The following introduction to LANDBACK comes from LANDBACK.ORG
On July 3, 2020, Land Defenders took to Mt.Rushmore to reignite the fight for the Black Hills and the closure of Mt. Rushmore, a symbol of white supremacy and racism. Now, 21 of those Land Defenders who stood in defense of the sacred Ȟesápa, the ancestral homelands of Lakota and many other Indigenous Nations, are facing criminal charges.Inspired by the action taken that day, NDN Collective has developed the LANDBACK campaign, a mutli-faceted campaign to get Indigenous lands back into Indigenous hands, and empower Indigenous people across Turtle Island with the tools and strategies to do LANDBACK work in their own communities.The LANDBACK Campaign will officially launch on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, October 12, 2020.
Protecting water from fossil fuel pipeline projects is an example of #LANDBACK. There is the devastation to the earth during extraction of fossil fuels, during pipeline construction, and when the pipelines leak. The tons of carbon dioxide that will be added to our atmosphere when that fuel is burned. The acidification of the oceans as the water attempts to absorb some of the carbon dioxide from the air.
The routes of pipelines are an example of blatant environmental racism. As just one example, the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) was originally going to be built upstream of Bismarck, North Dakota. When there was an uproar from the people there who were concerned about contamination of their water, it was moved to cross the Missouri River just a mile upriver from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. (see: Bismarck residents got the Dakota Access Pipeline moved without a fight)
The world saw the despicable display of heavily militarized law enforcement personnel and their equipment attacking Indigenous people who were praying to protect the water.
And silence, never been so loud And the violence, never been so proud of our people. Nahko
So many times Indigenous treaty rights were and continue to be violated.
I’m sharing some of my own experiences with fossil fuel pipelines to show how widespread this work to protect the water has been, and continues to be. In Indianapolis in 2013 I was trained to organize and lead nonviolent direct actions as part of the Keystone Pledge of Resistance. Eight years later Enbridge Energy has cancelled the Keystone pipeline project.
I supported the Wet’suwet’en peoples in British Columbia as they struggled to prevent the construction of the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline through their beautiful lands. Multiple times militarized Royal Canadian Mounted Police attacked the First Nations people.
I participated in gatherings to protect the water from the Dakota Access Pipeline in Indianapolis, Iowa and Minnesota. Numerous water protectors were arrested by the state.
I haven’t been involved with the current work against the Line 3 pipeline. (see: Stop Line 3 ). But I am writing about recent events there because there is good news about stopping, at least temporarily, state sanctioned violence against water protectors at Line 3.
In a development progressives called a “huge legal win in the fight against Line 3,” a Minnesota court on Friday ordered police in Hubbard County to stop impeding access to the Giniw Collective’s camp, where anti-pipeline activists have been organizing opposition to Enbridge’s multibillion-dollar tar sands project.
Last month, (county sheriff) Aukes unlawfully blockaded a 90-year-old driveway that serves as the only means of entry and exit to the Giniw Collective’s camp, which is a convergence point for Indigenous-led protests against the expansion of the Line 3 pipeline. Police officers also cited and arrested individuals who attempted to use the driveway to travel to and from the camp.
Under the pretext that the small portion of the driveway extending from the Camp’s private property onto Hubbard County property is now suddenly a “trail” and not designated for vehicular traffic local sheriffs have either physically blocked access, at times by forming a line of over twenty officers, several armed with clubs, or issued citations to water protectors who have driven vehicles on the driveway, even when delivering food, water, or other necessary supplies.
This is a HUGE legal win in the fight against Line 3!! The court put a *restraining order* on the police from blockading camps and issuing citations. Keep up the fight! https://t.co/161AD4RvMO
Water defender Winona LaDuke says the Biden administration "is throwing Indigenous people under the bus" by allowing the Canadian energy company Enbridge to continue construction of the Line 3 pipeline in Minnesota. https://t.co/V4pPFnOIUJpic.twitter.com/9PMrwPVq67
The following is from the Peace and Social Concerns Committee of Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) that was approved yesterday.
Global chaos from rapidly accelerating environmental devastation is highly likely to occur, breaking down our economic, social, and political systems. As air and water temperatures increase, water supplies are drying up. Widening areas and severity of drought are decreasing crop production and forcing people to flee. Rising oceans are creating more climate refugees. The trend of increasing numbers of more ferocious wildfires, hurricanes and other storms are expected to accelerate. All kinds of infrastructure will likely be destroyed, creating more climate refugees, many migrating to the Midwest. How can we prepare our own communities for these disasters, and plan for the arrival of climate refugees?
Peace and Social Concerns, Iowa Yearly Meeting (Conservative) 2021
So if the future isn’t “the future” — if the myth of constant growth, progress, and expansion, driven by miraculous labour-saving technology — anymore, then, well, what’s in store for us? The answer to that’s pretty simple. Regress is.
What does a world crossing the threshold of runaway global warming have in store for it? You might imagine that people will unite in some kind of grand, noble revolution to save the planet, but unfortunately, that’s not going to happen. Instead, the opposite is.
People will flee from Fire and Flood and Plague Belts. As they do, entire economies will begin to collapse, and societies implode. Think about a Napa Valley that can’t make wine. Factories that can’t produce things, homes which can’t be insured, basic infrastructure systems — transport, food, water, energy — which no longer work. Bang. Game over. Entire regions and cities just wink out. As they do, economies grow depressed, while prices skyrocket. If you have a sense that that’s beginning to happen already, you’re precisely correct.
As huge waves of “human capital flight” — read mass migration — ensue, the political result will be, sadly, that today’s nationalism becomes tomorrow’s fascism. Look at how fast Britain — once the envy of the world, gentle, kind, friendly, expansive — fell into a catastrophic nationalism that utterly wrecked its future. Depressed economies need scapegoats. Demagogues arise to point the finger at anyone remotely foreign, different, other. The future looks ultra-fascist, at least to those who’ve studied history.
Do you think any nation will be happy to welcome, say, a million climate refugees? When it’s own systems are already buckling, because the planet’s boiling? When it’s own regions are flooding or burning or both? Of course not. It’ll be fodder for demagogues, who’ll blame the migrants for the woes of the pure and true.
Meanwhile, living on a burning planet is going to continue basically driving much of the human race verifiably insane. Take a look at how fast and hard bizarre delusions spread. It’s not just Facebook — that’s just the mechanism. It’s that life is incredibly stressful, to the point that many of us can’t cope. We need the delusions, just to make through another day. Much easier to hate someone slightly different from you than work together to solve real problems. Much easier to descend into superstition and fanaticism and fundamentalism than think through the plight we’re in these days.
Faith in the future is one of the linchpins which held our civilisation together. The myths of technological progress, economic growth, and living standards rising in tandem forever — eternally — are what sold the thing known as “the global economy” to the world. Only now they appear to have been proven badly wrong. The people dismissed as “pessimists” and “alarmists” in the 70s and 80s and 90s — ecologists, climate scientists, economists — appear to have been exactly right.
For a long time I’ve admired the thinking and writing of umair haque. Recently he has written a series of articles about environmental chaos that provide insight to our unfolding catastrophe in ways I haven’t found elsewhere. This morning I decided to learn more about him and was surprised to find he established the website he articles appear on, Eudaimonia. He says, ” you can think of it as a lab, consultancy, thinktank — what it really is is an invitation.”
September 14, 2017, he published The Story. Life, the World, Now, You, and Me, that tells how he came to create Eudaimonia.
Hi. I’m Umair. I want to tell you a little story about life, death, meaning, purpose, happiness, you, me, the world, and why I founded Eudaimonia & Co.
A couple of years ago, right at the peak of it all, jetting around the globe, writing books, giving speeches, invulnerable as a rock, I got sick. Keeling-over-losing-fifty-pounds-in-a-month-sick. The doctors told me I had months to live. And after the heart-stopping panic subsided, a funny thing happened: I was happy, thinking and writing about the meaning of it all, in a way I’d never really been discussing economics, leadership, and society.
Dying young — or at least thinking you’re going to — is like climbing the Mount Everest of inner clarity. You think about life. Not in a mournful way. Maybe you haven’t lived enough for that yet. Just in an appreciative one. Life is a funny thing. Unique, singular, strange. Camus famously called it absurd. It’s the only thing in a lonely, clockwork universe that struggles. Rivers flow, clouds dissipate, oceans ebb. But only life undertakes an improbable, uncertain, difficult quest for self-realization. A tree stretches into the sun. A little bird builds a nest. You strive mightily all your days long for happiness, meaning, purpose, grace, defiance, rebellion, truth, knowledge, beauty, love. That quest is what makes life so strikingly different from dust, fire, mud, air.
The economic paradigm of human organization doesn’t care. About life. Yours, mine, our grandkids, our planet’s. In any of it’s three aspects: not it’s potential, nor it’s possibility, nor it’s reality — life a beautiful and universal quest for self-realization. It’s sole end is maximizing immediate income.
And that’s the hidden thread that connects today’s four Massive Existential Problems. Climate change happens when the planet’s well-being is used up to maximize immediate income. Stagnation happens when people’s well-being is used up to maximize immediate income. Inequality happens when a society’s well-being is used up to maximize immediate income. And extremism is a result of all that ripping yesterday’s stable and prosperous social contracts to shreds. Today’s great global problems are just surface manifestations of the same underlying breakdown — a badly, fatally, irreparably broken paradigm of human organization.
The paradigm is the problem. A solely, paradigmatically, one-dimensional economic approach to human organization. That old, rusting, busted, industrial-age, economic paradigm is what’s created the Massive Existential Threats the world faces today. The single-minded pursuit of maximizing short-term income (versus, for example, optimizinglong-run well-being) is what’s ignited inequality, stagnation, climate change, and extremism — and the later problems that are likely to stem from them.
So. How can we begin crafting that better paradigm?
I call it moving from an economic paradigm to a eudaimonic paradigm of human organization. It has new ends for organizations: five new goals that elevate and expand life, versus blindly maximizing income. And it has new means: design principles with which to build organizations that can accomplish those ends. Together, those ends and means make up a little framework that I call “eudaimonics”. It’s meant to help us build organizations that are better at creating wealth, well-being, and human possibility, not just maximizing income, because life itself is the true measure of the success any and every organization, from a family to a company to a city to a country to the world itself.
So. A brief summary. Human organizations have become treadmills. But they should be gardens.In which lives flourish, grow, fruit, and flower. The great challenge of this age isn’t single-mindedly maximizing one-dimensional income as the sole end and purpose of human existence, but elevating and expanding life’s possibility. Whether mine, yours, our grandkids’ or our planet’s. That noble, beautiful, improbable quest for self-realization — eudaimonia — is the reason we’re all here, each and every one.
Remember me? There I was, happily dying. And then the fates did what fates do. Pulled the rug out from under me. I didn’t die. The old world did. And the new world isn’t yet born. We’re going to have to create it, give painful birth to it, drag it out of ourselves, kicking and screaming, with love and grace. Even those of us, like me, who thought they’d be content watching the sun set.
Hence, this little organization. You can think of it as a lab, consultancy, thinktank — what it really is is an invitation. So if you’d like to join me on this quest, consider all this yours.
As I pray and learn about atrocities and injustices, the courage of resisters in all struggles, through all time, inspire me.
My own first experience with resistance came when I was 18 years old and faced the decision regarding registering for the draft (Selective Service System). The stories of, the example of many Quaker men I knew, helped me immensely to decided to resist the draft. My friend and Quaker mentor, Don Laughlin, collected stories of Quaker resistance: Young Quaker Men Face War and Conscription
I spent many years resisting other fossil fuel pipelines, including the Keystone XL pipeline. And was peripherally involved with the Wet’suwet’en peoples’ resistance to the Coastal GasLink pipeline.
Now I am involved with those who are resisting colonial capitalism and white supremacy. As we build Mutual Aid communities. As we work for LANDBACK.
I don’t know what I will write each morning, as I wait in quiet and pray. The following poem triggered this today.
“‘Resist’ was inspired by Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour’s courage to stand against the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and ethnic cleansing of her people. In 2015, for the poetic line ‘Qawem ya sha’abi, qawemhum’ (Resist, my people, resist them), she was imprisoned on charges of ‘incitement to violence’ and sentenced to five months in jail and years under house arrest. This poem ‘Resist’ reflects on both the militarized violence and creative decolonial connections between Palestine and Hawaiʻi, which was an independent country prior to the U.S. military-backed overthrow in 1893 and the subsequent illegal annexation to the U.S. in 1898. Our own continued struggle as Kānaka ʻŌiwi includes protecting our lands and waters from U.S. military bases and testing, bombing, dumping, housing, and recreational sites, and protecting our people from related health hazards, poverty, and hopelessness. We will forever resist the destruction of our homelands and how they are being used to test weapons that bring horrific violence to others. I intend ‘Resist’ to be a poem of solidarity for the Palestinian people.”
Truth and Reconciliation Commission – From Apology to Action
In 2007 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) was established as part of the legal settlement of the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history. The TRC’s mandate was:
to learn the truth about what happened in the residential schools and to inform all Canadians about what happened in the schools. The Commission will document the truth of what happened by relying on records held by those who operated and funded the schools, testimony from officials of the institutions that operated the schools, and experiences reported by survivors, their families, communities and anyone personally affected by the residential school experience and its subsequent impacts.
In 2015 the TRC released its report including 94 Calls to Action which we urge all Canadians to read and strive towards in the ongoing process of reconciliation.
At Canadian Yearly Meeting in 2011 Canadian Friends approved this minute:
We are being invited by the Indigenous peoples of Canada as represented by the Indian Residential School Survivors, through the Indian Residential School Survivors Settlement Agreement, to enter a journey of truth finding and reconciliation. We encourage all Friends, in their Meetings for Worship and Monthly and Regional Meetings, boldly to accept this invitation and to engage locally, regionally and nationally, actively seeking ways to open ourselves to this process.
CFSC was honoured to witness and participate in the closing events of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Watch a clip from this powerful and important closing below:
A national Indian Residential School Crisis Line has been set up to provide support for residential school survivors and others affected. People can access emotional and crisis referral services by calling the 24-hour national crisis line: 1-866-925-4419.
Prayers were offered at the War Eagle Park in Sioux City this morning as the nine children of the Sicangu Oyate continue on their journey home from the Carlisle Boarding School in the land called Pennsylvania. They arrived around 1:30 am.
My friend Sikowis (Christine Nobiss) thanked those who helped and those who were bringing the children home.
Then Manape LaMere spoke. He mentioned how triggering the findings of the remains of many Native children at residential/boarding schools have been and continue to be. He mentioned having a family member who was a survivor one of those schools. Someone in the crowd was a family member of one of the nine children. Manape thanked his young nephew who sang the flag song yesterday. He traces many behaviors today back to the traumas of the residential schools. At the end he asked the cameras to be stilled as he sang the four directions song.
SIOUX CITY — After more than 140 years, the remains of nine Rosebud Sioux children are nearly home.
A caravan carrying the remains of the children, who died at Pennsylvania boarding school, left Sioux City Friday morning after a ceremony at the Tyson Events Center parking lot. The caravan was scheduled to arrive later Friday at the Rosebud Sioux reservation in western South Dakota.
“This is a very emotional time,” Trisha Etringer, of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, said Friday at the Tyson parking lot. “We are sad that it took so long for our Native children to return. But we are happy that their journey is nearly over.”
All together, ten Native children — nine from the Rosebud Sioux tribe and one from the Alaskan Aleut Tribe — were recently disinterred from a cemetery on the grounds of the Carlisle Barracks, which was also home to the U.S. Army War college.
The Rosebud Sioux Tribe, also known as Sicangu Lakota, had spent the past six years negotiating the reparation of the children’s remains.
In 1879 many children from the Rosebud Sioux Nation and many others were taken from their families and forced to attend the Carlisle Boarding School in what is known as the state of Pennsylvania today. For over 140 years all efforts on behalf of the Tribe to reclaim the remains of 9 of their children have been denied. This week these children are finally being brought home to rest following recent efforts led by 11 Rosebud Sioux youth council members supported by their Tribe.
On July 15th, 2021 the Meskwaki Nation welcomed these youth and members from the Rosebud Sioux Nation with a meal, song, and prayers to take with them on their journey home. Our Great Plains Action Society collective is extremely grateful for the actions of these youth and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe that have led to the widespread recognition of the atrocities committed at boarding schools across the United States. While repatriations have been taking place across Canada, many investigations have yet to take place here in the United States. Now, Deb Halaand (Secretary of the Interior) is launching a Federal Boarding School Initiative here in the US.
The strength and actions of the Rosebud Sioux Nation and their youth today will allow for numerous other Tribal Nations around the country to soon reunited with their loved ones who were lost at these assimilation schools. “…when one rises, we all rise” – Christopher Eagle Bear, Rosebud Sioux youth
SIOUX CITY — A caravan bringing home the remains of nine Rosebud Sioux children, who died at a Pennsylvania boarding school more than a century ago, will stop in Sioux City Thursday.
Ten Native American children — nine from the South Dakota tribe and one from the Alaskan Aleut Tribe — were recently disinterred from a cemetery on the grounds of the Carlisle Barracks, which also houses the U.S. Army War College. The Rosebud Sioux Tribe, which is also known as Sicangu Lakota, spent several years negotiating the repatriation of the children’s remains.
The cemetery contains more than 180 graves of students who attended the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School — a government-run boarding school for Native American children. This is the Army’s fourth disinterment project at the school in as many years.
“With the recent unearthing of our Native children’s bodies at boarding schools, this has been hard and emotional for all First Nations in the U.S. and Canada,” said Trisha Etringer, a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska.
Etringer is involved in organizing a community meal/prayer service at 8 p.m. Thursday at War Eagle Park in Sioux City. She said a fire will be lit at the park for anyone who wants to pay their respects before 8 p.m.
Ken Fisher,77-driving the bones of his 9 Lakota ancestors back home 2 Rosebud Sioux. Tribal Police officer for 36 yrs. Now deceased persons transport 4 FBI. “I don’t like to think about it too much. It’s all bad. We can’t bring them back-but we can bring them home.” Day 2 caravan pic.twitter.com/cLa7LlKqio
I have been learning a great deal from my friends at the Great Plains Action Society, including Sikowis (Christine Nobiss), Alton and Foxy Onefeather, Trisha Cax-Sep-Gu-Wiga Etringer and Ronnie James. Trisha is quoted in the story above, and both she and Sikowis appear in these videos.
Great Plains Action Society is an indigenous collective working to resist and indigenize colonial institutions, ideologies, and behaviors.
Great Plains Action Society (formerly Indigenous Iowa) was formed out of concern for the current state of our land, the climate and all living things–including Mother Earth. Using our sovereignty and ancestral teachings, we strive to resist colonial-capitalism and Indigenize the world.
Due to the recent Delta variant and other increased cases of COVID-19 in and around the area, this event will now be virtual.
Join us at 7:30PM MST, Friday – July 16, 2021 on Facebook Live @THEOGLALANATION for a Virtual Candlelight Vigil in truth and solidarity with our Sicangu relatives as they bring their ancestors home to their oyate in Rosebud.
Thank you for your understanding. Please stay safe and continue to practice COVID-19 prevention measures including wearing a mask, social distancing, hand hygiene, and get vaccinated.
CARLISLE, Pa. — Twenty-three-year-old Christopher Eagle Bear from the Rosebud Sioux tribe in South Dakota has been growing out his hair since he visited the site of the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School six years ago.
The trip, made by the Rosebud Sioux youth council in 2015, sparked a group of young tribal members to initiate a tribe-backed resolution to bring home their nine ancestors who died at the school as children some 140 years ago.
Six years after his initial visit, Eagle Bear’s hair falls down below the waist of his traditional regalia. He is back in Carlisle this week to bring his relatives home.
It’s a Circle
Five of the deceased children set to return home were among the first group of 84 Lakota children from the Rosebud and Pine Ridge Agencies that rolled into the Carlisle train station on Oct. 6, 1879, according to Pratt’s archived documents.
Russell Eagle Bear, tribal council member, addresses the youth after the press conference. “We’re really proud of you,” he said. “I’m really glad you’re speaking from your heart.”
After learning of their children’s deaths, Chiefs White Thunder and Swift Bear— the respective parents of Ernest and Maud— wrote to Pratt on Dec. 29, 1880. In their letter, they requested the bodies of their children be returned for burial, according to the original document archived by the Carlisle Indian School Digital Research Center. It is not known if Pratt ever responded, but the children were never returned.
“The letter should have been answered,” said Robert Becker, 67, Maud’s closest descendant who traveled with the tribe to Carlisle to bring his great grandmother back home. Becker said that although he felt disheartened by the apparent mistreatment of his ancestors at Carlisle, he would leave feeling “fully content” with the youth council’s work to bring their children home.
“It’s a circle,” he said. “It began with them, it’s going to end with them.”
The journey home from Carlisle, the tribe said, will symbolize the beginning of the healing ahead of them.
“Healing for me is uncovering trauma, whether you experience it or your parents or your grandparents experienced it,” Rachel Janis, 22, said on Tuesday. “When I was younger, I didn’t understand what I was going through. When we first came to Carlisle, although I never experienced boarding schools, I think that was another stem of where that might have come from. We got a lot of, ‘Oh this happened long ago. You weren’t even born when this happened.’
“But why can’t I sit with my grandma (and) have a conversation with her in Lakota? It’s a fear where they don’t want you to talk in Lakota or wear your traditional attire … They’re afraid because of what they went through at boarding schools.”
We all must put down our ignorance and accidental racism of not addressing the truth that this country had with Indigenous people. We are not asking for pity. We are asking for understanding.
LANDBACK Friends 