Climate activists Ruby Montoya and Jessica Renzicek are pleading guilty in federal court in the legal action against their sabotage of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
On July 24th, Ruby Montoya and Jessica Renzicek released a press release admitting that they had carried out multiple acts of sabotage against the then-under-construction Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in Spring 2017. The two activists set fire to heavy machinery and used blow torches to damage the oil pipeline and valves in an effort to decisively halt the project. While the DAPL was ultimately finished, their actions singlehandedly delayed construction for weeks or months. Their eco-sabotage resulted in millions of dollars of damage.
In September 2019, Jessica, 39, and Ruby, 30, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage to an energy facility, malicious use of fire, and other felonies. Montoya and Reznicek are now set to plead guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to damage an energy facility. The other charges will be dismissed, with sentencing due in May 2021. Pleading guilty may result in up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Both Montoya and Reznicek were seasoned activists and knew sabotage may carry consequences. However, they were clear that direct action was a must, if we are to protect the planet and future of life. They asserted they were in support of indigenous sovereignty and were resisting corporate power.
“Our conclusion is that the system is broken and it is up to us as individuals to take peaceful action and remedy it, and this we did, out of necessity,” Montoya said.
Although the direct action undertaken by Montoya and Reznicek may have been controversial, Deep Green Resistance stands in support of Ruby and Jessica and remains opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline, and any development that destroys the natural world.
Please listen to Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek talking with Jennifer Murnan and Max Wilbert during this 2017 interview, or read the transcript here. Their understanding and commitment is inspiring. We salute Ruby and Jessica and will keep readers up-to-date on their sentencing and where people can send support.
DGR stands in solidarity with indigenous peoples worldwide. They are often decisive defenders of the landbase that is their home and also the most vulnerable people, facing endless attacks, harassment and genocide by the culture of empire.
This is an excerpt from an article originally published on Mongabay.
The Philippines’ Department of National Defense has unilaterally terminated an accord that ensured the 17 campuses of the University of the Philippines were off-limits to the military and police.
The defense secretary justified the move by alleging that insurgents from the banned communist party and its armed wing are using the campuses’ sanctuary status as cover for their recruitment and propaganda purposes.
The decision has alarmed displaced Indigenous students who are harboring at UP’s Quezon City campus after the military bombed or took over their schools in a counter-insurgency campaign that began in 2018.
Critics say the move is the latest blow to human rights and environmental activists in the Philippines, following the recent enactment of an anti-terrorism law seen as giving the armed forces free rein to perpetuate abuses in a country already rated as the most dangerous in Asia for environmental and land defenders.
MANILA — Indigenous youths harboring from a military-led counterinsurgency in the Philippines may soon lose the only safe space they have known for the past two years.
Under a nearly 40-year pact, the 17 campuses of the University of the Philippines are off-limits to the country’s military and police. Since 2019, a group of 68 Indigenous students and teachers have taken refuge at the UP campus in Quezon City, where they attend a makeshift school following the forcible closure of more than 160 schools catering to Indigenous communities, or lumad, in the southern island of Mindanao.
But in a letter dated Jan. 15 this year to the UP president, National Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana unilaterally declared an end to the pact, effectively stripping the sanctuary status of the campuses of the country’s leading public university.
Lorenzana cited “recent events” that identified UP students as members of the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (CPP/NPA), and said that “national security issues” and the safety of students against rebel recruiters are the main driving forces for the termination of what’s known as the UP-DND accord or the Enrile-Soto accord.
“The Department is aware that there is indeed an ongoing clandestine recruitment inside UP campuses nationwide for membership in the CPP/NPA and that the ‘Agreement’ is being used by the CPP/NPA recruiters and supporters as shield or propaganda so that government law enforcers are barred from conducting operations against the CPP/NPA,” the letter, addressed to UP President Danilo Concepcion, says.
The Department of National Defense (DND) says it will not “station military or police” on campuses and will not “suppress activist groups, academic freedom and freedom of expression.” The DND has nothing to gain from suppressing these activities, Lorenzana wrote: “We want them [the youth] to see their Armed Forces and Police as protectors worthy of trust, not fear.”
But despite the secretary’s reassurances, the news has triggered alarms for Indigenous students, who could now be targeted in military raids. The development threatens a repeat of the military attacks on Indigenous schools that occurred after President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law in Mindanao in 2017, says Ruis Valle of the Save Our Schools Network (SOSN).
In 2018, the military conducted a series of campaigns and operations to crack down on lumad schools in Talaingod, in Mindanao’s Davao del Norte province, after Duterte threatened in 2017 to bomb the schools.
He had accused the CPP/NPA of using the schools as training grounds.
Since then, more than 160 schools catering to Mindanao’s Indigenous inhabitants have been bombed or transformed into military detachments, and completely shut.
The group of Indigenous students and teachers who sought sanctuary at UP’s Quezon City campus have consistently called for the reopening of Indigenous schools forced to close by the government, the SOSN says. It adds the now-scrapped UP-DND accord “served as a protective barrier for lumad children from direct military and police harassment.”
Human rights and environmental groups have also expressed concern at the DND’s latest move, calling the accord’s termination an attack on UP “as a democratic space.”
Since 2012, the university has “opened its doors to the lakbayan and kampuhan of indigenous people, national minorities, and farmers protesting mining plunder, land grabs, and other attacks against their ancestral lands,” the Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment, an NGO, said in a statement to Mongabay.
The university has also been “one of the few safe spaces” for environmental and human rights defenders to mobilize amid the government’s militaristic approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. Duterte signed a controversial anti-terrorism law during the lockdown, which critics say worsens an already fragile climate for environmental defenders and Indigenous groups in the Philippines. Eco-watchdog Global Witness rates the country the most dangerous for environmental and land defenders in Asia.
“The University of the Philippines is one of the pillars of academic freedom and critical thinking in the country,” Kalikasan said. “It is because of this freedom and critical thinking that the University can produce great minds that have excelled in different fields, including environmental protection and defense.”
Featured Image: The University of the Philippines campus in Diliman, Quezon City, Metro Manila.
Image by Ramon FVelasquez via Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
I have been asked to write a letter to someones grandchildren for the solstice. I think this fitting since i have no children. Sometimes i think of the movement as my children and is certainly a consideration when devoting to this path. 7 generations.
To all the grandchildren i have this message for you. As some of you know the world is in dire condition. Many of you have been born into a world where your existence and quality of life is questionable. Despite this please try to rise to the occasion and meet the challenges of your generation head on with dignity and determination. Defend your communities and the natural world. Challenge yourself to learn your roots. It helps to know where your coming from to know where your going. Try to get back to your roots before industrial civilization. Form sustainable habits. Find ways to give back to the earth who truly is our mother and source of your true power. Benefit and restore her whenever possible. Stick up for people. Stick up for all the creatures of the world the swimmers, the four legged, those crawlers and those who fly. Extinction is a major issue you will face in your lifetime. It will be difficult. Do it anyway. More people are coming to join you because there is no turning away from this truth. You will face climate catastrophe. Over 200 species go extinct each day. In the Anishinaabe wolf story it explains that what happens to the wolf will also happen to human kind. Remember not to be so worried about what people think of you that it prevents you from making a stand. On difficult days try to remember the animals and forests you fought for. Your causes. Put some water or tobacco on the ground from time to time.
If there was any wisdom i wanted to leave the youth was that we set out to prove wolves are sacred to the tribes of Turtle Island and they are. Wolves like humans in their ancient forms are what science calls a keystone species. This means they benefit the natural world around them. Its a compass telling you where to go, where to return to. How to find your way home.
Regularly study martial arts. One of the most useful things you can do for this world. Keep your self capable, and fortified. Do this for the planet so you can respond in defense of her, do this for your community, your family, lastly do this for yourself. This way you can protect. Solve problems as they arise. Build your mind and your spirit by building your body. Do this so your as a responsibility to pull your own weight. Be your own security. This is especially important for women so you don’t have to run to a man or the system for help, you can handle it right there on the spot. This is a huge and overlooked solution to many of the problems we face today.
At times it will seem difficult to work with other people and the people will be divided. Seek unity and collaboration where you can and hold it in high regard. The wolf teaches us to work together. That we are strong together. Community. This is the same for humans. Individuality is a lie. Contribute to the lives and well being of others. Seek to deeply understand the meaning of family in life. Be present for them. This is a very important time to be alive. Embrace it.
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.
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.
Indigenous teachings are thousands of years old. People born into these traditions are raised into knowledge that those born outside do not—and should not—have. Do not steal from others traditions. Instead, research your own family history and connect to your own roots.
This award-winning documentary deals with the popularization and commercialization of Native American spiritual traditions by Non-Indians.
Important questions are asked of those seeking to commercially exploit Tribal rituals and copy sacred ceremonies and those vested with safeguarding sacred ways. The film represents a wide range of voices from Native communities, and speaks to issues of cultural appropriation with humour, righteous anger, and thoughtful insight.
Written by Daniel Hart Youtube copyright notice : “Alice Di Micele-Not For Sale (24:16)”, sound recording administered by: CD Baby
The event was originally produced on Sunday, March 8, 2009 and tells the history of the Iroquois Confederacy, whose practice of gender equality inspired the emerging women’s rights movement in upstate New York over 100 years ago.
“Feminism is about transforming society to create whole human beings” — Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage, the two major theoreticians of the early women’s rights movement, had direct knowledge of the Haudenosaunee, writing about the superior social, political, religious and economic status of women in the Iroquois nations. Their work for women’s rights, Wagner argues, was inspired by the vision they received from the Haudenosaunee of gender balance and harmony.
Jeanne Shenandoah is a member of Eel Clan of the Onondaga Nation and serves as a representative of the Onondaga Nation in Onondaga Lake Environmental Cleanup. Jeanne is a member of Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force, founding Vice President of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation, and practiced as a homebirth midwife for 28 years. Shenandoah has focused her work on educating the community about her traditional life as a member of the Eel Clan and bridging between the native and non-native nations and the impact it has had on our community over the past 30 years. In 2002, as a Haudenosaunce woman representing the spiritual tradition of indigenous women, Shenandoah attended The Global Peace Initiative of Women Religious and Spiritual Leaders at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Shenandoah has also shared her personal story in Syracuse Stage’s production, Tales from Salt City. In 2005, she received The Harriet Tubman Humanitarian Achievement Award.
Deep Green Resistance gives thanks for the decades of thinking, writing, sharing and work of women globally.
