Monthly Archives: February 2017

Globalism and Indigenous Environmentalism

In January of this year, Isidro Baldenegro López was gunned down at his home village, Coloradas de la Virgen in Chihuahua, Mexico. He was shot six times, in the chest and abdomen, by a man authorities identified but could not capture. Just out of jail, he had returned to his family, against his better judgment. He knew firsthand that Chihuahua is a violent place. Drug trafficking and widespread corruption have made it, like several other Mexican border provinces, a militarized zone where the rule of law is only a dream.

But Isidro Baldenegro was not a narcotrafficker or corrupt official. He was a subsistence farmer and community leader of Mexico’s indigenous Tarahumara people in the country’s Sierra Madre mountain region. His 15-month prison term was handed down because he organized  protests against illegal logging there. In fact, in 2005, he was awarded   the Goldman Prize for his environmental work.

Isidro Baldenegro

Mr. Baldengro’s murder marked a horrible anniversary for indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere. Just a year before, fellow Goldman Prize winner, Berta Caceres— a member of the Lenca community in Honduras—was shot to death in her own home. She had been protesting the Agua Zarca Dam, a joint project of Honduran company Desarrollos Energéticos SA (DESA) and Chinese state-owned Sinohydro, the world’s largest dam developer. Like many such projects on Native land, Agua Zarca, “was pushed through without consulting the indigenous Lenca people—a violation of international treaties governing indigenous peoples’ rights” (Goldman Prize, http://www.goldmanprize.org/recipient/berta-caceres/)

Berta Caceres at the banks of the Gualcarque River in the Rio Blanco region of western Honduras.

According to the Goldman Environmental Foundation, the dam threatened to “cut off the supply of water, food and medicine for hundreds of Lenca people and violate their right to sustainably manage and live off their land.” Sadly, Beta Caceres and Isidro Baldenegro are the norm, rather than the exception. All told, 122 activists were murdered across Latin America in 2015. Being indigenous and caring for one’s homeland has clearly become a lethal occupation.

All told, 122 activists were murdered across Latin America in 2015

The NGO Global Witness has produced a chart based on statistics that record violence against environmental activists around the globe. It highlights,  in vivid color, the awful concentration of violence the western hemisphere’s indigenous peoples bear in this global war for resources.

It would be easy for citizens of the United States to write these deaths off as yet more Latin American “instability,” if it were not for the parallels these events share with those in North America. A recent post on this blog detailed  how the government’s about-face on the Dakota Access Pipeline brought with it more violence to the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations, this time in the form of BIA police .

Yet anyone familiar with American history knows that this is standard operating procedure for local, state, and federal governments when they heed the call of extractive industries and their powerful investors. In the late nineteenth-century, progressive activists like Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (who opened the first English-language kindergarden in the U.S.) constantly warned their eastern readers that the “management” of Indian Country actually involved a corrupt cabal of territorial governments, the federal authorities, and businessmen with vested interests in Indian lands. Writing to the Minister Lyman Abbot, Peabody explained,

The Indian Agency is “the most effectual instrumentality of a formidable Ring, composed of the still unreformed civil service on the frontiers, and the majority of the frontier population, who deprecate Indian civilization, and work against it with an immense mercantile interest scattered all over the Union, that fattens on the CONTRACTS FOR SUPPLIES, which is the breath of life to this well-named ‘Hidden Power.’” (“Sarah Winnemucca’s practical solution . . .” 1886).

In an era marked by non-Indian backlash against globalization, the sacrifices made by Native peoples across the hemisphere are worth noting. As Native legal scholar Duane Champagne recently reminded us, indigenous peoples can very well be likened to the “canaries in the coal mine” of democracy . What is happening at Standing Rock is part and parcel to what has rocked the Tarahumara communities in the Sierra Madre and the Lenca people of Honduras.

It is high time Americans saw their indigenous neighbors as partners, not adversaries. We are all in this together, battling  a global economy that has no care for our air and water, and prizes only what it can extract from our land—its beneficiaries hiding their profits in offshore accounts and manipulating the franchise the people have so desperately fought to win.

Canaries in the Coal Mine

Among the flurry of executive orders signed by the President over the past few weeks, several targeted Native American communities. From the infamous border wall project to the ill-conceived Dakota Access Pipeline, the President affirmed his commitment to assaulting tribal sovereignty and environmental justice.

Verlon Jose, the leader of the Tohono O’odham Nation on the Arizona/Mexico border spoke for many people in Indian Country when he said, “over my dead body will a wall be built.”

Although some might think of the border wall and the Dakota Access Pipeline as “Indian” issues, it and others like it affect all Americans. That’s because what happens in Indian Country does not stay in Indian Country.

We have a vital concern with Indian self-government because the Native American is to America what the Jew was to the Russian Czars and Hitler’s Germany.

Felix Cohen

For nearly two centuries Native communities have been the staging area for federal policies and practices that would later be turned on the nation as a whole. Educational ideas were tried out on Native children—the Lancastrian monitorial method, the industrial school model. National water projects flooded Indian valleys.

Toxic runoff on Ft. Berthold Reservation, Montana.

National forest clear cutting denuded Indian hillsides. Nuclear weapons testing irradiated indigenous dunes and mesas; uranium mining for those same weapons scarred Indian Country’s mountains and poisoned its water.

Last summer, Duane Champagne, Professor of American Indian Studies and faculty member of UCLA’s School of Law, recalled Felix Cohen’s famous comment (made now a half-century ago) that Indians were like the canaries in the coal mine of American democracy. Given the events of the past few weeks, Cohen’s observation seems especially prescient.

Even more startling than his canary analogy is the context in which he made it.

Margene Bullcreek, opponent of toxic waste dump.

It was in the Yale Law Journal, in an article titled “The Erosion of Indian Rights, 1950 – 53” that Cohen forged this startling connection: 

We have a vital concern with Indian self-government because the Native American is to America what the Jew was to the Russian Czars and Hitler’s Germany. For us the Indian tribe is the miner’s canary, and when it flutters and droops we know that the poison gases of intolerance threaten all other minorities in our land.

Intolerance. That’s the extra something that sharpens federal policy into the point of the spear in Indian Country. In North Dakota, the federal government was very slow to acknowledge and protect the civil rights of protesters. It essentially turned a blind eye to intolerance. Native people were denied hotel rooms because of their ethnicity. They were gassed and beaten in a way that no middle class white American has been. They were showered with rubber bullets, freezing water, and set upon by attack dogs all while the Obama administration did little on their behalf. It was only in the waning days of his presidency that Obama instructed the Justice Department to take a closer look at what was going on in Morgan County. Although Attorney General Loretta Lynch did eventually send Justice officials to the field to survey the situation, with the new administration,  even those slim protections have been lifted and an aggressive BIA police force installed at Standing Rock to intimidate its residents.

BIA policeman beating a man on the Cheyenne River Reservation, February, 2017. [http://nativenewsonline.net/currents/cheyenne-river-sioux-tribe-reacts-bia-police-brutality/]

With the protection of state’s rights as its new role, the federal government has turned a blind eye to state legislation that is clearly, and maliciously, directed at Native people—with no other policy goals than intimidation and intolerance.

A case in point is North Dakota House Concurrent Resolution 3017. In January, when the new president took office, North Dakota legislators attempted to pass a bill that essentially made the old 1950s federal policy of “termination” (exactly the law Felix Cohen was discussing when he made his canary analogy) a model for the state’s relationship with its indigenous citizens. Like most Indian-directed legislation, it pretended to have the best interests of Native people at heart:

A concurrent resolution urging Congress to modify the Indian reservation system by vesting the states with the ability to engage in relations with Native American tribes and with the responsibility of developing plans to improve the failed Indian reservation system, advance and elevate the quality of life on Indian reservations, promote and increase literacy on Indian reservations, and help Indian reservations to achieve economic stability and independence.

The events in North Dakota, along the border of the Standing Rock reservation, on the Cheyenne River reservation, and in the Tohono O’odham homeland should worry non-Indians. Its is a short step from Indian Country to the “inner city,” and from there to suburbs and shopping malls. Native Americans are once again seeing the sweeping suspension of civil rights that happens when the government promotes the interests of the few over the objections of those it brands as alien, un-American, other. They know, perhaps better than the rest of us, that being Indian is just the beginning. Ask the Nisei, American citizens who, in the 1940s, found out they too were “Indians” and that they too could be herded into reservations “for the duration.”

Fracking in Indian County, North Dakota.