Bill McKibben in Grist: After 525 years, it’s time to actually listen to Native Americans

Joe CatronBill McKibben, Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College in Vermont, a founder of 350.org (which co-sponsored a rally at the U.S. District Courthouse in Washington, D.C. held in solidarity with the indigenous resistance against DAPL, the Dakota Access Pipeline), and a member of Grist’s board of directors, has published an article at Grist, which begins:

The center of the fight for our planet’s future shifts. But this week it’s on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation straddling the border between North Dakota and South Dakota. There, tribal members have been, well, standing like a rock in the way of the planned Dakota Access Pipeline, a huge hose for collecting oil out of the Bakken shale and carrying it off to the Midwest and the Gulf where it can be made into gasoline.

The standoff has been picturesque and dramatic, featuring American Indians on horseback. But mostly it’s been brave and lonely, far from most journalists and up against the same forces that have made life hard for Indigenous Peoples for centuries.

The U.S. Army, for instance. It’s the Army Corps of Engineers that last month granted Energy Transfer Corporation the permit necessary to start construction near the reservation, despite a petition signed by 150,000 people, and carried—on foot—by young people from the reservation all the way to Washington. That would be the same U.S. Army that—well, google “Wounded Knee.” Or “Custer.” “Washita River.” “Pine Ridge.” More.

(The Bismarck Tribune's coverage has pointed out:

In a situation of historical irony, after the work shutdown, law enforcement pulled back from the protest site on Highway 1806 to a communication command center at Fort Lincoln State Park. The park preserves the fort from which the cavalry and Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer left to never return after a fatal battle against the Sioux. A replica of Custer’s captured flag was flying among others representing some of the 25 to 30 estimated tribes that have arrived to support Standing Rock since the protest started last week.)

Native American Pipeline Protest Halts Construction in N. Dakota

Native American protesters succeeded in halting construction of the Dakota Access pipeline near Cannon Ball, N.D. Credit: Courtesy of Montgomery BrownPhil McKenna has published an article in Inside Climate News (the publication won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, for its series on the tar sands crude oil spill in the Kalamazoo River) describing the mounting Native American protests against the so-called Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's ancestral lands along the Missouri River in North Dakota. The article begins:

A groundswell of Native American activists has temporarily shut down construction on a major new oil pipeline with an ongoing protest that has drawn around 1,200 people to Cannon Ball, N.D.

Construction workers walked away from their bulldozers Monday after protesters surrounded the equipment and called for an end to construction of the Dakota Access pipeline. A group of protesters on horseback also staged a mock charge toward a line of law enforcement officials guarding the site, and the county sheriff alleged others have fired guns and set off pipe bombs.

The $3.8 billion pipeline at the heart of the protest would carry about half a million barrels of crude oil per day from the Bakken oil field to Illinois where it would link with other pipelines to transport the oil to Gulf Coast refineries and terminals.

The protest was staged at a spot where the pipeline would pass beneath the Missouri River, just upstream from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, a community of 8,500 along the Missouri River in North and South Dakota.

More.

Resisting environmental racism at Yucca Mountain, Nevada

Corbin Harney (standing), Western Shoshone spiritual leader, and Raymond Yowell, then Western Shoshone Indian Nation chief, at Peace Camp, NV, Oct. 2002, leading protests against nuclear weapons testing, militarism, and radioactive waste dumping at the Nevada Test Site. Photo by Gabriela Bulisova.November 20th marked the end of a rushed, "going-through-the motions" Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (DSEIS) by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), a thinly veiled attempt to revive the cancelled Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste dump in Nevada.

NRC didn't even bother to provide advance notice to the affected Indian tribes downstream from the targeted site, let alone consult with them in a government-to-government manner, as is the agency's legal obligation. But at least NRC is consistent: it didn't provide any funding to the tribes, either, placing an extraordinary burden on the tribal nations to meet the arbitrarily-short deadline. In this regard, NRC's SDEIS public comment proceeding itself was a violation of environmental justice (EJ), not to mention the agency's biased push to bury 70,000 metric tons, or more, of high-level radioactive waste on indigenous land, guaranteed to leak into the precious, even sacred, drinking water supply.

Despite NRC's own EJ violations, the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe and the Native Community Action Council met the deadline, with powerful comments. They thereby continued a tradition of protecting Yucca Mountain, and its groundwater, that dates back not just years or decades, but centuries and millenia, to time immemorial. More.

Resistance commemorates dark Atomic Age anniversaries in New Mexico

July 16th marks two dark Atomic Age anniversaries in New Mexico of national and even global significance. It's 70 years since "Trinity," the world's first atom bomb explosion, at Alamogordo, NM -- the Manhattan Project "test" for Nagasaki to follow three weeks later. And it's 36 years since one of the worst (and least known) radioactivity disasters in U.S. history, the massive uranium tailings dam release at Church Rock, NM. Ninety million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes, spilled into the Rio Puerco River, vital source of drinking and livestock grazing water for Navajo communities downstream.

But resistance to nuclear weapons and nuclear power remains strong in the "Land of Enchantment," despite decades of ongoing radioactive abuses. For example, Diné No Nukes of New Mexico will join with S.A.N.S. and Nuclear Energy Information Service to celebrate a successful fundraiser for their collaborative "Radiation Monitoring Project," purchasing detectors to be used in Navajo country, still contaminated from decades of uranium mining and milling.

And Downwinders and nuclear weapons watchdog groups, including Beyond Nuclear's Alliance for Nuclear Accountability coalition partners Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Southwest Research Information Center are not only commemorating "Trinity." They continue their decades-long efforts, such as watchdogging the "Birthplace of the Bomb," Los Alamos National Lab; resisting nuclear weaponeers' attempt to keep their omnicidal trade going for decades to come, at unthinkable expense; opposing threatened in situ uranium mining; and outing the truth about the 2014 radioactivity leak at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, NM, to name but a few of their ongoing campaigns.

"Uranium? Leave It In the Ground!" film showing & discussion, Nov. 16

Sticker designed by Yuko Tonohira of S.A.N.S., as is the Nov. 16th event flier

URANIUM? LEAVE IT IN THE GROUND!
-A Film Screening & Discussion About Uranium Mining-

Sunday November 16
7:00PM-9:00PM
@ Busboys & Poets (5th & K)
1025 5th St. NW Washington, DC 20001
Metro: Gallery Place/Chinatown

Join the discussion with experts and activists fighting the Nuclear Fuel Chain from Cradle to Grave. What can we learn from the history and what is at stake with uranium at this moment?

Film: The River That Harms
(Dir. Colleen Keane, 45 mins, 1987, United States)
This film documents the largest radioactive waste spill in U.S. history - a national tragedy that occurred on Diné (Navajo) lands that received little attention. With the sound of a thunderclap, 94 million gallons of radioactive waste broke through a United Nuclear Corporation storage dam in 1979 and poured into New Mexico’s Puerco River, the main water supply for the Diné people and a tributary of the major source of water for Los Angeles, California. To the Diné people, this event impacted their lands, their health and their economy and sends a prophetic warning for all humanity.

Co-sponsored by: Beyond Nuclear, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Diné No Nukes, S.A.N.S., and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Link to PDF of Nov. 16th event flier, designed by Yuko Tonohira of S.A.N.S.