by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 31, 2017 | Repression at Home
Featured image: Protesters at the Dakota Access Pipeline Protest Camp. Image: Michael Nigro/SIPA USA/PA Images. Labeling Native American journalists as “activists” simply because of their heritage helps to further diminish the Indigenous narrative.
by Jenni Monet / openDemocracy
I get approached frequently to discuss my time spent reporting from Standing Rock, the Indigenous-led movement that sought to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. But what’s funny about these invitations is that they almost always incorporate some notion that I was there as an activist – and without even asking me if that was, indeed, the case.
It’s one of these common assumptions: Native American journalist equals Native American campaigner. To be sure, there are many Indigenous folks I know who call themselves journalists as well as activists in the same breath, and that’s awesome – we need positive and powerful messaging out there. From their headlines, these writers call out today’s problems from tribal community and prompt a call to action. And it works for a lot of different audiences. Indigenous Peoples get a boost, allies get to show their support and outsiders trying to grasp at a world unknown get an introduction to root causes and agendas. Combined, it makes for an easy narrative because of what little critical thinking is required.
But here’s the thing: Indian Country can be a complicated wonder at times, and to routinely simplify the narrative perhaps perpetuates situations like we saw at Standing Rock, where major media presence was uneven at best. It was a stark absence, the lack of journalists on the ground during some of the most critical moments of the movement. It took a harrowing night of police weaponizing water on protesters before major newsrooms ultimately sent crews to the standoff. If it hadn’t been for water protectors themselves live-streaming the episode on Facebook, many would have been led to believe what had been written by the regional Associated Press reporter, who called the sub-freezing night of police-led violence “skirmishes.” But even though citizen journalism corrected where mainstream under-performed, we need to recognize the relationship between the two – and start to scrutinize all newsfeeds that come across our screens.
Since that sub-freezing night of 20 November 2016, we’ve seen an unraveling of documentation proving that the North Dakota police used military-style tactics, guided by a former CIA operative behind the for-hire security firm, TigerSwan. From revelations by DeSmogBlog, The Intercept and other bottom-up revelations, it’s clear that North Dakota police targeted demonstrators, treating them not unlike “jihadists;” they were profiled as “terrorists,” and some were even formally charged with such allegations.
Again, it’s easy to see how a Native American journalist could be seen as an activist with so much stacked up against people demanding clean water.
As I type these words on 4 December 2017, I reflect back to a year ago on this day, when roughly 12,000 people stood in unity on the borderlands of the Standing Rock reservation on the day the Obama Administration called to halt construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Those who were there turned out to resist, not just an energy project, but the many other strands of injustices that the months-long demonstration represented: systemic and historic military-led violence, environmental racism, deliberate political marginalization and segregation. The response to these circumstances at Standing Rock was ultimately a resistance to these trends, and also a place for Indigenous Peoples to heal from generations of trauma.
At Standing Rock on this day, 4 December 2016, there were also teams of mainstream journalists literally scrambling to get the story that they had missed for months. I know because I spoke to many of them as they frantically searched for travel directions, quotable sources and facts, so many essential facts. Satellite trucks lined up along Highway 1806, overlooking the sprawling resistance camps. From their perches, reporters went live on the air, quoting Lakota prophecy, and explaining the “black snake,” the symbolic reference that water protectors, or protesters, had called the pipeline.
As the major media parachuted in, predictably, they hired Indigenous “fixers” to get at the story fast and quick; they featured images of the most colorful “Indians” dressed in regalia and face-paint; and they explained treaties and consultation, the cornerstone of these agreements, as if understanding these concepts for the first time – because they were.
But it was bottom-up journalism that helped shape a story that outsiders finally understood from Standing Rock. It’s why when we call Native American journalists “activists” in the same sentence, without thinking otherwise, it automatically diminishes the Indigenous narrative that is already burdened by a chronic, routine ignoring. It’s an injustice in and of itself and something that I often confronted when reporting from Standing Rock, including my own arrest.
On 1 February 2017, I was arrested while gathering interviews and taking photos of a demonstration near the main Oceti Sakowin camp, where water protectors had been camped out in the North Dakota winter. Despite showing my press pass when asked, and leaving the scene when police requested, I was detained for 30 hours, in which five were spent in a freezing garage where I was verbally accosted by the jail captain. I was denied my right to a phone call for more than a day, and while detained I learned that my white cellmates were spared the humiliation of being strip-searched but that Native American women like myself were not. When I was released from jail, I read that police had lied to the Bismarck Tribune about whether I had presented my press pass to officers at the scene of the demonstration. I did, even though they said I did not. Months later, I still face charges of criminal trespassing and engaging in a riot which could result in fines and up to a year in jail.
And so it’s important that we acknowledge that they arrested a journalist that day, on 1 Febuary 2017, not an activist. And it’s important that society respects and sees the difference between the two. My statement is not meant to throw a shade on activism. We need more resistance fighters in this world. It’s just not in my DNA to take to the streets, pump fists and chant politicised slogans. What is in my being is to observe carefully and think critically about these current events shaping our lives and to frame ideas backed by facts that can have the farthest reach with the most integrity.
Image: Becker1999 (Paul and Cathy)/Flickr.
We’re living in a day where judicial systems in towns like Mandan, North Dakota, work to discredit journalists by arresting them and labeling them “activists.” These are women like Amy Goodman, an unflappable field reporter and media businesswoman whose work has been recognised around the world. And so to enable this way of thinking isn’t just a disservice to the people who are teetering the fine line between credible narratives and nuance, but it’s a burden to the very democracy that journalism brings and the reason why I believe it is one our noblest professions.
And so as the resistance movement across America spreads, much of it inspired by the people power that came together at Standing Rock, we must also realise that there is a war on journalism happening in America and around the world. Until late November, the mega-chain Wal-Mart was selling a t-shirt that used off-colored humour suggesting hanging journalists. Store executives only agreed to pull the item from its racks following intense scrutiny from the American journalism community. Meantime, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, there have been reported attacks on at least three dozen journalists in the country alone.
Accountability journalism is becoming one of the most important professions of our time. We must respect this role in this time of resistance, and think twice before using the label “activist.”
Jenni Monet is an award-winning journalist and tribal member of the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico. She’s also executive producer and host of the podcast Still Here. @jennimonet
This article was originally published at openDemocracy as a part of Right to Protest, a partnership project with human rights organizations CELS and INCLO, with support from the ACLU, examining the power of protest and its fundamental role in democratic society. It has been re-published at Deep Green Resistance News Service under a Creative Commons License.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 7, 2017 | Colonialism & Conquest
Featured image: Cejudhcan Derechos Humanos
by Courtney Parker / Intercontinental Cry
¡Ya Basta! A phrase known for its political and revolutionary connotations throughout much of the Spanish-speaking world, translates roughly into English as, ‘Enough is Enough!’
It is a statement of finality; a concrete call to action; a heightened call for awareness; and an official call of duty to end cultures of violence and impunity against Indigenous Peoples.
His name was Felipe Perez Gamboa. He was 24 years old.
According to Mark Rivas, who has aided in representing the Moskito Council of Elders at the United Nations, Gamboa was a leader of much distinction among the young people of the community of La Esperanza on the traditional Indigenous frontier region of Moskitia – located on the northern Caribbean coast of colonial Nicaragua and home to the largest tropical rainforest, second only to the Amazon, in the western world.
For his part, Rivas credited Cejudhcan Derechos Humanos – a local NGO whose founder, lawyer Lottie Cunningham, and staff, have been on the receiving end of death threats for their ongoing human rights work in the region – with originally disseminating and confirming the tragedy to the larger community.
The traditional Indigenous frontier regions of Moskitia have been terrorized by mounting acts of deadly colonial violence, stemming from the expanding agricultural frontier and the rigidly nationalist agenda, since 2015.
IC first began reporting on the escalating tragedies in the traditional Indigenous regions in June of 2016.
Readers may refer to previous analyses here and in other outlets concerning the role of the Ortega government, neoliberalism, and the fraudulent banner of ‘Christian Socialism’ the fallen Sandinista leader still attempts to hang over his tenuous authoritarian rule.
As of right now, we can do no more than reach out to the Indigenous rights community in the rest of Latin America, and across the world, with the simple message, made famous by the Zapatsista, that ‘Enough IS Enough’.
It’s time to end this culture of impunity surrounding deadly violence against Indigenous Peoples – in this instance, those who are protecting the last bastions of a biodiverse, climate mitigating rainforest.
¡Ya basta!
¡YA BASTA!
by DGR Editor | Nov 23, 2017 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
Featured image by Michelle McCarron
by Michelle McCarron
When I was asked to tell in pictures the story of the Colorado river, I’ll admit that besides being honoured to be asked, that I also felt a little overwhelmed. How could I, an immigrant settler, tell one of the most American stories of all? Before I even began I was humbled by the river’s story.
We know of the Colorado’s significance in the spiritual and practical lives of the native peoples who lived in harmony with her flow. Historical accounts recall her part in the ‘taming’ of the west by European colonisers. Powell, his expeditions and novels were lauded for the accounts of their grand adventures down the river and her canyons, adding to the aura of the west.
Her beauty is world renowned. As she winds her way around Horseshoe bend and carves her majestic path through the red sandstone of the Grand Canyon, she is the Mona Lisa of the natural world. Since the dawn of time she has been sculpting the earth as it rose to meet her, working her way to its heart, unveiling its history layer by layer as she went. For millions of years.
In a relatively short timespan of 150 years humans industrialised and multiplied to such as extent that we felt compelled to change what a river had been doing for millennia. So along the Colorado we built massive dams and thousands of miles of infrastructure to control her according to the insatiable energy and water needs of 40 million of us across 7 states. But what is the complete story today that plays out along her foreshortened journey from the clouds to the sea?
In September a first of its kind lawsuit was filed in federal court in Denver seeking Rights of Nature for the Colorado river. The Rights of Nature movement seeks protections for nature that assert that nature has inalienable rights to flourish and regenerate regardless of it’s use to humans. The concept of the Rights of Nature movement is built on the premise that If the corporations that profit from earth’s resources have rights then why can’t nature have rights? Why is one awarded privileges and protections and the other not? Nature is not our subject so why do we act like her master?
Will Falk, a writer, attorney and member of the activist group Deep Green Resistance is one of 7 individuals named on the lawsuit as a ‘friend’ of the river. Will and I came together to tell the river’s story, highlight the case and prepare for what it’s outcome may mean in the stakes to protect life on earth. What will it mean for us and other species if the legal system refuses to grant nature the protections she needs given the current crisis, that might save her from annihilation by corporations? Have you thought about what that world looks like? I have.
When we can’t watch the birds or hear their song anymore, when all the polar bears are gone, when we can’t go to the beach because the beach is there no longer and the glaciers have all melted.
The intrinsic worth of nature has no value in the industrialised global economy. An endangered species knows this and so too do four endemic fish species of the Colorado river on the brink of extinction. Whether or not you value life, one thing is certain. Extinction is forever.
As Will and I began our journey, I realised that I had been perhaps a little naive to think that at the Colorado’s headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park, I would find some wildness intact. The reality is a river shackled by a canal called ‘The Grand Ditch’ wrestling her into compliance at her birthplace, sending her through valleys and rusty culverts to a series of reservoirs. From there she is forced uphill and through a 13 mile tunnel blasted beneath the peaks of Rocky Mountain National Park. From west of the great continental divide the Colorado is wrangled east to front range farmland and thirsty cities where no cities should be. This is just the beginning of her life.
Moving southwest through her Upper Basin, along the Yampa and Green Rivers we followed a sea of oil and gas wells in Colorado and Utah. We took a random diversion off the highway near Roosevelt, Utah and followed it into the mesa, uncovering a litany of drill pads disemboweling the earth of its carbon. Any road would have revealed the same thing. Coal fired power plants and their tailings ponds put the finishing touches on an industrial landscape where city billboards proclaim their love for coal and drilling. Out here is energy nirvana for oil and gas fracking companies getting drunk on the resources beneath America’s public lands.
However we spend our lives, one thing is clear. Nothing happens without nature. Without nature we have nothing. Yet nothing may be what we deserve. Though not what other species deserve or future generations who have played no part in our narcissism. We have a choice which we need to wake up to and act upon. Do we continue to let corporations do what they want? Including mining and destroying our lands, displacing us, poisoning our water and selling it back to us in plastic bottles? Or do we protect what we love and stand for something much bigger than ourselves? It’s a choice between doing nothing or doing something.
Wherever you are there’s a Colorado waiting to hear your choice.
by DGR Editor | Nov 18, 2017 | The Problem: Civilization
Let’s expose the structure of violence that keeps the world economy running
by Derrick Jensen and Frank Joseph Smecker / Truthout
With an entire planet being slaughtered before our eyes, it’s terrifying to watch the very culture responsible for this – the culture of industrial civilization, fueled by a finite source of fossil fuels, primarily a dwindling supply of oil – thrust forward wantonly to fuel its insatiable appetite for “growth.”
Deluded by myths of progress and suffering from the psychosis of technomania complicated by addiction to depleting oil reserves, industrial society leaves a crescendo of atrocities in its wake.
A very partial list would include the Bhopal chemical disaster, numerous oil spills, the illegal depleted uranium-spewing occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, mountaintop removal, the nuclear meltdown of Fukushima, the permanent removal of 95 percent of the large fish from the oceans (not to mention full-on systemic collapse of those oceans), indigenous communities replacement by oil wells, the mining of coltan for cell phones and Playstations along the Democratic Republic of the Congo/Rwanda border – resulting in tribal warfare and the near-extinction of the Eastern Lowland gorilla.
As though 200 species going extinct each day were not enough, climate change, a direct result of burning fossil fuels, has proved not only to be as unpredictable as it is real, but as destructive as it is unpredictable. The erratic and lethal characteristics of a changing planet and its shifting atmosphere are becoming the norm of the 21st century, their impact accelerating at an alarming pace, bringing this planet closer, sooner than later, to a point of uninhabitable ghastliness. And yet, collective apathy, ignorance and self-imposed denial in the face of all this sadistic exploitation and violence marches this culture closer to self-annihilation.
Lost in the eerily comforting fantasy of limitless growth, production and consumption, many people cling to things like Facebook, Twitter, “Jersey Shore” and soulless pop music as if their lives depended on it, identifying with a reality that’s artificial and constructed, that panders to desire rather than necessity, that delicately conceals the violence at the other end of this economy, a violence so widespread that we’re all not only complicit in it to a degree (e.g., if you’re a taxpayer, you help subsidize the manufacturing of weapons of mass destruction), but victims of it as well. As Chris Hedges admonished in his books, “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy” and the “Triumph of Spectacle,” any culture that cannot distinguish reality from illusion will kill itself.
Moreover, any culture that cannot distinguish reality from illusion will kill everything and everyone else in its path as well as itself.
As the world burns, as species die off, as mothers breastfeed their children with dioxin-tainted breast milk, as nuclear reactors melt down into the Pacific while the aerial deployment of depleted uranium damages innocent lives, it is perplexing that so few people fight back against a system that has horror as a reality for most living on the planet. And those who fight back, who stand in opposition to the culture behind such wholesale abuse and call it what it is – a genocidal mega-state (especially if you believe that the lives of nonhumans are as important to them as yours is to you and mine is to me) – are met with hostility and hatred, scoffed at, harassed, even tortured. With so much at stake, why aren’t more people deafening their ears to the nutcases who preach a future of infinite-growth economies? And why do so many people continue to put “the economy” first, to take industrial capitalism as we know it as a given and not fight back, defend what’s left of the natural world?
“One of the reasons there aren’t more people working to take down the system that’s killing the planet is because their lives depend on the system,” author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me from his home in California when I interviewed him on the phone recently. “If your experience is that your food comes from the grocery store and your water comes from the tap, then you are going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on them,” Jensen explained. “If your experience, however, is that your food comes from a land base and that your water comes from a stream, well, then you will defend to the death that land base and that stream. So part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it and it’s very difficult physically for us to live outside of it.
“The other problem is that fear is the belief we have something left to lose. What I mean by this is that I really like my life right now, as do a lot of people. We have a lot to lose if this culture is to go down. A primary reason so many of us do not want to win this war – or even acknowledge that it’s going on – is that we materially benefit from this war’s plunder. I’m really unsure how many of us would be willing to give up our automobiles and cell phones, hot showers and electric lights, our grocery and clothing stores. But the truth is, the system that leads to these things, that leads to technological advancement and our identity as civilized beings, are killing us and, more importantly, killing the planet.”
Even in the absence of global warming, this culture would still be murdering the planet, bumping off pods of whales and flocks of birds; detonating mountaintops to access strata of coal and bauxite, eliminating entire ecosystems. All this violence inflicted upon an entire planet to run an economy based on the foolish and immoral notion that we can sustain industrial societies, all while trashing the planet’s land bases, ecosystems and life. And the fantastic rhetoric those who insist on adapting to these changes promulgate – that technology will find a fix, that we can adapt, that the planet can and will conform to fixes in the market – is dangerous.
“Another part of the problem,” Jensen told me, “is the narratives behind this culture’s way of living. The premises of these narratives grant us the exclusive rights and privileges of dominion over this planet. Whether you subscribe to the religion of Science or of Christianity, these narratives tell us that our intelligence and abilities permit us exclusive rights and privileges to work our will on the world that is here for us to use. The problem with these stories, whether you believe in them or not, is that they have real effects on the physical world. The stories we’re told about the world shape the way we perceive the world and the way we perceive the world shapes the way we behave in the world. The stories of industrial capitalism – that we can sustain infinite-growth economies – shapes the way this culture behaves in the world. And this behavior is killing the planet. Whether the stories we are told are fantasies or not doesn’t matter, what matters is that these narratives are physical: the stories of Christianity may be fantasy – let’s pretend for a moment that God doesn’t exist – well, the Crusades still happened; the notion of race or gender may be up for debate, but obviously, race and gender does matter and this postmodern attitude drives me crazy because, yeah, race and gender is not an actual thing, but it all has real-world effects – African Americans comprise 58 percent of the prison population and one-third of all black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine are under some sort of criminal justice supervision; as for gender, well real males rape females.
“Another example [of how things that truly aren’t real still have real-world effects],” Jensen continued, “is there was this serial killer a while back who was killing women in Santa Cruz. Voices in his head were telling him that if he didn’t kill these women, then California would slide off into the ocean. It’s apparent this guy was delusional, a total nut job and sick in the head, but his delusions still resulted in real-world effects. Hitler too had the delusion that Jews were poisoning the race. That delusion had real-world effects. And we can sit around and discuss whether Weyerhaeuser truly exists, but forests still get deforested. Or better yet, it’s pretty clear that it’s silly to really believe that the world won’t run out of oil … and then it’s suddenly clear that it’s not so silly – there is a physical reality. In the real world, you can’t have a nature/culture split, but in this culture you do and it has real effects on the physical world. You can’t live on a planet and kill it at the same time.”
You find the problem with an industrial production economy when you unpack the word “production.” As Jensen makes clear in his book “The Culture of Make Believe,” production is essentially the conversion of the living to the dead: animals into cold cuts, mountains and rivers into aluminum beer cans, trees into toilet paper, oil into plastics and computers (one computer uses ten times its own mass in fossil fuels). To go paperless is not to go green, or maybe it is, depending on what shade of Green we’re talking about here. Basically, every commodity one comes in contact with is soaked in oil, made from resources, marked by, as Jensen puts it, the turning of the living to the dead: Industrial production.
And with conflicts and wars that are waged or instigated by this culture to access (steal) the resources needed to fuel this economy’s colossal machines, this culture winds up butchering entire non-industrialized communities of people … the elderly, children who cling to their mothers as drones hawk over staggered onlookers … the innocent and vulnerable written off as “collateral damage.” Himmler used a similar epithet for Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Serbs, Belarusians, and other Slavic peoples in a pamphlet he edited and had distributed by the SS Race and Settlement Head Office: “Untermenschen.”
This is an acceptable price we must pay it, so we are told.
In the US, more lives are lost weekly from preventable cancers and other illnesses than are lost in ten years from terrorist attacks. And the corporations this culture fights for overseas are the very organizations culpable for these domestic deaths every week.
The list of victims whose lives are subject to violent assault and extinction to feed this culture’s “production” is as long and as diverse as you want to make it.
“An infinite-growth economy is not only insane and impossible,” remarked Jensen, “it’s also abusive, by which I mean that it’s based on the same conceit as more personal forms of abuse. It is, in fact, the macroeconomic enshrinement of abusive behavior. The guiding principle of abusive behavior is that the abuser refuses to respect or abide by limits or boundaries put up by the victim. Growth economies are essentially unchecked and will push past any boundaries set up by anyone other than the perpetrators. And a successful abuser will always ensure that there are some ‘benefits’ for the victim, in this case, e.g., we can watch TV, we can have computer access and play games online – we get ‘benefits’ that essentially keep us in line.
“Furthermore, according to the stories of industrial capitalism, this economic system must constantly increase production to grow and what, after all, is production? It is indeed the conversion of the living to the dead, the conversion of living forests into two-by-fours, living rivers into stagnant pools for generating hydroelectricity, living fish into fish sticks and ultimately all of these into money. And really, what is gross national product? It’s a measure of this conversion of the living to the dead. The more quickly the living world is converted into dead products, the higher the GNP. And these simple equations are complicated by the fact that when GNP goes down, people often lose jobs. No wonder the world is getting killed.
“And if we take global warming into consideration here – oh and I believe the latest study on global warming mentioned something along the lines of the planet now being on track to heat up by 29 degrees in the next eighty years … if that isn’t curtailed immediately, no one will survive that … And so all the so-called solutions to global warming take industrial capitalism as a given. And here we see the same old abusive behavior: the narratives are not only created around the perceptions of the perpetrators, i.e. those in power, but are forced upon us by them as well, so we come to believe the narratives and accept them as a given. And, essentially, to take industrial capitalism as a given when it comes to solutions to global warming is absolutely absurd and insane. It’s out of touch with physical reality. Yet it has disastrous effects on the real physical world. If you force a planet to conform to ideology you get what you get.
“A while back I had a conversation with an anarchist who was complaining that I was ‘too ideological,’ and that my ideology was ‘the health of the earth.’ Well, actually, the earth is not and cannot ever be an ideology. The earth is physical. It is real. And it is primary. Without soil, you don’t have a healthy land base and without a healthy land base you don’t eat, you die. Without drinkable clean water you die.”
And this is one of the problems with our culture: its lack of ability to separate ideology – the kind that accommodates maximizing pleasure and domination – from the needs of the natural world. And, so, if solutions to global warming do not immediately address the basic needs of the planet, well … we’re fucked.
“One has to ask,” pressed Jensen, “if hammerhead sharks could provide solutions, if the indigenous could give solutions and if we would listen to the solutions they are already giving, would these solutions take industrial capitalism as a given? The bottom line is that capitalist solutions to global warming are coming from the capitalist boosters, from those in power who are responsible for exploiting and destroying us and more importantly, the planet.”
By the 1940s, in Germany, Arthur Nebe’s gassing van was in wide use. Those who drove Nebe’s death vans never thought of themselves as murderers, just as another somebody getting paid to drive a van, to do a job. Today, those who work for Boeing, Raytheon, Weyerhaeuser, Exxon Mobil, BP, the Pentagon … will always see themselves as employees, not murderers. They will always see themselves as working a job that needs to be done.
Those members of this culture who blindly go along without interrogating the culture’s narratives, who identify with the pathology of this culture, will always see themselves as just other members of society. For these people, the murder of a planet feels like economics; it feels normal after having been pushed out of consciousness by careers, styles and fashions; it may not even feel like anything at all after being psychically numbed by pop radio, sitcoms, smart phones, video games … But at the other end of all these glittery distractions is an unremitting array of violence, poverty, extinction, environmental degradation.
“I saw this right-wing bumper sticker the other day that read, ‘You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers,’ but it’s not just guns: we’re going to have to pry rigid claws off steering wheels, cans of hair spray, TV remote controls and two-liter bottles of Jolt Cola,” cautioned Jensen. “Each of these individually and all of these collectively are more important to many people than are lampreys, salmon, spotted owls, sturgeons, tigers, our own lives. And that is a huge part of the problem. So of course we don’t want to win. We’d lose our cable TV. But I want to win. With the world being killed, I want to win and will do whatever it takes to win.”
When Adolph Eichmann stood before the Jerusalem District Court and was asked why he agreed to the task of deporting Jews to the ghettos and concentration camps, his response was, No one ever told me what I was doing was wrong. Today, 200 species have become extinct; another indigenous community will disappear from this planet forever; an entire forest will be removed; and millions of human lives will be forced to endure the agonies of famine, war, disease, thirst, the loss of their land, their community, their way of life. Not enough people have stepped forward to say that what this culture is doing to the planet is wrong.
Well, here it is folks: What this culture is doing to our very selves, what it’s doing to the planet, is wrong. So damn wrong. And the sooner we replace this economy, the sooner we can dissolve these toxic illusions and their formative narratives. Only then, can we begin to live the free lives we were born to live and win the fight.
Images from 11 Thought Provoking Images Show what Humans are Really Doing to the Planet
Read more of Derrick Jensen’s essays here.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Oct 18, 2017 | Colonialism & Conquest
Featured image: Three young brothers and their mother, from a family with 6 children overall – Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) who fled to Bilwi, Nicaragua in August of 2015 from the frontier community of Santa Clara. Their family is struggling to get by in Bilwi; they are not used to needing money to survive. They don’t consider Bilwi their home and only wish for peace to be restored in the frontier community of Santa Clara so they may return to live in their traditional ways on their legal, traditional land. Photo by Courtney Parker. 2016
by Courtney Parker / Intercontinental Cry
One day after she received an ominous warning, Indigenous Community Judge Celedonia Zalazar Point and her husband, Tito José González Bendles, were shot to death by Colonos in the northern Caribbean region of Nicaragua, a region that has been plagued by an escalating land conflict with illegal settlers since at least 2015. The unthinkable double homicide took place in the Tungla, Prinzu Awala Indigenous territory—Judge Celedonia Zalazar Point’s jurisdiction in the municipality of Prinzapolka.
La Prensa journalist, José Garth Medina, reported a statement from The Center for Justice and Human Rights of the Atlantic Coast (Cejudhcan) on Sept. 8, the date of the killings, concluding that the settlers entered the family home and killed both husband and wife with firearms.
Despite claims issued by local authorities regarding pending investigations into this most recent incident, Medina reminded readers that the November 2016 massacre (which IC also reported on) of a Mayanga family by Colono invaders, has yet to generate any arrests.
Colonos are armed, Mestizo imperialist settlers who are terrorizing Nicaragua’s Indigenous communities. Their endgame varies from one faction to the next; however most of them are interested in expanding the agricultural frontier with cattle farms or illegal mining interests—an effort that runs parallel to what has been happening across the Amazon for decades.
Many Colonos are also in possession of illegal land permits that grant them ownership to traditional Miskito lands.
In fact, the Indigenous territories of the northern Caribbean coast, where this recent double homicide took place, is also home to the largest tropical rainforest second only to the Amazon rainforest in the Western Hemisphere. The Bosawás Biosphere Reserve received official UNESCO designation as a biosphere reserve in 1997.
La Inicativa Mesoamericana de Mujeres Defensoras de Derechos Humanos (IM-Defensoras) has issued a call on the international human rights community “to remain vigilant about the grave situation facing the indigenous communities of the Caribbean Coast.” They called on Nicaraguan authorities to investigate the double homicide of the community judicial leader and her spouse; and in the process, end the culture of impunity that surrounds the ongoing murders of Indigenous Peoples in Nicaragua.
Even amidst the Guardian’s largely publicized partnership with Global Witness—a human rights watchdog group that has defended their methods, model, and investigation into the killings in Nicaragua after receiving waves of criticism from leftist groups operating ‘in solidarity’ with the Sandinista/Ortega government—the Guardian now appears unwilling to directly address the wave of deadly violence in Nicaragua, or even utter the country’s name in articles stemming from the partnership.
While the individual names of the judge and her spouse are listed at the top of their ‘recent killings list’, the Guardian‘s most recent published article, dated Oct. 11, makes no mention of the couple, let alone the cold-blooded colonialism that drove their murders.
To be sure, Community Judge Celedonia Zalazar Point and her husband, Tito José González Bendle, were killed by senseless colonial, greed-fueled violence in a country that has ironically managed to brand itself in many circles of international human rights discourse as a global leader of Indigenous rights recognition. Behind the scenes, the Indigenous Peoples of the northern Caribbean coast have been begging for years to FSLN/Sandinista authorities to end the culture of impunity that surrounds—and establishes a complicity in—this slow burning genocide.
Community leader, Brooklyn Rivera, has had his name smeared through the mud from every side but he’s still treated like a modern day mythic hero when he travels the frontier, which unlike the loud-mouthed Gringo ‘Sandal-istas’ who got caught up in the romance of a campesino revolution in the 1980’s—and have been unwilling to update their internal programming to recognize the economic and political ideological shifts that have taken place in the Sandinista model under Ortega—he travels to these violence-torn communities regularly. He is recognized everywhere he goes, every much the leader he was when Russell Means of the American Indian Movement (AIM) fought by his side during the last Indian wars.
The Moskito Council of Elders, led by Chief of the Elders, Ottis Lam Hoppington, are an entirely separate faction of tribal political influence in Moskitia and have no direct connections to Brooklyn Rivera or the various factions of the Indigenous political party of YATAMA that have emerged over the years. And yet, the message they send to the world is the same.
The colonial violence and invasion, which has greatly escalated since June of 2015 according to Hoppington, has disrupted their ancient way of life and connection to the land—and even disrupted the natural cycles of the region to the point of drying up rivers, causing animals to migrate, and causing the climate patterns to shift. The residents of Moskitia have been vigilant stewards of one of the most biodiverse areas in the world since ancient times; and, this is all being threatened – the Indigenous Peoples’ lives, and the climate mitigating biodiverse forest—by armed factions who, according to Hoppington, are directly supported by the Ortega government.
Chief of the Moskito Council of Elders, Otis Lam Hoppington, on the far left. Photo taken by Courtney Parker in February of 2016 in Bilwi, Nicaragua as the Elders met to discuss their list of demands from the YATAMA political party in a private meeting preceding the YATAMA conference in February of 2016.
In a statement collected from Brooklyn Rivera last year, he explains in great detail, the de-evolution of relations between the residents of Moskitia and the Sandinista government. This history ranges from a time of civil war when Indigenous villages were burned to the ground by the Marxist revolutionaries and tens of thousands of Indigenous individuals were internally displaced. Later, the Indigenous leaders of the region still gave Ortega and the FSLN another chance to make things right – for two election cycles – until it became apparent that the FSLN’s hollow apologies for their human rights violations on the Indigenous Peoples of Moskitia committed in the past were just empty rhetoric, hiding their real intentions to expand and nationalize the autonomous ancient Indigenous territory once and for all.
Accordingly, in the past few years, the region has been exercising more and more political autonomy which has resulted in a long line of violent attacks on Indigenous leadership in the quasi-urban Indigenous city of Bilwi – called Puerto Cabezas by colonists. This has occurred in tandem with the escalated violence and terrorism by Colonos inflicted on the frontier where Indigenous Peoples of Moskitia attempt to maintain their ancient lifestyles.
Many of the refugees fleeing to Bilwi from the frontier have never had to use money to acquire housing or food. A large percentage don’t even speak Spanish – only Miskito, the language which defines their lived experience on the frontier – and are marginalized further by this micro-cultural barrier when fleeing to Bilwi or other relatively urban regions.
Of course, the modern border to Honduras does not mean much to Indigenous Peoples of the region, as there have been Miskitos living, since ancient times, on either side of the dotted line. Yet, for whatever reason, masses have somehow been able to escape the encroaching settler violence on the Nicaragaua side, by crossing into modern-day Honduras, a part of the ancient ‘binational’ Indigenous territory of Moskitia.
This geopolitical anomaly (which has proven inconvenient for some ideologically entrenched ‘human rights groups’) seems to further disrupt the prevailing narrative that U.S. funded factions in Honduras have produced the deadliest violence towards all land defenders in Latin America. They certainly have produced an inexcusable amount of violence by any measure, but as the October 11tharticle in The Guardian noted on Honduras, their official body count of murdered land rights’ defenders for 2017 is ‘one’; and, is once again trailing behind Nicaragua’s death toll for the current year.
