An unprecedented wave of wildfires has swept through indigenous communities in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Three deaths have been reported, and up to 700 people have been listed in critical condition. In the aftermath of the fires, the Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa, and Kankuamo Peoples have declared a state of emergency and turned to the international community for help.
Located on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is one of the world’s highest coastal ranges. Its millenary guardians are the Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa, and Kankuamo, the four indigenous descendant communities of the ancient Tayrona civilization.
The Indigenous peoples believe the Sierra Nevada is the Heart of the World, where they protect the balance of all life through pagamentos, or offerings. The Arhuaco and Kogi were one of the few indigenous communities that were never colonized and resisted being evangelized. They preserve their language, dress, and culture.
The Arhuaco and Kogi communities in particular were severely affected by the fires after an exceptionally dry and hot summer. The communities are currently asking for humanitarian help and donations because of the critical situation in the Sierra Nevada. More than 1,000 hectares and 4,000 people have been affected by the severe fires, damaging several important spiritual settlements. Some Kogi settlements have also been affected by the fires.
Many animals died in the fire as well, including mules, horses and the sheep that produce wool used to make traditional bags.
In a press release, the organizations representing the Kogui Indigenous People (OGT), the Arhuaco (CIT), the Wiwa (OWYBT) and the Kankuamo (OIK), represented by the Territorial Council of Cabildos (CTC SNG), explain the serious situation caused by the fires and the environmental crisis caused by an unusually hot summer.
The press release states the following:
“The four Indigenous Peoples of the Sierra Nevada make a statement the environmental crisis in the heart of the world
“The Indigenous Peoples and Organizations Kogui (OGT), Arhuaco (CIT), Wiwa (OWYBT) and Kankuamo (OIK), representing the Territorial Council of Cabildos (CTC SNG), speak about the serious situation caused by the fires and the environmental crisis caused by the strong summer in the Sierra Nevada de Gonawindua.
“We hereby communicate to the public, local, regional, national and international opinion, and the civil society the following:
“As caretakers of the Heart of the World, we express our uncertainty about the serious environmental situation and humanitarian crisis generated by the fires, which have been presented since last February 24, in more than ten (10) places in the Sierra Nevada, that increased because of the long summer, the heat wave and the strong winds that increase the risk of destroying other areas in this sacred territory, threatening our material and immaterial heritage, natural in cultural and environmental terms.
“The magnitude of the damages is incalculable, the fires have devastated more than 1000 Hectares (nearly 2,500 acres) of the mountainous ecosystem of the Sierra Nevada. To date the total destruction of houses in the settlements of Seynimin (Arhuaco), and Waneyaka (Kogi) is reported, fires still persist in the region of Nabusimake (Pueblo Bello), Sogrome, Donachwi, Jukwinchukwa, Suribaka, Shendukua, Zinka, (Valledupar) Piñoncito, Sabana Grande and Potrerito (San Juan), and other regions are at risk. In addition, spiritual and material damages have affected the following ancestral sites: Ezwamas, Kadukwa, Mamanua, Shentuan (Ceremonial Government Center) Kankurwas (traditional houses), farms, health centers, schools, and hundreds of families.
“Faced with this serious situation that puts at risk the balance and harmony of the territory as a source of life and the physical and cultural permanence of the communities that inhabit and take care of the Heart of the World; the mamos (spiritual authorities), indigenous authorities and peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, have taken the following steps:
TO DECLARE [a state of] cultural, social, environmental and economic emergency in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, traditional and ancestral territory of four indigenous communities.
TO REQUEST in an urgent manner the help of national, regional, and local authorities; relief, risk and disaster agencies, [Colombia’s] public prosecutor’s office and international organizations, [as well as] immediate intervention to address the declared [state of] emergency through coordination, accompaniment, and monitoring mechanisms.
TO ALERT the regional and local indigenous authorities along with the communities and families within the [four] communities to take the necessary measures of prevention and control in this situation according to our own mandates and regulations.
TO APPEAL for the solidarity of those who wish to provide humanitarian aid, donations of equipment, non-perishable food, mats, tents, hammocks, and other necessary elements that will be received in the offices of the indigenous houses in Valledupar, Santa Marta, and Riohacha.”
Direct donations can be sent to:
Asocit
Asociación de Autoridades Arhuacas de la Sierra Nevada
(Arhuaco Authorities Association of la Sierra Nevada)
Ana Barón is a collaborator of Mestizo Muisca origin, translator, and environmental activist involved in supporting indigenous communities in Colombia, South America.
This article is being published in collaboration with The Esperanza Project, a Green News Portal for the Americas.
“I brought you all some water,” I said to the ragtag crew of six holding our “All Nations Unite With Wet’suwet’en” banner across the lane of semi-truck traffic heaving out of the Port of Vancouver. We had been standing, rotating positions, for five hours now.
A hundred feet away, 200 people formed a square around the intersection of Hastings Street and Clark Drive, blocking semis, buses, and drivers headed to the glass towers of downtown. At the center of the intersection, Elders from local nations sang and drummed. With a pivot of their feet, they honored the four directions: north, south, east, and west.
I walked back to the intersection and stood with the man from yesterday’s march. He had been making his way through the crowd, offering people sage for smudging, a common cleansing ceremony. He held out his hands.
“I have to go soon. I didn’t smudge you yet. I want to give you this.” His hands held the abalone shell, the burning medicine, and feathers. Then, he looked me steadily in the eye and said, “I see you. We see you.”
Tears blurred my vision. I brought the smudge bowl to the table under the tent and cleared away bags of chips and plastic containers of muffins. I smudged. The medicine drifted through the air, and Dennis, the man from Moricetown on the Wet’suwet’en nation, walked away, toward the east. I held the feathers until, exhausted and triumphant, we marched out of the intersection as the winter dusk fell in the late afternoon.
That day, January 9, 2019, urban Native organizers led a six-hour blockade of the Port of Vancouver. We were responding to attacks by the RCMP, Canada’s paramilitary police force, on Wet’suwet’en people who have reoccupied their territory since 2010. The RCMP have been authorized by the British Columbia Supreme Court to forcibly clear a path for the construction stage of Coastal GasLink’s fracked gas pipeline. We targeted the Port because it is one of the most valuable economic sites in Vancouver, with goods worth hundreds of thousands of dollars passing through each hour. We targeted the Port to show the colonial state that Indigenous people will not sit quietly by while our cousins and comrades are under attack.
Since December 10, 2018, we have organized five other solidarity actions in Vancouver. We have occupied Coastal GasLink’s corporate offices; organized three simultaneous sit-ins of New Democrat Party (NDP) politicians’ offices (the “progressive” Party in BC under whose direction the RCMP is acting); led a march through downtown that blocked two bridges; mobilized 1,500 people into the streets of Vancouver to hear inspiring speeches; and, most recently, blockaded a rail line that leads into and out of the Port.
These actions have been strong, righteous acts of solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en nation in northern British Columbia. As urban Native organizers, we stand by our cousins and comrades at Wet’suwet’en.
This moment of organizing is fierce, but within our own communities, we talk quietly about the absence of sustained urban Native organizing, outside of the “flashpoints” of solidarity actions that we often lead in the city for Indigenous land defenders on the remote frontlines. In settler-colonial Canada, these flashpoints inevitably come every few years, but our organizing does not sustain itself beyond our reactions to violations of Indigenous sovereignty on the land.
Many of us wonder: where is our movement?
Red Power Roots
There is an incredible history of urban Native organizing in Canada and the United States. One of the most famous was the Indigenous sovereigntist Red Power movement, which was most active and visible between the 1960s and the 1980s. Many groups organized during Red Power, but perhaps the most popularly known organization is the American Indian Movement.
Red Power was sparked when Indigenous fishing rights, secured through treaties, were threatened. In response, Indigenous activists in Washington State staged “fish-ins,” risking arrest to fish in their own waters. Then in 1969, the 19-month reoccupation of Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay gained massive mainstream media attention and pushed issues of Native sovereignty and rights into the public discourse. Red Power was a pan-Indian movement that focused on unity between diverse Indigenous nations in the face of the colonial states of the US and Canada.
There are many ways that the stories of Red Power are told. Many who lived through the era speak about the movement’s internalization of colonized gender roles, and how this affected the leadership of women and two-spirit people. And most storytellers agree that the politics within Red Power shifted from a pan-Indian sense of unity to revitalizing cultural and spiritual practices specific to individual nations. On the ground, this often meant leaving the city as a site of organizing and going back to reservation or rural Indigenous communities.
There are lots of explanations for this shift, but from my perspective, this change was a complicated result of internal shifts in consciousness within the Red Power movement and external forces, including the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) targeting of the American Indian Movement; discourses of multiculturalism, most obviously instated through Canada’s 1988 Multiculturalism Act; the colonial states’ responses to broader Civil Rights-era movements by shifting money into education, which threatened social movements by offering routes to entry into the middle class; and, in the US, affirmative action policies.
With this shift away from pan-Indian identity and unity, Indigenous peoples in Canada and the US often began to return to their communities on traditional territories or reserves (in Canada) and reservations (in the US). Indigenous people also began, in earnest, relearning and revitalizing their languages, cultural and spiritual practices, and traditional or hereditary governmental structures, which, for centuries, the colonial governments had attacked and criminalized. Indigenous reoccupations of traditional territories, like at Wet’suwet’en in northern British Columbia, are the fruits of the tail end of the Red Power movement.
Yet, some urban Native organizers feel the loss of the pan-Indian politic: urban Indigenous people without a home territory to return to cannot connect to land-based activism. At issue is what sovereignty means to Indigenous people in Canada and the US, and whether we can expand our notion of sovereignty in ways that build connections and alliances between diverse experiences and expressions of Indigeneity in the early 21st century.
At issue is how urban Natives can assert our sovereignty as people who have been deeply dispossessed of our traditional territories, on the one hand, and find the city to be a rightful place of land relationships, on the other.
Who urban Natives are
Photo by Sharon Kravitz
In Canada, more than half of all Indigenous people live in urban centers, and more than 70 percent of American Indians and Alaskan Natives live in cities in the US. Many Red Power activists in the US had been removed from reservations into major cities through the 1956 Relocation Act. Today, we find ourselves in the city for many reasons: surviving foster care or gendered violence, adoption, the search for jobs, legacies of residential schools and intergenerational trauma, fractured kinship networks. There are almost infinite reasons. In cities, we form strong urban Native communities. We make long-lasting and loving connections with diverse Indigenous people from many nations across so-called Canada. We make the city our home.
The realities of life for urban Natives often collide with settler expectations for Indigenous people; while many of us may be rooted in our cultures, many of us are not. While some of us may visit the reserve often, some of us don’t even know which reserve is ours. The gaps in our historical memories are not our individual faults; they are the effects of colonialism, which has attempted for hundreds of years to wreck our kinship systems, our non-capitalist economies, and our cultural knowledges.
Indigenous movements today emphasize returning to the land, leading many Indigenous sovereigntists to reoccupy territories, participate in ceremony, and relearn languages and cultural practices. Reoccupying land is perhaps the foremost expression of Indigenous sovereignty because Canada and the US are actively engaged in a never-ending war for land. Refusing to be confined to reserves or reservations, and refusing to be dispossessed of our territories, asserts our sovereignty in ways that defy settler laws and settler entitlement. These trajectories are enormously inspiring, and hold great potential for Indigenous nationhood.
But this era of Indigenous sovereignty expressed most radically through reoccupation of territories makes it complicated for urban Native people to participate. Many of us live in poverty and face questions of survival in our daily lives. Many of us have fled our communities due to violence; others have severed relationships with our communities due to the varied effects of colonialism. Many of us cannot “go home.”
Urban Natives in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en
In between these two tendencies, I have quietly fought to carve out space for urban Natives to make connections with our cousins and comrades at Wet’suwet’en, and elsewhere. In Vancouver, I have been organizing with an ad hoc coalitional group that includes both settlers and Indigenous people. We come from different organizations and different politics and backgrounds. Our greatest shared point of unity is the political principle of Indigenous sovereignty, and a belief, different as it may be given our social and historical positions, in our responsibility to respond to this moment of colonial attack on Indigenous sovereignty in the streets.
Our work responds to two challenges: one is to create a place in Indigenous sovereignty movements to ensure that land defense politics also see the city as land; the second is to find a place for Indigenous struggles within class-based urban grassroots movements, which tend to elide the very real forces of colonialism that also structure the city.
In addition to my involvement with Wet’suwet’en solidarity organizing, I have been a member for the past seven years in an anti-capitalist and anti-colonial organization, Alliance Against Displacement. Our community organizing work has tended to focus on low-income struggles, homeless tent cities, and renter’s struggles. More recently we have started a campaign led by trans women called Bread, Roses and Hormones and a campaign against the police in the suburb of Surrey, called Anti-Police Surrey.
From the first years of being involved with Alliance Against Displacement, the urban Indigenous people within the group have wanted to start an urban Indigenous campaign. We have yearned to do this, ached over it, spent many hours dedicated to theorizing what an urban Indigenous campaign would look like in the second decade of the 21st century. We met with homeless Indigenous people in tent cities. We held talking circles for self-identified Indigenous people in Vancouver. It was hard to find the spark that could sustain a movement, and that is ultimately what we hoped to build through a campaign.
In the past two months of organizing Wet’suwet’en solidarity actions and support in Vancouver, I have felt a shift. We urban Native people are in the streets blocking ports, rail lines, speaking freely about our right to our land, our sovereignty, our nationhood. We are drumming and singing unapologetically, leading marches of thousands of people, some of us dressed in our traditional regalia happily standing beside some of us dressed in jeans and Wu-Tang sweatshirts. We are meeting each other spontaneously in the streets, building connections, and sharing politics. We are connecting with political elders, like Ray Bobb, who was involved with the Native Alliance for Red Power in the 1960s and 70s in Vancouver. We are meeting youth, like the young Stó:lô woman Sii-am, who spoke in the whipping wind and pouring rain just after we shut down a major transportation route in downtown Vancouver one evening.
While the violence against Wet’suwet’en people, and Wet’suwet’en land, is yet another mournful example of colonialism in Canada, I also see great potential in this moment. Urban Native people are being catalyzed through the Wet’suwet’en assertion of sovereignty. We are rekindling our voices, hearing new voices, developing a more explicit politics of sovereignty that takes us into the streets.
All photos by Murray Bush / flux photo
All photos by Murray Bush / flux photo
The future of urban Indigenous organizing
Photo by Murray Bush / flux photo
The Wet’suwet’en confrontation with colonial power has mobilized many of us Indigenous people, Wet’suwet’en and others, rural or urban. Urban Native people are rising right now, leading solidarity actions in cities across Canada, increasingly taking our rightful place in Indigenous sovereignty struggles.
We are targeting sites of economic trade and exchange, like ports and railways, because we know that colonialism and capitalism are entwined forces that must be fought simultaneously. We are taking to the streets alongside anti-capitalist organizers who are deeply committed to anti-colonial struggle, and recognize the necessity of dual movements against capitalism and colonialism in so-called Canada.
We are defying the “ally” politics that have plagued Indigenous land defense solidarity work for at least 15 years now, politics that center white activists and their relationships with Indigenous land defenders while simultaneously viewing urban Natives as “less Indian” than our rural cousins and comrades.
We are building from the strengths of the Red Power era of organizing in the 1970s and 80s, and moving past its weaknesses.
We are inheriting the consciousness-raising staged through Idle No More, an Indigenous movement that spread from Canada to the US in 2013, and are pushing this movement further, making on-the-ground connections between culture, land, and sovereignty.
We are creating a new politics that honors the particularities of individual nations’ land relationships, cultures, and knowledges while also embracing urban Natives as people with political agency as well.
We are synthesizing the varied and diverse Indigenous sovereignty efforts into a movement that has the numbers, strategic alliances, and political vision needed to fight Canadian colonialism.
We are acting in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en frontline, and we are also saying: the colonial frontlines are everywhere.
Protests against the anti-indigenous policies of Brazil’s President Bolsonaro are occurring in Brazil and around the world to mark his first month in power.
Demonstrators held placards declaring “Stop Brazil’s genocide now!” and “Bolsonaro: protect indigenous land.”
The protests have been led by APIB, the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, as the culmination of their “Indigenous blood – not a single drop more” campaign, known as “Red January.”
Before he was elected president, Mr Bolsonaro was notorious for his racist views. Among his first acts on assuming power was to remove responsibility for indigenous land demarcation from Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Department FUNAI, and hand it to the notoriously anti-Indian Agriculture Ministry, which Survival labelled “virtually a declaration of war against Brazil’s tribal peoples.”
President Bolsonaro also moved FUNAI to a new ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights headed by an evangelical preacher, a move designed to drastically weaken FUNAI.
Emboldened by the new President and his long history of anti-indigenous rhetoric, attacks by ranchers and gunmen against Indian communities have risen dramatically.
The territory of the Uru Eu Wau Wau Indians, for example, has been invaded, endangering uncontacted tribespeople there; and hundreds of loggers and colonists are planning to occupy the land of the Awá, one of Earth’s most threatened tribes.
But Brazil’s indigenous people have reacted with defiance. “We’ve been resisting for 519 years. We won’t stop now. We’ll put all our strength together and we’ll win,” said Rosilene Guajajara. And Ninawa Huni Kuin said: “We fight to protect life and land. We will defend our nation.”
APIB said: “We have the right to exist. We won’t retreat. We’ll denounce this government around the world.”
Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry said today: “Having suffered 500 years of genocide and massacres, Brazil’s tribal peoples are not going to be cowed by President Bolsonaro, however abhorrent and outdated his views are. And it’s been inspiring to see how many people around the world are standing with them.”
Featured image: On Jan. 18, an estimated 10,000 Indigenous activists and allies will descend on Washington, D.C. for the first-ever march to highlight human and civil rights abuses against Native communities. Photo by Indigenous Peoples Movement/Twitter. Many Indigenous people are victims of voter suppression, families divided by walls and borders, an environmental holocaust, sex and human trafficking, and police/military brutality.
Raising alarm about human rights violations and the global climate crisis, activists from around the world are traveling to Washington, D.C. for the first annual Indigenous Peoples March, which will kick off at 8am local time on Jan. 18 outside the U.S. Department of the Interior’s main building.
“Our people are under constant threat, from pipelines, from police, from a system that wants to forget the valuable perspectives we bring to the table. But those challenges make us stronger. We look forward to gathering together and raising awareness.”
—Chase Iron Eyes, Lakota People’s Law Project
“It’s wonderful—and needed, now more than ever—to see so many tribes and organizations coming together to raise awareness about the ongoing need to preserve and respect the rights of Indigenous peoples,” said organizer Phyllis Young of the Lakota People’s Law Project.
Launched by the Indigenous Peoples Movement, a newly formed coalition dedicated to fostering positive change on “issues that directly affect our lands, peoples, and respective cultures,” the marchwill be preceded by a group prayer at 9am and followed by an evening fundraising concert at the Songbird Music House.
“Indigenous people from North, Central and South America, Oceania, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean are a target of genocide,” the organizers charge. “Currently, many Indigenous people are victims of voter suppression, divided families by walls and borders, an environmental holocaust, sex and human trafficking, and police/military brutality with little or no resources and awareness of this injustice.”
More than 10,000 marchers are anticipated to descend on D.C. for the event, including people from Australia, Guatemala, Papua New Guinea, Canada, the Caribbean and across the United States. Those interested in participating or supporting the march can check for updates on the official Facebook event, and are encouraged to post updates to social media using the hashtags #IPMDC19 and #WHYIMARCH.
Chase Iron Eyes, lead counsel for the Lakota People’s Law Project, said in a statement on Wednesday that his delegation will also advocate for a Green New Deal—an increasingly popular proposal championed by the Sunrise Movement and other grassroots organizations as well as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and a growing number of Democratic lawmakers that would pair climate and economic policies—”as a way to combat climate change and create green jobs, especially in Indian Country.”
“It’s going to be a beautiful day,” he said of the march. “Our people are under constant threat, from pipelines, from police, from a system that wants to forget the valuable perspectives we bring to the table. But those challenges make us stronger. We look forward to gathering together and raising awareness. We must remind the world, again, that Indigenous people matter. We are all made better when we respect one another and lift each other up.”
Iron Eyes’ comments come just a day after global protests spurred by outrage over the Canadian government’s support for TransCanada’s plans to build a fracked gas pipeline through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory, despite opposition to the project from First Nations leaders. Public anger ramped up on Monday afternoon, ahead of the demonstrations, after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) invaded a checkpoint established by Indigenous land defenders and arrested 14 of them.
Plans for the march also come amid growing concern over the presidency of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who was sworn in at the beginning of the year and has not wasted any time launching attacks on the environment and Indigenous communities in his country.
As Common Dreams reported, “On his first day in office, Bolsonaro introduced an executive order that will effectively take away land rights for indigenous Brazilians and descendants of former slaves and gave control of Amazon lands to the agriculture ministry; eliminated LGBTQ rights from the purview of the country’s human rights ministry; and set the minimum wage lower than the rate his predecessor’s government had budgeted for.”
Today the Coastal Gaslink company will be negotiating with the Wet’suwet’en traditional leadership. They may potentially allow workers past the barrier at Unist’ot’en Camp to conduct “pre-construction” activities.
However, the compliance with the temporary injunction is not a surrender on the part of the Wet’suwet’en. It was a tactical maneuver to gain advantage in the short term and prevent physical harm to members of the nation. The camp stands and the nation has no intention of allowing the pipeline to be built.
They aim to continue the fight. A legal battle may be brewing that could end up in the Canadian Supreme Court. It is possible physical confrontations will continue in the future as well. The Unist’ot’en have already defeated 6 of the 7 proposed pipelines across their land and do not mean to let this final pipeline be built.
The #Gidimten access point and camp has been emptied after the RCMP enforcement on Monday. But the checkpoint, now fortified, at #Unistoten remains in place.
Hereditary chiefs made clear yesterday that these meetings and possible agreement do not mean they consent to Coastal GasLink building a pipeline in their territory. Said this is about keeping people at #Unistoten safe and preventing a second enforcement like the one on Monday
We are are humbled by the outpouring of solidarity and support for our Wet’suwet’en people. We expect RCMP aggression at any time. We are still fundraising for our legal battle in the colonial courts. Please donate.
COME TO CAMP: Supporters in the local area wanting to do something should head to KM 27 now. Meet at the junction of Morice River Road and Morice West where people are gathering to plan additional responses to this incursion.
HOST A SOLIDARITY EVENT: See the International Solidarity with Wet’suwet’en event page. We are conducting peaceful actions as sovereign peoples on our territories, and ask that all actions taken in solidarity are conducted peacefully and according to the traditional laws of other Indigenous Nations. Forcible trespass onto Wet’suwet’en territories and the removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands must be stopped. Provincial and federal governments must be confronted.
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