Settler-Colonialism

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. ...

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. ...

This episode of The Green Flame focuses on colonization and has three interviews: the first with Anne Keala Kelly, a native Hawaiian organizer, journalist, and award-winning filmmaker; the second with Mari Boine, a world-reknowned Sami indigenous musician; and the third with a river. We discuss colonization, history, tourism, the TMT telescope project on Mauna Kea, indigenous peoples of Europe, music, and how to connect with the land. Three of Mari Boine’s songs are used in this episode, with permission: Gula Gula, Goaskinvielija (Eagle Brother), and Vilges Suola. ...

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. ...

by Liam Campbell “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.” – Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation Reality prevailed on Earth for untold millions of years. Base elements, microbes, algae, fungi, animals, and plants, they existed in complex and changing configurations; these variations of life were deeply rooted in an objective, singular reality. For our ancestors, an apple was an apple, it existed independently and without symbolic constraints or meaning. Then we invented language, possibly the first true simulation, which allowed us to invoke the idea of an apple without the presence of one. This abstract concept of an apple became an amalgamation of all of our individual and cultural experiences of a thing, and the idea of an apple could only exist in relationship to other concepts of “not apple.” Baudrillard called this phenomenon a “simulacrum,” which is a representation or an imitation of a thing. ...

By Max Wilbert / Featured Image: San People in southern Africa making friction fire. Photo by Isewell, used under the CC BY-SA 2.5 license. Are humans inherently destructive? Are we, as a species, some sort of cancer on the planet? Are we “destined” to destroy the planet because we are “too smart” and “too successful”? No. I reject this idea completely. Humans are not inherently destructive, and claims to the contrary represent intellectually lazy and culturally myopic thinking. Even more dangerously, these claims lead to the conclusion that nothing can be done to reserve the destructiveness of civilization. The claim that humans are a cancer is a cop-out. ...

By Elizabeth Robson / Art for Culture Change In the preface to Columbus and Other Cannibals, Derrick Jensen asks: “why is the dominant culture so excruciatingly, relentlessly, insanely, genocidally, ecocidally, suicidally destructive?” [1] The author of Columbus and Other Cannibals, Jack D. Forbes, goes on to answer Derrick’s question in the chapters of his remarkable book, pinning the main cause of our suicidal destruction on a virus of the mind, wétiko. Wétiko was first identified by Native Americans and other indigenous people, when they saw how white colonizers so disrespected the natural world, women, and all people who were not yet colonized, they needed a name for the sickness in the colonizers’ minds that allowed them to commit such acts of aggression, hate, and conquest. ...

by Rudolph C. Rÿser / Intercontinental Cry Ever since the German Nazis committed horrendous mass murders of Jews, homosexuals, Roma, and Catholics, many commentators, analysts and scholars have made the mistake of associating “genocide” with “executions and gassing” of people en masse. The originator of the term “genocide” attorney and author Raphael Lemkin’s analysis essentially explains this error when his analysis points to how the Holocaust is not a synonym for genocide, but the consequence of Nazi imperialism and Colonialism in Europe. While the massive murders by the Nazi government was a horrific case of human destruction the genocide had already begun before the killings. Read from Lemkin’s book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe(Washington, DC: Carnegie Council, 1944) on page 79 how he describes genocide: ...

In so-called Canada, urban Indigenous organizers are re-energizing a decades-old struggle by redefining Indigenous sovereignty in the city streets. By Natalie Knight originally published on roarmag.org featured image by Sharon Kravitz “I brought you all some water,” I said to the ragtag crew of six holding our “All Nations Unite With Wet’suwet’en” banner across the lane of semi-truck traffic heaving out of the Port of Vancouver. We had been standing, rotating positions, for five hours now. ...

by Agustin del Castillo / Intercontinental Cry Este artículo está disponible en español aquí MESA DEL TIRADOR, Wixárika territories, Mexico — At midnight on May 10, 2018, members of the Wixárika (Huichol) community of Wuaut+a (San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlán), in the Western Sierra Madre of Mexico, took the dramatic step of blocking all entrances to their community, given the lack of response from the Mexican State for their demand to peacefully receive the lands that they have won from the ranchers of Huajimic in agrarian lawsuits. ...