National American Indian Heritage Month: Token Gestures

Today marks the final day of National American Indian Heritage Month, a national holiday invoked by the world’s most fervent philanthropist, Mr. George W. Bush.

With Thanksgiving leftovers still cooling in the fridge, the US Army on Sunday issued a statement ordering the closure of the main encampment of activists at Standing Rock in North Dakota. The land, known colloquially as Oceti Sakowin, is just north of the Cannonball River where tribes-people and environmentalists have been congregating in their thousands to oppose the development of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

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That this latest denial of indigenous rights has occurred in November, the very month that purports to uphold the rights of America’s much-abused indigenous population, comes as no surprise.

Tribes have always paid the price for American prosperity.

The 1,200-mile long pipeline has been fiercely contested since its conceptualization in 2014. If construction goes ahead, it will carry 470,000 barrels of domestically produced crude oil across 3 states, from North Dakota to Illinois.

The pipeline was initially scheduled to run just north of Bismarck, but the project was rerouted away from the overwhelmingly white city due to fears about the possible contamination of water supplies. The good people of Bismarck had legitimate cause for concern; it transpires that these pipelines do leak, and often. Since 1995, more than 2,000 significant accidents involving oil and petroleum pipelines have occurred, creating roughly $3 billion in property damage. Of these 2,000, Polaris Institute found that 804 of these spills could be attributed to pipes supplied by Enbridge Energy partners, the majority stakeholders financing the North Dakota Pipeline.

carl-sack-cartographer
Copyright: Carl Sack, Cartographer, 2016

It would appear that Energy Transfer Partner’s operating principles to work with individuals to “make accommodations and minimize disruptions” are not applicable when it comes to black or brown landowners. Riding the tailcoats of Trump’s certain lives matter campaign, the pipeline will continue America’s legacy of exploitation of the lands of Indian people.

The Sioux tribes’ complaint is both historical and philosophical. 

In the 1830’s, President Andrew Jackson ordered Native Americans in the South to leave their homelands and move to the Great Plains. After their eviction from the tribal lands they had occupied for the last 12,000 years, the white populace were invited to seize and settle at will. This careless removal policy serves like lunch money for a bully and has permitted the State to shunt indigenous people from region to region for the last 500 years. The Dakota Access Pipeline reveals how governmental lack of regard for indigenous culture remains intact.

Kayla DeVault, youth ambassador for indigenous matters for the White House, in her speech to the UN in November said “to be impoverished does not always equate to having no financial leverage. Hardships come in many forms“.

To truly understand Standing Rock and the integrity of the sacred land the pipeline threatens to destroy, it is necessary to try to glean a holistic understanding of Native Indian perspective.

DeVault describes their governing values of interdependence and connectedness; a religious bond to each other, the land, the four elements which build all life, the four seasons that govern time. Hardships are also felt in fours:

  1. To hear an orphan cry, as it was a terrible sound.
  2. To lose a child, an indescribable pain.
  3. To lose your mother.
  4. To not know where your warriors fell.
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Sitting Bull (1885) – Standing Rock Sioux (Copyright: Creative Commons)

The Dakota Acess Pipeline comes into conflict with several of their guiding doctrines. It will rip into sacred burial lands, threaten the security of the local water supply and disrupt the wider health of the planet. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe belong to a culture that saw their ancestors culled from 16 million to 250,000. The desire to hang on to the remains of their ancient cultural heritage is not difficult to understand, and this ritual of remembering happens to be firmly embedded in their land.

The protesters, or Water Protectors as they prefer to be known, are being represented by Clan Chieftain, David Archambault:

“Although the news is saddening, it is not at all surprising given the last 500 years of the treatment of our people. We have suffered much, but we still have hope that the President will act on his commitment to close the chapter of broken promises to our people and especially our children.”

The ability to hold on and create gardens out of rock is work indigenous communities have done for a very long time.

Of equal concern is the resurgence of guerrilla tactics used against peaceful and non-violent protestors. The Morton County Sheriff’s Department conjured the specter of 1960s racism as they blasted a crowd of 400 with a fire hose in freezing temperatures, shortly before the deployment of “non-lethal” concussion grenades and tear gas.

While the smooching of oil tycoons and government delegates is by no means a new phenomenon, Standing Rock demonstrates our inability to freely exercise our democratic right and protest major conglomerates and corporations; who, like it or not, are emerging as the real wielders of power in global affairs.

Whether it is the Black Lives Matter campaign or the Indian Sioux Tribe,this vicious suppression of democratic protesting contributes yet another page to America’s false narrative of social progress. With Donald Trump in the White House, these stand-offs are only likely to become more frequent.

We don’t need America or Britain to be “great” again, which is really just nostalgia for the lost epoch of Empire.

We need them to defend the rights of our peoples and animals that are on the verge of extinction rather than treating their communities as sacrificial zones for shortsighted American corporate interest. 

We need them to prove that the idea of State Protection doesn’t just apply to that which benefits the state: abortion, drug prohibition, rehabilitation.

And we as a global audience need to stop buying into media mythmaking about campaigns that only seek to improve the lives of communities that have always had to pay the price for American “prosperity”. This ludicrous narrative of white victimhood has enabled the transition of the far right from its shadowy spot on the margins, into the political center stage.

Despite popular belief and government action, we have much to learn from the Indian Sioux’s immensely successful way of life. As the West tiptoes towards chaos, we would do well to observe the Native Indian founding beliefs of balance and sharing, forces that create the harmony our world relies on.

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For practical information on how you can help, click the link below.

10 Ways You Can Help The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Fight The Dakota Access Pipeline

Solastalgia

I want you to listen carefully to this extraordinary story for it is yours as well as mine. Just 15 minutes of your time, after which you may decide what you want to do with this information.

I wish to speak to you about solastalgia; a word barely a decade old but that has infected communities around the globe. Its reach is pervasive and undiscriminating.

It is felt by the indigenous Awá tribe of the Amazon who stand solemnly as their rainforest is ripped apart and thinned as though plagued by a virulent case of Alopecia.

Solastalgia lingers upon the cracked banks of Lake Poopò, once the second largest lake in Bolivia, now a stinking puddle. The residents who manned these shores for centuries have fled their home along with 75 different species of birds. Only the elderly remain.

Solastalgia is a term invented by Glenn Albrecht, an Australian philosopher and environmentalist, and it describes the kind of homesickness that emerges from staying put. It speaks of powerlessness and involuntary farewells, the whispered goodbye to a familiar place, landscape or home as it is rendered unrecognisable by climate change or corporate action. Solastalgia cannot be undone or abated like its brethren nostalgia, as what was lost would take centuries to return. It is the creeping sense of distress we feel when we realise that the world has reached its nadir and yet no one is doing anything to stop it. Solastalgia is part of the emerging lexis that gives a name to the environmental changes occurring in plain sight around us.

Its reach is pervasive and undiscriminating. It is felt by the indigenous Awá tribe of the Amazon who stand solemnly as their rainforest is ripped apart and thinned as though plagued by a virulent case of Alopecia. Solastalgia lingers upon the cracked banks of Lake Poopò, once the second largest lake in Bolivia, now a stinking puddle. The residents who manned these shores for centuries have fled their home along with 75 different species of birds. Only the elderly remain. Solastalgia is a term invented by Glenn Albrecht, an Australian philosopher and environmentalist, and it describes the kind of homesickness that emerges from staying put. It speaks of powerlessness and involuntary farewells, the whispered goodbye to a familiar place, landscape or home as it is rendered unrecognisable by climate change or corporate action. Solastalgia cannot be undone or abated like its brethren nostalgia, as what was lost would take centuries to return. It is the creeping sense of distress we feel when we realise that the world has reached its nadir and yet no one is doing anything to stop it. Solastalgia is part of the emerging lexis that gives a name to the environmental changes occurring in plain sight around us.

polluted river mongolia
Picture taken from Photographic Book: “Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot”. Author/Editor: Tom Butler

Less than 24 hours into her tenure at Number 10 news broke that Theresa May, Britain’s second female Prime Minister, has dissolved the Department of Energy and Climate Change in a tirade of sweeping reform.

This suicidal omission of climate change from the political agenda occurs one week after the publication of a report from the Independent Committee on Climate Change ascertaining that Britain was “poorly prepared” for the inevitable impacts of global warming in the coming decades.[1] This builds upon the 2015 national security strategy which ranked climate change as a firm equal to international terrorism in the threat it poses to the UK. Oxford Street remains one of the most polluted streets in the world, breaching EU limits for nitrogen dioxide emissions for the entire year in a mere 7 days. The effects of this invisible killer are manifold; 9,000 premature deaths per year in the capital alone are attributed to air pollution while its festering particles attack our skin ageing us 10% faster than those living in the countryside.[2]

“My explanation of the CCC report is not enough. The words are not big or frightening enough to contain the enormity of our climate cataclysm. Look around you. Look at this absurdly perfect, balanced environment. Start taking pictures of it. 1 in 10 species will be extinct by 2050.

The report painted an apocalyptic picture of the next 20-30 years if fossil fuel emissions are not drastically curtailed. London, a sizzling 48° degrees in August luring in a cohort of Zika-bearing mosquitos and dengue fever; the winter months spent fighting the ravages of vicious flooding expected to affect one million homes each year. NASA part funds a report warning that systemic collapse is ‘difficult to avoid’.[3] Food supply chains interrupted, soil erosion and contamination rendering harvest impossible and a swath of climate related war and migration as we battle it out for the last scraps of habitable land. The message is simple: keep this up and it’s a hot, flooded, dead Earth.

Bleached Coral
Dead coral reefs of Lizard Island, Australia, as a result of rising sea temperatures. Photograph Copyright: The Ocean Agency.

So why is it that the fate of our home is consistently downgraded from the political agenda?

Besides the obvious spoils of environmental exploitation, climate scepticism goes hand in hand with the tilt towards far right politics that currently plagues much of Europe. But as Brian Cox astutely pointed out in his article in The Guardian, suspicion of experts and denying the truth about the world around us is the way back to the cave.

Warnings of climate change go unheeded not because there is not enough data or research, but because they fall like feathers upon our profit obsessed and hardened governments. My explanation of the CCC report is not enough. The words are not big or frightening enough to contain the enormity of our climate cataclysm.

Look around you. Look at this absurdly perfect, balanced environment. Start taking pictures of it. 1 in 10 species will be extinct by 2050.[4]

For many people it is easier to imagine the demise of our planet than an overhaul of our political economy and yet our Earth is the only thing that transcends the barriers of culture, class, nationhood that we have so assiduously constructed.

And so it falls to us, the people, you and me. It falls to us even though 10% of all waste is contributed by households. It falls to us because “the world is not inherited from our ancestors but borrowed from our children”. 

Climate change asks hard questions of us all.

It asks us to think temporally in deep time, Earth time, the paths that run parallel and ahead of our own lifespans. It asks us to pull our heads out of the sand and look brutally at the impact we have made upon this planet. It asks even harder questions of scientists. Do we plough ahead with assisted migration to try and save the creatures we have left? Or will our involvement in their battle for survival create hybrid animals that pose threats to existing ecological systems?

Climate debates are not aided by the fact that we have to push and scream to even gain a foothold on the agenda about changing the world. Promising noises were made at the Paris Climate Convention in December last year during which 195 countries agreed to adopt a universal action plan limiting global warming to 2°C. But a mere 6 months later, Obama’s attempts to implement the necessary reforms have been stymied by the infantile politics of the Republican party who continue to deny climate change as a national concern. Theresa May has closed the department responsible for meeting carbon targets absorbing it into the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Action where climate policies will have to fight to be heard above economic proposals for the flagging post-Brexit economy.

Bangladesh
Picture taken from Photographic Book: “Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot”. Author/Editor: Tom Butler

And so it falls to us, the people, you and me. It falls to us even though 10% of all waste is contributed by households. It falls to us because “the world is not inherited from our ancestors but borrowed from our children”[5].

At first look the task seems enormous, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of environmentally propped up capitalism. But we have to learn to hope with teeth.

Take comfort in the successes we have made so far. Look to campaigns such as Blackfish and realise our own potential to effect change on global organisations when it is packaged just right. Sign petitions and protest with Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Rainforest UK. Stop buying toothpaste with micro-beads that leaving the ocean clinking and wheezing like an antique armchair. Reduce your meat consumption. Support Sadiq Khan’s campaign to clean up the air in London’s cities. Plant trees. Support the switch over to renewable energy and glory in the revolutionary technologies that have been created that might just be enough to tide us through this epoch of geological adaption; Scott and Julie Brusaw’s revolutionary solar panels roads for one are worth checking out.  The Earth has a remarkable capacity to heal itself if we just let it breathe. And above all, do not be passive, lend your voice wherever you can because if the politicians defending the EU referendum result have taught us anything, it is that we as a democracy will be listened to if we shout loud enough.

“There is hope. But for it to be real, and barbed, and tempered into a weapon, we cannot just default to it.” – China Miéville, Limits of Utopia

 

[1] 2017 Committee for Climate Change Report. Available at: https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/uk-climate-change-risk-assessment-2017/

[2] Study conducted by Chinese Dermatologist Association and Olay Skincare.

[3] Review of the NASA Study: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists

[4] Extinction Risk from Climate Change, (2004) C.D Thomas.
Available at: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v427/n6970/abs/nature02121.html

[5] Quote taken from: Wendell Berry The Unforeseen Wilderness (1971).