely substandard, without water, electricity, adequate insulation, or sewage systems. It is hard to manage in these conditions in a first world country. And it causes stress to people.
Add to this the proposition of man camps and the degradation and victimization of Native women with the energy boom. That is why we resist them. They have no consent, either for our bodies or for our ecosystems. It is no stretch to say that this predator economics targets our lands, and our very bodies.
There is the physical destruction of peoples. In the United States, an epidemic of diabetes wreaks havoc on most tribal communities, with up to one-third of the population afflicted with the disease. Translate that into immense health costs and overall destabilization as people in the prime of their lives increasingly become impacted by a crippling disease. The physical destruction of the peoples as either a systematic or a secondary impact of an economics that views Native lives as external to their cost-benefit equations doesn’t stop there.
There are some communities, in fact, where the environment has become so polluted that women will be the future leaders of those communities simply because there will no longer be enough men born. One such community is Aamjiwnaang, an Anishinaabe community on the north shore of the Great Lakes. This community has chemical plants on its land. In the spring of 2013, at Aamjiwnaang, the Ojibwe blockaded the tracks of that plant. These are tracks that are full of chemical trains from some of the sixty-two industrial plants in what the Canadian government calls Chemical Valley. The Aamjiwnaang people would like to call it home, but they have a few quarrels with toxic levels of pollution in their houses. “If the Prime Minister will not listen to our words, perhaps he’ll pay attention to our actions,” Chief Chris Plain explained to the media at the takeover. A 2009 Men’s Health magazine article is entitled “The Lost Boys of Aamjiwnaang” because the Ojibwe Reserve of Aamjiwnaang has few boys. Put it this way: in a normal society, there are about 105 boys born for every 100 girls; that has been the ratio for a thousand years or so. However, at Aamjiwnaang, things are different: between 1993 and 2003, there were two girls born for every boy to the tribal community, one of the steepest declines ever recorded in birth-gender ratio. As one reporter notes,
These tribal lands have become a kind of petri dish for industrial pollutants. And in this vast, real-time experiment, the children of Aamjiwnaang (AHM-ju-nun) are the lab rats. I might have written “boys of Aamjiwnaang,” but actually, there are a lot fewer of them around to experiment on …
This trend is international, particularly in more industrialized countries, and the odd statistics at Aamjiwnaang are indicative of larger trends. The rail line, known as the St. Clair spur, carries CN (Canadian National Railway Company) and CSX trains to several large industries in Sarnia’s Chemical Valley. Usually four or five trains a day move through, all of them full of chemicals. The Ojibwe have endured a constant dose of chemicals for twenty-five years, and are concerned about its health impact. They are also concerned about proposals to move tar sands oil through their community in a preexisting pipeline, known as Enbridge Line Nine.
There are places that are still beautiful, and these places deserve to live. There are many of them, as indigenous territories have largely been remote. An overlay, for instance, of biodiversity and cultural diversity means that there is a map that illustrates that indigenous territories are ecologically diverse and teeming with life—our human lives, and the lives of our relatives (whether they have wings, fins, roots, or paws). That is the balance that has been preserved by careful and mindful living.
That is not the balance of the predator economics of industrial society.
“When you destroy the earth, you destroy yourself,” Melina Laboucan-Massimo explained to a reporter. “This is the common thread in indigenous thinking all over the world.” Melina is from a village that has been inundated with oil spill, and is one of many young women who have voiced opposition to the destruction of the land and water for the benefit of profiting corporations.
The Cree call the vast, pine-covered region niyanan askiy, “our land.” The Lubicon Cree, and the lands they represent, were left out of the treaty agreements made more than two hundred years ago when white settlers first carved and divided the land. Their rights to their traditional lands are still unrecognized, which means that they don’t have the right to protect their lands from the tar sands extraction that has devastated their territory over the past four decades.
In her 2012 testimony before the US Congress, Laboucan-Massimo described the devastation to her family’s land, which now is dotted with more than 2,600 oil and gas wells.
What I saw was a landscape forever changed by oil that had consumed a vast stretch of the traditional territory where my family had hunted, trapped, and picked berries and medicines for generations.
The Cree and Déné people, who have lived with their traditional territories for millennium, have had over 80 percent of it made inaccessible due to tar sands expansion. Although billions of dollars of investment and resources have passed through their lands, what trickles down has been overall devastation, while corporations like Suncor and others have been emboldened in their unaccountability by the Harper government, which has, like previous governments, sanctioned a full assault on the Athabasca River system.
Researchers have found that high levels of toxic pollutants in Alberta’s Athabasca River system are linked to oil sands mining and a drastically increased cancer incidence in Fort Chipewyan. Then there’s what happens at the other end. The most notorious of pipeline proposals from the tar sands is the Keystone XL. “It poses a threat to our sacred water, and the product is coming from the tar sands, and our tribes oppose tar sands mining,” Debra White Plume, an Oglala leader, told the press. White Plume’s family, and many others, have opposed the Keystone XL pipeline, along with a myriad of uranium mining projects proposed for the Paha Sapa, the Black Hills.
All of our tribes have taken action to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline. Members from the seven tribes of the Lakota Nation, along with tribal members and tribes in Idaho, Oklahoma, Montana, Nebraska and Oregon, are prepared to stop construction of the pipeline.
In October 2013, the Lakota rode some of the proposed pipeline route in a set of three spiritual rides organized by grassroots and national organizations, including Honor the Earth, Owe Aku, and 350.org. The routes covered territory between Wanblee on the Pine Ridge Reservation and Takini on the Cheyenne River Reservation, in a spiritual ride to honor the water and counter the oil. This ride was one of three rides (the other two were Minnesota-based pipeline rides on the Alberta Clipper and proposed Sandpiper route for fracked oil). The Lakota will ride again, and the Anishinaabe will stand with them, and with our Déné and Cree relatives.
The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty is the treaty between the United States and the Lakota Nation. Oceti Sakowin treaty territory is overlapped by Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska. These lands and that treaty are sacred to the Lakota; across Indian country, tribal leaders and non-Indians are demanding that those treaties be recognized as the law of the land, since they are affirmed in the US Constitution. At one of several summits of the Lakota and their allies, they reaffirmed their opposition to the black snake, the fat-taker’s pipeline—also known as the Keystone XL pipeline, a project intended to benefit oil companies, not people or the planet.
Gary Dorr, from the Nez Perce Tribe in Idaho, talked about opposition to the pipeline and his tribe’s legal position on the tar sands. The Nez Perce Tribe has already used its treaty rights to block the transport of so-called megaloads of mining equipment headed to Alberta’s tar sands through its territory. The tribe launched blockades and won a court battle to prevent shipments from traversing its lands. At the nearby Umatilla Reservation, people have also been arrested for blocking these loads.
That battle, about whether the megaloads can go north to feed the tar sands industrial complex, or the oil can come south, is raging in the northern plains. White Plume stated,
This whole area of the Great Plains was retained by the Lakota in the Ft. Laramie Treaty with the United States. As far as our people are concerned, that treaty is still the law. We look at this area as ancestral, as sacred, and as ours to defend. The KXL skirts actual, federally recognized reservation boundaries, but it is in our treaty territory and it is crossing our surface water and the Ogallala Aquifer.
What has been revealed recently is that TransCanada needs to build part of its infrastructure, which means a transmission line and power station through the lands of the Kul Wicasa, Lower Brulé, South Dakota, and the Sicangu at Rosebud, South Dakota. Those power lines are part of its infrastructure, and these two bands of the Lakota Nation oppose tar sands, oppose the Keystone XL, and are refusing to comply with the development of the Keystone XL infrastructure. So that’s about the latest thing that’s happening right now with our people.
Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist.
Opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline has many faces, from ranchers in Nebraska and Texas who reject eminent domain takings of their land for a pipeline right-of-way, to the Lakota Nation, which walked out of State Department meetings in a show of firm opposition to the pipeline. All of them are facing a pipeline owned by TransCanada, a Canadian corporation.
In this part of the land it’s just recently been spoken about in different reports from the federal government, and one report talks about parts of Mother Earth that America and other capitalist thinkers refer to as resources. They look at Mother Earth as a warehouse of resources for them to extract—gas, oil, and uranium. This federal government report was published recently and says $1 trillion worth of extractable resources are in Red Nations lands. So in looking at the long run, there will come a time when fat-taker will be knocking at your door, wanting your gas, oil, or uranium. Without skills to defend yourself, that’s going to be hard times. We’ve seen hard times come like that to many Red Nations.
Our land base is very large here, and from here to our nearest Lakota relative is an hour and a half, and that’s the Sicangu on the Rosebud Reservation. It’s about four hours to the four bands on the Cheyenne River Reservation. So the distances between our homelands are great—hours and hours of travel. To protect ourselves, every community needs this training just because of the distance involved between us. Debra White Plume says:
As a Lakota woman, I do not see a division between myself and the environment. That’s a concept I can’t even comprehend, and that’s how I feel toward the land and the water. In this area, the whooping crane, the fox, and many relatives where they live, their communities of free range, are going to be affected by this pipeline. We speak for them and for the Standing Silent Nation—the plants.
We know that on five hundred feet on each side of the pipeline, no trees are going to be allowed to grow. They’re going to cut every tree in their path for all of those thousands of miles. They won’t be allowed to grow back to protect the pipeline. That’s part of their security, and that’s criminal.
It’s criminal to impact an ecosystem, not only by the possibility of contaminating water, but by what’s actually in the Keystone XL—tar sands. The water wastage has damaged, maybe beyond repair, the ecosystem of the northern Athabasca River basin, as well as the boreal forest. As you look at the destruction already caused by the tar sands oil mine and now by this Keystone XL pipeline, we also have to look at it in terms of how it impacts all of life. To us it’s an attack against life. That’s how I see it.
We are here. And we’re not going anywhere. That’s what I will say about indigenous women. We are also connected to the Earth in a way that the fat-taker, the Wasichu, the corporate, predator economy is not, and will never be. That is because we understand our relationship and honor our mother. We understand that what corporations would do to the Earth is what corporations and armies have done to our women, and we give no consent. At the same time, we are visioning and creating the world we wish to live in, and we will live in. We are in the midst of work to restore local food systems, and restore and strengthen health, housing, and energy systems in our indigenous communities. And we are working at the level of policy for the creation of laws that protect water, seeds, and indeed, the rights of Mother Earth. That is what we will need—not only our strong and entrenched resistance, but the creative power of humans, of unfettered and unencumbered women, children, and men. That is how we will survive.
1. Canadian Press, “Supreme Court Won’t Hear Appeal in Congo Massacre Case,” CBC News, November 1, 2012, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/supreme-court-won-t-hear-appeal-in-congo-massacre-case-1.1297191.
2. KAIROS, “Congolese Massacre Victims Denied Justice in Anvil Mining Lawsuit,” KAIROS: Canadian Ecumenical Justice Initiatives, January 16, 2013, www.kairoscanada.org/sustainability/congolese-massacre-victims-denied-justice-in-anvil-mining-lawsuit/.