Sharing a border with Ecuador and Peru, the southern Colombian department of Putumayo takes its name from the Quechua term for “gushing river.” For some, its landscapes are a sacred doorway to the Amazon rainforest, a world unfathomably greater than the human. For others, however, this land looks more like oilfields and military bases, optimized waterflood assets and strategic trafficking corridors. This difference in worldview is at the heart of peacebuilding in Putumayo and the Indigenous struggle to reclaim ancestral territories across the Amazon basin.
The U.S. government says there has been no doubt that it intends to proceed with a land exchange in Arizona for a planned multibillion-dollar copper mine, telling the U.S. Supreme Court that its recent notice of publication of a final environmental impact statement for the project does not constitute urgent review.
There is nothing about the 60-day notice, which was filed in an Arizona federal court and published in the Federal Register on April 17, that supports claims by the Apache Stronghold that there may have been some uncertainty about the federal government’s intent to move forward with the land transfer, the government told the high court in a Monday letter.
Long before the large-scale Earth Day protests on April 22, 1970 – often credited with spurring significant environmental protection legislation – Native Americans stewarded the environment. As sovereign nations, Native Americans have been able to protect land, water and air, including well beyond their own boundaries.
Their actions laid the groundwork for modern federal law and policy, including national legislation aimed at reducing pollution. Now the Trump administration is seeking to weaken some of those limits and eliminate programs aimed at improving the environments in which marginalized people live and work.
Tongan community leaders and artists in New Zealand have criticised the Treaty Principles Bill while highlighting the ongoing impact of colonisation in Aotearoa and the Pacific.
Oral submissions continued this week for the public to voice their view on the controversial proposed bill, which aims to redefine the legal framework of the nation’s founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.
Aotearoa Tongan Response Group member Pakilau Manase Lua echoed words from the Waitangi Day commemorations earlier this month.
“The Treaty of Waitangi Principles Bill and its champions and enablers represent the spirit of the coloniser,” he said.
Pakilau said New Zealand’s history included forcible takeovers of Sāmoa, Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau.
“The New Zealand government, or the Crown, has shown time and again that it has a pattern of trampling on the mana and sovereignty of indigenous peoples, not just here in Aotearoa, but also in the Pacific region.”
Poet Karlo Mila spoke as part of a submission by a collective of artists, Mana Moana,
“Have you ever paused to wonder why we speak English here, half a world away from England? It’s a global history of Christian white supremacy, who, with apostolic authority, ordained the doctrine of discovery to create a new world order,” she said.
“Yes, this is where the ‘new’ in New Zealand comes from, invasion for advantage and profit, presenting itself as progress, as civilising, as salvation, as enlightenment itself — the greatest gaslighting feat of history.”
Bill used as political weapon
She argued that the bill was being used as a political weapon, and government rhetoric was causing division.
“We watch political parties sow seeds of disunity using disingenuous history, harnessing hate speech and the haka of destiny, scapegoating ‘vulnerable enemies’ . . . Yes, for us, it’s a forest fire out there, and brown bodies are moving political targets, every inflammatory word finding kindling in kindred racists.”
Pakilau said that because Tonga had never been formally colonised, Tongans had a unique view of the unfolding situation.
“We know what sovereignty tastes like, we know what it smells like and feels like, especially when it’s trampled on.
“Ask the American Samoans, who provide more soldiers per capita than any state of America to join the US Army, but are not allowed to vote for the country they are prepared to die for.
“Ask the mighty 28th Maori Battalion, who field Marshal Erwin Rommel famously said, ‘Give me the Māori Battalion and I will rule the world’, they bled and died for a country that denied them the very rights promised under the Treaty.
“The Treaty of Waitangi Bill is essentially threatening to do the same thing again, it is re-traumatising Māori and opening old wounds.”
A vision for the future Mila, who also has European and Sāmoan ancestry, said the answer to how to proceed was in the Treaty’s Indigenous text.
“The answer is Te Tiriti, not separatist exclusion. It’s the fair terms of inclusion, an ancestral strategy for harmony, a covenant of cooperation. It’s how we live ethically on a land that was never ceded.”
Aotearoa Tongan Response Group chair Anahila Kanongata’a said Tongans were Tangata Tiriti (people of the Treaty), and the bill denigrated the rights of Māori as Tangata Whenua (people of the land).
“How many times has the Crown breached the Treaty? Too, too many times.
“What this bill is attempting to do is retrospectively annul those breaches by extinguishing Māori sovereignty or tino rangatiritanga over their own affairs, as promised to them in their Tiriti, the Te Reo Māori text.”
Kanongata’a called on the Crown to rescind the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, honour Te Tiriti, and issue a formal apology to Māori, similar to what had been done for the Dawn Raids.
Hundreds gather at Treaty Grounds for the annual Waitangi Day dawn service. Image: PMN Digital/Joseph Safiti
“As a former member of Parliament, I am proud of the fact that an apology was made for the way our people were treated during the Dawn Raids.
“We were directly affected, yes, it was painful and most of our loved ones never got to see or hear the apology, but imagine the pain Māori must feel to be essentially dispossessed, disempowered and effectively disowned of their sovereignty on their own lands.”
The bill’s architect, Act Party leader David Seymour, sayid the nationwide discussion on Treaty principles was crucial for future generations.
“In a democracy, the citizens are always ready to decide the future. That’s how it works.”
Indonesia will offer amnesty to West Papuans who have contested Jakarta’s sovereignty over the Melanesian region resulting in conflicts and clashes with law enforcement agencies, says Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape.
He arrived in Port Moresby on Monday night from Indonesia where he attended the inauguration of President Prabowo Subianto last Sunday.
During his bilateral discussions with the Indonesian President, Marape said Prabowo was “quite frank and open” about the West Papua independence issue.
“This is the first time for me to see openness on West Papua and while it is an Indonesian sovereignty matter, my advice was to give respect to land and their [West Papuans] cultural heritage.
“I commend the offer on amnesty and Papua New Guinea will continue to respect Indonesia’s sovereignty,” Marape said.
“The President also offered a pledge for higher autonomy and a commitment to keep on working on the need for more economic activities and development that the former president [Joko Widodo] has started for West Papua.”
While emphasising that Papua New Guinea had no right to debate Indonesia’s internal sovereignty issues, Marape welcomed that country’s recognition of the West Papuan people, their culture and heritage.
Expanding trade, investment
Marape also reaffirmed his intention to work with Prabowo in expanding trade and investment, especially in business-to-business and people-to-people relations with Indonesia.
The exponential growth of Indonesia’s economy currently sits at nearly US$1.5 trillion (about K5 trillion), with the country aggressively pushing toward First World nation status by 2045.
Papua New Guinea was among nations allocated time for a bilateral meeting with President Subianto after the inauguration.
There is an important story to be told behind the story Aotearoa New Zealand’s mainstream media has been reporting on in Kanaky New Caledonia. Beyond the efforts to evacuate New Zealanders lies a struggle for indigenous sovereignty and self-determination we here in Aotearoa can relate to.
Aotearoa is part of a whānau of Pacific nations, interconnected by Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa. The history of Aotearoa is intricately woven into the broader history of the Pacific, where cultural interactions have shaped a rich tapestry over centuries.
The whakapapa connections between tangata whenua and tagata moana inform my political stance and commitment to indigenous rights throughout the Pacific. What happens in one part of the South Pacific ripples across to all of us that call the Pacific Ocean home.
Since the late 1980s the Kanak independence movement showed itself to be consistently engaging with the Accords with Paris process in their struggle for self-determination.
The Nouméa Accord set out a framework for transferring power to the people of New Caledonia, through a series of referenda. It was only after France moved to unilaterally break with the accords and declare independence off the table that the country returned to a state of unrest.
Civil unrest in and around the capital Nouméa which has continued for two weeks, was prompted by Kanak anger over Paris changing the constitution to open up electoral rolls in its “overseas territory” in a way that effectively dilutes the voting power of the indigenous people.
Coming after the confused end of the Nouméa Accord in 2021, which left New Caledonia’s self-determination path clouded with uncertainty, it was inevitable that there would be trouble.
Flew halfway across world
That France’s President Emmanuel Macron flew across the world to Noumea last week for one day of talks in a bid to end the civil unrest underlines the seriousness of the crisis.
But while the deployment of more French security forces to the territory may have succeeded in quelling the worst of the unrest for now, Macron’s visit was unsuccessful because he failed to commit to pulling back on the electoral changes or to signal a meaningful way forward on independence for New Caledonia.
Green MP Teanau Tuiono (left) with organiser Ena Manuireva at the Mā’ohi Lives Matter solidarity rally at Auckland University of Technology in 2021. Image: David Robie/APR
Paris’ tone-deafness to the Kanaks’ concerns was evident in its refusal to postpone the last of the three referendums under the Nouméa Accord during the pandemic, when the indigenous Melanesians boycotted the poll because it was a time of mourning in their communities. Kanaks consider that last referendum to have no legitimacy.
But Macron’s government has simply cast aside the accord process to move ahead unilaterally with a new statute for New Caledonia.
As the Kanaky Aotearoa Solidarity group said in a letter to the French Ambassador in Wellington this week, “it is regrettable that France’s decision to obstruct the legitimate aspirations of the Kanak people to their right to self-determination has led to such destruction and loss of life”.
Why should New Zealand care about the crisis? New Caledonia is practically Aotearoa’s next door neighbour — a three-hour flight from Auckland. Natural disasters in the Pacific such as cyclones remind us fairly regularly how our country has a leading role to play in the region.
But we can’t take this role for granted, nor choose to look the other way because our “ally“ France has it under control. And we certainly shouldn’t ignore the roots of a crisis in a neighbouring territory where frustrations have boiled over in a pattern that’s not unusual in the Pacific Islands region, and especially Melanesia.
There is an urgent need for regional assistance to drive reconciliation. The Pacific Islands Forum, as the premier regional organisation, must move beyond words and take concrete actions to support the Kanak people.
Biketawa Declaration provides a mechanism
The forum’s Biketawa Declaration provides a mechanism for regional responses to crisis management and conflict resolution. The New Caledonian crisis surely qualifies, although France would be uncomfortable with any forum intervention.
But acting in good faith as a member of the regional family is what Paris signed up to when its territories in the Pacific were granted full forum membership.
Why is a European nation like France still holding on to its colonial possessions in the Pacific? Kanaky New Caledonia, Maohi Nui French Polynesia, and Wallis & Futuna are on the UN list of non-self-governing territories for whom decolonisation is incomplete.
However, in the case of Kanaky, Paris’ determination to hold on is partly due to a desire for global influence and is also, in no small way, linked to the fact that the territory has over 20 percent of the world’s known nickel reserves.
Failing to address the remnants of colonialism will continue to devastate lives and livelihoods across Oceania, as evidenced by the struggles in Bougainville, Māo’hi Nui, West Papua, and Guåhan.
New Zealand should be supportive of an efficient and orderly decolonisation process. We can’t rely on France alone to achieve this, especially as the unrest in New Caledonia is the inevitable result of years of political and social marginalisation of Kanak people.
The struggle of indigenous Kanaks in New Caledonia is part of a broader movement for self-determination and anti-colonialism across the Pacific. By supporting the Kanak people’s self-determination, we honour our shared history and whakapapa connections, advocating for a future where indigenous rights and aspirations are respected and upheld.
Kanaky Au Pouvoir.
Teanau Tuiono is a Green Party MP in Aotearoa New Zealand and its spokesperson for Pasifika peoples. This article was first published by The Press and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
This story was originally published at Prism. As part of a Prism series last year, we heard from Indigenous leaders, land stewards, scholars, and practitioners of Traditional Ecological Knowledge to learn how the return of Indigenous land is integral to mitigating climate change. The cornerstone of these articles was the ongoing battle to restore the Black Hills (also known as Mount Rushmore) to…
The Dilkon Medical Center, a sprawling, $128 million facility on the Navajo Nation in Arizona, was completed a year ago. With an emergency room, pharmacy and housing for more than 100 staff members, the new hospital was cause for celebration in a community that has to travel long distances for all but the most basic health care. But there hasn’t been enough clean water to fill a large tank that…
The state of Alaska has finally, officially recognized nearly 230 tribes within the state, a move that many hope will improve relations between governments and people.
Alaska governor Mike Dunleavy signed House Bill 123, the Alaska Tribal Recognition Act, on Thursday, in which the state recognizes 229 tribes. The tribes already had federal recognition.
“House Bill 123 is nothing more or less than a statutory codification of a simple truth: that tribes exist in Alaska,” said bill sponsor Rep. Tiffany Zulkowsky, Yup’ik. “Tribes have quietly been doing excellent work as government in its most local form, and stewarding this land we now know as Alaska since time immemorial.”
The new law offers acceptance and recognition of tribes. How much more it does is unclear but Alaska Natives have high hopes.
Some see it as a basis for strong partnerships between tribes and the state of Alaska similar to those between tribes and the federal government. Others have said they hope it signals the end of state lawsuits challenging tribal sovereignty.
Zulkowsky said she’s commonly asked: What’s the point of statutory recognition if it doesn’t legally or structurally change state policy related to tribes?
Zulkowsky said Alaska is home to roughly half of the federally recognized tribes in the country. However, the state has had a long hostile and tenuous legal relationship with its tribal governments. Yet the state leans on its tribes and tribal partners to provide a myriad of essential services to Alaskans, from public safety and transportation to healthcare, economic development and education, she said.
“But how can the state talk about expanding relationships with tribes when it has never taken the most fundamental basic step by recognizing them in our legal code?,” Zulkowsky said. “This is not just about an opportunity to work more closely in the future. It’s an important first step towards healing and reconciling our past.”
Federal-Indian law lays out federal trust responsibilities to support tribal self-government and economic prosperity. In contrast, Alaska’s recognition act explicitly states it does not create a trust relationship between the state and tribes.
The Alaska Tribal Recognition Act acknowledges that the history of tribes in the Alaskan region predates both the United States and any territorial claims to land in the state.
“Indigenous people have inhabited land in the state for multiple millennia, since time immemorial or before mankind marked the passage of time,” the act states.“It is the intent of the legislature to …acknowledge through formal recognition the federally recognized tribes in the state. Passage of this Act is nothing more or less than a recognition of tribes’ unique role in the state’s past, present, and future.”
More than 100 people showed up to celebrate its signing at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage. Native dignitaries such as Native settlement act leaders Emil Notti and Willie Hensley, Alaska Federation of Natives president Julie Kitka, and state and corporate officials turned out for speeches and discussions of the recognition act.
Sophie Minich, Athabascan, is President and CEO of CIRI, the for-profit regional Alaska Native corporation for the Cook Inlet region in South Central Alaska. She said her mother, who lost her own mother at a young age, was put in the BIA system, which affected her self-identity.
“My mother was not proud to be Alaska Native and that breaks my heart,” Minnick said.
However, state recognition of tribes, Minnick said, likely would have changed that.
“Because days like today, if my mother were alive, I think my mom would rejoice,” she said. “She’d be proud again, and she would just be full of pride to stand up here and say, ‘I’m Alaska Native. I’m Athabaskan. I am from a tribe. I’m an ANCSA (Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act) shareholder. And I’m a person.’”
Minnick expressed thanks to everyone who worked to get the bill signed. “And Alaska: welcome to a new day, a new day for unity,” she said.
Former Rep. Bryce Edgmon is an Aleut descendent, the first Alaska Native to hold the post of House Speaker, from 2019 to 2021. He said just a few years ago tribes were the “boogeyman.” He said the introduction of even non-binding resolutions that mentioned tribes triggered the spread of anti-tribal misinformation.
Richard Chalyee Éesh Peterson is Tlingit, Haida, and Unangan. He’s president and CEO of the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. He too remembers when ‘tribe’ was a dirty word.
He said he was 19 when he began serving as mayor and tribal president for his village. He’s now 36.
“It was the tribe in our village that was powerful, that had money, that was getting things done. I had to wear my ‘mayor hat’ to get any recognition from the state, to get money from the state to get money into those projects,” he said.
Peterson said if he told legislators the tribe was the one making the infrastructure projects happen, “it just went silent. So I quickly learned if I’m going to be successful for my community, I’m going to have to stop saying the word ‘tribe,’ and that really bothered me.”
Those kinds of issues may be what Senate President Peter Miccice, a Republican from Kenai in South Central Alaska, had in mind when he thanked bill sponsor Rep. Tiffany Zulkowski for bringing the bill forward.
He said he did it “so that we can once and for all start the mending process of actually hundreds of years of not only unfair treatment but just the attitude that Alaska Natives were far less important, less deserving, less respected, deserve less respect for your culture and your subsistence way of life and just who you are as a people, the years of the boarding schools and countless things that occurred that were just simply unacceptable. This begins that process.”
Rhonda Pitka, Koyukon Athabascan and Inupiaq, is First Chief at Beaver Village Council and vice chair of the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments.
She said tribes and the state have a lot of work before them.
“I think a series of meetings need to take place to start establishing what does this look like? It looks vastly different than the one (relationship) with the federal government that we have.”
When Pitka outlined the ways tribes and the state could cooperate to both their benefit, she described features tribes share with the federal government.
First up, said Pitka, government-to-government consultation: “We need to start forming relations, settling with our legislators, their staff and then heads of agencies like we already do with the federal government.”
Next up: compacting and contracting with tribes to provide services to their citizens. “And I really think having the policies and protocols in place early is going to be really critical,” Pitka said. “I think a lot of tribal governments already have that capability because of other relationships. So we’ll be doing this mostly just educating the state at this point, and making sure that they’re on the same page with us.”
That cooperation can lead to increased federal funding in areas such as health, education, public safety and infrastructure such as broadband, said Peterson and other tribal leaders.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, also signed a bill authorizing the state to compact with tribes to operate schools, which supports self determination. Sponsor Rep. Gary Stevens of Kodiak said it will also encourage the teaching of Native languages and cultures.
The Tribal Recognition Act is much like a ballot initiative that was going to get put on the ballot in November. The Lt. Governor announced the ballot measure is nullified as being substantially similar to the law passed by the legislature.
Jen Deerinwater demonstrates the links between tribal sovereignty and what it means to achieve full reproductive justice.
This piece is published as part of We Organize to Change Everything, a collaboration between acclaimed socialist feminist magazine Lux and Verso. We Organize to Change Everything examines the fight for abortion from the 1970s to the present, bringing together the voices of clinic defenders, health care providers, and the networks of feminist activists helping pregnant people obtain care from Mississippi to Mexico. Contributors consider the intimate connection of abortion rights to forced sterilization and structural racism, incarceration and criminalization, Indigenous people’s sovereignty, transgender rights, and the growing threat of a white supremacist far right. Looking outside of the US to the Americas, the collection shows how US activists can draw inspiration, lessons, and strategy from the dynamic feminist movement across Central and South America.
Most importantly, this collection describes what a fighting movement for reproductive justice could look like — one that fights for the right to parent as we wish or not parent at all, and rejects the criminalization of anyone’s body.
I’ve supported abortion since I was ten years old. I noticed the adults that mistreated girls and womxn were overwhelmingly antiabortion, and I didn’t want to be like them. That’s no surprise, given that my youngest years were spent in a small town in Tulsa County on the now reestablished reservation of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Collinsville was a small, two-stoplight kind of town with a Main Street similar to many others I’ve seen across the so-called United States.[1] It’s an ultra-conservative, Trump-loving part of the country with many evangelical Christians and a long history of attempting to legislate the bodies and lives of those with wombs.
My first personal encounter with this came at fourteen years old after my boyfriend raped me. When my period was late, I was terrified that I could be pregnant. I didn’t know what I would do, but having a baby wasn’t an option. A friend’s mom bought a pregnancy test for me because I was worried, given how small my town was, that everyone would know if I bought one myself.
I had recently been hospitalized for attempting suicide and I came from a divorced family, which meant some people in this small town looked down on me. I also saw the way rape survivors were treated in the media: William Kennedy Smith, member of the famous Kennedy family, had been on trial for rape only a few years earlier and been rapidly acquitted of all charges, despite the testimony of multiple women and a rape kit. The survivor was first painted as a liar and then as a slut who got what she deserved. Given that I was a mixed Native child from a “broken home,” and had just been in a mental hospital, I didn’t think anyone would believe me, nor care. Thankfully my period returned and I didn’t have to worry about how I would access an abortion as a minor in rural Oklahoma — but that moment in time solidified my commitment to reproductive rights.
At fifteen, my step-dad accepted a new job in the dusty, cactus-spotted lands of Abilene, Texas. With a population of around 125,000, Abilene is the major urban area of this region of West Texas. Dallas is the nearest large city, roughly 180 miles away.
Abilene began as a stopping point for cattle drives and later became home to three private, ultra-conservative Christian colleges and Dyess Air Force Base. Sexual education, birth control, condoms, and abortion were not easily available, if at all. My high school sex ed consisted of our health teacher, a football coach as I recall, hanging a “True Love Waits” t-shirt on the chalk board. “True Love Waits” is the Baptist Church’s deeply misogynistic, anti-queer, and rape culture–oozing abstinence-only program that is fixated on female purity and virginity.
At my high school, I heard stories of unwanted pregnancies and secret trips to Planned Parenthood in Dallas or cases of or fears of contracting STIs. Thankfully, when I wanted hormonal birth control my mom made sure I had it, and being the research nerd that I am, I learned as much as I could about STIs, pregnancy, and prevention. Even if I had to steal them due to financial or privacy concerns, I always made sure I had condoms once I chose to become sexually active on my own terms.
I eventually escaped home and moved to the coasts. I grew, changed, and found a home of sorts in political movements, including the prochoice movement. I think this made it easier for me at twenty-six when my birth control failed and I became pregnant. I knew with unwavering certainty that I had a right to control my body and ultimately my life. Having that knowledge, though, didn’t make it easy.
I discussed the situation with my (by then) ex-boyfriend, and we were both in agreement with my decision to have an abortion. I would become part of the 25 percent of womxn in the United States who’ve had an abortion since Roe v. Wade became law in 1973. While my ex may have been prochoice and supported my decision to have an abortion, he only did so out of convenience for himself. He threw some cash my way and left me to deal with our problem on my own. He complained that I didn’t schedule the abortion at a time that was convenient for him. As if abortion was available on demand and it wasn’t my body going through it.
A friend went with me to Planned Parenthood, where we waited all day to receive the pills for the medical abortion, which I thought would be a less invasive and more private way to have an abortion. However, I didn’t fully understand that I was about to go through something akin to the process of giving birth. I was repeatedly instructed by medical staff to have someone with me, but no one explained why. I lied and said I wouldn’t be alone when I took the pills, because I was afraid I’d be denied an abortion. I couldn’t tell them that the father didn’t care enough to be with me. I was also struggling with the PTSD symptoms from what occurred when I was fourteen. I needed an abortion immediately and I would have said anything to get one.
Hours later, in the throes of extreme nausea and cramping, I wished he were with me. I didn’t want my ex back — he wasn’t a good person, nor someone that I would want to raise a child with — but I would have given anything to have him with me to get the glass of water I was too sick to get for myself. When I came to on my bathroom floor after passing out from the pain, I was utterly alone. He never called to see how I was after the abortion.
About a month later, I attended the annual protest that the Massachusetts-area affiliates of the National Organization for Women held to counter the Boston antiabortion protest. I thought I was prepared for the onslaught of demeaning, derogatory words that the antiabortion zealots use about people like me, but I wasn’t: a sign claiming abortion was manslaughter brought tears to my eyes. I dedicated my life to fighting for justice and a better world. Did these people not realize that I didn’t take having an abortion lightly and that I took every means necessary to prevent a pregnancy? Didn’t they realize that there was a (cis)man involved, and that the responsibility didn’t lie solely on my shoulders?
I was overcome by rage. Rage over the injustice of being called a murderer while my ex got off scot-free. He didn’t have to beg for a day off work, or go through hours of excruciating pain or weeks of bleeding. He would never be called a murderer, a slut, or have to fight for his right to control his body and destiny. He would never have to write an essay like this, and he would never feel enraged and frustrated over having to explain why he had an abortion. In a just world I wouldn’t owe anyone an explanation at all.
***
Despite my commitment to abortion rights, I didn’t see myself reflected in prochoice spaces. The people I was surrounded by were overwhelmingly white, hetero, able-bodied, ciswomen from middle-to-upper socioeconomic backgrounds. As I’m a multiply-disabled, bisexual, Native, Two-Spirit womxn these spaces often felt dismissive. Many of those people would feign concern over the privileged make-up of the prochoice movement, but wouldn’t do much to change it. I didn’t see the prochoice activists I met work in solidarity with oppressed people who were without abortion access, nor did I see their concern for those who lost their rights to parent entirely. Very few seemed to care that in the 1970s it is estimated that up to 50 percent of Native womb carriers were sterilized against their will by the Indian Health Service (IHS).
Created under the 1921 Snyder Act, IHS is a federally funded trust and treaty responsibility to provide healthcare for citizens and members of federally recognized tribal nations, which means our ancestors paid for this healthcare through the loss of their lives and lands. However, IHS has been used by the US government as a tool of genocide. The Claremore Indian Hospital in Oklahoma, where I went as a child, was notorious for forced sterilization. Stripping our womb-carriers of their ability to have children is the continuation of over five hundred years of misogynistic violence against Indigenous peoples, and an attack on tribal sovereignty and self-determination that uses our womxn as fodder. There are so very few of us left that it would take little to entirely eliminate us from the Earth.
Compounding the dire genocidal conditions that IHS’s sterilization caused is the reality that our children are continuing to be stolen from us and Native people are being denied the right to parent, which was exacerbated by Indian boarding schools. The boarding schools were created as part of a series of genocidal and white, Christian assimilationist policies known as “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Atrocious acts of torture, sexual and physical assault, and murder occurred at these schools. A recent report by the US Department of the Interior on the federally funded Indian boarding schools found there were 408 schools in thirty-seven states or the then-territories of Alaska and Hawai’i. Unmarked Native children’s gravesites have been found at fifty-three schools. The investigation is ongoing, and as has occurred in similar investigations in so-called Canada, more gravesites will surely be uncovered.
Native children have been singled out for adoption into white, Christian homes in the foster system as well, effectively taking them out of Indigenous communities. The theft of our children was so extreme that the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) became federal law in 1978. ICWA helps protect our Native children who are eligible for or enrolled in a federally recognized tribal nation from being adopted to overwhelmingly white, Christian homes. Before ICWA, 25 to 35 percent of all Native children were removed from their homes and 85 percent of them were placed outside their families and tribal nations even when safe homes with relatives were available.
Even with ICWA in place, many of our children are still stolen today, and our womb carriers’ rights to parent are still in question. Native people are up to four times more likely to have our children placed in foster care than non-Native people. Oklahoma, which has one of the largest Native populations in the US, reported in 2020 that Native children represented more than 35 percent of those in foster care, yet Native people only comprised 9 percent of the state’s population. It’s quite telling that many of those who want to overturn ICWA also want to overturn Roe, including Supreme Court justices Thomas, Alito, and Roberts (and most likely Kavanaugh and Coney Barret) — the idea, here, is a full-scale bid to control reproduction across the board. The Supreme Court will rule on ICWA in the 2022–23 session in Brackeen v. Haaland.
Not only has our right to have and parent our children been stolen from us, but so has our right to abortion. Roe didn’t grant abortions for all. Native people have a right to full healthcare at IHS, including reproductive healthcare, but under the Hyde Amendment abortions can’t be performed using federal funds except to save the life of the pregnant person or in cases of rape or incest. Despite this clause, though, abortion services are close to unavailable at IHS regardless of the circumstances: one study by Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center reported that between 1981–2001 IHS performed only twenty-five abortions, and that 85 percent of IHS facilities were noncompliant with IHS and Hyde Amendment regulations. Only 5 percent of IHS facilities provided abortion services onsite, and none of the IHS pharmacies kept Mifeprex (RU-486) for medical abortions. The study also found that IHS didn’t make referrals to outside abortion providers.
Because Native people are disproportionally more likely to live in poverty and to be disabled, many of us access our health care through Medicare or Medicaid, also subject to the Hyde Amendment. However, states can opt, and some do, to use some of their funds to pay for abortion for Medicaid recipients. And yet, even with three forms of federally funded health care supposedly available to me I have struggled to access even the most basic of reproductive health care. Most recently, I was a year late in replacing my IUD and suffered unnecessary pain as a result, because there weren’t enough providers that would accept Medicare and Medicaid to perform the simple procedure. There are also no IHS facilities in Washington, DC, where I now live, despite the agency being headquartered only seventeen miles away.
Compounding this reality is that thirty states, as well as the District of Columbia, have laws allowing the forced sterilization of disabled people. The 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell allows these eugenicist policies, but outside of the disability community this issue is rarely discussed in prochoice or even many reproductive justice spaces. This isn’t merely outdated legislation still on the books: in 2019 Iowa and Nevada codified the forced sterilization of disabled people.
All it would take is the stroke of a judge’s pen and I could legally be sterilized against my will. With the exception of North Carolina and Alaska, which have made forced sterilization of disabled people illegal, the law is unclear in the other seventeen states, so sterilizations might occur under guardianships. Guardianships, which garnered media attention when Britney Spears spoke of being forced to use long-acting birth control, is another way the system controls disabled people’s reproductive rights, and there are currently only three states that have banned the forced sterilization of disabled children.
To add insult to injury, as a resident of Washington, DC, I can’t use my Medicaid to pay for abortion outside of the Hyde Amendment exceptions. Many DC residents and elected officials support Medicaid-funded abortions, but Congress overrules this with a yearly appropriations rider in the Financial Services and General Government subcommittee. DC isn’t a state, so Congress has ultimate say over most facets of local government, and we have no voting representation in Congress. In far too many ways, my rights to reproductive justice have been stripped from me.
***
Today I awoke to a message from my mom reading, “Welcome to Gilead. Under his eye.” She’s never been particularly politically active, but she was enraged over the latest Oklahoma abortion ban. As I write this, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt has just signed the most restrictive abortion ban in the country into law. HB4327 was co-written and sponsored by Oklahoma Rep. Wendi Stearman of Collinsville, the town where I grew up. Under this violent law, abortion is banned once fertilization has occurred except to save a pregnant person’s life during a “medical emergency” based on a life-endangering physical condition that could require specific medical tests to authenticate; or in case of a rape or incest that’s reported to the police. This law takes effect even while Roe still stands. It also allows individuals to sue abortion providers, clinics, and anyone else who has taken part in providing or helping someone to obtain an abortion.
The violence of this law is undeniable: when Stearman was asked if Oklahoma should be forced to financially provide for people forced to have children under this law, she said no. As reported in the Tulsa World, when Oklahoma Rep. Cindi Munson, a Democrat representing Oklahoma City, asked Stearman “If a young girl is raped by her uncle, she’s likely not going to go report to law enforcement … She’s not allowed seek an abortion under your bill, as I understand it. And you’re OK with that?” Stearman replied: “I am OK with that.”
Given an earlier law that banned abortion at six weeks, two of the four abortion clinics in Oklahoma had recently stopped offering the procedure; when HB4327 went into effect, they all stopped. There are also concerns that this bill could lead to IUDs being outlawed, especially as other states, like Missouri and Idaho, are actively working to ban IUDs, which the antiabortion zealots falsely claim is an “abortifacient” (IUDs prevent fertilization of an egg, but they also stop the implantation of a fertilized egg).
Tribal nations as a whole are also needlessly under attack by the antiabortion forces. Governor Stitt recently commented that he’s monitoring our tribal nations to ensure that we don’t offer legal abortions on our reservations. Simultaneously, Stitt is waging a war against Oklahoma tribes and our treaty rights, and a ruling by the Supreme Court has yet to be made on Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, a case that could undermine sovereignty on our lands.
The point of Governor Stitt’s comment wasn’t based on any actual evidence from tribal nations, some of which have large conservative Christian populations, but was rather an attack on tribal sovereignty — just as the Goldwater and Cato Institutes have no interest or business in Native children’s affairs but support the overturn of ICWA in order to further weaken tribal sovereignty. It’s a similar approach that the antiabortion movement has taken that brought us here: they slowly chipped away at Roe at the local level and through the accretion of lawsuit after lawsuit, with the support of nonprofit organizations and for-profits.
The crushing weight of colonialism and the various forms of institutional oppression it brought to these lands has often left me feeling alone and overwhelmed. After all, my personal history is intricately intertwined with violent attacks on womxn and on Indigenous and disabled people, and a continued effort to control and eradicate us. But just as our ancestors rose against our oppressors, we resist now. Organizations like Indigenous Women Rising, an Indigenous health education and advocacy organization, has an abortion fund for Indigenous and undocumented people. Disabled womxn and people were quick to organize to ensure that disability justice is prioritized in our calls for abortion access. Many 2LBTQIA+ people have repeatedly stated that the end of Roe isn’t simply a ciswomen’s issue, but it touches everyone who is assigned female at birth. The resistance to the overturn of Roe has been vast, and I’m hardly alone in this struggle. But until tribal sovereignty is the law of the land, I will never have full reproductive justice. The colonizer’s court will never bring sovereignty.
[1] “So-called” is often used by Indigenous people in the US and Canada as a way to acknowledge that the land is older than the colonizing nations that currently occupy it and belongs to tribal nations.
For the first time ever, the red, white and black colors of the Tulalip flag are soaring over every Marysville School District campus. Tulalip’s iconic orca was raised up at each elementary, middle school, high school, and even District headquarters during the week of November 17th.
In each instance, the 3 foot by 5 foot cloth signifying the Tulalip Tribes as a sovereign nation was raised by a proud student representative and young Tulalip culture bearer.
“About a decade ago, my coworker Ricky Belmont and I started asking the schools we work at to fly the Tulalip Tribes flag out of recognition for the tribe being a sovereign nation and to honor the treaty lands that schools are built upon,” explained Matt Remle, Indian Education Program Coordinator for Marysville School District.
On November 5, the Canadian oil company Enbridge announced that it plans to increase capacity on its pipeline system that connects a crude-oil storage hub in Oklahoma to the Texas Gulf Coast, now that the Line 3 pipeline linking Alberta and Wisconsin is complete. The Carrizo Comecrudo and other Indigenous groups in the area, along with the Indigenous Environmental Network, have pledged to protect Indigenous sacred sites and oppose future pipeline developments.
Increasing capacity may include building a new pipeline linking the Houston area to the Port of Corpus Christi, more than 200 miles away. In October, Enbridge acquired the Ingleside Energy Center in Corpus Christi, Texas, the largest crude-exporting hub in the U.S.
The Gitxsan have posted on Instagram: “Gitxsan Hereditary Chiefs evict MLA Nathan Cullen from Gitxsan Lax’yip [territory].”
Their post continues: “The NDP has failed to uphold good relations with our peoples, and due to the violence inflicted on Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan Wilp [house group] members, the NDP is no longer welcome on our territories.”
“Someone needs to be accountable for the violent actions inflicted upon our peoples and territories by the RCMP and Coastal GasLink.”
It concludes: “We do not believe these are simply renegade police actions following the rulings of a mere Provincial Court. We know that the feds and the province are guilty of trying to exterminate our way of life.”
Cullen was a federal NDP Member of Parliament from June 2004 to October 2019.
According to UAINE youth coordinator Kisha James, who is Aquinnah Wampanoag and Oglala Lakota and the granddaughter of Wamsutta Frank James, the founder of National Day of Mourning, “We Native people have no reason to celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims. We want to educate people so that they understand the stories we all learned in school about the first Thanksgiving are nothing but lies. Wampanoag and other Indigenous people have certainly not lived happily ever after since the arrival of the Pilgrims. To us, Thanksgiving is a Day of Mourning, because we remember the millions of our ancestors who were murdered by uninvited European colonists such as the Pilgrims. Today, we and many Indigenous people around the country say, ‘No Thanks, No Giving.’”
Shay Lynn Sampson is determined she won’t be telling her children what salmon used to taste like or what it was like to live close to their land. She is one of the Indigenous people preventing Coastal GasLink (CGL) from running a pipeline under Wedzin Kwa (Morice River), the pristine water source for the Wet’suwet’en and their close downstream allies, the Gitxsan.
Twenty-two-year-old Sampson spoke to me on November 8 from behind a blockade inside a “Tiny House,” purposely built with many other structures to shelter the people putting their bodies on the line to stop the project. Sampson is also the youth engagement coordinator for Indigenous Climate Action. This young Gitxsan woman is helping to ensure the Coastal GasLink pipeline never gets built.
Nicaragua has an election to choose their president and national assembly on November 7. According to polls, the Sandinista Front (FSLN) currently in government is expected to win the presidency and a majority of seats in the assembly.
At the same time, the Sandinista government is intensely disliked by Washington and there has been a steady stream of negative news and accusations.
One theme of accusations concerns the indigenous peoples. In October 2020, PBS Newshour broadcast an episode claiming the US is importing “conflict beef” from the indigenous regions of Nicaragua. This story relied on an Oakland Institute report which alleges rampant violence against indigenous communities and a complicit Nicaraguan government.
On Friday, Oct. 8, 2021, United States President Joe Biden issued a first-ever Proclamation for Indigenous Peoples’ Day. The first two sentences state:
“Since time immemorial, American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians have built vibrant and diverse cultures – safeguarding land, language, spirit, knowledge, and tradition across the generations. On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, our Nation celebrates the invaluable contributions and resilience of Indigenous peoples, recognizes their inherent sovereignty, and commits to honoring the Federal Government’s trust and treaty obligations to Tribal Nations.”
Right off the bat, that second sentence is an insult to our Nations. We never did call ourselves “tribes”. That is a moniker put on us by the United States in the first place. It was an easy way to NOT recognize us as the NATIONS we are.
It was also easier to force us to live under THEIR form of government, a Tribal Council form of government.
Cetan Sa Winyan, director of the American Indian Movement’s Indian Territory Oklahoma chapter, said all tribes — not just the four already petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court — should stand together against potential changes to the Indian Child Welfare Act in a case the court has been asked to review.
“They closed the boarding schools and opened up CPS (Child Protective Services), but it’s the same thing — they’re still coming in and taking our children,” Winyan said.
The ICWA was enacted in 1978 to help keep Indigenous children in Indigenous homes. In ICWA cases, the first preference for placement is that the child go to an extended family member, even if the relative is non-Native. Second preference is someone within the child’s tribe; third preference is another tribe.
Amid record hurricanes, wildfires and droughts, battles are being waged over the fate of the Earth. Many of those battles are being fought by Indigenous people, and by others whose relationship to life, land and one another compels them to push back against an extractive, death-making economy that renders people and ecosystems disposable. On the front lines of the struggle to halt construction of Enbridge’s new Line 3 pipeline — which would bring nearly a million barrels of tar sands per day from Alberta, Canada, to Superior, Wisconsin — Water Protectors have locked themselves to excavators and drills, and overturned cars and barrels of cement, while also deploying aerial blockades, including elaborate tripods and tree-sits. In scattered encampments that run along a 300-mile stretch of pipeline construction, a culture defined by mutual aid, and a spiritual and physical struggle to defend the Earth, has held strong in the face of brutality and an increasingly entrenched alliance between police and the corporate forces fueling climate catastrophe.
I recently spoke with Giniw Collective founder Tara Houska, a citizen of Couchiching First Nation, over a shaky internet connection, as she held space at the collective’s Namewag Camp in Minnesota. The camp, which is led by Indigenous women and two-spirit people, was founded by the Giniw Collective in 2018, as Minnesota’s final permit decision on Line 3 drew near. Houska says she invited Native matriarchs, including LaDonna Brave Bull Allard and Winona LaDuke, among others, to initiate the effort. “We laid out our prayers and our songs to begin this phase,” Houska told me.
Since then, the Namewag Camp, says Houska, has been “a home for many people.” Some people have spent years at the encampment, while others have held space for months, weeks or even a few days. “It really depends on the person or persons that are coming through,” says Houska. The culture of the camp emphasizes direct action, mutual aid and Native traditions. “We’ve trained well over 1000 folks in non-violent direct action, decolonization, traditional knowledge and life in balance,” says Houska. People who call the camp home are committed to stopping the pipeline, but Houska says making a home at Namewag also requires a commitment to mutual aid as a way of life. “I think we’re trying to create a balance, a place that is more reflective of balance, and deep values that are very much needed in the climate movement, and also just generally in the world,” Houska told me, adding that, “the first structure that was built in this camp was actually our sweat lodge.” The encampment also includes a “very large, beautiful garden.”
Houska was not always an activist on the front lines. “I started out as a D.C. lawyer back in 2013, after law school, and worked on a lot of different issues for tribal nations, and saw the treatment of our people on the hill, and through the law,” says Houska. She engaged with legal efforts to thwart the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and efforts to stop the project that would eventually be known as Line 3, but Houska ultimately felt called to fight for the Earth “in a different way.” Houska travelled to Standing Rock in 2016 and “spent six months out there learning and resisting.”
While some Water Protectors involved in the Line 3 protests carry lessons from Standing Rock, the two struggles have manifested differently. The movement in Standing Rock drew an unprecedented assemblage of Natives from over 300 federally recognized tribes, and other Indigenous and non-Indigenous co-strugglers. Thousands of people converged on a cluster of camps, the largest of which was known as Oceti Sakowin. Houska says a variety of nations and groups are also represented in the Line 3 struggle, but rather than being relatively centralized, Line 3 encampments are staggered across 334 miles of pipeline construction. “We also have been fighting this pipeline during a pandemic,” Houska noted, “which means a lot of caution and precaution around COVID-19 and making sure everyone is healthy and safe, and that we’re not putting anyone at risk.”
Line 3 opponents say the pipeline, once fully operational, would be the carbon pollution equivalent of 50 coal-fired power plants. As an editorial that will be published in 200 health journals worldwide this fall, ahead of the UN General Assembly and the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, states, “The greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5°C and to restore nature.”
The pipeline would also tunnel under 20 rivers, including the Mississippi, threatening the drinking water supply of millions of people. In 2010, 1.2 million gallons of oil spilled from Enbridge’s Line 6B pipeline into the Kalamazoo River, in one of 800 oil spills the company experienced between 1999 and 2010.
While regulatory battles and legal maneuvers are crucial in any fight to stop a pipeline, Houska says that land defense, and the “building of a resistance community on the front lines” is an “under-respected, undervalued, but critical component to a healthy movement.” Houska says the work of building that communal effort, and sustaining it, has been “beautiful, hard, sad, [and] sometimes painful.” Houska explained: “Police have been getting pretty brutal in recent weeks. They’ve been shooting ‘less lethals’ at us, and using pain compliance tactics. So torturing people, really engaging in behaviors that are quite shocking, I think. Which means a lot of care, and community is really important for us on the front lines.”
Houska says sustaining the struggle also means making time to acknowledge “the hurt that we’re experiencing in real time” while also naming and uplifting “the reasons we’re engaging in struggle, [which is for] the littles, and those to come, and the four-legged and the winged, and the rivers, and the wild rice.”
Houska also notes that the violence of fossil fuel extraction embodies the longstanding violence of colonialism, with large influxes of transient workers at so-called “man camps” (temporary housing camps of mostly male pipeline construction workers) destroying the life-giving ecosystems that sustain Native communities, while also inflicting violence on Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people. For years, Native leaders have sought to raise awareness about the measurable increase in sexual assaults, murders and disappearances of Native women in areas where “man camps” are established. To highlight this threat, Water Protectors hosted by the Giniw Collective’s camp recently staged a blockade action in front of the Line 3 “man camp,” in which an “all-BIPOC group of mostly Indigenous femmes [and] two-spirits” locked themselves to an overturned vehicle, and other equipment.
“Man camps” are the modern embodiment of colonial raiding parties that have historically seized upon Native land, looted Indigenous resources and inflicted sexual violence on Native women. Today, pipeline workers and police inflict the violence of colonialism on Indigenous people, enacting the true character of capitalism for the world to see, while relying on the public’s lack of concern for Native people and the environment as they commit atrocities in plain sight.
A war is being waged against land and water defenders in the U.S., just as a war is being waged globally against environmental activists, by corporations and world governments, in order to maintain the repetitions of capitalism: extraction, exploitation, destruction, disposal, and the consolidation of wealth and resources. Globally, violence against environmental activists has hit record highs in recent years, with Indigenous people facing disproportionately high rates of murder and brutality for their organizing. Indigenous people make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, but steward over 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity. In some parts of the world, such as Colombia and the Philippines, the assassination of Indigenous activists has become increasingly common. Here in the United States, Indigenous activists have faced escalating violence and criminalization while acting in opposition to pipeline construction and other extraction efforts.
While many people recoil from any discussion of the reality of climate change, catastrophes like Hurricane Ida, and the Dixie and Caldor fires in California, are making the subject harder to avoid. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2021 climate report, environmental catastrophes will continue to accelerate over the coming decades, but human beings still have something to say about the severity of the damage. Coming to terms with the existential threat of climate collapse can easily lead to distress and despair, but with so much at stake, it is imperative that we not only absorb statistics and haunting images of destruction, but also zero in on the front lines of struggles like the fight against Line 3, where Water Protectors are modeling a relationship with the Earth that could help guide us into a new era.
The Theft of Water
The Giniw Collective has been vocal about Enbridge’s overuse of local water supplies during an ongoing drought. Enbridge was initially authorized to pump about 510 million gallons of water out of the trenches it’s digging, but in June, the company claimed it had encountered more groundwater than it had anticipated, and obtained permission to pump up nearly 5 billion gallons of water, in order to complete the project. According to Line 3 opponents, Enbridge paid a fee of $150 to adjust its permit.
Giniw Collective members say it’s unconscionable that the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources would allow Enbridge to displace so much water, particularly during a drought. “We’ve been in an extreme drought all summer long,” says Houska. “The rivers have been dry, the waterfalls are empty, and the wildfires have spread into Ontario and up on the north shore of Lake Superior.”
Activists organizing against Line 3 and members of the White Earth Nation argue that Enbridge’s voracious consumption of local groundwater threatens local wetlands, including cherished wild rice beds. “With higher than average temperatures and lower than average precipitation, displacing this amount of water will have a direct detrimental impact on the 2021 wild rice crop,” wrote Michael Fairbanks and Alan Roy, tribal chairman and secretary-treasurer of the White Earth Nation.
According to the UN, “By 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under water stressed conditions.” Scientific projections suggest that many regions of the U.S. may see their water supplies reduced by a third, even as they face increased demand for water due to a growing population. As world temperatures rise, and water scarcity continues to escalate, Enbridge is displacing 500 billion gallons of groundwater to build a pipeline that will transport 915,000 barrels of tar sands crude oil per day, threatening more than 200 water ecosystems — including 389 acres of wild rice, which are a source of sacred sustenance for the Anishinaabe.
The White Earth Nation has brought a “rights of nature” lawsuit against the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, in an effort to defend wild rice, or manoomin, which means “good berry” in the Ojibwe language, against the destruction being waged by Enbridge. According to Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Ojibwe tribe, for the Ojibwe people, manoomin “is like a member of the family, a relative,” which means “legally designating manoomin as a person … aligns with the Ojibwe world view.” As Pember writes, “According to [the United Nations’ 6th Assessment on Climate Change], recognition of Indigenous rights, governance systems and laws are central to creating effective adaptation and sustainable development strategies that can save humanity from the impacts of climate change.”
The suit is only the second rights of nature case to be filed in the United States and the first to be filed in tribal court. But as Pember notes, “Several tribes, however, have incorporated rights of nature into their laws.”
According to the nonprofit organization Honor the Earth, “The proposed new oil pipelines in northern MN violate the treaty rights of the Anishinaabeg by endangering critical natural resources in the 1854, 1855, and 1867 treaty areas.” In a statement outlining the alleged treaty violations, Honor the Earth explains, “The pipelines threaten the culture, way of life, and physical survival of the Ojibwe people. Where there is wild rice, there are Anishinaabeg, and where there are Anishinaabeg, there is wild rice. It is our sacred food. Without it we will die. It’s that simple.”
Buying the Police
During the movement in Standing Rock, we saw that resistance to pipeline construction can generate significant costs for local governments. In 2018, Morton County Commissioner Cody Schulz claimed that protests that aimed to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) cost the county almost $40 million. But rather than serving as a deterrent to other municipalities considering pipeline permits, the cost of the NoDAPL protests have been leveraged by authorities to more blatantly merge the interests of police and oil companies.
The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission included a provision in Enbridge’s permit for the project that requires the company to establish an escrow trust that would reimburse local law enforcement for any mileage, wages, protective gear and training related to the construction of Line 3. In order to access the finds, law enforcement agencies submit requests for reimbursement to a state appointed account manager — a former deputy police chief — who approves or denies the requests. In April of 2020, The Minnesota Reformerreported that Enbridge had paid over $500,000 to local law enforcement in support of pipeline construction. That number has since ballooned to $2 million.
“The level of brutality that is experienced by Indigenous people and allies in struggle with us is extreme,” Houska told me. “About a month ago now, I was a part of a group that experienced rubber bullets and mace being fired at us at very, very close range,” said Houska. “I was hit several times, but I also witnessed young people with their heads split open, bleeding down their faces … and sheriffs have been using pain compliance on people, which is essentially torture. They dislocated someone’s jaw a couple weeks ago.”
As Ella Fassler recently reported in Truthout, “More than 800 Water Protectors have been arrested or cited in the state since November 2020, when the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) approved the Line 3 permit.” The total number of arrests along Line 3, since November of 2020, has surpassed the total number of arrests during the Standing Rock protests, in which nearly 500 people were arrested. The charges Water Protectors and land defenders face are likewise escalating. According to the Pipeline Legal Action Network, 80 Water Protectors were charged with felonies during July and August of 2021, and as Mollie Wetherall, a legal support organizer with the legal action network told Fassler, “It’s clear that they really are in a moment where they want to intimidate people as the construction of this pipeline winds down.”
Direct actions similar to those that garnered misdemeanor charges two years ago have more recently led to felony charges. According to the Giniw Collective, which has bailed out hundreds of Water Protectors, individual bonds have often run between $10,000 and $25,000, making bail fundraising a crucial point of solidarity work.
Disturbingly, in late July, two Water Protectors were charged with felony assisted suicide for allegedly crawling into the pipeline as part of a lockdown action. Officials claim the pipeline was an estimated 130 degrees and lacked oxygen. The criminal complaint lodged against the two activists claims that they “did intentionally advise, encourage, or assist another who attempted but failed to take the other’s own life.” The charge of felony assisted suicide carries a 7-year prison sentence, $14,000 fine or both. If convicted, the Water Protectors could face up to 13 years behind bars.
For refusing to embrace the death march of capitalism, and resisting the destruction of most life on Earth, two Line 3 opponents are being charged with attempted assisted suicide. “These are 20, 21, 22-year-old people, who are literally chaining themselves to the machines, crawling inside of pipes, doing everything and anything they can to have a future,” says Houska. “And the charges being waged, like felony theft and felony assisted suicide for people who are trying to protect all life, [are] absolutely appalling, and a horrific reality of Water Protectors being imprisoned while the world burns around us.”
Members of Congress, including “the Squad,” signed a letter to President Biden on August 30, 2021, calling on the president to “uphold the rights guaranteed to Indigenous people under federal treaties and fulfill tribal requests for a government-to-government meeting concerning Line 3.” Among other concerns, the letter cited the troubling financial ties between Enbridge and local law enforcement, stating:
Law enforcement entities in the region have received around $2 million from Enbridge to pay for police activity against water protectors, which has included staggering levels of violence, tear gas, and rubber bullets. While Enbridge was required to pay these costs under project permits, leaders have noted they create a conflict of interest as law enforcement are incentivized to increase patrols and arrests surrounding pipeline construction.
Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar also hosted a press conference on September 3 to draw further attention to the struggle to stop Line 3, which included remarks from U.S. Representatives Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib and Sen. Mary Kunesh-Podein. During the press conference, Omar declared, “The climate crisis is happening and the last thing we need to do is allow the very criminals who created this crisis to build more fossil fuel infrastructure.” Bush, Presseley, Tlaib and Kunesh-Podein also visited the Giniw Collective’s Namewag Camp to hear from Water Protectors firsthand about the struggle. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that she had planned to join the group as well, but her plans were derailed by the climate impacts of Hurricane Ida in her district.
Finding a Home on the Front Lines
Despite the brutality protectors have faced, people have continued to answer the call to head to the front lines. After years of engaging in solidarity actions at banks and financial institutions that are funding the construction of Line 3, one activist — who asked to be identified by the name Marla, so as not to facilitate state surveillance of her actions — left her job as a nanny in Chicago and headed to the front lines in May of 2021. “I had never seen a pipeline before,” Marla told me. “I had only done solidarity organizing up until this point. Land defense was something new entirely to me, but I knew that bank actions alone were not going to stop this pipeline.” Marla saw heading to the front lines as “a tangible way to show up as an accomplice for Indigenous sovereignty.”
While living at Namewag has meant bearing witness to police violence, deforestation and constant state surveillance, Marla says it has also meant experiencing “a microcosm of the world we all want to build.” Marla says the Giniw Collective’s camp “an incredible place to live in community and resistance.”
“Living at Namewag shows us what a post-capitalist world could begin to look like,” says Marla, “where labor is valued because it keeps our community safe, skilled up and fed from the land.” Marla says the camp is a place “to see accountability in action, to learn and unlearn, and do better.” While police and the surveillance state can be intimidating, Marla says, “We keep each other safe working overnight security shifts by night and supporting folks taking action by day.” Marla also describes the camp as a joyful place, even amid pain and struggle. “Cooking meals from the garden, living outside among the trees, washing the camp’s dishes, [providing] elder and childcare, and making space for joy — all of these things sustain us.”
“People have consistently been showing up for the struggle,” Houska told me. “And that is a beautiful thing to witness and be part of.” Houska says that almost 90 percent of Line 3 construction is now complete. “We are still resisting, in the face of that reality,” says Houska. “So, if you’re planning to show up, please show up with your heart, and your good intentions and do your best to find your way to the place that calls to you.” Houska also encourages supporters to “use whatever platform or voice and agency you have to call on the Biden administration, and also to call on other people around you” to take action to stop the pipeline.
“This fight is not just about looking upwards,” says Houska. “It’s also looking at each other. This is our world, and no one else is going to protect it, but all of us.”
To learn more about other powerful movement work like the struggle against Line 3 and mutual aid efforts across the country, check out our podcast “Movement Memos,” which will release its next episode on Wednesday, September 15.
Years of negotiation to develop a collaborative fisheries governance model between Canada and eight First Nations along the West Coast came to fruition this week.
Fisheries Minister Bernadette Jordan and Coastal First Nations (CFN) president K̓áwáziɫ Marilyn Slett, along with other CFN member nations, celebrated the signing and next steps for implementation of the Fisheries Resources Reconciliation Agreement (FRRA) on Friday.
The first of its kind in B.C., the agreement between Canada and First Nations on the north and central coast and Haida Gwaii — whose territories make up 40 per cent of the province’s coastal waters — provides the nations an enhanced role in fisheries governance in their regions.
It was February in northern Sweden and the sun was returning after a dark winter. In the coming months the tundra would reawaken with lichens and shrubs for reindeer to forage in the permafrost encrusted Scandinavian mountain range. But the changing season also brought some unwelcome news to the Indigenous Sámi people, who live across northern Scandinavia, Finland and eastern Russia.
The members of the Saami Council were informed that researchers at Harvard planned to test a developing technology for climate mitigation, known as solar geoengineering, in Sápmi, their homeland. “When we learned what the idea of solar geoengineering is, we reacted quite instinctively,” said Åsa Larsson Blind, the Saami Council vice president, at a virtual panel about the risks of solar geoengineering, organized by the Center for International Environmental Law and other groups.
The Pueblo of Zuni would be remiss in this context to remain silent on the recent legal position taken by the Biden-Harris Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) regarding Chi’chil Bildagoteel (i.e., Oak Flat) and the Resolution Copper mine in Arizona. The Administration’s stated position is unfortunate and extremely troubling, as it is in fact little more than a continuation of a policy of containment and erasure of Native peoples that directly contradicts in substance, content, and spirit the Administration’s own E.O. 13985. This position is a reinforcement and reproduction of racist legal legacies of Native dispossession in the United States that gives preference to and promotes resource extraction and environmental destruction to the detriment of the capacities Native people indelibly require for any advancement or support of equity.
Rapid City, South Dakota – In a devastating blow to the Self-Determination of all Native American Indian Tribes in the United States, the Supreme Court denied the Petition in the case, Gilbert v. Weahke. In doing so, the Justices also violated Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, the Indian Self-Determination Act, the Lanham Act, the Transfer Act, and the Abstention Doctrine.
The case began when a federal agency, the Indian Health Service (IHS), gave an Indian Self-Determination Act multi-million dollar contract to a South Dakota non-profit corporation to manage the Sioux San IHS Hospital in Rapid City, SD. As the South Dakota non-profit corporation was not a Tribal Organization under the jurisdiction of any tribe and without federal recognition, this was a violation of Public Law 93-638, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (ISDEAA).
Seneca Nation President Matthew Pagels issued the following statement regarding the discovery of the remains of 215 children buried on the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada. The school, which operated between 1890 and 1969, was once Canada’s largest Indigenous residential school, which hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children were forced to attend. Thousands of children are known to have died at these schools in the United States and Canada, and it is believed that the deaths of hundreds – if not thousands – were never documented.
“Senecas are grieving along with the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc First Nation in the wake of this recent discovery – another gruesome reminder of the treatment and terror that generations of Indigenous people suffered at the hands of foreign settlers on our own lands.
A case brought before the United States Supreme Court by three Native American women, who have been representing themselves, may decide the future of the 1975 Indian Self Determination Act. Clearing the FOG speaks with Charmaine White Face, a petitioner in the case, about her fight to stop the privatization of an Indian Health Service facility, Sioux San Hospital in Rapid City South Dakota, that serves 325 tribes in the area. She describes how the privatization is harming the health of the people who use this historic hospital. To her knowledge, this is the first effort to privatize an Indian Health Service hospital. If the privatization is allowed to continue, which has been done without the consent of the people who are impacted, it will set a dangerous precedent for all tribes and allow any federal agency to take a similar illegal action.
Canada’s highest court has upended the federal government’s 65-year-old claim that an Indigenous nation from British Columbia’s Interior no longer exists.
In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada said the Sinixt Nation, whose reservation is in Washington state, has constitutionally protected Indigenous rights to hunt in their ancestral territory north of the border.
The ruling means that if Indigenous groups outside of modern-day Canada can prove they descended from a pre-contact society in what is now Canada, they can claim Section 35(1) rights under the Constitution, which recognizes and affirms the rights of Indigenous Peoples.
“Persons who are not Canadian citizens and who do not reside in Canada can exercise an Aboriginal right,” the decision said.
Traditional Six Nations chiefs have declared a formal moratorium on development within the Haldimand Tract, a broad swath of land spanning 10 kms from either side of the Grand River as it winds its way from Dundalk, Ont. down to Lake Erie.
Standing outside the Longhouse, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Chiefs Council said construction can’t proceed without the people’s consent — doubling down on their support for the land reclamation in Caledonia that now enters month 10.
“The Haudenosaunee Confederacy Chiefs Council endorses, supports and recognizes that development should not be proceeding on our lands,” Deyohowe:to Roger Silversmith, Snipe Clan chief of the Cayuga Nation, told reporters on Tuesday.
Canada – B.C.’s free-entry mining system allows any individual or company to stake a claim — and subsequently explore for minerals on that claim — anywhere in the province that is not already set aside as a protected area. This includes private land and Indigenous territory. Under provincial laws, which date back to the mid-1800s, no consent or consultation is required.
“It’s so archaic. It’s so colonial,” Marsden says.
In the mid-2010s, mineral exploration and mining companies started staking claims on Gitanyow territory. A tenure allows a company to conduct exploratory work, and if it finds enough evidence of minerals, it can then propose a mine. But even exploratory work has impacts on the landscape, Marsden says.
On August 18, 2020, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a petition by researchers at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) seeking federal approval to release their genetically engineered (GE) Darling 58 (D58) American chestnut tree into U.S. forests. Researchers claim the transgenic D58 tree will resist the fungal blight that, coupled with rampant overlogging, decimated the American chestnut population in the early 20th century. In fact, the GE American chestnut is a Trojan horse meant to open the doors to commercial GE trees designed for industrial plantations.
The D58 would be the first GE forest tree approved in the U.S. and the first GMO intended to spread in the wild. (GE canola plants were discovered in the wild in 2010 but that was unplanned.) “This is a project to rapidly domesticate a wild species through genetic engineering and accelerated breeding, and then to put it back into ecosystems to form self-perpetuating populations — an intentional evolutionary intervention that has never been attempted before with any species,” explain scientists at the Center for Food Safety (CFS) and International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA), which are nonprofits based in Washington, D.C.
“The southern U.S. is global ground zero for the forest products industry and we see genetically engineered chestnut trees as this industry’s sneaky way of opening the floodgates for ‘frankentrees’ that will harm forests, biodiversity and local communities across the region,” explains Scot Quaranda of Dogwood Alliance, a nonprofit based in North Carolina that works to protect southern U.S. forests. “Our natural forests that support wildlife and the economic sovereignty of rural communities will rapidly be replaced with tree plantations for wood pellets, paper and more, leaving environmental and climate injustice in their wake.”
The GE American chestnut faces an uphill battle due to decades of opposition to GE trees by Indigenous peoples, scientists, students, activists, foresters and others, including a GE tree ban by the Forest Stewardship Council and a United Nations decision that warns countries of the dangers of GE trees and urges use of the precautionary principle while addressing the issue.
By October 19, 2020, the close of the public comment period on the petition, 109 organizations, representing millions of members, plus an additional 123,426 individuals had registered their opposition to the D58. The next step is the creation of a draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) by the USDA recommending action on the petition. The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) estimates this could take up to a year to complete. Following this, another public comment period will be undertaken to review the draft EIS, after which the agency will develop a final EIS with a decision on the petition.
D58 Safety Studies “Invalid,” Warn Scientists
While American chestnut trees are known to live hundreds of years, D58 trees have only been growing since 2017, calling into question the ESF petition assertion that, “Darling 58 has been studied in detail and no plant pest or environmental risks have been observed.”
In a report on the GE American chestnut she co-wrote, Rachel Smolker from Biofuelwatch explains, “Given the long lifespan of trees and varying environmental conditions they face, we cannot extrapolate from tests done on very young trees under controlled lab and field conditions. How GE trees might behave in the diverse and changing context of natural forests over long periods of time is unknown and likely to remain unknown even after they are released.”
Scientists at CFS and ICTA warn of problems with the D58 safety studies, writing, “Given the young age of Darling 58 trees and corresponding dearth of tissue samples, conclusions from most of the animal experiments described in the Petition are too preliminary to depend upon.”
In studying ESF’s assessment of the impacts of inserting the blight-resistant oxalate oxidase (OxO) transgene into the chestnut genome, both CFS and ICTA further point out that some D58 studies did not, in fact, use material from transgenic D58 trees, rendering them invalid. “Petitioners did experiments to study how bumblebees might be affected by Darling 58 but did not have enough Darling 58 pollen for the experiments so used non-transgenic pollen instead, to which they added purified OxO from barley seeds.… Other important initial studies on animals reported in the Petition are of limited use because they involved feeding leaves from the Darling 4 instead of Darling 58 … even though Darling 4 has much lower levels of OxO in leaves … again invalidating the conclusions for risk assessments.” The Darling 4 was an earlier version of the American chestnut genetically engineered with the OxO transgene.
While researchers have argued that a strict regulatory process will ensure the safety of the D58 GE tree, a 2019 report by the National Academies of Sciences Engineering Medicine titled, “Forest Health and Biotechnology: Possibilities and Considerations,” raises flags: “Forest health is not accounted for in the regulations for the use of biotechnology or for other approaches to mitigating forest tree insect pests or pathogens.… There are no specific regulations or policies that those agencies apply to biotech trees.”
Profit Motive Trumping Morality?
Proponents argue that there can be no downside to releasing a tree engineered to resist an introduced blight. But like fire suppression, which has led to devastating wildfires due to an unnatural build-up of flammable materials in the forest, the future impacts of even a well-meaning action can become catastrophic, especially in combination with the unpredictable effects of climate change and extreme weather. Yet, researchers are engineering trees with the conviction that because they can, they should.
In her book, Can Science Make Sense of Life?, Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, explains the implications of this arrogance. “For life scientists and their enthusiastic promoters, the arc of the technologically possible, often coincident with the promise of financial gain, increasingly … defines the boundaries of the morally permissible.”
Researcher William Powell, whose GE American chestnut research has received both financial and technical support from companies with a vested interest in the approval of the GE American chestnut — including Monsanto, ArborGen and Duke Energy — defends his approach. In an article in The Conversation, Powell says, “One of the key advantages of genetic engineering is that it’s far less disruptive to the original chestnut genome — and thus to its ecologically important characteristics. The trees remain more true to form with less chance of unforeseen and unwanted side effects. Once these genes are inserted, they become a normal part of the tree’s genome and are inherited just like any other gene.”
However, in a briefing paper published by the Federation of German Scientists, Ricarda Steinbrecher, a molecular geneticist, and Antje Lorch, a biologist, counter that the genetic engineering process is inherently risky. The paper states, “It is well documented that the processes of plant transformation give rise to many mutations throughout the plant genome as well as at the insertion site of the transgene.… Any robust risk assessment study needs to take several generations into account, for example, to assess the stability and heritability of the transgene, unintended side effects and changes due to transformation impact.”
Why the American Chestnut?
The D58 American chestnut is the culmination of decades of effort to open the doors to GE trees in the U.S. by biotechnology and timber companies. In 1999, Monsanto joined with timber companies from the U.S. and New Zealand to form a “forestry biotechnology joint venture,” which later became ArborGen, one of the world’s leaders in GE tree research and development. GE tree research was originally focused on trees and traits valued by the forest products industry; trees like poplar, pine and eucalyptus, and traits like insect resistance, herbicide tolerance, faster growth or altered wood composition.
Other early associations — including the Tree Genetic Engineering Research Cooperative at Oregon State University, launched in 1994 — brought together university researchers with timber and biotechnology giants as well as the U.S. Forest Service to develop genetically engineered trees for industrial timber plantations.
These efforts were met with widespread opposition and sabotage, leading the industry to conclude that they needed a charismatic “test tree” to try to win over the public opinion relating to GE trees.
A 2007 published paper explains, “There is opposition to commercial application of trees engineered specifically for fast growth and increased yields, by those whose stance is that the value accrues only to ‘big companies.’ It will remain for traits that have broad societal benefits, such as conservation… for acceptance to be gained.”
The D58 is seen as a positive example for the beleaguered biotechnology industry of the benefits of “biotechnology for conservation.” Duke Energy also sees the American chestnut for its value as a greenwashing tool. Duke Energy invested millions into the GE American chestnut through the Forest Health Initiative. Its hope was to use the American chestnut to help “green” its devastated mountaintop removal mining lands.
Once dominant in eastern U.S. forests, the American chestnut was highly valued for its beautiful and rot-resistant wood and abundant nuts. While few actually remember the tree, which largely disappeared from the landscape by the 1920s, a public relations effort was launched in the early 2010s with articles appearing in numerous major publications heralding the return of this “mighty giant” through the wonders of genetic engineering. Millions of American chestnut stumps, meanwhile, continue to send up shoots that occasionally grow into trees large enough to produce nuts, and in some locations, wild American chestnuts are spreading on their own, showing at least some evolving blight tolerance.
Naturalist and author Bernd Heinrich has one such grove growing on his land in Maine. In a New York Times op-edin 2013, he wrote,
I have been enjoying American chestnuts for several years now, harvested from some trees that are now part of my forest of 600 acres in western Maine. I planted four seedlings in the spring of 1982. Beyond all my expectations, the trees thrived, and some are now 35 feet tall.… In my small corner of western Maine, the American chestnut is now promising to again become a significant component of the ecosystem.
Another decades-long program by the American Chestnut Cooperators’ Foundation is successfully breeding pure wild American chestnuts that are naturally blight-resistant.
In spite of examples like this, GE chestnut proponents have declared the American chestnut functionally extinct, and insist that its survival hinges on the release of unproven and risky genetic engineered American chestnut trees into forests. But Lois Breault-Melican, a former board member of the American Chestnut Foundation who publicly resigned from the TACF over the organization’s support for the GE American chestnut, points out that this argument ignores the risks posed to organic and other chestnut growers: “These growers are concerned about the potential GMO contamination of their orchards caused by the unregulated and unmonitored planting of genetically engineered American chestnut trees. If theUSDA approves these GE American chestnuts, the integrity of chestnut orchards would be forever compromised.”
Indigenous Sovereignty Concerns
Indigenous peoples in the regions of proposed D58 releases have expressed concern that unregulated distribution of a GE tree would violate their sovereign right to keep their territories free from GMOs. They insist that Indigenous peoples be consulted in the process of reviewing the D58 American chestnut.
“Today, there remain large areas of traditional and treaty lands on which much is forested and managed as sovereign territory of many different Native American Peoples,” explains BJ McManama of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “These forests are not only a source of economic self-determination but hold great cultural significance to include sacred sites where trees are an element of sustenance, knowledge and familial identity. Every living being within the forests is related in some form and nothing within these lands lives in isolation, therefore changing or altering the original instructions of any one or any part of these elements threatens the natural order established over millennia.”
The Eastern Band of Cherokee, members of the Lumbee Tribe of central North Carolina and Seminole Peoples from unceded Florida territory joined the Campaign to STOP GE Trees for an October gathering in the mountains of North Carolina to protest GE trees as a form of colonization. Their concerns were focused on the GE American chestnut trees.
Lisa Montelongo, a member of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee, explained, “I’m very concerned that GE trees would impact our future generations and their traditional uses of trees. Our basket makers, people that use wood for the natural colors of our clay work — there would be no natural life, no cycle of life in GE tree plantations.”
Following the camp, the Band’s Tribal Council passed a unanimous resolution prohibiting GE trees from their lands: EBCI Tribal Council Resolution No. 31 (2015): “We commit to rejecting biomass, genetically engineering the natural world, carbon trading, carbon offsets and carbon sequestration schemes as they are false solutions to the climate change.” Concerns were focused on the inability of the tribe to keep the GE American chestnut tree off of their lands if it were released into surrounding forests, which they describe as a violation of the Free Prior and Informed Consent mandate under the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Global Impact of the Genetically Engineered D58 American Chestnut Tree
In the end, the potential deregulation of the D58 is not about restoring a “mighty giant” to eastern U.S. forests. Its approval is about paving the way for the deregulation of all GE trees, toward the creation of an oxymoronic future “bioeconomy” where biodiverse forests are replaced with specially engineered trees for the manufacture of fuels, chemicals, textiles, plastics and other goods in a “green” version of “business as usual.” Implicit in this scheme is a massive increase in consumption of wood. This in turn will drive accelerated conversion of carbon-rich native forests, critical for climate regulation, and other ecosystems for conversion to fast-growing plantations that include GE trees with traits to expedite their use as feedstocks. Existing non-native plantations of eucalyptus, the most common plantation tree, are already notorious for their devastating social, ecological and climate change impacts. But new research out of Oregon State University is attempting to “green” these plantations with claims that eucalyptus trees can be genetically engineered to be infertile, through a process to “knock out LEAFY,” the gene believed to control flower formation. The research claims this would prevent eucalyptus trees from invading native ecosystems though it does nothing to address the ability of eucalyptus to spread asexually through vegetative propagation.
This new technology also does nothing to address the serious problems caused by industrial plantations of eucalyptus. These impacts, outlined in detail by the World Rainforest Movement, include depletion of fresh water; forced displacement of Indigenous groups, rural communities and subsistence farmers; and catastrophic wildfires. In fact, the addition of GE trees to these plantations could exacerbate known impacts and/or lead to new, unknown and potentially irreversible problems.
Another attempt to “green” GE trees for the bioeconomy involves the development of trees specially engineered to store extra carbon as a supposed climate change mitigation tool. But a new article in Yale 360 challenges schemes like this that focus on tree planting for climate mitigation. Echoing the findings of the World Rainforest Movement and others, the article reports “a growing number of scientists are challenging this tree-planting narrative. They say that these programs, especially those based on huge numerical targets, can wreck natural ecosystems, dry up water supplies, damage agriculture, push people off their land — and even make global warming worse.” In addition, they say, tree planting can “distract from the greater priorities of protecting existing forests and reducing fossil fuel use.”
The attempts to greenwash genetically engineered trees with their unpredictable and irreversible impacts is being opposed globally by a broad coalition of scientists, Indigenous peoples, agronomists, peasant farmers, foresters, teachers, and others, as well as organizations focused on protecting forests, human rights and climate justice. GE trees have no place in an ecologically and socially just future.
Sign the petition to join the movement to stop the massive and irreversible experiment of genetically engineered trees.
This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
