Archive for category: #Decolonial #Indigenous

Rebellion is not revolution. Rebellion might lead to revolution but if we are to have real change, we must understand the difference.

So often we see stories about societal collapse but few of them tell us what we can do about the coming collapse. This tells me that most doomsayer commentators are not seeking out long range solutions.

A lot can be learned by creating organizations and projects that try to help all of us survive this collapse. Perhaps they have not been involved in the hundreds of movements that have cropped up since the ‘60’s, where the participants learned what worked and what didn’t work in movement building.

Many did not know the difference between rebellion and revolution. Commentators called the massive rebellion in Tahir Square in Cairo, a revolution. But it was a rebellion and most rebellions, often sparked by a single event captured on Social Media, don’t survive, and the authoritarian systems that created the conditions that cause the rebellion remains intact. Why is that?

Because the rebellion was not rooted in a clear understanding of the system that created the conditions that led oppression, globalized Capitalism, with its destructive values. As a result, those involved in direct actions and other forms of rebellion relied on a capitalist owned app, Facebook, to do their organizing. 

They didn’t follow the new autonomous, horizontally led movements like the Zapatistas or the Kurdish movement in Rojava, both based on values that differ from capitalist values. 

Doomsday theorists have not created the institutions or organizations that give people the agency and vision to help them to decolonize their thinking and divorce it from Capitalist Values. 

Yes, there was a huge Uprising/Rebellion, but not a Revolution. Revolutions cannot be built or organized in weeks or months. They can take years, decades even. And successful revolutions, like the Zapatistas and Rojava, have managed to survive and grow because they created the Dual Power institutions, values, and organizations needed to keep from being defeated.

I attended a Dual Power Conference in the Indiana Dunes National Park, where around 200 people from around North America gathered to talk, meet and think about how we can survive this looming social and climate crisis.

And not just survive, but create a new society based on non-Capitalist Values.

I presented a workshop called ‘The Revolution Will Be Indigenized; How Indigenous Values Can Transform our Movements’.

Thirty-four people, White, Black, Asian, Indigenous, Latinx, LGBTQ+ and mixed race people came and listened to learn. I made it clear that all of us, including myself, were raised under Capitalist Values and still carried varying degrees of Capitalist values like Individualism, Competition, and Greed. Most of these values are unconscious and often cause conflicts which split and destroy movements. 

I presented the alternative — ancient, value systems of Indigenous people the world over. In most of human history, Indigenous people lived in harmony with the Natural World and based their values on what worked best in those Paleolithic times. But the recent rise of Capitalist systems based on unsustainable, inharmonious and exploitative values is leading to environmental and social collapse.

I was somewhat surprised that, so many came to hear my presentation.

But I realized that the group I co-founded, Cooperation Tulsa, had many followers on Twitter and other social media. Many people knew about our work and wanted to know how we managed to survive and grow in the Red State of Oklahoma.

We created a garden for the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

People are desperate to find out why our supposedly great Capitalist society is not working, except for Billionaires and the Military Industrial Complex.

Why the Climate Crisis is killing thousands and ultimately millions through fires, extreme flooding and extraordinary heat waves in the US and around the world.

And why do we keep burning fossil fuels, like coal, gas and petroleum, which we know causes the Greenhouse Effect?

Basically, we need to put out the word that people around the country and the world are working hard to organize a new system that replaces Capitalism.

A system based on better, more sustainable values like Cooperation, Community and an Ecologically based Solidarity economy. The Kurds in Rojava and the Zapatistas in Mexico share these values, which are the only values that will allow us to survive and hopefully reverse the Climate Crisis.

But most writers and commentators on the internet do not investigate these movements or groups like our Cooperation Tulsa, who have clear Indigenous values that guide our work and long range vision.

This one-sided view encourages isolation, fear, and paralysis. They need to stop being just keyboard warriors or Doomsayers and join or create groups that are making these real grassroots changes like community gardens, MakerSpaces, Mutual Aid and solutions for the Unhoused.

Cooperation Tulsa’s MakerSpace

Here is a list of groups and thinkers that they could start with: symbiosis-revolution.org; Cooperation Jackson; Cooperation Tulsa; the Zapatistas and Rojava, Murray Bookchin, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, John Mohawk and Eleanor Finley’s writings.

And even my writings on Medium.

Actions based on Indigenous/Communalist values create real changes and inspire hope among our young people.

Their energy and creative ideas need to be put out there for all to see.

Their work and commitment is what we need to make this new ‘radical revolution of values’, as Martin Luther King, Jr. called for, in his speech, Beyond Vietnam.

As the Indigenous leader, John Trudell said: “The future is not something we enter — It is something we create”

So let’s get on with it.

Roberto Mendoza

Roberto Mendoza is a Native American/Chicano artist, screenwriter, filmmaker, writer, and revolutionary.

Black Seminoles in the U.S. have long struggled against erasure and exclusion. Now, a recent reunion in Florida offers momentum for progress.

The post Marxism for the Age of Climate Emergency appeared first on Spectre Journal.

On Monday, the Biden administration officially announced it will approve the largest oil drilling operation proposed for federal lands in decades: the Willow project in Alaska’s North Slope. While the administrated opted to approve a reduced plan of three well pads, rather than ConocoPhillips’s original five, three pads could amount to up to 199 total wells, and the well pad reduction will only reduce the project’s estimated emissions by around 8 percent. Though pitched as a response to today’s energy security, the project is not slated to begin production until 2029. 

At its peak, the Willow project is expected to produce 180,000 barrels of oil per day and 600 billion barrels of oil total over its projected 30-year lifespan, all while releasing emissions equivalent to a third of the U.S. fleet of coal-fired power plants. The Arctic environment around it, meanwhile, has warmed four times as fast as the rest of the planet since 1979. Looking to soften the blow, the administration separately announced it will declare 13 million acres within Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve off limits to new drilling. 

The Willow project’s supporters have sought to frame opposition to the plan as coming solely from out-of-touch radicals. “The president and his team talk often about racial justice, racial equity, environmental justice—the vast majority of the native people in Alaska support this project,” Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan said last week at a major oil and gas conference in Houston, CERAWeek. “And what they’re starting to say is, these lower 48 environmental groups who are now doing this big campaign against Willow are undertaking really the second wave of colonialism. This is from our native leaders: eco-colonialism.” Asked afterward to clarify which indigenous communities he was referring to, Sullivan said “all of them.” 

The Willow project has indeed enjoyed support from many indigenous governments and groups in Alaska. Half of lease revenues from sales in the Arctic go to a special grant program that disperses money to North Slope communities, which are majority indigenous, “to help mitigate significantly adverse impacts related to oil and gas development.” The Willow project approval was welcomed by the North Slope Borough that encompasses the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska; elected leaders in the Iñupiat Community of the Arctic Slope, or ICAS; as well as the for-profit Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, which was formed by federal statute to allow Iñupiat shareholders to oversee and invest revenue from the state’s land and natural resources. In a joint statement on Monday, the Alaska Federation of Natives—the largest statewide Native organization—supported Willow and said that the project “bolsters U.S. energy security at an important time when we are trying to raise the urgency of investing in critical needs arising because of Russia’s aggression.”

Local support for the Willow project is hardly unanimous, though. Rosemary Ahtuangaruak—mayor of the 525-person city closest to the Willow project, Nuiqsut—has been an outspoken critic. “Our people feed their families with traditional subsistence activities like fishing and hunting caribou, moose, birds, and more,” she wrote last November. “The Willow project’s massive infrastructure would bulldoze straight through these crucial habitats, redirecting the animal’s migratory paths, moving them away from nearby villages, and endangering the food security of local people. That’s not to mention the damage from exposure to air and water pollution that we face.”

“Not only a complete betrayal of his commitments to confront the climate crisis but is also an open violation of Indigenous rights.”

The group Sovereign Iñupiat for a Living Arctic condemned the Biden administration’s approval of the project, calling it “a great disappointment” that “comes after years of grassroots, Iñupiaq-led opposition,” and represents “the continued prioritization of profit over climate and people.” The Indigenous Environmental Network has called the project “ the next U.S. climate bomb,” adding that the White House’s decision constitutes “not only a complete betrayal of his commitments to confront the climate crisis but is also an open violation of Indigenous rights. It doesn’t matter what other ‘Arctic Protections; this administration puts in place, the ecological & spiritual damage wrought by this project cannot be offset nor supplanted.” 

After the administration’s decision was announced this week, Sullivan hauled out the same talking point he had used earlier, and commended Alaska Natives in the North Slope for persevering “even as far-left, Lower 48, eco-colonialist NGOs continued their efforts to silence Alaska Native voices.” ConocoPhillips is one of Sullivan’s top donors. He has received nearly $50,000 from the company’s PAC and its employees—most donating considerable sums—since his inaugural 2014 Senate campaign. Sullivan’s top donor overall is the billionaire-funded conservative anti-tax group Club for Growth. 

ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance has used similar talking points. Approving the Willow project, he said Monday, “fits within the Biden administration’s priorities on environmental and social justice.” Praising the White House’s decision, Murkowski called Willow “meticulously-planned, socially-just, and environmentally-sound.” ConocoPhillips is Murkowski’s top corporate campaign donor, having furnished her campaigns with more than $140,000 since 2003.  

The intention of Seventh Generation thinking, as I see it, is to better relationalize our world – as in recognizing and pouring life into the organic links that connect everything to everything. The intention of longtermism, on the other hand…. Well, I really wonder.

As many Native Americans on Monday marked the 50th anniversary of the militant occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, participants in the 1973 uprising and other activists linked the deadly revolt to modern-day Indigenous resistance, from Standing Rock to the #LandBack movement.

On February 27, 1973 around 300 Oglala Lakota and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), seething from centuries of injustices ranging from genocide to leniency for whites who committed crimes against Indians, occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation for more than two months. The uprising occurred during a period of increased Native American militancy and the rise of AIM, which first drew international attention in 1969 with the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.

“The Native people of this land after Wounded Knee, they had like a surge of new pride in being Native people,” Dwain Camp, an 85-year-old Ponca elder who took part in the 1973 revolt, told The Associated Press.

“Anything that goes on, anything we do, even today with the #LandBack issue, all of that is just a continuation.”

Camp said the occupation drove previously “unimaginable” changes, including the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, the Indian Child Welfare Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.

“After we left Wounded Knee, it became paramount that protecting Mother Earth was our foremost issue,” he explained. “Since that period of time, we’ve learned that we’ve got to teach our kids our true history.”

Camp said the spirit of Wounded Knee lives on in Indigenous resistance today.

u201cThe AIM occupation of 1973 endures in a new generation of Native activists at Standing Rock and other protests https://t.co/O0KZn7KF9Ju201d

— ICT (@ICT)
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“We’re not the subjugated and disenfranchised people that we were,” he said. “Wounded Knee was an important beginning of that. And because we’re a resilient people, it’s something we take a lot of pride in.”

Some of the participants in the 1973 uprising had been raised by grandparents who remembered or even survived the 1890 massacre of more than 200 Lakota Lakota men, women, and children by U.S. troops at Wounded Knee.

“That’s how close we are to our history,” Madonna Thunder Hawk, an 83-year-old elder in the Oohenumpa band of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe who was a frontline participant in the 1973 occupation, told Indian Country Today. “So anything that goes on, anything we do, even today with the #LandBack issue, all of that is just a continuation. It’s nothing new.”

u201cu201cWhat the American Indian Movement taught me was that everyone was in the movement,u201d said Madonna Thunder Hawk, Wounded Knee veteran. On the 50th anniversary of Wounded Knee, she explained that AIM was about children, elders, and families.u201d

— Nick Estes (@Nick Estes)
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Nick Tilsen, an Oglala Lakota who played a prominent role in the 2016-17 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, North Dakota and who founded the NDN Collective, told Indian Country Today that “for me, it’s important to acknowledge the generation before us—to acknowledge their risk.”

“It’s important for us to honor them,” said Tilsen, whose parents met at the Wounded Knee occupation. “It’s important for us to thank them.”

Akim Reinhardt, an associate professor of history at Townson State University in Baltimore, told Indian Country Today that the AIM protests “helped establish a sense of the permanence of Red Power in much the way that Black Power had for African-Americans, a permanent legacy.”

“It was the cultural legacy that racism isn’t okay and people don’t need to be quiet and accept it anymore,” he added. “That it’s okay to be proud of who you are.”

u201cLeading up to the 50 Year Anniversary of Wounded Knee hear a testimony from Lakota People’s Law Project Community Organizer and (AIM) leader Madonna Thunder Hawk, and Russell Means, in this PBS video clip.nn#AmericanIndianMovement #WoundedKnee #MadonnaThunderHawk #RussellMeansu201d

— Lakota Law Project (@Lakota Law Project)
1677085745

Indian Country Today reports:

The occupation began on the night of Feb. 27, 1973, when a group of warriors led by Oklahoma AIM leader Carter Camp, Ponca, moved into the small town of Wounded Knee. They took over the trading post and established a base of operations along with AIM leaders Russell Means, Oglala Lakota; Dennis Banks, Ojibwe; and Clyde Bellecourt, White Earth Nation.

Within days, hundreds of activists had joined them for what became a 71-day standoff with the U.S. government and other law enforcement.

u201cBuddy Lamontu2019s family marches to remember their slain relative. A federal sniper shot and killed Lamont on April 27, 1973, during a ceasefire. The bullet pierced his heart. Lamont was a Vietnam veteran, killed by the US government.u201d

— Nick Estes (@Nick Estes)
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Black activist Ray Robinson, who had been working with the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization, went missing during the standoff. In 2014, the FBI confirmed that Robinson died at Wounded Knee, but his body was never recovered.

AIM remains active today. Its members have participated in the fights against the Dakota Access, Keystone XL, and Line 3 pipelines, as well as in the effort to free Leonard Peltier, a former AIM leader who has been imprisoned for over 45 years after a dubious conviction for murdering two FBI agents during a separate 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Kevin McKiernan, then a rookie reporter for NPR who was smuggled into Wounded Knee after the Nixon administration banned journalists from covering the standoff, said in an interview with NPR that the #LandBack movement—spearheaded in the U.S. by NDN Collective—is a leading example of the occupation’s legacy.

u201c#OtD 26 Feb 1860 the Wiyot massacre took place when white settlers murdered up to 250 Indigenous Wiyot people at Tuluwat, California, then expelled them from their land. But they and their descendants kept fighting and by 2019 got back most of their land https://t.co/YomPDwMR39u201d

— Working Class History (@Working Class History)
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“And I think that there is a collective or a movement like that on every reservation with every tribe,” McKiernan said. “They’re going to get back, to buy back, to get donated—just do it by inches.”

“That’s what’s going on in every inch of Indian country today,” he added.

Minneapolis, MN – East Phillips residents and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) started an occupation of the Roof Depot site in the early hours of Tuesday morning in resistance to the city’s plan to demolish the site which sits atop decades of arsenic contamination. Demands include an end to the demolition plan, no more additional polluting facilities and an end to evictions of encampments.

In the “arsenic triangle” in the most diverse neighborhood in Minnesota, the Roof Depot site is set for demolition next week against the wishes of many in the community who are fearful of the toxic impacts on their health and the health of future generations.

A tipi was erected in the morning, along with over a dozen tents and a sacred fire. In the morning, Unicorn Riot livestreamed the beginning of the occupation as well as an afternoon press conference.

Watch the press conference that took place at 1 p.m. at 27th Street and Longfellow Avenue below.

An ‘Arsenic Plume Rests Beneath The Surface’ of the Upcoming Roof Depot Demolition

Minneapolis March Connects Roof Depot Demolition Resistance to the Atlanta Forest

A press release from Defend the Depot said the community is demanding the city officials cancel the demolition and made seven specific demands. They also provided a brief history of the past century of heavy pollution on East Phillips, where the Roof Depot EPA Superfund site exists.

“For generations, East Phillips, a neighborhood of over 70% residents of color and home to the majority Indigenous Little Earth housing development, has been treated as an environmental sacrifice zone. For the last century, East Phillips has been zoned for heavy industrial pollution. According to US EPA data, the area within a one-mile radius of the Roof Depot site ranks nationally in the 89th percentile for diesel particulate matter, the 99th percentile for Superfund Proximity, and the 96th percentile for hazardous waste proximity.”

Press release from Defend the Depot – Feb. 21, 2023

The list of demands includes an end to encampment evictions and the creation of a new ‘navigation center’ for the unhoused people to access support, referrals, and resources:

• Total relocation of the Hiawatha Expansion Project
• Hand over control of Roof Depot site to the community
• Plans to remove of Bituminous Roadways and Smith Foundry [Bituminous Roadways and the Smith Foundry are sources of legacy contamination near to the Roof Depot]
• Enact a moratorium on encampment evictions [According to a Wilder Foundation Study Indigenous people make up 1% of Minnesota’s adult population, but a disproportionate 13% of the houseless population. A survey of a large encampment in Minneapolis in 2020 found that nearly half of the 282 people living there were Native.]
• Provide funding for peer support workers
• Invest in pilot programs to provide shelter and services to the houseless community like the former navigation center
• Provide funding for the community’s vision for an indoor urban farm at the Roof Depot site

“The area around the Roof Depot warehouse is a former Superfund site, and the Depot building itself sits atop a reservoir of legacy arsenic contamination. Public health and environmental experts have spoken out about the risks of demolishing the building and exposing arsenic beneath the site and releasing it into the community. The city’s own Environmental Assessment Worksheet (EAW) acknowledges the risk of “fugitive” dust, which experts say will likely contain arsenic and other contaminants, but the city declined to carry out more intensive environmental studies and has delivered no information about protection plans to those living near the demolition site.“

Press release from Defend the Depot – Feb. 21, 2023

Read the press release in full below.

“I appreciate everybody that has come out here to fight for our people. We can’t stand any more pollution. You know, our kids are sick, our elders are sick, and, we can’t do this, we’re gonna fight, so I hope you’re seeing this, Mayor Frey.” – Nicole Perez pic.twitter.com/5IUxTrCMlU

— UNICORN RIOT mastodon.social/@UnicornRiot (@UR_Ninja) February 21, 2023

On Sunday, a protest at the Roof Depot site brough together the resistance against the planned ‘Cop City’ in the Atlanta Forest and the East Phillips struggle against the Roof Depot demolition. At the action, AIM member Rachel Thunder told people to be expecting actions at the site and that “you’re gonna know in our words and our thoughts and our prayers and our songs, that we’re not gonna back down. We’re gonna make a stand here.”

During Sunday’s protest we heard from Cassie Holmes, an East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI) board member, about some of the history of the East Phillips community dealing with the Roof Depot site over the last several years.

In late January, the Minneapolis City Council voted 7-6 that the site was to be demolished. Unicorn Riot has been covering this story for several months, documenting protests and city hall meetings.

Daniel Schmidt, an organizer with the EPNI’s Communications Team, provides insight on the history of environmental racism in Minneapolis, including the origin of the arsenic plume that lays dormant underneath the East Phillips Roof Depot site.

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The post Indigenous-Led Occupation Begins at Roof Depot Site Demanding City Call Off Demolition appeared first on UNICORN RIOT.

Tribal leaders in Lac du Flambeau said they were asserting sovereignty in demanding long overdue payment for roads used by non-Native residents, who are now unable to drive home.