Re: <nettime> TREATY PEOPLE

Hi Brian, et al,

Such a vivid description of participation in direct action and protest; momentary freedom and intense emotion one feels when physically involved in such actions. I'm sorry about your family's house. The fire season is shifting wildly now, partly as the result of the massive drought...so more will unfortunately come.

Now with Deb Hallend in Biden's cabinet (Native American) as Secretary of the Interior, there may also be more hope for the resistence efforts.

Have traveled extensively in the Southwest, visited Reservations briefly outside Monument Valley some years ago which everyone should do because Pueblo cities were built during European "middle ages" and your sense of history will be quickly transformed by the presence of this unique architecture from the 13th c, long before Pilgrim landing or other "enunciatory" colonial acts.

Just returned from a trip to Death Valley, where tribal lands have been reclaimed (about 700,000 acres) by the Timbishi Shoshone. Curiously, desert towns are quickly turning to gated resorts as economic solutions to remote poverty, which in turn is boosting interest in "rural bandwidth" which is an ongoing reason for economic failure in rural areas.

Here are a bunch of related links:

https://mojaveproject.org/dispatches-item/how-the-timbisha-got-their-land-back/

http://mojaveproject.org/

https://artandcakela.com/2021/01/04/kim-stringfellow-the-mojave-project/

molly

molly hankwitz - she/her

http://bivoulab.org

On Sun, Jun 13, 2021 at 5:04 AM Andreas Broeckmann <ab@mikro.in-berlin.de> wrote:

hey brian, thanks for sending this moving report.

it strikes me that these Treaty People actually have treaties to refer
to which, if they were honoured, would create bearable situations -- in
comparison with so many other situations where there are only bad deals
or "contracts" that were rotten in the first place, or straightforward
robbery.

i found this reference to "what it means to be treaty people":

https://thevarsity.ca/2017/05/20/what-it-means-to-be-treaty-people/

regards,

-a

Am 12.06.21 um 20:03 schrieb Brian Holmes:
> The Mississippi River springs from innumerable lakes and wetlands in
> northern Minnesota, where the indigenous Ojibwe harvest wild rice. In an
> insane and suicidal world, what could be more beautiful than a rolling
> green protest camp full of activists chanting "Water is life"?
>
> We got up early last Monday and made our way to the previously secret
> location. It was a construction site: a pumping station along the route
> of the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline, which, if ever completed, would send
> almost a million barrels of Tar Sands crude every day to US refineries
> and Gulf Coast exporters. We were there to blockade, lock down on the
> equipment and ultimately get arrested by the police: civil disobedience
> by around two hundred people, with hundreds more in active support.
> Meanwhile another, even larger group was heading for peaceful and
> prayerful protest near Coffeepot Landing, at an Enbridge construction
> easement where the pipeline would cross beneath the nascent Mississippi,
> only a few yards wide at that point. Those folks are still there,
> camping on the easement, after the indigenous sheriff decided on
> conscience that he could not repress their action.
>
> I can tell you that it was blazing hot in the sun, that it was fabulous
> to lock arms with your neighbors and find out why they had come to stare
> down the cops, and that in a world condemned by speed and greed, there
> is no better use of your precious time than a pipeline protest to
> protect the rights of the people whom colonial capitalism has always
> tried to eliminate, in order to create the disaster that is now facing
> all of us.
>
> Jane Fonda spoke quite wonderfully while I sat in the shade of a
> bulldozer, but incomparably more inspiring were the voices of Winona
> LaDuke, from Honor the Earth, and Tara Houska, an indigenous lawyer and
> founder of the Giniw protest camp.
>
> When the fuzz finally came out in force, late in the afternoon, they
> were fast to invade and seal the pump station perimeter, but slow to
> extract the activists who had locked down on the machines. Those of us
> who were outside the gate at that moment formed a line and advanced
> right up to the noses of the cops, chanting for hours till the sun set
> with glorious colors and they finally came for all of us. The local
> jails were full by then, so we would only get citations. They zip tied
> our hands behind our backs and dragged us over to some bare bulldozed
> ground. As I went down in the dust, a cry rose up: "Who are we?"
> Everyone roared back with one voice: "Treaty People!"
>
> A protest action takes bodies and plans, concepts and visions. This
> action was exquisitely planned to reveal the water and wild rice at one
> site, the destructive equipment at another. The vision was clear: a
> restoral of indigenous life in the territory, coinciding with a drawdown
> of fossil-fuel infrastructure. And the concept was far-reaching.
>
> If we didn't know it already, we learned at the camp that the treaties
> made between native tribes and the early US state were "the supreme law
> of the land," enshrined in the Constitution, but honored only in the
> breach. Those treaties gave the tribes who signed them rights to hunt,
> fish, gather and carry out ceremonial activities on the treaty territory
> forever, even though indigenous ownership of the land would be
> restricted to much smaller reservations. Today those treaty rights must
> be extended to entire ecosystems, because resource extraction, overuse
> of water and relentless industrial pollution threaten every aspect of
> native lifeways.
>
> It takes two to make a treaty, and it takes two to uphold it. At the
> camp, indigenous leaders encouraged us to think, not only about them,
> their sufferings and their dreams, but about ourselves, who we are,
> where we came from and how we got to this place. As the descendants of
> European settlers, and/or as citizens of the United States, we have not
> only rights, but also unique and important treaty obligations. The
> colonial capitalist state is a traitor to its own law. Protest,
> political engagement and active solidarity have become ways that we, as
> individuals and groups, can begin fulfilling our part of the bargain.
>
> Who am I in the era of climate change? My ancestors came from the
> British isles and the Dalmatian coast. I was born in San Francisco,
> surrounded by an extraordinary natural environment. Yet today I live in
> a scorched world, whose probable destiny became so bitterly clear last
> year, when the California fires burned down the home that my family had
> built with our own hands. How much more terrible is this scorching
> feeling for young people in their twenties, who came in such large
> numbers to put their bodies on the line in Anishanaabe treaty territory
> in northern Minnesota? We shall have to spend the rest of our lives
> searching, not only for who we are, but for a world that we can live in.
> Neither of these things will be easy, though they may be intuitive for
> some. You cannot erase the past, but you can chose to inherit what still
> promises a future. In relation to the fragile and contested
> sovereignties of the Indigenous, we USians can strive to be Treaty People.
>
>
> ***
>
>
> Some links to find out more:
>
> https://www.stopline3.org <https://www.stopline3.org>
> https://welcomewaterprotectors.com <https://welcomewaterprotectors.com>
> https://twitter.com/GiniwCollective <https://twitter.com/GiniwCollective>
> https://unicornriot.ninja/2021/rising-up-to-the-heat-treaty-people-gathering-resists-line-3-pipeline
> <https://unicornriot.ninja/2021/rising-up-to-the-heat-treaty-people-gathering-resists-line-3-pipeline>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/climate/line-3-pipeline-protest-native-americans.html
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/climate/line-3-pipeline-protest-native-americans.html>
>
>
>
>
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