For native people wherever they live, the
land is home to the spirit; the two are
inseparable. So the Dine Navajo elders have
refused to leave their native lands in
Arizona, even though they are being virtually
starved out by the cruel policies of the
American government to enable Peabody Coal to
expand its operations. In the Dine language,
there is no word for relocation.
By
contrast, we white Americans seem to think
life is a freeway. We move across this vast
continent like nomads, restlessly pursuing
the ever-vanishing future as if it were a pot
of gold to be found at the foot of the
rainbow. We have tried to compensate for the
eerie instability of our disembodied lives by
investing in uniformity, as if by finding a
Macdonald's and a Walmart wherever we go, we
will know that we are still "at home." No
wonder one of the great realizations of the
contemporary ecology movement has been the
importance of place.
What
we could learn from the Indians! And indeed,
if we don't learn it soon, our planet will be
destroyed. In All Our Relations, Winona
LaDuke shows how the tentacles of industrial
civilization have extended to the far reaches
of the wilderness, threatening bigger and
better disruption of natural ecosystem, and
continuing devastation to the lives of "the
People".
Far
away in the Arctic circle, PCBs are found in
the breast milk of mothers who pick it up in
the fatty seal meat that is a principal part
of their diets. Up along the St. Lawrence
River, Hydro Quebec has rearranged rivers and
flooded forests, killing thousands of
caribou, to produce electrical power for the
Eastern seaboard, at indecently low rates to
the corporation. Far far away in
Newfoundland, Voisey's Bay Nickel Company is
turning over acres of wilderness to mine
metals; when they have taken all they can
find, they will leave behind a toxic
wasteland. And far south in the empty deserts
of Nevada, an enormous nuclear waste dump has
been planned.
It
makes sense, doesn't it? You wouldn't bury
your plutonium in Seattle or New York or DC.
And we "need" more electricity for those
urban centers, while here's just a few
people, a few Indian tribes, living along the
St. Lawrence river! Just surplus population,
insignificant, dispensable. Far more
important are the busy commercial centers of
the American Northeast! And where are you
going to test chemical and biological
warfare, if not in the wide open spaces of
Utah?
Yet
it doesn't sit well, not really. We had
thought the wilderness was inviolate. When we
stand on the shores of the Pacific ocean, we
cannot imagine that this vast sea can ever be
disturbed, much less polluted, by the hands
of tiny little men. With soda cans lying on
the top of Mt. Everest and junk circling
outer space, we have burst the dimensions of
what we had held to be sacred. It's all up
for grabs.
But
the native people have not given up. La
Duke's book chronicles not only the horror of
what Americans are doing and have done, but
the strength and courage of the resistance.
And often it is the native women who
lead.
In
Nevada, the government was tempting the
Paiutes with cash grants in order to use
their land for its Monitored Retrievable
Storage (MRS) program to dispose of
radioactive wastes, until Grace Thorpe went
to the library and found out what it was all
about. She started educating members of local
tribes and formed an organization called
NECONA, the National Environmental Coalition
of Native Americans, to stop the deal. They
were successful. In 1996, Congress withdrew
funding from the MRS; by 1998, all but two
tribes had removed themselves from the
program.
In
Montana, Gail Small has been fighting coal
strip-mining for fifteen years. In arid
regions like the tribal lands of the Northern
Cheyenne, the damage from such mining is
irreparable. In 1973, Small and the Northern
Cheyenne found numerous violations in federal
leasing procedures and managed to stop the
mining through the courts. Other tribes
followed suit. "I wish I could tell you that
we have a happy ending," Small told LaDuke;
"the battle is still waging because the
Cheyenne coal is now even more valuable." But
they keep on fighting. It's "the profound
spiritual dimension to our natural
environment" that inspires the struggle, she
said, "without it, the war would not be worth
fighting."
The
victories of the tribes are impressive,
especially in view of their numbers and the
immensity of the threat. "You are more likely
to find us meeting in a local community
center, outside camping, or in someone's
house than at a convention center or at a
$1,000-per-plate fundraiser," LaDuke writes.
And the power of the opposition is
immense.
According
to the Worldwatch Institute, 317 reservations
in the United States are threatened by
environmental hazards. And there aren't that
many tribes left. Only 700 Native nations
remain on the North American continent. Since
the arrival of the white men, "over 2,000
nations of Indigenous peoples have gone
extinct in the western hemisphere," LaDuke
writes.
In
White Earth, located in Northern Minnesota,
where LaDuke's people the Anishinaabeg live,
the forests are threatened. In 1995, "high
winds exacerbated by the clearcuts flattened
over 100,000 acres of trees on the
reservation." In the Dakotas, it's the
buffalo. There Rosalie Little Thunder, a
Lakota grandmother, has been fighting against
the continuing slaughter of the herd in
blatant disregard of laws to protect them. In
the Florida Everglades, the panther is in
danger of extinction. In every case, these
natural resources are the foundation of the
Native way of life. In Hawaii, where the
American military overthrew the Native
government in 1893, 6 million tourists a year
have made the islands the "endangered species
capital" of the nation, with 31 federal
hazardous waste sites &endash;&endash; more
than any other US state.
It's
a horrendous, horrifying story, relieved only
by the triumphant victories of tribes who
won't give up and individuals like LaDuke
herself, who have dedicated their lives to
holding the line against environmental
destruction. Her well-documented study of the
threats the Indians face in region after
region across the country demonstrates
clearly how the extermination of a people's
natural surroundings -- "all our relations"
-- robs them of their livelihoods. The
tremendous sacrifices borne by the Native
people should be a warning to industrialized
nations everywhere, if only they would hear
it. We cannot survive in a cement-and-plastic
bubble. We could do with a whole lot less
electricity, but we cannot survive without
the earth.
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