The Amazon has
over half of the planet’s remaining rainforest habitat and is home to
more plants and animals than any other land region on Earth. Indigenous people in the Amazon forest live in a way that preserves and regenerates the resources they use. Unlike people in other cultures, they do not exploit plants and animals in this ecologically diverse region where they live.
In the last 40 years, industrial development, large scale agriculture and encroachment of western ideas and ways of doing things have destroyed 20% of the Amazon. In Peru over 75% of its Amazonian territory is now in the hands of oil companies.
In this video, a group of Shipibo healers share what the Earth represents to them, and why it's so important that we stand with them in protecting the Amazon.
Great article from Imara Jones at Colorlines today for those of us trying to raise up impacts of our colonial ancestry:
Much hullabaloo has been made recently about slavery as entertainment in movies like “Django Unchained.” But lost in the discussion is slavery as history, and the simple fact that it was an economic system which seized the economic know-how of Africans in order to construct unimaginable wealth in North America, Europe and throughout the Western Hemisphere. Wealth from the slave trade took Western Europe from being one of the world’s poorest regions to its wealthiest and most powerful in under a century.
Though sadistic and macabre, the plain truth is that slavery was an unprecedented economic juggernaut whose impact is still lived by each of us daily. Consequently, here’s my top-10 list of things everyone should know about the economic roots of slavery.
I might also point out that the Idle No More movement is helping descendants of European colonials in Canada to discover untold, untaught history about oppression of First Nations citizens. I could really identify with some of the comments in this excellent OpEd by Heather Mallick yesterday in the Toronto Star, in particular her discovery of how oppressed peoples become invisible in the eyes of the privileged groups:
Most of Canada’s native people live in a misery we don’t even see
because we’d rather not know. It’s one of the many drawbacks of living
on the reserve, far away from the southern cities that Canadians cling
to. There’s no one to hear you scream, as the Irish writer Edna O’Brien
once said about rural child abuse in her own country.
If you don’t like Indians getting uppity, try this. Look at the
gorgeous, hopeful faces of their children, who don’t yet know they’re
headed for a life of blank despair thanks to our idleness.
But we don’t look because we don’t have to. They don’t live where we
do. We don’t consider them until they block our passage on road and rail
and then we just spray them with the same idle anger we show to other
drivers, cyclists and people not inside our own little vehicle.
I found this great article from Steven Newcomb the other day. I think it's an important one because he talks about how "patterns of racist and dehumanizing reasoning from the distant past continue to colonize and dominate the present". Anyone who cares about racial justice eventually has to locate and study patterns of oppression in their own being, ancestry and their own nation. The case that Newcomb refers to is interesting reading as well because it links early history of the United States and Canada to Indigenous rights issues in both nations today.
Obviously, there are many issues that the Original Nations and Peoples of Turtle Island in that region of the continent are attempting to address with the Canadian government. These range from the hundreds of murdered and missing Aboriginal women in British Columbia, and the Keystone XL Pipeline, as well as the exploitation of Indigenous peoples and territories, not to mention the extinguishment process that is being wrongly called a “treaty process” in British Columbia, the thousands of Indian children who continue to be put into the culturally assimilating milieu of non-Indian foster care.
In my view, however, all these pressing issues are the direct result of the history of dehumanization that the Original Nations and Peoples of Turtle Island have been subjected to for many centuries. I am fascinated with the conceptual roots of the existing idea-system that has been and continues to be used against the Original Nations and Peoples of the vast geographical region now called Canada.
That a leader of one of the Original Peoples of Turtle Island feels it necessary to go on a hunger strike for twenty days in an effort to win a meeting with Canada’s Prime Minister is, in my view, evidence of the phenomenon of dehumanization and disrespect.
An interesting view on Idle No More from Winona LaDuke:
“Idle No More” is Canadian for: “That’s Enough BS. We’re Coming Out to Stop You.”
Canada often touts a sort of “ better than thou” human rights position in the international arena. And it has, for instance, a rather small military, so it’s not likely to launch any pre-emptive strikes against known or unknown adversaries. And it has often sought to appear as a good guy, more so than it’s southern neighbor. More than a few American ex patriots moved to Canada during the Vietnam war, and stayed there, thinking it was a pretty good deal.
That attitude is sort of passe, particularly if you are a Native person. And, particularly if you are Chief Theresa Spence.
Okay, here's the link of the day for Raising Cain: a great Idle No More article by Harsha Walia at rabble.ca...I have also linked Blatchford's full article in the "related posts" section below the clip...
In her most recent piece, Blatchford has the audacity to refer to Chief Spence's action as "one of intimidation, if not terrorism." I am reminded of the words of Martin Luther King, "We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to surface the hidden tension that is already alive." Blatchford provokes further, "there is I think a genuine question as to whether there's enough of Aboriginal Culture that has survived." Wrong, Blatchford. Indigenous peoples, cultures and nations have survived and thrived despite genocide -- despite a long, shameful and racist history of residential schools, forced sterilization, small pox and germ warfare, the breaking of treaties, legislative control including through the Gradual Civilization Act and the Indian Act, forced dispossession from lands and relocation to reservations, outlawing of ceremonies such as the potlatch and traditional activities such as fishing and hunting, and much more.
Attawapiskat First Nation Chief Therese Spence is now on her 16th day of a hunger strike. Spence says her strike is ultimately about respect: for treaties and for aboriginal peoples. As such she thinks she deserves a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Harper, as well as the Queen's representative in Canada. Here's an interview she gave on December 21st, 2012:
I found lots of exciting ideas in this artile from Catalyst Project. They have developed a grassroots toolkit to help people take some of these ideas into their communities:
Catalyst Project believes we need to create a new world, where all people are free from all forms of oppression and are able to live in sustainable relationship with the earth. We envision a world based on global justice where everyone has housing, income, water and food, relevant education and healthcare. Creating this type of material change is no small order and will require a fundamental transformation of power on a global scale. It will require vibrant, massive, multiracial social movements that unite the 99% around the world, and build power at the grassroots. Another way to say this is we want global revolution that liberates all people from oppression.
Really interesting article about the links of our modern food system to plantations and slavery, and how some folks are working to change that system:
If, back in the 18th century, you could see all the way across the Atlantic, you would find an unbroken line of plantations that stretched from Buenos Aires to Baltimore. Down this entire line, slaves harvested sugar for British tea, rice for the West Indian consumption, and cotton for the textile mills of New England. These were vast monocrops that broke the body and ruined the soil—but made money for planters and big companies that traded the goods.
Here, you see the logic of the modern industrial food system in its rawest form—a logic of prioritizing profit over human and environmental welfare. A lot has changed in the 400 years since the Elmina Fort was built, but this principle has not gone away. The logic of the plantation is the logic of today's industrial food system.
Jeff Biggers writes a lot about environmental justice issues related to coal mining, but he also has ties to Arizona and has been contributing a lot of articles for the past couple of years. Here's one on resistance efforts in Latino communities to SB 1070 and its impacts...
With defiant Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer growing more emboldened as the Supreme Court readies to unveil its ruling on the state's SB 1070 "papers, please" immigration law, Arizona human rights group Puente and their national allies are bolstering their "Barrio Defense Committees," as "neighbors link with neighbors to learn their rights and make collective plans to defend themselves."
They are also asking their fellow Arizona neighbors and politicians to take a stand.
"Within Arizona we're ready to pose the question to every individual and institution, police department and school district, what side are you on?" Puente executive director Carlos Garcia wrote in an email. "SB 1070 can only function if individuals allow undocumented people to be singled out, if school districts allow their security guards to double as immigration agents, if businesses refuse to offer us safe haven, and ultimately if Obama's administration agrees to deport whoever Arpaio turns over to ICE."
I really liked Joe's presentation because it connects some dots between sound bytes in the "war on women" and the larger systemic ground of patriarchy in which it is being waged:
