A major humanitarian crisis is engulfing the Yanomami. In the last few months several communities have been subjected to repeated, violent attacks by heavily armed goldminers who are operating illegally in the Yanomami territory. Following one such attack on Palimiu community, two young children drowned in the river as they tried to escape.
On 5 June a large group of miners entered the community of Maikohipi and set off tear gas canisters, forcing the Yanomami to flee into the forest.
Another community, Walomapi has been under constant attack since 10 May, according to the indigenous health body, Condisi-YY. The latest there was on 8 June, when miners fired at Yanomami hunters who had to dive into the river to escape.
Junior Hekurari Yanomami, president of Condisi-YY said: “The situation is chaotic… the authorities must act urgently…. and uphold the Brazilian constitution.”
Since 30 April Yanomami organisations have sent six desperate appeals to the authorities. A federal judge ruled on 12 May that the authorities must establish a permanent presence in the Palimiu region to guarantee the safety of the Yanomami communities. On 24 May a Supreme Court judge ordered the government to immediately take “all necessary measures to protect the lives, health and security of the Yanomami.” The UN and OAS have also condemned the violence and urged the authorities to take immediate action, but the authorities have done little.
According to Dario Kopenawa, vice-president of Hutukara Yanomami Association: “Every day, the Yanomami are intimidated. There’s a lot of harassment, death threats, shouting, brandishing guns, shooting with tear gas. The authorities have never sent in security forces permanently… The authorities have not complied with our requests [for protection and to remove the miners]. The situation is very tense.”
Uncontacted Yanomami communities are highly vulnerable to attacks and diseases transmitted by the miners, and fears are growing for their safety.
The social and environmental impacts of the invasion are immense: 20,000 miners are polluting the river systems with highly toxic mercury. Several studies have shown that some Yanomami communities in the mining zones have levels of mercury poisoning significantly over the WHO’s recommended limit.
The miners are also destroying the forest – a recent report by Hutukara revealed that 2,400 hectares of forest have been destroyed. In 2020, deforestation increased by 30%.
Yanomami leader and shaman Davi Kopenawa, chairman of Hutukara Yanomami Association said: “You see the dirty water, the yellowish river, pits everywhere. These prospectors are like pigs from big farms—they dig a lot of holes looking for precious stones like gold and diamonds. They eventually come back. Twenty years ago, we managed to send these invaders away, and they returned. They are coming in like starved beasts, looking for the wealth of our land. They are advancing very fast.”
Along with the attacks, miners are also spreading malaria and Covid-19. In the past five years cases of malaria have increased by 500%. In 2020 the indigenous health department registered 20,000 cases of malaria. More than a third of the total Yanomami population may have been exposed to Covid-19, making a lethal combination which is devastating their health and ability to feed themselves. Yanomami children are dying from malaria, pneumonia and malnutrition.
Survival International has worked closely with the Yanomami for 50 years. Our Research Director Fiona Watson, who knows them well, is available for interview: press@survivalinternational.org
Writing about history is important for this project, but why is that? I took for granted how important learning from history is without really thinking about why. When I read How Change Happens by Duncan Green, he clarified things. This got me thinking about wanting to understand learning from history better to then write about it.
Successes and failure of the left
Duncan Green, who’s area of focus is international development, describes how looking at history lets us question the world we take for granted and understand the long-term trends that shape it. By understanding how our current world has been created, we can find more realistic methods to change it. He describes how the success of the abolitionist movement shows that massive, immovable objects have been changed before. Green describes how history can inspire a deep respect for the personal sacrifices and campaign skills of our predecessors. History can also provide intellectual material to challenge the current narrow window of what’s acceptable. By studying historical examples that are an alternative and different from the norm, it gives new insights and ideas. Green explains that history encourages curiosity and humility and reminds us that activists are usually less influential than political, economic or unexpected changes. [1]
Campaigning for change: lessons from history by the History & Policy Network and Friends of the Earth explain that the case studies in the book: “illustrate, documenting activism and organising for change in the past gives us greater understanding of strategic choices, communications strategies, timing and serendipity in campaigning, as well as some extraordinary examples of mobilisation on a scale that today’s campaigners can scarcely dream of.” [2] The book explores ten case studies from the last 200 years in Britain.
They reference the famous quote ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’, and describe how politicians and pundits regularly use history to try to understand the present but without thinking how to do that appropriately. [3]
The History & Policy Network and Friends of the Earth describe the three questions that academic historians focus on the most:
how you choose your questions/choosing your histories,
the truthfulness of historical explanations/choosing your historians,
the unique character of historical events/translating past into present/challenge of drawing parallels. [4]
The conclusion of Campaigning for change: lessons from history identifies four areas of learning:
Big game-plan and proxy campaigns – many modern-day campaigns do not have a bigger game plan compared to campaigns of the past.
Approaches – using economics arguments instead of moral arguments is now common; movements do reach out to elites to build coalitions as they did in the past; we now have loose networks heading in the same direction compared to broad-based cohesive movements and coalitions of the past.
Tactics – strong individual and group identities are important; people have relationships with the place they live in and the people who live there; direct action has contributed to successful campaigns in the past when used strategically; over time women have extended their sphere of influence in movements resulting in novel and successful tactics.
The backlash – prepare for and understand what possible backlashes may appear and from where, and prepare how to use them to benefit the campaign; and understanding that those in power cannot always control the narrative so aim to control or change the narrative. [5]
In Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy Rinku Sen describes how looking at the history of community organising shows several different models, that are based on a “specific theory of constituency building and social change”. These specific models of organising can be beneficial and limiting. Understanding the model that our tactics are based on means we can “follow that model to a logical conclusion, get help from others who have used it, avoid its pitfalls, and describe ourselves effectively in our attempts to raise money and train new leaders.” Models can also limit campaigns ability to innovate, which is key to success. Sen explains that pure models do not exist and effective organisers mix and match. Community organising and social movement history are full of examples of tactics from past campaign being applied to ongoing struggles. She argues the importance of being able to articulate the theory of social change being applied to then stick with it or adjust it as necessary. [6]
Professor Jodi Dean describes how historical accounts are meant as lessons and guideposts, ways of thinking that let us learn and do better next time. She argues that sometimes leftists forget this and get bogged down in lessons of the past as if they tell us exactly what will happen. As if history is completely determinist [7] and there is no alternative. She argues that the determinist perceptive is an academic approach and instead need to think in more political and revolutionary terms. Dean describes that we need to look at the past for guidance and the future should determine how we apply this guidance in terms of ‘strategy, tactics, practices, and slogans.’ [8]
Jodi Dean also argues that we need to learn the positive lessons from terrible historical periods. Jodi Dean wrote The Communist Horizon intending to reclaim ‘communism’, argues that when people reduce communism to the Soviet Union, they don’t want to learn from history. Instead, they want to universally criticise and condemn the Soviet Union. I’m no fan of the Soviet Union for obvious reasons (it was responsible for the mass murder of millions of people and highly repressive) but like Jodi Dean, there were experiments in self-management and collectivisation that we can learn from. It’s important to not write the whole period off. The people that undertook these experiments – scientists, doctors, farmers – do have something to teach us. [9]
Ben Reynolds who wrote The Coming Revolution: Capitalism in the 21st Century describes how we need to learn where the left has made missteps or gone wrong. Not so much about blame as being able to conduct an honest appraisal of our historical and current failures that will help us to build a strong and solid movement going forwards. He links this to how fractured the left is, with people being very ideological and not many reading or listening to opposing voices on the left. Reynolds describes how those on the left caricature those in other tendencies, so they are seen as evil and the enemy. The result is that no one learns from the historical experience and instead everyone is just regurgitating their talking points. He describes some of the lessons from the victory of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and the mistakes the left made there. [10]
Naomi Klein describes the emotional benefits of learning from this past in a talk she gave in 2011 about her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She explains that the large amounts of terrifying information that we are bombarded with result is us being in a state of shock so we don’t make important connections or construct analysis. This keeps us in the immobile state we’re stuck in. She describes that when we gather and tell ourselves stories then the clicks of connection happen. We can’t be effective activists if we’re hysterical. We can be calm and angry at the same time. Our role models in the effective political struggles of the past weren’t hysterical. They were focused and calm. Klein describes that when we make the connections between issues – war, torture, economics – between the present and our past, then our bodies start to relax. We calm down, get more focused and we can feel some of that rage as opposed to just fear. So we can be much more effective activists and fighters. [11]
The Marxist economics Professor Richard Wolff, explains in many of his youtube videos how important learning from history is in relation to why the 2008 economic crash happened and also what happened in the US in the 1930s in response to Great Depression – labour movements forced President Roosevelt to implement the New Deal by taxing the rich. [12] He also explains that most people know a lot of what he explains in his talks but he shares his understanding of history with a narrative in the hopes that it will cause people to join with other people to make a change. [13]
Richard Wolff explains clearly in this video how since 1980 the capitalists in the US rolled back the New Deal gains for ordinary people of benefits, pensions, and full employment. He explains near the end of the video that although the rich were heavy taxed during the New Deal period and post-war boom, they were left with the resources to be able to support the neoliberal project of think tanks and academics from the middle of the twentieth century. It then became the dominant political and economic ideology from the late 1970s. I will describe the history and nature of neoliberalism in a future post.
Richard Wolff argues in the video that what we learning from the last fifty years is that: if taxes are drastically increased and regulations are put in place to stop another financial crash, the rich have the resources to undo them again and they will do this. He concludes that “you can not leave some people in control of a disproportionate amount of the wealth of society and then be surprised if they use that wealth to keep themselves at the top. If we don’t want that, then let’s not fight over redistributing the wealth. Let’s not distribute unequally in the first place. We shouldn’t have some people earning millions of dollars and other people fighting to get $15 an hour as a minimum wage. That creates inequality and the corruption of politics to keep that inequality in place.’ [14]
History from below
In All Knees and Elbows of Susceptibility and Refusal: Reading History from Below Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts describe two perspectives of ‘history from below’: “‘radical history’ – the history of more or less organised political movements which challenge and sometimes shape the order of things – and history from below as the history of unheard voices and experiences per se.” [15]
All Knees and Elbows of Susceptibility and Refusal: Reading History from Below has eight chapters. The introduction describes core figures and institutions that are used as a starting point to explore the field. Chapter two looks at class, ‘the people’ and ‘the below’, and how history from below has expanded these categories. Chapter three explores questions related to the discovery and use of historical sources. Chapter four looks at how the working class developed intellectual practices and developed distribution networks for the dissemination of dissent. Chapter five focuses on the relationship between history, literary forms and myth-making, and how people construct their own identities and experiences about the dominant culture. Chapter six looks at education – university institutions, their critique and protest against them. Chapter seven looks at history and state politics, focusing on the Coalition Government concept of the ‘Big Society’. The final chapter describes some of the disputes and controversies that ‘historians from below’ have initiated.
Reflections on Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements edited by Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally brings together “radical adult education and historical theoretical frameworks to explicitly examine the knowledge production, learning and politics involved in processes of retrieving and critically engaging with movement histories and developing activist archives, and further, in ways which put them into dialogue with contemporary activism.” [16] Its asks important questions “How do educators and activists in today’s struggles for change use historical materials from earlier periods of organizing for political education? How do they create and engage with independent and often informal archives and debates? How do they ultimately connect this historical knowledge with contemporary struggles?” [17]
The book is divided into four sections:
engagement with activist/movement archives,
learning and teaching militant histories,
lessons from liberatory and anti-imperialist struggles,
learning from student, youth and education struggles.
Six of the chapters focus on social movements in South Africa. Struggles are explored from other countries including Argentina, Iran, Britain, Palestine and the US [17]
The introduction (download here) gives an overview of the book and aspects of learning from history. It describes the importance of developing “context-specific, locally relevant ways to connect historical movement knowledge with contemporary organising.” [18] It also states that “histories from below can be fraught with contradictions, silences, omissions, distortions, and absences in similar ways to official histories, just as learning and knowledge produced in activist milieus can sometimes replicate rather than disrupt dominant power relations.” [19] Using ideas and concepts from previous struggles requires us to be aware of potential problems of “constructing imagined histories and continuities with the past”, so we need to avoid romanticising earlier struggles. We need to avoid copying past victories and applying now in different conditions and contexts. We also need to seriously consider to value of ‘old tactics’ that did not work in the past. [20]
The introduction stresses the importance of being aware of the problems of historical and social amnesia. This amnesia “risks losing the thread and texture of what it takes to bring about social change, with all of its tensions and contradictions and threatens to leave us with a version of history that glosses over or ignores the significance of behind-the-scenes organising. Such amnesia can paper over the conflicts, tensions and power dynamics that have been part of these organising efforts and from which we can also learn.” [21]
It also underlines how important it is for many movements to identify the “historical context for the conditions in which people live and struggle”, related to capitalism and colonialism. It describes the essential need to fashion “tools from forms and histories of resistance that are sometimes forgotten and buried.” It is important to appreciate struggles “at the margins or dissenting currents within larger movements, the ideas that they produce and their contributions to organising.” Finally, the introduction describes the need to be aware of revisionism “we need to also bring to light ways in which the latter struggles sometimes get overwritten by dominant accounts which focus on individual leaders and more visible or more powerful organisations.” [22]
Endnotes
How Change Happens, Duncan Green, 2016, page 76/77
Campaigning for change: lessons from history, History & Policy Network and Friends of the Earth, 2015, page 9
Campaigning for change, page 11
Campaigning for change, page 12
Campaigning for change, page 160-174
Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy, Rinku Sen, 2003, page lxiv
Determinism is the philosophical theory that all events, including moral choices, are completely determined by previously existing causes. Determinism is usually understood to preclude free will because it entails that humans cannot act otherwise than they do.
Logging has begun in Jackson State Demonstration Forest, 48,000 acres of state owned redwood forestland in Mendocino County in Northern California. The forest consists mostly of heavily cut over land – probably logged several times since logging in the County began in the 1860s. This continued when the state acquired the land in 1947 – the hypothesis then was to acquire forestland to apply science to commerce with goal of demonstrating best practices. Today, seventy five years later, it’s not easy to find much that’s “best” in this highly disturbed forest land. Still there are numerous groves of second-growth redwood to be found – remnants of what was once one of the wonders of the natural world.
The Jackson State Demonstration Forest is managed by CALFIRE, the huge state bureaucracy known mainly for fighting fires; that we may be thankful for. Alas, there seems to be very little evidence that CALFIRE is much interested in forest ecology. They do no logging themselves but farm out the work to a garden variety of logging operations, this time to Anderson Logging of Fort Bragg. Financially, it’s no big deal for CALFIRE, a darling of the state in this era of wildfire. Nevertheless, the evidence is that the income (from this “cash cow” as the locals call it) is important for them. Since then Forest’s inception they’ve fought tooth and nail to defeat any and all suggestions to reverse its practice, no evidence to hint that it might be interested in other, better uses for Jackson State. No doubt the high price of timber this spring influenced them to hurry up, but they like other public agencies prefer the fait accompli. They play by the very letter of the law.
The news of new logging plans – all on the far western slopes of the forest, beginning with the “Caspar 500,” the closest to residential communities – was received with disbelief on the coast, where the forest is cherished (even in its present state) by many – hikers, dog walkers, mushroom pickers, bicycle riders. Chad Swimmer, president of the Mendocino Trail Stewards, a bicyclists’ organization, reported he was “heart broken” when he “first heard that CALFIRE was planning logging in my back yard. I was heartbroken and indignant, but I didn’t know how to contest a timber harvest plan (THP). Now I do, I know the protocol. I also understand that this agency considers itself all powerful and unstoppable – with no need to argue with the public about forest management.”
The Trail Stewards took the lead this time around but there is a long history of “forest defenders” here in Mendocino County, and opposition to the plan is widespread and also diverse – ranging from bands of Pomo Indians to school kids from the village of Mendocino. In May, two tree sitters set up shop in a grove of giant trees, one in the “Mama Tree” the other in the “Papa Tree”; they’re still there. Since then, there have been blockades, invasions of sites to be logged, as well as appeals to local, county and state representatives. There was a demonstration at Town Hall in Fort Bragg; there, members of the Coyote Band of Pomo, explained the meaning of the forest to them – a sacred place now and for thousands of years past, a place still home to ancient relics and practices, a place for recovery and restoration. On June 19, the Trail Stewards organized a well-attended demonstration at Caspar, this one where the big log truckers will join Highway one, the Coastal highway, jammed at this time of year with holiday traffic. Bill Heil, a veteran of the Redwood Summer era of the 1990s, explained they “had to get this to stop. They had to get CALFIRE to face the public and talk.”
This opposition and obstruction – the tree-sit, blocking roads, chaining themselves to gates, invading active logging sites – forced Anderson Logging to move down the road to another site. However, this second attempt too was obstructed by protesters, on foot and on bike, as well as random holiday hikers who wondered unknowingly into “closed” areas. The activists used whistles to let the workers know that – above all – they were there, well knowing the danger this implied for all. Then, on Monday, June 21, facing increasing pressure, CALFIRE announced a “pause” in logging the “Caspar 500” section of the forest, as well as its intention to “further engage with our local community.” This was a victory for the activists, certainly, but simultaneously logging was begun several miles to the east, near Fort Bragg, along state Highway 20. Inspired, the activists followed. “We’re grateful that logging here has been paused, a day without logging is a good day,” says Michelle McMillian, the media representative for the “Mama Tree Network.” “We’re not overly optimistic, however. We want to have a conversation but we want more than lip service.”
Opponents of logging since the first years of the Save-the-Redwoods League based their case on the sheer beauty of the redwood grove, and its inspirational value. This has not changed, even with the massive damage done. These groves, even these remnants of ancient coastal forests, remain like nothing else, even the second growth. Only 4% of the old growth redwood forest in California remains, nearly all in overburdened state parks. Reed Noss, the well know advocate of the forests explained it this way: “the redwoods deserve all the lavish terms used to describe them. No one with an open mind could walk through a redwood forest without being humbled. No thoughtful person could stand beneath one of these immense trees, gaze up into its canopy, and not help but think that here is a remarkable organism –so much more than all the board feet of lumber men might cleave form it. Not only are they among the largest living trees, they are among the largest. Their close ancestors have been here since other giants – including dinosaurs- came and went. An entire forest of these trees is one of the most remarkable expressions of nature’s productive capacity. And it is beautiful, truly beautiful.”
We don’t have here in Mendocino the kind of forest Noss sees, but we still have beautiful groves. And we still have the chance that these groves can be the heart of a new forest if this one, today, can just be left alone. A lot, then, is at stake. Alas, however, there’s more, much more. Today, there is a new crisis and a new urgency. McMillian insists that this is not the old movement of tree-huggers versus loggers. “This is about everybody. Climate change doesn’t know sides.” And climate change has indeed become the mantra of the movement. It is now widely accepted that the current mega drought is directly linked to climate change as are the wildfires. The stakes, then, are existential.
CALFIRE has half-heartedly challenged this reality, with some supporters going so far as to deny climate change altogether. The agency insists that drought is not an issue, that logging inhibits fires and that removing old trees increases the sequestration of carbon.
Never mind the massive waste of water, just to keep the dust from the worksites in the woods and truck traffic down the logging roads in this ultra-dry summer. The prospect of wildfires now terrifies literally millions across northern California, and rightly so. These northern counties were developed with little thought to an ecology of drought and fire. We on the coast have long seen the redwood forest as our firewall. It still is but now only to a degree. In 2020 fires raced through redwood stands in Santa Cruz County, devastating large stands of trees even in Big Basin state Park. Professor Will Russell, an environmentalist at San Jose State University, explained the “new normal” this way: “Any honest fire scientist will tell you that small trees burn more readily than large trees. Timber harvest operations target large healthy trees as they supply the highest quality timber products. Once these trees have been removed they are replaced by a regenerating forest of very small highly flammable saplings and sprouts. Timber operations also tend to open up the forest stand which allows for greater air flow providing oxygen for any fire that might start. Anyone who has ever built a fire knows that small sticks with a lot of air space gives the best chance for a successful fire – the same is true for a forest fire.”
Then, of course, there is carbon sequestration. CALFIRE argues that when a large tree is cut, many small ones take its place, hence increasing the number of trees and allowing for more carbon sequestration. Again, the consensus in science seems to suggest the opposite. J.P. O’Brien is currently a post doctoral research fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Climate and Global Dynamics Division, in Boulder, Colorado. He tells us: “Short of burning fossil fuels, cutting down trees is the single worst thing we can do for climate change. Not only do trees directly remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store it for centuries to millennia, the very act of cutting them down results in immediate carbon releases via felling, hauling, milling, and processing machinery that represents a “double hit” to the climate. Climate change presents a clear, present, and ever increasing danger to nearly every aspect of our lives and the earth system, including our terrestrial forests.”
Times are changing here on California’s north coast, and while logging continues – the vast majority of redwood forest land is in corporate hands – the once overwhelming culture of work in the woods and the mills of our counties is greatly diminished, as is the number of jobs and mills. The Trail Stewards circulated a petition that in a very short period of time was signed by more than five thousand supporters. It called for a moratorium on logging, for cultural & tribal sovereignty, unified ecosystem restoration, climate change mitigation and environmentally sustainable economics. (https://www.mendocinotrailstewards.org/forest-reserve-proposal).
Mendocino County is valued right across California, even beyond, for its redwoods, its steep canyons, oak woodlands and its wild, rocky coast line. It is a liberal county; it voted for Bernie twice, in large numbers, and there is widespread support for a Green New Deal. Alas, however, we are a large County with a small population, relatively far from population and media centers. Perhaps this explains the silence of our elected representatives – our city councils, supervisors, assembly members, senators and congressmen, also of course our Governor Gavin Newsome and his new head of the Resources Agency, Wade Crowfoot, virtually all Democrat, virtually all in on climate change. And virtually all prepared to support President Biden’s plan for “conserving” 30% of our country by 2030 – “30 by 30.” But not here. Perhaps there are louder voices. The Mendocino Redwood Company (MRC), owned by San Francisco’s Fisher Family owns 227,000 acres of redwood timberland. In Humboldt County, just north, it owns another 200,000, making it, with holdings in Sonoma County, 440,000 acres, vast holdings, the journalist Will Parrish tells us, the “owner of more redwood forest than any private entity ever has.” This is not insignificant. Then there is the clamor of the developers and the builders and the voices from the past.
The tree-sitters, the blockaders, the forest defenders, trail stewards and local residents and many visitors are appealing for support. They deserve it. Your voice can help.
This article originally appeared in Indian Country Today on Jun 24. Republished with permission.
Editor’s note: DGR stands in deep solidarity with indigenous peoples worldwide. The American Holocaust is the largest genocide in human history, and it is ongoing. The catholic church and the school system, two of the most disgusting and evil institutions of this culture, have been – and still are – playing a vital role in this. We deeply condemn both of them for their horrible atrocities.
Featured image: The site near the former Marieval residential school where a ground search has been underway Thursday. APTN journalist Dennis Ward says they are some of the first images being shared by The Federation of Sovereign Nations and Cowessess First Nation. (Photo by Dennis Ward, Twitter)
WARNING: This story has disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the US. The National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline in Canada can be reached at 1-866-925-4419. If you’re in Treaty 4 territory, call 306-522-7494.
Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan says it discovered 751 unmarked graves at the site of the former Marieval Indian Residential School in a press conference Thursday. The discovery follows last month’s report of 215 graves at another school.
They are currently treating the area as a “crime scene,” Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme said.
The graves were found using ground-penetrating radar which resulted in 751 “hits,″ indicating that at least 600 bodies were buried in the area, Delorme said. The radar operators said their results could have a margin of error of 10 percent.
“We want to make sure when we tell our story that we’re not trying to make numbers sound bigger than they are,” Delorme said. “I like to say over 600, just to be assured.”
He said the area continues to be searched while the radar hits are reviewed by a technical team. All numbers will be verified in the coming weeks.
He said each grave – some only one meter by one meter apart – was now marked with a small flag. It is unknown if all of the dead are children, Delorme said.
“This was a crime against humanity, an assault on First Nations,” Chief Bobby Cameron of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous First Nations in Saskatchewan said. He said he expects more graves will be found on residential school grounds across Canada.
“We will not stop until we find all the bodies,” Cameron said.
The site at Marieval is an open space of unmarked graves, Delorme said. The Catholic church removed headstones from the site in 1960 and tombstones were never put back, he said.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Thursday he is “terribly saddened” to learn of the unmarked graves. He added that the findings “only deepen the pain” that many feel.
“The findings in Marieval and Kamloops are part of a larger tragedy,” Trudeau said in a statement. “They are a shameful reminder of the systemic racism, discrimination, and injustice that Indigenous peoples have faced – and continue to face – in this country. And together, we must acknowledge this truth, learn from our past, and walk the shared path of reconciliation, so we can build a better future.”
Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe said the entire province mourns the discovery of the unmarked graves.
Don Bolen, Archbishop of Regina, Saskatchewan, posted a letter to the Cowessess First Nation on the archdiocese’s website.
“The news is overwhelming and I can only imagine the pain and waves of emotion that you and your people are experiencing right now,” Bolen wrote.
Bolen said two years ago he apologized to the Cowessess people for the “failures and sins of Church leaders in the past.”
“I know that apologies seem a very small step as the weight of past suffering comes into greater light, but I extend that apology again, and pledge to do what we can to turn that apology into meaningful concrete acts – including assisting in accessing information that will help to provide names and information about those buried in unmarked graves,” he said.
Delorme says the search at Marieval began in June. It was prompted by the discovery of 215 unmarked graves of children — some as young as 3 years old — at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which was once Canada’s largest Indigenous residential school near Kamloops, British Columbia.
Following that discovery, the Canadian federal government announced a $27 million fund to help pay for searches at schools across the country. Pope Francis also expressed his pain over the discovery and pressed religious and political authorities to shed light on “this sad affair,” but he did not offer the apology sought by First Nations and by Canadian prime minister.
“We are not asking for pity but we are asking for understanding,” Delorme said. “We need time to heal and this country [Canada] must stand by us.”
Next steps for the Indigenous nation will include putting names to the graves found, Delorme said. It has reached out to the Catholic church to identify these individuals.
The First Nation is located north of North Dakota and about 85 miles east of Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan, a Canadian province. The Marieval Indian Residential School operated from 1899 to 1997.
Florence Sparvier, 80, said she attended the residential school.
“The nuns were very mean to us,” she said. “We had to learn how to be Roman Catholic. We couldn’t say our own little blessings.”
Nuns at the school were “condemning about our people” and the pain inflicted continues generations later, Sparvier said.
“We learned how to not like who we were,” she said. “That has gone on and it’s still going on.”
“The Pope needs to apologize for what happened,” Cameron said. “An apology is one stage in the way of a healing journey.”
From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 First Nations children were required to attend state-funded Christian schools as part of a program to assimilate them into Canadian society. They were forced to convert to Christianity and not allowed to speak their Native languages. Many were beaten and verbally abused, and up to 6,000 are said to have died.
The Canadian government has admitted that physical and sexual abuse was rampant in the schools, with students beaten for speaking their Native languages.
According to the release from the FSIN, the community and former school site are closed because of COVID-19 precautions.
The release also stated: “We ask that all members of the media please be respectful of survivors, descendants and the communities affected by this discovery and respect privacy at this time.”
Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania is believed to have been a template for Canada’s residential schools after it passed the Indian Act in 1876.
Nicholas Flood Davin, then a member of Parliament, was tasked with finding a means to educate the country’s Indigenous peoples. Davin visited Carlisle in 1879 and was impressed with U.S. Army Lt. Richard Pratt, the school’s founder. Pratt’s motto, “Kill the Indian, save the man,” helped shape the regimented, military style that defined most boarding schools.
Researchers say that most of the more than 350 U.S. Indian boarding schools — more than double the 130 or so schools in Canada — have cemeteries associated with them. Unlike Canada, the U.S. has never had an accurate accounting of the number of Indian boarding schools, the number of children who attended or those who died at the schools.
U.S. Department of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced a new initiative this week that will result in a detailed report compiled by the Interior and will include historical records of boarding school locations, burial sites and enrollment logs of children’s names and tribal affiliations
The unprecedented move will ultimately aim to create healing by understanding the true scope of boarding schools in the U.S., said Haaland, Laguna Pueblo.
Many reacted to Thursday’s news on social media.
“The spirits of our murdered children are stepping out of the shadows of their lost graves and screaming out for justice,” Brandi Morin, Cree and Iroquois, said in a video posted to Twitter.
“This is a wake up call,” Morin said. “It’s time to face this.”
This article originally appeared in The Ecologist. Republished under Creative Commons 4.0.
Editor’s note: It’s very important to be clear about the destructiveness of mining and organize resistance against governments and cooperations. While this article is only very cautiously mentioning degrowth, scaling back, and recycling as “solutions”, we believe that societies have to reject and give up industrialism as a whole and immediately start ecological restoration everywhere at emergency speed and scale.
By Diego Francesco Marin
‘Green mining’ is an oxymoron that is gaining traction in the EU and pushes a risky narrative about an environmentally destructive sector.
Mining dominates, exploits and pollutes, suppressing other ways of living with the land. In low-income countries, it can be deadly. Activists, civil society and grassroots movements have been loud and clear about the dangers posed by the mining sector, yet few politicians seem to listen. In the European Union, the European Commission and mining operators are clearly aware of the issues. But unless your community has been targeted as the next mining project to supposedly meet the EU’s climate goals, you are probably not aware of how destructive mining can be.
As part of its Raw Materials Action Plan, the Commission is striving to create the conditions for more mining in Europe by convincing the public that mining can be “green.”
Foolish
Last month, the Portuguese presidency of the EU organised a European conference on so-called green mining in Lisbon. Only one civil society organisation, the EEB, was invited to what had all the appearances of an industry convention rather than a green policy forum.
However, outside the venue, over a hundred activists from grassroots movements and citizens organisations protested the conference and the government-backed lithium mining projects in northern Portugal- despite COVID restrictions.
To gain thesocial license to operate, politicians and industry are challenging previous civil society backlashes against mining projects by equating mining with renewable technologies. Even raising concerns over the toxic fallout of continuous extractivism is deemed foolish.
When communities fight for their right to decide their futures, they are labelled as suffering from a case of nimbyism. Portuguese Secretary of State for Energy, João Galamba even went so far as mentioning that “those who are against mines are against life.”
This scramble to mine is about lucrative business and actually undermines the energy transition. New low-carbon infrastructure needs to be built to enable the move away from fossil fuels, which means money.
Lithium
>Lithium, for example, is one of the most sought-after metals for low-carbon technologies and Europe is almost 100 percent dependent on battery-grade lithium from third countries, especially Chile.
An often-cited figure is that, by 2030, under ‘business as usual’, Europe will need around 18 times more lithium and up to 60 times more by 2050. Therefore, to make the switch to renewable technologies and be competitive, Europe wants to scale up supply to avoid bottlenecks, right in its own backyard.
But this strategy comes with serious concerns. The mountainous Barroso region, for example, sits on Western Europe’s largest lithium deposits but is also located 400 metres from the Covas do Barroso community, in the municipality of Boticas.
Even the Boticas mayor, Fernando Queiroga has spoken openly against the project over pollution, water and environmental worries. He also fears the negative impact it would have on the region’s agricultural, gastronomy and rural tourism sectors.
According to Savannah Resources, the mining operator behind the Minas Do Barroso, the mine would generate €1.3 billion of revenue over its 15-to-20-year lifetime.
Overconsumption
In terms of helping the EU meet its demand, the project would only provide 5 to 6 percent of Europe’s projected lithium requirement in 2030.
A study conducted by the University of Minho for Savannah Resources found that the lithium output of this mine would be “insufficient to meet the demand for lithium derivatives for the production of batteries in Europe”.
This region is one of only seven in Europe to make the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s list of Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems. Communities here use “very few surpluses where]the level of consumption of the population is relatively low compared to other regions in the country” as the FAO’s website indicates.
In the age of overconsumption driving the ecological crisis, it is ironic that low-impact communities are targeted for green growth pursuits.
If the Mina do Barroso project is allowed to proceed, the region’s proud agricultural heritage would be undermined and would surely lose its international recognition.
Frenzy
With 30 million additional electric vehicles planned to hit Europe’s roads by 2030, it should come as no surprise that communities on the ground do not want their land to become the next sacrifice zone to feed the EV frenzy.
In Europe, there are three other proposed mining projects where environmental concerns have also been raised, including in Caceres, Spain.
The Iberian Peninsula is a major target for mining companies. In Spain, there are around 2,000 potential licenses for new mining projects. In the case of Portugal, 10 percent of the country’s territory is already under mining concessions.
In the northern Portuguese regions, the situation is troubling amid concerns that open-pit mines may even be allowed near protected areas, as in the case of Serra d’Arga. The Mina do Barroso project is now undergoing public consultation for the environmental impact assessment.
Despite government and industry rhetoric that public participation will be respected, and the needs of local communities will be met, local organisations and activists are not convinced. In January 2021, an NGO submitted an environmental information request to the Portuguese environment ministry, but no access was granted.
Denial
The same request was sent in March to Savannah Resources, but the company also refused.
Although the Commission for Access to Administrative Documents (CADA) issued a report stating that the environmental information that had been requested should be made immediately available, the Portuguese authorities decided to ignore the request.
Only some documents were made available during the public consultations and nearly three weeks after the consultations started.
The lack of access to information kept civil society and local communities in the dark and they lost around 3 precious months.
For the past month, they have had to scrutinise more than 6,000 documents. A formal complaint was submitted in the context of the Aarhus Convention, which protects the right of access to environmental information, over claims of deliberate denial of access to information.
Courts
The case is already before the Portuguese courts and the public prosecutor. The end of the public consultation period for the EIA was to end on June 2nd, the same day of the launch of the Yes to Life, No to Miningjoint position statement to the European Commission, but public pressure over irregularities forced the Portuguese authorities to extend the consultation period to July 16th.
target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”Green mining relates to the belief that we can decouple economic growth from environmental impacts, however, this mindset ignores a larger issue and will ultimately have irreversible consequences on the environment.
Perhaps instead of putting such emphasis on the supply of lithium or other raw materials, we can take a look at the demand. For example, by prioritising circularity over primary resource extraction, we can greatly reduce our need to mine more resources.
Political action to limit global warming is necessary and urgent. This means that we need to find the quickest paths to decarbonisation. But we must do it in less materially intensive ways. We can build cities that are less car-dependent, increase public transport, promote walking or enhance micro e-mobility.
Cycling, for example, is ten times more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities. Other solutions include urban mining initiatives that move us toward more circular societies. In an inspiring example from Antwerp, 70 creative makers gather the waste from the city and turn them into a wide variety of products: lamps from old boilers and chairs from paper and sawdust for a whole jazz club.
Solutions
The solutions exist, we just need the political will.
By making the most of the resources we have, European cities can greatly reduce the impact that they create for European rural communities and in low-income countries where most of the mining projects are slated to take place.
However, broader policy measures are also needed. For starters, the EU should agree on creating a headline target to cut its material footprint and continue to promote measures on targeting energy efficiency, recycling, material substitution, use of innovative materials, and the promotion of sustainable lifestyles.
Another way to do this is to look at the energy transition through an environmental justice lens. Granting communities, the right to say no to mining projects by taking inspiration from already enshrined protocols in international law as in the case of Free, Prior and Informed Consent for Indigenous Peoples, the brunt of the energy transition will not have to be put on low-impact communities around the world.
This can address the current imbalance of power between mining companies, governments and communities and the future EU horizontal due diligence law can offer such opportunity. Banning mining projects from taking place within or near protected areas is a necessary step forward.
Living
So can mining ever be green? Maybe that is not the right question. We should instead ask, how do we change the way our societies operate?
I’m going to use Jane McAlevey’s definition for organising as described in a previous post: “organizing places the agency for success with a continually expanding base of ordinary people, a mass of people never previously involved, who don’t consider themselves activists at all – that’s the point of organizing.”
In this post, I’ve included activism around ‘rights’ and ‘issues’, to make this list as comprehensive as possible. I’d also add that this is a rough sketch of what to organise (and mobilise) around and this list needs more research and probably reworking.
Workplace
The first area to organise around, with a long history is the workplace and employment. This was an important area of struggle to change society in the twentieth century, but the nature of work has changed and the trade unions have been crushed in the last 40 years. There have been, and are, several union forms; those from the past will be looked at in future posts. Currently, there are large unions, known as ‘service unions’, and ‘base unions’.
The second area to organise around is the community, including: community organising, community unions, the community rights movement, and community social welfare programmes.
Community organising was developed in the mid-twentieth century in the US. It involves campaigns to change institutional policies and practices to improve the living conditions for community members. Hackney Unites has put together a good HU-community-organising. National reformist community organising organisations doing good work include Citizens UK and Community Organisers. There will be many local groups and organisations using community organising methods all over the UK.
There has been a first step in the UK to set up a community rights movement in the formation of the Community Chartering Network. This comes from a successful community charter in Falkirk, Scotland, that resulted in the Scottish Government banning fracking in Scotland. Read the story here.
Community social welfare programs are generally run by local government or NGOs (Non-government organisations). A good example of this in the UK was the British Restaurants – communal kitchens set up in 1940 to provide cheap food so everyone could eat.
Communities have been under attack since the 1970s, with many basic services and social centers no longer in operation. Community social welfare organising now involves activists running basic services in their communities to fill the gaps where the state has been rolled back. The classic example would be the Black Panthers Free Breakfast for Children in the US in the 1960s/70s.
In 2014/2015 a pay as you feel cafe called Skipchen in Bristol served over 20,000 meals. Can Cook in Garston, Liverpool provides thousands of free hot lunches for children in poverty in the Merseyside area. Foodhall is a public dining room and kitchen in Sheffield that is managed by the community, for the community, tackling social isolation and encourage integration across a diverse range of groups. Foodhall are campaigning for a National Food Service, to develop public social eating spaces around the country. There is Cooperation Town movement based on Cooperation Kentish Town that provides a community space with healthy, cheap food, childcare and more.
Combining Workplace and Non-Workplace
The third area to organise is a combination of workplace/job and struggles outside the workplace, including: Jane McAlevey’s ‘whole worker organizing’, community unionism, and social movement unionism.
Whole worker organising merges workplace and non-workplace issues based on Jane McAlevey’s extensive experience of community and union organising. This article gives a good summary of McAlevey work in Connecticut that combined housing and workplace struggles.
Janice Fine is her 2005 article, “Community Unions and the Revival of the American Labor Movement” describes community unionism as community-based organisations of low-wage workers that focus on issues of work and wages in their communities. They are based on specific ethnic and geographic communities (as opposed to workplaces), especially immigrants and African Americans. Fine describes how they have appeared from several sources including: “community and faith-based organizing networks, Central America solidarity movements and other left-wing organizations, legal services as well as other social service agencies, immigrant nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), churches, and some labor unions.” These community unions are mainly focused on work-related issues but also include other aspects of life including housing, healthcare, and education.
Social movement unionism is currently popular in the US, involving the combination of workplace unionists and social movements to tackle issues, civil and human rights and alter structures of law and political power. This article gives a history and critique of social movement unionism. This interview with a member of the UK National Union of Teachers (now the National Education Union) describes the three legs of a stool working together to make a strong union: bread and butter issues, professional issues, social justice and community campaigning.
Megan Behrent writes about a radical form of social movement unionism called ‘social justice unionism‘ here.
Social Strike
The ‘social strike’ is described by Antonio Negre and Michael Hardt in Assembly as the ‘weapon of social unionism’. [1] Keir Milburn states here that the social strike “brings out three functions that will be required from any set of practices able to play a role equivalent to the twentieth-century strike. These are making the new conditions visible, disrupting the circulation of capital and directly socialising, collectivising and communising our social relations, reproduction and struggles.” Negre and Hardt describe the social strike as “the labor movement’s interruption of industrial production and the social movements’ disruption of the social order.” [1]
Recent examples are the UK Youth Climate Strikes and the planned global Earth Strike on September 20th. Around social reproduction, there is the Women Strike Assembly, which organised strikes in 2018 and 2019 on International Women’s Day, March 8th.
Politics
Political organising takes place via a political party or independent citizens’ platforms. Political parties come in several forms: classical traditional political parties, social movement parties, single-issue parties, and digital/internet-based political parties. Some parties combine a few of these forms.
There have been recent innovations in classical traditional political parties such as Obama’s organising/movement presidential campaigns and Bernie Sanders 2016 US presidential campaign using ‘Big Organising’.
Single issue parties would be the green parties in different countries (although many have broadened their policies over time) and the Brexit Party in the UK.
Organising around politics can also be done outside political parties, as the municipalism movement (see below) is showing. For examples of independent politics at the local level in the UK, there is The Indie-town project and Take Back the City in London.
Municipalism
Municipalism is the process of self-government by cities, towns, or municipalities. There are three broad municipalism traditions: municipal socialism, libertarian municipalism, and the right to the city movement.
Municipal socialism describes the local government-led social reform. There have been several phases in the UK. The most recent is the Preston Model, where the local authority changed the procurement for the council and local large institutions (university and hospital) to buy from local businesses and cooperatives. This strengthens the local economy. It is based on the Cleveland model and is known as community wealth building.
Libertarian municipalism (also known as Communalism) is from the theorist Murray Bookchin. Bookchin proposed a twin strategy of popular or people’s assemblies to look at local issues and start to form an alternative government, combined with running municipal candidates chosen by the people’s assemblies to stand in local electoral politics. Bookchin wanted to build institutional capacity and repurpose state power to increase libertarian collective power. The societal, larger-scale vision of libertarian municipalism or Communalism is Confederalism – where self governed cities and localities are connected in a larger network. Ideas of confederalism have been put into practice in Rojava in northeast Syria/West Kurdistan and are known as Democratic Confederalism. They have also been taken up by the international Fearless Cities Movement and Cooperative Jackson in the US.
The right to the city movement started in the 1960s with geographers such as Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey analysing the city from a Marxist perspective. They argue that the transformation of the city depends upon the exercise of collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization to meet the people’s needs.
Poor people’s Movements and Solidarity
The history of poor people’s movements have been explored in detail in the book Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. This article gives a good summary of the more spontaneous and disruptive nature of these movements. They are based on mobilising rather than organising, which links to momentum driven organising discussed in this previous post.
DP Hunter has written a book Chav Solidarity and in this article he describes chav solidarity: “if just the left-leaning working class were to collectivise our resources (wages, savings, inheritance, homes, and whatever else), or we were to transform our economy into a communal one, we would be able to provide for one another. Those economically marginalised and living in poverty, as I was not that long ago, would not be in positions of such deprivation and exclusion, their short term concerns of where their next meal was coming from, where they would be sleeping in a week’s time, would abate.”
Institutions
Organising around institutions can take three forms: influencing institutions, reclaiming existing institutions for the left and supporting or creating alternative institutions.
Influencing institutions includes attempting to change state behaviour through laws in parliament or rulings in courts. It could also include influencing political parties, the media or corporations. A good resource on this is How Change Happens by Duncan Green.
Examples of reclaiming existing institutions for the left would be all three municipalism traditions described above. The Labour Party has recently been reclaimed for the left by Jeremy Corbyn. The UCU trade union membership recently elected a grassroots left candidate as General Secretary – Jo Grady. We Own It, campaign against privatisation and make the case for public ownership of public services.
For alternative institutions, the community social welfare programs described above in the community section is an example of this. Others are workers coops in the UK and Mondragon in Spain. Concerning alternative media, see here. Concerning credit unions, see here. Libertarian municipalist people’s assemblies (see above in municipalism section) are an example of an alternative government. There is the recent idea of public-commons partnerships where citizens become co-owners, co-earners and co-decision-makers of municipal cooperatives.
Rights and Issues
There is a lot of crossover between rights and issues, so for now I’ve combined them.
Rights include human rights, democratic and political rights (right to vote, citizenship, civil liberties), economic rights (right to a decent job and pay, and a social safety net such as benefits), rights to public goods/services (public healthcare, education, housing, media etc), community rights movement (see above), and rights of nature.
Issues include the rights of women, gay people, people of colour, disabled people, and others, anti-war and the peace movement, LGBTQ+ movement, inequality, environmental issues with climate change being the biggest concern, and the alter-globalisation or anti-globalisation movement.
Endnotes
1. Assembly, Antonio Negre and Michael Hardt, 2017, page 150
