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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

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An update on #NoDAPL

From way down the lawn: the United States White House. The trees are full; and the sky is bright and clear. It must be summer.
Photo credit: Srikanta

“Elections have consequences.” That’s the Told Ya So of 2017: annoying and yet valid.

Among the consequences: the AP reports that the acting US Army Corp chief has authorized resumption of the Dakota Access Pipeline project. Construction is moving forward yet again, over the objections of the Standing Rock Tribe and coalitions like the Indigenous Environmental Network.

(A transnational pipeline expansion project, Keystone XL, will transport Canadian tar sands oil from Oh, Canada to Texas, Our Texas by way of Nebraska. The previous federal administration reviewed it for six years before failing to advance it.)

I’ve written about this energy construction project several times over the last six months. I’ve never been to South or North Dakota. I’m not part of the indigenous community, and I only started paying attention to climate change and energy politics a few years ago.

I still came to follow and care about the pipeline project and several of the Native communities who’ve mobilized against it because of its route through unceded Sioux land.

I’ll keep sharing updates on this pipeline until it’s stopped (ideal) or operational (increasingly more likely).

In the meantime, follow and help to fund the IEN, and take action with the Standing Rock community.

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Grassroots responses

A roadside billboard ad features Nestlé's Ice Mountain spring water bottling plant. Trees below the ad are orange and red.
Photo credit: 9 and 10 News, MI; © Heritage Broadcasting.

I teared up this morning watching a 30-second video of indigenous women singing at yesterday’s Women’s March.

Deborah Parker, a Tulalip Tribes organizer and policy analyst from Washington, explained to Pearce that she and the other indigenous women and men who had traveled from other nations had come together to “make sure that the indigenous woman’s voice is not forgotten.”

They’re concerned about water integrity, the sacredness of tribal territories, and the safety of women across this continent, and they have been organizing with several other tribes and nations to see those concerns addressed and resolved by the United States government.

A few years ago, Lakota organizer Matt Remle wrote about multi-nation grassroots coalitions that formed in Seattle to challenge a pro-colonization school curriculum and the observance of Columbus Day. They mobilized over several years, lobbying city council members, drafting resolutions, preparing alternative to current curricula, and insisting on the value of their own perspectives.

“We are simply part of a larger movement being fought on the local grassroots level,” Remle wrote, “to not only abolish Columbus Day, but see our communities rise up and assert our own voices on our own terms on issues of importance to us.

“We sought to show the power our communities possess when we come together unified under the belief and knowledge that what we do today is both work to heal past generations and lift the spirits of our future generations.”

I see a lot of people asking one another “what’s next” post-Women’s March. I had the same question for myself after the People’s Climate March three years ago. What has to be next each time is multi-issue, multi-demographic active solidarity. It doesn’t matter which issues we each start with, but the principle of the network of mutuality means that my individual zone of responsibility begins right where I’m standing and each issue and community I open up to eventually connects with others.

#NoDAPL + gross state neglect of human services in Flint, Michigan + corporate presumption + unchecked privatization = Nestlé hoping the State of Michigan will allow it to pay $200 per year so it can bottle 400 gallons of water per minute, and make billions in sales profits. Meanwhile, Flint still has no clean water supply.

Nestlé is essentially appropriating what is a common good for their personal corporate utility.” —Jeff Irwin, November 20, 2016

The public comment period on this proposal was extended from November 3, 2016 to March 3, 2017. This means a few more weeks for Michiganders to make it clear that Nestlé should not be able to pump water out of the ground, especially while some state residents remain thirsty.

What you can do

Submit a comment to MI’s Department of Environmental Quality by March 3: Email Carrie Monosmith at deq-eh@michigan.gov, or write to Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance, P.O. Box 30241, Lansing, Michigan 48909.

Materially support the work of the Indigenous Rise coalition: Donate through the Native Americans in Philanthropy website.

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The good news of solidarity

Part of my do list this week has been to develop materials for an organizational partner. When an organization is learning how to offer substantive support to LGBTQ employees and their families, it may need some guidance on identifying what “support” actually means.

Who defines the terms of support also matters: so much can go awry when programs grow without the input of the people designed to benefit from them. The organization is fortunate that its stakeholders are as engaged and receptive as they are. I hope it means that they’ll keep designing long-term solutions together.

What with network journalists soft-peddling the rise of overt White supremacist nationalism, and North Dakota police using hosed water in freezing temperatures as weapons against #NoDAPL water protectors, and Flint, MI, still being without clean municipal water, there are so many communities and causes to stand in solidarity with. And various traditions define solidarity in different ways.

M. Shawn Copeland notes that Baptist theologian Walter Rauschenbusch defined solidarity as cosmic relationship—”relationship with God and human persons”— expressed through mutual service. Indigenous activists define solidarity even more directly:

Accomplices aren’t motivated by personal guilt or shame, they may have their own agenda but they are explicit.
Accomplices are realized through mutual consent and build trust. They don’t just have our backs, they are at our side, or in their own spaces confronting and unsettling colonialism. As accomplices we are compelled to become accountable and responsible to each other[;] that is the nature of trust.

Don’t wait around for anyone to proclaim you to be an accomplice, you certainly cannot proclaim it yourself. You just are or you are not. The lines of oppression are already drawn.” (Accomplices not allies: Abolishing the ally industrial complex, May 4, 2014)

Solidarity has material implications, then. Whether we express it through service, through attention, through practical work, or through money, solidarity has to move from notions of agreement (or shared aggrievement) to actions that move matter. It’s visible, Copeland argues, and it has “cognitive, affective, effective, constitutive, and communicative dimensions. It has implications for how we think about or perceive one another and our common situation, how we feel, how we acknowledge the effects we cause, how we arrange or rearrange our environment, and how we present our situation in conversation with one another. Solidarity doesn’t require us all to be alike. It moves to act with others, to serve, and to heal regardless.

That’s the kind of relationship that so many vulnerable people are seeking now. So when we talk about solidarity, this is what we need to be able to offer others. It’s also what many of us need to receive.

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Take action: An update on #NODAPL

We can't live without water. We have alternatives to oil. We have alternatives to oil; we have no alternatives to water. —Kandi Moss, Indigenous Earth Network of Turtle Island #NoDAPLKandi Mossett of the Indigenous Earth Network shared a live update from Standing Rock today.

She describes the way the National Guard, police from five states, Energy Transfer Partners, and the Dakota Access corporation have corralled indigenous people in camps near DA Pipeline construction. And she calls for trans-ethnic solidarity.

[These states are] sending their police forces over here to protect an oil industry pipeline which is becoming obsolete before it’s even built.

The price of oil has dropped so low. The amount of oil that’s being pumped out of the Bakken Shale Formation is so low that this pipeline is becoming obsolete before it’s even constructed. There are charts; there are graphs that show that they may not even need this pipeline.

And so why they’re continuing to allow it is beyond me.

We don’t know where our president is. We don’t know where you are, Obama, but we could really use your help out here. We’re trying to protect the water for your children too.” —Kandi Mossett

Mossett’s update is 16 minutes long, and includes some graphic reports of violent policing. It is auto-captioned.

Mossett invites Native and non-Native people to journey to Standing Rock and stand with the Native people there.

She also encourages continuing donations to the Indigenous Environmental Network of Turtle Island‘s Indigenous Rising project and to Sacred Stone Camp. The costs of this disruption are significant and water protectors shouldn’t face them alone.

We need people to come because the Missouri River is right there, and we need people to help us to protect the Missouri River. For the 18 million people that are downstream, for the millions more that are downstream of [them], we need President Obama to demand a full environmental impact statement. We need the Department of Justice to come out here and see what’s happening to us. We need you to go to your Army Corps of Engineers offices and we need your help…

We never give up hope… Send your support any way you can.” —Kandi Mossett

Donate

Watch today’s update

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Get up to speed on #NODAPL

Native protesters walk toward construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. C. Northcutt took this photo.
Native protesters at Standing Rock. Photo credit: C. Northcutt via the BBC.

Last summer, Peterson Toscano’s Climate Stew podcast included segments imagining major turning points in environmental justice.

Each of these segments featured ordinary people moved to act and the determined grassroots activism they developed to mobilize others and create change on energy or climate policy.

“On This Day In Climate History” will one day need to include this year’s Native protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline Project. Energy Access Partners, the company that the US government has so far allowed to build this pipeline, plans to track it across Native treaty lands and four states, Illinois, Iowa, South Dakota, and North Dakota.

They do not have Native consent.

Thousands of people from more than 100 Native tribes have converged on Standing Rock Sioux land [South Dakota] to pray, protest, and physically block construction of the pipeline. Today, after pipeline builders destroyed Sioux burial grounds and a private security firm attacked protesters, a court order has halted construction around the grounds, but construction continues elsewhere. A full hearing is scheduled for September 9.

Check out these sources to get up to speed.

Follow Lakota artist Frank Waln: “What’s happening in Standing Rock has been happening for 500+ yrs in the US. Settler colonialism & Native genocide are ongoing.” #NoDAPL

Read his September 6 thread.

Follow Chelsea Vowel: “In what universe is it acceptable to bulldoze up the bones of people’s relatives? Seriously?
Oh right. In a white supremacist one… Indigenous dispossession is ONGOING and has never stopped since Contact.”

Read her September 5 thread.

Read Bill McKibben: “The fight for environmental sanity—against pipelines and coal ports and other fossil-fuel infrastructure—has increasingly been led by Native Americans, many of whom are in that Dakota camp today. They speak with real authority—no one else has lived on this continent for the longterm. They see the nation’s history more clearly than anyone else, and its possible future as well. For once, after all these centuries, it’s time to look through their eyes. History offers us no chances to completely erase our mistakes. Occasionally, though, we do get a chance to show we learned something.” (New Yorker)

Dig into DeSmogBlog’s investigations since last February: “Will the proposed Dakota Access pipeline — which faces stiff opposition from conservatives and liberals alike for its risks to property rights, prized agricultural lands and the environment — become a political hot potato in the 2016 election cycle? Neither the Trump nor Clinton campaigns have weighed in directly about Dakota Access.”

Articles from international services like the AP, the UK’s The Independent and the BBC, and popular sites like Heavy are adding much-needed external attention to the pipeline project and the protests, which have been going on for months.

Finally, support the protest materially: Sacred Stone Camp still needs supplies and you can contribute.