On Sunday, March 7, 1965, roughly 600 African Americans and their allies gathered and marched towards Montgomery, Alabama in order to take a stand and draw attention to the fact that 99% of Selma, Alabama’s registered voters were white, and that the African American community was being denied their legal right to vote. The unarmed men and women who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge were met by a heavily armed police force and were tear gassed and beaten horrifically. In the end, 17 marchers were hospitalized, and another 50 were treated for injuries caused by the police.
On Sunday, November 20, 2016, more than 400 Native Americans and their allies marched on the Backwater Bridge outside of Cannon Ball, North Dakota. The Water Protectors had been demonstrating peacefully for months in order to preserve sacred burial grounds and protect their only source of clean drinking water from the oil-bearing Dakota Access Pipeline. However, this unarmed march was meant to clear vehicles that had been set up by DAPL to block the Backwater Bridge. They were attempting to clear the road so that emergency medical vehicles could have faster access to the residents and campers at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. After being trapped on the bridge by heavily armed police, the marchers were hosed with water cannons in 23°F temperatures, and shot with rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, and concussion grenades for more than 7 hours. 26 people were hospitalized, and more than 300 were treated for injuries caused by the police forces.
It is highly likely that neither group of marchers knew the full extent of the violence that they were about to experience as they marched on these bridges for the first time. However, they certainly knew what was in store for them for any subsequent actions. After the first march on Montgomery, the nation was horrified by the images broadcast by media sources, and on March 9, more than 2500 people showed up for the second march on Montgomery. Due to a pending decision, and a restraining order issued by Federal District Court Judge Frank Minis Johnson, the marchers turned around on the Pettus Bridge.
Ultimately, on March 17, Judge Johnson ruled that the civil rights activists’ right to march could not be abridged by the state of Alabama, writing “The law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups…by marching, even along public highways.” Meanwhile, on March 13th, President Lyndon Johnson met with Alabama Governor George Wallace in an attempt to prevent further violence and harassment from being directed at the civil rights activists. While unsuccessful with Wallace, President Johnson introduced a bill two days later to Congress. That bill became the Voting Rights Act. While it took time for the bill to pass, President Johnson deployed 2000 soldiers of the U.S. Army, 1900 Alabama National Guard troops under federal command, and unknown numbers of FBI and Federal Marshals to protect the demonstrators as they successfully continued their march on March 21.
When I showed up on November 24 to bring supplies and provide medical support at the Oceti Sakowin Camp, there were an estimated 3500 people at camp. When I left at the end of the week, there were roughly 10,000. Dozens of countries, and hundreds of tribes from around the world are expressing outrage and concern over the violence and harassment directed towards the Water Protectors at Standing Rock. These communities are also outraged that the pipeline was originally supposed to pass north of Bismarck, ND, but was rejected as being too dangerous to pass near that overwhelmingly white community’s water source, and instead was relocated to pass through traditional Lakota lands and under their Missouri River water source without any conversation regarding indigenous concerns and opposition to the pipeline.
Governor Jack Dalrymple of North Dakota is escalating his rhetoric towards the safety of the people camped at Standing Rock. He has threatened anyone bringing food and clothing donations to the camps with $1000 fines. This week, he threatened to oust the Water Protectors from their camps in the name of safety, due to winter conditions. However, the Water Protectors are not going to leave, and making someone homeless in winter is unconscionable. Using water cannons on peaceful demonstrators in sub-freezing temperatures shows that safety is not Dalrymple’s top priority. Getting people to vacate the land is his priority.
The Water Protectors are going to continue to march, pray, and peacefully demonstrate, regardless of the violent reactions from DAPL security and police forces. They are doing everything that they can to stand up for their rights in a peaceful manner. They are waiting for action from President Obama. It is time for a sit-down between President Obama and Gov. Dalrymple. It is also time for an immediate and decisive response from the Obama administration to ensure the safety of peacefully assembled citizens and their right to clean water. This means troops standing with the Water Protectors, not opposed to them. President Johnson was not perfect, but he has been judged by this nation, and the world, to have been on the correct side of history on civil rights in the wake of Bloody Sunday. Due to the shared history of abuse and denied rights, despite laws and treaties on their side, it is difficult to see why President Obama praises one group’s actions, but has yet to do anything of substance for the other.
Bloody Sunday
When will troops protect the Water Protectors? So far the only troops acting in such a capacity are the veterans recruited by Wes Clark Jr. My thanks go out to Mr. Clark and his veterans. However, anything short of deploying troops to protect the peacefully assembled demonstrators, in conjunction with pushing a bill through Congress to extend the rights of indigenous communities over the governance of their own land, would be a shameful act by the Obama administration. This is your Pettus Bridge, Mr. President. On which side of this historic bridge do you stand?
Taking the least effective route to enact change is not praiseworthy. A teacher would award a D for such effort.
While the ruling by the Army Corps of Engineers sounds nice, demonstrators are still fighting for Lakota rights on land that is considered to be federally-owned, but was granted to the Lakota “in perpetuity” by the government. The Lakota never relinquished their right to this land. The government took it.
There are still Federal Police and Army Corps vehicles on Lakota land. They are still on the north side of Cantapeta Creek…with the DAPL security forces. I will believe something has changed when Federal forces are standing shoulder-to-shoulder WITH the Standing Rock Water Protectors, indigenous rights have been extended by law, and the pipeline is re-routed or terminated. Until this happens, nothing has changed.
Noah Weber is a nurse and a farmer from Montana. He volunteered as a medic at the Oceti Sakowin Camp at Standing Rock, though most of his time went to ensuring everyone in the medic, healer, midwifery, and warming tents had wood, warmth, and functional stoves.
With a Thanksgiving holiday release of “Moana,” Disney’s Polynesian cartoon extravaganza can simultaneously expand its lucrative enterprise of exploiting marginalized, indigenous peoples (Pocahontas, Lilo and Stitch, Frozen) while perpetuating American amnesia.
A note about Thanksgiving: Early feasts of giving thanks celebrated some notable atrocities committed against Native peoples, including the 1637 massacre of 700 Pequot Indians by white Christians and the 1676 butchering and beheading of Wampanoag Sachem Metacom, whose severed head was then displayed on a pike for 25 years at Plymouth. Ultimately it was President Abraham Lincoln who declared it a national holiday in 1863, less than a year after he ordered the hanging of 38 Dakota men, which remains the largest mass execution in U.S. history.
Given the pre-Halloween rollout of the Maui skin suit so that children would unwittingly promote “Moana” like human billboards, I doubt the choice of a release date was any less thought out. Some of the most experienced and powerful business minds in the world own and operate Disney — they’re not the type to leave a hundred-something million-dollar investment to chance.
Opening dates, promotion, and merchandising are carefully planned well in advance to achieve maximum financial gain. The skin suit and Thanksgiving release shouldn’t be thought of as unintended cultural faux pas — these were calculated risks. To give the benefit of the doubt to a $50-billion corporate predator waiting to vacuum up a few billion more off of our culture(s) is to agree with the offense.
Most indigenous peoples under U.S. control, certainly Hawaiians, have yet to carve out a meaningful space to represent ourselves, what we value and our reality in mass media and film largely because America’s master narrative relies on our subjugation. The truth of what matters to us undermines the colonizer’s imagineered innocence. The narrative of Hawai’i as “the Aloha State” is a perfect example — every non-Maoli living and vacationing here is able to do so because of the theft of our nationhood and the complete appropriation and subversion of our land and culture.
While there are certainly other oppressed groups, our oppressions aren’t any more equal than our successes. Hawaiian world—indigenous world is all buss up, and our narratives are convoluted. But the settler world isn’t, and neither is its story.
Our hopes, dreams and struggles are inconvenient to what Disney has chosen to produce about us. Worse yet, we’re expected to shut up and enjoy the ride everyone’s taking on our back. Yes, some of our own people, grateful for any acknowledgment, don’t recognize an insult or culture theft when they see it. Others will happily join in with the massive, commodifying monstrosity of “Moana” and buy Moana gear and computer games. (I heard that the Ala Moana Disney Store is already well-stocked.)
One Maori writer, who likes the Maui skin suit, said it’s like dressing up as Santa Claus. He’s not far off, seeing as how we’re the ones doing all the giving. He reminded me of something funny that Haunani-Kay Trask, one of our beloved sovereignty leaders, once said to me: “Yah, the haole, they stole everything we gave them.”
Being culturally poached and misrepresented isn’t flattering — it’s a threat. The historical fact is that colonization in the Pacific, and everywhere for that matter, has had catastrophic consequences for indigenous peoples in every conceivable way. And native collaboration, while highly problematic, doesn’t legitimize hijacking or pimping our knowledge, heritage and identity.
Having said that, not knowing who the members are of the Oceanic Story Trust, a group that was hand picked by Disney to shepherd the cultural content and merchandising, we can’t ask these Pacific Mouseketeers what the capital F they were thinking when they helped Disney strip mine our culture(s) for the sole purpose of making a profit.
Although bad publicity in the form of complaints that the skin suit is racist motivated Disney to take it off the shelf, they did it with a condescending, “We regret that the Maui costume has offended some,” version of an apology. I suppose that’s the best we can expect from an entity whose bottom line is protecting its investment.
But Hawaiians and other indigenous Pacific Islanders are the ones who need to think hard about what something of this magnitude will mean. Given that it’s shaping up to become this region’s cultural heist of the century (so far), we may want to try to make native sense of the intent and the processes at work here, especially us Hawaiians.
I say especially Hawaiians because so much is being done to us politically, materially, culturally and spiritually these past few years. From the mass desecration project of the Thirty Meter Telescope to the Obama administration’s determination to force feed us federal recognition against our will, ours is a never-ending struggle to simply survive in our homeland as who we are.
The cultural imperialism of Disney mirrors the military imperialism of the United States and the other industries it uses to erase our indigenous belonging: tourism and real estate. Disney’s Aulani Resort, and now its “Moana,” secures its place in the economically enforced ethnocide and culturcide that is steadily replacing us with settlers.
If the promotional trailer is anything like the film, Disney’s about to get even richer by exploiting and mocking us in deeply genealogical and spiritual ways—turning Tutu Pele into an ugly lava monster and Maui into a ridiculous, clowning sidekick. The noted psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary and writer Frantz Fanon was so on the mark when he said, “… Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it.”
Disney has reduced us and our world to a cartoon at a time when our political future is hanging in the balance, when Hawaiians absolutely need to be heard and taken seriously, not distracted by or silenced for entertainment. Disney is trying to do to our culture and identity what America is doing to our land and nationhood: we are being carved up, sold off, and drained of our mana.
Since the Maui skin suit debacle, Disney’s 21st century iteration of the white supremacist ideology that informed people like British Major General Horatio Gordon Robley, a proud collector of Maori heads, and that guy who tried to sell a Hawaiian kupuna skull on E-Bay, I’ve been thinking in metaphors. I’m looking at what’s happening right now, but looking, too, at the horizon, at what’s coming toward us, imagining what might follow, hoping that whatever it is, Hawaiians and all Pacific Islanders can face it together instead of letting it further divide us.
I have no doubt that Disney’s “Moana” will materially and psychologically aid and abet the colonial project of indigenous erasure and removal. It’s a cultural tsunami and it will impact the entire region. However, unlike natural disasters, this man-made disaster will play out over many months and years and will continue for as long as Disney can suck the marrow from our spiritual and cultural bones.
Anne Keala Kelly is the award winning filmmaker of “Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai‘i,” and a journalist whose work has appeared in The Nation and Indian Country Today, and on the Pacifica Network and Al Jazeera.
When some people hear that we want to “end civilization” they initially respond negatively, because of their positive associations with the word “civilization.” This piece is an attempt to clarify, define and describe what I mean by “civilization.”
a society in an advanced state of social development (eg, with complex legal and political and religious organizations); “the people slowly progressed from barbarism to civilization” [syn: civilisation]
the social process whereby societies achieve civilization [syn: civilisation]
a particular society at a particular time and place; “early Mayan civilization” [syn: culture, civilisation]
the quality of excellence in thought and manners and taste; “a man of intellectual refinement”; “he is remembered for his generosity and civilization” [syn: refinement, civilisation]
The synonyms include “advancement,” “breeding,” “civility,” “cultivation,” “culture,” “development,” “edification,” “education,” “elevation,” “enlightenment,” “illumination,” “polish,” “progress,” and “refinement”. Of course. As Derrick Jensen asks, “can you imagine writers of dictionaries willingly classifying themselves as members of ‘a low, undeveloped, or backward state of human society’?”
In contrast, the antonyms of “civilization” include “barbarism,” “savagery,” “wilderness,” and “wildness.” These are the words that civilized people use to refer to those they view as being outside of civilization—in particular, indigenous peoples. “Barbarous,” as in “barbarian,” comes from a Greek word, meaning “non-Greek, foreign.” The word “savage” comes from the Latin “silvaticus” meaning “of the woods.” The origins seem harmless enough, but it’s very instructive to see how civilized people have used these words2:
barbarity
The quality of being shockingly cruel and inhumane [syn: atrocity, atrociousness, barbarousness, heinousness]
A brutal barbarous savage act [syn: brutality, barbarism, savagery]
savagery
The quality or condition of being savage.
An act of violent cruelty.
Savage behavior or nature; barbarity.
These associations of cruelty with the uncivilized are, however, in glaring opposition to the historical record of interactions between civilized and indigenous peoples.
Let us take one of the most famous examples of “contact” between civilized and indigenous peoples. When Christopher Columbus first arrived in the “Americas” he noted that he was impressed by the indigenous peoples, writing in his journal that they had a “naked innocence … They are very gentle without knowing what evil is, without killing, without stealing.”
And so he decided “they will make excellent servants.”
In 1493, with the permission of the Spanish Crown, he appointed himself “viceroy and governor” of the Caribbean and the Americas. He installed himself on the island now divided between Haiti and the Dominican republic and began to systematically enslave and exterminate the indigenous population. (The Taino population of the island was not civilized, in contrast to the civilized Inca who the conquistadors also invaded in Central America.) Within three years he had managed to reduce the indigenous population from eight million to three million. By 1514 only 22,000 of the indigenous population remained, and after 1542 they were considered extinct.3
The tribute system, instituted by [Columbus] sometime in 1495, was a simple and brutal way of fulfilling the Spanish lust for gold while acknowledging the Spanish distaste for labor. Every Taino over the age of fourteen had to supply the rulers with a hawk’s bell of gold every three months (or, in gold-deficient areas, twenty-five pounds of spun cotton; those who did were given a token to wear around their necks as proof that they had made their payment; those did not were … “punished” – by having their hands cut off … and [being] left to bleed to death.4
More than 10,000 people were killed this way during Columbus’ time as governor. On countless occasions, these civilized invaders engaged in torture, rape, and massacres. The Spaniards
… made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babes from their mother’s breast by their feet and dashed their heads against the rocks … They spitted the bodies of other babes, together with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords.5
On another occasion:
A Spaniard … suddenly drew his sword. Then the whole hundred drew theirs and began to rip open the bellies, to cut and kill – men, women, children and old folk, all of whom were seated off guard and frightened … And within two credos, not a man of them there remains alive. The Spaniards enter the large house nearby, for this was happening at its door, and in the same way, with cuts and stabs, began to kill as many as were found there, so that a stream of blood was running, as if a number of cows had perished.6
This pattern of one-way, unprovoked, inexcusable cruelty and viciousness occurred in countless interactions between civilized and indigenous people through history.
This phenomena is well-documented in excellent books including Ward Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present, Kirkpatrick Sale’s The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. Farley Mowat’s books, especially Walking on the Land, The Deer People, and The Desperate People document this as well with an emphasis on the northern and arctic regions of North America.
There is also good information in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States. Eduardo Galeando’s incredible Memory of Fire trilogy covers this topic as well, with an emphasis on Latin America (this epic trilogy reviews numerous related injustices and revolts). Jack D Forbes’ book Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism and Terrorism is highly recommended. You can also find information in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, although I often disagree with the author’s premises and approach.
The same kind of attacks civilized people committed against indigenous peoples were also consistently perpetrated against non-human animal and plant species, who were wiped out (often deliberately) even when civilized people didn’t need them for food; simply as blood-sport. For further readings on this, check out great books like Farley Mowat’s extensive and crushing Sea of Slaughter, or Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (which also examines precivilized history and European colonialism).
With this history of atrocity in mind, we should (if we haven’t already) cease using the propaganda definitions of civilized as “good” and uncivilized as “bad” and seek a more accurate and useful definition. Anthropologists and other thinkers have come up with a number of somewhat less biased definitions of civilization.
Nineteenth century English anthropologist E B Tylor defined civilization as life in cities that is organized by government and facilitated by scribes (which means the use of writing). In these societies, he noted, there is a resource “surplus”, which can be traded or taken (though war or exploitation) which allows for specialization in the cities.
Derrick Jensen, having recognized the serious flaws in the popular, dictionary definition of civilization, writes:
I would define a civilization much more precisely, and I believe more usefully, as a culture – that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts – that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from latin civitatis, meaning state or city), with cities being defined – so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on – as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.
Jensen also observes that because cities need to import these necessities of life and to grow, they must also create systems for the perpetual centralization of resources, yielding “an increasing region of unsustainability surrounded by an increasingly exploited countryside.”
Contemporary anthropologist John H Bodley writes: “The principle function of civilization is to organize overlapping social networks of ideological, political, economic, and military power that differentially benefit privileged households.”7 In other words, in civilization institutions like churches, corporations and militaries exist and are used to funnel resources and power to the rulers and the elite.
The twentieth century historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford wrote one of my favourite and most cutting and succinct definitions of civilization. He uses the term civilization
… to denote the group of institutions that first took form under kingship. Its chief features, constant in varying proportions throughout history, are the centralization of political power, the separation of classes, the lifetime division of labor, the mechanization of production, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of slavery and forced labor for both industrial and military purposes.8
Taking various anthropological and historical definitions into account, we can come up with some common properties of civilizations (as opposed to indigenous groups).
People live in permanent settlements, and a significant number of them in cities.
The society depends on large-scale agriculture (which is needed to support dense, non-food-growing urban populations).
The society has rulers and some form of “aristocracy” with centralized political, economic, and military power, who exist by exploiting the mass of people.
The elite (and possibly others) use writing and numbers to keep track of commodities, the spoils of war, and so on.
There is slavery and forced labour either by the direct use of physical violence, or by economic coercion and violence (through which people are systematically deprived of choices outside the wage economy).
There are large armies and institutionalized warfare.
Production is mechanized, either through physical machines or the use of humans as though they were machines (this point will be expanded on in other writings here soon).
Large, complex institutions exist to mediate and control the behaviour of people, through as their learning and worldview (schools and churches), as well as their relationships with each other, with the unknown, and with the nature world (churches and organized religion).
Anthropologist Stanley Diamond recognized the common thread in all of these attributes when he wrote; “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home”.9
This common thread is control. Civilization is a culture of control. In civilizations, a small group of people controls a large group of people through the institutions of civilization. If they are beyond the frontier of that civilization, then that control will come in the form of armies and missionaries (be they religious or technical specialists). If the people to be controlled are inside of the cities, inside of civilization, then the control may come through domestic militaries (ie, police). However, it is likely cheaper and less overtly violent to condition of certain types of behaviour through religion, schools or media, and related means, than through the use of outright force (which requires a substantial investment in weapons, surveillance and labour).
That works very effectively in combination with economic and agricultural control. If you control the supply of food and other essentials of life, people have to do what you say or they die. People inside of cities inherently depend on food systems controlled by the rulers to survive, since the (commonly accepted) definition of a city is that the population is dense enough to require the importation of food.
For a higher degree of control, rulers have combined control of food and agriculture with conditioning that reinforces their supremacy. In the dominant, capitalist society, the rich control the supply of food and essentials, and the content of the media and the schools. The schools and workplaces act as a selection process: those who demonstrate their ability to cooperate with those in power by behaving properly and doing what they’re told at work and school have access to higher paying jobs involving less labour. Those who cannot or will not do what they’re told are excluded from easy access to food and essentials (by having access only to menial jobs), and must work very hard to survive, or become poor and/or homeless. People higher on this hierarchy are mostly spared the economic and physical violence imposed on those lower on the hierarchy. A highly rationalized system of exploitation like this helps to increase the efficiency of the system by reducing the chance of resistance or outright rebellion of the populace.
The media’s propaganda systems have most people convinced that this system is somehow “natural” or “necessary”—but of course, it is both completely artificial and a direct result of the actions of those in power (and the inactions of those who believe that they benefit from it, or are prevented from acting through violence or the threat of violence).
In contradiction to the idea that the dominant culture’s way of living is “natural,” human beings lived as small, ecological, participatory, equitable groups for more than 99% of human history. There are a number of excellent books and articles comparing indigenous societies to civilization:
Chellis Glendinning’s My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization (Shambhala, 1994). You can read an excerpt of the chapter “A Lesson in Earth Civics.” She has also written several related books, including When Technology Wounds: The Human Consequences of Progress (Morrow, 1990).
Marshall Sahlin’s Stone Age Economics (Adline, 1972) is a detailed classic in that same vein. You can read his essay “The Original Affluent Society.”
Anthropologist Stanley Diamond’s book In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization (Transaction Publishers, 1987).
These sources show there were healthy, equitable and ecological communities in the past, and that they were the norm for countless generations. It is civilization that is monstrous and aberrant.
Living inside of the controlling environment of civilization is an inherently traumatic experience, although the degree of trauma varies with personal circumstance and the amounts of privilege different people have in society. Derrick Jensen makes this point very well in A Language Older than Words (Context Books, 2000), and Chellis Glendinning covers it as well in My name is Chellis.
Endnotes
1. Definition of “civilization” is from WordNet R 2.0, 2003, Princeton University
2. Definitions of “barbarity” and “savagery” are from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, 2000, Houghton Mifflin Company.
3. I owe many of the sources in this section to the research of Ward Churchill. The figure of eight million is from chapter six of Essays in Population History, Vol I by Sherburn F Cook and Woodrow Borah (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). The figure of three million is from is from a survey at the time by Bartolome de Las Casas covered in J B Thatcher, Christopher Columbus, two volumes (New York: Putnam’s, 1903-1904) Vol 2, page 384 ff. They were considered extinct by the Spanish census at the time, which is summarized in Lewis Hanke’s The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philapelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1947) page 200 ff.
4. Sale, Kirkpatrick. The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1990) page 155.
5. de Las Casas, Bartolome. The Spanish Colonie: Brevisima revacion (New York: University Microfilms Reprint, 1966).
6. de Las Casas, Bartolome. Historia de las Indias, Vol 3, (Mexico City: Fondo Cultura Economica, 1951) chapter 29.
7. Bodley, John H, Cultural Anthropology: Tribes, States and the Global System. Mayfield, Mountain View, California, 2000.
8. Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Human Development, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1966, page 186.
9. Diamond, Stanley, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1993, page 1.
Edited transcription of an interview by John Carico for The Fifth Column
How do you feel about Dr. Jill Stein and the Green Party of America?
I’m not a huge fan of the Green Party. I did a talk ten years ago at the Bioneers conference, which is about social change and environmentalism. One year their tagline was “the shift is hitting the fan,” about paradigm shifting. The thing that broke my heart was, so far as I know, I was the only person there who talked about power and psychopathology. I don’t think you can talk about social change without talking about power, and I don’t think you can talk about the destruction of the planet without talking about psychopathology. The Green Party has a lot of really good ideas, but how do you actually put them in place, given that those in power are sociopaths and the entire system rewards sociopathic behavior?
That doesn’t mean we need to give up or do nothing. A doctor friend of mine says the first step to a cure is proper diagnosis. If part of the disease that’s killing the planet is this sociopathological behavior, then fighting that sociopathological behavior needs to be part of our response.
I have voted Green in a couple of elections, and would vote again for a local Green. On the national level, the voting I’ve done was pretty much symbolic. I voted for Nader. I voted for a friend one time. The last time that I voted for any mainstream candidate was against Reagan in ‘84, and you pretty much had to vote against Reagan. But, interestingly, in 1980 I voted for Reagan and then realized I was an idiot, and voted Democrat in ’84. By ’88, I had an awakening and realized the whole system was just full of crap.
I do believe in voting on a local level. Voting on a national level may not change much, but locally, you can protect some things.
What warnings would you give young environmentalists as to how to differentiate green-washing from effective efforts?
The best way we learn is by making mistakes. The advice I give to young activists is to find what they love and defend it. Probably at some point, when they run up against the economic system, they’ll find themselves screwed over. That’s a lesson we all have to learn.
By the mid 1990s, I had already recognized that this culture is inherently destructive, but the “salvage rider” was still a big lesson for me. In ’95, activists all over the country had been able to shut down the Forest Service timber sales using the appeal process. Basically, if you could show the timber sales were breaking the law, you could appeal to have them stopped. Then they would have to produce a new document. Then you would stop them again by showing where they violated the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, etc. We were successful enough that Congress passed the salvage rider, wherein any timber sales that they wanted would be exempt from environmental regulations. The lesson was that any time you win using their rules to stop the injustice and stop the destruction, they will change the rules on you. There is really no substitute for learning this lesson yourself.
Artwork by Stephanie McMillan
Recognizing Greenwashing comes down to what so many indigenous people have said to me: we have to decolonize our hearts and minds. We have to shift our loyalty away from the system and toward the landbase and the natural world. So the central question is: where is the primary loyalty of the people involved? Is it to the natural world, or to the system?
What do all the so-called solutions for global warming have in common? They take industrialization, the economic system, and colonialism as a given; and expect the natural world to conform to industrial capitalism. That’s literally insane, out of touch with physical reality. There has been this terrible coup where sustainability doesn’t mean sustaining the natural ecosystem, but instead means sustaining the economic system.
So when figuring out if something is greenwashing, ask, “Does this thing primarily help sustain the economic system or the natural world?”
That’s one of the problems I have with industrial solar and wind energy. They are primarily aimed at extending the party, not aimed at protecting salmon.
I would also ask young people to think about the linkages. A solar cell may be really groovy and you can power your pot grow but where did the solar cell come from? It required mining. It required global infrastructure. Even climate activists ignore these linkages. I heard one activist say, “Solar power has no costs, only benefits.” Tell that to the lake in Bhatu, China, who is now completely dead as a result of rare earth mining. Tell that to the people, human and nonhuman, who no longer can sustain themselves from the lake or from the land poisoned all around it.
A friend of mine says, “A lot of environmentalists start by wanting to protect one specific piece of land, and move on to questioning the entire culture of western civilization.” Once you start asking the questions, they don’t stop. “Why are they trying to destroy this piece of land?” leads to, “Why do they want to destroy other pieces of land?” Then you ask, “Why do we have an economic system based on destroying land? What is the history of this economic system? What happens when it runs out of frontiers? What happens when you have overshoot?” It’s important for young activists never to stop asking those questions.
Can you name successful revolutions of the past that you think we should look to when forming our own strategies? Where colonizing powers withdrew, and left the economy to its people?
Economy is a really hard word when you have a global economic system. We can talk about the Irish kicking the British out, or the Vietnamese kicking out the United States, but the real winner in Vietnam is Coca Cola, because Vietnam is still tied into the global economic system.
I think it’s great that the Indians and Irish kicked out the British and that the Vietnamese kicked out the U.S., so I’m not attacking revolution when I say this. But one of the problems is that when you defeat a certain mindset, it will often find expression in another way. When the United States illegalized chattel slavery, the underlying entitlement, where white people felt entitled to the lives and labor of the African Americans, was still there and found expression in a new way with the Jim Crow Laws. We see this all the way up to today with mass incarceration of African American males in such shameful ways. Like I said earlier, we need to keep looking at the linkages and, unfortunately, this makes one depressed. Because when you see a victory, oftentimes, you also see a backlash and a reconfiguration and reestablishment of the underlying bigotry.
We see this too with monotheism’s movement toward science, especially mechanistic science, where the world is not alive. The monotheism of the Christian sky-god did the initial heavy lifting by taking meaning out of the world and leaving it up there. Mechanistic science is really just an extension. We can say, “Wow, we really got rid of the superstition and the bigotry that has to do with Christianity,” but this belief in science is even scarier. At least with the Christian sky-god there was someone above humans. Now humans are making themselves into this new god and think they control the whole planet.
Having said that as a preamble, the film The Wind That Shakes the Barley highlights one of the smart things the Irish did. The film starts off with all these Irish guys playing hurling. When I saw this at first, I thought, “What the hell does this have to do with the Irish liberation struggle?” As I mentioned, one of the things we have to do is to decolonize ourselves. They did this in part by playing Irish sports, using Gaelic Language, and reading Gaelic Literature. A successful revolution begins with breaking identification with the dominat system. First comes the emotional part. After that, it’s all strategy and tactics; you look around and ask, “What do we want to do, blow something up, vote, peaceful strikes?”
This ties back into everything we’ve talked about so far. Are we identifying with a system or are we identifying with those we are trying to protect? We can say the civil rights movement was successful in the sense that African Americans now have a provisional right to vote. Of course mass incarceration targets black males and thus takes away their right to vote, but the movement was still successful in that it accomplished some aims. This was done by identifying as black voters. So, identifying is very important.
Several years out from the writing of Decisive Ecological Warfare, is there anything you would change in terms of strategy that you’ve learned since?
We don’t know because no one is doing it. All I know is that there are more than 450 dead zones in the world and only one of those has recovered — in the Black Sea. The Soviet Union collapsed, making agriculture no longer economically feasible there. They stopped agriculture and the dead zone has recovered enough that they now have a commercial fishery. That makes clear to me that the planet will bounce back when this culture stops killing it, presuming there’s anything left.
The image that keeps coming to mind is this body, which is the earth, and it keeps bleeding out because it’s been stabbed 300 times. All these people are trying to heal this body, and they are doing CPR and putting on bandages and everything else. But they’re not stopping the killer who’s still stabbing the person to death. We have to stop that primary damage. We have to recognize that we can’t have it all. We can’t have a way of life that relies on industrial capitalism and continue to have a planet.
Now, I haven’t really answered your question, mostly because of what I said at first: nobody’s doing it, so we don’t know what mistakes there are in the strategy. I’ve been saying for fifteen years that if space aliens came down to earth and were doing what industrial civilization is doing to the planet, we would put in place Decisive Ecological Warfare. We would destroy their infrastructure. This is an important point. We can make a very strong argument that World War II was won by the Allies, primarily in the killing fields of Russia. But I would argue that either first or second most important was the destruction of German industrial capacity. Similarly, the North won the Civil War not just because they had better generals, but because they destroyed the South’s capacity to wage war.
I don’t care how we do it; we can do it by voting, if that works. But we have to find a way to stop this culture from waging war on the planet.
Will Potter’s Green Is the New Red talks about the crackdown against Green movements. Do you have any advice for people who want to speak openly about resistance but are afraid of the repercussions? Where is the line between security culture and the need for movement building? The Invisible Committee says we need to tie the actions that have been done into a narrative. Is the problem that the media never covers the actions of those who, for instance, did direct action against fracking in New Jersey, and that any direct action the media does cover seems to follow the horrible lone wolf narratives? Do you think this stifles our movement?
What you say makes a lot of sense. Coverage of direct actions, and the true reasons behind those actions, can’t be left to mainstream media. The movement needs people aboveground who can publish the narrative, and another separate group which is underground, to actually do it. Both roles are critical, but we need a firewall. Many activists have been arrested partly because they tried to do both. We in Deep Green Resistance are trying to fill that aboveground role, as is the North American Animal Liberation Front Press Office.
As for security culture…I think, sometimes, about the whole marijuana legalization movement (I realize this isn’t so much a successful revolutionary movement as a successful social movement). They’ve done a good job pushing an agenda that would have been unthinkable thirty years ago. They’ve done this by using this model, by being below ground with the growers and above ground with NORML. We can say the same thing about the IRA.
You need that firewall when you live in a security state, but we shouldn’t feel unnecessarily paranoid. Although surveillance is everywhere and they pretend they are God, those sitting at the top are not actually omniscient. Living in northern California, where the pot economy basically runs the entire economy, has helped me to a healthy understanding that the Panopticon is not as all seeing as it wants to be. (Again, I know there is a difference between A) growing marijuana, which many cops probably smoke or view with sympathy, and B) ending capitalism, which would freak out all the cops.)
I’m very naive about many things, including drug culture. But I used to teach at Pelican Bay, a Supermax Prison, and students told me that if you dropped them into any city in the world, they could find drugs within 15 minutes. I couldn’t even find a bathroom in 15 minutes! That means the underground economy is surviving the Panopticon very well; it isn’t omniscient.
The Green Scare did not succeed because of the power of the Panopticon, or because of brilliant police work. The cases of sabotage were solved by good old-fashioned stoolie, because Jake Ferguson was an abuser, junkie and a snitch. Basic security culture probably would have defeated the investigations.
Can you give a critique of anarchists and why you see a lot of their work as ineffective?
I had a conversation a couple years ago with a very famous, dedicated anarchist who has some critiques of anarchism, but didn’t want me to use his name because he knows if he says anything critical about anarchism he will get death threats. One of the big problems is that anarchism is open membership, in that anyone can become an anarchist simply by identifying as an anarchist. He says many who call themselves anarchist, aren’t; they are just antisocial and have found an ideological excuse for their bad behavior. He says anarchists have a long tradition of fighting for the eight-hour work day, or fighting againt fascism as in Spain. He says there needs to be a way to kick out people who are simply sociopaths who call themselves anarchists. I mean, here’s a quote by an anarchist/queer theorist: “Smashing the institutions of patriarchal racist capitalism goes hand in hand with being a repulsive perverted freak.” Seriously? We’re supposed to put this person in the same category as Goldman or Kropotkin? Are we going to let that person in, even if they are just a prick? Any group will have nutjobs: Republicans, Democrats, stamp collectors. But anarchism is so small, so vocal, and so open that the nut jobs really stand out and can discredit the larger group.
I’m also concerned about effectiveness. The individualist anarchists (as opposed to collectivist anarchists) have an active hostility toward organization. DGR isn’t alone in getting attacked for this, for being perceived as hierarchical. I’ve seen writing on this going back 40 years, with anybody who believes you can have an organization with a stable schema immediately being attacked as Stalinist. They attack the organization simply because it’s an organization. There is a great line by Samuel Huntington that says “The west won the world, not by the strength of its ideals, but by its application of organized violence.” (He’s actually a supporter of the western empire; he says it’s a good thing.)
I talk about this in Endgame. I have become convinced that the single most important invention of the dominant culture, which has allowed it to destroy the planet, is the top-down bureaucratic military style organization. I’m not saying we need to model our organizations after this, but it is really effective. It is how this culture was able to murder the Native Americans. They had one big army. In my experience, people can generally be very contentious. It’s really hard to get together on the same page.
I had a friend who was trying to start an environmental organization years ago. An indigenous member warned that 95% of the time would be spent dealing with personality conflicts, and the other 5% actually doing the work. It’s an accomplishment, albeit a terrible one, that the U.S. Military gets 5 million people to act toward one aim: killing brown people, or whatever it is they are doing. They have propaganda on TV and in print, they have the capitalist system which rewards bad behavior, they have an organizational schema and, on the other side, we are supposed to defeat them without being organized?
Civil War General McClellan lost against Lee due to piecemeal efforts. McClellan attacked in one place and Lee moved his troops back. McClellan attacked another place, and Lee moved his troops back. The Turkish military had a strategy of attacking in piecemeal, and lost every battle for nearly two hundred years. The Russians would attack en masse and the Turkish army would send in one unit at a time and get slaughtered. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a terrible racist but brilliant Civil War strategist, said, “The way you win a battle is getting there first with the most.” In any conflict you want local superiority.
You asked why I see anarchist strategy as oftentimes ineffective: if you’re fighting an organized force, you should try to be organized as well.
Can you give a definition of Radical Feminism, and a response to some of your detractors who’ve accused DGR of transphobia?
The question I would ask is “Given that we live in a rape culture, do you believe women have the right to bathe, sleep, organize, and gather, free from the presence of males?” If you do believe that women have that right, you will be accused of transphobia; you will receive death threats. If you are a woman, you will receive rape threats. I’ve been de-platformed over this, some trans activists have threatened to kill the children of DGR activists over this. All because I believe that women have the right to gather free from the presence of males.
I want to make clear that no one in DGR is telling anyone how to live. I don’t give a shit! I’m not saying people who identify as trans should get paid less for their work, or that they shouldn’t have whatever sexual partner they want. I’m not suggesting they should be kicked out of their house, or should be de-platformed from a university, or that anything bad should happen to them.
Somebody wrote me and said, “I have a a little five-year-old boy who loves to wear frilly clothes, loves to dance ‘like a girl’, and sing ‘like a girl’; doesn’t this make him transgender?” I wrote back and asked, “Are you saying only little girls can wear frilly clothes? Why can’t we just say ‘this is a little boy who likes to play with dolls, and sing in a high voice?’ Why can’t we just love and accept this child for who he is? What does it even mean to dance ‘like a girl’? ”
Shoddy thinking makes me angry. I know the trans allies are going to get mad when I say, “Women should be able to gather alone” because they will then ask, “Who are women? Aren’t trans who identify as women, in fact women?” My definition of woman is human female, and my definition of female is based on biology. Some species are dimorphic. Just like there are male marijuana plants and female marijuana plants, and male hippopotami and female hippopotami, there are male humans and female humans.
I want to say two things before anyone offers a counter-definition of ‘woman’:
1. A definition cannot be tautological. You cannot use a word to define itself. You cannot say, “A woman is someone who identifies as a woman,” any more than you can say, “A square is something that sort of resembles a square.”
2. A definition must have a clearly defined metric. If I said, “Here is a three sided thing, it’s a square,” you would say, “No, it’s not a square because a square has 4 sides.” You have to be able to verify. I can say I’m a vegetarian but I had great ribs for dinner. This destroys not only the word ‘vegetarian’ but also the word ‘definition.’ I would ask those who disagree with my definition, “What is your better definition that is verifiable, for the word ‘woman’?” and second, “Is the fact that I have a different definition for the word ‘woman’, which is defensible linguistically, so important that you think it’s acceptable for men to threaten to rape women?”
I’ve never publically discussed this point before, but I think this is an important issue to discuss. It’s part of a larger post-modern social movement that values what we think and what we feel over what is real. This takes us right back to the greenwashing, with people saying, “We have to come up with the economy we want.” No, first we have to figure out what the Earth will allow!
This culture has a deep hate for the embodied and for what is natural. Here’s a great example: I have coronary artery disease, and I told my doctor I was feeling better since I had been diagnosed. This was right before Obamacare kicked in, so I didn’t have insurance yet. The pain got less in that time, and I asked why. The doctor said that when the arteries get clogged, the body sends out capillaries all around it to basically do its own version of bypass surgery. I had never heard that before. We all think it’s some miraculous thing when someone cuts open your chest and does bypass surgery, but we don’t even think about it when the body does it itself. There is tremendous wisdom of knowledge in the body, and we have to learn to respect it. This is important, both on a larger global scale and on the personal scale. I think it’s really important to recognize how this culture devalues the body. How I feel is way less important than what is.
Can you talk a bit about left sectarianism?
This goes back to the machine-like organizational structure of the dominant culture, which I am not valorizing, but do recognize as really fucking effective. It’s been able to get people past sectarianism.
Over the years, I’ve gotten thousands of pieces of hate mail, of which only a couple hundred were from right wingers. I’ve gotten hate mail from anti-car activists because I drive a car, vegans because I eat meat, and anarchists because I believe in laws against rape. I’ve never understood why animal rights activists and hunters don’t work together to protect the habitat. I wouldn’t have a problem with that. I do believe in temporary alliances. Once that’s done, animal rights activists can sabotage the hunts.
There’s a great example from 300 or 400 CE. These two sects of Christianity fought, same name but one had an umlaut, and one didn’t. They killed each other — hundreds of people! — over the question “Do you believe the fires of hell are literal or figurative?”
I was talking to a guy about the left always attacking each other. He mentioned that where he lived in West Virginia, there used to be a single KKK chapter consisting of three brothers. Now they have three chapters, because they can’t stand each other. So it’s not just a problem on the left.
Instead of getting mad at sectarianism, which I’ve been doing for the past fifteen years, we need to figure out what to do about it. It’s probably part of the human condition.
My friend Jeanette Armstrong, an indigenous activist and writer, told me once, “We, in our community, have just as many squabbles as white people do. The difference is I know my great-grandchild might marry your great-grandchild, so we figure out how to get along.” I really like that. I think we just have to ask “What are we really trying to do?”
What’s wrong with me having a really strong disagreement with a trans activist, for example, and them having a really strong disagreement with me? We can both continue doing our work and, at worst, ignore each other. There are plenty of people with whom I disagree. Families have different political views all the time and still love each other.
The question I’ve been asked over the years that cracks me up is what it’s like at my house on Thanksgiving. One of my sisters is a petroleum engineer, and she used to be married to a guy who did cyanide heat leaching and owned a gold mine. Now she’s married to a guy who used to work for the NSA and now works for the Israeli Military. What do we talk about? We talk about football. My brother is a huge Seattle Seahawks fan, so go, Hawks! I don’t talk about environmental stuff; it’d just start an argument. So I don’t understand why we activists can’t agree to disagree.
Noam Chomsky, who really disagrees with the anti-industrial perspective, is another great example. I was scheduled to give a talk in Scotland, and they wanted to ask me about Chomsky blasting anti-industrialism. I really disagree with him on this, but I really respect his work, so my agent, a really smart person and also Chomsky’s agent, said just to say “I’m not attacking Chomsky. We just have a disagreement on this.” I don’t understand why we can’t do this more often. There is a limit, of course. Roman Polanski is a rapist, so it makes sense to talk about his personal life.
I can’t stand Richard Dawkins, have critiqued his work a lot, and have heard, individually, that he’s pompous. But I’ve never heard that he’s a rapist or anything so I don’t know why I wouldn’t just keep my critiques focused on his work.
I think film is really detrimental to communication, because it’s so removed from real life and the way we communicate. In order to move a film story forward, you need dramatic tension. So a lot of times you have people fighting who wouldn’t fight in real life, and because we learn to communicate from the stories we take in, we learn to be even more contentious than we otherwise would be.
I know someone who was on Bill Maher and was relatively polite. They got mad and said, “If you are ever on the show again, you have to interrupt people and be contentious, because that’s what makes the show work. We want Jerry Springer, we want people to throw chairs.” We may not really want that, but that’s what works for the spectacle. And then we learn that’s acceptable behavior.
I’m writing a book right now with a coauthor. We had a significant conflict Saturday, but both parties handled it in a mature fashion. We still have a significant disagreement, but we strengthened our friendship because we handled it maturely.
What are your thoughts on Prison Abolition?
When talking about prison abolition, I get a little nervous because I can’t wrap my head around it. Obviously the prison system is horrendous. But I’m not a prison abolitionist, because when I taught at the Supermax, the students agreed that the only way for prison abolition to work is if you’re going to kill a bunch of people. I knew a kid who was put out for prostitution at age four, and really, what chance did this kid have? He was really fucked up by the time he was six. Another kid was living on the streets of Oklahoma at six with his little brother. This guy is now doing life for murder. Probably the first time he knew where his next meal was coming from was when he got to prison.
My creative writing students used to pass around jellybeans, but warned me never to take anything from one inmate. He had tortured a person to death, and since getting to prison, he’d poisoned three people. Something, obviously, had happened to this guy.
A friend had a student who said to her, “I am so broken, I need to be kept out of society.”
Another guy — not sure if he was executed or died on death row — killed his wife and kid and put each heart in a separate pocket because “the blood couldn’t mix.” When he was on trial, he pulled out one of his eyes because “that’s how the feds were putting stuff into his brain.” That didn’t work, so he pulled out his other eye and ate it. I’m not saying he needed to be in prison as it currently exists, but he definitely needed to be separated from society. Or removed. What do you do with Ted Bundy?
I’m not saying that Ted Bundy makes the case for locking up some fifteen year old, and I’m not saying we shouldn’t eliminate for-profit prisons and the prison industrial complex. And I’m mostly against the death penalty — though I think Tony Hayward of BP should be executed, it’s outrageous as it is because it’s racist and classist. But the whole culture is completely messed up, and we can’t simply abolish all prisons without addressing the rest of the problems.
I had a student who said if he could change one thing about society’s perception of drug dealers, he’d destroy the stereotype of the drug dealer in an Armani suit. He said, “You try living in Oakland with three children and working at McDonalds; you can’t do it. Drug dealing puts food on the table.” Now he’s in prison which doesn’t help anybody.
Before I went to work in the prison system, I was completely apolitical on the drug war, because I never thought about it. But I became highly politicized because a lot of my students would have been perfectly fine neighbors as long as you either A) kept them off drugs, or B) made the drug legal like cigarettes. Many of my stdents did terrible things to get money for drugs, but if it had just been like cigarettes, they never would have murdered people.
One student was in because he was a marijuana dealer in the 1970s, and shot dead someone who tried to rob him. If he had been a shoe salesman and shot someone who tried to rob him, he wouldn’t have gone to jail for even one night, much less for the rest of his life.
A friend who was a police abolitionist went into communities known for police brutality, and got push back because the police are only one threat. The communities also have armed drug gangs, sometimes just as organized and just as nasty as the cops. The local people had no interest in police abolition until there was a community defense that made it practical. Similarly, Craig O’Hara said that anarchism is not about the eradication of all laws, but about making society such that you don’t need them. That’s it, exactly. You can’t push theoretical ideals at the expense of what people need for safety right now. I’ve seen anarchists get mad at women for calling the cops for rape!
I talked to Christian Parenti years ago about police. He observed that police have two functions: to stop meth addicts from bashing in the head of Grandma, and to bash in the heads of strikers. Two roles: to protect and serve, and to protect and serve the capitalists. Police like to emphasize the prior, whereas anti-police activists like to emphasize the latter. Parenti said they spend most of their time making sure people don’t drive 80 mph through a school zone. I don’t have a problem with someone getting a ticket for driving 80 mph through a school zone. But their most important social role is to bash in the heads of strikers.
We need to realize that our broad cultural conditions are really really, really terrible, and that something needs to be done about Ted Bundy until we have a society where Ted Bundys aren’t made.
Featured image: Francisco Tiul Tut mourns the burning and destruction of his home in Barrio La Revolucion. On January 8th and 9th, 2007, the Guatemalan Nickel Company, local subsidiary of Canadian Skye Resources, ordered the forced eviction of five Q’eqchi’ Mayan communities around Lake Izabal in El Estor and Panzos, Guatemala (Photo: James Rodríguez/mimundo.org)
While much of the controversy surrounding Canada’s extractive industry centers on oil and gas projects like SWN Resources’ drilling plans in New Brunswick, Enbridge’s Line 9 pipeline and the widely felt impact of Tar Sands extraction in Alberta, there is a significant lack of debate concerning Canada’s larger and much more influential mining sector.
It’s estimated that 75% of the world’s mining and exploration companies are based in Canada. Collectively, they account for 42 billion dollars of Canada’s gross domestic product, making mining and exploration one of Canada’s most economically powerful sectors. Some 40% of global mining capital is raised on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The impact of Canada’s mining sector, however, goes far beyond mere facts and figures.
Wherever Canadian mining companies operate, they have an indelible imprint on the social, political and environmental realities in which they insert themselves. In countries that are politically unstable or where a culture of impunity is permitted to thrive, that imprint can span generations with successive mining companies following in the footsteps of their predecessors. Such is the legacy of shame that the Maya Q’eqchi people in Guatemala have been forced to endure for the last half century.
The “Fenix” Mining Project in El Estor, Guatemala. Established in 1965 as the EXMIBAL nickel mine owned by Canadian mining firm INCO, the project was transferred to the Guatemalan Nickel Company (CGN) in 2005 after the expiration of the original 40-year license. CGN was the local subsidiary of Canadian Skye Resources, a junior mining company comprised of former INCO directors. Skye was bought by HudBay in 2008, and the project sold to the Russian-based Solway group in 2011. (Photo: James Rodríguez/mimundo.org)
For the average Canadian, the effects of mining and other forms of resource extraction are not immediately apparent; indeed, those who tend to benefit the most from such projects also tend to be shielded from the harsh realities that befall those who are affected by them, as Mi’kmaq lawyer and activist Pam Palmater toldIntercontinental Cry (IC).
“People in far-away cities may enjoy oil for their cars, diamonds from their city jeweler, or minerals needed to build cities and never have to see the housing crisis and lands stripped of trees and wildlife, or see the deformed fish and contaminated water.”
“The people who benefit are separated from the people who pay the social and environmental price,” she added.
For more than two years, Palmater, who leads the Centre for Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University, worked closely with Mathias Colomb Cree Nation (MCCN) Chief Arlen Dumas, who, in 2013, served two Stop Work Orders to Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting Ltd (Hudbay) in connection to the Lalor mine project in Northern Manitoba. According to Chief Dumas, Hudbay failed to obtain MCCN consent to operate its proposed mine, situated on unceded MCCN lands. Soon after the Stop Work Orders were delivered, Hudbay sought out and obtained a court injunction against Palmater and Chief Dumas, restraining them and others from interfering with access to the company’s property.
A long line of Canadian mining companies have adopted a similar modus operandi, avoiding their constitutional obligation to consult, accommodate or even inform First Nations before seeking approval of mining projects that could adversely affect their indigenous rights.
Far more companies have been under fire for human rights abuses and other transgressions that took place outside of Canada. Among them, there is Barrick Gold, Fortuna Silver, Sherritt International, IAMGOLD, Curis Resources, Tahoe Resources Inc., Denison Mines Corp., First Majestic Silver, TVI Resource Development, Inc., Nevsun Resources Ltd., New Gold Inc., and GoldCorp.
In their unyielding pursuit for justice and accountability, Indigenous Peoples are presently pursuing at least three of these companies in Canada’s court system. Foremost among them is Hudbay Minerals.
In 2010, Toronto-based law firm Klippensteins Barristers & Solicitors filed a set of civil suits against Hudbay Minerals on behalf of Maya Q’eqchi people in Guatemala who suffered three separate injustices in connection to the Fenix Mining Project in El Estor municipality near the Pacific Coast.
The ongoing case against Hudbay Minerals centers on the actions of its former subsidiary Guatemalan Nickel Company (CGN) and security forces hired by CGN between 2007 and 2009, specifically the murder of Adolfo Ich Chaman, a respected community leader; the attempted murder of German Chub, who was paralyzed after being shot at close range; and the gang rape of eleven women.
The case is widely considered to be a major step forward to holding the Canadian mining sector to account for its actions abroad.
The story of Hudbay in Guatemala goes back several decades to another Canadian mining company, INCO (now Brazilian company Vale). Linking together the history of INCO and Hudbay in this Central American country is crucial to understanding not only the Canadian mining sector but also its role around the world.
HISTORY OF INCO IN GUATEMALA
The violence against Indigenous Peoples who have opposed mining in Guatemala should be viewed as part of the wider violence that swept through the country in the 1950s when a military coup overthrew a democratically-elected government. “The history of INCO in Guatemala is [in its simplest form] the history of the military coup in 1954 and then the aftermath of that military coup”, Graham Russell, director at Rights Action network, stated in an interview with IC.
From 1944 to 1954 two nationalist, reformist and capitalist regimes attempted to modernize and equalize the country[1]. Part of this effort stemmed from a moderate agrarian reform bill in 1952 that would have redistributed hundreds of thousands of acres of land to landless peasants. This bill greatly affected the United States-based United Fruit Company (UFC), which was at the time the largest landholder and employer in Guatemala. Seeing the bill as a threat to its deeply entrenched economic interests, UFC hired legendary public relations expert Edward Bernays to carry out an intense misinformation portraying then-president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán as a communist threat. While Bernays was busy winning hearts and minds, the company carried out an equally energetic lobbying effort back home to convince lawmakers and the U.S. public that Guatemala desperately needed a regime change.
Once U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower came to office, it wasn’t long before he authorized Operation PBSUCCESS, a covert op in which the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funded, armed, and trained 480 men led by Carlos Castillo Armas, the first of many dictators to succeed Guatemala’s presidency.
A long and brutal civil war ensued that would – over the course of 36 years – take the lives of more than 200,000 civilians and displace more than 1.5 million, culminating in a genocidal rampage against the Maya in the 1980s.
INCO had its own role to play in this vicious circle of violence. The Guatemalan military repeatedly used the company’s airplane landing strip to bring in soldiers and INCO trucks to transport them to Maya Q’eqchi lands for de-population. Graham Russell told IC that INCO’s position in the mining industry was a key factor as well, explaining that “…at this point (INCO) was the biggest private investor in all of Central America, not just Guatemala. These brutal military regimes and the wave of brutal violence starting in the late 60s and all through the 70s was directly associated to INCO’s mining interests in Guatemala.”
INCO was able to gain its status in Central America by cultivating a monopoly on nickel extraction. The company controlled nearly 54 percent of the nickel market in the West. During the 1950s it controlled 75 to 80 percent of the US nickel market[2]. Part of building this monopoly also involved Nazi war profiteering. Prior to World War II, INCO arranged a cartel agreement with the German company I.G.Farben to allow the stockpiling of nickel for the Nazi war effort[3].
INCO and the U.S. Hanna mining company formed Izabal Mining Operations Company (EXMIBAL), a subsidiary company, to operate in Guatemala in 1962. EXMIBAL attained a tax-exemption in Guatemala in 1968 for leading what was described as an “industry of transformation.” Under its contract, EXMIBAL would pay the Guatemalan government $23,000, a tiny fraction of the estimated $10 million it would make each year between 1971 and 1980.
With the civil war well underway, both government and private security forces seized the opportunity to remove any indigenous-led opposition to mining under the auspices of fighting communism. Over 400 massacres were carried out during the period of the civil war, including the notorious slaughter of more than 100 Q’eqchi who were peacefully protesting EXMIBAL’s mining operation in El Estor.
Although there was considerable resistance to EXMIBAL’s mining operation and controversy over how little INCO paid in taxes what lead to the end of the company’s mining operation was the 1980 demand from the military government of Romeo Lucas Garcia that EXMIBAL pay 5% of the value of nickel extracted to the Guatemalan government. EXMIBAL suspended operations and left Guatemala, retaining rights to its mining concession.
In 2003, the former director of INCO became the president and executive of the Canadian company Skye resources. Days before the 40-year concession on the old EXMIBAL mine expired, it was transferred to CGN, the local subsidiary of Canadian Skye Resources (purchased by Hudbay Minerals in 2008). The concession also gave CGN the “right” to expel the Maya Q’eqchi. In 2006, the International Labour Organization (ILO), a branch of the United Nations, held that Guatemala broke ILO Convention 169, a binding international law, by failing to carry out free and prior consultations with the Maya Q’eqchi. Five years prior to this, in 2001, the constitutional court of Guatemala held that the property rights of the land in question belonged to the Maya Q’eqchi. Both rulings were ignored by the Guatemalan government and CGN.
As if tearing a page straight out of Guatemala’s civil war, CGN proceeded to order the eviction of five indigenous communities from the concession area. In January 2007, a combined police and military force arrived to carry the order out with help from residents from neighboring areas who were trucked in by CGN. During the eviction, hundreds of homes were burned to the ground and, in the community of Lote Ocho, a total of 11 women were gang raped by CGN’s mine security personnel and members of Guatemala’s police and military forces.
Homes in the community of Barrio La Revolucion are burned and destroyed by personnel hired by the Guatemalan Nickel Company (CGN). (Photo: James Rodríguez/mimundo.org)
One year later, HudBay Minerals purchased Skye Resources and promptly changed the company’s name to HMI Nickel Inc.
Despite the re-branding, however, the Maya Q’eqchi would continue to face a routine of repression with HudBay’s security forces shooting and killing Adolfo Ich Chaman and paralyzing German Chub Choc in 2009. One year later, Angelica Choc, the wife of Adolfo Ich Chaman, announced her intent to sue HudBay Minerals and its subsidiary in Canada.
Eager to evade a potentially catastrophic ruling, HudBay Minerals promptly sold CGN, the Fenix mine and its other Guatemalan assets to the Cyprus-based Solway Investment Group. The sale, however, did not deter Canada’s courts from agreeing to hear the case(s) against Hudbay.
PATHWAYS TO JUSTICE
A favorable ruling could have far-reaching implications not only for Hudbay but for the entire Canadian mining sector. As Graham Russell explained to IC,
“…there is a growing number of Canadians becoming aware that there are hundreds, if not more, [Canadian mining companies] operating in many places around the world [that] are often involved in creating environmental harm or contributing directly or indirectly in serious human rights violations including killings and gang rapes.”
The possibility that anyone who suffers at the hands of a Canadian mining company could turn to Canada for their day in court could very well change the face of the industry.
Katherine Fultz, visiting Instructor of Anthropology at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA, who has studied opposition to mining in the Highlands of Guatemala, told IC by phone that community referendums as a tool to resist mining projects are also gaining popularity among mine-affected communities:
“It actually started elsewhere in Latin America. The first one was held in Peru and a number were held in Argentina and later in Columbia … Guatemala has held more than any other country with more than sixty votes at this point. Over half a million people have participated in them.”
These community referendums have rejuvenated anti-mining activism in the highlands of Guatemala leading many communities to take direct legal action against the Guatemalan government to protest mining on a national level.
Recently, the Guatemalan constitutional court ordered the suspension of two hydro-power mega projects (Vega I and Vega II) for failure to properly consult with affected Indigenous communities. Other mining projects have also been suspended due to lack of consultation with indigenous communities. In one case, the rural community of Zunil in the municipality of Quetzaltenango carried out referendums (consulta) declaring their territory to be a mining free zone.
An avenue that Canadians can use to stop international human rights abuses by mining companies may one day be found in Canada. In 2009, Liberal MP for Scarborough-Guildwood John McKay introduced Bill C-300 as a private members bill to the Canadian House of Commons. The bill called for the creation of an ombudsperson that would oversee Canadian mining firms. Bill C-300 ultimately lost by six votes in 2009, even though the NDP and Liberals held a majority in the House of Commons at the time. McKay said in a recent interview that, although he thinks existing structures that oversee mining companies need to be strengthened, re-introducing the bill is a high priority for the Liberal government.
Instead of the provisions in Bill C-300, Canadian mining and extraction companies fall under “Building the Canadian Advantage” (BCA) which the Conservative government put in place instead of Bill C-300. Viewed by critics as an irresponsible PR gimmick, BCA moved Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) funds to support community projects run by Canadian mining companies and created a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) councilor to mediate disputes between affected communities and mining companies. None of these provisions, however, are binding; and while there is strong language about protecting human rights in BCA they are little more than guidelines that companies are under no obligation to follow.
The historical and contemporary case of Canadian mining companies operating in Central America shows that one should have no illusions about the role these companies play around the world. While building more north-south solidarity and mine-affected communities holding referendums are positive steps on the road to justice, there is the bigger issue related to the way that mining is tied to larger social, political, environmental and economic realities.
In an interview with Canadian Dimension Magazine, Alain Deneault, who was sued along with his co-author and publisher by Barrick Gold for the exposé Noir Canada, ties together the issues of over-consumption and planned obsolescence to the mining industry. “If we could put all of these questions on the agenda at the same time, we could say, okay, maybe it’s worthwhile to dig that hole in that specific area because we need zinc, but we’ll use it carefully. We’ll exploit zinc carefully because we’ll make sure that what we dig out will be recycled in many objects that we will use.” Deneaut went on to advocate for the creation of a permanent and independent commission of inquiry that would have powers to not only inquire into the activities of corporations but also summon their representatives to appear and submit documents.
For now, the more the Canadian public is informed about the activities of Canadian mining companies, the better. Pam Palmater advocates for a broad approach to bring Canadian mining companies abuses to light and urges that we work together to fight for our collective futures:
“…the more the public knows about the destructive activities of mining companies, who’s really profiting and what it means for our collective futures, the better chance we have at forcing change through varied means used simultaneously – including protests, court cases, political pressure, shareholder pressure, advocacy at the international level and building allies amongst social justice activists, environmentalists, scientists, First Nations, other countries, politicians and legislators.”
Notes[1] Guatemala: the politics of violence pg 1.
