by DGR News Service | Dec 17, 2020 | Indigenous Autonomy, Listening to the Land
This article by J.P. Linstroth contains some helpful wisdom regarding respectful ways of relating to each other and Earth. We do not agree with the author that so-called ‘green’ energy technologies are solutions to the climate crisis. However, the article raises important points regarding human separation from the natural world, soil degradation, indigenous rights, continued destruction, and the need to find a new way.
by J.P. Linstroth / Counterpunch
It may sound patently absurd to discuss a “re-Indigenization” of society.
Yet, I argue not only is it practical but necessary if humanity is to survive into this century and beyond. Humans, for most of their history, lived as hunter-gatherers, for about the first 290,000 years or so. It is only in the last ten to fifteen thousand years from the “Agricultural Revolution or Neolithic Revolution”, did we begin domesticating animals and plants, and thus began so-called “civilization” with writing, hierarchies, state systems, endemic warfare, and worst of all, slavery. In fact, most of us do not even think about this pre-history. We simply “are” in the world today—a globe we inherited from our collective human shift of moving away from hunting and gathering to a world of domesticating the natural environment.
If we are to legitimately address a history of these inequalities and their historical consequences, “environmental destruction”, “genocide”, “racism”, “systemic warfare”, “human exploitation”, and “state system oppression”, we must begin by examining if progress means a continuation on our present path toward self-destruction. In part, I address some of the effects of these colossal man-made calamities in my new book, Epochal Reckonings (2020, Co-Winner of the Proverse Prize)—a poetic guide to some of our 21st century crises.
What I wish to examine here is a re-thinking of ourselves on our planet earth, in relation to an indigenous understanding of “Mother Earth”.
Moreover, I will argue while we have moved well beyond the likes of French philosopher René Descartes, for many reasons his intellectual legacy still remains as we struggle to come to terms with our environment and our heritage from the Agricultural Revolution.
Descartes is well-known for his “Cogito, ergo sum”, “I think, therefore I am”, which in many ways, makes Descartes the father of “philosophy of mind” and “consciousness” from a Western perspective. He thinks and therefore he knows he exists. But what does existence mean though in terms of our own present day understanding in relation to the world and the environment? In biology, cognition, and neurology alone, our knowledge of brain, mind, and body are indeed profound. With basic evolutionary knowledge, we know biologically we are animals, although perhaps a special kind, and why it is a false narrative to separate humankind from nature. When René Descartes wrote, for example: “…For as to reason or sense, inasmuch as it alone makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts, I prefer to believe it exists whole and entire in each of us…” (Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 1637 & 1641, 1998, trans. Donald Cress, p. 2), Descartes had no way of knowing the future of human epistemology. Perhaps he might even have been amused by the contemporary subdiscipline of primatology as aiding our comprehension of human behavior. Who is to know?
What is extremely dangerous, however, is holding on to a kind of Medieval thinking that somehow our world is centered around us, humans and humans alone, and God made man (humans) for the world and for him (them) alone. In the Old Testament, Isaias (45: 18) in the Bible (1899 edn.) it states: “For thus sayith the Lord that created the heavens, God himself that formed the earth, and made it, the very maker thereof: he did not create it in vain: he formed it to be inhabited. I am the Lord, and there is no other”. Yet, it is in Descartes’ Meditation 6 where he explicitly outlines why he separates “Mind from Body” as if the mind itself in all its abstractive capabilities can somehow be divorced from our corporeal selves.
And thus, if men’s (human’s) minds may be divided from our bodies then humans may be divided from nature.
Here is what he asserts: “Thus it seems to follow that the power of imagining depends upon something distinct from me. And I readily understand that, were a body to exist to which a mind is so joined that it may apply itself in order, as it were, to look at it any time it wishes, it could happen that it is by means of this very body that I imagine corporeal things…” (p. 93) Of course, and to be fair, René Descartes was well ahead of his time on his discourse about the mind, human perception, and the brain. Even so, there are remnants from what he contended which have remained with us, namely, “Cartesian Dualism”, or our complete divorce from nature.
In Maurice Bloch’s (2013) seminal work, In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies: Theory of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social, he explains rather than thinking of the separation of mind and body, or culture and nature, “…The social is understood as the flow of interaction between people: I call this the transactional. On the other hand, the transactional social is contrasted with conscious, explicit representation of the social: these I call the transcendental social. I argue that the transcendental social consists of second-order phenomena created and maintained by rituals. The transactional social is governed by norms and ways of doing things that are largely subconscious. It involves the continual mutual monitoring of each other by the members of a social group” (p. vii). In other words, there is no separation between mind and body, nor nature and humankind, nor between culture and nature the biological is intertwined with the social and vice versa.
In addressing the human issue of our separation from nature may have its Western roots in the so-called “Scientific Revolution” of the 1500s-1600s and the “Age of Enlightenment” of the 1700s, but today, we may re-examine some of the erroneous philosophical carryovers and create a future of cohabitation and interbeing akin to an indigenous understanding of our world. A skeptic may declare, “Well that’s all fine and good but what about poverty, starvation, over-population, and the like?” A re-indigenization of society means a re-orientation of human thought. It does not mean becoming Native or indigenous. It means re-imagining our humanity.
As a society we need to think beyond technological progress and using the planet as an unending natural resource. Here is how in my humble opinion.
1) Accept human beings as part of Earth, and not apart from it, and by this acceptance, accept our dependence upon it;
2) Accept Earth as a living being, the Gaia theory. And if we are to take care of ourselves, we need to take care of the Earth too and become its guardians. We need to love the Earth and respect it as much as indigenous peoples everywhere do;
3) Being grateful for our being on this planet and not endlessly destroying it and polluting it is a good beginning which has been around for a while in ecological consciousness circles;
4) Instead of putting resources into warfare, put resources into renewable energies and into solving malnutrition and poverty in sustainable ways. Make farming more sustainable too instead of a form of factory production and endless soil depletion;
5) Allow indigenous peoples to have “more voice” with first-world nations (Europe, United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other powerful states as China and Russia) in United Nations forums and such environmental decision-making as the Paris Agreement of 2015;
6) Protect indigenous peoples and their rights and allow for indigenous parks and reserves to remain and to be expanded upon by protecting larger tracts of land, instead of developing and exploiting natural resources on indigenous lands for industrial farming, mining interests, oil extraction, electric dams, lumbering, and ranching;
7) Make the “re-indigenization” project official in international law and international treaties, and along with other international laws concerning indigenous peoples (e.g. ILO Convention Number 169 of 1989 and the 2007 UNDRIP, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples). Make all nation-states adhere to such a project if possible;
8) Create more public awareness through more education programs through universities, and above all, create an ecological consciousness understood from indigenous perspectives and in their own voices;
9) Remember scientists believe we are entering the sixth extinction phase on the planet and we must prevent this by all productive means necessary;
10) And finally, allow more indigenous peoples to be spokespeople and to become planetary ambassadors for realizing such a re-indigenization project before it is too late.
One indigenous leader in Ecuador, Nemonte Nenquimo, First Female President of the Waoroni Organization of the Pastaza Province and Co-Founder of the Ceibo Alliance, declared in an open letter to world leaders:
“My name is Nemonte Nenquimo. I am a Waorani woman, a mother, and a leader of my people. The Amazon rainforest is my home. I am writing you this letter because the fires are raging still. Because the corporations are spilling oil in our rivers. Because the miners are stealing gold (as they have been for 500 years), and leaving behind open pits and toxins. Because the land grabbers are cutting down primary forest so that the cattle can graze, plantations can be grown and the white man can eat. Because our elders are dying from Coronavirus, while you are planning your next moves to cut up our lands to stimulate an economy that has never benefited us. Because, as Indigenous peoples, we are fighting to protect what we love—our way of life, our rivers, the animals, our forests, life on Earth—and it’s time that you listened to us. In each of our many hundreds of different languages across the Amazon, we have a word for you—the outsider, the stranger. In my language, WaoTededo, that word is “cowori”. And it doesn’t need to be a bad word. But you have made it so. For us, the word has come to mean (and in a terrible way, your society has come to represent): the white man that knows too little for the power that he wields, and the damage that he causes. You are probably not used to an Indigenous woman calling you ignorant and, less so, on a platform such as this. But for Indigenous peoples it is clear: the less you know about something, the less value it has to you, and the easier it is to destroy. And by easy, I mean: guiltlessly, remorselessly, foolishly, even righteously. And this is exactly what you are doing to us as Indigenous peoples, to our rainforest territories, and ultimately to our planet’s climate.” (The Guardian, October 12th, 2020).
J. P. Linstroth is a former Fulbright Scholar to Brazil. His recent book, Epochal Reckonings (2020), is the 2019 Co-Winner of the Proverse Prize. His article was published in Counter punch on DECEMBER 11, 2020. You can access the original article here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/11/why-a-re-indigenization-of-society-makes-sense/
Featured image by Max Wilbert: fish-trap basket and weaver in a rural part of the Philippine archipelago.
![[Old Growth Blockade] Old-Growth Blockade Enters Fourth Month](https://dgrnewsservice.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2020/11/fairycreek.jpg)
by DGR News Service | Nov 12, 2020 | Obstruction & Occupation
Fairy Creek Blockade: defending old growth forests on unceded Pacheedaht territory
by Reuben Garbanzo, on Lekwungen territory
Joshua Wright, is a seventeen year old film-maker from Olympia, Washington with an irrepressible passion for protecting the last remaining old-growth temperate rainforests; and has handy access to a state-of-the-art digital mapping program that allows him to track and monitor industrial logging activities in near-real time. In early August, this year, he gave heads up to Vancouver island grassroots forest activists to a road-building crew subcontracted to Surrey-based tenure-holder of TFL 46, Teal Jones, cresting the ridge into the old-growth Yellow Cedar headwaters of Ada’itsx/ Fairy Creek watershed, the last unlogged tributary of the San Juan River system, unceded Pacheedaht territory, near Port Renfrew.
Forest firefighter Will O’Connell surveyed the road-building operation with spell-binding drone footage that captured earth-moving machinery operating on dangerously steep terrain pushing into a watershed never before logged, with no current cutblocks approved, but nonetheless heightening the risk of logging plan approvals, once the investment of road infrastructure had been established. This bold expose of a logging road incursion into one of the last roadless places on southern Vancouver island rapidly spread on social media and in the midst of a pandemic, galvanized forest defenders into non-violent direct action.
On Sunday, August 9th, twenty ancient forest activists from all over the south island, including the nearby communities of Port Renfrew and Cowichan valley, gathered at Lizard Lake and decided to set up a road blockade above the clouds 1000 metres up a treacherous logging road on a steep ridge overlooking the Gordon river valley, on the western flank of Fairy creek, where road-building into the Fairy, was slated the next work day. Tents were set up under the giant bucket of a gargantuan excavator and a 10′ diameter cedar log round from an ancient tree felled in the Klanawa Valley, propped vertically on a plywood frame, was installed as a barricade centrepiece across the road. When the Stone Pacific road crew arrived in darkness at 5 am the next morning they were politely confronted by a dozen people putting on the morning coffee around a small fire on the road end, with the intention of protecting Fairy Creek from road incursion.
Two weeks later another blockade was set up to protect the watershed on its eastern flank and to stop clearcut logging in an area of contiguous ancient forest that is part of the 5100 acre Fairy Creek rainforest, much of which is already under Old-Growth Management and Wildlife Habitat Area designation.
Pop-up blockades disrupting business as usual in other remnant old-growth forest locales have also sent a message to government and industry that in a down-spiraling climate and biodiversity crisis, disruption to the status quo is to be expected until the government takes decisive action to protect what is left of these globally significant and irreplaceable forests. The objectives/demands of all these blockade actions is to protect the last 1-3% of low-elevation old-growth rainforests left standing on so-called Vancouver island.
The Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek blockades are now entering their fourth month with no logging or road-building behind the barricades and no injunctions or arrests. This blockade, now the longest land-based direct action campaign on this island in over two decades has evolved quickly into a decentralized grassroots direct action movement under the banner of oldgrowthblockade, aimed to stem the tide of the colossal destruction of the shocking equivalent of 32 soccer fields of old-growth forests per day on the island alone.
Winterized infrastructure has been built at the main Fairy Creek base Camp, 7 kilometres off the the Pacific Marine Rd. including wood-heated Elder and Indigenous Warriors’ tents, bear-proof kitchen arbour, tool shed and hot water shower and change room. Dozens of volunteers communicating via several online platforms have provided coordination and mobilized material support to the frontlines which have been steadily maintained by a gritty, dedicated crew of core forest defenders, young and not so young, mostly women, who provide daily logistical coordination, elder care, leadership, hosting and reconnaissance on the ground.
This settler-Indigenous blockade has been blessed with the support and wise leadership of Pacheedaht elder Bill Jones who has asked that the entire valley, part of his childhood stomping ground, be dedicated as an Indigenous Protected Area in honour of the victims of the smallpox epidemic. Pacheedaht Chief and council have not responded for or against the blockade. The area is in the electoral riding of Premier John Horgan who has himself yet to respond to the demands of the blockade to protect Fairy Creek rainforest and all remaining old-growth temperate rainforests on the island.
On September 29th, the blockade received a strong statement of support from the Union of British Columbia Chiefs (UBCIC) who issued a breakthrough resolution calling on the Province to implement all 14 recommendations of their Old-Growth Strategy Review report and for the immediate protection of key old-growth forest hotpsots including Fairy Creek. Most significantly, their resolution called for government to assume responsibility in invesment in supporting First Nations to break free from the economic dependency on the old-growth forest destruction of their land-base, a major policy piece in the transition away from the destructive legacy of old-growth logging, once and for all.
To join the blockades:
https://oldgrowthblockade.com
To donate:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/bc-old-growth-blockade
Fairy Creek Blockade Chronology of Events:
August 1st : Discovery of Stone Pacific ( subcontracting to Teal Jones) road construction cresting the Ridge into the unlogged Fairy Creek headwaters
August 9: Grassroots activists from across Vancouver island meet at Lizard Lake and decide to erect an emergency logging road blockade at the end of Reid mainline, on a high ridge on the western side of Fairy Creek headwater, to prevent cutting, bulldozing and blasting activity into Fairy Creek the very next day. Notice is sent to Pacheedhat Chief and Council and Elder Bill Jones of setter-activist intentions to block road-building operations on their unceded territory.
August 10: Ridge camp blockade turns away Stone Pacific road and falling crews. Call out to request people to attend camp to defend against logging road construction into the last unlogged watershed in the San Juan River system.
August 17th: 2nd blockade at River Camp is established at another road access point into Fairy Creek along Granite mainline in the Renfrew Creek watershed, on the east side of Fairy Creek.
August 24th: a temporary, pop-up blockade is set up on Braden Mainline aimed at halting road-building and logging of old-growth forests on Edinburgh mountain, across from Fairy Creek in the San Juan river basin.
August 31st: Ridge camp blockade is moved 7kms down the road to a new blockade location aimed at halting road-construction into Fairy Creek and logging of contiguous old-growth forest adjacent to the Fairy Creek watershed.
September 4: Pacheedaht elder Bill Jones releases an official letter of invitation to Indigenous and non-Indigenous forest defenders to unite on the territory to defend the old-growth rainforests on his ancestral lands. An Elder’s tent is built at River Camp, where the elder has been staying overnight.
September 6: A caravan of Indigenous youth and elders, from many territories visit the blockades to further advise on appropriate respect protocols for forest defenders taking action on the land. 📷
September 22: The blockade camp on Reid main is moved back to its original position at the top of the Ridge at the end of Reid main. More Pacheedaht community members visit the blockades.
October 3: Northview Timber pulls road-building machinery off the mountain, abandoning plans to push roads through into Fairy Creek, past Ridge Camp, until after winter. Ridge camp remains for monitoring. Winterization of River camp continues, including bear-proof communal kitchen shelter, wood-heated communal tents, tool shed and a hot water shower.
October 22: An exploratory trail is cut from the Ridge camp along the Ridge to a lookout point above Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek with a group of Indigenous youth.
October 25: A sacred fire is lit at River Camp by Indigenous elders, youth and matriarchs, for prayer and ceremony, supporting the blockade, the forest and forest protectors.
November 9: Pop-up blockade is established at Grierson main to protect rare valley bottom ancient rainforest from road-building into Camper Creek headwaters.
by DGR News Service | Oct 18, 2020 | ANALYSIS, The Problem: Civilization
We Indigenous people are fighting to save the Amazon, but the whole planet is in trouble because you do not respect it
by Nemonte Nenquimo / Originally published in The Guardian, Oct. 12 2020
Featured image: Waorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo shows evidence of crude oil contamination in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest. Photograph: Mitch Anderson / Amazon Frontlines
Dear presidents of the nine Amazonian countries and to all world leaders that share responsibility for the plundering of our rainforest,
My name is Nemonte Nenquimo. I am a Waorani woman, a mother, and a leader of my people. The Amazon rainforest is my home. I am writing you this letter because the fires are raging still. Because the corporations are spilling oil in our rivers. Because the miners are stealing gold (as they have been for 500 years), and leaving behind open pits and toxins. Because the land grabbers are cutting down primary forest so that the cattle can graze, plantations can be grown and the white man can eat. Because our elders are dying from coronavirus, while you are planning your next moves to cut up our lands to stimulate an economy that has never benefited us. Because, as Indigenous peoples, we are fighting to protect what we love – our way of life, our rivers, the animals, our forests, life on Earth – and it’s time that you listened to us.
In each of our many hundreds of different languages across the Amazon, we have a word for you – the outsider, the stranger. In my language, WaoTededo, that word is “cowori”. And it doesn’t need to be a bad word. But you have made it so. For us, the word has come to mean (and in a terrible way, your society has come to represent): the white man that knows too little for the power that he wields, and the damage that he causes.
You are probably not used to an Indigenous woman calling you ignorant and, less so, on a platform such as this. But for Indigenous peoples it is clear: the less you know about something, the less value it has to you, and the easier it is to destroy. And by easy, I mean: guiltlessly, remorselessly, foolishly, even righteously. And this is exactly what you are doing to us as Indigenous peoples, to our rainforest territories, and ultimately to our planet’s climate.
It took us thousands of years to get to know the Amazon rainforest. To understand her ways, her secrets, to learn how to survive and thrive with her. And for my people, the Waorani, we have only known you for 70 years (we were “contacted” in the 1950s by American evangelical missionaries), but we are fast learners, and you are not as complex as the rainforest.
When you say that the oil companies have marvellous new technologies that can sip the oil from beneath our lands like hummingbirds sip nectar from a flower, we know that you are lying because we live downriver from the spills. When you say that the Amazon is not burning, we do not need satellite images to prove you wrong; we are choking on the smoke of the fruit orchards that our ancestors planted centuries ago.
When you say that you are urgently looking for climate solutions, yet continue to build a world economy based on extraction and pollution, we know you are lying because we are the closest to the land, and the first to hear her cries.
I never had the chance to go to university, and become a doctor, or a lawyer, a politician, or a scientist. My elders are my teachers. The forest is my teacher. And I have learned enough (and I speak shoulder to shoulder with my Indigenous brothers and sisters across the world) to know that you have lost your way, and that you are in trouble (though you don’t fully understand it yet) and that your trouble is a threat to every form of life on Earth.
You forced your civilisation upon us and now look where we are: global pandemic, climate crisis, species extinction and, driving it all, widespread spiritual poverty. In all these years of taking, taking, taking from our lands, you have not had the courage, or the curiosity, or the respect to get to know us. To understand how we see, and think, and feel, and what we know about life on this Earth.
I won’t be able to teach you in this letter, either. But what I can say is that it has to do with thousands and thousands of years of love for this forest, for this place. Love in the deepest sense, as reverence. This forest has taught us how to walk lightly, and because we have listened, learned and defended her, she has given us everything: water, clean air, nourishment, shelter, medicines, happiness, meaning. And you are taking all this away, not just from us, but from everyone on the planet, and from future generations.
It is the early morning in the Amazon, just before first light: a time that is meant for us to share our dreams, our most potent thoughts. And so I say to all of you: the Earth does not expect you to save her, she expects you to respect her. And we, as Indigenous peoples, expect the same.
Nemonte Nenquimo is cofounder of the Indigenous-led nonprofit organisation Ceibo Alliance, the first female president of the Waorani organisation of Pastaza province and one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world.
by DGR News Service | Jul 26, 2020 | Indigenous Autonomy
The CoViD-19 pandemic is impacting Indigenous peoples across the Americas who are already living under ongoing colonization, have poor access to health care, and suffer disproportionately from pre-existing conditions that compromise the immune system.
by Laura Hobson Herlihy and Daniel Bagheri Sarvestani / Intercontinental Cry
Coronavirus now has spread throughout the Indigenous Americas. The Navajo nation reported over 1,600 cases of COVID-19 and 59 deaths on the largest US reservation, which expands through Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Nineteen members of the Afro-indigenous Garifuna people living in New York City have died. The Garifuna are migrants from the Caribbean coast of Central America, hailing from Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
South of the U.S. border, iconic groups like the Kakchikel Maya in Guatemala, the Kuna in Panama, and the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon all have reported COVID-19 cases. Hugo Tacuri, President of CONAIP (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Peru), said: “Deaths are not recorded in Latin American cities by ethnicity and minorities are being mixed in with the greater population.” Tacuri said about 10% of the cases in Lima, Peru’s capital, were Quechua people, and a few were from the Amazon.
Native peoples in the early colonial period were decimated by diseases such as smallpox and measles. They lacked immunity to fight disease from outside and from European populations. As if through genetic memory, native peoples began extreme measures of social distancing soon after the coronavirus pandemic was reported in the Americas.
US and Canadian reservations went into lockdown and denied entrance to outsiders. Clément Chartier, leader of the Metís nation in Canada, commented, “we created check points along the road and established curfews.” Amazonian tribes in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru retreated deeper into the forest. A Brazilian tribe stopped missionaries aboard a helicopter, from entering their rainforest homeland.
Indigenous elders, valued for their knowledge and transmission of cultural ways, language, and traditions, are especially at risk from coronavirus. They pass on stories of past epidemics and the remedies to heal fever and respiratory illness. Indigenous peoples refuse to discard their grandparents and elders. Indeed, they are following their elders’ advice to self-isolate.
The Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast
Countries not preparing for the pandemic stand in violation of Indigenous rights. A recent New York Times article cited Nicaragua as being one of three Latin American nations, along with Mexico and Brazil, to have ignored the pandemic and minimized its seriousness. Nicaragua, however, is one of the poorest nations in the Americas, and cannot afford to shut down its economy. Most Nicaraguans work in the informal economy–if they don’t work, they can’t eat. Nicaragua also has the lowest number of infections and deaths in Latin America: the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health (MINSA) only reports three deaths due to Covid-19.
Nicaragua’s ruling Sandinista regime recently sprang into action, blocking international flights into the Managua Airport, but their borders, businesses, and schools remain open. The Sandinista government now considers mandating rest in place and social distancing, as recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. The WHO also recognized the difficulty of populations living in poverty to quarantine.
Nicaragua’s most impoverished region, the pluri-ethnic Caribbean coast, is home to the Indigenous Miskitu, Mayangna, Ulwa, and Rama peoples, along with the Afro-descendant Kriols and Afro-indigenous Garifuna. The Caribbean coast ethnic groups are organizing to protect themselves from the virus, partially self-isolating and creating resources shared on social media in their own languages. In the Indigenous capital of Bilwi (pop. 185,000), many people live crowded together in households without running water, plumbing, or electricity. Those dwelling in remote forest communities are unable to reach hospitals.
Afro-descendant populations, like the Kriol and Garifuna in Nicaragua, have the pre-existing medical conditions of diabetes, obesity, and high blood pressure. José Coleman, of the Indigenous Youth Organization of Moskitia—Mark Rivas (MOJIMM), stated that Nicaraguan Indigenous peoples “most commonly suffer from anemia, asthma, and cardiovascular illness.”
Anemia is brought on by malnutrition resulting from their poor diet, high in of carbohydrates and sugar. Amidst settler-colonization, food Insecurity also causes malnutrition within the Nicaraguan forest-dwelling populations. The Miskitu and Mayangna are afraid to leave their homes to go to their fields for subsistence activities. So far in 2020, armed colonists’ attacks have left nine Mayangna leaders and land-defenders dead in Las Minas, the mining region, and the UNESCO-designated Bosawas biosphere reserve.
Nicaragua’s health system is weak on the Caribbean coast. Despite excellent doctors, the Bilwi hospital suffers from a lack of infrastructure and investment–medical technology is antiquated and hospital rooms are hot with no fans or ventilation. The patients’ family members bring them food plates three times a day, similar to the Bilwi prisons.
Overcrowded hospitals, prisons, and markets are particularly concerning for the transmission of coronavirus on the Caribbean coast. The Miskitu and other coastal peoples in Nicaragua brace themselves for the impending epidemic.
Health Disparities and Indigenous Peoples Rights
Indigenous peoples have comparatively poor access to national health care systems, and suffer disproportionately from comorbidities, that is, pre-existing conditions or health-related complications that compromise the immune system.
In Canada, First Nations communities have a lower life expectancy and much higher mortality rates due to infant deaths and physical injuries. Indigenous youth are far more likely to experience psychological and emotional health complications, including chronic depression, all factors that are contributing to a suicide rate that is far higher among First Nation communities than the general population.
Central American Indigenous territories are subject to increasing encroachment from mestizo settlers and multinational industries causing water pollution and land degradation. In Honduras, food and water insecurity are sighted as the leading social determinants of health disparities, as illegal operations and mestizo settlers continue to invade Indigenous territories, carrying the risk of infecting them.
The Honduran Indigenous communities are also suffering disproportionately during the statewide shutdowns and COVID-19 confinement measures enforced by state authorities. The Tolupán and Maya Ch’orti’, among other Indigenous nations, have already reported severe food shortages and a chronic lack of access to basic goods. Since most Honduran Indigenous communities are made up of subsistence farmers, the unilateral restrictions imposed in public spaces mean that many families are unable to meet their daily nutrition needs. Furthermore, the widespread police brutality cases reported as part of the enforcement of those restrictive measures have created an atmosphere of increasing state-sponsored oppression of Indigenous communities, further eroding Indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination and consultation.
It is no secret that, in many places around the world, governments have taken unfair advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to advance policies that are harmful to Indigenous peoples. In the Canadian province of British Columbia, for instance, the Coastal GasLink Pipeline is forging ahead through Wet’suwet’en “unceded territory” without First Nations consent and in spite of widespread public outcry. The oil sands industry is not only threatening to pose a major ecological threat, but it also presents a major risk for the spread of COVID-19. First Nations peoples have collectively put pressure on Ottawa to stop the construction of the pipelines immediately, but whether or not the government will heed their urgent request remains to be seen.
Human Rights, which include Indigenous Peoples Rights, must not be overlooked, particularly during current health crisis, and when Indigenous peoples are at a great economic and social disadvantage as a result of longstanding systematic discrimination by state institutions. States have a responsibility to ensure equal access to public services to all their citizens, free from discrimination.
Because Indigenous peoples are disproportionately vulnerable to the pandemic, the International Fund for the Development of Indigenous Peoples in Latin America and Caribbean (FILAC) recently stated that countries should have a plan to support ethnic groups in dealing with COVID-19. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) also published a list of recommendations to defend Indigenous rights during the pandemic.
Governments must consult Indigenous leadership and community members in good faith regarding any intervention and decision liable to impact their communities. This is precisely why the right to consultation and the right to participation are the two fundamental pillars of international standards for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as highlighted by United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and required under Articles 6 and 7 of the ILO Convention 169. Consultation is needed to achieve Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC). Governments are held to international law regarding any intervention and decision-making that may impact Indigenous territories. This necessity does not change with the current crisis.
Many Indigenous nations, for instance, have long had their own methods of preventative health care based on a variety of native plant medicines. In northwestern Honduras, the Maya Ch’orti’ peoples and other groups regularly rely on locally grown plant medicine to boost their immune systems against common diseases. Medicinal plants, in many cases, have been proven to have tremendous health benefits. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), for one, recommends an intercultural approach to working with Indigenous peoples, meaning that medical interventions in Indigenous communities should respect and incorporate traditional knowledge and medicine as a viable form of healthcare.
During a two-part conference organized by the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), titled Human Rights and Indigenous Peoples in the Time of COVID-19, Navaho elder Chili Yazzie and other leaders called on the human family to come together and correct our destructive tendencies. Socially and morally irresponsible overexploitation of the environment makes the world population susceptible to natural disasters like pandemics. As elders like Chili Yazzie postulate, COVID-19 teaches us that we should balance our needs with the sustainability of the ecosystem and live in union with our planet.
Indigenous nations around the world provide us with examples of sustainable living. Their ways of life provide us with a vivid alternative to the current corporate-centric world order. Indigenous peoples also are custodians of some the world’s last remaining biospheres. Now is the time for international communities to act, to promote environmental sustainability worldwide in conjunction with Human Rights.
The world that we have taken for granted for too long will either be one, or not at all.
by DGR News Service | Jul 25, 2020 | Gender, Male Violence, Women & Radical Feminism
Trinity La Fey writes of sharing walls with abusers, of poverty and work, of finding radical feminism, and of navigating relationships in the midst of a patriarchal society.
By Trinity La Fey
Background is always tedious; I’ll try not to bore. Poverty, racism and sexism were not things I gradually discovered. I spent early years with a ranch-based family, that I had no idea I wasn’t related to, that called me their n!&*$r baby when I reflexively braided my hair into manageable bits. We were all pale as the moon, all American mixed. Their racism confused me because I knew that we were not 100% whatever white was. Children get it. Coming from ranch families that had the grandmother trauma of the depression made the family frugal to the point of neglect. The single man coming from this environment who was responsible for the lives of my brother and I was destitute. There was no one to mitigate his desperate rage and isolation, or inherited, old-timey sexism. We had the lot of landing with a genuine psychopath, but those circumstances would have pushed even the most outstanding person. Because the level of violence and impunity was so extreme, however, there was just no getting out of it (sane or otherwise) without putting a few things together, both about how social power works and the difference between self-discipline, or self-control and say, punishment or manipulation.
Having made it out early, I was also dubiously blessed with the rare experience of living for extended periods of time with all kinds of arrangements: all males, except me; all older women, except me; all women of mixed ages; mixed sexes of different ages; mixed sexes of the same age; and living alone.
When I was outed as a lesbian, at thirteen, it was the most beautiful word I had ever heard. Sure, I was a pariah and I walked down the overcrowded halls of my middle school with my hands frozen in dread that they might graze someone in a way that would make it worse, but I knew that what I felt with her was nothing like I could ever feel with a male, any male, ever. Lesbian. I describe my felling toward men at that time like the glazed eyes of a dead fish. Nothing. I had experienced men and boys and really tried (like a well-trained pretty, pretty, princess sex-kitten). They were just irredeemably disappointing. Same when you get a massage: a woman just knows where and how in a way that men cannot. I’ve no doubt it’s the same for men with men. Over time, maybe it was hormones, maybe it was predation’s flattering persistence, but I did get to finding some of them kind of cute again. I should’ve left it there. They rarely did me anything but harm. By the time I left Narcotics Anonymous, at seventeen, I’d put in eighteen months. By the time I was eighteen, I’d done pretty much everything there was to do out there, for a bookworm.
Poverty is a Wall
A big, big, big, big wall. Barely graduating in between my busy schedule of getting kicked out of places, I knew that I could not afford college, even as the elders that I loved did not. I came from depression trauma people. You never, ever get into debt. So I skipped it. I had been working, after all, since I could remember. I knew what I could make in my little food service wage job that I would feel stuck at until I risked leaving for a slightly less horrid wage job that would have its own special mindfuck lying in wait, until it went under, and over and over. Poor is something that cannot be explained. I was a pedestrian. Unless you have lived in America (not NY, NY) without a car, there can be no understanding. It changes your brain. Like working in service (particularly food service): if you haven’t done it out of need, you cannot know what it is to submit, in this way: to sacrifice pride and dignity while simultaneously pretending to keep face, for a living. It is true in a much more profound way when it comes to pornography and prostitution. There were moments during my time in the industry where I balked, when I wanted to quit and wasn’t able. Some coercion was external, but then sometimes my training just kicked in and stole the voice right out of me. That was not only true “professionally” I recognized.
When I fell in love, at eighteen, with a lesbian couple, there was a lot in the way. Falling in love is a real thing for me. At the time, I’d come from this Conversations With God kick, retrospectively for survival. I cultivated affections wherever I felt them, advocating for open relationships and demanding it in my own. By then, my partner was the guy who didn’t go to the strip club with the guys when they turned eighteen. I made it clear that I didn’t want children and that I would never marry. He agreed and we went on to have thirteen tumultuous years together that taught me three things: in America, if you care about the person that you are having sex with and they have no one else, you need medical access to them that you cannot get unless you are married; everything you do wrong in the beginning, your partner will do wrong in the middle, but if you handle that well, the ending may be prolonged; and, male culture is real and men hide it from women when we learn to see it, then attempt to silence women when we teach ourselves to talk about it. Even the cute ones. We had, none of the four of us, learned any of this yet. My love for this couple taught me so many things: even radicals are territorial; even women loving women can act out gendered violence; I am not immune to jealously; substance abuse is abuse and leads to abuse; and, women have trauma that men don’t have. Men’s dehumanization is sometimes complete even to themselves and still, as a class, there just isn’t the level of crazy-making bullshit for them to deal with all the goddamn time that will give them even the baseline female stress until they go to prison or war. I didn’t understand that when I was with girls, when we were only just beginning to process and experiment. Even with all that surviving girlhood cost, we still had hope kinda’. Now I got it: they were acting out their respective abuse with all the subtlety and skill of people who knew what they were doing. “I met her when I was seventeen, Trin.” one said to me, well on her way to a scene straight out of The Feminist Mystique. They definitely understood the master’s tools. We just didn’t know how to not use them.
The love and the shock, the violence of it coming this time so unexpectedly, the resignation, the loss and change demanded of all of us from that experience changed me in a way I didn’t know I could change again (but have come to appreciate will happen again and again). The other woman that survived that relationship is, I hear, happily married to a woman she loves and has (hopefully still) no warrants out for her arrest. I have fallen in love with no woman since. I thought, for a time, that it was protective, or somehow an unconscious choice I had made. After all, how could I not be attracted to women? It just never came to love again. I still love her and I know I always will: the kind of love no man can know. I know that we are better apart.
Then Came the Epiphanies
Things a self primed by Howard Zinn and Daniel Quinn could not anticipate. Another aspect of poverty, though not limited to it, is that of sharing walls with abusers. There was not a single building in which I lived (and I’ve lived in more than my share) where abuse did not occur. I remember so clearly the way it first came to me. I had tried everything: cops, social services, spells, yelling, inquisition, helpful offers, intrusion, song, shame, public letters. At each new space, an old option had been considered, tried and discarded. I was standing in front of a window, losing vision, hearing it fade, going still and numb as can happen. I saw an individual life’s accumulated sexual terror, like a ground zero, from which a golden-grey shockwave of mangled souls was spreading out past the horizon in all directions. Visions are hard to describe or convey, like books are to movies, but I understood something that all the violation I had seen and endured could not make me understand. The scope, the breadth of it was so vast, so deep, so impersonal that I finally got it. Then again with Darfur. Then again with human trafficking. Then again with Juarez. Then again with porn. Each next-day, ashen-faced me was an increasingly different person along a trajectory I could not see.
About halfway through my twenties, internet access was finally available to me in the home. It was a slow YouTube crawl (ongoing) to find my people, although I didn’t know at the time that’s what I was doing. I would’ve just said I was doing research, because sifting through the chaff factory that is the internet was very educational. Not bothering with social media, I came in with just enough immunity to not get too distracted. I’d been following the work of Chris Hedges (whose speeches are excellent background for me) for years by the time he gave me the gift. It was an interview with Lee Lakeman and Alice Lee during which he said, and I heard for the first time in my life, the name of Andrea Dworkin. A researcher oughtn’t need to be told twice. I listened to all of her available speeches. Then I read all of her non-fiction. Then the non-fiction of the other second and first wave women (still at it; what a library our forewomen have made!), whose lectures were oases of helpful vocabulary, theory and reassurance.
Maybe it was just my wyrd, but considering how deliberately I made my conscious choice, before I found radical feminism, to never be with another man, I suppose I should’ve seen him coming, but I didn’t. When I met my future husband, in my thirties, I had finally gotten access to some public assistance that had helped me get out of a situation. Invasive, humiliating, void of human consideration or respect for human dignity, the system was not a favored lifestyle choice. It was a double-bind between having my home invaded every six months, while being periodically psychologically terrorized, or, being consistently psychologically terrorized and periodically having my body invaded. I chose the former. I don’t know what it is like to be stigmatized for the color of my skin, but I do know what it is like to be dismissed as trash. When black women organized to talk about how they cannot afford to be separatists, I partially understand why. The men I have loved, who have also been discarded, are not people I am prepared to stop working or associating with because, on a practical level, we need each other. We physically, materially, cannot do without each other; we are often too weak of clout, even inside our own sex-castes, to have any longevity, let alone political voice. We die young, more often publicly and saddled with stigma rightfully belonging to The Bum on the Plush. When I fell in love with my future husband, it was not like anything I’d experienced. I had a vision. Radical feminism wasn’t on my radar yet and I honestly thought he was gay. He was too fully human. He still doesn’t understand what I mean. Those who know, know. The way I feel about him, the way he looks at me, the way I am made certain of his respect and admiration is something I know is rare and something I value and nothing I would sacrifice to any ideology. He is real to me back.
Rage is a Language Hard to Hear Through
If I had found radical feminism before meeting him, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. He would’ve been invisible to me and I would’ve forfeited all these glorious opportunities to be proven right or wrong about him, and men: to be disappointed and to be surprised. As it stood, we learned about it together. Though I carried all the initiative, he was a pretty good sport about being educated on the nature of his status as oppressor early on. Classic: I do all the work and he gets all the credit and praise for not throwing a tantrum at the suggestion of his need to change. We would watch Julie Bindel talk about how men can only be allies and he would just listen and accept. I would ask him for feedback and conversation and he would just listen and accept. The cop-outs didn’t take long to crop up; not everyone has the drive and stamina for this that I do. Even women. Still, I smell a cop-out and tend to pounce and so it was that I learned his limits as an ally and mine as an effective communicator. It is easy to say that it is not my responsibility to educate him, that we should’ve been important enough to warrant interest without coaxing, because that is true. It is also true that rage is a language hard to hear through. Like any female socialized into femininity, I have some pretty dysfunctional communication habits, especially around confrontation. Like I have specifically learned, I tend to go from Placation-Station to Gorgon with very little fair warning or opportunity given to make things right. How does anyone work with that? That is unworkable. This man seriously impresses me. I once saw him call a Coopers Hawk out of the sky. A wild one. He has my mother’s birthday. Day, not year. He is younger than I am. He scored a fucking zero to my full A.C.E. score. His experience of life is a mystery to me. I am infuriated by his lack of curiosity about me. He considers it respectful. When I tell him things, he listens and accepts. When I ask him things, he is afraid of me. He knows how I am. He doesn’t know that I understand that women are fully human in the worst ways too; that in our respective searches for the way, we have all done harm. We work on trusting each other to have these conversations. We both have messed that up too. We inch back toward it: the conversation.
By aligning with him in any way, I risk fundamentally in ways he will never be vulnerable to or fully understand. I married him and so forfeited my meager assistance for a much better deal. No more home invasions or periodic psychological terror, plus, I get to live with my best friend. But what about body invasion? Is it radical enough just to be able to ask the question? I would argue that you have to be able to ask the question and be able to say no. What about the patronization inherent in the very clear reality of my financial dependence? It affords me a better living situation and greater opportunity with more ease than I was able to scramble for myself. Must that not also mean that I will be less likely to risk his hatred or indifference? I would say fuckin’ please. Of course it does.
I decided that I would read Intercourse aloud to him, who has ADHD and cannot sit still for a second. After watching the panel Julia Long had put together of women speaking about it, I had some idea of what I was getting us into, but hadn’t read it yet. Whatever it was, we were going to do it together goddamnit. That’s when that magick started. He really started to annoy me. The cop-outs were a sharp noise to me now. Un-real dude. Now how are we gonna’ get anywhere if it’s like this? I would read a chapter and he would listen. I would try to get as many in as possible before he would beg off, my mouth dry and fumbling, not knowing when I’m going to get him back into a sitting position. It went on like that, passionate Andrea Dworkin chapter after disturbing chapter, until we hit the one. When I read The New Woman’s Broken Heart, the whole book was like that: there was a different person on the other side of that book, a more integrated, sober, resolute person. Just like all the other times, only this time. But every one of her books has a chapter that does that to me. When I got to that chapter for me in Intercourse, I could feel in the room how I was bigger, like I was filling up that whole room with my grief and recognition, like a radiant body whose skin stretches thin past the walls. I could feel him inside of that, bewildered and seeing me for the first time as I am and have been. He got it. Then forgot it. Because joy and enlightenment are fleeting and we have things to do, all of us. I get it.
Patriarchy: We Are Bound to Fail
But now, there is a frame of reference. Now there is, at least, some honesty and the conversation becomes possible. The question has been asked. He is not the only one who, from time to time, needs to be called out; neither is he the most frequent one to give feedback or the worst one at receiving it, between us. My idea and expression of sexuality changed dramatically with that book, as did his accordingly. How could they not? There had to be an accepted ‘no’ for the question to be real. When prodded for feedback about my decisions about what to build and what to destroy, he says he just accepts. He often has wisdom beyond me. I have feedback about everything.
Even though he wouldn’t have stood a chance if I’d been ‘properly’ educated, I had to laugh when Germaine Greer called herself ‘incurably heterosexual’. Seriously, if there was a cure for love, I would have found it, before radical feminism, instead of my husband. For all the horror, it didn’t reveal any one atrocity so much as help to integrate my story into ours. With the assistance of this theoretical framework it is impossible to ignore my own glaring domestication in the lack of address I have to that second problematic certainty: ability by the grace of another is not true ability, financial or otherwise. I can do things he could never do (not just make babies). I know things he will never have the opportunity to know (besides cramps). Inside this patriarchal framework, we are bound to fail, to be subject to all the predictable pitfalls, to feel our way toward the conversation in the darkness. We can but do our best. He brings home more scrilla. I refuse to clean up after him. He insists on watching Steven Universe in the middle of the damn night and Golden Girls in the evening. I handle crises situations very well. He can take instruction very well in a crisis. I know that I put the light in his eyes. He will never be my political focus. I will always have to battle on the personal and political front with him as my partner. He is an ally I remain proud of.
Sources:
