This episode of The Green Flame features an interview with James Darling who is currently on the 8th day of a hunger strike against logging of old-growth forests in British Columbia, Canada (occupied First Nations territory). You can contact James at: (250) 816-4321, or at james0darling@gmail.com.
In this interview, James talks about why he started the hunger strike, the old-growth logging in British Columbia, the path forward for the movement, and revolutions that have used hunger strikes.
Protests against the anti-indigenous policies of Brazil’s President Bolsonaro are occurring in Brazil and around the world to mark his first month in power.
Demonstrators held placards declaring “Stop Brazil’s genocide now!” and “Bolsonaro: protect indigenous land.”
The protests have been led by APIB, the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, as the culmination of their “Indigenous blood – not a single drop more” campaign, known as “Red January.”
Before he was elected president, Mr Bolsonaro was notorious for his racist views. Among his first acts on assuming power was to remove responsibility for indigenous land demarcation from Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Department FUNAI, and hand it to the notoriously anti-Indian Agriculture Ministry, which Survival labelled “virtually a declaration of war against Brazil’s tribal peoples.”
President Bolsonaro also moved FUNAI to a new ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights headed by an evangelical preacher, a move designed to drastically weaken FUNAI.
Emboldened by the new President and his long history of anti-indigenous rhetoric, attacks by ranchers and gunmen against Indian communities have risen dramatically.
The territory of the Uru Eu Wau Wau Indians, for example, has been invaded, endangering uncontacted tribespeople there; and hundreds of loggers and colonists are planning to occupy the land of the Awá, one of Earth’s most threatened tribes.
But Brazil’s indigenous people have reacted with defiance. “We’ve been resisting for 519 years. We won’t stop now. We’ll put all our strength together and we’ll win,” said Rosilene Guajajara. And Ninawa Huni Kuin said: “We fight to protect life and land. We will defend our nation.”
APIB said: “We have the right to exist. We won’t retreat. We’ll denounce this government around the world.”
Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry said today: “Having suffered 500 years of genocide and massacres, Brazil’s tribal peoples are not going to be cowed by President Bolsonaro, however abhorrent and outdated his views are. And it’s been inspiring to see how many people around the world are standing with them.”
Featured image: On Jan. 18, an estimated 10,000 Indigenous activists and allies will descend on Washington, D.C. for the first-ever march to highlight human and civil rights abuses against Native communities. Photo by Indigenous Peoples Movement/Twitter. Many Indigenous people are victims of voter suppression, families divided by walls and borders, an environmental holocaust, sex and human trafficking, and police/military brutality.
Raising alarm about human rights violations and the global climate crisis, activists from around the world are traveling to Washington, D.C. for the first annual Indigenous Peoples March, which will kick off at 8am local time on Jan. 18 outside the U.S. Department of the Interior’s main building.
“Our people are under constant threat, from pipelines, from police, from a system that wants to forget the valuable perspectives we bring to the table. But those challenges make us stronger. We look forward to gathering together and raising awareness.”
—Chase Iron Eyes, Lakota People’s Law Project
“It’s wonderful—and needed, now more than ever—to see so many tribes and organizations coming together to raise awareness about the ongoing need to preserve and respect the rights of Indigenous peoples,” said organizer Phyllis Young of the Lakota People’s Law Project.
Launched by the Indigenous Peoples Movement, a newly formed coalition dedicated to fostering positive change on “issues that directly affect our lands, peoples, and respective cultures,” the marchwill be preceded by a group prayer at 9am and followed by an evening fundraising concert at the Songbird Music House.
“Indigenous people from North, Central and South America, Oceania, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean are a target of genocide,” the organizers charge. “Currently, many Indigenous people are victims of voter suppression, divided families by walls and borders, an environmental holocaust, sex and human trafficking, and police/military brutality with little or no resources and awareness of this injustice.”
More than 10,000 marchers are anticipated to descend on D.C. for the event, including people from Australia, Guatemala, Papua New Guinea, Canada, the Caribbean and across the United States. Those interested in participating or supporting the march can check for updates on the official Facebook event, and are encouraged to post updates to social media using the hashtags #IPMDC19 and #WHYIMARCH.
Chase Iron Eyes, lead counsel for the Lakota People’s Law Project, said in a statement on Wednesday that his delegation will also advocate for a Green New Deal—an increasingly popular proposal championed by the Sunrise Movement and other grassroots organizations as well as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and a growing number of Democratic lawmakers that would pair climate and economic policies—”as a way to combat climate change and create green jobs, especially in Indian Country.”
“It’s going to be a beautiful day,” he said of the march. “Our people are under constant threat, from pipelines, from police, from a system that wants to forget the valuable perspectives we bring to the table. But those challenges make us stronger. We look forward to gathering together and raising awareness. We must remind the world, again, that Indigenous people matter. We are all made better when we respect one another and lift each other up.”
Iron Eyes’ comments come just a day after global protests spurred by outrage over the Canadian government’s support for TransCanada’s plans to build a fracked gas pipeline through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory, despite opposition to the project from First Nations leaders. Public anger ramped up on Monday afternoon, ahead of the demonstrations, after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) invaded a checkpoint established by Indigenous land defenders and arrested 14 of them.
Plans for the march also come amid growing concern over the presidency of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who was sworn in at the beginning of the year and has not wasted any time launching attacks on the environment and Indigenous communities in his country.
As Common Dreams reported, “On his first day in office, Bolsonaro introduced an executive order that will effectively take away land rights for indigenous Brazilians and descendants of former slaves and gave control of Amazon lands to the agriculture ministry; eliminated LGBTQ rights from the purview of the country’s human rights ministry; and set the minimum wage lower than the rate his predecessor’s government had budgeted for.”
This photo shows the flyer in question, and was sent to us by a business making a complaint.
Over the past few days, several organizations from across the United States have reached out to Deep Green Resistance, letting us know about a printer exploit being used to print off DGR-themed flyers at their place of business.
We want to be very clear that these flyers are not official DGR material and have not been approved by us for publication anywhere, and certainly not on private printers without consent. The use of a Printer Exploitation Toolkit to hijack unprotected printers is unethical, unhelpful for anyone, and illegal.
At the moment, we are unsure who is behind these mailings. If this is the work of an unaffiliated DGR supporter, we ask that you please stop immediately and avoid such invasive, unhelpful behavior in the future. If these mailings are the work of agitators attempting to discredit our movement, we would ask that you please find something better to do with your time and stop wasting paper. Either way, we would like to apologize to anyone who has had to deal with this time-wasting stunt. Although we are unable to prevent every unstable or unscrupulous person from deciding to do stupid and unhelpful things, we are taking every step possible to make sure this doesn’t happen again. In the meantime, we encourage everyone – especially activists – to make sure their internet-connected devices are secure.
Here is the official recommendation on how to secure your printers against this type of attack: “Network administrators should never leave their printers accessible from the Internet and disable raw port 9100/tcp printing if not required” (more here).
On October 12, 2018, hundreds of women, men, children, youth and the elderly decided to leave Honduras as a desperate response to survive. The massive exodus that began in the city of San Pedro Sula, reached more than 3 thousand people by the time the group crossed to Guatemala. The caravan, which is headed north to Mexico first, and to the United States as the goal- is the only alternative this people have to reach a bit of the dignity that has been taken from them. They are not alone in their journey. Various waves of Hondurans, whose numbers increase every hour, are being contained by Honduran security forces on their border with El Salvador and Guatemala.
The Honduras Solidarity Network in North America condemns any threats and acts of repression against the refugee caravan, human rights activists and journalists that accompany their journey. The conditions of violence, marginalization and exploitation in which this refugee crisis find its origins, have been created, maintained and reproduced by US-backed social, economic and military interventionist policies, with the support of its Canadian and regional allies. We call on people in the US to reject the criminalization, prosecution, detention, deportation and family separation that threaten the members of this march and the lives of all those refugees forced from their homes in the same way. We urge a change of US policy in Honduras and to cut off security aid to stop human rights abuses and government violence against Hondurans.
This refugee crisis has been exacerbated by the governments of Guatemala and Mexico, who subservient to Donald Trump’s administration, have chosen the path of repression. Bartolo Fuentes, a Honduran journalist and spokesperson for the refugees, has been detained in Guatemala. Meanwhile the Mexican government has sent two planeloads of its National Police to the border with Guatemala. Irineo Mujica, a migrant rights activist and photojournalist, was arrested in Chiapas by agents of the Mexican National Institute of Migration when he was getting ready to support the Honduran migrant march. Today (Friday) in the afternoon, tear gas was fired into the group as they tried to come into Mexico on the border bridge. Honduran human rights organizations report that a 7 month old baby was killed.
The massive forced flight of people from Honduras is not new; it is the legacy of US intervention in the country. Since the 2009 US-backed coup in Honduras, the post-coup regime has perpetuated a system based on disregard for human rights, impunity, corruption, repression and the influence of organized crime groups in the government and in the economic power elite. Since the coup, we have seen the destruction of public education and health services through privatization. The imposition of mining, hydro-electric mega-projects and the concentration of land in agro-industry has plunged 66 percent of the Honduran population into poverty and extreme poverty. In the last 9 years, we have witnessed how the murder of Berta Cáceres and many other activists, indigenous leaders, lawyers, journalists, LGBTQ community members and students has triggered a humanitarian crisis. This crisis is reflected in the internal displacement and the unprecedented exodus of the Honduran people that has caught the public’s eye during recent days.
The fraudulent November 2017 elections, in which Juan Orlando Hernández -president since questionable elections in 2013- was re-elected for a second term in violation of the Honduran constitution, sparked a national outrage. The people’s outrage was confronted by an extremely violent government campaign with military and US-trained security forces to suppress the protests against the fraud. The result of the repression was more than 30 people killed by government forces, more than a thousand arrested and there are currently 20 political prisoners being held in pre-trial prison.
To the repression, intimidation and criminalization faced by the members of the refugee caravan, we respond with a call for solidarity from all the corners of the world. In the face of the violence that has led to the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Hondurans, we demand an end to US military and security aid to Juan Orlando’s regime, not as the blackmail tool used by Donald Trump, but as a way to guarantee the protection of the human rights of the Honduran people. We demand justice for Berta Cáceres, for all the victims of political violence as a consequence of the post coup regime, and the approval of the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act H.R. 1299. We demand freedom for all the political prisoners in Honduras. We demand the US end the criminalization, imprisonment, separation, deportation and killing of migrants and refugees.
Today we fight so that every step, from Honduras to the north of the Americas, is dignified and free
Last week, I was invited to join a Sacred Water Run-Walk in Nevada by Chief Johnnie Bobb of the Western Shoshone National Council. Chief Bobb attended the Sacred Water, Sacred Forests gathering back in May, and we exchanged contact information.
I decided to attend last minute after his phone call, and gathered my supplies and energies. It is a 14 hour drive from my home in Oregon to the area the walk was to take place, so I took two days to make the drive. I stopped along the way and purchased as much food and supplies as I could afford, although I didn’t know exactly what was needed.
I slept on the night of October 1st in my car at the Swamp Cedars, where we were supposed to meet. The Swamp Cedars are an ecologically unique stand of Rocky Mountain Junipers on the bottom of Spring Valley. Pure water coming out of the ground, shade from the trees, and rich grasses that brought in game animals made this area a gathering place for Newé (Western Shoshone/Goshute) people for thousands of years. It is also why the people were gathered here when they were massacred by the U.S. Calvary, one of several massacres here.
I was awoken before the dawn the next morning when Rupert Steele, the chairman of the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute Reservation, pulled in next to me. We spoke for a while, and then others started to arrive. The others included about 15 or 20 other people from 12 different indigenous nations.
Mr. Steele and Chief Johnnie Bobb both said prayers and burned sage as the sun rose over Spring Valley. I introduced myself to various people, including the woman who organized the run (Beverly Harry). I told her about the food, which she was happy about. Then the runners started out. I stuck around for a while and made some coffee for the elders. One of them asked me to join them in the run-walk, a great honor. I ended up doing 10 miles that day. We did it relay style, so at least one person from the group ran or walked every mile.
We covered 100 miles that first day, then stayed at Cathedral Gorge State Park. We had a nice night around the fire and got to know each other a bit better. I was able to stay through the second day. We covered another 75 miles the second day, and then I had to leave. The runners continued down to the Moapa Paiute reservation.
Our network against the water grab is growing. There were some solid people there. In the event SNWA begins to build the pipeline, there will be serious resistance.
