Editor’s note: this piece began circulating in the wake of the raids on Wet’suwet’en territory. We have covered these topics and discussed strategic approaches to escalation in recent weeks. This piece contributes to this ongoing discussion. Featured image via Unist’ot’en Camp. #ShutDownCanada #ReconciliationIsDead #RevolutionIsAlive. As with all cross-posts, sharing this does not imply that Aphonika Distro endorses Deep Green Resistance.
By tawinikay (aka Southern Wind Woman)
If only one thing has brought me joy in the last few weeks, it began when the matriarchs at Unist’ot’en burned the Canadian flag and declared reconciliation dead. Like wildfire, it swept through the hearts of youth across the territories. Out of their mouths, with teeth bared, they echoed back: reconciliation is dead! reconciliation is dead! Their eyes are more keen to the truth so many of our older generation have been too timid to name. The Trudeau era of reconciliation has been a farce from the beginning. It has been more for settler Canadians than natives all along.
“Reconciliation is dead” is a battle cry.
It means the pressure to live up to our side of the bargain is over. The younger generation have dropped the shackles to the ground. Perhaps we are moving into a new time, one where militancy takes the place of negotiation and legal challenge. A time where we start caring less about what the colonizer’s legal and moral judgement and more about our responsibilities.
Criticizing reconciliation is not about shaming those elders and people who participated in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it’s about attacking a government that used that moment of vulnerability to bolster it’s global image. I have said it before and I’ll say it again, I do not blame our older generation for being hopeful about a more peaceful future. Those who lived through the horror of residential schools and the 60s scoop and the road allowance days and the sled dog slaughters could only have wanted a better life for the coming generations. It is the responsibility of those younger generations to stand up and say that what is being offered is not good enough. It is up to us to say that we would rather another hundred years of struggle than to accept the gentle assimilation being offered. It is up to us to give thanks to our elders for their service and then to turn to the frontlines with our feathers and drums and fists.
Because ideas on their own don’t make change. That is a liberal lie. It takes action behind words to make a difference. That action needs to be undertaken together. Neither ideas or practice are created by individuals. Everything written here is the result of discussion and interaction with other land defenders, lovers, anarchists, mothers, children, and resistors. We need to be accountable to the things we say while also recognizing that knowledge is created by communities. It has to always be seen that way in order to subvert hierarchy, to never allow one person to be elevated over any other.
So what is written here is all of yours. Take it and do with it as you please.
Argue it. Defend it. Decry it. Make it your own.
Forget the rules.
Canada is a colonial state. It exists to govern territory and manage the resources of that territory. It is nothing less and nothing more. It has done an excellent job convincing its citizens that it stands for something, something good. This is the way it maintains its legitimacy. The national myth of politeness and civility wins the support of its constituents. This has been carefully constructed over time and it can be deconstructed. In fact, the rules of Canada change all the time. I would write more about this but the truth is I could not do a better job than something I recently came across online. @Pow_pow_pow_power recently wrote the following:
Settler governments have been making up the rules as they go from the beginning of their invasions. While each generation of us struggles to educate ourselves to the rulebook, they disregard it and do what they want when they want. This should not be a surprise. It has always been this way because they prioritize themselves about all – above other people, above animal relatives, above the balance of Nature, and certainly above “what is right”. Laws have always been passed to legitimize their whims and interests as the intentions of seemingly rational rulers, and to keep us in compliance with their needs.
We currently live in a time where our Imperialist structures have been deeply concerned with appearing ordered and civilized to fellow regimes of power to cultivate a sense of superiority. This is why the violence we have become accustomed to is no longer mass slaughters and public torture and exiles but night raids and disappearances, criminalizations and being locked into systems of neglect. It has become more reliant on structural violence & erasure than direct violence, and therefore more insidious. Insidiousness is more tidily effective and harder to pinpoint as a source of injustice.
This is why when we approach them, lawful and peaceful and rational and fair minded and smooth toned, as gracious and calm as can be, we are easily dismissed with polite white smiles of “best intentions” “deepest regrets” and “we’re doing our best”, in fact “we’re doing better than most”. And when we insist, more firmly, more impassioned, more justified, the response from Settler Governments is as clear as we see now: “Why can’t you people just obey?”
Canadians want to believe that colonial violence is a thing of the past, so the government hides it for them. That is why the RCMP doesn’t allow journalists to film them as they sick dogs on women defending their land. That is why they will get away with it.
The time has come to stop looking for justice in settler law.
For Indigenous people in Canada, it is impossible to avoid the violence inflicted on us by the state. When we raise our fist and strike back, it is always an act of self-defense. Always. Committing to non-violence or pacifism in the face of a violent enemy is a dangerous thing to do. Yet, attempting to avoid using violence until absolutely necessary is a noble principle. One which carries the most hope for a new future. But what does violence mean to the settler state?
They don’t consider it violent to storm into a territory with guns drawn and remove its rightful occupants. They don’t consider it violent to level mountaintops, or clearcut forests, or to suck oil out of the ground only to burn it into the air. They don’t consider it violent to keep chickens and pigs and cows in tiny crates, never allowing them to see sunlight, using them like food machines.
But smash a window of a government office..
Well, that goes too far.
It is time we see their laws for what they are: imaginary and hypocritical. Settler laws exist to protect settlers. We are not settlers. We are Michif. We are Anishinaabek. We are Onkwehón:we. We are Nêhiyawak. We are Omàmiwininì. We are Inuit. We are Wet’suwet’en. So why are we still appealing to their laws for our legitimacy?
Time after time, communities spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal challenges to land rights. Chippewa of the Thames First Nation used money won in a land claim to launch a legal challenge against Canada to say they were never properly consulted, nor did they consent to, the Line 9 pipeline through their territory. The Supreme Court ruled against them, saying that Indigenous peoples do not have the right to say no to industrial projects in their territories. Line 9 is still operational. The Wet’suwet’en won probably the most significant legal challenge in Canadian history. The Delgamuukw verdict saw the courts acknowledge that the We’suwet’en territory is unceded, that they hold title and legal jurisdiction, and yet look at how Canada honours that. Legal victories are not the way we win our land and dignity. Canada cares as little about Canadian law as they do Indigenous law.
The same goes for the United Nations and their precious UNDRIP. We have seen that the state will adopt United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) principles and interpret them to suit their needs. That document says that governments and companies need free, prior, and informed consent to engage in projects in their territories. BC adopted it and, yet, says that it does not mean they have to gain consent from the Wet’suwet’en. Consent will never actually mean the right to say no. And the UN has no way to enforce it.
The time has passed for legal challenge in their courts that does nothing but drain our resources and slow us down. I honour those relatives and ancestors who attempted the peaceful resolution, who trusted in the good intentions of other humans. But the settlers have proven that the peaceful options they offered us are lies. Fool us once, shame on you.
This is not only about Unist’ot’en anymore.
This is about all of us. Any day now the RCMP could attempt to move in and evict the rail blockade at Tyendinaga. I stand in solidarity with them as much as I do with the Wet’suwet’en. This moment is not just about getting the government and their militarized goons to back down at Unist’ot’en and Gitdum’ten, it’s about getting them to loosen their grip around all of our necks. This moment is about proclaiming reconciliation dead and taking back our power.
This is not to say that we should forget about Unist’ot’en and abandon them when they need us most. It is a proposal to widen our scope so that we don’t lose our forward momentum if what happens out west doesn’t meet our wildest dreams. This is about crafting a stronger narrative.
This means that we should think before claiming that the Wet’suwet’en have the right to their land because it is unceded. Do we not all have a right to the land stolen from our ancestors? For land to be unceded it means that it has never been sold, surrendered, or lost through conquest. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 urged Canada and the dominion to only take land through the making of treaty. And so agents of Canada set out to do so. They continued to make treaties across the continent, sometimes lying about the content of the treaties to ancestors who didn’t speak english, sometimes finding whoever the hell would sign the treaty without much concern for if that person was acting with the support of the community. After the signing of the last treaty, Canada made it illegal for Indians to hire lawyers to challenge land claims. And then they stole the rest of what they wanted. They continued to flood the land with settlers until native peoples had only 0.2% of the land they once protected and lived on.
I don’t care about appealing to the legitimacy of unceded territory. All land is stolen land. Canada has no jurisdiction on any of it because they have broken any agreements they ever made in the process of taking it.
The same critique rings true for holding up hereditary governance as the only true leadership of Indigenous peoples. I am not advocating for band council. But it is important to understand that many of our relations have lost the hereditary systems that once helped them live good lives. We are going to have to rekindle our governance. Some we can pull from the past, some we will have to make anew. All freely chosen forms of Indigenous governance are legitimate. Our legitimacy does not flow from the mouths of our leaders, but from our connection to the land and water and our commitment to our responsibilities to all life today and generations to come.
This is a good thing if we let it be. It is foolish to think we would not have changed and grown in 300 years. Our systems would look different today no matter what. This is an opportunity to combine new and beautiful ideas with the time-honoured traditions and ceremonies of our ancestors, spiritual communities where hierarchy is subverted and gender is liberated!
It is time to shut everything the fuck down.
Canada has always been afraid of us standing in our power. Reconciliation was a distraction, a way for them to dangle a carrot infront of us and trick us into behaving. Now is the time to show them how clear our vision is. Being determined and sure is not the same as being unafraid. There are many dangerous days ahead of us. It is dangerous to say, “I will not obey.”
The first thing we need to do is stop stabbing each other in the back. Take a seat on band council if you want, but stop letting it go to your head. Don’t ever see yourself as more than a servant, a cash distributor, a rule enforcer. Being elected is not the same as earning a place of respect in your community. It does not make you an elder. Let me take this time to say a giant “fuck you” to the Métis nations who sign pipeline agreements because they are so excited the government considered them Indigenous. The Métis have no land rights in Ontario and yet they continue to sign agreements as if they do, throwing the Indigenous nations with actual territory under the train. Let me extend that “fuck you” to the Indigenous nations who signed pipeline agreements and stand by in silence as their relations are attacked for protecting the water. Or even worse when they do interviews with pro-oil lobby groups and conservative media decrying the land defenders in their midst. Can’t they see the way Canadians eat up their words, drooling over the division amongst us, using it to devalue our way of life? I do not condone attacking our relatives who have lost the red path, but we need to find a way to bring them back home. Not everybody has to take up a frontline in their community, but at the bare minimum they should refuse to cooperate with the colonial government and their corporate minions.
The second thing we need to do is act. But we do not have to limit ourselves to actions that demand the withdrawal of forces from Wet’suwet’en territory. The federal government is the one calling the shots, not just at Unist’ot’en but at every point of native oppression across all the territories. Any attack on the state of Canada is in solidarity. Any assertion of native sovereignty is in solidarity.
It’s time to start that occupation you’ve been dreaming up.
Is there a piece of land that has been annexed from your territory? Take it back. Is there a new pipeline being slated through your backyard? Blockade the path. Are their cottagers desecrating the lake near your community? Serve them an eviction notice and set up camp. Sabotage the fish farms killing the salmon. Tear down the dam interrupting the river. Play with fire.
When we put all of our hopes and dreams into one struggle in one spot, we set ourselves up for heartbreak and burnout. Let’s fight for the Wet’suwet’en people, yes! But let’s honour their courage and their actions by letting them inspire us to do the same. Let’s fight for them by fighting for the manoomin and the wetlands and the grizzlies.
Choose your accomplices wisely. Liberals who read land acknowledgments often have too much invested in this system to actually see it change. Communists envision a system without a capitalist Canada, but they still want a communist state. One that will inevitably need to control land and exploit it. Find common heart with those who want to see the state destroyed, to have autonomous communities take its place, and to restore balance between humans and all our relations. Choose those who listen more than they talk, but not those who will do whatever you say and not think for themselves. They are motivated by guilt. Find those who have a fire burning in them for a more wild and just world. Most of them will be anarchists, but not all, and not all anarchists will come with a good mind.
Creating a battlefield with multiple fronts will divide their energies. The rail blockades are working! If the night time rail sabotage and the copper wire and the blockades keep coming, it will shut down all rail traffic across this awful economy. More is better. But do it not just for the Wet’suwet’en, do it for the rivers and streams that weave themselves under the rails. Do it for the ancestors who saw the encroaching railroad as their coming demise.
And as a critique out of Montreal wrote: don’t settle for symbolic and intentional arrest.
When they come to enforce an injunction, move to another part of the rail.
When they come with a second injunction, block the biggest highway nearby.
When they come with a third injunction, move to the nearest port.
Stay free and fierce. The folks at Unist’ot’en and Gitdum’ten didn’t have the option to, but you do. Anticipate their next move and stay ahead of them.
This is a moment among many moments. Our ancestors have been clever, sometimes biding their time quietly, sometimes striking, always secretly passing on our ceremonies and stories. I honour them as I honour you now. We are still here because of them and our children and our children’s children will still be here because of us. Never forget who we are. Fight in ceremony.
I suppose this is a proposal for adopting a strategy of indigenous anarchism here on Turtle Island. A rejection of tactics that demand things from powerful people and a return to building for ourselves a multitude of local, diverse solutions. This is a rejection of Idle No More style organizing, let’s not repeat the mistakes of the past (for a detailed critique of INM, see https://warriorpublications.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/idle-no-more-speak-for-yourself/ and while you’re there read everything else). It is a plea for us to choose our own leaders and create governance that refuses hierarchy. An ask for us to reject reconciliation and move towards a militant reclamation. The idea of indigenous anarchism is still in its infancy. Write me about it.
This is one of our moments. Let’s make it not about demanding for them to leave Unist’ot’en alone, but about demanding that they leave the land alone. Don’t make it about stopping CGL from making money, make it about denouncing the idea of money. This is about colonization everywhere. This is about all of us.
To the settlers inevitably reading this zine.
What is written here is meant for you too. Not in the “rise up and take back your land” kind of way. Been there, done that.
But I have been reading the messaging on the reportbacks and in the media and I see you falling into all sorts of tired traps. You are not just cogs in the solidarity machine, you too can take up struggles in the cities you live. Remember the Two Row: you can fight parallel battles towards the same goals.
I have heard many an elder say that we will not win this fight on our own, and that is most certainly true. Thank you for the ways you have attacked the economy and the state. Thank you for answering the call. Now take this and run with it.
You too should look for ways to defend the land and water in the places you live. You too should look for ways to undermine and weaken the power of the government over these lands. Don’t let yourself be disheartened if the RCMP don’t leave Unist’ot’en. That is only one fight of many. That is only the beginning. Don’t fall into the traps of appealing to Canadian or international law.
See yourself for what you are, for who your community is. Act in ways that bring about a world where reconciliation is possible, a world in which your people give back land and dismantle the centralized state of Canada. Don’t romanticize the native peoples you work with. Don’t feel that you can’t ever question their judgment or choose to work with some over others. Find those that have kept the fire alive in their hearts, those who would rather keep fighting than accept the reconciliation carrot. Don’t ever act from guilt and shame.
And don’t let yourself believe that you can transcend your settlerism by doing solidarity work. Understand that you can, and should, find your own ways to connect to this land. From your own tradition, inherited or created.
In this episode of The Green Flame podcast, we speak with Sakej Ward. Sakej (James Ward) belongs to the wolf clan. He is Mi’kmaw (Mi’kmaq Nation) from the community of Esgenoopetitj (Burnt Church First Nation, New Brunswick). He is the father of nine children, four grandchildren and a caregiver for one.
Sakej is a veteran of both the Canadian and American militaries. During his military career, he volunteered and excelled at some of the most demanding leadership courses in the military, including the Special Forces Infantry Leader’s Course. He finished his military career at the rank of Sergeant.
Wanting to pursue academics, he immediately went to university and immersed himself in politics where he graduated from the University of New Brunswick from the Honour’s program with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science with a specialization in International Relations.
Recognizing the value of an academic background, he continued to advance his studies and attended the University of Victoria where he successfully completed the Master’s of Arts Degree in Indigenous Governance.
Sakej has a long history of advocating and protecting First Nations inherent responsibilities and freedoms, having spent the last 21 years fighting the government and industry. This deep desire to bring justice to all Indigenous people has given Sakej experience in international relations where he spoke on behalf of the Mi’kmaq Nation at the United Nations Working Group for Indigenous Populations (WGIP). For his efforts in protecting Indigenous people, freedoms and territory he has received the National Aboriginal Achievement Award.
Having taught, organized, advised and led various warrior societies from all over Turtle Island down into Guatemala and Borike (Puerto Rico) Sakej has made warrior-hood his way of life. He has been on over a dozen warrior operations and countless protest actions. He dedicates all his time to developing warrior teachings and instructing warrior societies from all over.
This show features poetry by the Chickasaw poet, playwright, and novelist Linda Hogan, and the song “Zabalaza” by South African political music collective Soundz of the South (SOS).
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
February 7th updates from Unist’ot’enCamp and Gidimten:
The RCMP raid continues today as militarized, heavily-armed police backed up with K9 dogs, heavy equipment, and helicopters move further into Unist’ot’en territory. As we write this federal police are currently raiding the Gidimt’en checkpoint at 44km.
6:15pm: We are hearing that 30 RCMP are surrounding #Wetsuwetsuweten Hereditary Chiefs and supporters at 27KM who have blocked the road. Among them, Dini’ze Smogelgem, Dini’ze Dsta’hyl, and Tsake’ze Sleydo’.
Everything is quiet at @Gidimten checkpoint. Those in the cabin no longer see or hear police. It seems like the majority of the force has headed out and at least 15 RCMP have headed to 27km. The tower is still standing. The road is still blocked.
Denzel Sutherland-Wilson from the Gitxsan nation was arrested and removed from @Gidimten tower earlier today. Only those in Chief Woos’ cabin remain. The Gitxsan are the oldest allies of the #Wetsuweten.
3:45pm:#RCMP are now blocked in on the forest service road at the 27km mark after people parked several vehicles sideways — preventing vehicles from passing (this is the route out to Houston) #Wetsuweten. RCMP visibly frustrated at this additional barrier.
3:15pm:Anne Spice has been taken down from the tower. One person remains on top of the tower. Legal observers, @GitxsanJt, and a documentary filmmaker are still on site but far away.
2:30pm:RCMP are now using ladders to move up the wooden tower overlooking the territory.RCMP have said that the people on the tower are already under arrest and they are just trying to get them down.RCMP won’t specify what the charges are or why the people in the tower are under arrest.
2pm: The US-Canada border crossing in Mohawk territory was shut down by protests.
1:55pm: Eve Saint, the daughter of@Gidimten Chief Woos, has been arrested along with one other. They were removed from the bus blocking the road. They have been walked out by RCMP. They are not hurt.
12:55pm: The metal gate at @Gidimten is down. Legal observer is trying to get RCMP badge numbers and police names but RCMP won’t respond. Some RCMP are wearing masks to cover their faces.
12:45pm: RCMP are trying to limit the visibility of the tactical team to media by surrounding a bus containing media. RCMP “have one person stationed on the other side of the flipped van. They’re the one doing the lethal overwatch. They’ve got a gun pointed at us, underneath the warrior flag,” we’ve just heard.
12:30pm: Those at @Gidimten just said the teams dropped off by the helicopters included K9 units – so they are surrounded by snipers and police dogs.
6:30 am: RCMP militarized convoy engines are running and lining up in Houston now. Their extremist force is hardly a peaceful action against our unarmed, peaceful protestors. Shame!!! – Gidimt’en Checkpoint
February 6th updates:
6:45 pm: All six people who were arrested in Gidimt’en territories this morning are being released with no charges. Three are out already.
4:44pm: Chiefs & supporters blocked the road at 27km, forcing RCMP to let Wet’suwet’en chiefs in. Clearing work has stopped at 44km. Dsta’hyl (Likht’samisyu) said the #Wetsuweten will enforce the eviction of Coastal Gaslink, with any means at their disposal.
4pm: Solidarity actions are taking place across Canada. A blockade has shut down the Port of Vancouver. Various politicians offices have been occupied. Indigenous youth are locked down at the B.C. Legislature.
2:40pm Pacific Time: People at the Gidimt’en Access Point (44 km; the site of the armed police raid in January 2019) are now confirming that they see heavy machinery approaching.
Militarized, heavily armed police units known as “tactical enforcement teams,” supported by K9 dogs and infrared camera-equipped drones, have this morning raided the Wet’suwet’en First Nation territory in central British Columbia, Canada to remove indigenous occupation aimed at preventing construction of a fracked-gas pipeline.
Between four and six people have been arrested at the blockade setup at 39KM on the Morice River Road, 27 km from the main Unist’ot’en Camp. Journalists on-site were threatened with arrest, prevented from photographing the events (including police smashing the window on a truck), and forcefully removed from the area. This is the second militarized raid on the peaceful indigenous resistance camp. The previous raid, in January 2019, was later revealed to have included “lethal overwatch”—authorization to shoot to kill. In both raids, police carried sniper and assault rifles.
The police raid Wet’suwet’en checkpoint shows they are acting as private contractors for the gas company, facilitating the plunder of stolen indigenous land and destruction of the planet for private profit.
Coastal GasLink/TC Energy is pushing through a 670-kilometer fracked gas pipeline that would carry fracked gas from Dawson Creek, B.C. to the coastal town of Kitimat, where LNG Canada’s processing plant would be located. LNG Canada is the single largest private investment in Canadian history.
Each clan within the Wet’suwet’en Nation has full jurisdiction under their law to control access to their territory. Under ‘Anuc niwh’it’en (Wet’suwet’en law) all five clans of the Wet’suwet’en have unanimously opposed all pipeline proposals and have not provided free, prior, and informed consent to Coastal Gaslink/ TransCanada to do work on Wet’suwet’en lands.
This is a developing story and we will share more information as it comes.
Call to Action — Blockade the Colonial Institutions
Indigenous youth in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en Nation are calling for organized, rolling occupations of MLA and MP offices, and of financial institutions tied to Coastal Gaslink pipeline corporation.
7:48 am: RCMP are transporting the 4 arrested supporters to Houston. BC. Everyone at 39KM was arrested except media. Media that were at 39km are being driven out in a police van.
7:22am: 36 vehicles, 1 ambulance and heavy machinery went up from 4 KM. At least 2 bulldozers and excavator.
6:59 am: We have reports RCMP have headed up from town in an approximately 20+ vehicle convoy. #Wetsuweten#WetsuwetenStrong
6:43am: We have reports that RCMP are now blocking the forest service road at 4KM.
6:22am: We have lost all communication with the Gidimt’en watch post at 39KM after RCMP smashed the window of the radio vehicle. It’s still pitch black out.
6am: We have just heard that RCMP denied access to a reporter headed out to the camps this morning. Media exclusion zone is in full effect.
5:56am – The person on radio at 39km reports RCMP have broken in the windows of their vehicle.
5:43am – We estimate more than a dozen cops on site, with six cops surrounding the person communicating updates over radio.
5:30am – We’re hearing reports from the front line that some RCMP had their guns out – not pointed at people – but guns in hand.
We’re told that even with more than a dozen vehicles out on the territory, the Houston community hall is still full of cops waiting to invade our lands.
5:05am – We’ve heard 13 RCMP vehicles headed up the road earlier this morning. Up to 4 arrests have been made now, and RCMP are taking down tents. Our understanding is these tents were NOT blocking the road and are not part of the injunction area.
4:55am – It’s not yet 5am – still totally dark out – and we’ve just heard RCMP made their first arrest at the #Wetsuweten monitoring post at 39KM. Cops are surrounding people there and beginning to clear the road to the Gidimt’en checkpoint.
Deep Green Resistance delegation to Unist’ot’en Camp – 2012
Editor’s note: The following is the complete text of Larry Engelmann’s “The Woman Who Remembered Paradise,” which first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, on July 10, 1988. The “Westerners,” whom the Spaniards called the “San Juan Indians,” are elsewhere identified as the Amah Mutsun people, who lived and hunted in what are today’s San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Benito Counties.
Anyone who finds this article as moving as we do is encouraged to visit the Amah Mutsun website. The tribe’s statements about themselves, their past and their future are equally educational and moving, and make it clear that while Ascención Solórsano may have been the last person fluent in the Mutsun language, the tribe itself is far from dead. Further reading has confirmed that Popeloutchom was NOT in Santa Clara Valley, but in the Pajaro River valley, around the present day town of San Juan Bautista, in San Benito County, just northeast of Monterey. At that time, the tribe’s range was roughly from there to Santa Cruz, and was the reason for the establishment of the missions at San Juan Bautista and Santa Cruz.
This article does, in some ways, reflects the prejudices and simplistic understandings of anthropologists and of civilized attitudes towards the indigenous. However, it nonetheless gives valuable insight in the life of indigenous people of what is now central California. Thank you to Mark Behrend for providing this article, and for the above research.
The Last San Juan Indian in Silicon Valley
By Larry Engelmann
Long, long ago, before Silicon Valley was settled and suburbanized, before it was leveled and developed, subdivided and paved, tract-homed and condoed, malled and gridlocked, and long before the air was browned and seasoned, the streams and well waters shellacked with chemical solvents, before it was high-teched and silicon-chipped, mainframed and PC’ed, before it was airported, theme-parked and fast-fooded, before the rude snorting of the first automobile shattered the pristine silence on the narrow rutted trails that passed through miles and miles of gorgeous orchards, before Leland Stanford built his university, before the silver mines were chiseled out of the hills or the missions constructed, before Sir Francis Drake peered from the deck of the Golden Hinde at the Golden Gate, long before any European ever heard the word America, another race of people inhabited the place we call Silicon Valley. They believed they were living in an earthly paradise. They called it Popeloutchom.
The people of Popeloutchom were gentle. As gentle, it was said, as the climate and the cool breezes that slipped over the mountains to the west and whispered through the fruit trees and caressed all the living things in the valley each evening. They believed this valley was the most beautiful place in the world.
Because of that conviction they had no desire at all to travel far and look upon what must surely be lesser lands given by the gods to lesser men. In this garden of Popeloutchom, where the air was clear and the water pure and the Earth naturally fruitful and abundant, they were happy.
When the first Franciscan missionaries arrived and told the stories of their God and the Eden he had created for his first man and woman, the people of Popeloutchom were fascinated and flattered. Obviously, they felt, the God of the Franciscans had once seen this valley, and had tried to copy it for his people far away.
The important difference, of course, between his Eden and this place was that no one had ever been expelled from this paradise. Here there was no evil serpent and no fall from grace, no paradise lost. Popeloutchom was paradise preserved. In the English translation of their own language — a language long since lost — the people of Popeloutchom called themselves “the Westerners,” because they were the westernmost group of several loosely related tribes. Over the years, though, they had lost contact with their Eastern cousins, who had simply melted away, like snow before the summer sun. Yet the gods had preserved and sustained the Westerners in Popeloutchom.
The Westerners were an indigenous people, who knew neither treachery nor deceit nor war. They welcomed the befuddled strangers who sometimes stumbled upon their settlements. Such lost travelers were regarded as honored guests who would, when treated warmly, tell unusual stories about distant places and strange gods, before moving on.
And so the Westerners welcomed the first white men who “discovered” their valley. Unlike earlier travelers, however, these intruders came to stay. They constructed missions, put up walls and worshiped the God who created Eden. And they brought with them also their deadly trinity of cholera, smallpox and measles. The Westerners, with no immunity to the European diseases, began to die by the hundreds. Those few who survived were brought within the discipline of the missions. They lost their old faith and their old lands. They were given a new name by the missionairies. They became the San Juans.
And gradually, like their Eastern relatives, they melted away.
Early in the twentieth century, when historians and ethnologists tried to record the story of the Westerners, they found that those gentle people of Popeloutchom had become extinct. And they concluded, after careful research, that sometime around 1850, the last member of that kindly and tolerant race had vanished.
It came, then, as a substantial surprise when word was relayed to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in late 1929, that all of the Westerners had not died. There remained, in fact, a single surviving full-blooded member of that tribe. And she wanted the story of her life and of her people recorded for posterity.
John Harrington, the Smithsonian’s leading ethnologist, rushed to California in order to transcribe that final testament of this rare survivor of a lost race, this last Westerner.
She called herself Ascención Solórsano, and for as long as anyone could remember, she had lived in Gilroy. There she was known, because of her curative powers, as a great and generous “doctora.” For several decades, the few remaining Indians of the region had known of the miracles performed by the doctora. Her wisdom, they believed, was the accumulation of learning of a hundred generations of Westerners.
Each day, the sick and the lame and the afflicted came to her from hundreds of miles away. They lined up in the doorway to her tiny house, and camped at night in her yard, transforming her property into a humble pastoral version of Lourdes. Inside, the doctora listened carefully to their tales of physical woe. Then she mixed tonics and ointments from local herbs and roots and dispensed them to the afflicted. It was rumored that the remedies of the doctora were always successful. She restored the health of anyone who sought her help. Those who could, paid for her miracles. Those who could not pay brought food or small articles of some value. And those who could pay with nothing material were reminded simply to remember the doctora in their prayers.
For many years the doctora tirelessly carried on her practice. The local press ignored her and the local authorities overlooked her. She practiced medicine without a license, to be sure. But those who were supposed to enforce laws forbidding such activities either never heard of her or never believed she existed. No complaints for malpractice were ever filed against the doctora.
Then, one night in the late summer of 1929, a light evening breeze whispered a prophetic message to the doctora. For all of her life, Ascención had read such portents and premonitory signs in the wind and rain, and in the lost language of the birds. She could read the messages from nature as easily as one today might read the headlines in a newspaper.
The wind told Ascención that she was going to die in three days. And so now at last the things that remained to be done must be done quickly.
She took out the black silk dress she had sewn years earlier to wear when she confronted death. She then said goodbye to her friends in Gilroy and went to the home of her daughter — who was half Indian — in Monterey. There, in her daughter’s tiny two-room frame house, she waited for death. A bed was set up in one room and several pillows were placed on it so that Ascención might sit up comfortably. Neighbors and friends were summoned to see her. And she shared with them all the stories and the collective memories of the Westerners. It was, she believed, the final gift of her lost race to the children of the despoilers of Popeloutchom.
Then, through her narrative, Ascención apparently assuaged the gods of the Westerners and aroused their compassion. As she spoke, day after day, her strength was restored and death was postponed.
When Harrington arrived from Washington, Ascención looked at him in silence for a long time. Then she pronounced her evaluation of the enthusiastic scholar. “You are a vehicle of God,” she said, “that comes to see me in the 11th hour to save my knowledge from being lost. I will teach you up to the last day that I can, and see if I can tell you all that I know.” This is what she told him.
“I have lived for 83 years. My mother, Barbara Sierra, lived for 84 years. And my father, Miguel Solórsano, lived for 82 years. One week after the death of Barbara Sierra, my father died of grief at the loss of his lifelong companion.”
Ascención, their only child, was taught the language and the legends of the Westerners by her parents. But with their deaths, the dialogue in the native tongue was relegated forever to the world of the spirits.
She said that the Westerners traced themselves back hundreds of generations to a time when men had descended from the gods and had been placed in Popeloutchom. This was followed by a great flood that caused the ocean waters to rise to the top of the Gabilan Mountains. Following the flood, the founder of the Westerners taught his children how to live on Earth, how to heal illnesses, how to prepare food, build homes and worship the gods. This father and teacher had then departed to the world of the afterlife in the west, beyond the mountains and the sea and the sunset. And there, after death, every Westerner would in his turn be welcomed by the father and teacher. Yet, after death, the Westerners might still visit their children and friends in Popeloutchom in dreams.
Among the Westerners, Ascención said, age was respected and venerated. It was not, as among the white people, considered simply a purgatory prior to death. With age, the Westerners realized, came wisdom and magical powers. Aged women, it was believed, had the power to control the growth of plants.
And death was not something that the Westerners feared. When death came, relatives of the deceased covered themselves with ashes and mourned openly. Some even removed themselves from other members of the tribe for several days and fasted and chanted songs of death.
In Popeloutchom, Ascención said, “nature provided such an abundance of food that the Westerners always had an oversupply of wild fruits, greens and seeds.” Consequently, they did not practice agriculture, nor did they ever cultivate the land. And except for the simple process of gathering food each day, work was completely unknown to the Westerners. They lived like Adam and Eve in Eden. Daily life was organized around leisure and play, and there was neither worry nor care about tomorrow.
The men and boys of the Westerners wore no clothing. And the women wore only a simple brief buckskin skirt. Yet, Ascención asserted, their skin did not burn in the summer sun, nor did they catch colds, even in the most severe winters.
The secret of their health, she believed, was the daily immersion in cold water. Each morning, as soon as they had risen from their sleep, every Westerner walked to the nearest river or stream. Even the tiniest infants were borne along. Then the Westerners jumped into the water and washed themselves. The practice was pursued every day of the year, regardless of the weather. When they left the water the Westerners returned to their dwellings for the morning meal.
The basic food of the Westerners was a gruel consisting of acorn kernels that were crushed and then bleached with water to remove the bitterness, then boiled with meat, fish or greens.
After breakfast each day, the Westerners began their daily activities. The gathering of food and fuel — the most important tasks — were considered an adventure and were carried out in both a communal and a leisurely way.
The men and boys hunted in small groups, leaving the camp each morning and returning late in the afternoon. They roamed the hillsides and the valley floor of Popeloutchom in search of game, especially deer. They were informal during the hunt, always making it more sport than work. When other local bands were sighted, the groups would stop to talk and exchange stories. If game had already been taken, part of it was cooked and eaten by both groups. Athletic competitions — running, wrestling and archery — were also common at these informal encounters.
The Western hunters had learned, through centuries of observation, the habits of their prey, Ascención recalled. They could, therefore, cover themselves with deerskin, walk on all fours like a deer, and approach their prey very closely. A small bird in flight could commonly be hit by most Western archers with a single arrow, so well did they understand the speed and flight patterns of the winged game of Popeloutchom.
In the rivers and streams of Popeloutchom, the men trapped fish in the shallows and then shot them with arrows. Sometimes, when hunting parties traveled as far as the western ocean, they took sea otter, seals and sea lions. And sometimes the hunting parties came upon a small whale that had been trapped in a tidepool or had washed ashore — a magnificent gift from the gods that might feed a single village for weeks.
While the men and boys hunted, the women and girls gathered acorns, roots, nuts, greens, fruits and other foods. In the quest for these, Ascención remembered, they blended conversation, laughter and singing. Like the men, they went out to their decidedly unstrenuous activity in small groups. Collecting firewood meant greater effort and travel, so there was seldom more than a single day’s supply of wood in any village in the valley — even when heavy rain clouds threatened.
The women also provided water for every household in a village. Water was carried from the streams in baskets woven by hand. The baskets were made from the roots of “cut grass,” and when they were filled with water they swelled and did not leak — not one drop, Ascención said.
The Westerners mastered countless crafts and passed the pride of workmanship on to each succeeding generation. The men made beautiful and powerful bows, reinforced with layers of sinew. They were master archers and could string and fire arrows with almost blinding speed. Their arrows, guided in flight by eagle feathers, slipped easily through the body of a deer or a bear.
The women were the weavers of baskets. They sat in a large circle out of doors and constructed baskets while they talked and sang. Each woman’s baskets carried a distinct design that reflected her individual creativity. The patterns were never repeated or copied. And at a woman’s death, her baskets were burned or given away to strangers.
More for sociability than protection, the Westerners lived in small villages. Each home resembled a beehive. They were constructed by driving willow poles into the ground in a circle, bending the tops together and then binding them. Horizontal poles were then laced through the verticals, and deer grass was applied as a cover. A few small holes were left as windows. The door was small and low and faced away from the prevailing winds. The ground served as the floor of the house. Sleeping mats were woven from bullrushes. Robes from deer and bear hides served as blankets.
Fifty years before Ascención was born, the first white men arrived in Popeloutchom, she said. They examined the countryside and named the land San Benito. They then built a mission and named it after a man who paid great deference to the practice of immersion in water — John the Baptist. They called the mission San Juan Bautista; the inhabitants of the 23 villages in the area near the mission were called simply San Juans, referring to their traditional practice of immersion in water. Then they taught the Westerners how to cultivate fields and work and how to pray and how to live. And how to die.
Not long after the first white men had arrived in the region, the gods of the Westerners had demonstrated their grave displeasure with the intruders. The gods, Ascención said, stamped their feet upon the valley floor and caused buildings to fall and great cracks to open in the ground. The white men, of course, were utterly terrified by the quaking of the Earth. They lived outside their homes for several days and nervously questioned the Westerners about the earthquake. But the white men remained. And in the years that followed, again and again the displeased gods of Popeloutchom pounded on the Earth in protest, but in vain. The white people poured in and disregarded the warnings.
John Harrington listened to Ascención’s tales of the Westerners and scribbled down page after page of notes. He was amazed at the comprehensiveness and vividness of her memory.
He was, however, only one of many witnesses to Ascención’s long narrative. Chairs were set up facing the bed in small, even rows, and dozens of local people came daily to sit silently for hours on end and hear this last Westerner sing and chant and whisper the ageless stories of her people one last time.
And as Ascención spoke of a world that was no more and that would never be again, she drew, day after day, untapped reserves of strength. Through October, November and December, she talked and Harrington wrote. Her audiences increased as word of the wise woman’s stories spread. And many of those she had cured traveled great distances to pay their last respects and to hear her last words.
But in January her strength suddenly started to slip away. And as the end neared, she began to hear and see the spirits of the Westerners in the room and outside the house, reminding her of stories she had not yet told and beckoning her to finish her work. As she spoke, more slowly now and almost in a whisper, she would suddenly point to someone sitting at her bedside and say, “The spirit of my father, Miguel, is sitting beside you!” Then she would speak to Miguel in a language no one in the room had ever heard before and would never hear again.
Finally, she heard the spirits of her race tapping at the door, summoning her. She had told John Harrington all she remembered of Paradise, a place once called “Popeloutchom.” Now she gazed at Harrington once more in silence for a long time. It was a sad, piteous look. But the sadness and the pity were not for herself, but for Harrington and for those of us who would read what she had whispered and he had written, and who would never ever look upon a place in this world as beautiful as her Eden, her Popeloutchom.
She closed her eyes and began very gently picking imaginary flowers from the blanket. Then, peacefully and without any struggle, she stopped breathing.
It was January 1930 when the last Westerner left Popeloutchom. The next morning some of the baskets she had woven were burned, and the others were given away to strangers.
From a talk delivered November 1, 2019. Northern Michigan University Sonderegger Symposium: Anishinaabek: East, South, West, North. Marquette, MI. Featured image: American Progress by John Gast, ca. 1872.
Overview
I’m going to cut straight to the point: averting climate change is not going stop the global collapse of the planet as we know it.
Don’t get me wrong. Climate change is a global emergency and will cause tremendous damage, and, in fact, already has for many.
But the thing is, massive, global-scale destruction has been going on for a long time even before climate change. Although it has roots that go back further, 1492 marks the beginning of this global emergency.
So, first, averting climate change will not stop the global emergency because climate change is only one part of this global emergency.
Second, addressing climate change using the values and viewpoints of this Western culture will only exacerbate the problem. The disease powered by solar fields is still the same disease that is powered by coal.
Third, Western industrial civilization is the cause of the global collapse of the planet as we know it.
Thus, fourth, this Western culture must change if we want to save the planet as we know it.
Finally, fifth, we need to look to healthy cultures for answers about how to change this diseased culture so we can not just avert climate change but also end today’s global ecological collapse. One way to do this is to become acquainted with the resistance movements of healthy cultures. We have examples we can learn from right here in Anishinaabe territory.
Identifying the Problem
To begin at the beginning, what exactly is the problem?
In 1800, half the planet’s land was still in tribal hands.[1] Over the next 150 years, “virtually all indigenous territory” in the world was taken over “by colonizing industrial states” with around 50 million Indigenous people dying in those 150 years alone.[2] In the Americas, this genocide began in 1492 with some estimating as much as 90% of the Indigenous peoples here wiped out.
As this settler culture spread, it deliberately destroyed not only Indigenous human peoples and their ways of life but also the lives and cultures of the Indigenous non-human peoples. Untold numbers of plant and animal relations driven to extinction or near-extinction. Waterways choked with poison. 80% of the planet’s forests annihilated.[3] Grasslands destroyed. Children stolen. Cultures shredded. Or to quote one British author extolling the virtues of European colonization of Indigenous Africa: “This great work of progress will be accomplished through the religion of God. Africa shall be redeemed . . . Her morasses [swamps] will be drained; her deserts shall be watered by canals; her forests shall be reduced to firewood. Her [African] children shall do all this . . . In this amiable task, they may possibly become exterminated. We must learn to look upon this result with composure. It illustrates the beneficent law of Nature, that the weak must be devoured by the strong.”[4]
The majority of people in the settler culture not only stood by and watched this apocalypse but actively promoted it as Progress, although a few wept tears for the passing of the natives. Still, even for the sympathetic, it was assimilate or be annihilated – Progress is inevitable.
Then climate change came along. Suddenly the privileged elites felt threatened realizing this time they, too, will be feel the impacts of their own destructive culture. This time, they are concerned and want to take urgent action to stop the destruction.
The problem is their version of “urgent action” doesn’t call on sufficient change to address the problem because they don’t understand the cause of the problem. Most climate activists look at this industrial civilization and boldly claim the urgent action we must take is to stop powering this civilization with fossil fuels. We can do this, they say, with a carbon tax or a carbon dividend. We can do this with mega-wind and mega-solar. Their version of “urgent action” means getting off of fossil fuels as quickly as possible and replacing them with “green” energy sources. A technologically intensive civilization powered by wind, they argue, is the wave of the sustainable future. If we do this, as long as we haven’t yet passed the tipping point, we will stop global climate change and save the planet. Then we can get back to the business of Progress as usual.
The changes the elites want are only those changes that will allow them to continue their materialistic, colonizing way of life. Swept up in the urgency of things, everyone else gets swept up in their fervor, a fervor that feeds the disease and keeps it going. Haudenosaunee philosopher-activist John Mohawk compares it to being rabid.[5] Santee activist John Trudell calls it being “industrially insane.”[6] Aboriginal Australian singer/songwriter Bobbie McLeod sees it as a culture of Wayward Dreams. It is the culture that needs to change, this disease that needs to be cured. From there, all else will follow.
Artist: John Hunter (Gamilaraay)
Other Indigenous teachings from the Honorable Harvest to the Hopi Prophecies to the Anishinaabe Seventh Fire prophecy talk about what happens when a culture is out of balance with the Earth. The problem we need to address today, according to these teachings and prophecies, is not so much whether industrial civilization is powered by wind or coal but whether or not industrial civilization itself is sustainable. It also the raises the question: is the inherent parasitism of civilization even moral?
Industrialism has greatly exacerbated the disease of civilization. Yet Columbus landed in what we now call the Americas well before the Industrial Revolution. The Western cultural arena he came from was already grossly disconnected from the land, its burgeoning population well beyond the land’s carrying capacity[7], and thus most of Europe, even before the Industrial Revolution or before capitalism, was already wreaking havoc with its landbase.
Europe itself had undergone colonization by civilized cultures some centuries before Columbus. Prior to the civilizing of Europe, Europe was alive with tribal societies. The civilizing of those tribal societies by colonizers is likely where much of Europe’s disconnect from the land arose.
Yes, I just contrasted tribal societies with civilized cultures.
Um…what?
Trudell says, “The Great Lie is that it is ‘civilization.’ It’s not civilized, it has been literally the most bloodthirsty, brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization […] The great lie is that it represents ‘civilization.’ That’s the great lie. Or if it does represent civilization and it’s truly what civilization is . . . then the great lie is that civilization is good for us.”[8]
This is the conclusion many anthropologists, such as John Bodley, have come to.Civilization is not the human ideal we’ve been trained by this civilized culture to believe it is.
According to anthropologists (and as can be seen by the definition and origins of the word itself), a civilization is a society that is city-based. The city is the central point of power. Some of the traits that define a city-based society, as opposed to a tribal society, include the rise of economic, religious, and political power hierarchies and stratification within the urban society. The city needs these oppressive power structures for it cannot provide for itself from within its own borders. It needs the resources of the people who live on the land. This it most often obtains by force through such means as taxation, tribute, or outright military conquest. The primary target for an urban area to use for resources is the surrounding countryside, thus the rural area is made subject to the urban.
But the surrounding countryside is usually not sufficient to satisfy the urban appetite. Disconnected from the land and thus from understanding carrying capacity (or ignoring it), the urban world needs ever more land and resources for their ever-expanding populations. To get it, city-based societies or civilizations engage in what some anthropologists call “predatory expansion” against their neighbors.
For the last 6000 years, Indigenous people and their tribal societies have been targeted by civilizations by their predatory expansions. Europe itself was once a region of tribes who, if they followed the general pattern of tribal societies, would have lived in relative balance with their land and all their relations. Eventually, however, one by one the European tribes fell victim to the predatory expansion of their more civilized neighbors and became themselves one of history’s most destructive colonizers of tribal peoples.[9] As urbanite and historian Theodore Roszak writes, ““Whatever holds out against us[, the city] — [be it] the peasant, the nomad, the savage, we regard as so much cultural debris in our path.”[10]
But in the 6000 years of civilization and its predatory expansion, Indigenous peoples and other peoples of the land have resisted the incursions of civilization and its power inequalities, its colonization of rural/tribal areas, and its attempts to disconnect people from the land.
It was a mere two hundred years ago that, Indigenous peoples and their healthy lifeways protected half of the land on this planet. It is because of this that we have what little healthy land we have today. And it is this land today that is most targeted by resource corporations and their puppet governments in the Western world.
Despite the fact that some cultures got off track and became diseased with this cultural maladaptation of civilization, the Indigenous way of living with the land respectfully and in a good way is our heritage as human beings. All of us have a human heritage of more than 300,000 years of living well with our relations. It’s only in the last 6,000 that some of us have fallen ill and fallen out of balance. But it is human to live in harmony with the Earth. It is human to be at peace with the planet.
So, how do we cure this disease and move, once again, to a healthy way of living with Mother Earth?
Living the Circle: Learning from the Past
If we see the world through the lens of the Medicine Wheel, we will see our history is not a linear lockstep “progression” leading away from those good lifeways but rather a circle leading us back to them.
Our elders represent some of the greatest repositories of how to keep walking that circle. Climate activists of all ages can learn from them, and in fact many climate activists are those elders who have been on the front lines for decades. Without the work of these elders, we wouldn’t have the Endangered Species Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Water Act. Without them, we wouldn’t have the treaties and the struggles to protect those treaty rights. We wouldn’t have had Wisconsin’s mining moratorium. The older generations have worked hard, sacrificed much, thinking of us today and those who are yet to come.
This resistance movement to protect this planet and all our relations, is generations old and has very ancient roots. If we follow the teachings of the Medicine Wheel, we know we need the gifts of all ages, from the young to the elders, to realize our full power as a people.
Here in the northern Great Lakes area, the rural resistance movement to Western industrial civilization has been alive and well for some time. Most of the rural resistance I’ll discuss here comes from the Anishinaabe communites, but some also comes from the non-Native people of the northern Great Lakes area.
The two-plus centuries of rural resistance in our region emphasize how important it is to:
+ Resist civilization in its attempts to control
+ Resist removal from the land
+ Resist the predatory expansion efforts of urban areas/civilization
+ Resist the ideologies of human supremacy
As these rural resistance movements up here show, we can do this by:
+ Becoming a member of the community of a particular land or region by living on the land
+ Maintaining and reclaiming self-sufficiency and the necessary land skills for that self-sufficiency
+ Respecting the sovereignty of all our relations in accordance with the Honorable Harvest
This Land Is Our Home: Resisting Removal from the Land
From the beginning of the treaty era in the Anishinaabe homeland, people showed their reluctance to sign away their land or to leave the land they had belonged to for generations. Alfred Brunson, an outspoken Indian agent at LaPointe (whose criticism of the American government’s treatment of the Anishinaabe lost him his job within a year), wrote in January of 1843, “[S]o much dissatisfaction exists among the Indians and half breeds of the Chippewas of this agency” that there are “many omens of a Threatening Storm,” some of which included “a party of warriors & braves on the [1842] treaty ground.”[11]
During the discussions leading up to the 1842 treaty, Acting Superintendent of Indian Affairs Robert Stuart told the Anishinaabeg “it was no difference whether they signed or not” as the land would be taken anyway.[12] He also issued a veiled threat of outright removal from their lands. While uttering assurances that it was only minerals not the land that the U.S. wanted at the present time, he suggested that in the future they would be removed like so many other tribes “sent west of the Mississippi, to make room for the whites.”[13] After his words, as historian Ronald Satz writes, the representatives “of the Wisconsin bands from the Lake Superior region remained silent.”[14] They were “not . . . willing to sell or make any agreement.”[15]
Eventually and reluctantly, however, the Anishinaabe did sign. Brunson points out that “the Indians did not act free & voluntary, but felt themselves pressed into the measure,” largely by Stuart’s tactics. [16]
Photo: Great Lakes Indian Fish & Wildlife Commission
In 1850, Stuart’s threat of eventual removal became U.S. policy. An executive removal order was issued by President Zachary Taylor to remove the Anishinaabeg of northern Wisconsin and the western U.P. to Sandy Lake, MN by moving the location of the tribes’ annuity payments.. Closing the Indian agency at Fort LaPointe on what many know today as Madeleine Island, the Anishinaabeg of the 1842 ceded territory were told they’d have to travel to the Sandy Lake agency to receive their annuity payments of cash, implements and food. The idea was to use a velvet glove to force the Anishinaabeg to settle around Sandy Lake (and out of the 1842 territory). To the U.S., the Anishinaabe land in question was known as “the mineral district” and removing the Indigenous people from the area could prove beneficial to mining interests, particularly as the Anishinaabeg had already shown a resistance or dissatisfaction to mineral exploration on their homeland. Many refused to make the trip to Sandy Lake. Those that did arrived in October to find they had to wait weeks for what turned out to be only a very small part of the annuity payment in early December. Dysentery and malnutrition weakened and even killed some of those who waited at Sandy Lake. Understanding the intent of this maneuver, most made their way back home in early December. Over 250 more people died along the way. The entire incident is often referred to as the Sandy Lake Tragedy.
Once back home, the people refused to move and instead organized a petition drive, obtaining signatures from the Native and non-Native community. A delegation, headed by Chief Buffalo, then an elder in his nineties, traveled to Washington D.C. to present the petition to President Fillmore. The petition, the delegation, and the refusal to be moved from their homeland were all eventually successful as the executive removal order was rescinded.
Defending the Land: Resisting Civilization’s Predatory Expansion
Those who live on the land and call it home are more apt to defend that land from those who threaten it. As you see, we have a long history of such land defense in the rural resistance of the northern Great Lakes area.
Prior to Sandy Lake, back in 1820, the territory of Michigan organized the Cass Expedition whose purpose was to assess the natural resource wealth of the Anishinaabe homeland, land still legally Anishinaabe territory as the major land cession treaties were still over a decade away. The Cass Expedition was, pure and simple, a predatory expedition, surveying another’s homeland to assess its potential to benefit American civilization.
According to Henry Schoolcraft in his Narrative Journal of the Cass Expedition, the Anishinaabe people resisted giving him information that would lead the Expedition to the minerals they sought.[17] This was an early example of the Anishinaabeg resisting the mining that has plagued our region for the last century. In another instance of such mining resistance, a contemporary historian writes, “We know that the upper lake Indians traditionally opposed white mining exploration before and after the treaty [of 1842], and that Father Baraga had opposed mines in the Ontonagon and Keweenaw country.” [18]
Anecdotal evidence of resistance to industrial civilization on the part of the Anishinaabe in the Great Lakes area also comes from Broker’s account of her great-great-great-grandfather who worked in the settlers’ logging camps. “I do not like cutting the trees,” he says. “I think too often of the animal people. They will be few, and they will be gone from this land. When we have enough of the lumber, I shall no longer cut the trees or travel the rivers on them. My heart cries too often when I do this.”[19]
1910 Wisconsin Lumber Camp — Wisconsin Historical Society
In Anishinaabe country, there are and have been non-Native people who struggle to defend the land they’ve come to call home. One of the ironies of history in the United States is that this is a nation founded on freedom and overthrowing colonialism. Yet the the nation is also founded on that same colonialism and thus is founded on the destruction of the lives, freedom, and lifeways of the land’s Indigenous peoples. That is still an identity crisis most Americans have yet to deal with. It’s why you can have American historian Frederick Jackson Turner decrying, and accurately so, that the closing of the frontier sounded the death knell for American democracy, yet, with no sense of irony, also firmly believing that taking the land from its Native people was all a necessary part of creating that beloved frontier.
Here in the northern Great Lakes area we have that same irony.
In the nineteenth century, as the Anishinaabeg were dispossessed of their land, settlers, land speculators, and resource corporations came in. The trees were cut and almost all of Northwoods’ pre-colonial forests were annihilated.[20] Mining corporations formed and tore up the Earth for minerals, poisoned the waters with mine run-off, and kept their laborers as serfs. Settlers came in an attempt to farm the cutover areas, areas that once rang with the laughter of Anishinaabe families and once were rich with the wellspring of Anishinaabe culture: the verdant and generous woodlands of the north country.
Those settlers who arrived to make a living on the land were often in competition with corporations and land speculators seeking to get rich off the land. This produced some interesting scenarios. These days, mining corporations may have convinced many in the U.P. that mining is our heritage here, or, as one oil and gas representative told me, that “Yoopers like to be exploited.” But that prejudice ignores the rest of the U.P.’s heritage. In fact, one could argue environmental resistance is our true heritage here in the northern Great Lakes area, a heritage the corporations would prefer we forgot. Finnish immigrants who worked ardently to unionize miners and then sought refuge in the backwoods from corporate thugs, are yet another example of this. And there are more.
We’ve even had what one historian calls “guerrilla warfare” launched by non-Native homesteaders against logging corporations up on the Keweenaw in the 1890s. A lumber company named Metropolitan Lumber claimed to own land that the U.P. homesteaders saw as their own. To protect “their” land from corporate interests, these nineteenth century Yooper homesteaders engaged in what we would call eco-terrorism today. Draft horses pulling corporate sleds of logs were shot and killed. Steel spikes were driven into logs that were intended for the Metropolitan Lumber sawmill. Iced corporate roads, perfect for pulling out heavy loads of timber, were melted with hot ash. One woman lay down in the middle of an icy winter road to prevent a horse-drawn sleigh from taking away logs that Metropolitan Lumber had cut on her land.[21][22]
In the last several decades, the Anishinaabe also have risen in force to protect their land from mining interests. In Wisconsin, one of the most successful mining resistance movements around the world came out of the struggle to exercise the Ojibwe treaty rights to hunt and fish in the 1842 ceded territory, a fight for the right to maintain self-sufficiency. This fight for treaty rights took on racism in some of its ugliest forms. The struggle merged with the movement to protect the Northwoods from the opening of a metallic sulfide mining district. In doing this, the Native and non-Native people of Wisconsin foiled the multinational mining corporations. As Anishinaabe activist Walt Bresette often mentioned, the corporations seemed intent on dividing the people of the northern Great Lakes area by fanning the flames of white supremacy and racism. In this way, Bresette pointed out, they attempted to manipulate the people of the Northwoods into fighting each other while the true threats to the land moved in and tried to open up a metallic sulfide mining district in northern Wisconsin. The people of the land, Native and non-Native, however, united despite their differences, and fought off the multinational mining corporations with the passage of the mining moratorium, also known as the Prove It First Law. This hard won struggle marked Wisconsin, according to one mining industry representative, as the toughest place on the planet to put in a mine.
Then we have the Bolt Weevils of central Minnesota.
The Bolt Weevils were farmers who organized in the 1970s to protect their lands and scenic areas from high-voltage transmission lines. The lines were intended to bring power from a coal-fired power plant in North Dakota through Minnesota’s rural areas to the urban populations of the Twin Cities in Minnesota. From the beginning, the power companies told them the same thing the U.S. government told the Anishinaabe: you can resist us, but it won’t matter because we’ll get your land anyway.
Local public opinion strongly supported the farmers in their opposition. The farmers used every legal means possible: public hearings, planning commissions who denied the permits, lawsuits. Despite it all, it was determined that the greater number of people living in the city counted more than the smaller number of people living on the land in the rural areas of Minnesota. As one veteran powerline resistor, Verlyn Marth, who lived in the area said, rural people are seen as “just a colony to be used.” He told them, “You are being programmed to think you are helpless. But they are an evil cartel assaulting individual farmers…It is your responsibility to beat the line. You are the stewards of the land.”[23]
Despite the farmers’ objections, the power lines in rural Minnesota were approved and construction began. But the farmers didn’t stop. Their resistance to the lines turned to physical violence against the power lines. The state governor called in the state troopers to protect the powerline as it was built through the rural areas. The Twin Cities got their coal-fired electrical power.
But the farmers still didn’t stop. As singer/songwriter Dana Lyons so aptly describes in “Turn of the Wrench.”
Farmers opposing the powerline
The thing is, when a society is civilized, this type of thing is part of its predatory means of obtaining resources for its urban populations. Even if the power had been wind-derived, the powerlines would still present the exact same issue for the farmers: destruction of their lands in order to supply power to the city.
In fact, in the heart of Anishinaabe country at the turn of the twenty-first century, the Lac Courte Oreilles band of Lake Superior Chippewa and eleven rural Wisconsin counties also opposed a 400 kV transmission line. The line was to connect central Wisconsin to Minnesota’s energy grid, helping, in part, to increase Manitoba Hydro’s ability to bring more electrical power to urban areas in the U.S. The power would come from “green” energy which actually meant the expansion of mega-dams that threatened traditional Cree homelands. The Cree helped the people of Wisconsin resist the line. When all counties passed resolutions opposing it, however, American Transmission Company told them they’d take their land anyway, only for less compensation under eminent domain. The line was built. The mega-dams expanded. Wisconsin bragged about how wonderful it was they’d obtained more “green” energy. Ask the Pimicikamak Cree and the people of northwestern Wisconsin how “green” that energy truly is.
Likewise here in the U.P., several communities have opposed energy projects sold as “green” projects. Most climate activists hearing of wind projects will uncritically support such projects. Summit Lake Wind Project near the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and the Heritage Wind Project on the Garden Peninsula are two such projects generating both rural resistance and knee-jerk climate activist reactions.
KBIC successfully opposed Summit Lake, not because they oppose wind in general, but because this “green” energy project would first clearcut an area that is 94% forested and full of all the gifts a forest offers. Further, in industrializing this wild area with the extensive road network needed for the turbine construction and to transport the heavy equipment for the project, KBIC feared it would open up the land to mining interests eager to get at the ore underneath the extensive forest, part of one of the largest wilderness areas left east of the Mississippi.[24]
The other example of this type of “green” energy project here in the U.P., Heritage Wind is built along a major bird migration route and, as such, is opposed by the USFWS among others. Although concerns are many, unique to the area are concerns over culturally significant sites, like the limestone caves containing pictographs of Anishinaabe constellations. To safely hold its 400+ foot wind towers, Heritage drills 200 foot deep foundations into the peninsula’s limestone. Some of the turbines will be built near the caves. Will the limestone be strong enough to resist collapse?[25]
None of the power from either of these wind projects would be generated for the rural communities they are placed in. Instead, for projects such as these the power they produce is loaded onto high-voltage transmission lines and made part of the national grid to be sold to urban areas. The rural area is the site for the energy generation. The urban areas are the sites for the energy use. This is energy colonization. The rural areas are being used as energy colonies for corporate “green” power production.[26]
Instead of colonizing rural areas with ever more electrical projects and ever more transmission lines, however, what if we as a society admit we have a problem – we are energy addicts. The biggest hurdle for any addict is first admitting there is a problem. Until then, the addict will do anything, no matter how destructive, to get what they crave. That’s happening right now. It’s time for it to change.
Resisting Control: The Right to Self-Sufficiency
The history of civilization’s attempts to colonize rural-wild areas to satisfy urban appetites clearly shows that destroying self-sufficiency to force people off the land into wage-dependency is an essential component of the colonizing process. Self-sufficiency makes people difficult to control.
more time spent in wage work, the less time there is available to engage in traditional land skills. This both makes peoples easier to control and weakens a people’s knowledge of the land and how to live with it. Colonial governments on Indigenous lands around the world have used Western-style education, wage-labor, and other civilizing methods to dispossess people from their homelands.
Robert Stuart, Acting Superintendent for Indian Affairs, was well aware of this colonial strategy. In 1843, he wrote about the Anishinaabeg, “There are those who think that all these Indians should be at once removed to the unceded district,” but this could not be “easily accomplished just now, as they have considerable game, fish, and other inducements to attach them to their present homes; but so soon as they realize the benefits of schools, and the other arts of civilization, which I trust we shall be able to cluster around them, there will be less difficulty in inducing them to renounce their present habits” and thus be able to remove them.[27] This approach was used around the world in colonization to varying degrees, including in Kenya where Indigenous workers were forced into wage labor by various taxation laws and then were forbidden from quitting their job, on pain of torture, without permission of their employer.[28]
Social engineers in the twentieth century employed a similar mindset with planning out what they saw as proper land use for the northern Great Lakes area. These social engineers came from urban universities. For example, P.S. Lovejoy (1918-1941), for example, was from the University of Michigan. George Wehrwein (1883-1945) from the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point. Both were well respected men in the early twentieth century, and their ideas about how the northern Great Lakes area should be regulated to allow for a healthy regeneration of this cutover area were highly regarded. In their view, everyone in the Northwoods should be productive members of the national industrial economy. Farmers should not farm for subsistence but should be for-profit farmers. People who lived far back in the woods, should be induced by zoning laws to move closer to towns. After all, George Wehrwein argued, without neighbors to watch over them, “people in the forest might resort to a sort of savagery, bereft of any standard of morality or cleanliness.”[29] Without this type of social engineering, Lovejoy argued, the northern Great Lakes area would continue “breeding paupers and morons and fires.”[30][31]
Out of this mindset came elitist game laws, intended to preserve wildlife for future generations of sportsmen rather than for those who hunted for food. They completely ignored Anishinaabe treaty rights. Despite having their way of life outlawed unless they could afford to buy the proper permits, people resisted these laws and managed to provide for their families regardless. As Ignatia Broker writes, “Then came the laws to control the fishing, the hunting, the trapping, even on the reservation lands…The Ojibway, however, continued to net fish and hunt deer as they had always done . . . [They] still laid nets for the fish and pulled them in early in the morning. But they had to clean, salt, and dry their catch inside their house instead of in the outdoor ovens, so the man who enforced the laws against using nets would not know.”[32][33]
One of the major obstacles to controlling a people, as identified by colonial agents, is a peoples’ ability to provide for themselves from their own land. One of the key causes of our current environmental and climate crises is that people around the world have been thrown off the land by this civilizing process. As a result, like Europe in 1492, most people today are disconnected from the land and no longer possess an intergenerational knowledge and love of a specific land. As such, we are all subject to ever greater control by our governments,and we face global ecological crises of cataclysmic proportions. As Okanagan author Jeanette Armstrong says, the corporations know “how powerful the solidarity is of peoples bound together by land, blood, and love.
Resisting Human Supremacy: Respect the Sovereignty of All Our Relations
In traditional Anishinaabe teachings, living with the land involves an intricate system of values that is based on seeing all beings as relatives, respecting their right to self-determination. Respecting the sovereignty of all our relations.
In striking contrast, Western industrial civilization is based on a belief in the supremacy of human beings. This Western belief in human supremacy[34] is found in its religion. It’s found in its secular views on other species. It’s found in its science. It permeates Western culture, justifying its takeover of the planet through industry, science, consumerism, and even conservation-minded management.
The Indigenous concept of respecting the sovereignty of all our relations is complex yet straightforward. Potawatomi biologist and author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, describes it well when she refers to this relationship as “the democracy of species.” Being a part of this democracy means participating as a respectful member of a community, not as its tyrant or emperor. Part of it involves giving respect to other beings so that we can see them as fully functioning, sentient, intelligent beings. Not as our slaves. Or our wards.
From a traditional Anishinaabe perspective, all species are sentient whether they are plant or animal. Yet there is the recognition that life gives its life for other life to continue. Part of living in this democracy of species as human beings is to follow the guidelines of the Honorable Harvest. In fact, hunting, fishing and gathering in the respectful manner outlined by the Honorable Harvest connects us to the land in an intimate manner. This connection helps us understand the land.
The Honorable Harvest also recognizes the sentience of all relatives. When harvesting blueberries, for example, you first ask permission of the blueberries to harvest. If they don’t give you that permission, you listen and do not harvest them.
One recent example of respect for the sovereignty of all our relations comes from the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Isle Royale is part of the traditional territory of the Grand Portage Band. As you know, there’s been an ecological conundrum of late as the predator/prey relationship of the moose and wolf is currently out of balance. The U.S. government determined relocation of wolves from other areas to the island was the best way to resolve the imbalance.
Grand Portage, however, initially opposed the relocation of wolves to Isle Royale. According to the band’s reply to the National Park Service Draft Environmental Impact Statement on the relocation plan, “The Grand Portage Band observes a cultural value that allows for natural cycles of predators and prey and the cultural philosophy of management only when necessary.” The band continues, “Thus, we urge non-interventionist policy for management of wildlife on Isle Royale National Park and feel that upholding the Park principle of maintaining unmanaged wilderness is most appropriate.” Wolves, they say, have only been on the island since 1949. Ice bridges often form between the island and the mainland. Wolves have used this ice bridge recently to cross to the island. But they choose not to stay. The band argued that for the next ten years at least, we should let nature take its course. [35]
The National Park Service eventually obtained the band’s cooperation when they agreed to first relocate Grand Portage wolves to Isle Royale. This, the band felt, would protect Grand Portage wolves from diseases and parasites that could be brought in if wolves from outside the area where relocated to the island.
However, of the four Grand Portage wolves relocated to Isle Royale, one died from the stress of captivity. A second died a month after being relocated to the island. Another wolf, a female who was radio-collared, left the island, crossing back to the mainland via an ice bridge – according to leading Western expert on wolf biology, David Mech, relocated (I’d say kidnapped) wolves released within eighty miles of their home will often return to their home.
The White Earth Land Recovery Project refers to Ma’iingan (the Wolf) as “[t]he one sent here by that all-loving spirit to show us the way.”[36] Ma’iingan, one of our very home-centered, family-oriented relatives, did once again shows us the way: our animal relatives are not there for us to control. A central tenet of traditional Indigenous philosophy that can be found around the world is the development of a relationship with all our relatives that respects the sovereignty and life force of those relatives as a whole and as individuals. The settler culture, however, being the civilized entity that it is, seeks to control that which is out of its control. This is central to the disease that so besets a civilized culture.
Yet there are non-Native people in the northern Great Lakes area who also demonstrate resistance to aspects of this diseased culture by protecting our non-human relatives. A retired teacher who has lived in my area since childhood is a recent example of this. A pillar of her Christian community, a well-respected member of various community organizations, this outspoken rural woman who usually votes Democrat, although she preferred to vote Green rather than vote for Hillary, lives at the end of a dirt road with her Republican husband. She loves and nurtures monarch butterflies. When the county Road Commission brushcutter headed down her way one summer, after having destroyed a milkweed patch along her road the previous year, she blockaded her end of the road with her car to protect the milkweed there, milkweed reserved for the monarchs. I call it, the Monarch Blockade, yet another great example of rural resistance. As the Earth-advocate Derrick Jensen often prescribes, find something you love, then stake yourself to it and protect it.
The Oshki-Anishinaabeg and the Green Path: On Being an Evangelical Heathen
I recently learned this summer that the word “heathen” comes from a time when England was converting to Christianity. People who lived in the city became Christian. These urban people looked down on the people who lived on the heath. The heath was a wild, “uncultivated” land. The people who lived there kept to the old tribal ways. The people of the city, like so many urban people of today, ridiculed the rural people as unenlightened and backward because it was those people, the people of the heath, the heathen, who kept to the old ways. [37]
Well, I have decided I am an unequivocal, evangelical heathen. I firmly believe returning to the wild, “uncultivated” lands and the old ways that belong to them is our way out of this mess. Our way out of climate change. Our way out of the larger global emergency that civilization has brought to this planet.
To quote a scientific report done in 1964, “It is realized that a whole system of culture and an age-old way of life cannot be changed overnight, but change it must, and quickly.”[38]
Like so much of civilization’s attempts to control and manipulate the people of the land, this report was directed at forcing the self-sufficient tribal peoples of India’s Chittagong Hills to become cash-croppers.
But this sentiment needs to be reversed.
Indigenous peoples around the planet were forced to change quickly from living in their well-adjusted tribal cultures to becoming part of the colonizers’ diseased, maladjusted one. The rapidity at which this happened shows how quickly cultures can change. But this time, it’s Western industrial civilization’s turn to change and change as quickly as possible. For those things that cannot humanely change rapidly (for example, in dealing with our overpopulated numbers), we need to start planning now on how to get to where we need to be. All of this needs to be part of a Seventh Generation Sustainability Plan wherein we work out where we need to be seven generations from now. Part of this involves long-range planning. Part of it involves urgent immediate changes.
As Trudell said, “Earth is a living entity. It is not in man’s destiny to destroy the Earth. That’s arrogance. What it is man’s destiny to do is destroy civilized man’s ability to live with the Earth… the antibiotic will come, in a planetary sense. If it means…letting it wipe out civilized man, then the Earth will do that. The Earth will continue on.”
The question is, will we?
The thing is, we have various Indigenous teachings and prophecies that are there to help. According to the Anishinaabe prophecy of the Seventh Fire, this is not only a time to be choosing the Green Path over the Burnt Path, but it is also a time when the oshki-anishinaabeg, the New People, will rise. Various culture bearers from Eddie Benton-Banai to Nick and Charlotte Hockings to Walt Bresette and others have felt this includes both Native and non-Native people. It refers to those people working to bring us back to the Green Path through finding that which was lost during the process of colonization.
The root causes of this global collapse are ignored, and in many cases, even exacerbated by the solutions proposed. Even if the ice caps stop melting and climate change is averted, as long as this industrial, technologically intensive, species-isolated culture continues as is, the apocalypse will continue until there is nothing left for us as human beings.
If, however, we recognize our potential in becoming the oshki-anishinaabeg we are prophesied to be, leading this society to the good path, we can enter a future where we don’t have to fear for our children and our children’s children.
I’d like to end with some words from Anishinaabe activist, Walt Bresette. As usual, in this excerpt of a speech he gave to a crowd at Northland College in Ashland, he offers us a way to build that bridge together and move into a world that, seven generations from now we can look back on and say, “We’re proud of what we’ve done.”
Miigwech. Mii i’iw.
Aimée Cree Dunn teaches at the Center for Native American Studies at Northern Michigan University.
[1] John Bodley. Victims of Progress. 6th edition. NY: Rowan & Littlefield, 2016. p7.
[2] John Bodley. Victims of Progress. 6th edition. NY: Rowan & Littlefield, 2016. p10.
[3] John Bodley. Victims of Progress. 6th edition. NY: Rowan & Littlefield, 2016. p184.
[5] John Mohawk. Thinking in Indian: The John Mohawk Reader. Ed. Josée Barreiro. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2010. p260.
[6]Trudell: A Film by Heather Rae. Passion River, 2007.
[7] Anyone who thinks overpopulation is not a problem, that overpopulation is not something that we should be concerned about, needs only to look at Europe in the fifteenth century. The overpopulation of Europe, like steam coming out of a boiling kettle, launched Columbus and the ensuing colonization of Indigenous lands around the world.
[8]Trudell: A Film by Heather Rae. Passion River, 2007.
[9] In fact, that is the danger in existing as an Indigenous person within a colonial society. The pull to assimilate is strong, to go with the crowd, even when it’s the liberal wing of the colonial society. Such assimilation, over generations, leads to becoming colonizers ourselves.
[10] Theodore Roszak. Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society. 1978. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1979. p243.
[11]U.P. Indian Treaties. Institute for the Development of Indian Law and Cook Christian Training School. “Treaty Rights Workshop: L’Anse Chippewa Treaty 1842.” Mimeographed copy at Northern Michigan University Olson Library. N.d. p36.
[16]U.P. Indian Treaties. Institute for the Development of Indian Law and Cook Christian Training School. “Treaty Rights Workshop: L’Anse Chippewa Treaty 1842.” Mimeographed copy at Northern Michigan University Olson Library. N.d. p36.
[17]U.P. Indian Treaties. Institute for the Development of Indian Law and Cook Christian Training School. “Treaty Rights Workshop: L’Anse Chippewa Treaty 1842.” Mimeographed copy at Northern Michigan University Olson Library. N.d. p8.
[18]U.P. Indian Treaties. Institute for the Development of Indian Law and Cook Christian Training School. “Treaty Rights Workshop: L’Anse Chippewa Treaty 1842.” Mimeographed copy at Northern Michigan University Olson Library. N.d. p8.
[19] Ignatia Broker. Night Flying Woman. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1983. 72.
[20] Most estimates place the amount of pre-colonial forest remaining in Michigan and Wisconsin at around 1%. Dickmann and Leefers write that by 1926, after less than 100 years of colonization in Michigan, only 7% of the original forest was left, most of that in the Upper Peninsula. They add “most of that has since been cut.” Donald I. Dickmann and Larry A. Leefers. The Forests of Michigan. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016. p173.
[21] Theodore J. Karamanski. Deep Woods Frontier: A History of Logging of Michigan. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 1989. 101.
[22] This is not intended as a promotion of violent protest but rather simply referencing histories that are all too often ignored.
[23] Barry M. Casper and Paul David Wellstone. Powerline: The First Battle of America’s Energy War. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. p44.
[29] James Kates. Planning a Wilderness: Regenerating the Great Lakes Cutover Region. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. p158.
[30] Qtd. in James Kates. Planning a Wilderness: Regenerating the Great Lakes Cutover Region. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. p48.
[31] For a more thorough discussion of this issue, see my article “Listening to the Trees: Traditional Knowledge and Industrial Society in the American Northwoods” originally published in Honor the Earth: Indigenous Response to Environmental Degradation and Beyond. Ed. Phil Bellfy. Now available at https://voiceforthewild.wordpress.com/2019/10/28/listening-to-the-trees/
[32] Ignatia Broker. Night Flying Woman. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1983. p117.
[33]For a more thorough discussion of this issue, see my article “Listening to the Trees: Traditional Knowledge and Industrial Society in the American Northwoods” originally published in Honor the Earth: Indigenous Response to Environmental Degradation and Beyond. Ed. Phil Bellfy. Now available at https://voiceforthewild.wordpress.com/2019/10/28/listening-to-the-trees/
[34] Derrick Jensen. The Myth of Human Supremacy. NY: Seven Stories Press, 2016.
Editors note: The Columbia River has been turned into a slave of civilization, forced to provide hydroelectricity, barge transport, and irrigation water to cities and big agribusiness. It is shackled in concrete and dying from dams, from overfishing, from toxins, from nuclear waste, from acoustic barrages and armored shorelines and logging and endless atrocities.
We at Deep Green Resistance do not believe that the federal government will accede to demands such as these. Furthermore, there are thousands of dams currently under construction or proposed worldwide. There are millions of dams in the “United States.” The salmon, the Orca whales—they have no time to waste. Everything is heading in the wrong direction. Therefore, we call for a militant resistance movement around the world to complement aboveground resistance movements and to dismantle industrial infrastructure.
Featured image: The Columbia River is constrained by Bonneville Dam, and bracketed by clearcuts, highways, and utility corridors. Public domain.
Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation
On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, October 14, 2019, the Yakama Nation and Lummi Nation hosted a press conference urging the removal of the lower Columbia River dams as part of a broader call for federal repudiation of the offensive doctrine of Christian discovery, which the United States uses to justify federal actions that impair the rights of Native Nations. The press conference took place this morning at Celilo Park near Celilo Village, Oregon.
“The false religious doctrine of Christian discovery was used by the United States to perpetuate crimes of genocide and forced displacement against Native Peoples. The Columbia River dams were built on this false legal foundation, and decimated the Yakama Nation’s fisheries, traditional foods, and cultural sites,” said Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chairman JoDe Goudy. “On behalf of the Yakama Nation and those things that cannot speak for themselves, I call on the United States to reject the doctrine of Christian discovery and immediately remove the Bonneville Dam, Dalles Dam, and John Day Dam.”
The doctrine of Christian discovery is the fiction that when Christian European monarchs obtained what was for them new knowledge of the Western Hemisphere, those monarchs had a religious right of domination over all non-Christian lands. This doctrine was propagated by the Roman Catholic Church through a series of papal bulls in the 15th century, including a papal bull authorizing Portugal to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans” and to place them into perpetual slavery and take their property. The Roman Catholic Church then implemented a framework where the right to subjugate the Americas was split between Spain and Portugal, although they were later joined by other European states. The doctrine was therefore one of domination and dehumanization of Native Peoples, and was used to perpetuate the most widespread genocide in human history.
In 1823, the United States Supreme Court used the doctrine of Christian discovery as the legal basis for the United States’ exercise of authority over Native lands and Peoples. See Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823). The Court found that the United States holds clear title to all Native lands subject only to the Native Nation’s right of occupancy, which the United States can terminate through purchase or conquest. In relying on the doctrine of Christian discovery, the Court described it as “the principle that discovery gave title to the government . . . against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession.” Id. at 573. The Court used this religious doctrine of domination and dehumanization to unilaterally deprive Native Nations of their sovereign rights, racially juxtaposing the rights of “Christian peoples” against those “heathens” and “fierce savages.” Id. at 577, 590.
In the years that followed, this false religious doctrine became the bedrock for what are now considered to be foundational principles of federal Indian law. In United States v. Kagama, 188 U.S. 375 (1886), and Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 553 (1903), the Court announced Congress’ extra-constitutional plenary power over all Indian affairs—the plenary power doctrine — which it justified by pointing to Native Nations’ loss of sovereign, diplomatic, economic, and property rights upon first ‘discovery’ by Europeans. In The Cherokee Tobacco, 78 U.S. 616 (1870), the Court applied the doctrine and held that Congress can unilaterally abrogate Treaty rights with subsequent legislation unless there is an express exemption provided in the Treaty—the last-in- time doctrine. In Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 435 U.S. 191 (1978), the Court deprived Native Nations of criminal jurisdiction over non-members based on the statement in M’Intosh that Native Nations’ rights “to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished” by European ‘discovery’ — the diminished tribal sovereignty doctrine. These legal doctrines have been weaponized against Native Nations ever since, including by Congress in authorizing construction of the Bonneville Dam, Dalles Dam, and John Day Dam without the Yakama Nation’s free, prior, and informed consent.
The history of the lower Columbia River dams can be traced back to 1792, when United States Merchant Robert Gray sailed up our N’chi’Wana (Columbia River) and claimed the territory for the United States. Mr. Gray entered our lands and performed a religious doctrine of discovery ceremony by raising an American flag and burying coins beneath the soil, thereby proclaiming dominion over our lands and our families without our knowledge or consent. Following the War of 1812, the United States and England falsely claimed joint authority over what became known as the Oregon Territory until 1846, when England relinquished its claim south of the 49th parallel. Having eliminated British opposition, Congress passed the Oregon Territorial Act of 1848 and the Washington Territorial Act of 1853. Both Territorial Acts reserve the United States’ claim to the sole right to treat with Native Nations, thereby maintaining the federal government’s doctrine of Christian discovery-based claims.
At the Walla Walla Treaty Council in May and June of 1855, the Yakama Nation’s ancestors met with United States representatives to negotiate the Treaty with the Yakamas of June 9, 1855. Article III, paragraph 2 of the Treaty reserves the Yakama Nation’s “right of taking fish at all usual and accustomed places . . .” including many places throughout the Columbia River basin. At no point during these negotiations did the United States express a claimed right of dominion over the Yakama Nation’s traditional lands that would allow the United States to unilaterally ignore the Treaty. Territorial Governor Isaac I. Stevens did not explain that the United States would dam the rivers and violate the Yakama Nation’s Treaty-reserved fishing rights without the Yakama Nation’s free, prior, and informed consent.
What followed was a 100-year conquest of the Columbia River by the United States. First, the United States Supreme Court paved the way by affirming federal regulatory authority over navigable waterways like the Columbia River in Gilman v. Philadelphia, 70 U.S. 713 (1866), and Congress’ extra-constitutional plenary authority over Indian affairs in United States v. Kagama, 188 U.S. 375 (1886). Congress then exercised this supposed authority by passing a series of legislative acts without the Yakama Nation’s consent, including Rivers and Harbors Acts, Right of Way Acts, the General Dams Act, the Federal Water Power Act, and the Bonneville Project Act, all of which facilitated construction of the lower Columbia River dams without regard for the Yakama Nation’s Treaty-reserved rights.
During the Depression, Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act authorizing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to approve public works projects like the Bonneville Dam. Construction started in 1933, but President Roosevelt’s approval of the project was quickly deemed unconstitutional in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935). The authorization was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority from Congress to the President. It should have been deemed unconstitutional under the United States Constitution’s Supremacy Clause — which says the Treaty of 1855 is the “supreme law of the land” — because it was inconsistent with the rights reserved to the Yakama Nation by Treaty. Any argument to the contrary is an argument that Congress has plenary power over Indian affairs rooted in the false religious doctrine of Christian discovery.
Congress quickly re-approved the Bonneville Dam’s construction, which was completed in 1938. The Dalles Dam was built from 1952 to 1957, and the John Day Dam was built from 1968 to 1972. The Yakama Nation, as co-equal sovereign and signatory to the Treaty of 1855, never approved the construction of these dams. They inundated the villages, burial grounds, fishing places, and ceremonial sites that we used since time immemorial. Celilo Falls was the trading hub for Native Peoples throughout the northwest. The United States detonated it with explosives and drowned it with the Dalles Dam. After the Dalles Dam’s construction had already started, the United States negotiated an insignificant settlement with the Yakama Nation for the damage caused by the Dam. This was domination and coercion, not consent.
Today, the lower Columbia River dams stand as physical monuments to the domination and dehumanization that the United States continues to impose on Native Nations under the false religious doctrine of Christian discovery. “Columbus Day is a federal holiday celebrating the Christian-European invasion of our lands under the colonial doctrine of Christian discovery. Today, the Yakama Nation rejects that narrative by celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day and calling on the United States to remove the lower Columbia River dams that were built without our consent using the same false religious doctrine,” said Chairman Goudy.
In this episode of The Green Flame podcast, we speak with Sakej Ward. 
